by Judith Tarr
Amalric rubbed his jaw. If Marco had not known better, he would have thought the man was embarrassed. “Not yet. But soon.”
“Your courage amazes me,” Brother Richard said. “I could never play both sides as you so boldly do, still less contemplate allying myself with that family for the rest of my days. What if your guard slips?”
“It won’t.” Amalric was not even arrogant. He simply knew. “You should give me credit. I’ll save the lady’s soul and snatch her from the arms of iniquity. A good mortal marriage, a good Christian husband—that will rid her of the taint that’s on her.”
“And her dowry is improbably rich.” Brother Richard shook his head. “Bold, my lord. I’ll stop short of calling it foolhardy.”
Marco listened, appalled. It had taken him a while to understand what they were saying. Messire Amalric was paying court to the Rhiyanan princess—Marco had seen it on the road to Acre, but he had not known enough to recognize it. How could he think to marry her, with such blood as she had? How could he imagine that her kin would let him do it?
Brother Richard saw Marco then, and told the others. Messire Amalric looked surprised. Brother Thomas did not.
“Your father has a message?” Messire Amalric asked. His voice was rough. He was never polite when he did not need to be.
Marco shook his head till his hair whipped in his eyes. They stung; he rubbed them furiously. He had been steady all this time, but now suddenly he began to shake. He knew he looked every bit the mooncalf his father—and surely Messire Amalric—thought him.
Brother Thomas was silent. Brother Richard was kind, if somewhat mocking. “No message? Did you come out of the goodness of your heart, then?”
Marco shook his head again, not as hard this time. If he spoke, he knew that he would stammer. But he could not help but speak. He fought the words through his stumbling tongue. “I—I—I come because I have to come.” He flung himself down at Brother Thomas’ feet and clung to the monk’s coarse robe. “Brother, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’d give anything not to have to tell you, but he’s gone—he’s gone—”
“Back to Genoa without us?”
Brother Thomas fixed his brother monk with a cold eye. “Levity is hardly called for here,” he said. He turned that same eye, but the merest shade warmer, upon Marco. “What has he done? ‘He’ being, I presume, your father?”
“My father, yes,” Marco said. He was calmer now, with the beginning out of the way, and Brother Thomas’ habit in his hands. It was like an anchor. “He’s gone to the prince. He wants to ransom the dispensation, I think.”
“He doesn’t know where it is,” Amalric said so quickly that he could not have thought at all.
“He knows who has it,” said Brother Richard. He looked as cool as ever. “We should have watched him more closely. He never lacked for intelligence, however low its order. He would know that he was being left out of our counsels.”
“And whose idea was that?” demanded Amalric.
“Yours.” Brother Richard rattled the beads that threaded his cincture, seeming to take an innocent pleasure in the sound. “So, then. The rat has gone to the cat. What do we do about it?”
“Pray,” said Brother Thomas.
Amalric curled his lip. “That’s easy for you to say. The king knew nothing of this when I saw him just this hour past. If we’re lucky, he won’t be home yet, and the Assassin will be hunting somewhere safely distant, and it will only be the prince.”
“The most dangerous of them,” said Brother Thomas, “and the one with least cause to love us for what we have done.”
“You call him dangerous? More even than the Assassin?”
“The Assassin kills cleanly, with a dagger in the heart. The other is Christian and a Celt. He may favor teeth and claws.”
“More likely he will challenge my lord Amalric to a passage in the lists.” Brother Richard seemed to like the sound of that.
Amalric went faintly green. “I wasn’t talking about mortal combat,” he said.
“True,” mused Brother Richard, “he is the least of them in name for witchery. I doubt that that makes him less than either of the others; simply more inclined toward battles of the body, and more adept in them. He, of them all, seems most fond of seeming to be human.”
“He pretends badly,” Brother Thomas said. “He is a warrior both of his hands and of the darker arts. The king would pause for conscience. The Assassin has none. He who falls between—him, truly, I fear.”
“They’ll hunt us wherever we go,” Amalric said. “They’ll find us wherever we hide, by our spoor among our kind.”
“A hermitage in the desert might be good for all our souls,” said Brother Richard.
“You may go,” Brother Thomas said, “and hide if you can. You, my lord, have little to fear, I think; they lived and fought and suffered the grim defeat with you, and never marked you for their prey.”
“And you?” said Amalric.
“I am the one they seek. I wrote the dispensation as it was read before them. When they have me, they will hunt no lesser quarry.”
“A martyr,” said Amalric, half in wonder, half in scorn. “A holy Christian martyr.”
Brother Thomas took no notice of his mockery. “If you will go, you had best go now: I doubt that they will tarry, once they know where I am.”
Messire Amalric barely hesitated. Nor did he thank the man who would suffer for his sake. He turned on his heel and left them, walking swiftly.
“A prudent man,” Brother Richard observed, “and, thereby, a safe one.” He shrugged, sighed. “I was never overfond of prudence.”
“Nor I!” Marco cried. “I’ll stay, Brother. I can’t do much, I know that, I’m not good for much of anything, but maybe I can die for you.”
Brother Thomas looked down at him in mild surprise. No contempt, Marco saw that. Wonder, a little, and a dawning of respect. “I am hardly worth dying for,” Brother Thomas said.
“God is.”
Brother Thomas nodded. The respect was clearer now, and the wonder. “I see that I have underrated you.”
Marco shrugged, miserably embarrassed. “I’m nothing. Except maybe a shield for you.”
Brother Thomas reached down and pulled him up, brushing him off with his own frail saintly hands and holding him by the shoulders and looking deep into his eyes. “Messer Marco, have you a vocation?”
“Yes.” Marco’s voice was hardly more than a squeak. “At least, I think so. All I ever wanted was to belong to God.” And you, he added in his heart, but Brother Thomas did not want to hear that “My father doesn’t like it. He’s a good man, Brother, you have to believe that. But he’s of the world. He doesn’t understand.”
A great light kindled in Brother Thomas’ eyes. It dazzled Marco; it made him blink and his heart swell. “We shall have to see,” said Brother Thomas, “what can be done about that.”
He let Marco go. Marco almost fell. “But now,” Brother Thomas said, “we gird for battle. Shall we pray together, Brother, Messer Marco?”
36.
As Aidan, with Ysabel and Akiva and a reluctant Seco in his wake, prepared to leave the caravanserai in pursuit of Brother Thomas, he met Gwydion coming in. Collided with him for a fact, as he strode blindly down the passage in a rare and inscrutable temper. Aidan would have wished to know what had caused it, but his own temper was rarer and more terrible. He caught his brother in a light strong grip and held him when he struggled, and shook him into something resembling consciousness.
Gwydion blinked at him, eyes pale and strange. Aidan gave it to him whole, as only witchfolk could.
He seized on it as Aidan had hoped, and came fully into the world again. “Truly?” he whispered. “Truly, at last?”
“Truly and inarguably.” Aidan grinned at him. “Will you hunt with us?”
His answer was to turn and stride before them.
o0o
The pope’s legate greeted them with honest pleasure, unperturbed by the grimn
ess of their faces or the white terror of Seco’s. Aidan would not have brought Abbot Leo into it, but Gwydion was insistent. “For courtesy,” he said. “And for a witness whom none will question.”
It was Gwydion who told the tale as Aidan had given it to him: shock on shock for Seco, who was learning much too late what power could do. Abbot Leo listened in stainless quiet. At Brother Thomas’ name, a shadow crossed his face. Pain, perhaps; sorrow. “He is the most promising of my servants,” the abbot said when Gwydion was done. “Alas for his soul! What brought him so low?”
“Sanctity,” Aidan replied. “Good men of God have forged lies before in holy Church’s name. He thinks that he preserves it from the evil that we are, by committing a lesser sin.”
“Hell has been bought for less,” said Gwydion. He was all hunter now, and all implacable. Aidan eyed him narrowly and resolved to fathom his trouble. Soon.
Abbot Leo rose stiffly, refusing the proffered hands. He did not hate the brothers for being older than he yet knowing none of the frailty that beset him, but he had his pride. Aidan let him keep it. It was small price to pay for such a witness, and time was fleeting.
There was no joy like the joy of the chase, with the scent hot and rich in one’s nose, and the quarry in sight, and the hunt closing in for the kill. Such a chase as this, across all of Outremer, through war and defeat, was sweeter yet, and its end more glorious when it came. Soon now he would taste blood. Soon he would hold the quarry between his claws, and sink his teeth in its throat.
Guillermo Seco, poor mortal craven, was paralytic with terror. The children half-carried him between them, which only made his terror worse: grown witchfolk were ill enough to bear, but their young were appalling. Aidan showed him a smile much too full of teeth, and paused on the threshold of the monks’ chapel. The prey was within. He had tracked it by its absence, through the memories in men’s minds: a servant who saw them pass, a monk who left the chapel as they entered it, a sacristan who saw them kneel within to pray.
The wall of nothingness which had so frightened the children was stronger and stranger than ever. It beckoned. It seduced. It lured the power down into its lightless dark. There was nothing of his own kind about it. It was a human thing; a mortal horror. Not power, but its utter, boundless absence.
Gwydion’s presence surrounded him before he could fray and scatter. The children wove themselves within it. And all about it like a thread of silver and steel, the purest of all presences, stronger than any and more skilled, and furious that he had thought to leave her out of it
Protection! she spat at him where none but he could hear. Idiot! Brainless fool! Where would you be at all, if I were not here to protect you?
Actually, he said, I was protecting our prey. That stopped her. He smiled as she shaped herself out of air, and kissed her before she could toss him off.
All together they were a thing of light and splendor, a weaving of magic more potent than any one of them apart, or any five of them unwoven. What Gwydion had seen on the Mount of Olives before his entry into Jerusalem, now shaped itself into solidity.
They braced themselves. Aidan drew his sword with a soft hiss of steel. Morgiana’s dagger was in her hand. Gwydion and the children bore no weapon but their power; but that would be enough.
“Now,” said Aidan.
The wall of not-power swayed before the assault; stiffened; held. Aidan smote it with all their conjoined strength.
It shattered; and the door with it, in a rain of stinging shards.
They sprang through the splintered door, Aidan in the van, Morgiana hard upon his heels. He was a tower of light, she a leaping flame.
They came like the wrath of God. No weapons met them; no last desperate stroke of not-power. Only silence and stillness and the scent of incense.
The monks’ chapel was rather a part of the cloister than of the cathedral, small and almost bare, although its shape was beautiful: an aisle and a graceful curved bay with the altar set in it, and columns from old Rome holding up the roof, red stone polished bright beneath the flowering capitals, and a floor of colored marble. The hand of Islam had struck the faces from the mosaics above the altar, and the Frankish archbishops had done nothing to restore them. There was an odd power in the stiff elongated figures, faceless as they were, veiled as if in clouds of awe.
Those whom Aidan hunted knelt beneath the faceless Christ. Three together, each in his separate fashion: a thickset monk who seemed to lie at languid ease even on his knees, and a wizened monk as stiff as a carven saint, and a boy in a cotte rather richer than a commoner should venture, trying to be as stiff as the monk beside him, but trembling in spasms.
Guillermo Seco, whom Aidan had all but forgotten, lurched forward a step through the last of the magelight. He was oblivious to it. “Marco! What are you doing here?”
The boy lurched to his feet, tangling them as he turned. His face was white and defiant. “Father. What have you brought here?”
“Retribution.” Aidan studied their faces. Such utterly human creatures, to have thwarted power for so long. The fat one was beneath contempt: a hanger-on, a seeker after entertainment, with no regard for the cost of it. The boy was merely young. The third—the third was the one he sought. He knew that, meeting those level dark eyes.
This one was dangerous. It was his not-power which warded them all, whispering its seduction even through Morgiana’s potent guard; his will which held them. And his hand surely which had wielded the pen. He had written as if he were the lord pope, words which were his own deep conviction.
Aidan could find no hate in him, though better far for all of them if there had been. Hate was a simple thing. One found it, one measured it, one destroyed it.
This was worse. It was true faith, and pure conviction. Brother Thomas believed what he had written. He knew that Aidan and his kin were evil; that they should be named anathema.
o0o
Thomas stood firm under the weight of that stare. All of them had come after all, and the betrayer with them; and Abbot Leo, whom they had seduced long ago. It was better so, Thomas thought. Whether he lived or died, he would know, surely and incontrovertibly, that he had been tested to the fullest.
They were beautiful as the sons of God were, even cast down into perdition. A perilous beauty. God meant it, surely, as a warning; humans, flawed creatures that they were, might only see how it seduced. The eye strove to soften the edges of it, to blur its strangeness, to shape it to human measure.
Seen clear, it ceased even to be beauty. It was merely alien. The woman, the ifritah, most of all: humanity in her was patently a mask, and naught beneath but the beast, fanged and clawed and deadly.
Strange that she should have mated with the one who, of them all, came closest to a semblance of humanity. He spoke again in the silence. His voice was like a man’s voice, indeed very like, yet it was not. It rang too clear, its music too flawless, no murmur in it of mortality. “Brother Thomas,” he said. “You have something that is mine.”
Such simplicity. Thomas smiled. “I do,” he answered. He heard Marco’s gasp of shock. Poor child. He understood so little, who sacrificed so much. Had he thought that Thomas would lie, or at least prevaricate?
The witch-prince himself seemed somewhat startled. “You admit it?”
“I can hardly lie to you,” Thomas said.
“Tell me where it is.”
Princely, that; imperious. Thomas answered it with perfect serenity. “No, lord prince. I will not. Not without a price.”
Prince Aidan’s lip curled. “So. Even you will bargain with the devil.”
Thomas laughed. He had not felt so light of heart since he was a child. “Why not? Should my charity be perfect, and I imperfect man?”
The prince was barely amused. “Name your price.”
“These,” said Thomas, indicating the conspirators. “Set them free. Give me your faithful word that you will do no harm to any of them.”
“And yourself?”
&nb
sp; “I am nothing,” said Thomas. “You may do with me as you will.”
“A martyr,” the prince said. Thomas could not be certain that it was scorn. Admiration, it was not. The grey cat-eyes flicked from Richard to Seco to Marco; held each, stripped his soul bare, cast him aside. There was no more compassion in it than in the death-play of a cat. “And do you trust me, once you are disposed of, to keep my word to these others?”
“Yes,” said Thomas.
That raised the prince’s brows. He spared no glance for those who had come with him, although the Assassin, at least, looked as if she would speak. “Very well,” he said. “In return for your surrender and for the pope’s dispensation, they may go.”
“Unpunished,” said Thomas with gentle precision. “Unmolested by you or yours, now or ever.”
The prince barely hesitated. “They are free.”
Thomas smiled. Richard seemed disinclined to linger. Seco wavered, his eyes not on Aidan but on his son. Marco was oblivious to him. Aidan patently was not. “If I were wise,” the prince said very gently, “I would go.”
The color drained from Seco’s face. He shot a last, wild glance at Marco. Marco was aware of it: he stiffened, but he kept his eyes on Thomas.
Seco turned abruptly. Perhaps he strove for dignity. It mattered little. It was still, incontestably, flight.
Marco would not follow him. He clung to Thomas, white and shaking but immovable. “I want to die with you,” he said. Through the chattering of his teeth, his voice was remarkably steady.
It was the Elvenking who spoke, soft and seeming diffident, but one could not help but listen. “Let him stay. He can hardly do more harm than has been done already.”
The prince seemed inclined to disagree, but after a moment he acquiesced. Marco sank down at Thomas’ feet, the look on his face compounded of terror and triumph.
He was safe enough, by the prince’s own given word. Thomas believed that, if Marco did not: and all the braver of him to remain in the face of such fear. Thomas signed a blessing on his brow and stood straighter, meeting the prince’s stare.