Shroud of Shadow (8 page)

Siegfried peered into the helmet. He had to win Fredrick. For the sake of God. For the sake of the Church. For the sake of Furze. “And so God has given you a chance. A chance for repentance.”

Plat
.

“And all you have to do . . . is tell the truth.”

A murmur from within the helmet, a spasmodic shaking. Fingers, broken beyond writhing, beyond clenching, writhed and clenched nonetheless. A burned and mangled tongue wrestled futilely with the spikes and clamps that held it. Moisture that was not blood or pus or lymph dribbled from tight-shut eyes.

Fredrick was weeping.

Siegfried had seen it before: the rush of grief that brought tears even to the most hardened of heretical faces when confronted with the absolute, incontrovertible, inescapable love of the Most High. It was, as always, a moving sight, and Siegfried's own eyes were moist as he put his hands up and cradled the skeleton helmet as though he held the head of an infant. “Will you tell me the truth, my son Fredrick?”

Another murmur. Tears ran down the scathed, gaunt, imprisoned face.

“Will you confess your heresy?” Fredrick's heresy, though, was undoubted: the man simply would not have been so tortured and broken had he not been the most flagrant of heretics. Siegfried knew what the answer would be here—he had, after all, seen the tears of grief and repentance—but he did not know what answers Fredrick would give to other questions, questions much more far reaching and important.

Another murmur, gratifying in its quickness, its eagerness.

“Will you tell me about your associates?”

Fredrick wept and murmured.

“Will you tell me about the wool cooperative? About the money they intend to receive from Jacob Aldernacht?” Siegfried's fingers gripped the bars of the helmet. The wealthy Alpine Waldensians had held out even against Cattaneo's concerted crusade, had even the audacity to turn the force of civil law against their persecutors! Money for them had been a shield and a bulwark behind which they could practice their pernicious vice, and Siegfried knew that with an influx of gold into Furze, another shield would take form, one that, considering the Aldernacht millions, could hide anything, protect anything. His course was therefore clear: prosecute now, destroy now. The tares had to be uprooted immediately, for if left in the field they would themselves uproot the corn.

But there was no murmur in reply to his impassioned questions. Fredrick's tears ceased abruptly.

Siegfried pressed on, shaking the helmet softly in cadence with his whispered words. “About Paul Drego? About Simon the Jew. About James the furrier. About all the rest?”

Plat
.

“So that God can show them how much He loves them, too?”

Fredrick's eyes opened wide, stared through the metal bars. In contrast to their white terror a few minutes ago, now they were almost luminous. They met Siegfried's gaze, and, for a moment, the Dominican thought that surely Fredrick—his soul dangling as it was over an abyss of pain and certain death—was seeing beyond the walls of stone and earth, beyond the world, into what lay beyond: that he was seeing, face to face . . .

A whimper from Fredrick, another quiver of the tongue, a sudden frantic straining against unyielding bonds. Siegfried understood, and with practiced hands, he removed the spikes, spun the clamps loose, unfastened the catches that held the helmet shut and threw it back on its brazen hinges. In a moment, Fredrick's head—seamed, lined, emaciated—was free.

Fredrick's tongue moved, licked his parched lips, left a trail of pus and slime behind.

“You see how much we love you,” said Siegfried.

His eyes filled with the luminous glow of revelation, Fredrick opened his mouth. “I . . .” His voice was dusty, weak.

Siegfried leaned closer.

“I . . .”

Latens deitas
. “Yes, my son?”

“I . . .” Another lick. Fredrick's eyes grew wider. “I . . . hate you.”

Siegfried pulled back, blinked.

Fredrick found his voice at last. “I . . . hate you. I hate your religion. I hate your Church.” His voice, raw and dusty, grew in strength, his thick tongue no impediment to the emotion and despair that rushed out of his mouth. “If this is God's love, then I hate God, too!” His voice edged into hysteria, edged into a scream. “Damn you!
Damn you all, you filthy bastards! I'll go to hell before I'll share heaven with you!
”

And, with what strength was left to him, Fredrick gathered a mouthful of spittle and blood and lymph and pus and belched it into Siegfried's face.

“
Damn you!
” he shrieked. “
Damn you! Damn you! Damn you!
”

The door was flung open: Giovanni and the others had heard Fredrick's blasphemous shouts. Crowding into the room, they stopped short at the sight of the mutilated, mangled figure that continued to spew abuse and blood both.

“
Damn you! Damn you all! D—
”

Fredrick fell silent, sagged in his bonds and chains. Shaking, Siegfried wiped blood from his eyes and peered at him. The prisoner's face was slack, his eyes glassy. Pink drool wound down his cheek, joined the fluids that had pooled on the sodden floor at the base of the chair.

Plat.

Plat. Plat.

Siegfried wiped his face. “He is dead.”

Giovanni crossed himself. “He didn't confess, did he?”

“No,” said Siegfried. “But he said enough to perhaps gain him a little mercy from a greater tribunal than ours.” He hung his head, discouraged. “Take Fredrick's body out and burn it. God will have to make the final judgment, for I cannot. But he implicated Paul Drego before he returned to his heretical ways, and therefore I want Paul watched. I want his comings and goings made known to me. I want records of what he says, of his visitors and his guests.”

Fredrick's glassy eyes saw nothing . . . or perhaps everything. Siegfried looked carefully into his face. Perhaps, just at the moment of death, Fredrick had seen . . . something. Something that might have left some faint mark of hope or terror in his visage. But no, nothing.

Plat.

Plat.

Plat.

What was he seeing now? God? The devil? Anything? What did heretics see? What had they been seeing when, years ago, they had naively claimed that a living man or woman could look into the stars and see the face of the Creator?

Siegfried mopped his face again, turned away.
Adoro te devote.

***

Natil dreamed.

The starlight was far fled from her, but for now she was not worried about the starlight, for at a time when starlight was unthinkable, starlight was valueless. In a time without starlight, what mattered was
rebirth
.

There would be a land, a land far away across the ocean. She herself had trodden its length and breadth decades ago, searching fruitlessly for elvenkind. Far in the future, though, after a long winter of the world, a long slumber beneath a shroud of shadow so dark that it seemed absolute negation, it was there that the sleeping, elven blood would reawaken.

How might it begin? she wondered. But perhaps she had seen exactly how it might begin. Amid sights and sounds that, with the openness of the dreamer, she accepted and called by their proper names—automobile, jet, radio—she saw that it might begin with a man named George Morrison, who, after standing in a fold of the Rocky Mountains, rapt by the coming of spring and by the undeniable response he felt in his blood and bone and fiber and sinew (no airy spiritualism here, but a stirring as visceral as an orgasm), was again driving west, following the setting sun, following the season of rebirth.

The mountains stayed with him, somehow, as though they had found a small vacancy in his heart: a bare room with a bare bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling, a mattress on the floor, perhaps a rickety table in the corner. Not quite flophouse accommodations, but certainly spartan and mean. But the meanness could be gotten rid of later, was, in fact, going away already, and George was satisfied that the mountains had decided to move in, to plunk a ratty old toothbrush into the unwashed plastic glass on the back of the toilet, to give him a wave and a cheerful
Hi, roomie
!

But he knew that he was not supposed to remain in the mountains. He would return, but he could not stay. Not now. He had other things to do. And so, following that inner surge of life that echoed the rising sap in the pines and the aspens, his face stubbly and his shirt beginning to smell after an entire day of staring at mountains and trees as though he had never seen such outlandish things before—mountains, trees: what did that mean, anyway?—he had climbed back into the van and continued west, picking up I-70 after a few minutes, rumbling up to the Continental Divide in second gear, passing through the Eisenhower Tunnel (the van rolling smoothly now, like a bullet through a rifle barrel) and down the Western Slope.

He drove throughout the night with the moonlit mountains rising about him like cupped hands. April. Spring. But it was not just April or spring—he sensed dimly that it was much bigger than that. He had heard about the Age of Aquarius foolishness that was bandied about by people who wore headbands and spoke a little too quickly, but it was, yes, bigger than that, too.

George found that he was thinking of it as a matter of breath. Somehow, as he had stood entranced in the little valley just off Highway 6, the earth—the whole planet, perhaps the whole universe—had
breathed
. A long exhalation had ended, to be abruptly replaced with a sucking in, a filling, much as a man might awaken from a long sleep, rub his face, belch, gape, and smile broadly as he pulled in a big, jowly gulp of air from a world that could not possibly deal in loaded dice or stacked decks . . . because it would not fucking
dare
.

And so George was feeling good as he crossed into Utah, and he still felt good even when he realized that he had driven all night beneath a moon as big as a beach ball and as bright as a teen-age girl's smile, driven and been even further entranced. But even the bespelled had to eat, pee, and wash their faces, and so, with the dawn coming up over the Rockies as though the stars had all melted together and run down into the east, George pulled off the highway and onto the small streets of a small town named Cisco. A diner was open. Breakfast, it said.

And maybe because he was already thinking of a girl's smile, or because the mountains were with him, or because of something else, something indefinite, something that had caused him to come to this very diner at this very moment in this very mood of hope and strangeness that had so intermingled in his reborn soul that he was now ready to move beyond mountains and trees so as to see—really see—people, he walked into the diner, pushing through the door that rattled as badly as the van and was losing paint even worse, and looked up to see a young woman wiping the Formica counter.

She looked up to see him, too. Her eyes were the color of cornflowers, and she was slender and rather pretty; but what struck George was that he was absolutely certain that she was someone else who was feeling more than April, more than just the spring.

Hope? Fancy? Reality? Natil did not know. But she watched George walk across the worn linoleum floor and order breakfast and a cup of coffee, saw him smile at the young woman in a way that she had never before seen a human being smile, saw that same smile returned.

It might happen. It
could
happen.

And then she was being prodded awake, and she opened her eyes to the morning. Beside her, Omelda sat back and shrugged apologetically. Her eyes were cloudy. “Play something, Natil,” she said. “Please. It's prime.”

Hypprux, to Natil's eyes, had not changed much in the last hundred years. To be sure, the city had grown, and there were new buildings, new faces, a city council with a charter from the baron, and a bishop who was more interested in hunting than in heresy; but Hypprux was still a city, its streets were still unyielding and hostile to an elven foot, and, within it, men were still hitting women and women were still scolding men. There was shouting, and human sorrow—beggars crouching in the thin sunlight and thieves staying well out of it.

Natil and Omelda paid the toll at the north gate and entered the city along the Street Gran Pont. Natil walked with an uncovered head, carrying her harp, ignoring the stares drawn by her demeanor and clothing. Omelda shuffled along, head down, furrow-browed because it was terce: the Divine Office went on.

“We will go to the square,” said Natil. “I will play there, and you can sit next to me and listen.”

They made their way up the crowded street towards the bridge that spanned the River Tordion. Here were hawkers, vendors with pies, young boys selling circlets of dried flowers. A man, standing on a box, was announcing that the Platonic Academy of Hypprux, under the generous patronage of Damal a'Verne, baron of the city, was sponsoring a series of lectures about the new Italian humanism. A few onlookers seemed interested, but a few others snorted and shouted that Italy was a den of vice. Unperturbed, the man on the box replied that Italy was also the seat of Rome and the papacy.

“See?” said one of the scoffers. “It just goes to show.”

The man on the box flushed. “You're talking about the Holy Father!” he said. “What are you, some kind of heretic?”

“You pig!” said the scoffer. “You watch what you go calling people! I'll show you heresy! You're teaching humanism right under God's own nose!”

“Humanism belongs under God's nose!”

“Who's a heretic now?”

And Natil, a little pale because of the speed with which tempers had ignited, dragged Omelda away from the ensuing brawl. No, Hypprux had not changed in the least.

“What was that?” said Omelda, blinking as though she had been asleep. Under the influence of the chant, she had at times only a vague idea of what was going on about her.