Reave the Just and Other Tales

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  “The time has come for an accounting between us. Scriven, why do you serve me?”

  I had said that I would do what I could, but dismay mocked my given word. The compulsion to dodge and feint in the face of peril ruled me. Rather than answering honestly, I countered, “My lord, why do you oppose the High Cardinal?”

  The Duke’s eyes narrowed, and a glower darkened his visage. I felt impatience through his urgency. He had not brought me to this hall in front of these witnesses in order to watch me scurry aside. Yet his self-mastery was greater than mine. Despite his vexation, he responded as I had asked.

  “All Mullior knows my reasons. You know them yourself, Scriven. I oppose High Cardinal Straylish on both worldly and spiritual grounds.”

  In a formal voice, Duke Obal declared, “His Reverence Beatified has made plain that he considers it the province of Mother Church to dictate both law and policy to such states as Mullior. I do not.” Each word he articulated with the force of a decree. “Where the duties of my station and my birth are concerned, I will be no man’s puppet. The soul and its salvation are the proper care of Mother Church. Worldly circumstances are not. It is not the place of Mother Church to judge or control the actions of suzerains. Such matters as whether I form an alliance with one neighbor, or welcome refugees from another, are not resolved by theological debate. And I take it as a transgression—as a personal affront—when Cardinal Straylish commands me to enact laws which restrict or punish those citizens of Mullior who have not entrusted their souls to Mother Church. I grieve when my people do not recognize the light of Heaven, but I will not in any fashion deny them the freedom of such determinations.”

  Lord Vill and Lord Rawn nodded their approval, but no one in the hall spoke. All Mullior’s highborn had often heard Duke Obal assert his convictions. They waited restively for the outcome of his peroration.

  “These are worldly questions,” the Duke continued. “On spiritual issues also I am not persuaded by the service His Reverence Beatified gives to God. Its tenor disturbs me.

  “I was taught by the clergy of Mullior, Bishop Heraldic among them”—subtly he undermined the Bishop’s censorious disapproval—“that God is a God of love, that Heaven is a place of joy, and that the task of Mother Church is to teach us to open our hearts to such beneficence. Therefore I believe that the true sign of those who serve Mother Church is that their hearts are open. Filled with God, they are neither condemnatory nor cruel.

  “Yet the High Cardinal has closed his heart to all who do not honor his dominion. He persecutes any and all who do not share his beliefs, or his nature. He does not ask if they are accessible to salvation. Rather, he coerces them to it. And if he deems them beyond coercion, he seeks their destruction.”

  Duke Obal made no effort to disguise his bitterness. “In this His Reverence Beatified does not count the cost. Because he loathes evil, he prefers to torment and maim, to make war, to spill the blood of the harmless like water, and to impose his will by terror, rather than to suffer the existence of hellspawn. Better, he believes, to excruciate and murder an innocent—or a thousand innocents—than to risk letting one blood-beast escape him.

  “I disagree,” the Duke pronounced harshly. “I do not believe that coercion and torture are the proper instruments of love and joy. While I live, I will oppose them. If I am wrong, I will answer for it before Heaven. But I will not answer to His Reverence Straylish Beatified.”

  There he stopped. He had said enough to demean my evasion, and I was ashamed of it. Yet I strove to conceal myself still. Across the expec-tant silence of the assembly, I answered softly, “And does that not suffice to account for my service, my lord?”

  He shook his head. “It does not.”

  And Bishop Heraldic echoed behind him, “It does not.”

  Their eyes held me. Every gaze in the hall was fixed toward me. Although I could not stanch my grief enough to see clearly, I felt horror and fascination from my witnesses—revulsion accentuated by the secret excitement of proximity to forbidden things.

  “Very well,” I sighed. “If I must.”

  And still I temporized. Of the Duke’s son I inquired, “May I have wine, my lord? It will not restore me, but it will ease my throat.”

  I meant that I hoped it would ease my abasement.

  “Certainly,” answered Lord Ermine. He left my side. I heard murmuring, and a low voice asked, “Where is the wine which the Duke requires?” For a reason that eluded me, Lord Ermine was answered by a priest of the Duke’s retinue—he may have been the Duke’s personal confessor. The tension of the gathering grew sharper still. But I gave no heed. I cared only that when Lord Ermine returned he placed in my hands a goblet brimming with the sacred color of deep rubies and blood.

  I preferred water, but I drank the wine, praying that it might have an effect upon one of my kind—that it might serve to blunt the edge of my distress, as it did for other men. And if it did not lift my weakness, or soften my woe, perhaps it would sanctify my penance.

  With what strength I had, I declared, “I serve you, my lord, because His Reverence Straylish Beatified instructed me to do so.”

  My audience reacted with disbelief and indignation, and also with a kind of febrile mirth, heated by alarm. Bursts of harsh laughter punctuated shocked expressions of virtue and rejection. I was accused of “sacrilege,” “Satanic cunning,” and—more kindly—“madness.” However, Duke Obal dominated the response.

  “Explain yourself, Scriven,” he demanded. “Are you a spy?”

  I shook my head. “No, my lord. You will understand—”

  As best I could, I hardened my heart.

  Directing my gaze into the red depths of the goblet, I told my tale for the first and only time.

  _______

  “Like others of my kind,” I explained, “I am commonly homeless. We cannot nourish each other, and none sustain us willingly. We are cursed to isolation. Therefore we wander.

  “Perhaps a year ago, my roaming took me to Sestle”—the birthplace of the Cardinal, and the seat of his power. “There I settled to fend for survival as unobtrusively as I could.

  “I cannot tell how others of my kind make their way. I suspect that we are diverse as ordinary men, and that some of us cut as wide a swath as they may, while others covet more timid existence. For myself, I had learned as I roved that places of worship provided congenial feeding grounds. In such places men are plentiful—and careless of their safety, thinking themselves protected by their gods. For the same reason, when a community comes to fear one of my kind, it seldom searches its sanctuaries and chapels. In lands to the east and south of Sestle”—lands which had not been enfolded by Mother Church—“I had lived well and long by secreting myself and selecting my prey within places of worship.

  “That was my intention in Sestle. Avoiding the great cathedrals, I chose a decrepit chapel immured among the city’s multitudinous poor, in a region named Leeside, where the worshipers were at once devout and defenseless, and where any number of unexplained deaths might pass unremarked. At first I made my home among the nameless graves in the chapel basement. Later, however, I learned that the chapel’s builders, dreaming of grander sanctuaries, had given the edifice lofts and attics among the high rafters, and there I eventually took up residence. From above I could watch and hear what transpired below me, among the worshipers. This greatly improved the efficacy of my position.

  “I believed that I had found a place where I might live for many years and be secure.

  “However, its effect was not what I had imagined. From my lofty perch, I watched and heard—too much.

  “The congregation I observed comprised little more than human refuse, more ruined than their house of worship, reduced by poverty and near-starvation to the semblance of vermin. And yet the devotion on their faces, the simplicity revealed through their grime and pain, the untrammeled trust of their hymns and prayers—these things touched me as I had never been touched before.

  “Must I speak
the truth, my lords? Then I will acknowledge that I saw myself in them. My homelessness and wandering, and my ceaseless isolation, had taught me to understand their deprivation. And my kind is always hungry.

  “As I watched my intended prey, there reawakened in me a yearning which I had ignored for so long that it seemed to have no name, a longing of the heart to stand among other men, other folk, and call them mine.”

  Hearing whispered opprobrium and doubt, I admitted, “I am well aware that I revolt you, my lords. Throughout my life I have known only revulsion. It is the fact around which my existence revolves. Yet the truth remains. In that chapel I ached to join the congregation, and give myself up to be healed.”

  Then I resumed.

  “As I say, I saw too much when I watched. And when I listened I heard too much. For the first time, I attended to the conduct and attitudes of my prey. Their priest—an old man called Father Domsen—was no less ruined than they, no less tattered and besmirched, no less stricken by want. But he was also no less devout, and his love of Heaven seemed to shine like a beacon in the dim sanctuary. Again and again, day after day, he spoke of love and acceptance and peace, and of an immortal joy beyond the smallest taint of earthly suffering, and in his faith I heard intimations of an ineffable glory. I was persuaded by it, my lords, when I had not known that I could be moved at all.

  “The alteration in me was gradual, but it brooked no resistance. At first I was hardly conscious of the change. Then I found that I had grown loath to prey on those who worshiped in my chosen home. This required me to search more widely for sustenance, and to accept more hazard. Nevertheless I gained a comfort I could not explain from the knowledge that the chapel’s congregation was in no peril. And for a time that contented me.

  “As I listened to the priest’s kind homilies, however, and to his gentle orisons, and heard the heartfelt goodwill of his blessings, I came to desire a deeper solace. I wished for the more profound balm of standing shoulder to shoulder with men and women who did not abhor me, and of sharing their simplicity.

  “So it was that perhaps three months after I had arrived in Sestle I left my high covert in order to join the congregation when it gathered to worship.

  “That was difficult for me, my lords. As I say, I had known only revulsion from ordinary men—only hatred, and a lust to see me exterminated. To mingle with folk who would avidly rend me limb from limb under other circumstances cost me severely. My pulses burned with fear, and at intervals my hunger swelled with feverish urgency. Yet I endured. Having entered among the congregation, I could not withdraw without drawing notice. At all times, notice threatens me. And in that gathering to be noticed would block any relief from the yearning which had driven me there.

  “I did not know the prayers or the hymns, and the liturgy itself was new to me. But I mimicked those around me until I had secured a rote knowledge of their service. So I avoided the notice I dreaded. Men granted me the same vague nods they gave their fellows, children laughed or squalled in my presence, women and maids curtsied to me without recognition or concern. By small increments I began to feel that I was accepted.”

  I gripped my goblet weakly. “This was an illusion. I understood its ephemeral nature. The folk around me did not know what I was.

  “Yet there was truth in it also. The poor of Sestle feared no one who was not better born, or wealthier, or more predatory than they. Within its plain limits, their acceptance of me was sincere.

  “And I valued it for what it was. Soon I learned to treasure it.

  “Determined to pose no danger in Leeside, I hunted ever more widely for sustenance. Consequently disturbances and rumors began to circulate in the neighborhoods of the rich and the wellborn, causing guards and watchmen to increase their vigilance—and my difficulties. Yet I regretted nothing that I did. The illusion of acceptance eased and nurtured me. I would willingly have incurred far greater hazards to preserve it.

  “Still it was illusion. It taught me to crave more substantial consolations.

  “However, I found that I could not glean what I sought by rote and mimicry. The forms of the chapel’s worship were potent in my heart, but their content—I could not comprehend it. Apparently my life and my nature had precluded essential insights or assumptions which the devout of Mother Church shared with their priest, but which conveyed nothing to me. What was ‘God’—or ‘Heaven’—or ‘soul’? I had no experience of their import. I knew only life and death. And death terrified me because it was not life. When the priest spoke of ‘sin’ and ‘forgiveness’ and ‘salvation,’ I could not imagine his meaning. I could only mouth the hymns and the prayers, and feel true acceptance slipping from my grasp.

  “Eventually my desire to stand among those worshipers in their sanctuary might have curdled to darkness. My yearning had been reawakened, and its frustration could well have driven me to other extremes. However, I was spared that loss.

  “Men say that my kind have no souls, and it may be true. But if we do not, I am unable to explain why God deigned to lift the burden of my isolation before it grew too cumbersome for me to bear.”

  Sighing, I drank from my goblet. In some measure, the wine did ease me. It cleared my throat for speech. But it did little to disperse the thunderheads of weeping and fury which threatened to overwhelm my fragile composure with storms. I had never told my tale because it gave me too much pain.

  Nevertheless I did not stop. I hungered for expiation, despite its cost.

  In the silence of the assembly, I continued my litany of woe.

  “Like ‘Heaven’ and ‘sin,’ ‘love’ was a word I did not comprehend. I had no experience of it. I could not have explained ‘kindness’ to a passing cur. How then could I grasp the higher concerns of the spirit? But I was taught—

  “One day as I entered the sanctuary among the worshipers, a maid curtsied to me. I hardly regarded her, except that I feared all notice, and so I replied with a bow, not wishing to call down attention by rudeness. Then I passed her by.

  “However, she found a place near mine in the sanctuary. The hood of her threadbare cloak covered her hair, but did not conceal her face from me. During the first hymns, she met my gaze and smiled whenever I chanced to glance toward her.

  “Instantly I feared her. How had I drawn her notice? And how could I deflect it elsewhere? Attention led to death, as I knew too well. Yet I was also intrigued by her. I saw no revulsion in her soft eyes—and no malice. No cunning. No knowledge of what I was. Rather, I seemed to detect a shy pleasure in my confusion, my muffled alarm. Although I knew nothing of such matters, I received the impression that she wished me to repay her notice.

  “Covertly, I studied her during the prayers and readings. To me, she was comely—smooth of cheek and full of lip, alive with the vitality of youth, yet demure and pious in her demeanor. Her poverty was plain in the wear and patching of her attire, but if she understood want—as did all Sestle’s poor—she had not been dulled by it. No taint of bitterness or envy diminished her radiance. In the depth and luster of her gentle gaze, I caught my first glimpse of what Father Domsen meant when he spoke of ‘the soul,’ for her eyes seemed to hold more life than mere flesh could contain.

  “Her smiles teased me in ways which disturbed me to the heart.”

  Within myself I wailed at the memory. But I did not voice my sorrow.

  “The priest delivered his sermon earnestly, but I did not heed him. I could not. I felt a mounting consternation which closed my ears. I wished only to flee the maid’s nearness—and dared not, fearing to attract still more notice. Through the final hymns and prayers, and the priest’s distant benediction, I stumbled. Then I sought my departure with as much speed as I could afford.

  “To my chagrin, she accosted me in the aisle before the doors. Avoidance was impossible. Curtsying again, she stepped near and laughed to me softly, ‘Sir, you sing very badly.’

  “To my chagrin, I say—and yet I felt a far greater dismay when I found myself unable to turn away from
her jest. She meant no harm by it, that was plain. No insult sullied her mirth. She simply wished to speak with me. And the impulse gave her pleasure.

  “By that soft enchantment she held me, despite my knowledge of death, and my fear. I might safely have stepped past her there, urged ahead by the moving throng, but I did not. Instead I bowed to conceal my face, murmuring, ‘The melodies are new to me.’

  “While I spoke, I cursed myself because I did not flee. But I cursed myself more because I could not match her smile. The pain of my loneliness had become greater than I knew.

  “‘You are a stranger then,’ she remarked.

  “‘I am,’ I told her. Because my discomfort seemed rude to me, I added, ‘My lady.’

  “She laughed again. ‘“My lady”? You are truly a stranger. No native of Sestle would attempt such excessive courtesy here. I am not so wellborn, sir.

  “‘I am called Irradia. Those who desire more formality name me “Irradia-of-the-Lees,” for I was discovered as an infant among the dredgings of the river, and raised by the good folk of Leeside. This chapel is my home.’ She glanced fondly about the edifice.

  “Her enchantment did not release me. Awkward with difficulty, I strove to answer her. ‘You honor me,’ I said gruffly. ‘As for me, I am so far from my birthplace that I have no name. But you will honor me further if you call me Aposter.’”

  Unable to face my audience, I gazed into the darkness of my goblet. “My lords, that is not my name,” I told the last of my wine. “Nor is Scriven. But it is the name I chose to give her. And it is the name by which I am known to His Reverence Straylish Beatified.”

  Hardening my sorrow, I resumed.

  “She accepted it without demur. How could she have known that it was false? That I was false myself?” Or that she would die in anguish because she could name me? “So commenced my true conversion to the teachings of Mother Church. Until that day, I had stood among the worshipers, singing and praying attentively, but I had only aped their devotion, not shared it. I desired it, but could not grasp its import. From that moment forward, however, the maid Irradia became my teacher, and I began to learn.