Shroud of Shadow (4 page)

Nothing happened at random. Not even now. The Dance went on whether Natil was cognizant of it or not, and therefore, everything—
everything
—had meaning. Even a dream. Even this young woman who was so tormented with inner voices. Even Natil and her discouragement and her absurd, incessant, elven desire to help.

Yes, Omelda had found her. And after eons of helping and healing, Natil could not easily forsake what was left of her ancient soul. “Where do you live?” she asked. “Are you wandering?”

Omelda shrugged impatiently, groped fuzzily through the interior voices. “I wandered . . . for a while after I first ran away . . .” She laughed with bitterness. “Right now, I keep house for a merchant in Maris. I scrub floors, clean pots . . .” She lifted her hands, waggled the chapped and split fingers with as much disdain as she had regarded her torn womanhood. “What do you . . . think, Natil? If you won't play for me, can you teach me to play for myself?”

Natil tried to examine her dispassionately, but the old elven dispassion—at once loving and objective—was gone along with everything else. She might as well have been one human woman examining another, a mother regarding an abused daughter. “I think not,” she said slowly. “But you can sing, I daresay, and that might be enough.”

Omelda winced, shook her head violently. “I . . . I don't want . . . to sing. I don't want to sing ever again.” She waved her hands vaguely, trapped by the inner voices. “These words . . . these damned words. Can't you . . . play something?”

Natil weighed the choices. Ahead, to the south, lay Malvern . . . and hoped-for oblivion. But here, now, was Omelda. And she had asked for help. And nothing happened by chance.

Abruptly, she bent, picked up her harp, struck a chord. Another followed, and another. One-handed, her teeth clenched, she played a fragment of the Dance that she remembered, throwing the weight of a past universe and a brighter world at Omelda's infirmity. Omelda shook with the sudden cleansing, but her eyes cleared, and she sat down on the floor like a felled tree, put her face in her hands. “Thanks.”

The sky was lightening. Away to the east, the sun was rising. Natil ran a hand back through her hair, felt the brush of the eagle feather. “I will teach you what I can,” she said slowly. “You come with me, and as . . .” She hesitated. “. . . as long as I am in this world, I will teach you.”

Omelda looked up. Her eyes were wide. “I won't be a problem. I'll do anything you want me to. Just don't ask me to sing.”

Just don't ask me to breathe,
she might as well have said; but Natil nodded, feeling the weight of the burden she had again assumed: the world, prolongation. The Elves had known them both. And now, Elf or not, with spiritual sustenance or without, she would continue to know them.

“I might ask,” she said. “I might not. I do not know.” She offered her hand, and Omelda took it. “But we will find a way. Together.”

“In the name of God and profit.”

The sunlight trickled in through the cracks in the shutters of the dark bedroom, dribbled down the wall, pooled on the floor. It was a cold morning, but Jacob Aldernacht, seventy years old and growing older with each new drop of the brimming day, had seen colder. Back when that crazy French girl was routing the English at Orleans, when Jacob was just drawing his first breath in what was then a tiny cottage on the outskirts of town, it had snowed. No, this morning was not too bad at all. And it was Easter to boot.

“In the name of God . . . and profit.”

Jacob's cracked lips moved again, whispering into the semi-dark. He had come to despise those words, but he uttered them nonetheless, for the Aldernacht fortune was built upon them. The motto appeared at the top of every ledger book, was chiseled into find Carerra marble over the door to Gold Hall, appeared in cryptic monogram in the plate and silver off which the family—sons and grandsons and no wife (odd how he thought of Marjorie now only as an absence, a piece of property misplaced or stolen)—ate every day. In the name of God and profit.

The house was astir. Footsteps in the hall: old Eudes, the chief steward, treading toward Jacob's door with the customary morning sop. No . . . no, this was Easter. Communion. No morning sop, just a knock on the door . . .

The knock came: respectful, polite.

. . . and a good morning . . .

“Good morning, Mister Jacob,” came the steward's dry voice. An old voice, old as Jacob's own. Jacob could not recall when Eudes had come to serve the family. In truth, he seemed a part of the furniture, like the wardrobe in the corner of the room or the rosewood desk in Gold Hall. Eudes was here. Eudes was always here. Furniture. It was Marjorie who had left, not Eudes.

. . . and a lifting of the latch.

The latch lifted, and Eudes, dry and dusty, entered Jacob's bedroom and opened the shutters. The sunlight was like cold water. The sky was clear . . . like blue crystal, or that sapphire the Aldernacht ships had been smuggling out of Arabia right under the nose of the Venetian monopoly.

“Did you have a pleasant . . . night, Mister Jacob?”

“Pleasant enough.” In the spill of cool air, Jacob wondered idly whether a village girl—or two: he was wealthy enough to buy two, old enough to fantasize about it, wise enough to leave it at that—might keep him just as warm as the pile of down comforters that locked him in a nightly vapor bath. He felt his wrinkled face crease up into a wry grin. Girls. After all these years, he could still think about girls. Well, maybe there were still a few squirts left in the old prick. If they didn't kill him on the way out.

The house was indeed astir. More footsteps, sounding clearly from the open door. Servants' chatter. Bustling preparations for mass. In the distance, Francis was intoning “A blessed and holy Easter to you” to someone, making sure, as he always did, that he intoned it loud enough for everyone in the house to hear him whether they wanted to or not. Through the unshuttered window came a few unskillful plucks of an out-of-tune lute: Josef was still working on that Italian song. It was still so wretched as to be unrecognizable, but, well, that was Josef.

Jacob sighed. Two sons, Three if he still wanted to count Karl, or if Karl wanted to count him. Obviously, whether it killed on the way out or not, sperm, like Spanish oranges, lost its freshness after a time.

After modestly closing the door, Eudes came over to the bed, hoisted the comforters away, and held up fresh linens for Jacob. “A most blessed . . . Easter, sir.”

Jacob stood, crackling. “You didn't say it half loud enough, Eudes. You have to shout it, you know, like Francis does, so that everyone will know how virtuous you are.”

And, yes, there was Francis's voice again, plainly audible even through the closed door: “A blessed Easter! God bless you!”

Eudes—loyal old wardrobe!—lifted an eyebrow, said nothing, laced up Jacob's linens . . . performing his morning task, Jacob suspected, as everything in the family was performed, as everything (he was certain) in the world was now performed: in the name of God and profit.

It had not always been like that. Once—and Jacob privately admitted that he was more than likely indulging in an old man's senile reminiscences about times that n ever had been—the world had occasionally taken notice of something besides money. Nobles and wealthy men had, now and again, thrown it all up and gone off to serve God, whether on a crusade or in a monastery. Cathedrals had been raised. Pilgrimages had consisted of more than sightseeing and souvenir collecting. To be sure . . .

“A blessed, blessed Easter!”

. . . money had been at the bottom of much of it, but there was at least a faint hint of an alternative. People had at least
thought
occasionally of God without fear of sin or fear of Inquisition to prod them; and they had not linked Him so indissolubly to profit.

And would Jacob ever throw it all up and settle for something else? Begging his daily bread, maybe, in the streets of the town he more or less owned?

He snorted.

“Sir?” Eudes was dusty, dry, polite.

“Get me dressed, Eudes,” said Jacob. “We'll have prayers instead of breakfast, and then we'll all go to mass.” He snorted again. “In the name of God and profit.”

***

The Chapel of Our Lady of the Angels was a dumpy, Romanesque pile, round shouldered as a slattern. Four centuries ago, the baron of Furze, Harold delMari, had caused it to be raised by the simple expedient of funneling half of a year's income from his prosperous estate into the fabric fund. The chapel, built to atone for some unnamed and unknown sin that had tormented Harold's conscience, had risen from foundation to dome to cross in five years. Harold had seen it dedicated . . . and had died on his way down the steps.

This morning, the chapel, dumpy as it was, was bright with candles and silks. White candles. White silks. It was Easter Sunday. Jesus had risen from the dead for the redemption of all humankind, just as the chapel had risen from a patch of bare earth for reasons that were, doubtless, considerably more sordid and mundane; and Albrecht, bishop of Furze and celebrant for this high mass, vested and attended by deacon—inevitably (dear God!), it
had
to be Siegfried—and sub-deacon, and accompanied by the almost-tuneful jubilation of the choir that Brother Pierre had managed to scrape together, processed to the foot of the altar, careful that his right knee, which was none too steady, did not fail him.

Through the open doors of the chapel, straight across the town square, he could see something that was not dumpy and round shouldered but rather tall, high, and gothic. At least, what there was of it was tall, high, and gothic. In truth, the cathedral of Furze that so drew Albrecht's eyes was not even a quarter finished, and Albrecht doubted that it would ever be more than a quarter finished. Despite his dreams of reconstructing it, he was enough of a practical man (at least, he hoped he was) to know that an impoverished, economic wasteland like Furze could never hope to accomplish such a herculean—and expensive—task.

The unfinished cathedral, therefore, rose up amid the houses and hovels of Furze like the back half of a skull. The stonework of the choir and the apse was complete up to the level of the vaulting, but there was no vaulting. There was no glass in the clerestory. There was no roof, either, and rough wooden planks and straw thatch had to serve where concrete, stone, massive timbers, and lead would (as Albrecht devoutly hoped and prayed) someday rise. The nave and transepts were no more than a few columns and a series of holes partly filled with foundation stones.

Jesus had preached poverty, and Albrecht often thought that Furze had been a zealous convert. One hundred years ago, the city had been all but razed by the same robber companies that had taken and sacked Shrinerock, and the town had thereafter slipped in and out of municipal consciousness for several decades. The economy, founded squarely and symbiotically on the rich dairylands surrounding Belroi, had broken down completely, and when Albrecht had been given the city as his bishopric—a move that he always suspected had its origins in a desire of old Innocent and his cardinals to be rid of the silly old fellow with the gimpy leg and the delusions of piety—he had arrived to find a pauper town, pauper merchants, pauper artisans, pauper churches . . . and paupers themselves who were so crushed by their lot that any one of them, he suspected, would have gladly thrown everything up for the comparatively more remunerative life of a galley slave.

Fresh out of Rome and heartily tired of intrigues and politicking, Albrecht had welcomed the simplicity that came with poverty. Though he did not like the attendant strictures any more than anyone else, he had taken Furze in order to beat Rome much as a man might take wormwood in order to beat the plague. To be sure, the imbiber of the wormwood was looking forward to a time when he would not have to drink the bitter draft anymore, and, likewise, Albrecht was looking forward to a different Furze. A prosperous Furze. A wealthy Furze that would have plenty of money for clothes on its back, food on its table, help for its poor, and, incidentally, money for the fabric fund of the cathedral.

Surrounded by candles—and by the frumpy chapel—Albrecht blessed his people, giving an especially generous smile to the knot of shabby merchants how, with their families, stood together with Paul Drego and h is matter-of-fact wife. The wool cooperative was trying to revitalize Furze, to shift its shattered dairy economy over to sheep and cloth, and Albrecht suspected that, with the help of Aldernacht gold, they just might succeed. Paul and his fellows had drunk their share of wormwood in Furze, but their eyes were firmly set upon the future.

Another smile—a fitting expression for Easter, Albrecht thought—and the bishop turned back to the altar. As he did so, though, he noticed that Siegfried was also looking at Paul and his small knot of foresighted merchants. The Inquisitor, though, was not smiling.

Albrecht held out his hand for the aspergillum. Siegfried, staring at Paul, did not seem to notice. Quietly, Albrecht cleared his throat, and the Inquisitor came to himself suddenly and handed him the implement. Albrecht nodded, but, with a sense of discomfort that he could not exactly place, did not give Siegfried an opportunity to kiss his hand.

He sang the old chant:

“
Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor; lavabis me et super nivem dealbabor.
”

But as Albrecht sang, trying hard to be mindful only of the great mystery that he was about to celebrate, he was, unwillingly, aware of other things. Siegfried's thoughts, he was sure, were on the mass no more than his own. The wool cooperative was keeping its own counsel. Another few weeks, and Jacob Aldernacht himself would be coming to make the final arrangements for the loan that might lead to the transformation of Furze.

Albrecht appreciated poverty, but he also dreamed of a cathedral. Siegfried dreamed, he supposed, of heresy . . . and for some reason did not appreciate the cooperative at all. Paul Drego and his fellows dreamed of wool. Jacob Aldernacht . . . well, his dreams were his own business.