Shroud of Shadow (9 page)

“One man called another a heretic,” Natil sighed. “A serious charge, and a foolish one to make in public, even in a city without an Inquisition.”

“How did . . . did . . .” Omelda batted ineffectually at her ears. “How did he know the . . . man was a heretic?”

“In truth, beloved, the man probably was not. He simply said the wrong thing. Just as is the case with most supposed heretics.”

The harper's statement appeared to cut through Omelda's mental fog. “Are you saying . . . there aren't any . . . heretics?”

Natil wished fervently that the subject of heresy had not come up, for the mere mention of the word tended to attract too much attention of exactly the wrong kind. “There are people who were never taught the religion they are expected to practice,” she said, “and who are therefore condemned for not knowing what they were never told. There are people who think, who are condemned because they demand some privacy for their thoughts.” She eyed Omelda. “Just as there are those who demand some silence. I myself will not call anyone heretical, because I myself do not know what heresy is.”

Omelda nodded, slipping back into vagueness. Natil had continued to demand that she learn to fight her own inner battles against the intrusive chant, but Omelda had continued to be uncooperative, absolutely refusing to sing unless Natil pressured her mercilessly, thereby making an already difficult task essentially impossible: she simply had no tools with which to work, and little hope of acquiring any.

But it was not all her fault, nor did Natil blame her. The harper could talk about consciousness and knowledge, but these were but words, and words alone could not communicate to Omelda the intentional and willing union with music, the flow of melody in one's own body, the release of art, like breath, into the world. And, in any case, words were not what Omelda needed. Omelda needed to do it. She needed to be it.

Now, Omelda rubbed at her ears again as Natil tossed two pennies into the toll basket at the bridge, but she sighed and dropped her head as she followed the harper over the river. “You're . . . right, Natil.”

The water flowed beneath them, as polluted as it had ever been. “Right?”

“You can't keep . . . doing everything for me.” Omelda shrugged, discouraged. “God can't help me. Why should I expect you to?”

To Natil, Omelda's words were a near-physical pain. She hugged her harp close as a cart loaded with bolts of linen rumbled by and nearly knocked her down, but her eyes were unseeing for a moment. “It is true, Omelda,” she said. “I cannot do everything for you all the time. But does your God not reward those who work diligently toward a goal?”

Omelda blinked at her strange choice of words.
Your God
? But: “Yes . . . I think so,” she said after a moment.

“Then you must work. And sometimes work is unpleasant.” Natil remembered the words she had spoken, long ago, to another young woman who had been dealing with an internal and deeply personal torment. “It takes time. There is time.”

Omelda nodded, but slowly, doubtfully. Natil read in her face that she did not believe in time any more than Miriam had.

But as they walked into the city square that was bounded by the cathedral and the chateau, pushed past the money changers who worked in defiance of the sabbath and the indulgence sellers who did a sparkling business because of it, Natil could not but wonder whether she herself still believed in time. She had promised to help Omelda, but promises, like everything else, took time to make good, and there did not seem to be much time left.

Her brow suddenly tight, she drew Omelda to a seat on the coping that surrounded a planter. The small trees within were in leaf, and on the branches were buds that promised blossoms.

The trees said it perfectly: Hypprux, like Adria, like all of Europe, was opening out to a warming spring, a spring that was as much of the human spirit as of the seasons. Regardless of any prudish objections or accusations of heresy, the Platonic Academy would give its lectures right under God's nose, or orthodoxy's nose, or, for that matter, the Inquisition's nose, and new translations and interpretations of Aristotle and others—printed on presses—were already taking their places beside hand-written copies of Averroës. Books, ideas: a burst of intellectualism like meadowflowers opening in the warming weather.

But there was no room for Elves on the bookshelf or in the meadow, for this was a human spring and a human summer, circumscribed by mortal concerns and limitations as much as these trees were confined by pavement and marble. And, still, it was all just words in the end, for Hypprux could have altered its shape to that of a Rome perfected, with the very best of Vitruvius's art dictating the placement of every house, the design of every wall, the flow of every fountain—and there would still be men striking women, women scolding men, and, in the hostile and unyielding streets, beggars in the sunlight and thieves out of it.

Natil's eyes were drawn to a woman across the way. She flickered in and out of sight among the people who took the air and showed off their fine clothes in the square this morning. With her ragged cloak wrapped about her two emaciated children, she hugged the base of a sunlit statue, searching for warmth.

Beggars. Her husband was dead, or perhaps he was in prison for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. What mattered, though, what made Natil weep inwardly not only out of pity but because of her own loss of ability to intervene, were the stark facts, the facts that never changed: women and children, ragged clothes, and hungry mouths. This was the world she would leave, the world that had simply grown too big and too diseased for the Elves to heal.

“Natil?”

The harper came out of her thoughts. Omelda was watching her curiously, almost concerned; and a group of people were standing nearby, eyeing her harp, waiting expectantly.

With a forced smile and another look at the woman, Natil put her harp on her lap and played, letting the echoes of elven melody mingle with human tunes. A lifetime dedicated to music and harping—a lifetime beyond all human conception of a lifetime—allowed her to make music when she felt none, and Omelda, who had begun to show an odd talent for busking, worked the crowd as the harpstrings flensed her mind of plainchant.

Natil played for an hour, bought food for herself and Omelda, played again. But the oppression of the city burdened her more than usual this morning. This was no place for an Immortal: Elves needed open countryside and mountains, places that did not reek so much of humans and money and the slow eroding of mortal flesh. At times, she had to fight the urge to rise, throw her hood over her face, and make her way out of the city. Direction would not matter, destination would not matter: just out.

But she was not alone now, and so she stayed, for food for two took more coins than food for one. Omelda's cloak, too, was a disgrace, and a new one would take more coins still. And therefore, as the money clinked on the tables of the changers and in the coffers of the indulgence sellers, it clinked also into the cap that Omelda proffered to the burghers of Hypprux.

“Not bad,” Omelda said at the end of the day. Shadows from the Chateau and the cathedral were lengthening, crowds were dwindling, and Natil's endurance was ebbing. “I did pretty well.” She forced a tentative giggle. “And the Benedictines aren't even a mendicant order!”

Natil permitted herself a small laugh. But she saw that across the way, the woman and her children were wrapping their thin cloaks about themselves, preparing to look for shelter after a day of fruitless begging: they had neither Natil's music nor Omelda's talent to help them.

Natil watched. There was nothing the Elves could do anymore, and soon, very soon, there would be no Elves left to try. Perhaps there were none left already. But, her spirit unexpectedly growing defiant, she fished into the cap and pulled out, from among all the silver, the single gold coin she had earned that day: Baron Damal himself had given it to her. “You say that the Benedictines are not a mendicant order, Omelda?”

Omelda was almost offended. “Of course not. We're contemplatives. We work and we study and we pray.” Abruptly, though, she looked at herself, at her cracked hands and her rough frock still stained with her blood. Natil could see memories of labor and flight and rape and exploitation flicker across her face. “At least we are when we're where we're supposed to be.”

Natil handed her the coin. “Everything that happens,” she said, “happens exactly as it should, when it should.” She struggled to believe her own words. “We are here in Hypprux today because we are needed here.” She nodded toward the woman and her children. “Give that woman this coin: she needs it more than we.” Omelda stared at her for a moment, plainly puzzled, then shrugged and turned to perform the errand; but Natil caught her arm and held her for a moment more. “And look into her face when you do, beloved, for that is music also.”

Another stare, and then Omelda left with the coin. Natil's eyes turned moist of a sudden, and she looked up at the late afternoon sky, wishing again that she might see a 747 crossing it.

***

“Well, you know, Father, it's daft.”

Jacob Aldernacht blinked, shoved his spectacles up to the bridge of his nose, squinted at his son across the expanse of rosewood desk that had dominated the main room of Gold Hall. It was after hours, and the clerks and accountants and money counters and secretaries had all gone home: he was alone with Francis. “Oho . . . we're saying that the old man is daft, are we?”

“That's not it at all.” Even though he spoke only to Jacob, Francis uttered his words as though he were addressing multitudes. But he always spoke like that. Jacob occasionally surmised that his eldest son practiced in the marble-walled privy, where the acoustics—echoing and sonorous—could not but lend him the desired air of godhood. “Not at all.”

“What, then?”

Francis sighed with great patience. “Furze is a cauldron . . .” He examined the metaphor as another man might savor a wine, nodded approvingly. “. . . yes, a cauldron of Inquisition. Paul Drego told us about it himself. Siegfried of Madgeburg has that city in the palm . . .” He clapped his hands together for emphasis. “. . . of his hand.”

Jacob was used to Francis's theatrics, wondered sometimes whether there was anything to his son
besides
theatrics, but kept his expression noncommittal. “So?”

Francis folded his hands like a prelate addressing his flock. “The laws of confiscation, Father. Everything the heretic owns goes to the Inquisition and the Church, and any contracts he might have made are declared null and void.” Francis leaned forward across the desk, his voice deepening with gravity. “Well, you know, it's completely non-acceptable, but they do it anyway.” A nod like the keystone of an arch thudding into place. “It's put a damper on business all over Europe—it only takes one suspicious Inquisitor to bring down an entire firm.” He sat back, snorted as loudly as his narrow face would allow.

If Jacob was unsettled at all, it was not because of his son's words, but rather because of his face. Marjorie's face. Francis had a little of Marjorie's face, but—poor Francis! poor Jacob!—he had too much of his father's heart.

“I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was the reason the Medici fell,” Francis finished.

It was Jacob's turn to sigh. “I've told you over and over: Lorenzo's family went down because Piero was an idiot. He let the silver exchange rate get out of hand. I warned him, but he over extended himself. Just like that idiot Genoese fellow. Did you hear? They brought him back from his last voyage in chains. He over extended himself. But that doesn't make him a heretic, even to Ferdinand and Isabella.” He leaned forward, stabbed at the air with a finger: his own theatrics. “And Paul Drego isn't a heretic either.”

“He doesn't have to be. I . . .” Francis broke off, looked about the room. There was no one there, but he nonetheless leaned forward and dropped his voice. “I really think, Father, that half the heretics they sentence aren't really heretics.”

“Half?” Jacob chuckled dryly. “A good nine-tenths, if you ask me.” He poked at the elegant but unfigured candle holder on the desk. Another family with the wealth of the Aldernachts would have bought themselves a patent of nobility by now, would have had their crest engraved on everything that did not move. But Jacob was a businessman. He had nurtured his investments and his fortune with his own sweat—indeed, in the beginning he had carried much of it on his own back! He was proud of that, he was proud of his plain candleholders: he could hold his head up higher than those asslicking Fuggers!

But he could see Francis's point. Furze was a risky business indeed. If even one member of the wool cooperative was found to be heretical, the Inquisition could take everything. Jacob knew that, knew that it was perhaps unwise to link the fortunes of a family whose motto was
In the name of God and profit
with the uncertainties of a struggling town.

But there were two parts to that motto, and though Francis knew profit, he inevitably overlooked God. Jacob would never have admitted to his son that God had anything whatsoever to do with his negotiations with the wool cooperative, and, in fact, he was not sure that he would have admitted it to himself, either. He would, however, go so far as to confess that a man who, after driving his wife away, had subsequently raised one bloodless profiteer, one mercenary, and one nitwit, could do much worse than lend a little money to a group of men willing to work hard and pull their city out of an economic swamp.

Confiscation was a possibility, but Jacob doubted that any confiscation ordered by the Inquisition could affect the Aldernacht business save in the most trivial ways. Perhaps the loan to the tobacco growers in Spain would fall through. A few investors might be frightened off. But little else.

No, it was much more likely that Jacob's eldest son—who was absolutely sure that 1) upon his father's death, he was going to exercise absolute control over the family business, and 2) said death would be (dammit,
had
to be) coming soon—did not want even a single florin squandered on ridiculous ventures. Save, perhaps, to tobacco growers in Spain.