Hounds of God (13 page)

Pilgrims, monks, matrons, pilgrims, idlers and marketers and
beggars, servants, pilgrims. No Oddone. A princeling and his bravos; a lady in
a litter; a cardinal in state. Of Oddone, not a sign. And all Rome to be lost
in and a piazza before the seeker, with great ways and small radiating from it
like the spokes of a wheel.

The people were not so crowded here. The street had confined
them; they had space now to scatter.

Pilgrims clustered around the statue on one edge, an image
out of old Rome: Dionysus in his robe of fawnskin, crowned with vine leaves,
with a leopard fawning at his feet. Guides always swore that it was a saint in
the arena, taming the beast that would have slain him. One was swearing it now,
loudly, in bad Norman. Giacomo could understand enough to be sure of that.

No Oddone here. These were all hulking towheaded
northerners, with a scatter of stragglers on their fringes, hawkers of relics
and tokens, beggars, the odd pilgrim. Giacomo skirted them, mounting above
them, for they overflowed the space around the image and poured up the steps of
the little church called, of course, Saint Bacchus. From the top he might be
able to see his way.

Intent, peering over heads, he collided with an unexpected
obstacle. It grunted and said in a familiar tuneless voice, “Prior
Giacomo, look. Just look!”

Giacomo seized him as if to shake him, half for relief, half
for white rage. All his anxiety, all his desperation, and Oddone was not even
surprised to be found again. He could only gape at an old statue like half a
thousand other statues in this city of marble and memories, beautiful maybe,
but a beauty grown lusterless with surfeit.

His narrow face was rapt; his sallow cheeks were flushed. He
looked feverish. “Sweet saints,” he breathed. “I have to
paint that face.”

Giacomo sighed gustily. “So paint it. Or any one of
its thousand twins.”

That managed to startle Oddone, but not enough to free his
eyes from their bondage. “Twins? Brother Prior, there can be none like it
in the world. Only look at it.” Oddone caught Giacomo’s arm with
amazing force and turned him bodily.
“Look!”

There was Saint Bacchus with his ringlets tumbling down his
marble back, no face to be seen. There was the leopard with its fanged grin.
There were the pilgrims, row on row.

Not all after all were Norman. One stood among them like a
child in a field of tall corn, his black curly head bare to the sun, his black
eyes sparkling with mockery as the guide rambled on. His face was dark and
young and wild, a deal more handsome than not, and as utterly un-Norman as any
face could be. Levantine, Giacomo would have said, or Greek.

Oddone shook his Prior lightly. “Do you see him now?
Have you ever seen his like?” And losing patience at last, he pointed. “By
all the angels, Brother Prior, are you blind?”

His finger pointed directly to the right of the dark boy, to
one of the tall figures that hemmed him in. That one, Giacomo saw, stood
slightly apart, an inch perhaps, or a world’s width.

From the steps he seemed to stand almost face to face with
the statue, a pilgrim clothed like any other, hat and hood, gown, cloak and
scrip and staff. But the face he lifted as if to exchange stares with the
marble god...

Giacomo swallowed. No one should have a face like that.
White like marble, but living, breathing, tilting over the boy’s head
toward one of the brawnier Normans, smiling a very little and murmuring
something far too faint to be heard.

“I have to paint him,” Oddone said. “For
my archangel.” He stopped and sucked in his breath. “Brother Prior!
Could he—could he really be—”

“The age of miracles is over.” As soon as he had
said it, Giacomo wished that he had not. Not that he had wounded Oddone—the
lad was well past it—but that he might after all have lied.

Oddone looked fair to lose himself again, though this time
at least he had a visible destination. Giacomo got a grip on the back of his
cincture. He hardly seemed to notice the weight he towed behind him.

Yet once he had reached his quarry he hung back. Shy,
Giacomo thought, then saw his face. It wore the same look as when he stood with
brush in hand and model before him, and page or panel waiting for the first
stroke.

The guide had ended his tale and gathered his flock, herding
them churchward, hangers-on and all. Only three were not to be moved: the dark
youth, the big Norman with his rough sandy beard, and Oddone’s archangel.

The boy wandered up to the statue, exploring its base with
quick light fingers. The Norman, who alone had no hat but only a hood, let it
fall back from a tonsured head and said in excellent Latin, “Well,
brothers, what now?”

Neither of his companions responded. The boy ignored him
utterly. The other turned his head from side to side as if questing.

His eyes were enormous, colorless as water. He should have
had a bleached look, all white as he was; he should have seemed browless and
lashless, naked and unfinished. But his brows were fine and distinct and set on
a definite tilt, just touched with gold; his lashes were thick and long; and
all his pallor had a sheen like light caught in alabaster. Beside him the
marble Dionysus was a dull and lifeless thing.

The Norman sighed. “I for one,” he said with
elaborate patience, “would like to know where my head will rest tonight.
And how we’re going to occupy ourselves until we get there.”

Oddone had found his opening, a sending straight from
heaven. “Why, good pilgrims, if that’s your worry, I know just the
place.”

The big man looked down in startlement to the voice that
chirped by his elbow. He had a battered soldier’s face, but his eyes were
blue as flax flowers. They took in Oddone from crown to toe and back again, not
a long journey at all.

Surprise and suspicion had turned his face to flint; now it
softened, and his stare turned quizzical. “Do you, Brother? Where may
that be?”

“Why,” said Oddone quickly, “in our own
San Girolamo. We don’t keep a regular hostel, but we have a guesthouse,
small but very comfortable, with its own garden. And to a Brother of our own
Order and his companions, we can offer a warm welcome.”

Giacomo gaped in astonishment. Shy Brother Oddone, diffident
well-nigh to tears, not only stood up to a man thrice his size; he offered
lodgings on behalf of his whole monastery.

The Norman monk was interested, even a little amused. “Is
that San Girolamo near the Palatine? The one with the lovely campanile?”

“Yes!” cried Oddone, delighted. “Brother,
you must come, you and the others. Must they not, Brother Prior?”

Now at last he was mindful of his own low rank—now all
his sins were committed. Giacomo made no effort to smooth his face, although he
knew he looked formidable. “Prior Giacomo,” he named himself with
the formality of suspicion, “of San Girolamo.”

“Brother Jehan,” the foreigner responded, “from
Anglia.” If Giacomo’s manner daunted him, he gave no sign of it. “For
myself, I’d be glad enough to take your Brother’s offer, provided
you approve. My companions I can’t speak for.”

Slowly the strange one turned. His expression was remote,
even cold, but his gaze was clear enough. As it flickered over Giacomo, the
Prior shivered. It seemed to have substance, a touch like wind, both burning
and cool. “I would be content,” he said. His Latin was flawless,
his voice as uncanny as his face. “With the Prior’s consent.”

Giacomo’s scowl deepened. Oddone was quivering like a
pup before its master, uncertain whether he had earned a reward or a whipping.
The two tall men waited, the boy coming between them, bright-eyed with
curiosity but offering no word.

At last Giacomo spoke. “Of course I consent. It’s
in the Rule. Hospitality to all who come, out of Christ’s charity. Our
Abbot won’t argue with that.”

Oddone clapped his hands. “Come on, then! We’re
taking an easy way back; we’re at liberty, you see, and needn’t
hurry. Are you hungry? Thirsty? Is there anything you’d like to see?”

A grin transformed Jehan’s face, stripping away a full
score of years. “You choose, Brother. We’re even freer than you—at
loose ends, for a fact; we’ll follow wherever you lead.”

And lead them Oddone did, with skill as amazing as
everything he had done since he came to Saint Bacchus, chattering happily with
the Norman monk, harkened to with silent interest by the young Greek, and quite
undismayed by his strange one’s abstraction.

Giacomo trailed after the oddly assorted company. After some
little time he discovered that he was matching his pace to that of the white
stranger.

The others had drawn somewhat ahead up the remnant of an old
paved way, a road like a green tunnel through one of Rome’s many
wildernesses. The sun was shut out here; the awareness of humanity, of the
city, was dim and distant. Yet Oddone was leading them through the city itself,
from the mighty fortress bulk of the Colosseum toward the Palatine Hill and,
past that, San Girolamo in the hollow of the hill.

This was not true wasteland as Rome knew it, vast expanses
of open field and tangled copse and malarial marsh strewn as thickly with ruins
as a battlefield with bones, but rather a garden gone wild. Through the knotted
canes peered a pale blurred face, old god or old Roman set on guard here and
long forgotten.

Within reach of the image, Giacomo’s companion slowed.
He took off his hat as if it irked him, and let his hood fall back, shaking out
a remarkable quantity of winter-gold hair.

The gesture struck something in Giacomo, made him conscious
that he had been seeing no living man at all, but only an ageless abstract
beauty. The beauty had grown no less, yet something, maybe the green solitude,
had thawed the ice; the marble angel had become a man, and a very young one at
that, a princely youth who looked about him with newborn awareness. His eyes
had darkened although they were light still, clear silvery grey, alive and
alert and very, very keen.

They found the crumbling statue, examined it, let it pass in
favor of the living face. Bright though they were, the terrible brilliance was
gone; they saw no more than any eyes had a right to see.

Giacomo began to bristle. He was not a marble Roman, to be
stared at for so long a count of heartbeats down so elegant a length of nose.
Yet for all its pride, it was not an arrogant stare; it had a strange clarity,
an innocence that asked no pardon and never dreamed it needed any.

“Well, sir,” said the Prior as the silence stretched,
“do you find my face ugly enough to be fascinating?”

The pilgrim lowered his eyes. “Your pardon, Brother
Prior. I meant no discourtesy.”

“I suppose I can forgive you. You’re a nobleman
at home, aren’t you?”

He looked almost dismayed. “Is it so obvious?”

“Rather,” Giacomo said.

“How strange,” murmured the pilgrim. He walked
more slowly still, pondering.

Giacomo might have thought him mad, or slow in the wits; the
former all but certainly, if only instinct had not rebelled. There was
something eminently sane about this young man, although it was not the sanity
of the common run of mankind. It was in fact very like Oddone’s.
Brilliant, narrowly focused, and generally preoccupied.

His focus shifted abruptly to Giacomo; just as abruptly he
said, “I’m called Alfred, or Alf if you like. Like my friend, I
come from Anglia.”

“So,” said Giacomo, “Oddone was almost
right. Not an angel after all, but an Angle.”

Alf smiled a little ruefully “I earned that, didn’t
I?” And after a moment: “Your face is not ugly at all, and yet I do
find it fascinating.”

“All Rome in a nose,” Giacomo said, half
annoyed, half amused. “You wouldn’t happen to be an artist, too,
would you?”

Alf shook his head with a touch of regret. “I’m
but a poor student of the world and its faces. Sometimes, as you’ve
discovered, to the point of rudeness.”

“It’s forgiven,” Giacomo said.

As they hastened to catch the others, now lost to sight, he
realized that all his ill humor had evaporated. Nor could even Oddone’s
tuneless singing bring it back.

“O Roma nobilis, orbis et domina,

cunctarum urbium excellentissima....”

There was only one reasonable defense. With a better will
than he had ever expected to have, he added his own rich basso:

“Roseo martyrum sanguine rubea,

albis et virginum liliis candida....”

New voices joined them, strong trained Norman-accented
baritone and sudden, piercingly sweet tenor.

“Salutem dicimus tibi per omnia,

te benedicimus—salve per saecula!”

They made quite a passable choir, Oddone notwithstanding.
Even as their singing faded into the clamor of Rome and died, Giacomo
discovered that he was smiling.

As prisons went, Anna supposed, this one was quite
luxurious. It was clean; if not warm, it was certainly not too cold to bear,
and she had the blanket; the food was edible though somewhat monotonous. Her
hands were healing well; she had taken off the bandages some little time since,
reckoned in visits of their unseen jailer. Food appeared at regular intervals;
the chamberpot was never full, the lamp never empty.

It was like a tale out of Anna’s eastern childhood,
save that her nurse had never told her how very frightening it was to be waited
on by unseen hands, watched over by a guard whom she could not perceive.

At first it nearly drove her mad not to know who watched, or
where, or why. But with time she calmed. Let him watch, whatever he was, wizard
or demon or renegade of the Kindred. Let him know all she did, thought, said.
She had nothing to be ashamed of.

She huddled at her end of the pallet, or prowled the cell,
or played with the children. Pups she refused to call them, and she was
adamant. Yet pups they were. Rather dull at first like all newborn creatures,
all their beings focused on food and sleep.