Hounds of God (42 page)

“They already have.”

He was immense; he was smiling the sweet guileless smile of
a child, frightening on that Norman reiver’s face. He stepped aside to
admit the Cardinal Torrino and a grimly smiling archbishop and a fierce-eyed
bronze-gold witch, and the ivory delicacy of the Queen. A delicacy that smote
the heart even when one knew that she wore mail and surcoat like a man, and
stood nigh as tall as the armored Bishop, and matched her pace to that of a
wolf as great as a moor-pony.

She took the Superior’s seat as her right, the wolf
settling molten-eyed at her feet. Her own eyes were fiery gold yet strangely
gentle, resting lightly upon these men who struggled not to shrink from her.
For all their bitter enmity, none had yet stood face to face with any of her
kind.

“You will pardon the intrusion,” she said, “but
we have tidings which could not wait upon your pleasure. My lord Archbishop?”

With grim relish, he set the Pope’s parchment in the
Superior’s hand. The Pauline priest read it slowly, with great care,
without expression. When he was done he returned the writ to its bearer, calm
still. But the witches knew and the men guessed what raged behind the mask.
Raged and could not burst forth.

It was all in order. Perfectly. It was all decided in the
Devil’s favor. They gloated, those women who were not women, those daughters
of Lilith with their demons’ eyes.

One man found voice to speak, he who had spoken of the Queen’s
adultery. “You have not triumphed,” he said low and harsh. “We
are not ordered out of this kingdom.”

“You are.” Benedetto Torrino had to fight to
keep the satisfaction out of face and voice. “I so command it; and I am
Pope Honorius’ voice in Rhiyana.”

“That can be argued.”

“That will be obeyed. I have sent messages to your
false Legate. If he would not be brought to trial as an usurper and an
impostor, he had best refrain from completing his journey.” The Cardinal
examined each in turn. His fine Roman nostrils flared; his fine brows met. “You
will join him as soon as may be. You have until sunrise to depart from this
city, you and all your cattle; if by the fifth day hence this realm is not
clean of your presence, I will loose its folk upon you.”

“We fear no witches.”

Torrino’s voice was silken. “I was not speaking
of the King’s Kindred.” Almost he smiled. Almost he was kind. “You
had best be quick, Brothers. Morning may be closer than you think.”

Deliberately, meticulously, the Superior made obeisance to
him, to Bishop and Archbishop, to the Queen and her familiars. “We are
vowed to obedience,” he said. But he paused, face to face with Maura. “We
go as we are bidden, without treachery, for we are men of honor as well as men
of God. But you will have small occasion to rejoice. Our exile may endure no
longer than the life of one aging Pope, and then we may return to greater
victory. Your exile must endure for all of time.”

“Perhaps not,” said the bronze witch. “The
world changes. Men change. One day we may come forth again.”

“Not in this age of the world,” said the vicar
of Saint Paul in Rhiyana. “No, lady witch; your triumph rings hollow. God
and His Hounds and His mortal children have won this kingdom. Not all your
spells and sorceries can gain it back again.”

He signed himself with the cross and beckoned to his
companions. “Come, Brothers; we are cast forth, for a time. Let us go in
what dignity we may.”

“Tomorrow,” Alf said, “we go.”

Jehan forgot what he had come to the Chancery for. He forgot
twenty years of hard lessoning in the world and in the Church and, most
brutally, in the papal Curia. He burst out like a raw boy, with a boy’s
sudden terrible hurt. “It’s still the dead of winter. Rhiyana’s
still in an uproar over the war. Gwydion’s heir doesn’t even know
he’s—”

“Duke Rhodri knows he will be King. Gwydion told him a
long while ago, when he was a boy. Now he knows the day and the hour. Much to
his credit, he’s less elated than frightened that it has come at last;
and he grieves for the loss of his dear lord.”

Words, empty rattling words. Jehan shook them out of his
head. “You weren’t to go till Pentecost.”

“We were to go no later.” Alf caught the tail of
Cynan’s gown before it vanished over the threshold, and swung the child
into his lap. “No, imp. No forays among my poor clerks.” He laughed
at his son’s deep displeasure, and said still laughing, “Little
terror; he drove Mabon the under- chancellor into hysterics by falling out of
air into my lap. With his gown coming separately and somewhat later, and
falling full on Mabon’s head. He’s not quite the master of his
power yet.”

“I am too,” snapped Cynan, sounding remarkably
like his mother. “I hate clothes.”

“They keep you warm,” his father said.

“I keep myself warm.” He shut his eyes in concentration,
opened them again. The gown vanished. He grinned at them both with wicked
innocence.

Alf sighed deeply. “You are a trial to your father’s
soul.”

“Your father is a trial to mine.”

Jehan’s pain had lost its edge. Alf’s doing,
damn him. “You are a conniver, do you know that? A heartless manipulator.
A damned, ice-blooded, eternally scheming witch. Why won’t you let me do
my hurting in peace? I’ll tell you. Because it hurts
you
.”

“It does,” Alf agreed, calm as he always was
when the target was only himself. “Jehan, we must go. The Pope has
commanded it. For the kingdom’s welfare, for our own good, we can’t
linger. Nor can we spread abroad that we go, or all Rhiyana will rise, some few
to cast us forth, most to bar our way. Even yet Gwydion is well loved.”
He paused for breath, for compassion. “Tomorrow the King goes hunting
with his Kin on the borders of Broceliande. We will not come back.”

This was worse than death. In a score or two of years, Jehan
himself would die; if the doctrine he preached was true, he would live again
with those he loved about him. But not Alfred. Not any of these people whom he
had come to love as his own blood kin. “Except one,” he said. “The
one I hated. God help me! I slit the wrong throat.”

“Jehan—”

He spun away.

“Jehan de Sevigny, what did you say to Anna about
growing up?”

He spun back. “Is there anything you don’t know?”

Alf went on quietly, almost absently, as if Jehan had not
spoken. “I was never very good for you. I demanded so much of you. So
much looking after; so much thankless pain.”

“As if I didn’t give back every bit of it ten
times over.” Jehan sat down slowly. Suddenly he was very tired. “I’m
a disgrace,” he muttered. “Anna, that stubborn little snip of a
girl—she grew up. She let you go. But I who was preaching that doctrine
to her, I’ve been bellowing like a weanling calf.”

Alf said nothing. Jehan laughed painfully. “Don’t
fret, Alfred. I’ll wean myself. When you’re gone I’ll do what
they do in an abbey when a sainted Brother dies, and declare a three-days”
festival.”

Still silence. Cynan was utterly subdued, even when his
father set him on the carpet by the fire and walked to the window. The cold snowlight
leached the gold from Alf’s hair, the youth from his face.

He had never looked less human. Jehan had never loved him
more. His voice came soft and slow. “Jehan, there is one thing. I would—if
you would—Thea and I, we would like our children to belong properly and
formally to God, however we all may end. I know it is Lent, I know you should
not, but since there will be no chance hereafter…will you perform the
rite for them?”

Jehan’s throat closed. He wrestled it open. “Of
course I will. If you can still want anything to do with the Church that cast
you out into the cold.”

Alf turned swiftly, all his ice turned to fire. “But
it did not!” He reached Jehan in a stride, grasped the wide shoulders,
shook them lightly. “Jehan, Jehan, didn’t you understand? Didn’t
you see? His Holiness exiled us all, and in a very strict sense we are
excommunicate—cast out as no humans ever have been, set apart from every
office of the Church. That was his duty, his obligation under canon law. But
when he spoke to me, behind and among his words he told me another thing. He
left me to God and to my own wisdom. He set me free.”

Jehan shook his head, denying nothing, trying only to clear
his fogged brain.

“Listen,” said the eager beautiful voice. “See.
He struck away the chains I forged of a lifetime in the cloister. He said,
Go, find your God where He waits for you,
where He has always waited for His strangest children
. I was a priest, I am
one still, I shall be forever, but of what faith or rite or order, only God may
tell me. For what is a priest after all, but a servant of God?”

The mingling of exaltation and sorrow that had lain on Alf
since they left the palace of the Lateran, that had seemed the simple
bitter-sweetness of a victory won hard and at great cost, lay now all bare to
Jehan’s wondering eyes. Honorius, the devious old courtier, had shown Alf
the way out of his long dilemma, and done it without a single uncanonical word.
And Jehan had thought that the Pope was only casting all his troubles into the
lap of a higher Authority.

“What more did he need to do?” asked Alf. “He
has sense, does Cencio Savelli: the one thing I’ve never had. Thea would
be angry, if she weren’t so highly amused. It took the Pope of Rome to
convince me of what she’s always known, that I’m flesh and spirit
both, and I can’t deny one at the expense of the other. I can’t go
about as half a man, even the half that seemed so happy with its lordship and
its lady and its worldly riches. I have to make myself whole.” His hands
left Jehan’s shoulders; he shivered, and for a moment the light went out
of him. “It’s hard. I don’t need prophecy to tell me it will
never be easy.”

“If it were, would you want to bother with it?”

“No,” Alf admitted wryly, “I wouldn’t.
Sometimes I could sing for joy that the burden is gone. Then I sink down under
a world’s weight of terror and pain and loss. You’re not alone in
hating to grow up.”

“You’ve already grown far beyond me.”
Jehan straightened, found a smile. “And if I know you, you’ll get a
treatise out of it all.”

Alf laughed. “Yes; and I’ll set it against that
great arrogant folly of my youth, the
Gloria
Dei
: a
Gloria magici
, a
Tractatus de rebus obscuris et tremendis
.
And no doubt when I’m as old for my kind as now I am for a man, I’ll
smile at all these childish fancies.”

“As long as you don’t forget how to smile,”
Jehan said.

Alf smiled at that with every appearance of ease. Jehan
turned away too quickly, eyes and ears and mind closed against any calling
back.

oOo

It was meant to be a quiet celebration, a Mass and a
christening at dawn in Saint John’s chapel, with such of the Folk as
would come, and no great fanfare. But even before the first glimmer of light
had touched the sky, the small space was thronged to bursting. They had all
come, all the King’s Kin who were still outside the Wood, and the
Archbishop in plain Benedictine black, and the Cardinal Torrino, and Duke
Rhodri who would be King by sunset, and a number of lesser folk: courtiers,
servants, clerks and officers of the Chancery. Everyone who knew that this day’s
hunting party would not return. Alf had not realized there were so many.

And yet no pall of grief hung over them. They were sad, yes;
Rhodri above all looked worn and ill; but they could take a quiet joy in this
gathering and this rite.

King and Queen held each a wide-eyed child, Liahan and Cynan
both swathed in white silk, but the mere weight of fabric had no power to
subdue them. Their minds wove and unwove and rewove with one another, restless,
curious, taxing even Gwydion’s legendary patience with a barrage of
questions. Thea did not stoop to theology, and Alf was not answering: Jehan had
coaxed and cajoled and bullied him into the sacristy, and all but forced him
into alb and dalmatic. “Just once,” the Bishop said. “Just
one last time. For me.”

But for Alf’s own sake too, and Jehan was not fool
enough to think that thought would go unread. Pope Honorius had set Alf outside
the Canons, freed him from them, but spoken no word that forbade him to serve
upon the altar.

“And if he had,” Jehan growled, “I’d
give you a dispensation, and fight it out with him myself.”

Alf laughed, but he was shaking uncontrollably. Absurdly,
needlessly; and how many times had he done just this, for Jehan, for Bishop Ogrfan
who was dead, even once for the Archbishop of Caer Gwent? He had not been free
then. He had served out of a goodly measure of defiance, to prove to himself
that he had escaped all the chains of the cloister.

He had never been as close to panic then as he was now, with
the chains a glittering dust about his feet, and his exile full before him.
Exile more isolate than any abbey, whiter than the whitest of the white
martyrdoms of the island saints, and more complete, set apart within the walls
of Broceliande. Once the last gate closed, no mortal man could enter, nor would
any immortal depart, perhaps beyond the end of this world.

The altar waited, gleaming softly in its cloth of moonlight
and snow. There would be none such where he was going, and no one to raise the
Host before it, or to speak the ancient holy words. The chapel in the House of
the Falcon was an empty tower open to the stars, with no emblem of any mortal
worship. No cross, no crescent, no star or idol or sacred fire. No mask before
the face of God.

Yet this altar and this cross, how familiar, how much
beloved. This big man with his lived-in, ugly-beautiful face, and his clear
eyes, and his heart that was even greater than his body, vesting slowly and
trying not to resist Alf’s ministrations-how hard, how cruelly hard to
know that they would never stand so again. To stay, to cling, to refuse the
burden…