Shroud of Shadow (5 page)

Had it always been like this? Albrecht had seen the bad business in Rome, and he had heard about its occurrence in other places as well. Lorenzo de' Medici had been openly attacked during a solemn mass just like this one, and poor Fra Girolamo had been hung and burned just two years ago for preaching publicly what most layfolk agreed upon privately. But although Albrecht supposed that there had been abuse and veniality since Peter had passed the shepherd's crook to Linus—not that the bishop ever suspected anything of those holy men themselves!—he also desperately hoped that at times it had been otherwise.

There had been miracles in the past. The Virgin herself had ofttimes taken a hand in the affairs of her children, and the old cathedrals had gone up across the continent in a mixture of legend and sanctity. But though those qualities had apparently been completely replaced by unabashed commerce—Alexander had declared a Jubilee Year, after all!—Albrecht desperately wanted to bring them back.

He knelt, but behind Siegfried's dark presence, beyond the faces of the merchants and the others, through the open door of the nave, across the open square, he sensed the beginnings of a cathedral. The last cathedral of Europe. It could be wonderful. It could bring back the legend and the sanctity. Maybe it could even bring back the Virgin and her gentle, lovingly meddling hands.

“
Introibo ad altare Dei.
”

Yes, yes: but would he ever go to the altar of the cathedral of Furze? Probably not: he was getting old.

But would anybody?

***

Whispers.

Whispers in Adria. Whispers throughout all of Europe. Whispers in a dark tavern. Whispers in the sitting room of a common house. Whispers in an alley.

Siegfried heard whispers in Furze, but in reality (just as he, the Church, the Inquisition, and all suspected) the whispers were everywhere. Even Natil, who by nature stood so far outside the mores and customs and beliefs of human beings that she expected her existence to terminate not in death but in fading, heard them. Whispers.

“God can go into the host, and He can come out, too.”

“There is more God in a barrel of malt than there is in a church.”

“A priest in mortal sin has no sacramental power.”

“I will not worship stocks and stones.”

“I will confess to God alone.”

But there was no room for whispers in the Church: its foundations were built upon an orthodoxy that, like the monodic chant that had once characterized its monastic practice, provided for no departure or improvisation. But the chant itself had long ago broken into octaves, and then fifths, and then had come full polyphony. Omelda's convent was one of the few that still limited the Office to a single line of melody; elsewhere, whispers of another kind had sent up shoots, leaves, flowers, and fruit that, though shaken to earth and stamped into pulp by reforms and papal bulls, had only rotted into compost and nurtured new sprouts. Now there was Josquin in the cathedrals, and even the complex and carefully wrought organum of Perotin and Leonin was looked upon as primitive, dated, not at all to the general taste for melody and harmony as ornate as the new tower at Chartres.

Nonetheless, throughout it all, the Church had continued to adhere to its single stem of doctrine, patiently and sometimes brutally lopping off heterodox branches. But a single stem could only grow so long. Change had to happen. The ancient and fertile enthusiasm of the Apostles and the Fathers could only sustain itself in rote practice for so long before, like a tree, it had to cleave, fork, become something else.

Had the Elves, Natil wondered, been just like that? Since the Beginning, since the primitive Earth had cooled into a jagged landscape of tortured basalt and seething pools of magma, they had been as a single stalk, one that, lengthening through years, centuries, millennia, had but grown thinner. They had fostered life, had healed and helped where they could, had taken on the appearance of one age after another, but they had remained Elves. They had not changed. They had never branched. And they had therefore dwindled.

Harp in hand, Natil stood at the edge of a dark abyss of non-existence just as she stood at the edge of the cathedral parvis this morning in Maris. She could not cross into the parvis—there was too much pain there—and she could not cross the abyss.

But once, years ago, an Elf named Varden had looked into that same darkness, and though he had been unable to cross, and though he himself had eventually faded (vanishing on a night of snow after a last meeting with a half-human son who wanted nothing more than to deny him), he had at the time looked beyond the abyss, sorting through the strands of starlight, the interlocking probabilities, following the potentials of existence to the other side of the deep, deep shadow—and he had seen . . . something: something that had given him a small glimmer of hope, as small and yet as bright as that glitter in the sky that Natil had seen—once again last night—in her dreams.

Elves and humans are two,
the Lady had said to Varden, her eyes mirroring both the starlight of the Elves and the moonlight of the witches,
but both are my children. Not one of my children shall be separate from Me.

The sunlight, though cold, was bright, and the colors of early spring, just now beginning to show, had the depth of oceans to Natil's eyes. Here were flowers—lilies and crocuses and daffodils—unfolding as they did every spring after a long sleep in the darkness of the earth.

Not one.
And Natil suddenly thought of the elven blood, sleeping in humanity like a sower's pouchful of seeds new planted, waiting for spring, waiting for the future.

Varden had seen. And now Natil, too, had seen . . . something.

“Are you going to play here?” Omelda was tugging on Natil's cloak, an exotic patchwork of fabrics from a hundred different lands, feathers from the far side of the Atlantic, stones and beads from the East Indies and the southern tip of Africa. Just the thing for an itinerant harper. She might well have been a gypsy, a professional wanderer. Perhaps she was. “This makes me nervous.” Omelda glanced around. “There are . . . there might be . . .”

Natil turned, looked into her intense eyes. Sleeping. But seeds had to be planted before they could grow. Surely she had learned that much in forty million centuries!

She felt herself smiles. “Not here,” she said. “We will go to the town square. The priests would not like secular music so near to their sanctuary.”

Omelda clutched at her ragged cloak. There was a cold wind, and she shivered. “I thought you told me that you didn't play secular music.”

“I do not. But the priests would not see it that way.” Natil took Omelda's hand, and they set off through the holiday crowds. They had made a point to stay out of the city until well after mass, and, indeed, Natil would have preferred to stay out of the city entirely; but she needed money for food: with the encroachment of farms and settlements on the forests, she had become as much a prisoner of economics as any human.

As they walked, though, Omelda's eyes clouded. Natil glanced at the sun, realized that it was sext. The services for the people were over, but the Divine Office was beginning once again.

“I can't stop it.” Omelda was groping suddenly in the bright afternoon. “I can't. I want to . . . scream. Play something.”

Natil held fast to her hand. “I told you before: I cannot always be with you. You will have to learn to do this yourself.”

“I don't even have a harp.”

“You do not need a harp. What is being sung right now?”

“
Beata immaculati.
”

“Sing it for me.”

Omelda blinked at the betrayal. “I'll . . . go . . . go mad!”

Natil continued on her way, drawing Omelda towards the square, struggling to hold fast to the way of the Elves in the face of an abyss that wrapped the future in a deepening shroud of shadow as it wrapped her present in a deepening humanity. “Sing, please,” she said. “Come now, Omelda; you have a voice, and you have a body—”

“It's . . . dung!”

Natil gave her arm a gentle shake. “It is
not
dung, O woman. Sing.”

Trembling, still fuzzy from her inner possession, Omelda quavered out the notes as though each one were red hot:

“
Utinam dirigantur viae meae, ad custodiendas justificationes tuas!
”

The syllables thumping out with monotonous regularity, Omelda plodded through the chant as she and Natil threaded their way through the streets of Maris. The afternoon was clear, the weather was warming, and the city, like the Church, had thrown off the dark sobriety of winter and Passion Week. In the square, jugglers worked the crowds. Acrobats tumbled. A musician, after a comradely nod at Natil, started up a song. There were smiling faces and new clothes; people were talking, laughing, wenching. Even the stern face of the baronial fortress seemed gentled by the general consensus that it was time for winter to become spring.

Omelda labored on through the hates and obsessive Office. “Stop for a moment,” said Natil suddenly. “Think: what are you singing?”

Omelda blinked. “The Office.”

Natil found a vacant spot on the steps that led up to the Hansa factory and sat down. The eagle feather in her hair glinted in the sunlight. “What were the words you just sang? Say them.”

Omelda grimaced: even a hint of the Office was more than sufficient to pain her, but: “
Concupivit anima mea disiderare justificationes tuas, in omni tempore,
” she said dutifully.

“You did not say them as you sang them, did you?”

“I just . . . said them, that's all.”

“Ah,” said Natil, “but you said them with expression and with feeling, as though the words actually meant something. Dame Agnes did not neglect your knowledge of Latin, did she?”

Omelda shook her head, put her hands to her ears. “No, she didn't. I can speak Latin. But can't you just play something, Natil?”

Natil smiled, pulled Omelda's hands down. “I shall. But listen to what I play, for I am going to play what you just sang . . . but I will play it as you said it.”

“Is that supposed to help?”

Natil checked the tuning of her harp, glanced up. She was already attracting a cluster of listeners. She was used to that. An outlandishly dressed woman who did not cover her head and who carried such a strange-looking harp almost always caught the attention—and usually the sympathy—of everyone within sight . . . even before she played a single note. There would probably be a few gold coins today. “Helping is what I do, Omelda. It is what I have always done. Now listen . . .”

The strings of her harp sparkled into music, and she could not help but recall again the thing that had glittered so brightly against the profoundly blue sky of her dreams. Was it just a dream? Or was it perhaps a vision that allowed her, like Varden, to pierce a dark and abyssal shroud of shadow?

The sunlight glittered on the windows of the 747, the white contrails of the jet even whiter for the very blue Colorado sky. It was April. The Rocky Mountains were still stippled with snow, but below, in Denver, elms had leafed, apple trees had budded, and cottonwoods were hung heavy with catkins.

There was something in the air that came inevitably with spring: a stirring that had nothing to do with temperature or weather, but which arrived every year, returning unfailingly even after the deepest, most frost-bitten and pipes-bursting-like-popcorn cold, an echo of all past winters, a promise of the newness of all future springs. And so the westbound 747 glittered in the sky, seeming itself to be a premature blossom of spring, as though 747s have been hanging whitely in the blue and April air since the beginning of time, promising connection, promising newness.

George Morrison drove west along Highway 6, feeling old. Denver felt old. The apartment he had left behind felt more than old: it smacked of ruin and of rot, of Kleenex that had been used, wadded up, and thrown away.

In the space of a day, he had lost his job, lost his lover, lost any feeling of roots or of belonging in the city in which he had been born. At the security firm, they had told him that his performance had not improved sufficiently. Tina had told him much the same thing.

“
I'm tired of beating my head against the wall. I'm tired of scrounging. I'm tired of watching you sitting in front of the TV while I try to figure out where the rent's gonna come from. I'm tired of everything.
”

“
But . . .
”

“
I can do better by myself.
”

It had been coming for a long time. George knew that. The fights, the sulks, her crying jags and his temper . . . The signs had been obvious. But he had, in a most human fashion, lied to himself as much about the inevitability of the split with Tina as about his inadequacies and fumbles on the job.

He had sunk his final check and most of his savings into a diamond engagement ring, but when he had come home in the middle of the day, Tina had been loading her belongings into her tiny car. Another man might have pleaded with her, might have gone so far as to grab her arm, show her the ring, force her to stay in the shabby little living room with delusions of making up and happy sex in the back of his mind. Another man might have become enraged at the affront to male pride and prerogative. He might have slapped her around a bit, or he might have killed her. It was, after all, 1980. Things like that happened.

But George had instead stood in the middle of the asphalt parking lot as Tina had driven away. He had not even told her about the engagement ring. He had waved good-bye, that was all, but he had known that she was not looking back. Tina was not one to look back.

Afterwards, in the backwash of silence left by the countless arguments now forever ended, the apartment had turned stale, the sounds of radios and stereos and televisions drifting in from other units altogether too loud, too oppressive. George had endured it for three days, and then he, too, had left . . . and he had not looked back.

He did not know where he was going. He knew only that he was heading west, into the mountains, following the 747 that hung in the top half of his grimy windshield like a promise of something better, a promise of spring for the world. He was, perhaps, looking for the spring. He was looking for the promise. Denver went on, pollution, politics, traffic and all, as ancient and weathered as a half-rotted Burma Shave sign; but George, following instinct—or, rather (though he did not know it), following something like instinct, something that was appearing in the world for the first time in half a thousand years—was looking for the New Season.