The Golden Horn (13 page)

He had ensnared them all and corrupted her son. Nikki struggled
wildly in her arms, not knowing her at all, aware only that she had taken him
away from his delight.

“You’re hurting him,” Alf said softly.

She tightened her grip. “Better I than you. How long
have you had your spell on him? How long before you make him one of you?”

“Since we met,” he answered, “and never.
No human can become what I am.”

Surely his candor was a trap. Nikki had quieted, chest heaving,
each breath catching in a sob. She held him more lightly and turned him to face
her. A sharp pain wrung from her a cry; he broke free.

His teeth had drawn blood. She pressed a corner of her shawl
to the wound and stood still, watching without comprehension.

Alf had not drawn the child in or otherwise sealed his
victory. Nikki clung to him with frantic strength; gently but firmly he pried
the clutching hands away and set Nikki on his feet.

For a moment his hands rested on Nikki’s shoulders.
They stiffened, then sagged. Nikki turned slowly, drew his mother’s arm
down, kissed the place where he had bitten her. His face was wet with tears.

She kissed them away. His arms locked around her waist. But only
for a moment. He stood back, head up, and turned his face from her to Alf and
back again. His pleading was clear to read.

She hardened her heart. “Who is your master, witch-man?
The Lord of Lies?”

“No,” he said, the flat word, no more.

“Why? Why did you turn out to be like this? We took
you in. We trusted you. We loved you. Why didn’t you—oh God, why didn’t
you keep me from seeing this?”

He touched her hand. She recoiled. But he pursued, rising, towering
over her. His fingers closed about her wrist; he turned her arm, uncovering the
wound. It had bled very little, but it ached fiercely.

He brushed her skin with a fingertip, rousing a deep
shudder, yet the touch was warm. The pain ebbed away; the marks faded like
smoke in the sun.

He let her go. She drew back step by step until she was well
out of reach.
“Why?”
she cried
to him.

“I wanted you to know from the first. You wouldn’t
listen. The doctor knew in Chalcedon. You wouldn’t heed him. And I was
weak enough to let you be. Tonight... Bardas is dying, Sophia. Within a year he
will die, nor can any power of mine do more than slow his dying. And before he
slept he wanted me to tend you as a grown son would when he should be gone. Could
I let either of you depend upon a lie?”

Her voice caught in her throat. She forced it out. “Does—does
he—”

“He knows.”

“But when—”

“Before I made him sleep. He said he always knew I
wasn’t like anyone else. He didn’t want you to know. You are a
jewel among women, he said, but after all you are a woman.”

“But he didn’t
say
any of that!”

“He thought it.”

There was a silence. Sophia gathered her scattered wits into
what order she might. Alf stood unmoving. The moon had caught his eyes and struck
fire in them.

She rubbed her arm where the pain had been, slowly, eyes fixed
upon him. “What would happen,” she asked in a steady voice, “if
I called a priest?”

“He would be extremely annoyed to be roused so late.”

She strangled laughter that was half hysteria. “And
for nothing, too. I can’t hate you, Alfred. I may be endangering everyone
who’s dear to me, but I simply can’t.”

“I’ll go away,” he said. “I should
have done it at the first.”

Sophia wanted to hit him. She seized his hand instead, too quickly
for either of them to shrink away, and held it fast. “Don’t be
ridiculous. You have a place here. There’s no point in running away from
it.”

“I’m corrupting your children.”

“You’re keeping my husband alive.”

He bowed his head. His face was in shadow, the lids lowered over
the strangeness of his eyes. He was a legend, a tale of wonder and of terror.
Yet she realized that she felt no fear of him at all. His hand was warm in
hers, made of flesh like her own; she had seen him ill and she had seen him
well, healing where men had destroyed.

“No,” he said, “don’t judge me now.
It’s only the wine and your anxiety for Bardas, and guilt that you spoke
to me as you did, though you had the right.”

“I had no right!” she countered sharply. “I
forgot everything I’d ever seen of you. I spoke to wound you who’d
already worn yourself to a rag for Bardas and for me; and I thought things of you
that no man would ever forgive. And you never moved to defend yourself.
Whatever you are, Alfred of Saint Ruan’s, you’re far closer to
Heaven than to Hell.”

“You’ve seen what I can do.”

“Would you harm me or any of us?”

“No.” He answered at once, without doubt, though
the rest was soft, almost hesitant. “I couldn’t. It would hurt me
too much.”

She embraced him tightly. “You’re safe now,”
she said. “No more fears and no more secrets. There’s only one
thing.”

He tensed.

Sophia drew his head down, the better to see his face. “Do
you always know what everyone’s thinking?”

His eyes widened in dismay and in understanding. “Oh,
no! Only when there’s need, or when the other wishes it; or when there’s
no help for it.”

She let him go, oddly comforted. “Of course,”
she said. “There would be laws and courtesies. And you are a philosopher?”

“Of sorts.”

“You’re not as young as you look, are you?”

“No,” he answered, “I am not.”

“Sometimes it shows.” She touched him again, a
brief caress. “Thank you, Alfred.”

“For what?”

“For everything. Even For telling me. I still trust
you with my children.”

He bowed low, unable for once to speak.

“Aristotle,” said Thea, “was a mere maker
of lists. Plato was a philosopher.”

“Plato lacked a system.” Alf closed his book,
rose and stretched.

Thea watched him from her corner of the window niche. “A
philosopher has to have a system?”

“If he wants to capture the fancy of the
schoolmasters.”

“And you?”

“I prefer Plato.” He sat down again, close but
not touching, and took up his book. “I’m illogical, old-fashioned,
and very probably a heretic.”

“Very probably,” she agreed. “I’m
tired of the Categories. Where’s the book you found in Master Dionysios’
library?”

“The Plato? In my room. Shall I fetch it?”

“Let me.” She set it in his lap, snatched out of
air. Their hands touched; his withdrew quickly. He opened the book more quickly
still.

His eyes ran over the words, but his mind reflected Thea’s
face. He stole a glance at her. She sat with knees drawn up, head cocked to one
side, waiting. A difficult pupil, she; lethally quick-witted and well aware of
it, acknowledging him her master but allowing him not an instant’s rest
upon his laurels.

She would catch him now if he did not bring his mind to order.
But it would not shape itself as he willed it. He watched his hand stretch out
to trace the curve of her cheek.

She smiled with the familiar touch of mockery. “Was
that in your book?”

“Dreams,” he said, “are shadows of the
life we live, and life a shadow of the Reality.”

“Have your dreams been strange of late?”

“My body is seventeen years old. My mind in sleep
follows it and it alone. What are six decades of philosophy in the face of that?”

“What use is philosophy at all? Except to keep dry old
men busy and to put young ones to sleep, where they dream of love and wake to
foolish shame.”

“My teaching bores you then? Do you want to end it?”
He managed to sound both eager and regretful.

She laughed and weighed their two books in her hands, Plato and
Aristotle. “Bored? I? How could I be? You’re the best of teachers,
and you know it. But I’m a poor philosopher. All those wordy old men with
their heads in the clouds…even Socrates, who knew a thing or two of the
world, what was he doing but escaping his termagant of a wife and finding
excuses for his poverty?”

“There’s more to the world than what we see.”

“Who should know that better than I? And I like to
give my mind a bit of exercise. But I can’t look at all those sober speculations
in the proper light. If you and I are only shadows, or faulty conglomerations
of the four elements, or a dance of atoms in the void, why is life so sweet?”

“To you perhaps it is.”

“And to you it isn’t? Humans have trapped you,
little Brother. They live a little while, bound in flesh that must decay; some
do the world a bit of good, but most, like angry children, destroy as much of
it as they can before they’re snatched away. Or they make up stories
about the foulness of flesh to convince themselves that they don’t want
to stay in it. They forget how to live, and say that God, or the gods, or the Demiurge,
or whatever power you will, set them here to test them and prove them worthy of
an afterlife. Or else, and worst of all, they deny that there is any meaning in
anything, and give themselves up to despair.”

“Would you rather that no one thought on his fate at
all?”

“Too much of anything is dangerous. Look at you. The monks
made you in their own image, and taught you to shrink from the world. Maybe
they were made for Heaven, but you weren’t.”

“Then I must have been made for Hell.”

She glared at him. “Don’t talk like a fool. You
were made for earth, which stands precisely between. And which means that you
can reach for both. Heaven if you live as you were meant to live, in full realization
of what you are. And Hell if you deny any part of yourself.”

“If I turn my power loose, I can destroy the world.”

“That’s arrogance, and a denial of your
conscience. We are gifted with one, you know. Or cursed, if you prefer.”

“
We
, you say. What
are we? Changelings, say people in Anglia. But all the legends tell of human
children stolen and monsters set in their places, troll-brats or mindless
images that shrivel away with the dawn. Not elf-children of the true blood.”

“Who’s to say what real elf-children are like?
Maybe we are monsters, too hideous or too incomplete to be endured, or else miserable
hybrids whom none of our lofty kin would acknowledge. Though I’ve talked
with beings of the otherworld, ghosts, and once a demon; and I’ve heard
tell of one of us who met a Power under a hollow hill. None of them could or
would tell us what we are. Maybe we really are changelings. Maybe we’re God’s
joke on humankind. Maybe we don’t exist at all. Who knows? There are only
a few of us that I know of, and those few have all gone to Rhiyana or known its
King.”

“Gwydion, for all his wisdom, knows no more than you or
I.”

“Yet you asked me, woman that I am, and anything but
royal. I’m flattered.”

“I was shouting in the dark.”

“And avoiding the main issue as usual. Your body isn’t
as easy to distract as your mind is. When are you going to listen to it?”

“When it stops bidding me to sin.”

“Is love a sin?”

“Love, no. This is lust.”

“Can you be so sure of that?”

That was her essence: to shake the foundations of his world.
He unclenched his fists, took the books from her, rose. “I can’t separate
the two when I think of you, but I will do it. Then we shall see.”

“Then you shall no longer have me to trouble you.”

She spoke so quietly and so calmly that she frightened him. He
moved by instinct, closer to her; standing over her, looking down into her
face. The books weighed him down; he willed them away and set his hands upon
her shoulders. So thin she was, all brittle bones like a bird. She had had no
more sleep or food or peace of mind than he had.

Without conscious thought, he bent and kissed her. She responded
with more warmth than he had looked for or dared to hope.

“Yes, damn you,” she said angrily, “I love
you, God help me. Love you, lust for you, and snatch with shameful eagerness at
any crumb you deign to drop in front of me.”

He stroked the smooth softness of her hair. She closed her eyes
and shivered. “Damn you,” she whispered. “Oh, damn you.”

He knelt face to face with her and took her cold hands. “Marry
me, Thea,” he said.

Her eyes opened wide. He met them, baring his mind to her,
all defenseless.
I mean it,
he said.
I want it. Marry me.

Her eyes, then her hand, freed from his, explored his face. Her
fingers tangled in his hair. “I love you,” she said.

He waited, heart hammering, unable to breathe.

“I love you,” she repeated, speaking carefully, “but
I don’t want to marry you.”

His heart stopped. All the blood drained from his face.

She played with his hair, smoothing it, stroking it. “You
want me almost as badly as I want you. But you’re afraid of the sin.
Marriage, you think, will take away both the sin and the fear. You don’t
see yet that words mean nothing; that love, not a priest’s mumbling, is
the sacrament.”

“I do see it,” he said in a voice he hardly
recognized as his own.

“Only with your eyes. In your mind, Alfred of Saint
Ruan’s, you’re still in your cloister, though the Pope has given
you a writ that says the opposite. And I won’t marry a monk.”

For a long while he knelt there under her hand. Little by
little his heart went cold. She saw it; he watched the dismay grow in her eyes.
But she said, “I would be your lover if you were the Lord Pope. Your wife
I cannot and will not be.”

He rose slowly. He understood now why she had flown from him
in Petreia. But her anger had been fiery hot. His was ice-cold. “I beg
your pardon, my lady,” he said. “I have offended you. I shall not
repeat my error.” He bowed with careful correctness and began to turn
away.

“Alf!” she cried.

He turned back. She faced him, and he saw a stranger, a woman
beautiful in her anger, who after all meant nothing to him.