The Gathering Storm (36 page)

“What i-i-is it?” whispered Iso. “M-my feet feel so slow.”

“It’s a guivre.” Its hideous shape should have frightened him. “It’s a hatchling.” The torpor wore off. It hadn’t the full force of an adult’s stare, that would pin a man to the ground. The nestling stabbed forward with a stubborn “awk” but couldn’t reach him because it dragged one leg under its body. It feared him more than he feared it and what it would become. “It can’t even fly yet. Do you see the wings? They don’t have their feathers yet. It should still be in the nest.”

“I—it’s a m-monster. Th-they’ll kill it if they f-find it.”

“So they will.”

Maybe they should. One shout would bring an army and with staves, shovels, and hoes they could hammer it to death, staving in its skull. But it was so young, and it was free, not chained and brutalized like the one that had killed Agius. In its own way it was beautiful, gleaming along its scaly skin where the last glow of sunlight and the silvery spill of moonlight mingled to dapple its flanks. Only God knew how it had come to be here.

Then he saw the wound that had crippled it, opening the left thigh clean to the bone.

“Iso, get me combed flax and a scrap of linen soaked in cinquefoil. Do it quickly, friend. Don’t let anyone see you.”

Iso mumbled the words back to himself, repeating them. He had a hard time remembering things. He lurched away with a rolling gait, for on top of everything else, he had one leg shorter than the other.

Alain eased into the brush and crouched as the hatchling hissed at him to no avail. It couldn’t reach him, nor could it retreat. Leaves spun in an eddy of wind, fluttering to the ground as the breeze faltered. Distantly, voices raised in the service of Compline, the last prayer of the day. The monks’ song wound in counterpoint to his own voice as he spoke softly to the hatchling. He spoke to it of Adica, of the marvels he had seen when he walked as one dead in the land where she lived. He spoke to it of dragons rising majestically into the heavens and of the lion queens on whose tawny backs he and his companions had ridden. He spoke of creatures glimpsed in dark ravines and deep grottos and of the merfolk and their glorious undersea city.

Guivres were unthinking beasts, of course, but the hatchling
listened in that way in which half-wild creatures allow themselves to be soothed by a peaceful voice. The hounds lay in perfect silence, heads resting on their forelegs and eyes bright.

Iso returned with his hands full. The young guivre kept its amber gaze fixed on Alain but remained still as he pulled the lips of the wound together, pressing linen over the cut, and bound it with flax tightly enough to hold but not so tight that it cut into flesh.

“Harm none of humankind,” he said to it, “but take what you must to survive among the beasts of the forest, for they are your rightful prey. May God watch over you.”

As he backed into the spreading arch of a hazel, the hatchling came to life. It spread its wings and, beating them, rattled branches as though calling thunder. Sorrow and Rage barked, and the creature lurched away into the forest, using its wings to help power it along since it couldn’t rise into the air. With a great deal of noise, it vanished from sight.

Behind, the last hymn reached its final cadence. Services were over. This was the time of day when the worshipers returned to their final tasks before making ready for bed.

Iso hopped anxiously from foot to foot. “Th-they’ll hear and th-they’ll come.” He wasn’t frightened of the beast but of what Brother Lallo might do to him for missing Compline.

A stone’s throw away, the stables remained oddly quiet, although now was the usual time for laborers who had no cot in the dormitory to make a final check on any animals stabled within before finding themselves a place to sleep in the hayloft. For a long time Alain couldn’t bring himself to move away from the forest’s edge, although he knew he ought to get Iso back to the dormitory. Instead, he listened to the progress of the beast and after a while couldn’t hear any least tremor of its passing. Would it grow into a fearsome adult, preying on humankind? Had he spared it only to doom his own kind to its hunger?

He remembered the poor guivre held captive by Lady Sabella, tormented by starvation and disease, fed dying men and, in the end, used by her as ruthlessly as she used the rest of her allies. He could not regret saving one after having killed another.

Sighing, he turned away from the forest and walked back to the dormitories with Iso hobbling, gasping and whispering, at his side. It would be hard for Iso to keep silent about the guivre, but who would believe him?

Alain laughed softly. Maybe disbelief could be a form of freedom. For the first time since he stumbled out of the stone circle with the memory of Adica’s death crushing him, he felt a lightness in his heart, a breath of healing.

As they passed the stables, they almost ran into old Mangod, who had labored here for more years than Alain had been alive. Like Iso, lie was a cripple with a withered arm that, once broken, never set right. When he lost his farmstead to his sister’s son, he retired to the monastery.

He had an excitable voice and a way of hopping from leg to leg like a child needing to pee. “Have ye heard?” he asked in his western accent. “There come some holy monks this morning to the abbot, and a couple of king’s soldiers. They say they’ve seen sleepers under the hill with the look of old Villam’s son, the lad who got lost up among the stones a few years back. Terrible strong magic, they say. And a revelation, too, to share with us brothers.”

His words made Alain nervous; they pricked like pins and needles in a foot that’s fallen asleep. As he and Iso walked up past the stables, he saw most of the day laborers clustered on the porch although they would normally be in their cots by now. A dozen of the monks stood among their number, straining forward, and at one corner of the porch huddled six pale-robed novices who had escaped from the novices’ compound where they were supposed to live and sleep in isolation until the day they took their final vows.

“‘His heart was cut out of him! Where his heart’s blood fell and touched the soil, there bloomed roses.’”

“Th-that’s a woman!” stammered Iso as they pressed forward into the crowd gathered on the dormitory porch.

The guivre’s eye could not have struck such sluggish fear into Alain as did her voice. He knew that voice.

“‘But by his suffering, by his sacrifice, he redeemed us from our sins. Our salvation comes through that redemption. For though he died, he lived again. So did God in Her wisdom redeem him, for was he not Her only Son?’”

“Heresy,” murmured a monk standing at Alain’s elbow.

“This one comes from the east, from the Arethousans.”

“All liars, the Arethousans,” whispered his companion. “Still, I want to hear her.”

“Do not let others frighten you. Do not let them tell you that the words I speak are heresy. It is the church that has concealed the truth from us—”

“To what purpose?” An older monk stepped forward. “Were the ancient mothers dupes and fools, to be taken in by a lie? Do you mean to say they were schemers and deceivers who conspired to damn us all by hiding’ the truth of the blessed Daisan’s true nature and his final days on earth? You haven’t convinced me with this wild talk!”

Alain pressed through the crowd until he was able to see the speaker. It was Hathumod. Somehow she had escaped the battle in the east and reached Hersford. He hung back. He didn’t want her to see him.

A frown creased her rabbitlike face as she examined the scoffer. She appeared the most innocuous of interlocutors. No one could look more sincere than she did. “Brother Sigfrid will answer you,” she replied.

Four young men stood beside her: the handsome blond and the redhead whom Alain had seen at services, as well as a stout fellow who resembled Hathumod and a slight young man no larger than Iso though apparently sound in all his limbs. The two Lions, Dedi and Gerulf, stood behind them, arms crossed as they surveyed the crowd with practiced vigilance. As Dedi glanced his way, Alain ducked down behind the shoulder of one of his fellow laborers, and when he glanced up, the slight young man had climbed up on a bench to address the crowd. He was dressed in a tattered monk’s robe, but despite his disreputable appearance, he responded in a voice both rich and sweet.

“Truly, Brother, I dare not set myself higher than the Holy Mothers out of whose words flowered our most sovereign and holy church. Yet you and I both know how few of their writings have come down to us, and how many have been lost. What might the ancient mothers say to us now, were they here and able to speak freely? What fragments have we been left to read, despite the best efforts of our brethren, brothers and sisters
who copied and recopied the most holy texts? Has it always been the most holy who have worked in the scriptoria? In whose interest has it been to conceal this truth?”

“That’s so! That’s so!” one monk muttered, maybe reflecting on old grievances.

Another said, loudly, “In whose interest is it to spread this heresy?”

The laborers merely stared, mouths agape. Several fingered the wooden Circles hanging at their chests.

“Heretics are burned,” said Sigfrid. “They gain no benefit from preaching the truth. When the split with the Arethousan patriarch came in the year 407, over the doctrine of separation, those in power in the holy Church may have feared losing the staff by which they ruled. They may have wished to crush for all time any discussion of the divine nature of the blessed Daisan.”

“The blessed Daisan does not partake of God’s divine nature!” cried one of the novices, a hound belling at a scent.

“The blessed Daisan is just like us!”

“Can it be that the blessed Daisan partakes nothing of God’s substance?” demanded Sigfrid. “Can the Son be unlike the Mother? Are they not of the same nature? Would God reveal Her Holy Word to one who was stained by darkness, as are all of us who live in the world? Nay, friend, Son and Mother are of like substance, and the Son comes directly out of the Mother’s essence—”

Brother Lallo’s roar came out of the twilight like that of a chained lion prodded and poked until it lashes out. “What manner of heretical babble is this? These poor foolish men are my charges. Who are you to corrupt them?”

He lumbered up onto the porch, striking to each side with his staff. The laborers scattered before him. His gaze lit on poor Iso, and he grabbed the lad and shook him until the boy’s teeth slammed together. Iso began to cry. “Must we throw you out for disobedience?”

The other laborers scattered into the night. The poor novices fell all over themselves trying not to be seen, but their master came running in Brother Lallo’s wake, his face flushed with anger. Other torches bobbed, a flood tide of monks rushing
to investigate the commotion. The abbot and several of his officials hurried up the steps onto the porch.

“You have abused my hospitality by preaching to these poor half-wits!” cried Father Ortulfus as he glared at Hathumod and her companions. “Are you oath breakers as well as heretics, that you take our bread and then throw it in our faces by breaking the rules by which we govern this monastery?” Son of a noble house, he had aristocratic bearing and elegant fury to spare, and his disdain was a well-honed weapon.

The frail Sigfrid did not back down. His friends moved forward around the bench, Lions forming a shield wall to meet an implacable enemy. “God enjoins us to speak the truth, Father. It would be a sin for us to remain silent. I do not fear your anger, because I know that God holds us in Her hands.”

“So be it.” Father Ortulfus beckoned to his burly prior.

“Prior Ratbold will escort you to Autun, where Biscop Constance can deal with you. The punishment for heresy is death.”

The red-haired one stepped forward with the calm of a man who has faced battle and not faltered. “We won’t go to Autun. We’ll leave here peacefully, but we won’t be made prisoners.”

“Leave to spread your wicked lies throughout the countryside?” Father Ortulfus shook his head. “I cannot allow it.” Behind him, Prior Ratbold signaled to certain brawny monks half hidden in the shadows. Iso trembled like a captured fawn in Lallo’s grasp as the abbot went on. “You will be taken to Autun and placed under the biscop’s authority—”

“I won’t go to Autun!” cried the handsome one petulantly. All at once, Alain remembered him: the pretty young trophy husband taken by Margrave Judith and paraded through the king’s progress in the same fashion she would have displayed a young stallion offered for stud. “We won’t go, and you can’t make us!”

The mood shifted as violently as wind turns and gusts in a storm. The novices were dragged away bodily by the master and his helpers. Ratbold’s assistants raised staffs, ready to charge. Dedi picked up the bench, bracing himself, and his uncle drew his eating knife while the young nobleman fell back behind their redheaded leader.

Alain could not bear to see any more. He stepped into the breach between the two groups. “I pray you, do not desecrate this ground with fighting.” Words came unbidden as he turned to face Father Ortulfus. “These men rode with Prince Ekkehard. This woman serves God with devotion and a pure heart. These Lions are loyal soldiers of the king. They fought a battle in the east, in the army of Princess Sapientia and Prince Bayan, and deserve more of a hearing than this!”

Father Ortulfus was so surprised to hear a common laborer scold him that he could not speak.

Hathumod shrieked and flung herself forward to kneel at Alain’s feet. “My lord!” She grabbed his hand to kiss it. Horrified, he stepped back to escape her. “My lord, how have you come here? How have you escaped that terrible battle? I pray you, give us your blessing!”

Her obeisance hurt, an old wound scraped raw.

“Nay, I pray you,” he said desperately. “Stand up, Hathumod. Do not kneel there.”

“What would you have us do, my lord?” she asked. “We will do as you command.”

Father Ortulfus stared in stunned silence with his officials clustered in like stupefaction around him. At the forest’s edge, an owl hooted. Wings beat hard back in the woodland, and for an instant Alain thought the guivre had returned, causing them all to ossify into stone. The owl hooted again. The moon’s light had crept up the east-facing porch, sliding up Hathumod’s arms to gild her face until she looked waxy and half-dead.