The Legends of Camber of Culdi Trilogy

by Katherine Kurtz

  “It was then that I realized that there was another witness I hadn’t noticed before.” The audience sat forward, for from here, Cinhil’s testimony was new.

  “There was a young Michaeline monk kneeling in the doorway of the oratory. Rhys told me that his name was Brother John, and that Bishop Cullen had asked to see him on a minor matter of discipline. They’d forgotten about him in all the confusion.”

  Here, Queron cleared his throat. “For the record, Father, though Lord Dualta confirms the presence of this Brother John, neither he nor any other member of the Michaeline Order whom we have questioned, has been able to locate this Brother John since the night in question. There appears to be no record that he ever existed. We know that you also tried to find him. Were you more successful?”

  Cinhil shook his head, to a few rumblings of disapproval from among the bishops.

  “Thank you, Father. Please continue. We’ll come back to this point a little later.”

  Cinhil bowed nervously and seemed to steel himself to speak again. Not a sound came from his rapt audience.

  “This—Brother John was kneeling just inside the oratory. I asked him whether he’d seen what had just happened. He replied that he was only an ignorant monk, and not learned in such matters, but I insisted that he answer. I remember that when he looked up, he had the most incredible eyes I’d ever seen—a sort of smoky black.”

  “Go on, please,” Queron urged.

  “Yes, sir. He—admitted that he had seen something. And when I pressed him for details, he said, ‘It was him. He drew his shadow across the vicar general.’”

  “And by ‘him,’ what did you take him to mean?” Queron asked softly.

  “I—asked him,” Cinhil breathed. “I asked him, and he said—he said, ‘It seemed to be the Lord Camber, Sire.’” Cinhil took a deep breath and closed his eyes, almost speaking to himself. “I shall remember his words until the day I die. He said, ‘It seemed to be the Lord Camber. Yet, he is dead. I have seen him! I—I have heard of goodly men returning before, to aid the worthy …’”

  A great sigh swept through the hall as Cinhil’s voice trailed off. Even Queron did not press him further. After a moment, Cinhil slowly opened his eyes, though he still did not appear to see. He raised his hands to stare at them, willing the clenched fists to relax, then let them fall slack at his sides as he sighed and looked up at Queron. Queron had drawn out of him what he had not wished to say, even though it was the truth. Now Cinhil wanted only to escape, to be quit of this public testimony for a man he had at once resented and feared.

  Queron let out his own breath and gave Cinhil an acknowledging nod.

  “Thank you, Father. Would you please tell the court what, if anything, happened after that?”

  “Little more,” Cinhil murmured. “I had to get away and think. I still did not want to believe what I had seen and heard. I—told them not to discuss the matter, and then I left.”

  “And went …?”

  “To—to the cathedral for a little while, to—pray beside his body.” He hung his head again. “After that, I returned to my apartments,” he whispered.

  “And nothing noteworthy occurred in the cathedral?” Queron persisted, though gently, for beyond this point, even he did not know what to expect.

  But Cinhil only shook his head, raising his eyes to Queron’s with such determination that even Queron’s aplomb was a little shaken. The Healer-priest bowed profoundly, one hand sweeping in a gesture of “as you wish,” patently acknowledging Cinhil’s shift back from witness to monarch. He seemed to regain most of his poise as he returned his attention to the archbishop. He had, after all, accomplished his purpose.

  “Your Grace, I think we need not cross-examine this witness further. May he be excused?”

  “Of course,” Jaffray said. “Sire, if you wish, we can adjourn for the rest of the day. I realize that this has been very difficult for you.”

  For answer, Cinhil turned his Haldane gaze hard on the archbishop, then pivoted slowly to scan the hall. His audience shrank under his scrutiny—all except Camber—not daring to speak or even to move as he finally ascended the three dais steps to pick up his crown and take his seat. Though he was a little pale as he replaced the crown on his head, his face now betrayed no hint of what he had just been through. That, in itself, was enough to give him a vaguely foreboding air. It did not help that he avoided looking at Jaffray as he laid his hands formally on the arms of the throne.

  But Camber, reading resignation as well as resentment for what had just transpired, did not share the apprehension of his colleagues. In a flash of vivid insight, he knew that even Cinhil, in his anger and frustration, had finally realized that one did not always have a choice of games which must be played. Not himself; not the bishops; not even Queron.

  And so, there would be no reprisals. Now Cinhil was simply going to reassert the proper balance between king and Church, to ensure a viable working relationship for the future. Cinhil had lost this particular battle, but he would not always lose. He had won a minor victory only the night before, when he had gained an understanding ally in his struggle to be what he wanted to be, as well as what he was forced to be. Cinhil had learned much in the past year.

  “We thank you for your concern, Archbishop, but no recess is necessary on our account,” Cinhil said, every inch the gracious monarch. “We would not have it said that the King of Gwynedd in any way impeded the functioning of this august court, regardless of any personal biases which he himself might hold. As a dutiful son of the Church, the king sits here at Your Grace’s invitation, and by your leave. Pray, continue, and accept our apologies if we seemed less than cooperative earlier.”

  To that, Jaffray had no choice but to make placating noises and assure the king that the court sympathized with his personal involvement, and certainly understood his seeming reluctance to testify, either for or against the matter under consideration. Cinhil accepted his reassurances graciously, and everyone seemed to relax.

  After a few false starts, Dualta was recalled to complete his testimony and to verify Cinhil’s story of the mysterious Brother John; and then Rhys and Joram were also recalled, though they could add nothing to what had already been said. Rhys had never seen Brother John before that night in Cullen’s chambers, and Joram claimed that the monk had come to him that evening with a story that Bishop Cullen had summoned him. Bishop Cullen, of course, could neither confirm nor deny Joram’s statement, having lost any precise memory of whether he had summoned a Brother John or not.

  That about wound up the morning’s testimony, other than to speculate on the significance of the elusive Brother John. The scant evidence regarding his existence, other than the testimony concerning his one-time appearance, furthered the air of mystery surrounding him, and even raised in one listener’s mind the possibility that said John had actually been an angel, sent to bear witness to God’s most recent miracle. That theory, voiced by the human Bishop of Nyford, who was by now an avid Camberian supporter, could not have been disproven except by those who dared not reveal the truth. And so, since the monk could not be produced, and it could not readily be proven that he had ever existed—perhaps he had been an angel. The possibility certainly did not detract from the growing Camberian hagiography.

  Similar speculation continued after a late lunch break, with numerous lesser witnesses coming forward to attest to changes wrought in their lives by the supposed intercession of the Blessed Camber: miraculous cures at his tomb, petitions answered, protection derived from calling upon the Defensor Hominum—the Defender of Humankind. Of course, none of the claims was necessarily provable by the rigorous criteria set in the morning’s testimony—but by then it did not really matter. The Council of Bishops was convinced. By the end of the afternoon, it was clear that only formalities remained to be performed before Camber’s sainthood would be officially recognized.

  Camber himself could only sigh and accept the inevitable, casting his required vote with a silent prayer
that the God Who had sustained him through so much already, and had allowed this to happen, would also accept this final bit of hypocrisy on his part.

  The vote was unanimous, the response to its announcement almost universally joyous. On the fourteenth of the month, two weeks away, Camber Kyriell MacRorie would be formally canonized, to be known henceforth as Saint Camber of Culdi, Defensor Hominum—and other titles to be determined in the intervening days before the official celebration.

  Camber said little as the company dispersed, drawing solace from the companionship of Joram and Jebediah, who could legitimately be with him at such a moment, and casting one long, sorrowful look at Evaine and Rhys in the gallery, before he passed out of the hall. He took no supper that night, and spent the evening in seclusion after hearing Vespers with his son and Jebediah. His new status was going to take some getting used to.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  How is he numbered among the children of God, and his lot is among the saints!

  —Wisdom of Solomon 5:5

  The season changed, and it was true autumn, and Saint Camber of Culdi was proclaimed in all the parishes and cathedrals of Gwynedd. The season changed again, and the Feast of Christmas came and went, and then it was the new year, though the Three Kings had not yet come bearing gifts.

  And in the early hours of a day midway between the coming of the Sun of Justice and the feast known as Epiphany, the Bishop of Grecotha knelt in the chapel now dedicated to the new-made saint and pondered what he had become—this man whom the world knew as Alister Cullen, but who knew himself to be the very Camber of the legends.

  Or, not the Camber of the legends, precisely, for that man was now a man who had never really lived, lauded with tales of miraculous doings never wrought by him in life, and now expounded when the man himself could not refute their claims. Or, he could have, but he would not. So far as the world was concerned, Camber Kyriell MacRorie was dead and must remain so.

  Resignedly, Camber gazed at the shrine his adherents had built to the man they had made of him, trying to understand at a level of the heart what his mind and reason had been forced to accept months before. All Gwynedd was talking about Saint Camber now. This was the first time he had found the new shrine empty in the nearly two months since the formal canonization, and this was only because it was snowing bitterly outside, and in the deepest dark of the night. What was it that drew them?

  He searched the face of the image they had made of him, the life-sized figure of a Camber who had never been, carved in a pale gray marble the way Guaire had seen him, cowl fallen back from gilded hair, the painted face upraised to gaze at hands which held a royal diadem, a replica of the crown of crosses and leaves which Camber had set on Cinhil’s head that night which seemed so long ago.

  Sanctus Camberus, Defensor Hominum, Regis Creator, the legend read on the altar front. Saint Camber, Defender of Humankind, Kingmaker. To either side of the altar, in hand-deep pans of sand set on wrought bronze stands, scores of candles blazed in tawny golden splendor, illuminating the chapel without any taint of colored glass. The entire chamber had been refaced with white stone, carved alabaster screens replacing the old wooden ones, even the floor being re-tiled in a white-and-gray cross pattern which some said was destined to become the badge of the Servants of Saint Camber, who had commissioned the entire work. It was rumored that the Camber shrine at the Servants’ abbey in Dolban was even more sumptuous, though Camber had not yet summoned the courage to go and see it.

  His own trepidations aside, he wondered what it all meant in terms of the world’s reality and not his own. As a cohesive force in the society of Gwynedd, he knew that the cult of Saint Camber was already showing incredible gains, drawing together humans and Deryni in ways which Camber himself could never have foreseen in the days when he had tried to prevent what had happened. Who could have dreamed that Saint Camber, as well as being the Defender of Humankind, would now be hailed as the patron of Deryni magic, a proponent of responsible use of that power—which was all the human population had ever asked of the Deryni anyway: that they not be exploited by their more gifted brethren. Certainly, no one resented the ministrations of the Healers, for example.

  But that did not explain the other things that had begun to happen: the increasingly miraculous occurrences ascribed to a saintly Camber’s holy intervention. The results being obtained were obviously real—cures and turns of luck and other answers to men’s prayers—but Camber knew that he was not responsible. Could it be that faith alone could work miracles, even if the agent being credited—in this case, “Saint Camber”—did not exist?

  Or did “Saint Camber” exist after all, because he was present in the beliefs of men? Perhaps the cult of Camber had passed beyond even the Deryni sphere of understanding, into that realm of Deity which transcended mortal ken. Why should an omnipotent God not work through the name of Camber, if He so chose? Was not one name as good as another? There must be some plan to account for what had happened, or Camber could not have managed to succeed thus far.

  But suppose he was wrong? Perhaps God was playing with him, building him up only to let him fall from even higher …

  He shuddered at that, leaning his elbows on the armrest of the prie-dieu and burying his face in his hands and wondering, not for the first time, whether he had gone too far. He heard a rustling sound behind him, from the doorway of the chapel, and suddenly realized that he was not alone, though he had heard no one approach. Even as he started to turn to see who it was, for he could detect no specific psychic identity behind close-held shields, a voice spoke softly.

  “Saint Camber, eh?”

  Almost, and Camber reacted physically as well as mentally, before he realized that it was Cinhil who had spoken and that the words were not an accusation. He looked back to see Cinhil leaning against the doorjamb, arms folded across his chest, snow glittering on the shoulders of his dark cloak and powdering his hair. Camber started to get up, but Cinhil shook his head and waved him to stay where he was as he came to kneel beside him. The king blew on his bare hands to warm them as he glanced around the chapel, an ironic smile playing about his lips.

  “You surprise me, Alister. I think I actually took you unawares. You didn’t even hear me approach, did you?”

  “You’re learning to shield quite well,” Camber smiled, relaxing. “I’m sorry. I was—preoccupied.”

  “So I gathered.”

  Cinhil glanced up at the statue towering above them and raised a wistful eyebrow, then looked back at Camber. His manner had become more serious, the gray eyes darker in the few seconds since he had knelt. Camber wondered what had brought him here at this hour, and in the falling snow. He suspected he knew.

  “Tell me, do you still doubt him, too?” Cinhil asked, his voice hardly more than a whisper.

  Camber averted his eyes thoughtfully, suspicions confirmed, painfully aware that this was the one area in which he could not be open with the king.

  “What does it really matter?” he answered. “His cult exists. No one can deny the positive effects his followers are exerting on Gwynedd. Perhaps that is the true criterion for sainthood, after all.”

  Cinhil thought about that for a moment, then nodded slowly. “You may be right. And yet, there’s something more to it than that. At times, I—God help me, Alister, I almost think I feel his presence, as if he—still wanted me to do something, only I don’t know what it is.” He looked down in embarrassment. “That sounds totally irrational, doesn’t it?”

  “Not necessarily,” Camber replied, a little amused at the double truth which Cinhil had unwittingly spoken. “But what does your heart say to you? Never mind your reason.”

  Cinhil gave a little sigh and shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve even tried to ask him. That night that he—saved you, I—came here to the cathedral and tried to pray beside his bier. I stormed the heavens; I demanded that he tell me what he was doing, what he wanted of me—but he never answered. He still hasn’t.”

  “If
he did, how do you think you would know?” Camber asked softly. He almost held his breath, waiting, for Cinhil’s answer would tell him much about how he must proceed in the times ahead.

  With another sigh, Cinhil sat back on his heels and gazed up at the statue of the saint in question. He thought in silence for so long that Camber had about decided that he was not going to answer. Then Cinhil shook his head and glanced at Camber.

  “I’m not sure I can answer that,” he finally said. “In the simplicity of what I used to believe, when I was only a simple, cloistered priest, spending my days in prayer, I suppose I would have expected—oh, I don’t know—perhaps a vision or a dream, such as Guaire experienced. I’ve tried to let something like that happen—believe me, I have, Alister—but nothing has. Besides, after all that’s happened in these past two years, I’m not sure that would suffice any more. I don’t know what would.”

  “Well, perhaps that is too simplistic an expectation.” Camber said after a moment. “I suspect that as we become more sophisticated in our view of the world, we tend to become more demanding too. We want more rational reassurances, when what we need is a reawakening of that childlike wonder that we all once had: that awesome ability to see the miracles in every waking moment, to believe what our senses tell us we see, to hear God’s voice speaking in His people and their deeds.”

  “And through His saints?” Cinhil asked cynically, glancing up at the statue once again.

  “Perhaps. Perhaps that’s even sufficient for most men. But as we grow and change, perhaps He changes His way of reaching into us, as well. Maybe for you, a Saint Camber isn’t necessary. All of the bitterness aside, you have a job to do now, and you’re learning to do it well, whether or not any saint continues to be a guiding factor in your life. Your conscience will tell you whether you’re doing His will. Perhaps that’s another language God speaks, after a time.”