Shroud of Shadow (2 page)

Up near the altar, Bishop Albrecht cleared his throat, a gentle, supposedly unobtrusive prompt for Siegfried to proceed with the rite. And Albrecht, too, had his masks and layers: dazzled and deluded by his fruitless dreams of new cathedrals in old cities and his belief in a naive piety that would triumph over the pernicious evils of the world, the bishop had essentially ignored Siegfried's twenty years of constant, exhausting work against heresy in Furze.

Lies. Lies to oneself, lies to others. Again, Albrecht cleared his throat. Siegfried sighed, frustrated, but he reminded himself that the work went on, that Albrecht's dreams had not, could not, interfere with the Inquisition; and therefore, his eyes still on Paul's face, he dried the hatmaker's foot, gave him a thin smile and a quick squeeze of the ankle, and moved on to the next man.

***

The wind came in from the sea like a black knife, and it stuck its cold point through the threadbare places in Omelda's cloak as she made her way toward the wharves. It was night, the services were over, the Betancourt family was abed, and the streets of Maris were empty save for this runaway nun who was taking the road to the sea and to death.

Her goal was not the wharves or the shore. That kind of ending would be too slow, and her body, losing courage, might drag her back to life. No, she needed something quick. If she could actually get out of the city, there were cliffs to the north. A steeling of nerves, a quick plunge, and that would be the end of it. God could judge her then.

With the ending of formal services in the cathedrals and churches and monasteries, her inner plainchant had subsided. It would, to be sure, begin again in the pre-dawn hours with matins and lauds, but for now she leaned against the wall of a salt-stained warehouse and peered out towards the water and the sea with a silent mind. She could wade out, pass the chains that locked up the harbor at night, and gain the outer shore, thereby avoiding the city wall with its gates and its guards. From there, she could climb to the cliffs. She would have silence until just past midnight. And, if she actually reached the cliffs, she might have silence forever.

She pushed on, and she had almost reached the water when a large hand seized her cloak and pulled her back into a pair of muscular arms.

“Well, what have we here? A li'l barnacle, looking for som'ting t'fix on?”

The man laughed, and his companion—yes, there were two—joined him. Omelda was square and stocky, but she might have been as slender as Nicholas Betancourt's pretty wife as she was whirled about like a willow wand and sized up by the two watchmen.

“What're you doing here?” said the second.

Omelda glanced out at the waves, at the distant cliffs that she could more sense than see. “I'm taking a walk.”

The men laughed. “You're up t'no good, girlie,” said the one who held her. He scratched the stubble of a black beard on his shoulder. “What sha' we do with you?”

“You can let me go,” she said. Here she was, standing and gabbling at these men, wasting precious minutes of mental silence. But she had no choice. Thirsty though she was, fate had snatched her water away.

The second man folded his arms and eyed her up and down. A crafty look had crept into his face, one that she had seen often, and she was not surprised at all by his next words. “What'll you give us to let you go?”

The look, the tone of his voice: she knew precisely what she could give them. In any case, they would take it whether she offered it or not: that they were willing to bargain at all was an unexpected stroke of luck. “Whatever you want, sir,” she said, and though she felt the dull numbness already creeping through her groin, she was grateful that she could do something that would, in the end, make them leave her alone.

They took her to a dirty lean-to, laid her down on a pile of sacks, and took turns pumping her full of sperm. But though Omelda's body was occupied, her mind was relishing the silence in which the men left her while they grunted and strained and satisfied themselves: the silence within her, the silence they could not touch.

When they were done, they let her go, and she waded out into the sea. The water—rank, stinking with sewage, clotted with the pitch that the aging Hansa boats persisted in throwing off like shit from diarrheic cows—weighted her garments, and she half-staggered, half-swam out to the pilings that held the harbor chains. Low tide. She was still in luck.

In another two hours, she had reached the shore outside the walls of the city and climbed the rocky path out to the cliffs. The viscous sperm dribbled out of her in clammy rivulets, and the wind turned her damp garments into a shroud of cold, but the chants were still, for the moment, silent; and now the ruins of the old fishing village that marked the tip of the precipitous headlands was in sight, shimmering in the bright gleam of a moon just past full.

Spring was indeed late: not even a handful of grass or wildflowers softened the hard earth and clumped boulders of the cliffs. A hundred feet below, the North Sea raged and flung itself at the base of the rocks as though determined to have them down, but Omelda, worn out as much by the men's use of her body as by her long trek, sat down at the edge of the drop and, wrapping her sodden cloak more tightly about her shoulders, bent her head.

The world hung at midnight, passed, and, in the dim corners of her mind, she heard a whisper, like a child's voice starting up out of a tomb:

Astiterunt reges terrae, et principes convenerunt
. . .

She could not thrust it away. In her old convent, in all convents and all monasteries, those consecrated to God had begun the first office for Good Friday. And Omelda, if she allowed herself to live, would hear it all. Antiphons. Psalms. The Lamentations of Jeremiah. The Mass of the Presanctified. Chanted, hymned, and intoned, the Hours would progress through matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers, and compline, and Omelda would be, as she had been since her father had deeded her body to the Church when she was three, an unwilling participant.

And she had so wanted to die with her own mind.

She put her hands to her face, felt the grit of salt and sand. Her vulva was burning: the men had been rough enough to make her bleed. It should not matter. It really should not matter. A brief pitch forward into the wind, and it would all be over.

Quare fremuerunt Gentes, et populi meditati sun inania.

Would that be Hell? Would that be the particular flavor of eternal punishment—divinely fitted with excruciating exactitude to her crime—to which she would be condemned? Never to hear silence? Never to experience anything save an endless round of chants and psalms and hymns and adorations and processions that would go on and on until her soul, plunged into a dementia from which there was no escape—

A lull in the wind. She heard a harp.

Only a note, two notes, and then the sound was drowned once again in the rush of air. But before that soft chime of bronze strings, the voices of her inner choir had faltered, and for a moment, Omelda stared stiffly out at the roiling, moon-gleaming ocean, not knowing whether to be startled, frightened, or grateful.

She turned around to the heaped ruins of the fishing village. There was a light there, very dim—Omelda did not wonder that she had not seen it before—and, in another lull, the harpstrings rang again, and again they scattered the chanting voices that had come creeping back into her consciousness.

She rose and followed the sound and the light; and as she approached, she heard the harp more clearly. Now the sound of plucked wire, soft and dulcet though it was, was cutting through the howl of the wind and the crash of the breakers . . . and it was cutting through Omelda's heart and the voices in her head, too.

She had never heard such music before. Upheld firmly by a counterpoint of open fifths, its notes constantly changing durations and inflections, it flowed like speech, or like a river. The notes rang, wove in and out, cascaded in sparkling arpeggios, all the while speaking with unalloyed clarity of sunlight and good weather, of azure sky and blue water.

And the voices in Omelda's head wilted before them.

She followed the light and the sound to a tumbled-down house that still possessed an intact chimney and a single room. There she peered in through a window that had long ago lost its shutters and saw a woman sitting before a fire. A small harp was in her lap, and her fingers were on the strings. Her long dark hair, shot with much silver, was uncovered and unbound save for a single, small braid in which was tied what looked like an eagle feather, and her clothing was such a patchwork of outlandish and foreign garments that Omelda could not but wonder whether this were one of those fabled women who had forsaken their homes and their families to run off with the gypsies.

But it was no exotic gypsy strain that the harper played. The music—at once shining and humane, comforting and sympathetic—was like a warm hand; and Omelda, leaning against the weathered sill with blood and sperm running down her thighs, wept. Whoever this harper was, whatever she was doing, she had the power to still the voices.

But after a time, the harper stopped, bowed her head, sighed. Her hands fell to her lap.

“Please,” said Omelda. “Please play some more.”

The harper gasped, turned. Startled blue eyes fixed themselves on Omelda. “Dear Lady . . . I had no idea.”

Omelda clutched her cloak about her could shoulders. “I'm not a lady. I'm just a woman. Please . . . please play.”

The harper was silent for a moment, and then she nodded slowly. “Of course, beloved. Of course I will play for you. Come in and share my fire. You must be frozen.” There was no suspicion or caution in her voice: the offer of a fire and of music was wholehearted, without reservation. “But what are you doing out in this weather?”

Omelda pushed in through the rickety door, swung it to behind her. The voices were bubbling up again, and she plunked herself down by the fire without answering. “Please . . .” she said, “just play. It's been so dreadful, and . . . you're the first to . . . to . . .” She shook her hands gropingly. There were no words for that long, awful running.

The harper regarded her calmly. “What is your name, child?”

“Omelda. Please play.”

The harper nodded slowly. “My name is Natil,” she said. And then she played, and the music rose up like a wave, swept away Omelda's inner choir, and left behind only a quiet, dark silence.

Natil was dreaming.

She should not have been dreaming: Elves did not dream, nor, for that matter, did they sleep. But though Natil did both now, she did not begrudge herself the failing, for dreams—dreams of the past, of faces long vanished, wishful dreams—were all she had.

Once, the world had been all ashimmer to her eyes, the patterns of the Dance, of the plexed causality and interrelation that made up the universe, obvious, immediate, immanent. Then, Natil had lived the Dance with perfect knowledge, had harped it in her music. She had spoken with the Lady who was at once her Creatrix and her identity not wordlessly and from a distance as the Christians communed with a God veiled beneath outward manifestations of bread and wine, but, rather, directly, face to face.

So it had been once with all her people. Once. But no more. The Elves had faded, and as the race had dwindled from thousands, to bare hundreds, to tens, to an isolated few and then, finally, to this last—a harper maid returned now to Adria after a century of wandering—so the knowledge and vision of
Elthia Calasiuove
had dwindled, too. Natil saw no more than a human, the stars had faded from her consciousness, and her bronze-strung harp rang only with memories.

And so now, like any human being, she slept. And now she dreamed, the images shifting and fluttering in a mind that had once known only the illimitable and constant light of the stars. Sunlight. A sliver of a crescent moon. Trees—pines and aspens—and mountains (she was sure they were not the Aleser) rising up, craggy and majestic, their summits white against a deep blue sky. A hawk floating in a high thermal.

Even for one so new to dreaming, these were old visions, for they had come to her each night for a long time. The same sky, the same mountains, the same trees. But it was a pretty scene, and she relished it despite its familiarity, for it was as much of the Lady as she expected she would ever see again.

But tonight, she saw something else, too. Something that flew higher than the hawk, much higher. Something that left a streak of white against the blue sky, that sparkled as though it were made of glass and . . .

. . . and metal.

Natil's eyes opened, the heavy human sleep evaporating into a dingy, refuse-choked room, a low burning fire that flickered in the draft from the shutterless window, a stocky, dark-haired woman who lay with her head on Natil's shoulder.

She eased out from beneath Omelda and lowered the young woman's head down tot he wadded bundle that was serving as a pillow. Omelda did not stir. She had seemed exhausted when she had first appeared, and fatigue had taken her quickly. Natil had actually found it necessary to break off in the midst of her playing and catch her as she toppled toward the fire.

But as she bent to wrap Omelda's threadbare cloak about her, she was startled by the sight of the dark blood that had soaked through it at several points. Menstruating? Natil sensed not. Sickness? Wounds? But Omelda had been unconcerned about anything save music.

Gently, Natil lifted Omelda's skirts, examined her bloody thighs, frowned. Rape. Or . . . something like rape. The man or men had not been gentle. She remembered another young woman who, years ago, had been abused by a renegade nobleman, who had come to herself raging with an anger that had, in the end, transformed worlds. Omelda, though, had not raged. She had, instead, pleaded.
Play,
she had said.

Natil shook her head. Once, she would have been able to look into the patterns of the Dance, the interweaving strands of starlight, and see exactly what so tormented this woman. Once, with her music and her mind, she could have woven her own pattern, infusing Omelda's torn flesh with healing and health. Now, though, she would have to be satisfied that the bleeding had apparently stopped of itself. As for the genesis of Omelda's pleas, Natil would simply have to wait . . . and ask her when she awakened.