Hounds of God (37 page)

“We do not choose. We do not even dream of it. The one
of us who did is dead; and he was our enemy, the power behind the Crusade, a
monk of the Order of Saint Paul.”

That brought Honorius erect. He had not known it. He did not
believe it. God and the Church were not so mocked.

“His name,” Alf said gently and inexorably, “was
Simon. He had power the like of which even we have never seen, nor ever wish to
see again. It drove him mad; it devoured him. Hear now what he wrought, he and
those who made use of him.”

Told all together in that soft calm voice, it was terrible;
it was pitiable; it was most horribly credible. “Without Brother Simon,”
Alf said, “no doubt the Crusade would have mounted on the wave that
shattered Languedoc. But Rhiyana could have withstood it, turned it back
without bloodshed. Its people would suffer no war and no Interdict.” He
drew a slow breath. “What is done is done. Simon died repentant; God has taken
him, he is at peace. Not so those who wielded him. Sworn to destroy all works
of sorcery, they loosed a sorcerer mightier than any in the world; in their
zeal to raise their Order above all others, they resorted to that very power
against which they thundered. In God’s name, God’s Hounds turned to
the ways and the arts of the Adversary.”

“Or so they would say.” Thea stood at Alf’s
back, hands on his shoulders, eyes on the old man in the tall chair. “As
they would say that any means is just if the end is holy. Perilous doctrine. It
permits murder and rapine and black sorcery in the name of an Order’s
furtherance, but it grants no mercy to those of us who try to live as the
Church prescribes. The first of us who died was a child. He believed devoutly
in God and the Gospels. He heard Mass every day. I never heard him speak ill of
anyone, nor knew him to do harm to man or beast. And he died. If he had not
been killed, if all had gone as our enemies intended, he would have been burned
alive.”

Honorius tore his gaze from her. She was not gentle; she was
not quiet. She was afire with rage. And justly, said the cold judge within, if
all was as he had heard. “What proof can you give?” he demanded of
her. “How may I know that you tell the truth?”

“Look yonder,” she answered.

Another white habit, another grey cowl. Brother Paul stood
dazed, torn from a black doze under the eyes of two monks and two mortal women
and two witchborn children. “Brother Paul,” Thea said, “was
the mind to Simon’s hand. His was the genius that found the mad boy and
knew him for what he was, and made him the chief of God’s hunting Hounds.”

“Not entirely.”

Even she stared at Father Alberich. He had listened in
silence, motionless but for the flicker of his eyes; he spoke as coolly as Alf had.
“Brother Paul was given the power of finding, but not that of making.
Such was my part. Like him I saw God’s hand in Simon’s coming among
us; I saw the working of God’s will. Here was the sword we had prayed
for, a keen weapon against the powers of the dark; here also was our shield and
our fortress.”

“You knew what he was. You accepted him; you used him.
Are you any less culpable than the King of Rhiyana?”

“It was God’s will.” Alberich’s
words were like a gate shutting. “Your Holiness, if Brother Paul is to be
punished, I beg leave to remind you that I am given full and sole jurisdiction
over my wayward brethren.”

Jehan stepped forward. “I claim episcopal exemption.
This monk has committed grave crimes against a whole kingdom.”

“Not yours, Bishop of Sarum,” drawled Brother
Paul.

“Mine for the duration of this embassy,” Jehan
shot back, “under the forty-third capitulum of the Synod of Poictesme,
which states—”

Honorius smote his hands together. “Sirs, sirs! By no
will of mine this has become a papal tribunal. It appears that we are trying
the guilt of the Order of Saint Paul on a charge of murder and sorcery. Or is
it that of Rhiyana’s King and certain of his nobility on a charge of
sorcery alone? Or shall it be both?”

“We do not deny either our possession or our use of
power,” Alf said, “which men call magecraft and sorcery. We do deny
that that power either stems from or serves the purposes of God’s
Adversary. And we charge that our kingdom has been assaulted without reason or
justice; that the guilt lies not with us but with the preachers of the Crusade.
We have lived as best we could between the laws of the Church and the laws of
our nature. In return we have been set upon with arms and with power; our
children murdered or taken; our human folk condemned to suffer for us, for no
better reason than that we live.”

“You live,” Brother Paul echoed him. “There
is the heart of it. You live. You do not die.”

“Save by violence.”

“Exactly.”

Thea tossed her head. “There’s a dilemma for you,
Lord Pope. God has made us, certainly, unless you subscribe to the doctrine
that the Devil could have done so, and that is heresy; He made us immune to
death by age or sickness. So if we are to die, we have only two choices. Murder
or suicide. The latter is forbidden by the Church. So is the former, unless, of
course, one calls it war. Or Crusade. Or destruction of a pestilence.”

“You cannot live,” said Father Alberich
dispassionately. “You are against nature. All things on earth fade and
die. Only spirit is undying.”

“Such fine ecclesiastical logic. It exists; it should
not; deny it and destroy it. Are you absolutely certain, Father General, that
your vision is clear? That you see what we are without an intervening cloud of
envy?”

“I see what you are. Beautiful; seductive. Deadly.”

“Ah, but to what? To your sense of superiority?”

“You are superior to no man.”

She clapped her hands. “Bravo, Father! Truly, we are
not. But neither are we inferior. We are another face of God’s creation,
no more good or evil than our human cousins. Consider what sets us apart: our
beauty, our power, our deathlessness. Have you nothing to counter these? Think,
Father Alberich. Have you?”

He crossed himself deliberately, eyes averted from her
shining face. To him she was doubly terrible, witch and woman both, and far too
intelligent for a female creature. Demonically intelligent.

“Demonically accurate,” she said. “Tell me
what you have that we have not. Tell me why a good Christian faces worse
punishment in long life than in early death. You have threescore years and ten,
maybe more, very likely less. We have years uncounted, bound to earth apart
from the face of God.”

A soft cry escaped from Fra Giovanni. “I see. Oh, I
see! He gives you the rest, the gifts men envy so bitterly, in recompense for that
one great grief. Lady…Lady, how do you bear it?”

“With ease.” Brother Paul’s hand swept
out, taking her in, close as she was to her lover, one hand unconsciously
stroking his hair. “Can you believe that they suffer? Look at them! No
expectation of Heaven, maybe, but none of Hell, either. He can abandon priestly
vows, sire bastards, sin with happy impunity. She can do exactly as her devils
prompt her. And believe this. Holy Father. That lovely form is far from her
favored one. Her nature and her instincts, whatever her likeness, are the
nature and the instincts of a bitch in heat.”

Alf surged up, breaking her strong grip with the ease of
wrath. In spite of his courage—and he had a great deal of that, whatever
his flaws—Brother Paul blanched. He was one of a rare few who had seen
Alf enraged; and then as now, he had provoked it, and paid dearly after.

Alf smiled with sweetness all the more deadly for the white
fury in his eyes. “Brother, Brother,” he chided, “your
language is most unsuitable in that habit and in this company. Will you make
amends? Tell His Holiness a truth or two. Tell him why you made use of my poor
brother who is dead.”

“Whom you killed.”

“He willed himself to death rather than wreak further
destruction. Tell him, Joscelin.”

The monk gripped Honorius’ knees. “I cry foul,
Holiness! He compels me with sorcery.”

Alf’s face set. He would not say it; he would not
permit Thea to say it for him. It was Jehan who strode forward and lifted the
man bodily, shaking him like a recalcitrant pup. “He does not. Do as he
says, monk. A word will do it. Two. Power; jealousy. You had a weapon against
the world, and a long-awaited chance to get revenge on the one who made your
lover forget you. Worse—you thought him fair prey, and he had the
temerity to best you.”

Honorius startled them all; he startled himself. He smiled.
As sternly as he might, he said, “Put him down, Jehan.”

The Bishop obeyed. Paul’s glare promised murder—later,
when there was no one to interfere.

The Pope steepled his fingers and closed his eyes. Not for weariness,
not any longer, but to think in peace without the distraction of those crowding
faces; the two in particular that were so heartrendingly fair, so young and yet
so anciently wise. In ignorance of them, with Father Alberich and his monks
hammering out their denunciations, it had been grimly simple. A race of
sorcerers had established itself in the outlands of Francia; one had dared to
crown himself King over Christian folk, and dared then to hold his throne for
years beyond the mortal span. However well he ruled, he could not alter the
truth. He was a creature of darkness, a child of demon Lilith or of the beings
of Scripture, the sons of God who came down unto mortal women and begot
halflings upon them. For far too long had the Church suffered his presence. The
Canons and the safety of men’s souls left no space for doubt. He and all
his kin must be driven from the earth.

Now his kin had come to plead his case. And they were fully
as perilous as Saint Paul’s disciples had warned; but not, exactly, in
the way he had been led to expect. The woman was a fierce creature with a
tongue like a razor’s edge, but she had a most disconcerting habit of
speaking the truth. The man was worse yet. He was subtle. He was gentle; he was
brilliant; he was so obviously a creature of God that it hurt to look at him,
just as it hurt to look on Fra Giovanni. If he had been mortal, people would
have said that he was not long for this world; God could not bear to leave his
like among sinful men.

He was not mortal. He was not human. He was steeped in sins
of the flesh, that he had confessed without shame or repentance; nor, all too
clearly, had he any intention of putting an end to them. And yet he belonged
surely and utterly to his God.

The Pope opened his eyes. They were looking at one another,
Fra Giovanni and the enchanter; they were smiling the same faint unearthly
smile. A mere man, even a man who was the Vicar of Christ, could only begin to
guess what passed between them. If it was sorcery, it was divine sorcery: a
communion of saints.

Saint Paul’s brethren watched them. Honorius thought
of Paul the Apostle while he was Saul the persecutor, watching the stoning of
the martyr while the cloaks of the Jews lay heaped about his feet. He had had
the law and the prophets behind him. So too did they. One proclaimed with
malice, one with regret, both with honest conviction: The Church must not
suffer these witches to live. Scripture, canon law, plain human expedience, all
forbade it.

Innocent
, Honorius
thought,
I would give this tiara that was
yours and is now mine, to pass this cup and this dilemma to you
.

If they had only been less beautiful. He could have thought
more clearly then. Beauty seduced, yet it also repelled. One wanted to trust
it; one dared not; then one distrusted one’s own distrust, because yes,
no man with eyes could help but envy that perfection of form and feature. And
what if all his doubts were in truth the warring of his will against their
enchantments?

He shook himself hard. More of this circling and he would go
mad. No wonder Brother Simon had; between what he was and what he believed, his
whole existence had been a contradiction.

The Pope’s eyes opened upon Alf’s face. There
was one who had not taken leave of his sanity, a miracle as surely as any in
the Gospels. What had been in the water’s mind when it realized it was
wine?

“Surprise,” Alf answered softly. “Denial.
Fear. Revulsion. But at last, at great price, acceptance.”

Honorius shook his head in reproof. “My son, can you
not grant me the privacy of my own thoughts?”

“Holy Father, you persist in invading mine. I have
none of your inborn defenses; I must labor to shield against you.”

The Pope could see the words as Alf spoke them. Men armored
and immune like knights in battle; enchanters naked to every darting thought. “But
not defenseless,” Honorius said swiftly. “Far from that. Our
weapons are few and feeble against the bitter keenness of yours.”

The Paulines approved his words, if not in great comfort.
They could see that the Pope was wavering; they dared not speak lest they cast
him into the enemy’s camp. So always had it been with the sorcerers. With
their beauty they seduced; with their magic they bound men’s souls. Not
even the successor of Peter could be proof against them.

Behind Brother Paul’s eyes, Joscelin de Beaumarchais
stood up and cried revolt. He had lost this battle once. He would not lose it
again. The witches were intent on the Pope and on one another. He was all but
forgotten.

He would have only one chance. He launched himself, joined
hands a club with all his weight behind them, his target the back of Alf’s
neck.

The damned sorcerer sensed something. He half turned, his
throat a better target still. So had Simon died.
So
.

Fanged horror lunged between them, bore Paul down, closed
its jaws upon his throat.

Gently, gently. The beast’s breath was searingly hot,
its jaws a vise held just short of closing. He could not even struggle.

Of all the faces that had reeled past as he fell, he saw
only Father Alberich’s. The reproach in it was worse even than his
failure. He had unmasked the were-bitch, but he had convinced the Pope. God’s
Hounds knew no reason nor justice. Their hate was blind, and in extremity,
murderous. They were proved to be as the witches had proclaimed.