The White Tree (37 page)

"'I am a monk,' he said. 'I have no temple, no mass or brotherhood to call my own, and I live only through the charity of alms. But I am at peace, and perhaps I can bring that to my brothers and my father.' The father smiled and again embraced his sons. But the others looked askance at Ben, lone among them who'd have no place in the gardens of the nobles."

Samarand paused her story and drank from a plain copper cup. She smiled out on the people. For the first time Dante thought he saw a crease of skin beneath her eyes.

"And so the brothers lived together as they'd done while young. The armsman kept their fields free of bandits, the farmer fed them each meal, the harlequin made them laugh and clap each eve. All shared their gift and talent—even Ben, silent Ben, would tell them stories of the gods and their prophets when asked. And for a time they did leave in peace.

"But as with all men who don't understand those whose joy comes from a different source, in time the brothers grew resentful and jealous. 'Ben swings no sword,' the armsman said. 'Why should I protect him from the thieves?' 'Ben grinds no bread,' the farmer said. 'Why should I feed him of my harvest?' 'Ben knows no dances,' the harlequin said. 'Why should I pass his long hours with mine?' And so they decided to cast Ben from their house. The father tried to argue, saying Ben was of their blood, he was wise as any, but he was old and couldn't stand against these ten sons. And so they took Ben up, breaking his fingers when he tried to hold fast to the doorway of the house, and they cast him on the street with his dog, penniless as the day he'd returned.

"Ben grieved for the loss of his brothers and his father, but he told what he'd learned to the beggars and the vagabonds and they shared their bread. He preached in the street and the people came to hear his words until no traffic could pass that throng in the square and still the crowds grew larger. A year from when he'd been cast out the people of the town came together and built him a temple: a proud, simple shrine of stone to hold his flock and hear the things he'd learned in his years and his travels. Twice each week Ben spoke his sermons, and in those times he smiled to see the joy he brought to those who'd listen.

"The brothers heard of his temple, came to town to see it. It was simple enough, but beautiful, in its way, and when they looked on it the shame of what they'd done to Ben burned inside their hearts. Instead of coming to him with open arms, they clustered together in angry words, and that night they came upon the temple and burnt out its roof and smashed down its walls with great golden hammers in defiance of the success Ben had earned.

"When Ben saw what they'd wrought, he wept. Not for the temple: temples can be rebuilt. Nor for himself: he knew the permanence of his temple had been an illusion, and that though it had been built for him, it was in no way his.

"He wept for his brothers. He wept for the anger that had turned them from joy; he wept for what he knew was next to come. For the townsfolk came to Ben and cried out at the sight of the ruins of what they'd built. 'Who did this?' they said, and Ben, who in his virtue told no lies, answered them: 'My brothers.'

"He tried to salve their anger, to tell them this was an earthly matter, that more stone could always be dug from the ground and set in place. His words fell on ears deafened by righteous rage. The crowd marched upon the house of the brothers and drove them out. They put the fine house to the torch and the brothers to the sword. The flames of their destruction cast long shadows on the town. They spared the father, the old man, and with damp cheeks and beard he walked from that place forever, taking with him Ben's black dog."

Samarand paused to smile forlornly and from his distance Dante saw Ben's terrible sadness reflected in her eyes.

"In time they built a new temple. Its spire kissed the heavens. It was more beautiful than the first. They brought Ben to it, and said unto him, 'We are sorry for the fate we brought your brothers, but they tore down what we put up.' Ben looked at them and nodded. 'I do not condemn you,' he said. 'There was no right in what they did.' 'Then we did right, to burn their house, to plant them in the earth?' the people said. 'No,' Ben said, and he held up his hands for silence. 'I do not condemn you. But do not mistake vengeance for justice. The gods look on us all with sorrow, for truly we have forgotten the harmony of their sphere.' The people bowed their heads. Ben returned to his sermons and the people returned to his temple. He spoke with joy and with righteous visage, and never again let the townsfolk see the sadness that had stolen his heart."

Samarand sighed. She stepped down from the altar and paced its steps, meeting the eyes of the barons, the ships' captains, the farmers, the docksmen, the landed gentry, the wandering vagabonds. She turned her back on the assembly and stepped back up to her place at the altar's peak. A few men coughed, muffling their weakness in their hands and cloaks. She let a minute go by before turning her plain face back toward their sight.

"The jealousy of men finds us all. The men of the south and the east, even some of our brothers and neighbors in our own land of Gask, they look on what we do and they mistake piety for threat. Who is Arawn? He takes us all, this much is true, but he does not seek nor want our end. He takes us in his time, and when he does he welcomes us to his fields in the stars.

"Still, we strive for Ben's virtue. His patience. We try to make his peaceful compassion our own. We try not to blame our brothers for the wrongs they do us. After all, they are our brothers. I've been to a dozen lands and I see the same faces here as any corner of the earth. Look around you. Go ahead." Thousands of faces turned and met each other. Samarand met men's eyes and nodded. "I see the same men and women, sons and mothers, uncles and sisters as anywhere else. Are we so fearsome? So foreign? Such a menace to the ordered world?

"Maybe we are. Our brothers think so. When they see our temples they look upon their own mortality. When they hear our scripture they hear the bells that toll for their souls. When we speak our truths, we speak of things that trivialize the weight in their purse, the bounty of their soil, the flash of their brooches and rings. Still, we want no man's death. We don't even seek to own his mind, which is more than can be said for some orders of the house of the Belt. We want nothing more than a place at the table.

"In the end," Samarand said, clasping her hands before her, her voice clear and pained in the open air of the great cathedral, "who is to be blamed for the chaos we have seen? Is it our brothers, for their failure to understand us? Is it us, for having the temerity to raise arms to reclaim those things we would build upon the face of the earth?"

She pursed her lips, shook her head.

"Let us seek to be like Ben. Let us take no pleasure in whatever we must do to keep our temples and our faith. The gods do not smile as we bury our dead. Not even Arawn wishes a man's blood to fall before his time, no matter what the men of other gods may say. We are not right to take their blood, no matter how wrong they may be to make us take it. Remember that. Whatever we must do, they are our brothers. They are our brothers. When they die, we must weep. We must be like Ben.

"Live this earth."

"Live this earth," the crowd responded, and this time Dante heard their words in a mixture of tongues. Samarand nodded simply. She stepped down from the dais and was surrounded by her clergy. For a long while no man spoke nor moved, their minds consumed by the truth of her parable. At last the men on the benches closest to the dais stood to speak to each other or gaze longer on Samarand's face where she exchanged words with the others of her order. The standing crowd blinked away their trance and the singular acoustics of the room dissolved into babble. A general movement toward the front doors began.

"Let's get outside," Dante said. "Get a good spot for her walk back."

Blays nodded. They forced themselves into the crowd. Dante glanced over his shoulder as he shuffled forward, trying to catch sight of the woman in black and silver. She would be delayed with her duties to recognize the presence of the men of importance who'd attended her sermon and now waited for her in the first rows. The rest of the masses oozed toward the doors, a foot every couple seconds. After a few minutes the blockage gave way and the people thinned and the boys could walk at something near a normal pace.

"She tells a good story," Blays said.

"Reconsidering?"

"Pretty words don't change what she's doing down in Mallon."

Dante nodded. "No swords." He glanced around the square, shielding his eyes against the glare of the day after the dim of the church. "I may be able to do it unseen."

"Right."

They drifted a short ways from the straight line between church and keep. The square was filled with men just milling about, talking over the speech, discussing what they'd do for lunch, a confusion of Gaskan and Mallish and a couple other minor tongues Dante couldn't place. The gates to the Sealed Citadel were open, but blocked by a black mass of guards. They weren't expecting Samarand to be long, then.

"I wonder how she does that," Dante said.

"Does what?"

"Reconciles what she's saying with the burning of Whetton. All the things they're doing down there."

Blays rubbed his left eye with the back of his hand. "She probably doesn't think she's doing anything wrong. Otherwise she wouldn't be doing it, would she?"

"But it's acting more like the townsfolk than Ben."

"So? That was just a story. That's just something they say to keep everyone else in line."

"Yeah, but it doesn't bother her." Dante stared into the space above the heads of all the people. "I really think she believes it. It's so hypocritical."

"Ben's a dream, you dummy. Something to keep little people like us happy and faithful while she's off getting things done. She's not moping around worrying over the state of our souls. She's off fitting the world like a glove to her hand."

Dante looked at Blays, alarmed. He was supposed to be the clear-eyed one, not Blays. Blays was supposed to be breezily unconcerned, unflappable. Something in his speech reminded Dante of the careful parsing he imagined Samarand must do to cleave her beliefs to the things she did.

"How does someone get like that?" he said.

Blays shrugged, spat between his feet. "We've killed a lot of people to get here."

"But we
had
to!" Dante said. Blays only shrugged once more.

Dante watched a half dozen troops march with pikes on shoulders across the square. A few pilgrims continued to trickle from the church doors. No sign of the priests. He took a drink of water. Though he could feel the pressure of his blood beating in his veins, his hand was oddly calm. He smelled the stink of the city and its people, the shit and the rot and the sweat, odors his nose had ignored since the day of their arrival. If he concentrated he could isolate a score of different conversations. The sun shone from the stones of the street and the faces of the buildings. It was a nice day.

"Did I tell you," Dante said, a grin replacing the brooding on his face, "the morning they were set to hang you, I wrote a letter to be read after my death?"

Blays' face lifted with laughter. "What did it say?"

"I can't remember. Something about how I was off to save my friend and I expected to die in the doing."

"I'd have traced my middle finger."

"I wasn't in the best of moods," Dante said, shuffling his feet. "That was actually the least hysterical thing I could come up with."

Blays nodded. He rubbed his clean-shaven jaw. "What would you say now?"

Dante thought a moment, giving the question its due. "I'd say hello to Cally and Gabe and Robert."

"That's it?"

"That's it. What would you say?"

"I'd ask them to catapult my body through the roof of a nunnery."

"You wouldn't!" Dante said, wiping cold sweat from his temple.

"Why not?" Blays yawned into the sunlight. "What would you do if a body came crashing through your roof? Scream, right? Get all excited? I'd like to think my last act was to give the sisters a little fun."

"Shut up," Dante laughed.

"They spend all day reading holy mumbo-jumbo and squeezing their legs together. Don't tell me they don't deserve a good time."

"There she is," Dante said, grabbing Blays' arm. He bumped him toward the cathedral. Men clustered up around the doors and called out to Samarand from the midst of her retinue. She met their wide-eyed gazes with a look of pleased shock. Men called out for blessings, falling to their knees at her feet. She touched their hands and brows and Dante could see her lips moving. He called out to the shadows just enough to make sure they were there. They waited, restless and snapping, as if aware of his intent. Samarand waded through the penitent. A number of armed and uniformed guards followed the troop of holy men, but they cleared no path, letting Samarand mingle with the faithful. Dante grasped Blays' cloak and forced them forward, trying to guess her course. A dozen priests at her side, as many guards. Not a chance for a straight fight. He had it, then, the plan that had till that moment been so nebulous and abstract. A single dark stab at the woman when she was too close to detect it before it opened her belly—then blend off through the crowd. Simple enough. His ribs felt prickly, like a hill of ants were walking up and down his skin. Samarand made no hurry through the surge of men and women seeking her touch, her words. More pushed forward to fill up the spaces as soon as they opened.

She came closer. Men walked away dazed and smiling with parted lips. The process was orderly in a way mobs weren't. Dante pulled his lips from his teeth, turned it into a tight smile to try to match the faces of those around him. He heard the musing tones of Samarand's voice and then the laughter of men. The priests clasped hands with men in gold-threaded capes and soft-furred cloaks, leaning in to exchange counsel and well-wishes. The knot grew nearer. Thirty feet off, now. The eyes of her bodyguards were clear, casting through the men who thronged around her for the glint of daggers or the shadow of nervous faces. Someone bumped into Blays and he fastened his fist tight. The boys exchanged a look. Blays' eyes were flat, cold, ready. Dante imagined his own as their mirror. Samarand smiled, bowed her head to someone's kind words, and Dante remembered all the men she'd sent to kill him. The dragging gasps of their last breaths. The way they'd hounded him through city and forest. Letting him be baited by the book, then making him fight his way to their favor or die on their blades. Like beating a pup until it was ready to prowl the grounds with nothing but hate for any man it saw. She would deserve it, he knew. She wasn't like Ben. She treated people like tools to keep her safe behind her high walls.