The Legends of Camber of Culdi Trilogy

by Katherine Kurtz

  Tavis raised an eyebrow. “Just to see us, my prince?”

  “Not—exactly.” Javan stared into the candlelight. “It’s only courtesy to offer a man refreshment when he comes visiting, especially if it’s cold outside and the man has ridden a long way. If there were something in the refreshment—”

  “If there were, he’d likely detect it,” Tavis said guardedly. “We’ve been sufficiently hostile to him in the past that I think he’d be somewhat suspicious even to be invited there.”

  “Not if he were needed as a Healer,” Javan offered. “Suppose that you were to send word that I was ill, that you needed his help. Don’t you think he’d come then?”

  “Probably.”

  “And if you were to give me some—wine, for instance, and then offered him some, quite casually?”

  “Something you had already drunk?”

  Javan nodded.

  “It would affect you, too. You know that,” Tavis said tentatively.

  “But, you could read him,” Javan whispered. “It would be worth it, if you could find out what he did to me that night. In any case, I can’t go on like this; having shields, knowing people’s lies—not without knowing where it comes from, and why!”

  Tavis closed his eyes for a moment and thought, then looked at Javan again.

  “The most difficult part will be getting the right dosage in him—enough to break his resistance, yet not enough to destroy him as a Healer. He doesn’t deserve that. I can counteract most of the effects in you as soon as I’ve gotten the drugs into him, but you’ll have to wait for the other effects to wear off, and you’ll probably have a beastly headache afterward.”

  “I don’t mind that, if it will get us some answers. Can you really make it so he won’t be able to detect anything?”

  Tavis nodded. “I think so. What I have in mind is tasteless and odorless. It has a bit of color, but in a dark wine, that won’t be noticeable.” He glanced at Javan. “I’ll have to come up with something to simulate symptoms of illness in you—serious enough that he’ll believe I couldn’t handle it by myself, but not serious enough to put you in any real danger—but I have an idea for that, too. That part isn’t going to be pleasant for you, either, by the way. You really will be sick, for a time.”

  “I told you, that doesn’t matter, so long as we find out the truth. Do we try it?” he whispered, clutching Tavis’s good wrist and staring into his eyes.

  “Aye, my prince. We try it.”

  Several weeks passed while word of Jaffray’s death went out and the summons was conveyed to all the bishops of Gwynedd to gather at Valoret and elect a successor. On the Feast of All Saints, beneath the floor of a cathedral named for that feast and in which he had presided as archbishop for a little more than twelve years, Jaffray was laid to rest beside his friend and predecessor, Anscom. Camber, as Alister, presided, and Jebediah and Rhys attended, though the latter two left immediately afterward. Evaine stayed at Sheele with the children, because of her advancing pregnancy. Queron had also come to Sheele to work with Rhys. Gregory and his family had gone to the Connait.

  Alroy’s Court returned to Valoret as planned, but somehow the regents contrived to have them arrive the day after Jaffray’s funeral, much to Javan’s disappointment. The regents, of course, professed profuse regret. Hubert immediately set to greeting the other bishops who had already arrived, conducting what could only be construed as campaigning.

  Ailin MacGregor, who had become Jaffray’s auxiliary bishop in Valoret only the year before, played host to his brother bishops, assigning accommodations to them and their immediate staffs in the archbishop’s residence as best he could, though the overflow of retinues and household guards had to be quartered in the town below. Still, there were no complaints from the bishops, for many of them hoped the archbishop’s residence would be his before year’s end. Only Hubert, who had retained apartments in the castle as regent, resided in any real comfort—and Archbishop Oriss, for whom Hubert also found quarters in the castle, reciprocating the archbishop’s hospitality in Rhemuth.

  By the middle of the second week in November, but a few days before Cambermas, all the prelates were assembled: five titled bishops, two auxiliaries, and five itinerant bishops with no fixed sees. Only three of the twelve were Deryni—none of them a likely candidate for archbishop, under the circumstances. Niallan Trey, who had only reluctantly come out of his retreat in the holy sanctuary city of Dhassa, was relatively safe even from the regents, so long as he lived and so long as he stayed quietly in Dhassa and remained neutral.

  The long-suffering Kai Descantor, so shabbily treated by the regents after Cinhil’s death, left semi-retirement only at Camber’s express urging. He had summered in Kheldour, where the regents’ writ ran only sluggishly, and then only at the behest of Earls Hrorik and Sighere, Ewan’s brothers, who paid little mind to the doings in Valoret and Rhemuth unless it suited them. Kheldour had been an independent earldom, almost a petty principality, for far too long for dead Sighere’s sons to bow easily beneath the yoke of vassalage, even if their elder brother was a regent. In any case, since a titled see had not yet been created in Kheldour, Kai had been kept amply busy.

  And of course, Alister Cullen’s candidacy was least likely of all, if the regents had anything to say about it, he having already been crowded out of the regency once for his politics and his race. Camber had reached Valoret a few days before Jaffray’s funeral, accompanied by Joram, a small guard escort, and Ansel. Now lightly bearded, as well as tonsured, hair still dulled to nondescript brown, “Brother Lorcan” looked nothing like the renegade Earl Ansel of Culdi, whom the regents still sought for outlawry. And where better to hide him than under the regents’ very noses? Ansel would be far safer at Valoret, under the watchful eyes of Camber and Joram, than cloistered at Grecotha amid relative strangers, however benign, who would not know whether or when he needed protection. Besides, as Brother Lorcan, Ansel could stay secluded most of the time in his master’s quarters, caring for his bishop’s domestic needs.

  Robert Oriss, the Archbishop of Rhemuth, presided over the convocation. He was joined, in seniority, by the Bishops of Nyford and Cashien, Ulliam ap Lugh and Dermot O’Beirne, both veterans of the synod which had elected Jaffray archbishop and made Camber a saint twelve years before, and both considered possible candidates for archbishop this time, though Dermot was still very young.

  Three of the five itinerant bishops were also veterans of that synod: Davet Nevan, the jocular Eustace of Fairleigh, and, of course Kai Descantor. Turlough, though unable to make the last election synod, had been among the first to arrive for this one. Zephram of Lorda, former vicar general of the Ordo Verbi Dei, had not been a bishop at the time of the last synod, but he had been present at the inquiry leading to Camber’s canonization, and it was he who had been elected to fill Jaffray’s former post after Jaffray’s election. Camber did not know where either Zephram or Turlough stood, but Eustace had told him that he thought Zephram might be leaning toward support of Hubert.

  Hubert MacInnis, of course, had not been at that famous synod. In those days, he had been a poor and obscure parish priest attached to the household of the then-Baron Murdoch of Carthane; and his rise had come with Murdoch’s own rise to favor. Murdoch’s restoration to his family’s ancient lands and earl’s title had brought Hubert election as an itinerant bishop; and he had become Auxiliary Bishop of Rhemuth a scant year before Cinhil’s death, when Robert Oriss had declined to be named as a potential regent, on the grounds of age, and recommended Hubert in his stead.

  Now the Regent-Bishop Hubert MacInnis sat in Valoret cathedral’s chapter house in the first of the six ecclesiastical thrones to the right of Archbishop Oriss. Niallan Trey sat to Hubert’s right—a matter of seniority, rather than affinity, for there was no love lost between Hubert and the Deryni Niallan—and to Niallan’s right were ranged Dermot O’Beirne and three of the itinerant bishops, Kai among them. Across the chamber, in a similar arc of five, sat Ailin
next to the empty primatial chair, followed by Ulliam, Eustace, Camber, and Turlough, each with his secretary-attendant seated on a stool to his left.

  The first day of the convocation was devoted to procedural business: the setting of operating rules, the reading of precedents, and the enlargement of the Council of Bishops by the creation of three new itinerant bishops. Two of the appointments Camber had anticipated, but the third was something of a surprise, and definitely had Hubert’s hand in it.

  Alfred of Woodbourne, long the confessor of Cinhil and his family, was an obvious choice, and one which Camber could hardly fault. The only real reservation Camber had was that Alfred might be too closely in the regents’ scrutiny and debt to remain his own man, and might let himself be manipulated, out of a false notion of what was best for his young charges.

  The other expected appointment was one Archer of Arrand, another of Oriss’s and Zephram’s Ordo Verbi Dei priests who had distinguished himself as a theologian—though of late, he had been speculating on the relative godliness of the Deryni as a race, and that made Camber nervous. Camber had heard him preach several times, and he was not certain he liked the conclusions Archer was drawing. If the man truly believed what he had been preaching for the past six months, then he could easily become a pawn for the regents’ use. Hubert had been making overtures in Archer’s direction, too.

  But even Archer could be endured, were it not for the third and unexpected candidate. Paulin of Ramos had come very highly recommended—by the regents—and that alone would have been sufficient to make Camber take a second look at him. About five years before, Paulin had founded a small but steadily growing religious order called the Little Brothers of Saint Ercon, based beside the river near his native Ramos, a little south and west of Valoret. Saint Ercon had been a scholar and historian of some repute, brother, local legend had it, to the well-known Saint Willim, child martyr to Deryni ill use, whose cults had sparked the overthrow of Imre more than thirteen years before. The Erconites were not vocally anti-Deryni like their Willimite brethren, apparently devoting themselves to teaching; but they did not denounce the Willimites, either. Speculation persisted that there was more connection between the two groups than mere brotherhood of their two patrons, but nothing presented itself which could be grasped or examined. Camber only wished he had more to go on than a vague mistrust of someone the regents wanted.

  But Camber’s mental reservations did not stop the ratification of the three men, and the next day saw them consecrated bishops with the full panoply of the Church. When the bishops were finally seated to begin the real business of the synod, they were fifteen, not twelve, and still only three of them Deryni. A vote of ten would be necessary to elect a new primate.

  They met each day except Sundays, their first task to explore the state of the kingdom and determine the way it should be led in the future, theologically speaking. They assessed the leadership which Jaffray had given them, Camber and his Deryni colleagues holding their tempers only with difficulty when Hubert made his first bid for power by denouncing Jaffray as a self-seeking Deryni who had manipulated his office for his own ends, and against the best interests of the kingdom. Only Bishop Ulliam dared to call him on it, and then only in general terms before suggesting that they return to discussion of other matters. Each of the titled bishops reported on the state of the parishes in his care, and then the itinerant bishops told of the course of their ministries since the synod had last met. The Deryni issue had been defused for at least a little while longer.

  But avoidance could not last indefinitely. Hubert willingly would have broached the subject again, but Bishop Alfred inadvertently beat him to it—though not precisely as Hubert might have hoped. Alfred had been present at the questioning of the assassins, as well as their executions, and he wondered at the propriety both of forcing Deryni to work against their own kind and of refusing the condemned men the final rites of the Church.

  This, of course, set Hubert off again. After soundly berating Alfred, a very junior bishop, for even suggesting that there was anything wrong with that, Hubert launched his attack on the Deryni in earnest. It was fact, Hubert pointed out, that Deryni had tried to kill the Princes Javan and Rhys Michael, not once but twice. Bands of Deryni continued to roam the countryside and harass honest subjects, and to harry Crown officers in the performance of their duties. Deryni obviously were members of a subversive element; and to uncover their plots, any means were justified.

  This led to guarded discussion of magic in the context of the Church—a topic which the three Deryni prelates would have preferred not to discuss and which the others did not know enough about to discuss. It did no good to try to point out that much of what Deryni could do was not really magic at all, but only a heightened form of awareness which enabled them, at times, to harness energies not normally accessible to other men.

  Bishop Niallan broke his self-imposed discipline of silence and spent an entire afternoon trying to make his brother bishops understand the added dimension of spirituality accessible to a Deryni who used his powers to enhance his meditation and prayer life—which was fascinating to a few of them, but threatening to far more, who began to find themselves roused to jealousy by the idea that some people, especially laymen, might have a more effective link with Deity than they did. Unfortunately, Niallan did not realize this, and likely did more harm than good by his discourse.

  Of course, none of them brought up the other aspects of their talents, and the fact that some of the things they could do really did appear to be magic. Events such as Camber had experienced the night of Cinhil’s death could not be explained by anything in Camber’s experience except magic; and there were other examples, too numerous to recount.

  But, was it magic, or was it religion? Or were the two the same?

  The mere time of year at which the convocation met brought problems, too, for Cambermas fell during the first full week—an event of some embarrassment to Camber himself and one which opened a whole new line of questioning on the part of many others. The matter of Camber’s sainthood was not reopened—then—but it was noted even by the usually flexible Eustace that for the common people, Saint Camber’s veneration seemed to have lost a little of its luster over the years. Paulin of Ramos was quick to agree, pointing out that the Deryni saint’s failure to intervene in the matter of the plague had not gone unnoticed by the people.

  Camber, as Alister Cullen, said nothing one way or the other on the matter, and so neither of the other two Deryni made an issue of it, either. As a result, the synod made no judgment on Camber’s sainthood, contenting themselves with the declaration that perhaps Camber would be more appropriately deemed an optional saint, whose feast might be celebrated or not, according to the dictates of one’s conscience. Hubert had agitated for more stringent measures, but he could gain no real support—too many of his colleagues had seen and heard the testimony which led to Camber’s canonization in the first place.

  By the first week of Advent, the bishops had finally come to the major reason for their convocation: the election of a new primate. By then, the regents had already made their preference known in ways none too subtle but, to cement the issue, they had the king address the assembled bishops in the castle’s great hall on the Tuesday of that week, there delivering a speech on which he obviously had been heavily coached.

  “For the sake of future harmony in this our realm,” Alroy concluded, “we commend to your affection our well-beloved servant, Hubert MacInnis, and entreat you, out of the love and obedience you bear us as King, to confirm him as Archbishop and Primate in this, our kingdom.”

  Hubert pretended some degree of modesty, and little was said until the bishops had returned to the chapter house that afternoon; but there Dermot O’Beirne, who fancied the office for himself, had the temerity to suggest that Hubert’s seniority was not sufficient for the job, even if his bold-faced campaigning were seemly for one seeking so exalted a position—and that brought on the expected tirade from Hubert and a
n ensuing free-for-all argument among all of them which did not end until they recessed for the night.

  Camber had several late-night callers from among his brother bishops who were concerned at the active role the regents seemed to be taking in the election. If tempers had gotten this heated before the balloting even began, what chance was there for things to proceed rationally, once the voting did start?

  The next morning, tempers seemed to have cooled somewhat, however, and the other candidates got the chance to have their own virtues presented and discussed. Niallan started them off on a light note by dismissing his own candidacy on the grounds that the Bishop of Dhassa must remain neutral, and that this was a safe and responsible place for a Deryni, especially in view of the regents’ preferences. He had made it amply clear from the beginning that he would not consider accepting such a position even if it were offered. That somewhat mitigated Hubert’s animosity over the remark about the regents.

  Balloting began the following morning, with a preliminary vote giving no candidate more than three votes. Hubert was visibly annoyed, for he had fully expected to do better than that, but his angry reaction did nothing to endear him further to his brethren. On the second vote, no candidate still had anywhere near the requisite two-thirds vote necessary to elect. Hubert had five, Dermot O’Beirne had four, Ulliam two, and Oriss, Ailin MacGregor, Eustace, and Kai one each.

  Ballots were taken again and the numbers did not change; again, and those supporting Ailin, Eustace, and Kai threw their support to Oriss, who did not want it but could do nothing about it. Camber merely shook his head as the next ballot was taken, for the results of that balloting left them with five for Hubert, four each for Dermot and Oriss, and two for Ulliam. The vote stayed that way for the next three ballotings.

  It was obvious that something was going to have to be done. Each day began with a Mass of the Holy Spirit, to implore Divine guidance, and each balloting, with its speech-making and prayer session before it, took close to half a day—which meant that only two votes might be taken each day, and the convocation did not meet on Sundays. As Advent wore on, and the bishops appeared no closer to a choice than they had been at the beginning of December, the regents grew more anxious and Hubert’s disposition became more sour. It became increasingly obvious that he was not going to become primate the easy way.