“Radio?” Jean-Louis set his cape gun against the wall of Jacqui’s house. “We have no radio.”
“No radio?” Crispin echoed, incredulous.
“Your Chantry does not allow us such things, you know?”
Lud stepped forward to help Kyra with his wounded fellow, and through his helmet said, “If I may, ladyship, your father must have learned by now that we didn’t arrive in Artemia. He’s sure to send out ships to find us. They’ll be over these mountains in hours—if they aren’t already.” “We could send up flares,” said one of the other soldiers.
“And alert whoever is after us to our location?” Kyra snapped, rounding on her man. The soldier blanched at the force in his captain’s voice, and he pressed his lips together.
Sabine snapped her fingers, “Get the wounded into the house, then.” She did not ask the woman permission before storming into her home. She was palatine. She only ordered it be so, and so it was. The adorator woman did not resist or object, only held her son out of the way as Kyra and Lud pushed through the wooden portal with the injured Ored hopping between them. Crispin pushed in after them, a hand on his aching head.
Jean-Louis stood in the door, said something to the woman in their native tongue. Crispin raised an eyebrow. “I told her we won’t be here long.”
“Only until relief arrives,” Crispin said in answer.
But the adorator was not listening, he had busied himself shooing the boy out the door. What was the matter with these people? He was an Imperial palatine, the son of their lord archon! And yet the peasant seemed unbothered by the gulf between them, knelt instead before the boy, Léon, saying, “You see my friends here?” The boy nodded his head, and the adorator said, “They need the abbé’s help. Can you get him for us?”
In a small voice, Léon said, “Oui, monsieur.”
Monsieur? That sounded almost like messer. This language they were speaking—was it Classical English? Not for the first time, Crispin wished that it was Hadrian in his place. Hadrian was the one with the ear for languages and the head for words. Hadrian would have known what was being said. Hadrian would have known what to do.
Crispin only stood there, useless and confused, not understanding as he watched the boy hurry out the door. He’d never felt so out of place, so like he did not belong. He’d never felt so powerless. There had been nothing he could do during the attack on the shuttle, was nothing he could do now. Nothing but wait. Exhausted, he sank upon a low stool that stood just inside the door beside the peasants’ mounded shoes.
The house looked like something out of one of his mother’s holograph operas set in the mythic past. The stone walls were coated with plaster cracked and flaking, but painted a warm mustard color. The furniture was all of wood, simply fashioned but solid as the darkly stained floor. And nowhere was there to be seen the glow of a holograph, the gleam of a camera eye or grill of a speaker patch. The lights were electric, and he thought he saw a refrigeration unit in the next room—but aside from these humble artifacts he saw nothing more sophisticated than a lamp. There wasn’t even climate control, and the windows were all open and unglazed. Still, it was not altogether unpleasant, albeit in a poor, barbaric way.
A piece of the decoration caught his attention, and to cover the untidy silence as Kyra and Lud helped Ored to sit on a flattened couch by the big window opposite, Crispin asked, “What is that?” He pointed at a wooden cross like the one Jean-Louis wore about his neck, which depicted an emaciated man hanging from its beam, his head wreathed like the victor in a Colosso.
The woman of the house looked round, as if unsure what it was Crispin was asking about, as if there were nothing strange about the image of a crucified man hanging on the wall in this otherwise bright and wholesome place. Crispin thought again about the stories he had heard about these mountain cultists. That they drank blood and lay with their own siblings. They sounded like the Cielcin, the aliens that drank up human colonies along the edges of the Empire. Unseen beneath his black cape, Crispin clutched the hilt of his sword. “Quelle? Oh!” she said. “You mean the crucifix?”
To Crispin’s surprise, Sabine answered, “It’s their god.”
“Their god?” Crispin repeated, still confused. “But he’s dead.”
A trace of a smile flickered over both Jacqui and Jean-Louis’s faces, and Crispin felt a flash of annoyance fill him up. What was so amusing? After a moment’s uneasy silence, Jacqui answered, “It is … difficult to explain, my lord.” She tried, and with Jean-Louis’s help delivered a halting tale about an ancient carpenter in the Golden Age of Earth who had been born without a father. She said that he had been put to death by the empire of that day, executed for fomenting unrest in an obscure corner of the world. Crispin listened incredulous as the woman said her god-man had risen from the dead after three days, during which time he had contended with Death herself and loosed the righteous from hell. Neither peasant looked at Crispin as they spoke, eyes flitting in turn between the floor and the icon hung on the wall.
“Hell, is it?” Crispin said when at last they’d finished, fidgeting all the while with the platinum signet ring wound round his left thumb. It depicted a devil in capering outline, a trident raised above its head, poised as if to throw. Hell. Devils. “How long did you say this community has been here?” In a certain light, the pagan story sounded almost treasonous. The Marlowes were devils, after all.
“On the planet?” Jean-Louis asked, stroking his pointed beard. “Oh, since the Second Aurigan War. Almost nine thousand years.” He made a face. “In one form or another.”
House Marlowe had made its name in the Aurigan Wars. Lord Julian Marlowe—the first Lord of Devil’s Rest—had made his name in that war, fighting for Duke Tiberius Ormund for control of the province. Had the settlement of these Museum Catholics on Delos been a condition of the treaty that ended that war? Hadrian would have known. Or Father.
“You say this Church of yours stretches back to the Golden Age?” Crispin asked, “That’s what? Twenty thousand years?”
“Nearly twenty-one,” Sabine interjected.
“Twenty-one thousand years,” Crispin repeated, and blind to the antiquity and memory of so ancient a tradition, unmoved by the fact that here were members of a living culture older than the Sollan Empire and space travel itself, he grinned. “In all that time you lot didn’t realize this god’s mother of yours just got herself with child off some other man and told her husband ‘Oh, God did it?’” He glanced around at Sabine, at Kyra and the ragged soldiers, expecting a laugh. None came. Only a weak smile from Sabine, who shook her head.
Jean-Louis’s face was white, and for a moment Crispin thought the man might lunge at him. His fists were clenched. For a moment, Crispin almost laughed, forgetting for a moment that here was the man who had saved him and his sister that very night. He wanted to hit something, and for a moment hoped this peasant would try it. Making a disgusted sound, Crispin turned from them and standing moved towards the window. “Bunch of primitive muck farmers,” he sneered.
Beyond the confines of the quiet house, the village was waking up. The wind-lamps that lighted the path through the vale below the township were going out with the golden sunrise, black sky turning a pale yellow. In the white building on the hill above—in the very center of the village—a bell began to toll the sixth hour. By the light of the new sun, Crispin saw there were peasants already toiling in the fields and the terraces below the wall.
“You shouldn’t insult our hosts, Crispin.” Sabine kept her voice low as she moved beside him, placed a warm hand on his arm. “They could have left us in the woods. Or shot us.” Crispin nodded, but said nothing. She was right. “We need them to get a message to Devil’s Rest. To Father. Meidua can’t be more than a couple hours away by flier. We’ll see this elder of theirs and then maybe we can get a message out.”
“Do you have any signal on your terminal?” Crispin asked, “Jean- Louis said they don’t have a radio in the village.”
&n
bsp; “My terminal’s dead,” she said, “not sure if the crash killed it or if it’s the battery, but I can’t get it to work. Not that it would do any good. Kyra says she can’t get a signal either.”
Crispin leaned both elbows on the windowsill and massaged his scalp, “It’s these mountains. Father will have to install comms relays throughout.” He banged a fist on the sill, startling the people in the room behind him. “Why hasn’t that already been done?”
“Not worth the cost,” Sabine said.
To their surprise, Lud added, “The mining crawlers have all the comms equipment they need, lordship. And when they’re done, they’re just air-lifted out with the dorm units and all.” The two Marlowes turned to the soldier, who rose from his place beside the injured Ored on Jacqui’s couch. He had removed his helmet at last, and Crispin was surprised at just how young he seemed, with short dark hair and ears like rocket fins. He pressed his lips together, remembering at once just who it was he was speaking to, pointing out the obvious like that. He ducked his chin, “I hope I’ve not given offense. My father was a miner. I know a thing or two.”
“No, no,” Crispin said, and waved him to silence.
Just then a knock sounded at the woman’s back door. Those soldiers as could all stood, turning with hands on weapons, forgetting that no one that meant them or this village harm would have the manners to knock. At a nod from Captain Kyra, Jacqui opened the door to find an old man standing there beside the breathless Léon. The boy had clearly been running, and despite the chilly morning his, sweaty curls lay plastered to his forehead.
But it was the man who drew Crispin’s attention. He had the look of Chantry Prior, dressed as he was in simple black, though he wore a heavy crucifix not unlike Jean-Louis’s on a golden chain threaded through a buttonhole on his black cassock. He was very pale, pale almost as Crispin and Sabine were themselves, his white hair and beard seeming somehow dark against his skin. He reminded Crispin sharply of old Tor Gibson, the tutor he’d had as a boy, the one who had tried to sell his brother to the Extrasolarian barbarians.
“Excusez-moi, Madame Jacqui,” he said in a deep voice before switching to Galstani. “Your son said I should come at once. Is something the matter?” Only then did his eyes catch on the two palatines, on Kyra and the half dozen soldiers variously sitting or standing in her home. His eyes widened, and he removed his round, wide-brimmed hat with a steady hand. “What is going on here?” He did not have the native accent the rest of the villagers shared, but spoke in a clipped-off fashion that reminded Crispin of the Legionary officers he had met with when they visited Delos from offworld.
Jean-Louis stepped forward, “Abbé Laurent! Thank you for coming.” The priest held his flat hat to his breast, surveying the wounded men, Crispin, and Sabine. He passed his hat to Jean-Louis without comment and stepped into the middle of the room, peering at them through wire- rimmed spectacles. “You’re palatine,” he said evenly, looking for all the world as if there were nothing unusual about the situation they found themselves in. “House Marlowe?”
“Yes,” Crispin said, “I am Lord Crispin Marlowe, and this is my sister, the Lady Sabine.”
The man did not bow, only bobbed his head. Crispin felt a flash of irritation at the man’s lack of deference, but he stayed himself. If this man was the village eolderman, it would not do to shame him. The old man sucked on his teeth, “I’m Abbé Laurent.”
“You’re what?” Crispin asked, “Their prior? Their eolderman?”
“We prefer the word priest around here, son,” he said, but he pressed on with the deliberate forward momentum of a career soldier. “Father Laurent will do. What happened?”
Crispin took Sabine’s hand off his arm and stepped forward, “We were shot down midway to Artemia. Your people found us and brought us here, but we’re still being hunted.”
“Let’s just hope we weren’t pursued,” Sabine said. “We didn’t intend to put your people in any danger, um, Abbé.”
“Father,” he said, “Abbé is father in French.”
French? Crispin thought. That must be the strange language these adorators spoke. He’d thought it was Classical English, such as the scholiasts used in their athenaea. He’d never even heard of French before. “Jean-Louis,” the priest said, turning to the younger man, “can you send one of your cousins down to Camlen’s Gap? Someone needs to contact the city so we can get Lord and Lady Marlowe safely on their way back home.”
The adorator nodded, “I’ll go myself.”
“No,” the priest said, “I need you to help me get these people up to the church. They’ll be safer inside the walls, and Jacqui needs her front room back.”
“Why me?” Jean-Louis asked.
“Because you have the wagon and the horses we need.” Sabine came forward, “Don’t you trust your people?”
“Of course I do,” the priest said, “but it may be that not everyone in town are my people. God helps those as help themselves, or hadn’t you heard?” He turned back to Jean-Louis. “What are you doing standing there, lad? Get your cousin on the road and get your wagon, double quick!” By the end of his pronouncements, there was no doubt left in Crispin’s mind that this man had been a soldier. When he turned, Crispin saw the bluish outline of an eagle tattooed on the man’s thick neck above the Roman collar. It was a soldier’s mark, the emblem of some legion or other. That explained the man’s pallor as well. Who knew how many years and decades the priest had spent in the dark of cryonic fugue or on ships in the black of space? How long had he gone without knowing the light of suns or the touch of rain—and how long had he been on Delos?
Jean-Louis answered the priest as though he were his commanding officer and hurried to the door. Crispin could hear him shouting to those of his family who had remained outside, barking orders to the others in his strange language. He turned smartly, standing in the open door such that the autumn wind came in around him. “I told one of them to make for Camlen’s Gap.”
“How far is this place?” Kyra asked, doubtless estimating how much time they would need to hold out in the village.
“When my papa took me to there last time, we had to camp for the night!” said the boy, Léon. The boy could not have been more than eight standard, Crispin judged, and his Galstani was muddled and lisping.
“Camp?” Crispin repeated.
“It’s about two days’ ride,” Jacqui said. “Day and a half if you don’t like your horse much.”
“A day and a half!” Sabine said, the exasperation in her voice matching that in Crispin’s head. It took that long for freight to climb a hightower to orbit. “Don’t you have a flier? Or a groundcar?”
Jean-Louis shook his head, and matching Crispin’s earlier sneer said, “We are but humble muck farmers.”
Sabine’s fingers tightened on Crispin’s arm, and it was all he could do to stop himself striking the smug little plebeian where he stood. How dare he speak to him like that? But Crispin restrained himself.
Father Laurent ignored this little exchange, “I thought I told you to fetch your wagon, Jean. There’s a good lad.” He smiled encouragingly, “Go on.”
“The others are just mounting up.”
The older man reached up behind his spectacles and rubbed his eyes, as if he too had been up all night at some hard trial. For a moment he was no legionary veteran at all, only an old man, tired and grandfatherly. So it was with grandfatherly insistence that he repeated himself. “I said go on, Jean.”
The younger man went, leaving the priest and the mother and son alone with the survivors. Crispin lowered himself back upon the stool he’d occupied near the pile of work shoes in one corner. “Thank you,” he said at last, the words strange and fuzzy on his tongue. “You didn’t have to help us.”
The priest eased himself onto the arm of the sofa where Ored sat with his missing leg. “Yes, I did.”
“Your people could have as easily passed us by in the forest,” Crispin said, “but they didn’t.”
&nb
sp; “They would never.”
“Why not?” Crispin asked, and reframed the question he had asked Jean-Louis when they met in the words, “Why are you helping us?”
The priest’s thick beard rearranged itself into a smile, and he said, “Hospes eram et collexistis me.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It is one of the most quoted pieces of Scripture, but only because it is one of the most important.”
Sabine leaned into the conversation, “Is that … Latin? What does it mean?” Crispin smiled at her. Sabine had something of Hadrian’s gift for languages, it seemed. It bothered Crispin that he hadn’t known that.
He could almost imagine his lost older brother answering with the priest as he said, “I was a stranger and you took me in. Our Lord asks us to care for those who need it. Quamdiu fecistis uni de his fratribus meis minimis mihi fecistis. What you do to the least of my brethren you do to me, He says.”
“The least?” Crispin echoed.
Father Laurent raised a defensive hand, “Even the least. Jean-Louis is a good man. His father taught him well. He would have helped you if you were a beggar or the Prince of Jadd.”
His father … Crispin’s father had taught him to rule. To rule over his people, regardless of whether or not they wanted him or obeyed. What you do to the least of my brethren you do to me. Such a lord would have the love of his subjects, and they would serve him willingly. By the sound of it, these villagers yet served their Lord God twenty thousand years after his death on Old Earth. What reason other than love and devotion could there be for such a thing?
“You’re only helping us because you think it’s the right thing to do?” Crispin said, unable to keep the edge from his voice. His lips curled. “You expect me to believe that?”
The old priest only shrugged, “My beliefs do not require you to.”
Chapter 7
The Servants of God
An hour had passed and the better part of a second before Jean- Louis returned with the cart. It stank of wet straw and of the horses that drew it, and the canvas roof that covered its flat bed was stained and patched, reminding Crispin just how primitive these plebeians were. He clambered in first with Sabine, seated himself on an empty crate to one side and watched as the others struggled to lift Ored into place. The amputee struggled to hop up the rungs, and twice he slipped back to ground.
The Lesser Devil Page 5