Hounds of God (44 page)

Alf sat his mare, all silver and fallow gold, and watched
Nikki’s mind in its flounderings. He was not cool, after all. He was not
dispassionate. He was tearing himself by the roots from this earth which he so
loved and so hated.

Nikki gathered the reins, touched leg to his mare’s
side, turned her slowly upon her haunches. Grey earth, grey sky. Grey cold
winter-scented air.

But it was not grey. The sun was palest gold. The earth was
russet, brown, wine-red and wine-gold, umber and charcoal and faintest, shyest
green, spring enkerneled in winter’s bitter shell.

The mare scented it. She flared her great Arab nostrils and
snorted, pawing the road; it rang with each impatient stroke. In the depths of
Nikki’s cloak, the cat began to purr.

They would not dislike one another, she and Arlecchina.

No. No, he could not go back. Not how. Creeping, blushing,
begging forgiveness for what could never be forgiven.

“Why not?”

Nikki opened his mouth, closed it.

“Yes,” Alf said, “it’s time you
taught yourself to talk. To be a man in all senses.”

Never. Never, while he had no ears, while he had power.

“You have Stefania.”

No
.

Alf was silent.

Stefania. Sunlight. Laughter and pain, quarreling, loving,
growing and breeding and birthing and dying. Beauty flawed; squalor flawed,
because there was beauty in it. He of all men, he had eyes to see. That fear,
like the rest, had been purest folly. He would always have them.

If he stayed to use them.

Stefania.

It burst out of him. Laughter, tears. Alf was laughing,
weeping. They did not touch, hand or body. Their minds met, embraced, clung.
Tore free, bleeding a little, pain as sweet as it was bitter.

Lovers’ logic. Brothers’. Nikki’s will
gathered, though it trembled, though it yearned to turn coward and run.
Now
, it bade Alf.
Now
!

They were gone, cat and mare and boy who would learn now to
be a man. Alf’s power returned to itself, with yet a vision of a rider
upon a hill and all Rome below; and a woman in it, and a sister, and a world
that he would make his own.

But it was Alf’s no longer. He let the wind scour the
tears away. He would not weep again upon this earth.

The company had ridden out of sight if never out of mind.
Alf turned his mount back toward the road they had taken, and gave her her
head.

oOo

Broceliande grew slowly before them. A shadow at first over
the stony hills, no more substantial than a tower of cloud. Little by little
the shadow swelled. On the third morning even human eyes could see that the
darkness was the massing of trees, a mighty wall of bole and branch that had
stood since the shaping of the world.

Jehan knew what lay within. Trees and winding tracks, glades
that were glorious in spring and summer and autumn, a veining of streams that
gathered into a small swift river; open meadows rich for tilling; and a lake
like a jewel, and on its shore a mound and on the mound a castle, the House of
the Falcon. And beyond that, deep wood and grey moor and the pounding of the
sea. It was a wider realm than one might think, more varied and more beautiful.

Yet riding toward it under a grey sky, in a bleak raw wind,
he saw only the looming shadow. Once the last exile had passed within, the
barriers would close. Mortal men would shrink from them in sourceless horror,
or if for daring or folly they ventured in, would wander the maze until it cast
them out again, starved and very likely mad.

“It’s necessary,” he told himself. “It
has to be.”

Already the first of them had ridden under the trees. Tao-
Lin in gold and vermilion, sparing no grief for the lover who had abandoned
her, no glance for the world she was forsaking, her back straight and stiff as
she spurred onward. The shadows retreated from her; a shimmer lay upon her, a
moonlight sheen. Gwydion, Maura, Aidan, Morgiana, followed side by side, and
the sheen grew to a spectral splendor, embracing the wolves that trotted in the
Queen’s wake, and the lady who rode her dun stallion behind.

Cynan, perched on her saddlebow, gazed steadily back. She
fixed her eyes firmly ahead. She had never been one for backward glances, had
Thea Damaskena.

Jehan’s horse halted of its own accord, snorting,
tensed to shy. Alf’s tall grey continued unruffled. Jehan would not,
could not move or speak.

Yes, let them go this way, calmly, without a word. No tears,
no foolishness. Simply a man on a chestnut destrier, watching, and an enchanter
on a grey mare with a moon-pale child peering out of his cloak, riding away
into the luminous dark.

On the edge of it, as it began to reach for him, Alf paused.
His mare half turned; he looked back. His hand raised, sketched a cross in the
air. His smile was sudden and shining and laden with all there had never been
time to say, and all there had.

Jehan cried out, he hardly cared what, kicking his mount
into a startled, veering gallop. The mists thickened. The stallion bucked,
plunged, fought. Jehan cursed and wept and hauled the great beast back upon its
haunches under the very eaves of Broceliande.

Almost he could have touched the one he loved most in any
world. Almost Alf could have touched him. Their eyes met. Jehan’s
blurred.

The white figure shimmered and faded. When at last he could
see, they were gone, all of them, and all their light with them.

“The magic has gone out of the world,” he said.
He threw back his head to rage at Heaven, dropped it to rage at earth and its
fools of priests, and found his fist clenched upon something. With all his will
he forced it open. And laughed in wonder through the flooding tears. In his
palm lay a brooch of marvelous work, ivory and carnelian, malachite and silver:
a white hound, red-eared, with wickedly merry eyes, and dancing with her among
woven leaves a proud-winged falcon. Its eye glinted upon him, now silver-gilt,
now ember-red.
All the magic, Jehan de
Sevigny?

He laughed again, with a little less pain. “Not if you
can help it.”

He saluted the silent wood, a sweeping, exuberant,
triumphant salute made all the stronger for its leavening of grief, and wheeled
his stallion about. Now that he thought of it, he had a bishopric to take in
hand. He rode toward it; and as he rode, though still he wept, he began to
sing.

The Hounds of God

Volume III: The Hound and the Falcon

Judith Tarr

Book View Café Edition July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-182-5
Copyright © 1986 Judith Tarr

First published: February 1986

Cover design by Dave Smeds

Volume I: The Isle of Glass
Volume II: The Golden Horn
Volume III: The Hounds of God

v20120610vnm
v20120627vnm

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Judith Tarr
holds a PhD in Medieval Studies from Yale. She is the author of over three dozen novels and many works of short fiction. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, and has won the Crawford Award for
The Isle of Glass
and its sequels. She lives near Tucson, Arizona, where she raises and trains Lipizzan horses.

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Alamut

Judith Tarr

The sun was gentle in the first hour of its rising. It lay
lightly upon the hills of Jerusalem; it washed with gold the walls of Aqua
Bella castle, and the village huddled beneath them, and the green that was the
great wealth of the demesne: the oaks that were holy, the olives that were more
than holy, and the glorious tangle that traced the track of the stream. Women
were washing in it, singing sweet and high, with here and there a ripple of
laughter.

He came by the road that led to the sea, riding all alone,
all his armor and his weapons borne on a dove-grey mule. His destrier was a
fine blood bay, and he a fine high-spirited creature himself, his grey cloak
flung back from a flame of scarlet, and gold about his brows, and a ruby in the
pommel of his sword. He sang as he rode, setting the charger’s pace.

Chevalier, mult estes guariz,
Quant Dieu a vus fait sa clamur
Des Turs e des Amoraviz,
Ki li unt fait tels deshenors….

The women’s singing faltered and died. Safe in their veils
of greenery, they stared out at the wonder: a knight in gold and splendor,
unguarded, unattended. He was a mad one, surely, or one of God’s protected.

His voice was both deep and clear, free and glad and
fearless, calling the air to arms for a battle thirty years won.

Ki ore irat od Loovis
Ja mar d’enfern avrat pouur,
Char s’alme en iert en pareïs
Od les angles nostre Segnor.

No fear of hell had ever troubled him, nor any fear of
mortal steel. His stallion danced, shying from the flutter of a veil; he
laughed and bowed to the eyes staring wide or shy or brightly fascinated from
the thicket, and never lost the rhythm of his song.