Shroud of shadow, p.12
Shroud of Shadow, page 12
“Mountain man,” she laughed. And then she choked. “Dear God. What's happening to us?”
When she lifted her head, he noticed that she looked younger. Her face had altered subtly, too: something about the cheekbones. This was Sally and yet not Sally. And then he realized that this was not Sally at all. Sally was gone. This was Wheat.
He was afraid. Afraid of what was coming. Afraid that he could not stop it. Afraid that he could stop it. Afraid to try either way.
But Wheat was staring at him in the darkness of the room that he knew was no darker to her eyes than to his. And he could guess a little of what she was seeing. “You've . . . changed . . .” she said.
“Yeah . . .” he said. “I guess so.”
Again, he lifted a hand. The shimmer about it was clear: a shadowed silver. Some of the roughness was gone from the fingers, some of the squareness from the palm. And when he closed his eyes to sigh softly with the air of a man confronted with the incomprehensible, he saw another shimmer, one that bordered on the familiar. Eyes closed, he stared at it for a moment, puzzling over yet another puzzle, then gave up.
Wheat sat up, looked at her hands, her arms. Slowly, she traced a finger along her softly luminous skin, felt her face. Another laugh, but nervous now. “I . . . I imagine we'll wake up tomorrow morning . . . and this will be ri—” She touched her face again. Familiar, and yet not. “—diculous.”
“You sure?”
“No.”
George nodded.
She was peering at him again. “What do you want me to call you?”
“Huh?”
She shrugged as though she had been caught playing a silly children's game, as though she did not give a damn that she had been caught. “I'm Wheat now. Who are you?”
He shrugged. “Who should I be?”
“Not George. Not anymore. Do you have a nickname?”
“In high school, they called me Lumpy.”
Her laughter was as a sound of bright bells, and she covered her face. “We'll have to try something else. What's your middle name?”
“Hadden.”
She lifted her face from her hands. “Oh . . . how lovely.”
Her language, he noticed, was changing. So was his. There was a lilt in their speech. But, yes, it was a lovely name. “It was my grandmother's maiden name.”
“It's you.”
He nodded. He knew that.
“OK, Hadden,” she said. “By the way: you're glowing.”
He took a deep breath. “I know.”
“Are you scared?”
“Shitless.”
Wheat passed a hand through her dark hair. Even the individual strands seemed to glisten now. “You know,” she said, “I have a feeling that if we really rejected this, if we really didn't want it, we could make it go away.”
A long silence. A truck passed, westbound, on distant I-70. In the kitchen, the refrigerator came on.
“Is that what you want?” Hadden said at last.
Another silence. Then: “No.”
“Same here.”
Arms about one another, then, they lay back down, kissed, and drifted back off into sleep with the certain knowledge that when they awoke, the last shreds of George and Sally would be gone, purged away by the light and the wonder. Frightening though that was, Hadden was looking forward to it, looking forward to a morning that could not be glorious when suffused with so much and such inner radiance.
Chapter Ten
Natil dreamed. Albrecht fretted.
There was only a little moonlight to break the deep darkness of midnight, and in it the columns of the unfinished and roofless cathedral stood like the fingers of pale hands that stretched up toward heaven, begging to be made complete. From the apse triforium—the only part of the gallery that existed—the bishop could see them glimmering, beseeching . . . incomplete. Terribly incomplete.
The apse and the choir, the columns, and no more than that. There was no glass for the few window apertures, no floor in the nave save earth, no west wall, not even a plan for a rose, not a trace of a tower.
For a time, Albrecht considered what he saw—and what he did not see—and then, with a sigh that told of sleeplessness and nocturnal melancholy, he sat down on the edge of the gallery (careful that his undependable knee did not suddenly pitch him headlong into empty air) and let his feet dangle. One hundred and twenty feet below him lay as much of the marble floor as had ever been laid, the legacy of Blessed Wenceslas, who, almost a century ago, had confronted the devastation left by the free companies and met it with the foundations of a cathedral.
But the money had not been there, and the beginnings had remained beginnings: the foundations, a few walls, some columns. Albrecht had added to them, had managed to push the apse and choir walls a little higher and top them with a gallery, but it was still only a beginning.
And so it would remain, it seemed, because . . . because of Siegfried . . .
Albrecht could not be certain—indeed, given the secrecy of the Inquisition, he could be certain of absolutely nothing—but he was beginning to suspect that Siegfried's unauthorized visitation at Shrinerock Abbey had been but the shilling in the armpit that indicated a great and deeply entrenched ill; and the ache that had begun gnawing at his stomach made him think that perhaps a shilling in the armpit might have been more reassuring. At least one did not have to live with plague for very long.
Unwilling as yet to confront the Inquisitor directly, Albrecht had asked questions where he could, and had rapidly discovered that no answers would be forthcoming. Casual visits with Siegfried's ministers and subordinates resulted only in casual conversations. Formal interviews yielded polite but firm reminders of the privacy and autonomy of the Inquisition and its immunity from local (local!) interference. Albrecht had even attempted to enter the House of God, but had not been admitted. Siegfried's orders, it seemed.
Convinced, as he had always been, that his work lay invariably with souls, and that bureaucracy and politics were, just as invariably, impediments to that work, Albrecht had, he now realized, allowed the episcopal power in Furze to slip away from him. Away from him . . . and toward Siegfried. Even the cathedral chapter—the chapter to whom it was but a mere technicality that no cathedral actually existed—seemed much more concerned about the Inquisitor's opinions and plans than about Albrecht's. And, worse, the treasurer of the fabric fund had been unwilling even to discuss the moneys that, penny by trickling penny, had been building up since construction on the cathedral had tottered to a halt five years before.
Albrecht put his face in his hands, stared down between his fingers. The marble floor was a pale blankness some twenty fathoms below.
Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. Albrecht did not normally consider matters of money save as they involved the worship of God or the bare essentials of his office, but he had suddenly begun to wonder how Siegfried was managing to pay all the ministers, officers, beadles, secretaries, notaries, and (the bishop mentally crossed himself) torturers he employed. The money and property confiscated from heretics counted for something, to be sure, but Furze was a poor town: even the heretics were poor. Siegfried's expenses were great. The fabric fund had grown by mites into something that might raise the west wall someday, but the treasurer did not want to talk about it.
And that meant . . .
Albrecht did not want to think about it.
. . . that meant that . . .
The bishop was struggling in vain with his suspicions when the sound of footsteps came from the stairway up to the arcade. It was very dark, and not until the visitor spoke did Albrecht know him.
“A fine evening, Excellency.”
“Oh! Hello, Mattias. What are you doing up here?”
The clerk's smile was evident in his voice. “Watching over my superior, Excellency. I heard you got out, and when you did not return, I thought I might find you here.”
“Well,” said Albrecht, “you were right. Come, Mattias: sit. I can use the company. Let's talk about . . . about . . .”
“Cathedrals?” said Mattias, coming closer.
“No,” said Albrecht quickly. “About . . . say . . . Furze. Jacob Aldernacht will be arriving in the city shortly. What news is there?”
Mattias settled himself cross-legged on the floor . . . a good ten feet from the edge over which Albrecht was still dangling his feet. “Well,” he said, “there certainly has been discussion in the cooperative. Paul and James were in favor of a splendid display upon Jacob's arrival. But our good Simon, with characteristic Hebrew wisdom, counseled that such diversions would convince our guest that his services—and his money—might not be as desperately needed as he thought.
Albrecht laughed. “What will it be, then?”
“The wisdom of the Jew, and the welcome of peasants,” said Mattias. “Good food made by wifely hands, and backslaps all around.”
“Jacob Aldernacht will like that,” said Albrecht. “He prides himself on being a businessman. A peasant. I've heard that he just turned down a patent of nobility from the king of France.”
“Ummm . . .” said Mattias. “That might well have been pride. Or pure economics. The king wanted to borrow money for the Italian Wars and offered the grant as full payment.”
Money. There it was again. But was that not the way it was these days? Money, money, and more money. Albrecht covered his face again. Mattias was suddenly solicitous. “Would Your Excellency like to be helped back to bed?”
“It would be a waste of time,” said Albrecht. He was tempted to add and of money, but he did not.
Mattias said nothing, but Albrecht thought he detected a nod of understanding from the shadow that was the clerk.
“You've seen the world, Mattias,” he said after a time. “What do . . .” But, no, he did not want to hear what Mattias might say about the fabric fund. His chief clerk had a sophisticated and unprovincial mind: he might speak the truth . . . and Albrecht did not want to hear the truth. So, instead: “What do you think of Siegfried of Madgeburg?”
The bishop felt Mattias's glance as though the clerk had tapped him on the shoulder. “I believe he is a very ambitious man.”
Not at all what Albrecht wanted to hear. “Ambitious?” he said, still trying to deny his own suspicions. “Why do you say ambitious, Mattias? Siegfried is a holy man.”
Again, there was a smile behind Mattias's words. “Ah, Excellency, there are all kinds of ambition, even among holy men. In the years before Saint Benedict gave his rule to the monastic life, hermits often vied with one another in the severity of their practice. They would mortify their flesh in ever-harsher ways, attempting to demonstrate their holiness to one another. In that, they were ambitious. I think that Siegfried, though he may not know it, is ambitious in much the same way.”
“He serves God.” Albrecht noticed that his protest sounded as uncertain as his bad knee.
“But he serves God to . . . hmmm . . .” Mattias mused. “How shall I say this? He serves God to show others, perhaps to show himself, just how much he serves God.”
“That doesn't . . .” It did. “. . . make sense, Mattias.”
Mattias laughed. “Oh, Excellency: we are human beings! God absolved us from making any sense after the tremendous farce in Eden!”
Albrecht blinked. “Be careful that Siegfried doesn't hear you talking that way, Mattias. I'd miss my chief clerk greatly.”
Mattias's tone abruptly turned somber. “My point exactly, Excellency. He is ambitious. His practice is as rigorous as that of the old hermits.”
Something about his clerk's choice of words made Albrecht uneasy. He thought again of the House of God. They . . . tortured people in there. True, the crime of a heretic was heinous enough to warrant torture, even death, but still . . .
Mattias continued. “But I have thought it wise always to remember that ambition can take one in either direction.”
“Heaven or hell?”
“Well . . . up or down. There have been many with ambition who have suddenly found themselves and all they have worked for ground into dust. By their own ambition. Or blown up by it as a town might be blown up with gunpowder.” Mattias shrugged: a rustle in the night. “Boom!”
“Boom,” said Albrecht, suddenly wrestling with his own conscience. Ambitious. Was he ambitious? How much pride did he take in his office and his title? Was the cathedral he so desired a tribute to God or to himself? He was suddenly uneasy. “Boom . . .”
“Exactly. Boom. The Wheel of Fortune takes one up, and it also casts one down. The highest Tower can be struck by lightning and laid low.” Another shrug, another rustle. “Boom.”
“You've been looking at heathenish pictures, Mattias.”
“All the better to serve God as best I can,” said the clerk. “If, because of what I know and what I think, Siegfried wants to call me heretical and kill me, then he will call me heretical and kill me. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that I can say or not say that will change his mind.”
Albrecht was once again disturbed. “I thought you said that Siegfried is a man of God.”
“I said also that he is ambitious,” said Mattias as though that explained everything. And, after a minute's consideration, Albrecht admitted that it did.
***
Natil awoke, picked sleep from the corners of her eyes with a long fingernail, tasted the musty palate of morning mouth. Still drifting half in and half out of a dream in which Hadden and Wheat floated in visions of starlight, she stared blearily at the walls of the tiny room that contained her tiny bed.
She could appreciate the symmetry: as the man and the woman became more elven, so she herself became ever more human. Only a week ago, she had slipped in and out of her slumbers as she might pass through a door. Now, though, her limbs were heavy, her mind clouded, her breath rank. An Elf? Still? Was she sure?
She stumbled naked to the basin and pitcher that stood on a table near the window, poured out, splashed her face. The smack of cold water brought her wits back. An inn. Belroi. The Aldernachts had made good time, and Francis, ever obsessed by propriety, had insisted that Natil (the only woman in the party) be given a room to herself.
The harper rubbed her eyes, stretched, yawned. Well, not exactly a room. More like a fair-sized cupboard. But at least she had been able to sleep without having to worry about groping hands, or about accidentally uncovering her ears when she braided her hair for the night or tossed and turned with her dreams.
Wrinkling her nose, she freed the braid from its clasp and unplaited it. As if anybody would think that the shape of her ears meant anything save deformity.
But she was remembering her dreams now, remembering Hadden and Wheat and what she knew to be the starlight that was steadily growing within them. Reality or fantasy? She did not know. She had seen George and Sally become Hadden and Wheat, had noted not only the beginnings of physical changes that, continuing, could not but lead to an elven appearance, but also had heard evidence of mental alterations to match. But dreams were as pliant as music, and as Natil could effortlessly shift a grief-stricken aeolian melody into a more bittersweet dorian, or even into a comparatively optimistic mixolydian, so her sleeping mind could just as easily have taken her hopes and her wishes and transformed them into visions that told her no more than what she desired to be told.
“Dear Lady,” she murmured. “I do not know. Is it from myself or from You that these visions come?”
And then she realized it: there was something missing from the tale of Hadden and Wheat. The Lady was missing. Hadden had seen the mountains, and Wheat had been transformed by an almost Eleusinian vision of Montana grain, but in none of it was any sense of the presence of Elthia Calasiuove.
But She was there. She had to be there. She was the mountains. She was the wheat. She was, in fact, the very being and substance of Hadden and Wheat themselves. But no . . . nothing. Nothing direct. In her dreams, Natil might well have been witnessing the awakening of the elven blood, but if that were so, then she was also seeing it awaken without a glimpse of its Creatrix; and from what she had deduced about the ethos and mindset of the future, Hadden and Wheat probably did not even suspect that She existed.
Dreams? Or reality? Her face still stinging from the cold water, Natil stood shocked at the utter humanness of her quandary. If her dreams were indeed no more than manifestations of her own wishes, then surely they could not but include the face of the Woman who was everything. That she saw nothing of the Lady argued most tellingly for the veracity of her visions. But that meant . . .
She covered her face.
. . . that Hadden and Wheat did not see. Might not ever see. Might not recognize even if they did see.
“O dear Lady . . . what has happened to us?”
Elthia might come later, she reminded herself. That vision of immanence and of unconditional love might, heralded by other visions, other realizations, manifest eventually. It was not too late.
But then it all might still be a dream.
A tapping at the door. Natil realized that she had clenched her long hair in her fists. “Who . . . who is there?” she said, forcing calm into her voice.
“Just me, mistress,” came Harold's voice. “Come to wake you. We've a shorter ride for Furze than we did for Belroi, but Mister Jacob wants an early start.”
“Ah . . . certainly . . .”
“I've brought . . . breakfast.”
Perhaps it was her confusion, and perhaps it was that the starlight had been so long fled: regardless, she did not hear the catch in the shawm player's voice. Throwing a light shift on over her head, therefore, she went to the door, unfastened it . . .
. . . and Harold was suddenly pushing into the room, kicking the door closed behind him, clasping her about the waist. He drew her to him, held her fast, planted his lips firmly on hers. One of his hands was attempting to slide the gown from her shoulders.
Natil broke free of the kiss. “Let go of me.”
