The Golden Horn (35 page)

“I can hardly go back to it now,” he said,
reading Jehan’s thoughts with the ease of long friendship.

Jehan laughed and glanced at Thea. “Hardly indeed! She’d
never allow it.”

“Nor would I. We’re having twins, you know. A
son for me, she says. A daughter for herself. It will only be the second birth
among the Kindred in Rhiyana, the second time two of us together have made a
child.” Alf smiled. “Prince Alun is more excited than I am. At
last, while he’s still young enough to enjoy it, he’ll have cousins
like himself.”

“He’s what—eleven?”

“Twelve this past All Hallows. We all spoil him shamefully,
but somehow he manages to come out unscathed. That bodes well,” Alf
added, “for the two who are coming.”

“Love never spoiled anyone,” Jehan said with
pontifical surety.

He returned to the seat he had left, a bench set against the
tapestried wall. The court eddied beyond, returned to its own concerns: the
King on his throne with his Queen beside him, the high ones moving in the
ancient pattern of courts, fixed and formal as a dance. Music had begun to play
softly beneath the murmur of voices.

Alf settled beside Jehan. His eyes, changeful as water, had
warmed to pale gold; he rested his arm on the wide shoulders. They had sat just
so at their last meeting—was it five years ago already? And again, three
before that; and three more. The same bench that first time, the same rich
hanging portraying David with his harp and Jonathan at his feet, tall
white-skinned black-headed youths, each with the same eagle-proud face.

Not that Jehan had noticed them that time, or troubled to
find the models in the King and his princely brother—his nose had been
new-broken then in celebration of his emergence from two years’
cloistered retreat, and though almost healed, it ached unbearably when the wind
blew cold. Until Alf touched him with that wondrous healer’s touch and
took the pain away, and would have worked full healing if Jehan had allowed it.

“Let be,” he had said, proud young priest-knight
on the Pope’s errand. “It’s not as if I had any beauty to
lose; and I earned the stroke. Entering a tournament with two months’
practice behind me and two years’ softening in a library, and letting
myself be matched with the best man on the field. It’s a wonder he left
my head on my shoulders.”

Alf had smiled and let be. But Jehan knew he knew. Helmless,
reeling, half strangling in his own blood, with God and fate and the champion’s
arrogance to aid him, Jehan had struck his adversary to the ground.

The tale had run ahead of him, embroidered already into a
legend. Ladies sighed over him, whose face was all one hideous bruise from chin
to forehead, as if he had been as beautiful as the man beside him.

The bruise was long gone, the face neither harmed nor helped
by its broken arch. Soldier’s weathering was proving stronger than the
scholar’s pallor, the lines setting firm, the hair beginning to retreat
toward the tonsure. But he still had all his teeth, and good strong white ones
they were; his strength had never been greater.

He drew a lungful of clean Rhiyanan air overlaid with
woodsmoke and fresh rushes and a hint—a hint only—of humanity. The
last of which, he knew certainly, did not come from his companion. Alf on
shipboard, unbathed for a month save in sea water and toiling at the oars like
any sailor, had no more scent than a child or a clean animal.

His eyes looked past Jehan, resting like a caress upon his
lady, who held court near the fire. Lamplight and firelight leached all the
humanity from his stare, turning the great irises to silvery gold, narrowing
the pupils to slits.

So even in the chrysalid child could one mark his kind, the
people called by many names: changelings, elf-brood, Fair Folk; children of the
Devil, of the old dead gods, of the Jann; but in Rhiyana, the Kindred of the
King. Though that was not a kinship the law or the Church would recognize, of
blood and of family, save for the two who were brothers, twinborn, king and
royal prince: David and Jonathan of the tapestry, Gwydion the King and Aidan
his brother. The rest had come as Alf had from far countries, brought to this
kingdom by the presence of its King.

There were perhaps a score of them. They ran tall, although
there were knights of the court who overtopped the tallest; they were paler of
skin than most, although some were ivory. Man and woman, or rather youth and
maid, for the eldest looked hardly to have passed his twentieth year, each with
the same cast of feature, narrow, high-cheeked, great-eyed. And the same beauty—a
beauty to launch fleets of ships, to whistle kingdoms down the wind, fierce and
keen and splendid as the light upon a sword.

And as changeable, and as changeless. Just so had Alf been,
monk and master scholar of an abbey in the west of Anglia, ordained priest long
years before Coeur-de-Lion was born. Just so had he been in the debacle that
was the Crusade against Byzantium, when the Great City fell and a Prankish
emperor ruled over the ruins. Just so was he now with king and emperor long in
their graves, and so would he always be. Blade or bolt might end his life. Age
and sickness could not.

It should have been unbearable, Jehan supposed. He found it
comforting. A deep, warm, pagan comfort that his priest’s conscience chose
not to acknowledge nor to condemn. Like the old Pope with his grimoires, who
sang Mass with true devotion and called up his demons after, the scholar’s
mind knew its divisions. In one, God and the Church and all the Canons. In the
other, Alfred and his kin and his high white magic, and his perfect constancy.
Whatever became of the world, he remained. Would always remain, a bright strong
presence on the edge of Jehan’s awareness.

His physical presence was a rare and precious thing, to be
savored slowly, in silence. But this time the pleasure could not last. Memory
flooded, cold and deadly. Jehan’s muscles knotted.

Alf’s grip tightened, though gentle still, a mere shadow
of his strength. He did not speak. A warmth crept from his arm and hand,
soothing, loosening, healing.

Jehan set his teeth against it. “You’re
perilous, you know,” he said, trying to be light, “like lotus
flowers, or poppy. Won’t you let me suffer a bit? It’s good for my
soul.”

“Is it?” Alf asked. “Not that I would
know, who have none.” His glance was bright, full of mockery, but like
Jehan’s own it had a bitter core.

Jehan flashed out against it. “You know that’s
not true! You of all people in the world, who wrote the book for all our
theologians to build on.”

“They build on Aristotle now,” Alf said, “and
on the Lombard’s
Sentences
. Not
on my
Gloria Dei
. Which may be almost
as great as its flatterers make it, but it remains in its essence a testimony
to one man’s pride. If man you may call him—and when he wrote it, a
beardless brilliant boy of thirty-three, he knew that he was not.”

“You were scrupulous. You defined the soul according
to Plato, Aristotle, Boethius, Martianus. You quoted Scripture and the Fathers
and every recorded authority all the way to the Lombard himself. You corrected
the philosophers’ errors; you reconciled the canonists’
contradictions. But nowhere,” said Jehan, “did you exclude the
possibility that you yourself, in your immortal body, might not possess an
immortal soul.”

“I still had hopes then of my own mortality. Hopes
only, but they were tenacious. They dissolved long before my vows.” Alt
smiled with no appearance of strain. “It rather amuses me now. Arrogant
innocent that I was, embodying all theology in a single book and sending my
first copy direct to the Pope. As if all the vexed and vexing questions,
answered, could encompass the reality of God—or even of a woman’s
smile.”

“God and woman are great mysteries. But there’s
some comfort in answered questions, and more in your book, however you shrug it
away.”

“Not for me. And not for the busy scribblers in the
schools or in the Papal Curia. They have no love for simple solutions, nor for
my lamentable touch of mysticism. They’ll lock all the world into their
Categories; any who fails to fit them must be anathema.”

Jehan shuddered deep and painfully. “You’re
prophesying. Do you know that?”

“For once,” Alf answered, “yes. Tell me
what you have to tell.”

“What need of that? You know already.”

“Tell me.”

But Jehan, whose ready tongue was famous, could not bring
himself to begin. “The King—does he—”

“He hears.”

He was on his throne in a circle of nobles, deep in converse
with a portly prelate, the Archbishop of Caer Gwent.

He was the Elvenking. He could hear what no mere man could.

Jehan drew a slow breath.
Foolish
, he upbraided himself.
It’s
nothing so terrible. Tell it and have done!

His voice went at it cornerwise. “It’s been a
bitter year, this past one. John Lackland of Anglia dead and buried, and a
child crowned in Winchester; though it’s a strong regency we’ll
have, and I’ll see my own country again. Pray God I can stay in it for
more than a month at a time. I haven’t done that since Coeur-de-Lion
died, close on twenty years now. But I’m going back in fine fettle, with
a bishopric to hammer into shape, and a good number of friends at court and in
the Church. I’ll do well enough. I could only wish...”

“You wish,” Alf said for him when he could not, “that
Pope Innocent had not died hard upon the Anglian King, as if their long
struggle for control of the See of Canterbury, once ended, left nothing for
either to live for. And you wish that Innocent’s death hadn’t
slipped the muzzles from his Hounds.”

“The Hounds of God.” It was a sour taste on
Jehan’s tongue. “The Order of Saint Paul of the Damascus Road.
Hunters of the Church’s enemies. Richard threw them out of Anglia for
your sake; John at least had the sense to keep them out, and the Regents will
see that they stay there. They’re not faring so splendidly well
elsewhere, either. When the Cathari in Languedoc murdered the Pope’s legate,
Innocent preached a Crusade against all heretics, and the Paulines swarmed in
like flies to a carcass. But someone else had got there first: that Spanish
madman, Domingo, and his Preachers. That was Innocent’s doing, who’d
never had much use for his Hounds; he found them intractable.

“Now Innocent is dead and Honorius is Pope, and
Domingo’s irregulars have been signed, sealed, and chartered: the Ordo
Praedicatorum, with a particular mission to preach the Gospel to the lost sheep
of Rome. But Honorius is no fool. He knows he doesn’t have Innocent’s
power, or the sheer gall, to kennel God’s Hounds; and they’re
yapping in his ear day and night. Languedoc? What’s Languedoc? A few
villages full of Cathars, and a priest or two with a harem. There’s a
better target in the north. Small but fabulously rich, ruled not by mere mortal
heretics but by children of the Devil himself.”

“Rhiyana,” Alf said calmly.

“Rhiyana,” Jehan echoed him, without the
placidity. “Or Rhiyanon, or Rhiannon. With such a name, how can it be anything
but a lair of magic? And with such a king. Gwydion makes no secret of what he
is, nor could he. The whole world knows how long he’s held his throne.
Fourscore years, of which he shows a mere score-and he was a grown man when he
began. Even the Pauline Father General doesn’t try to deny that the
throne came to him from his safely mortal father. His mother was another
matter. A woman of unearthly beauty, come out of Broceliande to love a young
king, bearing his sons—and a daughter who died as mortal women die,
though no one has much to say of that—and keeping her loveliness
unaltered through long years; and when her lord died, vanishing away into the
secret Wood, never to be seen again. It’s fine fodder for a romance. It’s
meat and drink to God’s Hounds.”

Alf was silent, clear-eyed, unfrightened. Jehan’s
hands fisted on his thighs. “Rome has always walked shy of Rhiyana. It’s
never submitted to invasion, but neither has it encroached on its neighbors,
nor meddled—publicly—where it wasn’t wanted. Its King is
noted for his singularly harmonious relations with his clergy, is in fact a
most perfectly Christian monarch, unstinting in either his gifts or his duties
to Mother Church.

“True, he’s banned the Hounds from his domains,
and he’s been strict in enforcing it. But it’s not the Hounds themselves
who make me tremble. It’s not even the fabric of lies and twisted truths
that they’ve woven around the Pope; they’ve been weaving it since
their founding.” At last he let it go. “They’re preaching a
Crusade.”

“Ah,” said Alf. “It’s no longer a
mutter in the Curia. It’s a rumble in the mob.”

“It’s more than a rumble. It’s a
delegation sent to investigate the Church in the realm, and it’s a gaggle
of preachers mustering men in Normandy and Maine and Anjou. All your neighbors;
not your great allies, but the little men who are their vassals, the barons
with a taste for plunder, the mercenaries with a taste for blood. And the poor
and the pious, who shrink from slaughtering their fellow man—however
doctrinally misguided—but who would be more than glad to rid the world of
a sorcerer king.”

“The delegation we know of,” Alf said. “It’s
to arrive by Twelfth Night. A legate from the new Pope with a train of holy
monks. They will, His Holiness informs us, undertake to ascertain that all is
well with the Church in Rhiyana; that the clergy are doing their duty and that
the King harbors no Jews or heretics.”

“God’s teeth!” cried Jehan. “How can
you be so calm about it? Even without Gwydion’s lineage blazoned on his
face for a blind man to see—even if the Folk can bottle up their magic
and the human folk resist the Pope’s Inquisitors—they’ll all
burn for the rest of it. Rabbi Gamaliel in his synagogue near the schools, the
Heresiarchs debating the divinity of Christ with the Masters of Theology, and
Greeks and Saracens mingling freely with good Christians in the streets. This
kingdom is a very den of iniquity.”