When the Saints (12 page)

They collided into each other’s arms in a rib-cracking embrace. Anton had taught her what a man expected from a kiss. Wulf did not know the details, but he proved to be a very fast learner. It was a wonderful, passionate, soul-consuming, never-ending kiss.

Yet nothing in the world lasts forever. They broke it off eventually and just hugged, chins on shoulders, cheek against stubbled cheek. She was as tall as Wulf was—too tall, really, but the right height for Anton. Nothing else was right about Anton.

“Oh, God!” he whispered. “I love you! I have never wanted anyone or anything as much as I want you.”

“Me the same.” If he asked her to go away with him, she would, and damn the consequences, terrible though those must be. But he knew that already, and for either of them to say so now would trigger disaster for both.

“Now I know why lust is such a popular sin.”

“Love, not lust! You think I kiss every man like that?”

Grunt.

“If your brother gave kisses like that, you think I’d be here with you?”

Wulf pulled back just enough to put them eye-to-eye, much too close to focus. “You mean you like my kissing better than Anton’s?”

“His are just slobber. Yours are heaven.”

“Lady, my experience of kisses can be counted on the thumbs of one hand.”

She gave him another one for practice. Not quite so intense, perhaps, but even better, more deliberate, even longer. When it was over—

“Don’t let go,” sh co,&er„ murmured. “I’ll fall down.”

“We must let go,” he whispered. “Nothing good can come of this.”

He was right. Nothing good, only pain. Wulf was always right. Her handfasting to Anton ranked the same as marriage in the eyes of the Church. Few people below the rank of kings were ever granted a divorce, and about the only excuse for that was consanguinity. Even if she could prove that she and Anton shared ancestors a few generations back, then Wulf must be just as closely related to her.

If they ran away to cohabit out of wedlock, they would be in a state of sin all their lives. Friends and families would spurn them. Their children would be scorned and despised as bastards. Their daughters would never make a decent marriage; their sons could not enter a craft guild or a profession. Nor could a man marry his brother’s widow. She must not even think about that possibility.

“You’re right,” she said. “Mother will be tearing the walls down. If she isn’t, my … your brother will be. I must go.”

He released her carefully and stepped back, holding her hands as if unable to break the contact completely. There were tears in those golden wolf eyes. Men never wept; it must be the wind.

“Angel lady,” he said, staring at her.

“Hero.” She smiled. “We have an illustrated
Morte D’Arthur
on the bookshelf. You look just like Lancelot. But handsomer.”

He frowned. “And does Anton look like Arthur?”

Oh. She should not have said that. “Not in the least.… Um … Er … What happens now?”

“Mm?” He was smiling at her, apparently not listening.

“I mean the Wends lost a lot of men. That was a big defeat. Will they try again tomorrow?”

He shrugged. “They were trying to distract us while they bring in the Dragon. It was probably just a sop to the hotheads who wanted to do it the old-fashioned, manly way. By tomorrow or Monday their guns will smash the gates to kindling.”

So today.… “Can you stop them?”

“Us, you mean? Or just me?”

She tugged him close and whispered, “Just you.”

His eyes twinkled. “Do you want me to?”

“Yes, please.”

& ct s0em" width#x201C;Ask nicely.”

“Please, Wulfgang darling, don’t let the wicked Wends take the castle.”

“Then, just for you, I won’t.”

They shared a smile at this childish humor, but it faded like a flower in frost. Reality returned. He released her and stepped back.

“Go with God,” he murmured, and disappeared into nowhere.

She sighed and gathered her wits. Back to the infirmary.

CHAPTER
9

The vineyard at Avlona was deserted and breathtakingly hot. Wulf threw down his cloak, thought about going around to the door, and decided to sit where he was for a few minutes. Justina probably knew he was there. He’d had a busy morning and needed some time to dream about Madlenka. Who loved him. Who thought his kisses were better than Anton’s! That was incredible. Anton knew everything there could be to know about pleasing women. Ever since he was fourteen, Anton had driven Father Czcibor to distraction with his lechery. The old man had even refused him communion once, and there had been a stupendous family row. But lust was a trivial sin; how would the priest weep for Wulfgang, who had just slain a hundred men with a single act of diabolical witchcraft?

Sybilla came sauntering around the corner with her lithesome hips and sultry eyes and those worrisome bulges in her blouse. Alarm bells clanged. Wulf thought hard about Father Czcibor.

“God be with you,” he said, doubting it very much. “Is Justina here?”

Sybilla sighed. “No.” She bent over to put her hands and elbows on the stone table, so she could look him in the eye and he could peer in the top of her blouse. “She’s gone to Elysium. Are you hungry?”

“I would like something to eat, yes. Thank you.” It must be noon and time for dinner.

She did not move. “Would you like to kiss me like you kissed that skinny girl?”

“You were spying on us?” Wulf barked, outraged.

Sybilla smiled dreamily. “Of course. Speakers always spy on people. You can Look in on me any time you want. In this weather I sleep without a cover.”

“I’m not interested.”

She shrugged. That
was
interesting. “Well, except a man, sometimes.”

About to ask what she meant, he guessed in time, then veered away from the subject. “Tell me about Rome.”

She oozed into a new position, sitting on a corner of the table, with her skirt pulled tight over the thigh nearest him. “It’s dirty and hot and smelly and even men don’t dare go out at night. There are bodies floating in the Tiber every morning and the pope holds orgies.”

“Do you often attend the pope’s orgies?”

“Father won’t let me go.”

“Who is your Father?”

“Cardinal d’Estouteville. He’s dean of the College of Cardinals, you know.”

“A cardinal, and he’s your father?”

“He calls me his niece, but everyone knows.”

“Of course.” Wulf wondered if there might be some truth in all this.

“Begone!” Justina snapped, materializing beside them. “Go and tidy your room! Or muck out a stable somewhere, if you’d rather.”

Sybilla pulled a face and vanished like a bubble.

“Come indoors, squire. I am sorry about the wench. Subtlety is not in Sybilla. If she were a workaday, I’d thrash her backside raw, but you can’t thrash a Speaker.”

Wulf took up his cloak and went with his hostess. “I find her stories entertaining,” he said, being more polite than truthful.

“They’re rarely true, but not always lies. If I don’t get her jessed soon she’ll drive me out of my mind, I swear.”

“Jessed?”

“Oh.… Never mind. Married and pregnant.”

No, that was not what it meant. Jesses were the tethers applied to a bird’s legs in falconry. He had just been given another hint, which made no more sense than the others.

“Is Rome really as bad as she says?” He wondered how Anton would react to Sybilla.

“Worse, probably. Please sit. What did she say?”

The kitchen was dim and blessedly cool, with its windows shuttered against the noon heat. Pans and shelves bearing pots or jars of spices festooned the walls; hams and strings of onions dangled from low ceiling beams. Only a soft buzz of flies disturbed the silence. A solid table large enough to seat eight or so was already laden with bread, cheese, grapes, and wine.

“Does the pope hold orgies?” he asked, sitting down.

“Not this one. Or if he does, he just invites boys.” Justina handed him a large earthenware bowl, which he balanced on his lap.

“No! Not the pope!”

Smiling at his horror, she brought an ewer and poured water over his hands. “So they say, but Rome eats and breathes rumors. He does have a basketful of nephews and he heaps riches and offices on them. We all know the Church is corrupt, squire. Do you doubt that Bishop Ugne bought his diocese with gifts to the archbishop and Cardinal Zdenek? Probably to the pope, also. Bishop Starsi the same. That’s simony: it’s a major sin, and it goes on all the time. They all keep mistresses. Oh, there are some good holy men, but the others outnumber them.”

“Our chaplain at Dobkov was one of the good ones.”

“I think I could have guessed that. Lucky you.” She thumped a pot of soup on to the table, then clattered a pewter bowl and spoon down in front of him. “Eat all you want. Speakers never need go hungry.”

He ladled some of the soup into his bowl and peered at it suspiciously. Vegetables he recognized, but the bulk of it seemed to be little rings of something.

“This is Friday.”

“It’s fish,” she assured him. “A sort of fish, calamari.”

He was hungry and the calamari was tasty, if chewier than any fish he had ever tasted before, other than salt cod, of course.

Justina sat opposite and cut the bread. She gave him a slice, took one for herself, and dipped it in oil. But it was several minutes before she spoke, and he sensed a darkening of her mood since their earlier meeting. When she did speak, however, it was to praise him.

“That was good work you did this morning, squire. With the ladder, I mean.”

“Good for a haggard?”

“Good for a fledged Speaker with fifty years’ experience. Simple but effective. Most important, it went unnoticed, unless the Wends had Speakers watching the battle and saw you. You’re a very skilled Speaker already.”

The praise pleased and disgusted him at the same time. “What is the penance for killing a hundred men by witchcraft?”

She shrugged and dismissed that topic with a wave of her aged hand. “They were Orthodox, not Catholic. The pope will absolve you. The Dominican’s death is the real problem.”

“Not for me.” Azuolas had been a Speaker a kn a/dind a very unscrupulous one, in Wulf’s opinion.

“For others, though.” She chewed her lip for a moment, seeming much older than before. “I’m allowed to give you advice. I had to argue for even that much, and I’m not to give you any more help than that.”

He stared at her in shock. “The Spider?” What sort of betrayal was this?

“No, not Zdenek. He can’t know about the deaths yet, not unless he has one of his hirelings spying on us.”

“Hirelings?”

“His Speaker flunkies. I’m on loan to Zdenek, as a sort of mutual favor, but we don’t want to get mixed up in anything as messy as priest killings.”

“Who’s ‘we’ in this situation?”

She shook her head and dipped the last piece of crust in oil. Sybilla had said that Justina was in, or had been to, somewhere she had called Elysium.

He asked, “Did you spy on the parley also?”

She nodded.

“Is it honorable to use talent at a parley?”

“Of course not. That Alojz scares me. He doesn’t look old enough to have his talent under control. Mind you,” she conceded, munching bread, “he slipped a neat stroke by you when he tweaked the bishop. That was deft.”

“I wasn’t fast enough! How far can you twist a man’s mind?”

“Well, there’s a limit. If you try to make a man believe he’s a horse, you’ll drive him crazy. Tweaking only works properly if it’s used to make people change their minds when they already want to. If he wants to be brave, you could tweak him into thinking he was brave, at least for a day or two. Your Bishop Ugne would much rather believe he was deceived by an apparition than that he saw what he really saw. So young Alojz nudged him the way he secretly wanted to go.”

“Is that within the rules?”

“Not the Saints’ rules, but it gets done often enough. I’d say that if you meddle with a man’s free will, then God may lay all his future sins on
your
shoulders, not his. But yon Alojz boy would contend that he was striving to uphold the first commandment, concealing a public display of talent—which he was—and that excuses a lot. None of us want the workadays all upturned and shrieking about Satanism, and a sending is less threatening than a materialization. From what you tell me, that display that Havel and Vilhelmas put on in Gallant last night was shocking by any standard. I wish I knew why they did it.”

This was the sort of teaching he needed, and it confirmed much of what he had been thinking. She was stretching her orders to drop hints, and he mustn’t appear ungrateful. Yet questions whirled in his mind like midges. He forced himself to keep both his eating and his conversation slow and casual.

“Can you tell me what Havel really wants? Whose side he’s on?”