Behold the Dawn (38 page)

He looked back to Father Roderic.

“Tell me where he may be found,” Roderic said. “Once and for all,
where is Matthias of Claidmore
?”

Annan’s every muscle tremored. The breeze, warmed by the rays of the morning, filled the curtains like sails, and the air caressed his face, soft and humid and taunting. Screams and shouts had joined the harried buzz of the besieged city. Saladin was breaking through, just as surely and inexorably as was the past.

The Baptist was going to win after all. And Matthias would be dead no more.

Gethin came a step nearer, just within Annan’s vision. He whispered, his words barely rising above the clamor of besieged Jaffa: “Tell him.”

Annan filled his lungs, feeling afresh the stab of every wound. His head bowed, and the breath slipped back out. He shook his head. “You have found him already.”

Roderic’s brows darted together once more. “What?”

“
I
am Matthias.”

Chapter XXVII

RODERIC STAGGERED BACK, one hand groping for the arm of his chair. His eyes were huge in his face—gray slate against grayer marble.

Mairead stared at Annan. “But he’s dead. You said he was dead.”

Past the burn of strained tendons in his neck, Annan coughed. “He
was
dead. For sixteen years he was dead. And he resurrects now only because… I know no other way.”

To the left, hovering at the edge of his vision, Gethin looked on, eyes hooded like a purring cat.

Annan’s throat knotted. Aye,
he
was Matthias. It was
his
rage that had lit the fire of St. Dunstan’s holocaust. In his desire to remove Father Roderic’s iniquity,
he
had fomented the rebellion that had torn the Abbey apart and laid the peaceful brethren ripped and bleeding among the ashes.
He
had throttled Roderic and left him for dead, and it was only by some whim of Heaven that the bishop had lived.

He had left St. Dunstan’s even as it burned—with smoke like black horses thundering into the heavens and the flames licking higher and higher—and he had known to the dregs of his soul that he was forever blackened in the sight of God. He had despised himself; he had wished the very fires of Hell down upon his own wretched head. And from that day on, Matthias of Claidmore had lived no more.

Gethin stepped forward, his hands digging themselves elbow deep into his sleeves. His eyes glinted with jubilation. “I whet My glittering sword, and Mine hand takes hold on judgment. I will render vengeance to Mine enemies, and will reward them that hate Me.” The clamor of war and the frantic voices of the guards in the street punctuated the strains of his delight. “I will make Mine arrows drunk with blood, and My sword shall devour flesh; and that with the blood of the slain and of the captives, from the beginning of revenges upon the enemy.”

“I don’t—understand.” Roderic fell against the back of his chair, his eyes still on Annan. “This cannot be…”

“Suffice it that I am he.” Annan looked at Gethin. “But if he speaks of vengeance, Father, he speaks it upon my head. We will both of us die unforgiven. You, because even yet you bear the sins of bloodshed and whoredom. I, because I saw not the beam in my own eye and allowed myself to think it my right to punish those sins in kind.”

A shudder passed through Roderic’s limbs. “Yes. You
are
him. Eloquent, as ever.” He rose from his seat. “And you are right. You
will
die. At last I hold the upper hand, and I will not squander it.” He started forward, his gait stilted.

In the streets, people were screaming and running. The infidels were attacking the wall. Someone began pounding on the door.

Roderic hazarded not a glance at the interruption. “Lord Matthias, you will bow your head.”

Mairead hurled herself at the bishop’s sword arm. “Annan, don’t let them do this. Tell them you are not Matthias. Tell them he’s dead!”

“Enough!” Roderic cast her aside as a dog would a rat.

Behind Annan, the door crashed open. “Bishop! They are ordering every able man to the front lines! The king has barely fifty knights facing Saladin’s cavalry. No one knows if the reinforcements from Caesarea will arrive! He begs your attendance.”

Roderic waved as though shooing a fly. “I am occupied. Leave us.”

The soldier hesitated, and Roderic whirled on him. “Leave us!” The door pulled shut, footsteps hurried away, and Roderic turned back. “Matthias of Claidmore. Bow your head.”

“No!” Mairead struggled to rise from the floor.

Annan kept his head aloft. The pulse in either temple held steady. Here, at last, was death. And before he went to face whatever was beyond, he would die as he had not lived. With honor.

Roderic lofted the sword in both hands. He would cleave Annan’s head in half if he could not take it off. His eyes were dark and terrible. The sword fell.

With a motion like the well of the tide at equinox, Gethin shot forward, shrieking wordless nothings. From within his sleeve he had drawn a
dirk
the length of the bone between shoulder and elbow. The blade found a space between Annan and Roderic’s sword and stopped the descent of execution with the crash of metal against metal. “
Veritas vincit!
” Truth conquers. He hammered his free hand into the bishop’s face. Father Roderic staggered back, falling against the footstool. “
Judice regit!
” Justice reigns.

With the deftness of one of the Moslems’ famed Ismailian assassins, he clutched Annan’s shoulder, dragging him forward, and severed the rope that bound his hands. “
Vindicta esse ab noster!
” Vengeance is ours.

For all of a breath, Annan didn’t move. The heart that had been ready to meet death in silence suddenly filled his chest with its pounding. Blood smashed through the veins of his aching hands. Fire surged into the throbbing depths of his brain.

He lurched for Roderic’s fallen sword and rolled to his feet.

A wheezing Roderic scrambled, on hands and knees, to where Mairead still lay in the red-gold light of the window. He fell atop her, and when they rose together, he had pulled a dagger from some hidden pocket, the necessary caution of a man who had spent his life crushed beneath the killing weight of fear.

Annan froze.

“Stay yourself, Brother Matthias.”

Mairead’s veil of hair, smashed between her face and Roderic’s palsied hand, shuddered with her gasping.

“If you kill her, do you think I would let you live?” Annan demanded.

“Her life for mine. It is just.” Roderic’s eyes bulged.

In the background, Gethin scoffed. “What does he know of justice?”

Annan stayed where he was, bloody and aching, before the face of this man he had despised for sixteen long years. Time and again, Gethin had urged him to kill him, and time and again, Annan had sworn that to kill him would be to unleash the mistakes of St. Dunstan’s all over again. He swallowed past the ache of his throat and held out his left hand.

“Give her to me, and I will not slay you.”

He could hear Gethin’s start of surprise. Slowly, Roderic’s grip on Mairead’s throat slipped. Her hair fell away from her face, and he withdrew entirely. Uttering a cry, she staggered to Annan’s outstretched hand and folded herself into his arm, face pressed against the hollow of his shoulder.

But Annan didn’t heed. His gaze didn’t falter from Roderic’s. He watched, waiting until the tentative relief melted from the bishop’s features, as Roderic realized what so many men upon the tourney field had realized when they had seen the same look upon his face.

Annan took a step forward, opening his arm to let Mairead go.

“Annan—”

Roderic staggered back. “But you said you would spare—”

Annan no longer wanted to spare. The man deserved death. How many times had Roderic tried to tear from Annan all that mattered? Would he not have killed Mairead even now had he the chance? He was filth in the sight of both God and man, and he deserved to die. Why shouldn’t Annan finish what he had begun?

All the reasons that had been burrowing inside his skull for the past sixteen years fluttered away, chaff before anger’s fiery wind. He would kill Roderic, pluck Marek from his cell, which would be but lightly guarded in the face of the Moslem attack, and then they would leave this place behind forever.

“Kill him.” Gethin’s words grated at the edge of his perception, shrill against the cacophony of battle noises. “He is evil. Evil must die. He murdered his own bride to gain a bishopric. He debauched his body and his office. He tried to silence me forever when I called for righteousness!”

“Annan, don’t do this—” Mairead’s fingers were cold against his arm, even through his sleeve. “Will breaking your word to him acquit you in the eyes of Heaven?”

He faltered. His sword arm quivered.

Her hand pressed against his jaw, trying to make him look down at her. “If you do this thing now, you will be truly lost! You are not yet too lost for redemption, no matter what you’ve convinced yourself to believe all these years!”

“If you shirk your duty, do you think you will be redeemed?” Gethin demanded.

“No!” Tears clogged Mairead’s voice. “It is only your stubborn pride, your own shame that separates you from the forgiveness of God!”

Annan stopped, and a long breath shuddered in his body. Where would the killing stop? Where would forgiveness begin? If not now, then when? His hand trembled, and he closed his eyes.

“Oh God—” Mairead’s hand dropped from his face to his chest, and he opened his eyes to see her bent head. “You can still begin anew,” she said. “Please don’t throw it away.”

Annan looked up and found Roderic cowering in the light of the window. His shoulders slumped. “Take your life as a gift, Father. May you make better use of it now than you did the last time.”

Then, pulling Mairead close to his side, he turned away.

“No!”

He didn’t look back at Gethin’s screams.

“No! You cannot go! You must kill him for what he did to me!” Gethin caught Annan’s shoulder from behind and spun him around. His grip had the strength of talons as he clutched Annan’s arm. “I will have justice!”

“Nay.” Annan put a hand atop that of this one-time friend. “I am as much to blame for what happened to you as is he.”

Gethin’s fingers sank deeper, his eyes protruding in the distorted wreck of his face. “Kill him, I tell you!”

“His sins were not ours to avenge.”

“Aren’t they?” Gethin leaned away, and in the rabid depths of that intense gaze, Annan recognized the madness Marek had so often jested about. “If you have sunk so low you cannot do what must be done—” He stepped back, and one hand reached into his sleeve. “Then I must.”

He whirled, short sword whipping once more from within his sleeve, and flung himself at Father Roderic.

Roderic had not even time to cry out. Gethin’s dirk pricked above the heart and plunged as deep as the
forte
. Roderic clamped both hands on the wound and fell back against the window. Gethin stayed upright, only tilting the sword so that the bishop’s body might slide off.

Annan’s breath hissed past his lips. In the shadow below the window lay the prior of St. Dunstan’s Abbey. But this time the weight of his blood did not rest upon Annan’s hands.

“It is done,” rasped Gethin. “You are weak.”

Annan said nothing. Since their reunion in Bari, Gethin had not listened to him, and he would not listen now.

Eyelid quivering, Gethin limped a step forward. “He tried to kill me. He had them beat me like a dog and then cast me aside as dead. He had to die for that!”

“Not at my hand.”

“It
should
have been at your hand!” He took another step. “Do you know why he beat me? Why he tried to kill me?”

“Because of me.”

“
Yes!
” The word clawed the air. “Because I befriended you when you came to us, consumed with your guilt. Because I stood beside you when you cried for reform! Because I would not renounce you when you took the law into your own hands! I thought you strong then. But you are not strong! You have refused to finish what you started. And because of that, you will share in his sins!” The short sword flashed in his hands.

Reflex saved Annan. He snapped Roderic’s blade before his face and caught Gethin’s ringing blow.

“God will have His justice!” Gethin shoved hard with both hands.

“It is not
God’s
justice you seek!” Roderic’s sword was made to be wielded with just one hand, but Annan wrapped one fist on top of the other. The scabs in his palms cracked and split. New blood, sticky with clotting, seeped. Something wasn’t right in his left shoulder; the arm was heavy, the joint thick.

“You do not know of what you speak, tourneyer!” Deadlocked against Annan’s strength, Gethin strained, then broke free and struck again. In the Saracen prison camp outside Acre, Annan had admired the sword that had felled an infidel guard. Now, standing against the fervor and skill of the Baptist’s blows, he had cause to admire the arm that had wielded that sword.

Gethin fought like some mad knight
paladin
escaped from Marek’s minstrel songs. A strange, impassioned strength hummed in the lines of his crippled muscles. His fury astounded Annan. The body that had been destroyed at St. Dunstan’s found new life in its anger. Without buckler or mail, and with the odds evened by Annan’s wounds, they fought as equals, neither giving ground, neither finding an opening.

Annan faltered beneath a hammering blow, and the dam that had been their equality was swept aside. He took one halting step back with his wounded hip, and Gethin flooded through the breach.

Back, back, they battled, Gethin’s breath gusting in huge, angry bursts. Annan gritted his teeth. Was this how his opponents felt? Suffocating with their exertion and hardly able to afford the distraction of any breath at all? White-washed daub closed in on either edge of his vision, and he braced for the impact of the collision. As his shoulders crashed into the wall, it yielded. Warm air wheezed against his neck.

His cheek quivered. He was leaning against a set of slender doors. He had seen them—painted red like the window curtains and barely as tall as his shoulder—when he had been dragged into the room. From the feel of them creaking behind his shoulders, they were made of only the lightest of woods.