Hounds of God (43 page)

So then. He could stay. He could defy the Pope, who after
all was but a mortal man. And in a little while he would go mad, and there
would be a new Simon Magus to torment the world. Even now his power surged
against the walls of his control, urging him, tempting him to heal every hurt
that came close to him, to open himself wide to all his visions of what would
be. It was growing stronger. The duel with Simon, the battle with Gwydion, had
swelled it from a constant and endurable ache to a desperate need.

No; it was as well that he was going away. His battered
shields were falling one by one. In too brief a while he would be naked, and
then he would shatter.

Jehan was vested, waiting, a line of worry between his
brows. Alf took up the censer. With a small, childish, rebellious flare of
power, he kindled the coal within it.

A smile touched his lips, skittered away. Some of the fear
fled with it. In the chapel without, Liahan was asking Gwydion why she had to
be presented to God, if He had made her. Was He so forgetful that He needed to
be reminded?

The smile crept back, settled, grew a little. The fear slunk
into shadow and pretended to sleep.

It was a Mass like any other, and yet it was not. Benedetto Torrino
approved the devotion and the sheer physical presence of the man who wore the
chasuble, but his eyes lingered most often upon the acolyte. The boy, as it
seemed, who performed the duties of a servant, quiet, self-effacing, and bathed
in a light that owed nothing at all to lamp or candle or rising morning.

It flared to a white fire when King and Queen brought their
charges forward. The words and the water flowed over the dark head and the fair
one, but the Kindred were not looking at the mortal priest. Alf had emptied his
hands of cloth and vessels, and his mind, it seemed, of human rituals. Even as
the words of baptism rolled into silence, he raised his hands, and they were
filled with light. It brimmed and spilled and flowed as the water had, and the
words he sang were the same, and yet how utterly different, for he sang them
not with throat and tongue and lips but with the purity of his power.

The light faded as water will, vanishing into air. Liahan
shook her damp head and laughed, sudden and sweet in the silence. Alf kissed
her brow and that of her brother, smiling the most luminous of all his smiles,
and withdrew again into the meekness of the servant. The Bishop of Sarum
blinked like a man roused from a dream, shook himself, continued the Mass.

oOo

“There walks wonder and splendor,” said the
Cardinal to the Queen, whom chance and perhaps design had placed beside him in
the exodus from the chapel.

Gwydion was well ahead with his brother and his somber
successor; the lesser ones had scattered, the children been entrusted to their
mother, the Folk gone to ready themselves for the riding. So were they alone,
they two, if well within sight of the celebrants in the sacristy. From where he
stood, Torrino could see the blur of white and gold that was Alfred divesting
the Bishop of his chasuble.

“His Holiness saw with truly miraculous clarity,”
Torrino went on, “to do as he did with your kinsman. But did he know that
there could be such glory in our own rite? The Mass of the white enchanter…
There, surely, is one who has seen the light before the throne of God.”

“So he has,” she said, “and he has shown
us its dim reflection. Which is fortunate for us, whether we be mortal or
immortal; we have not his gift, to face the full Glory and live.” Her
face was still, her eyes downcast. “That is his task. To be the bridge;
one might say, to be our saint. I find, now my queenship is over and my exile
begins, that I am very glad of him. He at least is going to fulfill his nature.”

“And you are not?”

She shrugged simply, as a child will. “I have never
known, truly and indubitably, what I am. I was a village witch. I became a
queen. I was never wholly content with either. Now I shall be... I know not
what. Do you know that we will be alone? No servants. No attendants. Only
ourselves and our power. It is going to be very strange.” Her eyes
lifted; they were clear gold. “It is a whole new world.”

He looked at her and his own eyes dimmed. Already she had
severed herself from humankind, had turned mind and heart upon that world no
mortal would enter.

She and her wedded lord. She had greeted Gwydion’s
return with courtly propriety, but Torrino had seen the spark that leaped
between them, and the sheen that had lain upon them since. He had made himself
see it. He had made it his atonement.

He made himself bow, although a smile was beyond him. “Whatever
you become, you can never be less than royal.”

Her laughter both angered and soothed him. “But,
Eminence, that is only habit and the weight of a crown. I shall be glad to see
the last of both.”

He was silent. Her eyes softened; her voice grew gentle. “I
shall always remember you.”

“That,” he said with control that amazed them
both, “is a very great gift.”

“I must go.” She kissed him lightly, yet that
lone brief touch would burn him lifelong. “Fare you well, my lord.”

oOo

They rode out in the cold clear morning, all the Fair Folk
together, with hawks and hounds and the Queen’s wolves and one small
green-eyed black cat that rode in the fold of Nikephoros’ sling, and a
company of mortal men who would witness the passing of the Kindred. The King’s
aging seneschal led them, somewhat grimmer-faced even than his wont, and Jehan
had attached himself to them.

No one stopped him. Not that he had any delusions of
anonymity; the beard he still wore, and the Jeromite habit kilted over high
soft boots, were even less disguise here than they had been in Rome. He
established himself beside Alf, and there he stayed, saying little, doing his
best to think of nothing beyond the moment.

Nikephoros rode far back, somewhat apart from the rest. He
had glanced back only once at Caer Gwent; at the tower from which the King’s
banner still flew, proud merciful deception; at the people lining the road
between.

They would not know until he was long gone that they had
seen the last of their Elvenking. That even now the twice-great grandson of his
sister, a mortal man, not young, sat in the King’s chamber with his
Duchess who had become his Queen, and contemplated the crown which Gwydion had
laid in his hands. They were Rhodri’s people now, who cried Gwydion’s
name, who even paused here and there and muttered against a king who could ride
a-hunting so close upon so grim a war.

Nikki barred his mind to them. They had never been his own
folk. He was born a Greek; he had become an enchanter. His adopted kin rode
ahead of him, some silent and somber, some singing. More than once Tao-Lin
looked over her shoulder, almond eyes at once bright and soft. He willed
himself to smile in response.
Tonight
,
she promised, a thought like a caress.

He shivered and cast up all his shields. The silence was
blessed; appalling. His hands and feet, unguarded, throbbed with cold. He turned
his face to the brilliant warmthless sun. The same sun that shone on
Broceliande, yet not the same at all. The walls of power made it strange.
Softened it, turned its glare to a wash of gold.

His traitor mind cast him back to the sun of Rome, potent even
in winter. Showed him his own face that could not even blanch to white, only to
sallow grey, so long had the eastern sun burned upon his ancestors. And raised
up an image he had schooled himself never to see again.

On the night of the King’s return, Tao-Lin had come to
Nikki’s bed. It was nothing new or shocking; she had come many a time
before, as he had come to hers. The two of them had always reckoned that they
were lovers, though not, to be sure, in the pure and single-minded fashion of
those other scandalous sinners, his brother and the Lady Althea.

That night when the war ended, Nikki had welcomed Tao-Lin.
Had made her laugh and exclaim that he was eating her alive. Had taken her with
something very like brutality. And through every moment, seen not those bright
black eyes, but eyes the color of evening. Stroked skin like perfect ivory, and
remembered soft dark down on human flesh. Clasped her who had been a famous
courtesan, and could think of nothing but a sweetly awkward, very mortal woman.

He shook his head, eyes clenched shut. Their choices were
all made. She had returned to the course she had long since chosen, and he was
riding to the fate that had been his since an Anglian enchanter fell sunstruck
upon the road to Byzantium. What had been between them had been diversion only.
Lust; infatuation. A few days’ glorious folly. She had learned swiftly to
hate him, and by now she would have learned to forget him. In Broceliande,
where power ruled and human fear could not come, he would forget her. This was
only pain; it would pass.

But ah, before it passed, how terribly it hurt.

It did no good to open his eyes. The sun smote them; the
wind whipped them to tears. The earth was harsh and winter-grey and bitterly
beautiful, stretching wide before him all unexplored.

He would explore the world within, the realm of power that
was vaster than the earth and all upon it. And some of the Folk spoke already
of wandering beyond; it was only the world of men that was barred to them. To
rise beyond the circle of the moon, to walk among the spheres of the planets,
to seek the stars in their courses—what was mere dull earth to that?

“What indeed?”

Nikki started a little. Alf was beside him, and his mind had
fallen open by no will of his own, to gape like a wound. Fiercely he forced it
shut.

But Alf had got inside it and would not be driven out. There
was no defense against that voice. Soft, gentle, relentless. The face had
nothing soft in it, and very little that was human. “Frankly, Nikephoros,
I had thought better of you.”

Nikki sat stiff and cold in the saddle. He would not ask. He
did not need to. “You know well what I’m getting at. Are you set on
committing yourself to this madness?”

Are you?

“For me,” Alf said, “it’s the only
sane choice. But I’m not speaking of myself or of my kin.”

I am one of you.

Alf shook his head. “You are not. You never were.”

Nikki abandoned words for his speech of the body, wild,
cold, edged with iron. He was of the Folk. He was made to be like them. Alfred
himself had done it.

“I gave you the words you longed for. I took away none
of your essential humanity. Broceliande won’t change that. You’ll
grow old there as you would here, and you’ll die. And you’ll die
mad. She saw it, your lovely lady to whom you were so cruel. She saw it as
clearly as I in all my prophecy.”

Nikki’s fingers tightened on the reins until his mare
jibbed to a halt, protesting this utterly unwonted pain. Alf’s grey stood
as if she had never been aught but stone, and Alf’s face was stone, but
his eyes—

Nikki could not meet those eyes. Would not. Must not.

“Go back to her,” said the quiet voice. “Go
now. She weeps for you; she curses you, and she loves you. She will make a
world for you.”

She hated him who had loved her and left her. “Of
course she hates you. She loves you to distraction.”

That
, snapped
Nikki, driven back to words,
is
absolutely illogical
.

Alf laughed, merry and sad at once, and bitter to endure. “It’s
lovers’ logic, and perfect of its kind.”

Nikki rounded upon him. Rage was white, white as snow, white
as steel in the forge, white as the sun before it struck the eye blind.
Why? Why now, when it’s too late? I
could have stayed; would have. But you stood. You said no word, but you had no
need. You lured, you beckoned. You needed me. I was your only way to get at Gwydion.
Now... I’m no use to you, am I? I’m an embarrassment. An old mistake
you’d rather forget. A stink of mortality in the perfect air of your
Broceliande.

If Nikki’s words dealt wounds, Alf did not betray
them. He only bowed his head and said utterly without anger, “I needed
you, yes. I thought you would see sense on your own, once the need was past. I
thought you would stop clinging to me like a child and walk as a man.”

That was manhood? To
run straight to a woman’s skirts?

A smile touched Alf’s eyes. “And she into your
arms, and soon a young one between you. That is the way of the world.”

Nikki clutched at saddle, reins, mane. No—no, that he
had not done, please God, he had not got her with child.

“No?”

The rage flooded back.
You
can’t force me that way. Not with lies, not with threats. I go where I
must go.

“Go then,” said Alf, cool and dispassionate. It
was not contempt that paled those eyes to silver. The Master of Broceliande,
great heretic saint, did not stoop to contempt. “Only remember. Once the
gates close upon you, there will be no returning.”

A shudder racked Nikki to the core. He looked at Alf, and he
saw a face as familiar as his own and more beloved, the face of a master, of a
friend, of a brother. Its eyes were inexpressibly tender, and utterly alien.
They saw no walls before them, but gates opening upon a myriad of worlds.

Nikki saw walls. He named them gates, he told himself of the
worlds. But they were only walls.

The others were far ahead now, human and unhuman together.
Tao-Lin was a flame in her saffron silks. Her thought of him had faded; she had
retreated into one of her pagan reveries. Walking the steps of the Way, she
called it. When Alf did it, he called it prayer.

When Stefania did it, it was philosophy. But it was not the
same. It was warmer, less perfect in its focus, more perfect in its intensity.
Humans were like that; all too easily distracted, but also more conscious of
measure, of restraint. There was something almost frightening in the Folk, an
absoluteness of concentration, poised forever on the edge between power and
madness.