“Ah, scarcely a Christian sentiment. True, he caused you to go into exile. But thereby he saved you and your family from perishing with Ys.”
“No wish of his, that was!” Nagon barely kept from spitting on the floor. “And what brought Ys to ruin but him—he that made mock of the Gods—” After an instant: “Without owning the one true God.” He swallowed. “Sir, I’ve asked about it. I’ve gone to the Aquilo neighborhood myself and talked with Osismii and such Ysans as I could come on in the woods. Ys is gone. My city, my folk, my clan. I am the last of the Demari Suffetes, do you know? I’ve only two children alive, both girls. The Demari die with me. What’s left to live for?”
“Them and your wife,” Bacca suggested. “Whatever career you can find among us.”
“Oh, I’ll provide for them, sir, of course. And I’ll make my way as best I can. But if that could be by helping you against Grallon—” The breath staggered into Nagon and back out. “That’d be worth dying for.”
“I hope we can arrange something better, including the satisfaction you want,” Bacca soothed. “It does require patience.”
“Say the word, and I’ll catch him alone and kill him.”
“He might very well kill you instead. Besides, that would be stupid, making a martyr of him, possibly angering the Imperium. No, let us undermine him, discredit him, till he is powerless and disowned; and meanwhile, let him experience it happening.”
“Bear in mind, my man, this is a preliminary conference,” said Glabrio. “You will provide information. If in addition your opinion is occasionally asked, do not get above yourself. I have not forgotten the consequences of your last advice. Furthermore, everything that passes between us, today and later, is a secret of state. If you reveal a single word, you will rue it. Is that clear?”
Nagon was still for a space, so still that the noise of the wind outside flew alone through the room under the stares of the saints, before he said: “I understand.”
“Good. You may be seated.” Glabrio gestured at the floor. “We shall proceed.”
A knock sounded at the door. “What the devil?” exclaimed Bacca. “Didn’t you order we aren’t to be interrupted?”
“Unless for something major,” Glabrio told him nervously. “Enter!”
The slave obeyed, bowed, and announced, “I beg the governor’s pardon and pray I have not erred or given offense. An emissary from the bishop has arrived and demands immediate audience.”
“What? From Bishop Martinus? Why, he should be at his monastery—”
“I thought, rightly or wrongly, the governor would wish to know. Shall I admit him, or have him wait, or … send him on his way?”
“No, no.” That last would be impolitic in the extreme. “I will see him.”
The slave scuttled out. After a minute during which the wind gusted louder, a man came in. Young, lean, he was clad only in a rough dark robe and sandals. His fair hair was shaved off from the brow to the middle of the scalp, the tonsure of Martinus; weather had ruffled what was left into a halo against the dimness of the chamber.
“God’s peace be upon you,” he said evenly. “You will not remember me. I am of no consequence. But my name is Sucat.” His Latin bore a curious accent, Britannic subtly altered by years of Hivernian captivity.
“I do, though,” Glabrio answered in a relieved tone. “You are the bishop’s kinsman. Welcome.” He pointed to a vacant stool. “Will you be seated? Will you take refreshment?”
Sucat shook his head. “No, thank you. My message is soon conveyed. It is from Martinus, bishop of Turonum. He commands you in the name of God that you show mercy to the poor survivors of Ys and afflict them no more than the Almighty has done; for what would be presumptuous, and un-Christian, and troublesome to the Church in her work among them.”
Glabrio gaped. Nagon froze. Bacca stood up and spoke tautly: “May I ask why the bishop chooses … to advise the civil authorities?”
“Sir, it is not for me to question a holy man,” Sucat replied, unshaken, almost cheerful, and beneath it implacable. “However, he did point out that there are souls to be saved; that their community may become the seed from which the Evangel will grow through a tribe still mostly pagan; but that first it needs protection and nurture.”
“And exemption from the usual requirements?”
“The civil authorities can better decide such things than we religious. We simply appeal to their consciences. And, of course, to their hopes for their own salvation.”
“Hm. How did you find us, Sucat?”
“The bishop bade me seek the basilica. He said the governor and yourself would be here, together with a third party who should also be reminded about charity. He said that if you want to discuss this with him, you are free to come out to the monastery; or you can arrange an appointment for sometime after he has attended to the suffering poor and conducted services in the city. Have I the governor’s leave to depart? Good day, and God’s blessing be upon you, His wisdom within you.”
The young man strode out.
Glabrio dabbed at sweat on his face, chilly though the room was. “That … puts a different … complexion on the matter, doesn’t it?”
Nagon lifted hands with fingers crooked like claws. “You’ll bow down to Martinus with never a word?” he shouted. “Him, so old and feeble he can barely totter into town once a sennight? What right has he got?”
“Be still,” Bacca snapped.
He paced the floor, scowling into shadows, hands working against each other behind his back. “We’ve small choice, you know,” he muttered at length. “Martinus may have no office in the government, but he stood up to Emperor Maximus, and with his influence he could break us apart and scatter the pieces. He would, too, if we made him angry enough.”
“He could do worse than that.” Glabrio’s flesh rippled with his shudder. “He’s driven demons from the altars where pagans worshipped them, and raised the dead, and talked with angels—he could bring all of them down on us—No, we’ll heed him; we are good, obedient sons of the Church.”
A hiss went between Nagon’s teeth.
Bacca stopped before the man, looked into his eyes, and said low: “Control yourself. Bide your time. Nothing forbids us to watch, and learn, ana think, and wait. Our beloved bishop is in fact very old. Soon God will call him home to his reward. Then we shall see. We shall see.”
2
Again Gratillonius sought privacy on the heights, but now it was with Rufinus. At first they walked in silence. The path climbed and curved amidst leaves whose brilliant green broke morning light into jewel-glints of color on raindrops that clung to them yet after the past several wet days. Cloudlets wandered on a breeze filled with fragrances. Birds a hundredfold rejoiced. Where the view opened downward, it was across a broad western sweep of land. The rivers gleamed through awakening acres; smoke rose from the hearths of Aquilo; northward the colony site at the confluence was half hidden by mists steaming out of its newly spaded earth, white against the forest beyond.
Finally Rufinus ventured, “You can unlock your throat here, master. You’ve kept too much inside for too long.”
Gratillonius’s close-trimmed beard only partly concealed how his mouth writhed. He stared before him as if blind. A minute or two passed while they walked on, until he said, “I wanted to speak alone with you.” His voice sounded rusty.
Rufinus waited.
“You’ve been to Hivernia,” Gratillonius continued presently. “You know them there.”
Rufinus winced. The expression grew into one of pain as Gratillonius went unheeding on: “It’s become pretty clear what happened, how Ys was murdered and who the murderer is. What we must figure out is how to get our revenge.” Laughter barked. “How to exact justice, I mean to say … when Corentinus or Apuleius or their sort are listening. But probably it’s best if they aren’t.”
“I’ve heard little,” Rufinus said with care, “and what I have heard may well be unreliable.”
“Maeloch—He c
ame back from Hivernia himself, you know. After he … told me … what he’d learned—I thought of swearing him to silence. But of course it was already too late to gag the men who’d sailed with him. And others from Ys, they have their own stories to tell. Luckily, everyone’s been too busy to think much about it. Except me.”
Rufinus nodded. Of late, Gratillonius had often gone away by himself, riding or striding for leagues in the rain; and he was curt among people, and bore signs of sleeplessness.
“They’ll also put two and two together eventually,” Gratillonius said. “The story will be in every common mouth … throughout Armorica … for hundreds of years? Dahut’s name—” He did not groan, he roared.
Both halted. Rufinus laid a hand on the massive shoulder beside him and squeezed until most men would have cried out. “Easy, sir,” the Gaul breathed.
Gratillonius gazed past him. Fist beat in palm, over and over. “Dahut, whore to Niall the Scotian,” rattled forth. “She stole the Key from me while I slept, for him. It must have been her. We all slept so heavily in the Red Lodge, in that wild night that should have kept us awake, and I know she could cast such spells, Forsquilis told me she had a gift for witchcraft like no princess—no Queen, since—since—And before that, oh, I closed my eyes and stopped my ears and who dared warn me? He can’t have been her first lover, Niall. Why else did—Tommaltach, Carsa, those young men challenge me, make me who liked them cut them down in the Wood? And that Germanic pirate—Maeloch says he was lying, but I can’t believe it and I don’t think Maeloch really can either—Dahut! Dahilis, our daughter!”
“Are you quite sure?”
Gratillonius wrestled himself toward steadiness. “What else will account for everything we’ve discovered? And Corentinus, he knows. There at the end, he told me to let her go, let the sea have her, or … the weight of her sins would drag me down with her. Not that I cared, not that I did … willingly. The visions he gave me, of the Queens, how each of them died, it made me—I lost strength—” He snapped air. “Since then, he won’t talk about the matter. When I’ve asked, he’s said that’s not for him to speak of, and gone straightaway to something else. Oh, he can find enough urgent business to steer me off this.”
“Are you angry with him, then?”
Gratillonius shook his head. “Why? As well be angry with the messenger who brings bad news. And he did save my life, and other lives, and now when he’s off to Turonum I realize through and through how much he’s been doing for us here.”
Suddenly, terrifying calm, he lifted his face to the blue overhead and declared: “No, this goes beyond the world. Gods have been at work. What else could have led my Dahut astray like that? The Gods of Ys, and that poor, bewildered, lonely girl; They played on her like Pan playing on pipes made from a dead man’s bones. And Mithras, Mithras was too careless or too afraid to stand by us. Dahut was left all alone with the Three, and They are demons. As for the God of the Christians—I don’t know. I’ve asked Him for an honest answer, and gotten silence. So I don’t know of anything except the demons. Maybe otherwise there’s only emptiness.”
Rufinus, who had entertained the same idea, shivered to hear it thus set forth. He waited a bit, while Gratillonius brought his gaze back to earth and across the lands afar, before he said low, “You want to avenge Dahut—and Ys—on Niall.”
“Since I cannot reach the Gods,” replied Gratillonius, flat-voiced, still looking into distance. “In any event, he needs killing.”
Rufinus mustered courage. “First I do.”
Startled out of grief, Gratillonius swung around to peer at him. “How’s that?”
Rufinus stood straight, hands at sides, and spoke fast. “Sir, I failed you. I may well have something to do with what happened. You remember my telling now I freed that prisoner of Niall’s, Eochaid, the same man Maeloch found on the island. It seemed like a fine trick at the time. But it must have poured oil on Niall’s fire against Ys. Certainly it made it impossible for us to send any mission to his kingdom, negotiate, try to engineer his overthrow. I was vain and reckless, I overreached, and Ys had to suffer for it.”
A slow smile, with no mirth but considerable pity, lifted Gratillonius’s lips. “Is that all? Nonsense. You should know the Scoti better than that. I do. They never forget what they think is any wrong done them, and anything that keeps them from having their way is a wrong. Blame me. I was the one who wrecked his fleet and his plans, all those years ago. And I don’t feel guilty about that. It was a good job well done. As for you, why, you freed an enemy of his, who may yet become an ally of ours.”
Rufinus hung his head. “Maybe. But I did go away, down south, just when the trouble was brewing. I should have stayed. I might have been able to warn you, or—or somehow head things off.”
“You might have at that,” said Gratillonius, “you, if any man alive could. I’ve wondered what made you go. It wasn’t really necessary, and you didn’t seem like simply wanting the adventure.”
“I had … reasons,” Rufinus croaked. “I thought it-might ease a conflict—I should have stayed, whatever it cost. All the way back from Italy, after the news came, I was feeling more and more certain the whelming couldn’t have been an accident, it had to be some outcome of the evil I’d smelled everywhere around us.”
“You did? You never let on.”
Rufinus straightened, met his master’s look, and grinned his grin that was half a sneer. “I’m good at putting a nice face on things.” He slumped. “Now scourge me, kill me, anything to free me of this.”
Gratillonius sighed. “All right, you made a mistake, but I was with you in it. I could have required you to stay, couldn’t I? Are we magicians to foretell the future? I need your wits. Throw that remorse of yours on the dunghill where it belongs. That is an order.”
Rufinus’s words seldom rang forth as they did: “At your command, sir! What do you want of me?”
“I told you. For the present, your thoughts. And your ways of dealing with people, seducing them into doing what you want and believing it was their own idea. Well have our hands full getting the colony established, dealing with Imperial officers, collecting intelligence about barbarian movements and making ready to meet them—everything.” Gratillonius paused. “But it’s not too soon to start thinking about Niall of the Nine Hostages.” His tone had gone quiet as a winter night when waters freeze over. “I mean to wash Dahut’s honor clean in his blood. Then my little girl can rest peaceful.”
3
The day was so lovely that to sit in the murk and dinginess of Martinus’s hut was itself a mortification. The door did sag on leather hinges, letting in a bit of sunlight and a glimpse of grass and river. Sounds also drifted through, from monks at their prayers—those who worked in the kitchen gardens stayed mute—all along the bottomland and up in the hillside caves which were the cells of most. But smells of loam and growth were lost in malodor; saintly men scorned scrubbing. The light picked out dust, cobwebs, mushrooms in the corners of the dirt floor. Two three-legged stools and a chest for books and documents were the only furniture.
The bishop’s few remaining teeth gleamed amidst wrinkles and pallor as he smiled. “Do not pretend to virtues that are not yours, my son,” he jested. “I refer to simplicity. You know perfectly well who should take leadership there. Yourself.”
Corentinus bowed his head. That was never quite easy for him to do for a fellow mortal. “Father, I am not worthy.”
Martinus turned serious. His dim eyes strained through the shadows, studying the visitor. “No man born of woman should ever dare imagine himself truly fit for the cure of souls. However, some are called, and must do the best they can. You are familiar with those people, and familiar to them. You get along well with their King—with him who was King. In fact, the two of you make a formidable team. Moreover, you are a man of the folk; you have known labor and hardship, shared the joys and sorrows of the humble. That includes the tribes round about. The effort to bring them into the fold has waned wit
h Maecius’s strength. You are still in your full vigor, never mind those gray hairs. Who better to take over the ministry?”
He sat still before adding, “This is more than my judgment, you understand. God has long marked you out. You are one of the miracle workers.”
So lengthy a speech took its toll of him. He hunched, hugging himself against chill despite the springtime mildness, regaining breath. Eyes closed in the snubnosed countenance.
They opened again when Corentinus protested hoarsely, “Father, that was nothing—No, I repent me; of course I must not demean His mercies. But that is what they were—the fish that kept me fed in my hermitage, the ability to heal or rescue, the rare vision of warning—mercies to a wretched sinner.”
Martinus straightened. Something of the old soldierly manner rapped through his tone. “Enough. Humility is not a virtue natural to you either, Corentinus. Affecting it like this, false modesty, is nothing more than spiritual pride. You have your orders from Heaven. Obey them.”
The tall man gulped. “I’m sorry.” After a moment, his words wavering: “Let me confess it, I’m afraid. I don’t know how to handle these powers. They were such small, comfortable miracles before. Now—”
“You confront the very Serpent.” Martinus nodded. “I know. All too well do I know.”
He leaned forward, intent. “The divine will is often hard to riddle. We make blunders which can bring disaster. And sometimes—oh, Satan works wonders of his own. I have seen what wore the semblance of Christ Himself—” He drew the Cross before him.
“But the Lord is always with us,” he said, “even unto the end of the world. He will help us see through and win through, if only we ask. I recall a mistake—” Once more he must stop to breathe.
“Tell me, Father,” Corentinus begged.
Abruptly Martinus seemed nearly at ease. He smiled anew. “Ah, no great thing. There was a shrine not far from here which my predecessor had consecrated as being of a martyr. But I could find no believable story about his passion; even his name was uncertain. Could members of my flock be calling on a false saint? I went to the grave and prayed for enlightenment. Night fell. A figure appeared before me, wrapped in a shroud black with clotted blood; for his head had been cut off and he must hold it to the stump of his neck. I bade him speak truth, and he confessed he was a brigand, put to death for his crimes. Afterward sheer confusion among the rustics—confusion with a former godling of theirs, I think—caused them to venerate him. I dismissed the ghost to his proper place, and next day made known the facts, and that was the end of that.”
The Dog and the Wolf Page 11