Isle of Glass (21 page)

She laughed very softly. “Why, little Brother! Prison’s been
good for you. It’s chipped off a layer or two of prudery.”

“Is that all you came to see?”

“No.” She released him and sat on her heels. “I’ve been
eavesdropping. You haven't used power much, have you?”

“Only with my questioner, and only a little.”

“That’s what I was afraid of. I don’t suppose you know
what’s been happening.”

“The King is looking far afield for me. Bishop Aylmer is
waiting for the Hounds to betray themselves. Kilhwch’s messenger is coming.”

“You’re better informed than I thought,” Thea said. “Did you
know that you’re to be tried on St. Nicholas’ Eve?”

Alf drew his breath in sharply. “Two days—but they were
waiting for my confession!”

“The Hounds were. Earl Hugo and his imbecile of a Bishop
have been getting nervous. They want you safely tried and burned before the
King gets back. Aylmer they’ll tell of the trial—far too late for him to gather
any resistance. Then when Richard appears they can say that it was an
ecclesiastical matter; that Aylmer was notified; and that the sentence was
carried out promptly to prevent a public outcry against the terrible sorcerer.
All in due and proper form. And you’ll be a heap of ashes, and he'll have lost
what he loves most.”

“No,” Alf said. “He doesn't love me. He loves my face. He
lusts after my body.”

“He loves you,” said Thea. “God knows why.”

Alf clenched his fists. “You are doing your best to talk me
out of this. You won’t succeed. I know what I’m doing; I’ve considered all the
consequences. I won’t be shaken.”

“You,” she said in a thin cold voice, “are the most selfish
being I‘ve ever known.”

“Why? Because I won’t walk out with you now and forget both
my duties and my troubles, and let you seduce me as you’ve tried to do since
first we met?”

“Seduce you?
You,
you pallid, spineless, canting
priest?”

“You sound exactly like the King,” he said. “Do you fancy
that you love me?”

When he could see again, she was gone. He lay where she had
felled him, his mind reeling.

Women, he thought foggily, were frail vindictive creatures,
given more to tears than to blows. But this one had a heavier hand then
Coeur-de-Lion.

Almost he called her back. He had meant to wound her; and
yet, he had not.

Better for both of them that they not meet again.

He lay on his side, hand to his throbbing cheek, and tried
to make his mind a void.

The Chapter House of St. Benedict’s was a wonder of the
north: a ring of pale gold stone, its vault held up with many pillars, and on
each pillar a carven angel. Between St. Gabriel and St. Michael, beneath a
gilded arch, sat Bishop Foulques. Robed and mitered, with an acolyte warding
his jeweled crozier, he seemed no living man but an image set upon a tomb. His
long pale face had no more life or color than one molded in wax.

On his right, beneath arches smaller and unadorned, sat
figures cowled in black or grey, monks of St. Benedict and of St. Paul. On his
left, somewhat apart, was Bishop Aylmer, dressed as he had come from Mass in
the brown habit of a monk of St. Jerome. Set against the splendor of his
brother Bishop’s garb, his simplicity was a rebuke.

Jehan, beside him, felt even larger and more ungainly than
usual, crowded into a narrow niche with no more than a finger’s breadth to
spare on either side. He battled the urge to make himself as small as he might
and sat erect and still, shoulders back, hands on his knees. Opposite him, the
monks stared and whispered. They had not expected Bishop Aylmer to appear on an
hour’s notice. Nor, Jehan suspected, had they thought to see himself.

Reynaud was not among them. After that first swift glance,
Jehan ignored them.

A man in Pauline garb entered and knelt before Bishop
Foulques, murmuring in his ear. The Bishop nodded once, imperially.

There was a pause, then a stir at the door, echoed round the
hall. Jehan went rigid.

Four monks of St. Paul paced into the hall, burly men with
hard grim faces. In their midst walked their solitary charge.

Jehan drew a shuddering breath. Brother Alf moved with the
same light grace as always despite the chains that bound his hands; he bore no
mark of violence. Yet he was alarmingly thin, his eyes black-shadowed, his skin
so pale that it seemed translucent.

His guards brought him to stand apart on the Bishop’s left,
facing outward. If he saw Jehan, he did not show it. His gaze was strange,
blurred, exalted, as if he walked in a trance.

Bishop Foulques rose slowly. The acolyte placed the crozier
in his hand; he settled it firmly and straightened his cope. “My brothers,” he
intoned, “we are met in Christ’s name by the authority of Holy Church. The Lord
be with you.”

“And with your spirit,” the monks responded.

“
Oremus
,” the Bishop bade them. “Let us pray.”

Jehan barely heard the long ritual, prayer and psalm and
prayer again, blessing and invocation and calling of Heaven to the labor of
justice. His eyes and his mind fixed on the tall slight figure of the prisoner.

The prayers ended; a monk came forward, he who had spoken to
Bishop Foulques, with a parchment in his hand. He began to read from it in a
voice both soft and clear.

“We gather here, my most noble and august Lord Bishop, to
seek your judgment. Before you stands one anointed with the sacred oil of the
priesthood, consecrated upon the altar of God most high, yet accused of crimes
most terrible and most unholy, forbidden by all the laws of God and man. By the
testimony of many witnesses and by that of the prisoner himself, we have found
due and proper cause to call him to this trial. Therefore, with God as our
witness, we contend that this prisoner, known in this world as Alfred, once of
St. Ruan’s upon Ynys Witrin and now of the following of His Majesty’s Lord
Chancellor, is in fact a thing unholy and unclean, a changeling, a sorcerer,
and a servant of the Lord of Hell; that he has knowingly and blasphemously
profaned his sacred vows; and that he has cast a glamour upon His Majesty the
King and upon His Majesty’s Chancellor, blinding them to his demonic origins
and shaping them to his infernal ends.”

Jehan ground his teeth. Aylmer’s hand had clamped about his
wrist, else he would have risen. Perforce, he sat motionless and helpless,
while the gentle voice wove its net of lies and half-truths.

As the monk went on, Jehan’s wrath turned cold. In that grim
clarity he became aware of a strangeness, a faint, maddening reverberation at
the end of each pause.

At first he did not trust his ears; yet with each brief
silence he heard the echo more clearly. When at last the speaker ceased, there
was no echo but a faint, distinct “
Amen
!”

Brother Alf had heard the charges without expression. But
his eyes had focused slowly; had flickered about as if he searched for
something. Others too cast uneasy glances around the room; one of the monks
crossed himself.

Bishop Foulques seemed oblivious to the ghost-voice. “We
have heard the charges,” he said. “We will now hear the witnesses.”

Was that a ripple of eldritch laughter?

The Pauline monk laid aside his parchment, genuflected to
the Bishop, nodded to the man who guarded the door. He opened it to admit a
young man at once arrogant and afraid. His eyes flicked at once to Alf and
flinched away. He bowed low before Bishop Foulques, hesitated, bowed likewise
to Aylmer.

As he straightened, the monk smiled at him. “Ah, sieur, you
come in good time.”

He gestured; an acolyte brought a stool and set it in front
of the Bishop. As the young man sat on it, the monk said, “You would be Sir
Olivier de Romilly, would you not?”

The knight nodded; again he smiled. “And I am Brother Adam
of Ely. My lord Bishop you know; it is to him that you should speak, although
it is I who will question you.”

Sir Olivier smoothed a wrinkle in his scarlet hose. “And the
rest?” he asked.

“They will only listen,” said Brother Adam. “I will speak
and my lord will judge.”

The other nodded.

Adam paused. After a moment he said, “Some days ago you told
me a tale. Perhaps it would be best for my lord if you told it to him now, just
as you told me.”

Olivier obeyed. He would not look at Alf or at the silent
Bishop; he spoke to the likeness of St. Michael with his flaming sword, in a
high rapid voice as if reciting a lesson. “A fortnight and more ago, I was
riding with the King against Earl Rahere and his rebels. We fought in the hills
by Windermere; a hard fight as they all are, though we had the victory. I was
one of those who paid for it. I met a man with an axe—a Viking he must have
been, as they tell of in old tales, a great blond giant of a man. I broke my
sword on his axe; he dragged me from my horse and hewed me down.

“I was badly hurt. Very badly hurt, Brother, my lord. My
yeomen carried me to the tent where the doctors were. There were strangers
there. They were helping the doctors.”

Olivier stopped. The listeners leaned forward, intent.
Bishop Foulques frowned.

“They were helping the doctors,” Olivier repeated. “I didn't
think much of it. One doesn’t when one’s had an axe in the shoulder.

“One of them came to me. He gave me water. I was very glad
of that. Then he...he touched me.”

“Yes?” murmured Adam as the pause stretched beyond
endurance.

“He touched me. I remember, he was looking at me—not at my
face but at my shoulder. I thought he must have been a clerk, but he was
dressed like a squire. Then I thought it was strange that I could think at all.
And then...then I knew.” Olivier shivered. “I didn’t feel any pain. None. Only
a sort of warmth, like a patch of sun.”

“And your wound?”

Olivier touched his shoulder and flexed it. “I was all over
blood. But there was nothing there.”

“No scar?”

“Brother, you know full well—” He stopped, composed himself.
“There was a scar. My lord. But no wound. That, I’ve sworn to, on holy relics.”

“May my lord see?”

Jehan had felt the blood drain from his face as the young
knight told his tale. When he bared his shoulder and the deep livid scar there,
the novice swallowed bile.

He had not known of that healing; Brother Alf had never
spoken of it. Which was most damnably like him. Had he been trying even then to
get himself killed?

He seemed unmoved, although the eyes that turned to him held
now a kind of horror.

“Prisoner,” Bishop Foulques said, no name, no title. “Have
you aught to say?”

Alf drew a breath to speak. In the silence, a thin eerie
voice chanted: “
Kyrie eleison
!”

His lips tightened. "No,” he said. “No, my lord. I have
nothing to say.”

Adam turned to him. “No, Brother? Is it true then as Messire
has said? Did you work your sorceries upon him?”

“‘And He healed them,’ ”sang that voice without breath or
body: “‘and the multitude wondered, when they saw the dumb to speak, the maimed
to be whole, the lame to walk, and the blind to see: and they glorified the God
of Israel.’ ”

Alf threw up his head like a startled deer.

Laughter rippled through the hall. Bishop Foulques
half-rose; Olivier drew his dagger and spun about, hunting wildly for the
enemy.

Brother Adam alone seemed unperturbed. “The air is full of
sorcery,” he said. He sketched a blessing over Olivier’s head. “Go, and have no
fear. No evil can touch you.”

Olivier withdrew, white and shaking, his dagger still in his
hand. One by one the monks settled back into their seats. The Bishop sat once
more; his acolyte straightened his cope and crowned him again with the miter
that had fallen from his head.

Brother Adam considered them all, so quietly certain of his
victory that Jehan wanted to strike him down. “You have heard, Brothers,” he
said, “true and certain proof that we contend here with the work of the Enemy.
For it is the way with demons that they make mock of what is holy. I would have
you hear now of a night not long ago, when our prisoner revealed his nature for
all to see.”

The new witness was a stranger to Jehan, a man in the garb
of a Benedictine novice. He had a handsome languid face and the air of a
nobleman, but some ruthless barber had cropped his hair to stubble.

By that Jehan knew him. He took in the stranger’s lazy
grace, his expression of worldly ennui, and detested him instantly, utterly.

He performed an obeisance that was proper to the point of
parody and sat where he was bidden, enduring Brother Adam’s introduction with
every evidence of boredom. When he spoke, it was to Alf. “So, Brother. You look
well in chains.”

“And you," Alf said, “look ill in that habit.”

Joscelin smiled. “Maybe it’s your ham-handed barbering.”

“Brother,” Adam said, with the first small hint of sharpness
Jehan had heard from him, “you are here to tell your tale.”

“So I am,” Joscelin agreed, unruffled. “Well now. How shall
I begin?”

“At the beginning,” Adam suggested.

Joscelin settled more comfortably. “So. The beginning. A
good enough place, isn’t it, pretty Brother?” He caught Adam’s eye and
grimaced. “Very well. I’ll begin. I was the King’s esquire then, and proud of
it too. A little more than a sennight past, I walked out with friends for an
evening’s pleasure. On the way we met with yonder beauty.”

Jehan clenched his fists. Olivier had told the truth as much
as he might, but this was truth twisted out of all recognition.

As Joscelin told it, he and his fellow squires had taken Alf
with them out of sheer goodwill, with a touch of censure for his most
unclerical fondness for ale.

“And for the serving wench,” said Joscelin with a wry look,
half the admiring young squire, half the new-hatched cleric. Alf had gone
upstairs with them, though reluctantly, Joscelin conceded; but then, he had
been with the King not long before.