Shroud of Shadow (39 page)

The doctors of law chuckled quietly. The scribes went on writing.

Natil regarded Siegfried in silence, and his tongue abruptly faltered. “You know,” she said quietly, “that you are speaking an untruth.”

The statement struck him like a spear. He struggled with her intuition and her starlight . . . and with his own conscience. “Vagabond!” was all he could muster.

Sad. Growing even sadder. The last Elf—barely clinging to her status—condemned by a priest who was apparently torturing himself as much as he tortured his prisoners. “Did you wish to try me for heresy, Brother Siegfried?” she asked courteously, “or for wandering?”

“Out of your own mouth are you condemned!”

“Condemned for what?”

“Heresy.”

“I cannot be a heretic, for I am not a Christian.”

Siegfried lost patience. “Well, then what
are
you?”

“I am an Elf.”

The pens fell silent again. A number of the scribes opened their mouths to laugh, then reconsidered and shut them. The doctors, who had again been conferring, stopped in mid-whisper.

Siegfried was speechless for a moment. Then: “You are saying that . . .” He could not find words, but Natil knew his thoughts. The prisoner was telling the truth. But the truth she was telling utterly eclipsed any picayune question of heterodoxy, was, in fact, so immense, so monstrous, that the churchmen present in the room could not, at first, even comprehend it.

“Inquisitor,” said Natil, feeling a flicker of defiance, “you have before you the last of the Firstborn, the last Immortal. You have killed or saddened into non-existence all the rest of my people. When I am gone, the Earth will be yours, to do with as you wish.” A small flash of wrath, which, after examining it carefully, she allowed. “I hope you are satisfied.”

Siegfried stared. Then: “You are . . .” A long pause, because the truth in Natil's words was so compelling that he did not believe his own statement. “. . . mad.”

She was fettered, but she stepped forward a pace, her bare feet noiseless on the wooden floor. Even the rattle of her chains was muffled and indistinct. “You know that I am most certainly not mad,” she said. “You know—do not deny it, for I can see it plainly—that I am speaking the most truth that has been uttered in your presence in twenty years of Inquisition.”

Rooted as the coachmen were by her voice and her words, no one moved, not even when she stepped forward another pace and confronted Siegfried across the polished surface of his desk. Natil felt a stirring within her, saw no reason not to yield to it. Her voice went up, liquid and hard-edged both.

“I will speak to you, then, as the last of my people. I will speak to you words that we perhaps should have uttered long before, but compassion stilled our tongues.”

Silence. Stunned silence. Not a word. Not a movement.

“In the beginning, we saw your world coalesce out of void, and as it solidified and cooled, we prayed for it and for its future. We saw life arise from pools of slime, and we encouraged it, fostered it, kept it from death. And when it took to the land, we sheltered it from storm and sun, fed it when it hungered, brought water when it thirsted . . .”

Siegfried's mouth moved silently. Natil read his lips.
My God.

“. . . and when, after great eons, your race descended from the trees in Africa, hairy and bestial and knowing no more than food and sleep, we taught it the use of its hands and its voice, we showed it the use of tools.” Grief welled up, threatened to make her weep, but she turned it to compassion and continued. “We taught you stories and legends. We encouraged you to create others. And as we taught and healed and helped you, so we thought that you would, in turn, teach and heal and help one another.”

Siegfried's face was slack, his eyes stricken. What did he see? Hope? Revelation? Or a nightmare risen up from the past to threaten his kind and his Church?

Natil did not know. But she had to speak. It was her last chance to speak, the last chance of the Elves.

“And now,” she said, “the last of my race, I stand before you and ask you what we should have asked long ago.” The wrath welled up in earnest then, welled up and carried her voice throughout the room as though a sudden storm had been loosed: “
With what audacity or excuse have you so turned upon me and my kind, and perverted the intelligence which we so carefully and compassionately fostered?
”

Silence. Lengthening, prolonged.

Natil bent her head, finished. And, as she had expected, she heard a step behind her. The blow came quickly: a shock, and a white light. She did not lose consciousness, but the floor came up like a fist, and though her stars quelled the pain in a moment, she could not move.

“Take . . .” Siegfried's voice was hoarse, halting. He had seen. He had heard. He
knew
. And though he was trying to deny that he knew—trying to deny it to himself, trying to deny it to everyone in the room—he could not deny it. “Take her away. There is nothing more that we need . . .”

A long pause. Natil heard a voice: “Brother Siegfried?”

“. . . that we need here. She has admitted everything. Let her be burned.”

“Brother Siegfried, you don't suppose that she's—”

“I suppose nothing.”

“But perhaps we should—”

“Burn her!
Burn her!
”

Hands were already seizing Natil's chains, and she was dragged out of the room, down the corridors. Her head bounced on the stairs leading to the dungeon, but the starlight was with her, and though she felt the blood start to flow from her nose and scalp, she did not cry out. She had already said everything. She had given to men the last words of the Elves.

They took her back to her cell and hung her up again. She sagged weakly: feeling was returning to her limbs much faster than any control.

The door clanged shut. She looked at the stars, breathed the light.

So much that was left undone, so little that she could do about any of it. Far in the future, Hadden and Wheat had themselves found out about the much and the little, but they had persevered in spite of that knowledge; and, drifting in an inner bath of starlight, drawing from a sustenance and a hope from it that, she knew, could take her all the way through whatever fate—fading or burning—lay ahead of her, Natil saw them standing together beneath the stars of early summer.

And it suddenly struck the Elf that, for them, it was
Arae a Circa
, the Day of Renewal. Renewal for Hadden and Wheat. Renewal for the Elves. Renewal for the world.

Despite her condition and her future, Natil smiled, her tears mingling with her blood. It would happen. She knew not that it would happen. She had no more doubts, and if she regretted anything at all, it was only that the Elves, coming anew into the world, would have no knowledge of their Maker, no vision of the Lady, no touch of a starlit hand on their brows.
What gets us through?
they would ask, and the answer would be only hollow silence.

And with the rising of the sun, Hadden and Wheat blinked at a world remade. Shyly, like children, they turned to one another in the flood of new light, saw that the changes in their souls had been confirmed and complimented by changes in their bodies that went far beyond anything they had seen before: an utter purging of the last remnants of mortality . . .

. . . and humanity.

Knowing now what they were, they wandered hand in hand beneath the pines and the aspens, their steps soundless. They talked with birds, patted squirrels, wondered at the blueness of the sky, delighted in the breezes brought by this May morning. They climbed and explored the new Elvenhome, for it was a home, a home that had arisen within the Greater Home that Elves would always know.

“But . . .” Wheat was laughing, giddy and apprehensive both. A sparrow was nestled in her cupped hands and it chirped gleefully before it took flight. “. . . how are we going to explain this to anyone?”

Hadden shrugged. “We don't. We find people who don't need explanations.”

“Like who?”

He gave her a slow smile, a womanly smile. “People like us.”

The wind caught her hair, whipped it in front of her face. She ran her hands back through it, blushed as they brushed past her ears. “Oh, my God . . . you think that there are others.”

Hadden nodded. “Yes,” he said. “There'll be more.” He looked up at the blue Colorado sky. “We're home.”

Natil, hung like a piece of rotting meat in the House of God, awaiting the flames that would release her from life, watched as other lives unfurled. She saw Joan become Ash. She saw Lauri leave a broken-hearted past behind and embrace something so welcoming that she could neither understand it nor question it. She saw Amy flee from abuse, seize autonomy and starlight both, and take the name Bright for herself, her hope, and her determination.

And there were others. Raven. Web. Marsh. Heather. And their stories and their transformations all grew in Natil's mind as the hours passed and her death approached. Elvenhome of the Rockies. The land was bought, the cornerstone was laid. The walls—yes, there were walls now, but walls, like swords, had their place—went up, white and shining, and by elven hands and elven hearts they were all of a piece with the mountains and forests about them.

Once again, there were Elves in the world, but this time they did not keep to the forests and the wilds, but rather lived among their mortal brothers and sisters. They helped as they could, healed when they were able to make some vague sense out of the immanent starlight; but just as these actions were impelled by a dim, immortal instinct that was rooted in a past at which they could only guess, so also did a faint, racial memory urge them toward discretion: though they knew one another, acknowledged one another, and embraced one another, they said nothing of their existence to their human siblings.

And despite the confusion of such an immortal life of mixed love and caution, they had also to consider something else, for as their numbers had grown from two to several to a handful, so had the question:

What gets us through?

They did not know what would get them through. And Natil, five hundred years in the past, and imprisoned in the House of God, could not tell them.

For a moment, she saw the rainswept tree again, its cleft streaming with brilliance as though something divine were thrusting toward incarnation. It blazed at her, shimmering, aureate, and Natil found herself suddenly repeating, in common American English sparked with the lilt of an elven accent, the words she had heard from the lips of those who did not yet live.

“
What gets us through?
”

The language startled her, and she came to herself in the darkness of her cell. “What gets us through?” she whispered in English, savoring the taste of the words like the juice of some exotic fruit. “What gets us through? O my kindred, had I the power, I would tell you.”

She hung her head, but a faint sound made her lift it again. With the exception of an occasional muffled scream or slamming door, the dungeon was silent. But now something had intruded into the terrible custom, something as strange as the English syllables that had, a moment before, echoed off the stone walls.

Faintly, in the distance, Omelda was singing—her voice high and clear, distinct and deliberate—intoning the Holy Office with an ethereal purity that brought to this place of darkness and pain something of brightness and divinity, set the very air vibrating with it, and then, slowly, faded away into illimitable peace.

With difficulty, Siegfried kept his frantic steps from turning into a frightened run as he left the tribunal chamber; but his mind was less obedient than his feet, and it continued to leap ahead of him, looping relentlessly through Natil's testimony, dragging him toward panic.

Impossible though her story was, it was also absolute truth. Siegfried understood this instinctively, not only with a physical certainty that put a cold hand into his heart, but with the profound spiritual recognition with which the fallen confront what has been forever lost. And so he knew without doubt that the ancient legends so long dismissed as the maunderings of old crones and toothless widows were, impossibly, not legends at all, but fact.

Elves. Elves! Old Aloysius Cranby had not been a deluded fool, but had instead been setting his finger on the pulse of Adria!

But as for Natil's claim that she was the last, that with her death the threat would end, Siegfried would not allow himself to believe a word of it, for it was refuted by every instinct of the trained Inquisitor. Demons were sustained by the energies of hell, and therefore, far from being the last, Natil instead could not but be only one among countless others who were even now spreading their subtle poisons into Christian hearts. Perhaps it had been the Elves who had strengthened the Alpine Waldensians in their resistance. Perhaps they had also been responsible for the continuing outbreaks of Dolcianism and Lollardy in the passes of the Aleser Mountains. Perhaps . . .

. . . perhaps they even had a hand in the constant upwelling of heresy in Furze.

Siegfried's mind, racing, constructed with frightened speed a huge conspiracy, a network of infernal plots and snares that was, even now, reaching out to envelope all of Christendom. Of
course
Natil would claim to be the last, of
course
she would smile and treat him with devious compassion, of
course
she would speak with power and inhuman cunning: having been captured, her sole purpose was to lull him into a complacent acceptance of his victory . . . and so to cause his downfall.

It was imperative that she be burnt immediately, and Siegfried was heading for his office with the intention of writing the necessary orders himself. But though he climbed the stairs with his thoughts hammering at him that Natil was a demon, that he had talked with her face to face not only in the tribunal chamber, but also in the comparative intimacy of his office, that such unmitigated cheek on the part of a demon was an ominous statement about the intentions of the Prince of Darkness, still Siegfried could not help but think, sadly, of what a sore trial it was to be a human being: to so readily see, touch, and speak with corporeal representatives of evil, and at the same time to be so distanced from the absolute goodness of God. God was hidden. Transcendent. Perceptible only through faith.