Part 130 (2/2)
”Any man who could turn half of North Africa into a desert,” Ash said steadily, ”shouldn't have died at the hands of the Bishop of Rome. Not unless there's something we don't know about Pope Leo! No-” she corrected herself abruptly. ”Not Leo. Is it?” And she turned back to the stonework. ”Who is this Heito?”
There was a silence broken by nothing but the odd drip of condensation.
Florian's voice sounded harsh and sudden. ”I expected to pray tonight. I prayed when I was a girl. I was . . . devout. And if there were going to be answers, I expected them to be about Burgundy, about what happened to me out there, on the hunt.”
Floria sighed.
”When I left Carthage, I thought we'd left the desert demons behind. But here they are.” She pointed to a detail in the back of the shrine: the heretic Gundobad, preaching from a rock in a verdant southern landscape, and in the background, the tiny distant shapes of pyramids.
”Florian ...”
”I thought we'd come where they couldn't reach you.” Florian's eyes were dark holes, in the candles' shadows. ”I saw you walk away, remember? I saw them make you do it!”
”They couldn't do it when I spoke to them two days ago. This isn't about me,” Ash said. ”I didn't hunt the hart. You did. Now I want to know, why Burgundy? And the answer's Gundobad. Isn't it?”
Bishop John, as she turned on him, continued to look not at Ash but at Florian. At Florian's small nod, he spoke.
”This is the square of St Peter,” he said, touching key points on the painted stonework. ”Here, at the cathedral door, is where great Charlemagne was crowned. He had been dead a year when his sons, and Pope Leo, put on trial the Carthaginian prophet Gundobad, for the Arian heresy. Here is Gundobad, in the Papal cells, with his wife Galsuinda, and his daughter Ingundis.”
”He married?” Ash blurted. ”s.h.i.+t. I never thought about that. What happened to them?”
”Galsuinda and Ingundis? They were made slaves; they were s.h.i.+pped back to Carthage before the trial - I believe Leo used them to carry a message to the then King-Caliph.” Bishop John steepled his fingers. ”Although I believe the King-Caliph of that time was not sorry to be relieved of such a prophet, darkness and desert having come to his lands all in one year.”
”But it wasn't! It wasn't one year!” Ash hears in her head the voice of the machina rei militaris, when she was prisoner in Carthage: impa.s.sive, impersonal; retelling an undeniable history. ”The darkness didn't come until the 'Rabbi's Curse', four centuries later. That's when the Wild Machines drew down the sun, to feed them the strength to speak through the Stone Golem. Gundobad was long before that!”
”Is it so?” Bishop John nodded. ”We tell it differently. Stories of ages past become confused. The memory of man is short.”
The memory of the Wild Machines is longer. And a d.a.m.n sight more accurate.
”Nevertheless,” he added, ”it was in that year that the lands about Carthage ceased to be a garden, and became a desert, and Gundobad fled north to preach his heresy in the Italian states.”
”How much of this is true?” Florian demanded. ”How much is old records and guesswork?”
”We know that Leo died the year that Gundobad cursed him. We know that no Pope thereafter lived more than three days in Peter's Chair. And the great empire of Charlemagne was overthrown among his quarrelling sons that year, or not long after.27 Christendom became nothing but quarrelling Dukes and Counts; no Emperor.”
”And this Heito?”
”My 'ancestor'?” Florian said dryly, on the heels of Ash's question. ”Clearly, if he was alive in Pope Leo's day, he's probably the ancestor of half of Burgundy by now!”
”Yes.”
John of Valois looked as if that simple acknowledgement was some significant piece of knowledge.
”And that's why everybody rides with the hunt,” Ash filled in, with a sense of cold inevitability: fact fitting into fact. ”Everybody you can get with Burgundian blood . . . Florian, it's another bloodline. Only it isn't Gundobad's child. It's this Heito's descendants. Heito's children.” She turned on the bishop. ”Aren't I right?”
”Who for the last four generations have been the legitimate sons of the Valois,” the bishop confirmed, ”but we have always known, breeding horses and cattle as we do, how characteristics skip a generation, or turn up in a cadet line. When we were the Kingdom of Aries, it was no great matter for a peasant to become king, if he hunted the Hart. We have become complacent, since my great-grandfather's time. G.o.d reminds us to be humble, your Grace.”
”Not that f.u.c.king humble!” Ash snorted, at the same time as Floria delGuiz objected loudly: ”My parents were n.o.ble, both of them!”
”My apologies, your Grace.”
”Oh, screw your apologies!” Florian's voice dropped half an octave; took on the volume that presaged, in camp, a rapid readjustment of the surgeon's tent. ”I have no idea what's going on. Suppose you tell me!”
”Heito.” John laid his hand against the carved figure's mailed foot, looking up at him. ”He was a minor knight in Charlemagne's retinue; one of Charlemagne's sons took him into service after Charles's death. He was appointed guard over Gundobad, after the trial. He was there when Gundobad cursed the Holy Father. And he was there when Gundobad sought to extinguish, by a miracle, the flames of his pyre.”
The bishop flicked a glance at Ash.
”He'd heard the news from North Africa,” he added, more conversationally. ”It wasn't hard for him to realise that Gundobad wanted far more than a mere miraculous escape - that he was desirous of giving us a desert where Christendom now stands. And Gundobad would have, if not for Heito the Blessed.”
”Who did what?” Florian persisted.
”He prayed.”
Ash, staring up at the bas-relief carving, wondered if Heito's face had had that expression of stilted piety - whether, in fact, she reflected, he wasn't filling his braies and praying out of sheer terror. But it worked: something worked . . . because Gundobad died.
”Heito prayed,” the bishop said. ”All men have in them some small part of the grace of G.o.d. We who are priests are born with a very little more - a very, very little; sufficient only, if G.o.d grants it to us, to perform very minor miracles.”
A sudden memory of G.o.dfrey's face made Ash wince. She could not bring herself to speak to the machina rei militaris, to ask - as she suddenly wanted to -what do you think of G.o.d's grace now?
”Heito had the grace of G.o.d in abundance, although as a humble knight he had no reason to know this until he met his test.”
They stood in silence, surveying the bas-relief shrine.
”Heito told his sons that, when the fire was lit at Gundobad's pyre, he heard the heretic praying for escape, and for vengeance on all whom he called 'Peter's heretics', throughout Europe. The story comes down that, when Gundobad prayed, the flames did die. Heito was moved to prayer. He begged G.o.d's grace to avert the devastation of Christendom, and to help in kindling the fire again. Heito's story to his sons is that he felt G.o.d's grace work within him.”
Florian's hands strayed to her mouth. It was difficult to see, in the candlelight, but her skin seemed pale.
”Heito re-lit the pyre. Gundobad died. Christendom was not laid waste . . . Heito witnessed the death of the Holy Father, not long after; and the death of his appointed successor. He prayed that that Curse of the Empty Chair would be lifted - but, as his son Carlobad tells us, in his Histoire, Heito felt a lack of strength within himself. He had not the grace to do it. Nor his son after him, though Heito married his son to the most devout of women.”
”And then?” Ash prompted sardonically. She reached out, tucking Florian's arm within her own, feeling how the surgeon was swaying very slightly. ”No, I can guess. They married holy women, didn't they? All of Heito's sons . . .”
”His grandson, Airmanareiks, was the first who hunted the Hart. You must understand, at that time Burgundy was as full of miracles, and appearances of the Heraldic Beasts, as any other land in Christendom. It was not until later that ... as they say: G.o.d lays His heaviest burden on His most faithful servant. We had gained grace enough to have our prayers answered. Without some burden, we might have forgot our debt to Him.”
”'Burden' be d.a.m.ned,” Ash said cynically. ”You can't pick and choose. If you stop miracles, you stop miracles. End of story. No wonder Father Paston and Father Faversham have been desperate since we crossed the border! And didn't you have trouble with the wounded the first time we came here, after Basle?”
Florian nodded absently. ”I thought it was fever, from low-lying water meadows ...”
”We had hoped to grow strong enough, one day, to remove the curse and see another Holy Father ascend to Peter's Chair. That has not been granted to us. We have, though, done what Heito set out to do. Neither Burgundy nor Christendom have been corrupted into a wasteland,” Bishop John said. ”We have been ruled by the Franks, and the Germans, and by our own Dukes; but always we took the holiest of women as brides, and always the Lord of Burgundy was the one who hunted the Hart. Christendom has been safe. We have paid our price for it.”
Ash, ignoring the last of what he said, caught Florian's hand in hers and swung the woman around to face her.
”That's it. That's it!” She took in a breath. ”Heito knew what Gundobad had done to Carthage. He knew Gundobad had living children. That's what he was afraid of. Burgundy being made into a wasteland!”
”And he bred for a bloodline that doesn't do miracles - that keeps miracles from being done.” Florian's hands shut tight around Ash's gloved fingers, almost cutting off the circulation. ”They didn't know about the Wild Machines. They were just afraid of another Gundobad.”
”Well, she's out there, right enough!” Ash jerked her head in a random direction, understood to mean beyond these city walls. ”Our Faris. Another Gundobad. Any time the Wild Machines want to make her act...”
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