“I’m . . . sorry, Your Grace,” the young monk said. “You insisted on being told when he arrived . . .” He scurried away.
His place was taken by a vision out of hell. A huge, brutal figure filled the doorway, blocking the light. The lines of a scar marred his cheek above his scraggly black beard. His heavy fur cloak was of wolf pelts. A necklace of wolves’ teeth circled his throat. He gazed at the Bishop with dark eyes far crueler than any animal’s.
“Cezar,” the Bishop said, and smiled.
C H A P T E R
Ten
The ruined abbey lay peacefully in the moonlight, as it had for centuries. The solitary black wolf limped to the line of a nearby ridge and stood gazing up at it from among the trees. Dried blood matted the thick ebony fur of the wolf’s shoulder and hind leg. The bitter wind swirled around him as he settled down wearily, to begin a vigil whose reason he could not even comprehend. He lifted his head and howled his anguish at the waning moon.
Safe within the abbey’s walls, Phillipe sat on a crumbling terrace step beside the bonfire, watching as Imperius poured a huge tumbler of wine with unsteady hands. The old monk glanced up at the darkness apprehensively as the wolf howled. Phillipe studied him through the dancing flames, suddenly very sure that the monk was not simply afraid of wolves. “It’s him, isn’t it?” he asked softly. Navarre. The monk didn’t answer. “The wolf,” he said again. “Somehow . . . it’s him.” Knowing that, the sound of howling no longer frightened him.
Imperius filled a second tumbler with wine, not even bothering to look at him. “Here. Get drunk. You’ll forget.”
Phillipe shook his head, leaning back against the stone step behind him. “An hour ago you were drunk. And you remembered.”
Imperius looked up at him. Phillipe’s eyes held the monk’s insistently. He had told Imperius his own part in this strange dance of fate, more or less completely. And by bringing the hawk here, he had earned the right to know the greater pattern. He waited, his stare unyielding. Imperius slumped where he stood, defeated. Picking up his own drink, he crossed to the fire, sat down with a sigh of resignation. Phillipe pulled his feet up onto the wall, waiting.
The old monk glanced toward the lighted window in the abbey. “Her name is Isabeau of Anjou,” he said finally. “Her father, the Comte d’Anjou, was an intemperate fellow who died slaughtering infidels at Antioch. She came to a cousin, I think it was, in Aquila.” He was silent again for a moment, looking into the past. A wistful smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. “I’ll never forget the day I saw her. It was like looking at . . . at . . .”
Phillipe shut his eyes, remembering. “The . . . face of love.” He smiled, too.
Imperius looked back at him, and his own smile widened sympathetically. “You too, little thief? Well, I suppose we were all in love with her in different ways. His . . .” the monk’s throat seemed to constrict, “Grace could think of nothing else.”
Phillipe’s eyes widened. “The . . . Bishop . . . loved her?” he said incredulously.
Imperius nodded, his hands clutching the tankard’s handle in a painful grip. His bleary eyes turned suddenly bitter. “As nearly as that evil man could come to the emotion of love. He was wild in his passion. A man possessed.”
Phillipe thought about what he knew of the Bishop—a holy man who had never known the meaning of true holiness, who reveled in luxury and sin while he ground the people he had sworn before God to serve under his heel. He taxed them until they starved, then hanged them for stealing food. He was a man with no soul at all; but even he had recognized the beauty of Isabeau’s spirit, and become obsessed by her . . . knowing that she was all the things he would never be.
“Isabeau shrank from his attentions,” Imperius went on morosely. “She sent back his letters unopened, his poems unread. Her heart had been lost to the Captain of the Guard.”
Realization ran through Phillipe like a shock. “Etienne Navarre,” he murmured. Navarre standing alone with a faded letter in his hands and tears in his eyes . . . Navarre with the wounded hawk. “The madman . . .” Suddenly he did not seem as mad by half.
“To Isabeau—a fine man, a worthy man,” Imperius said sadly. “Their love was stronger than anything which could stand in its way. Until . . .” Imperius broke off again, lifted the tankard and drank as if it were bottomless, or he wished it were.
“Until . . . ?” Phillipe asked impatiently.
“They were betrayed,” Imperius muttered. “A . . . foolish priest heard their confessions, and in that priest’s subsequent drunken confession to his superior, he . . . felt a holy obligation to unburden himself. The Bishop had refused to let them marry. He had commanded Navarre never to see her again. But they continued to meet in secret. The priest . . .” Imperius broke off again, forced himself to go on, “committed a mortal sin, by revealing their mutual vows of love to the Bishop.”
Phillipe stared silently at the betrayer of Isabeau and Navarre. He felt disgust fill him as he watched Imperius take another drink . . . seeing in the old man one more example of the Bishop’s web of corruption. But even as he thought it, he knew that he was wrong. Imperius was a deeply religious man. If the fat old monk drank, it must always have been to forget . . . bound to serve the Bishop of Aquila, when he had vowed to serve justice and truth. But that still didn’t explain why Isabeau, and Navarre—
“He . . . didn’t realize what he’d done at first,” Imperius continued, gazing up at the stars; giving his confession at last to a thief, and to heaven. “He didn’t know the terrible vengeance the Bishop would take. But His Grace seemed to go mad—he lost both sanctity and reason. He swore that if he could not have her, no man would.”
Phillipe’s eyes widened again. He leaned forward.
“Navarre and Isabeau fled from Aquila. But the Bishop followed them . . .” Imperius told him everything, his tongue set free by the wine. Watching the flames, Phillipe saw the tragedy unfold before him as clearly as if he lived it himself: the captain betrayed by his own men on the Bishop’s orders; the lovers’ desperate midnight escape from the city, riding together on the black stallion . . . the Bishop himself leading the guards in pursuit.
The Bishop followed them, truer than an arrow, more persistent than a hound, until at last even the heart of the great stallion reached its limit. Goliath fell beneath them, and the Bishop’s men closed in like jackals. Navarre turned and fought. Captor after captor, guards he had served with, lay dead on the ground.
At last the Bishop, growing afraid for his own life, called off his men and withdrew. But he swore that the lovers would never escape him. Half-mad with fury and frustration, he called upon the powers of darkness. “For the means to damn them, he delivered his own soul to the Evil One . . .” Imperius shook his head, gazing down.
The wolf’s howl echoed out across the valley. Phillipe shivered, not at the sound, but at the power of the evil it had suddenly come to symbolize.
“The black powers of Hell spat up a terrible curse,” Imperius said hoarsely. “She was to be a hawk by day, and he—a wolf by night. Poor, dumb animals with no memory of their half-life of human existence. Never touching, in the flesh. Only the anguish of one split second at sunrise and sunset when they could almost touch—but not. Always together. Eternally apart. For as long as the sun shall rise and set. As long as there is night and day.”
Phillipe sat stunned and silent, gazing into the flames. At last he pushed himself to his feet and moved away, keeping his back to Imperius, looking out into the darkness in the direction of the wolf’s cry. The wolf howled again.
“You have stumbled into a tragic story, little thief,” Imperius said. “Now you are lost in it with the rest of us.”
Phillipe stood motionless where he was, until he heard the monk’s uncertain footsteps retreat into the abbey. He sighed, resting his hands on the solid reality of the low stone wall before him. He understood everything now . . . even Imperius. He didn’t know yet whether he was glad or sorry.
He turned away from the wall, rubbing his arms against the chill that had settled into his bones, and wandered down some steps past a makeshift shed. In the bonfire’s dim light, he saw a wooden cage filled with pigeons sitting inside the lean-to. He bent down, peering into the cage. A large white bird stared back at him, cocked its head as if it recognized him.
Phillipe cocked his own head questioningly. “A princess, perhaps?” he asked.
The bird cooed softly.
Phillipe nodded. “Just as I thought. And the rest of you. A sultan’s harem?” The birds did not answer. He shrugged. “What the hell. One can’t afford to take the chance, these days . . .” He jerked open the cage. The birds fluttered out in a cloud and flew away into the darkness.
The Bishop stood in the unpleasant and unaccustomed dankness of one of the numberless secret cellars hidden within Aquila Castle. Only one thing could have drawn him to this place in the middle of the night . . . He gazed darkly at the pile of freshly skinned wolf pelts lying on the floor at his feet. With the toe of his slipper he unlatched the solid-seeming metal base of his clerical staff. It slid back, revealing the gleaming, razor-sharp steel blade hidden within it.
Using the blade’s point, he began to peel one pelt and then another off the pile. Each one he saw marked another failure. As the pile continued to shrink, he flung the pelts aside more and more feverishly, spattering his white robes with blood.
The wolf hunter stood to one side, his brutal face filling with fear at the furious intensity of the Bishop’s search.
“Useless! All of them!” The Bishop looked up with blazing eyes.
Cezar hunched his shoulders. “My traps are full,” he said gruffly. “I can’t kill every wolf in France.”
The Bishop controlled his rage with an effort, forcing himself to think clearly and dispassionately. There was only one way to be certain that the hunter would find the right wolf. He knew the risk of revealing too much; and yet he had to be sure . . .
At last he said, “There is a woman.”
“Your Grace?” Cezar said, not understanding.
“A beautiful woman. With alabaster skin and the eyes of a dove.” Her memory haunted him, night and day. It haunted him now. “She travels by night—only by night. Her sun is the moon, and her name is . . .” Turning back to the hunter, he spoke it like a prayer, “Isabeau.”
Cezar continued to gape stupidly at him.
“Find her and you find the wolf,” the Bishop snapped. “The wolf I want. The wolf . . .” he looked on the ghost of another face, “who loves her . . .” He turned away abruptly, disappearing up the steps.
C H A P T E R
Eleven
Day became night and night day for Phillipe and Imperius as they watched over Isabeau. They kept constant vigils at her bedside, but she seldom woke, and was rarely able to speak to them. For the next few dawns Phillipe stood on the parapet above the abbey’s gate, searching for a sign of Navarre. Sometimes he called out, telling the silent hills beyond that Isabeau was healing. But he saw no sign of a black stallion or its rider. At first he worried secretly that Navarre might die of his wounds; but each night the wolf was back on the ridge, and he heard its mournful wailing until dawn.
When he was not sitting at Isabeau’s bedside, Phillipe wandered through the maze of ruins, unused to having peaceful time on his hands. The abbey reminded him of the time long years ago when he had been taken in at a monastery and lived with the monks. He had eaten regularly, and they had even taught him his letters, served with heavy doses of scripture; but the rigid discipline and the painful thrashings when he disobeyed had convinced him that he was not cut out for the religious life. With the coming of a new spring, he had run away again. He had never stayed long in one place since, always searching for something that he only seemed to find in dreams.
Phillipe quickly discovered that disillusionment with the religious establishment was the only thing he shared in common with Imperius—besides Isabeau. The old monk treated him rudely at best, and as if he didn’t exist the rest of the time, resenting Phillipe’s intrusion on his solitude and his self-pity. Phillipe ate the monk’s supply of cheese and bread down to crumbs, looked at his books in secret, and ignored the snubs. He had heard far worse often enough, and for far worse reasons.
Phillipe entered Imperius’s cell quietly and sat down by Isabeau’s bedside as another night began. He looked out at the crescent moon hanging like a jewel in the black sky beyond the window slit, as the wolf’s howl carried mournfully across the countryside.
He glanced back at Isabeau as she stirred on the cot, saw her eyes open, searching wildly. She tried to sit up, winced with pain.
“Don’t!” Phillipe said.
She looked at him, startled and confused. But her eyes were clear; her fever was gone. Imperius had told him that since her wound had not been a mortal one, it would heal with unusual speed . . . because of the curse.
“You . . . could start bleeding again,” he finished, his voice growing weak as she looked at him.
She smiled, used to finding him at her bedside by now. “Tell me your name,” she said.
“Phillipe, my lady. Phillipe Gaston. Most people call me . . . Phillipe the Mouse.” He glanced down.
“Odd,” she murmured. “For one with such spirit.” She took his hand gently. “I shall call you . . . Phillipe the Brave.”
Phillipe blushed. A shiver of astonished delight ran through him. He looked up at her again with shining eyes.
“You travel with him, don’t you?” she asked softly.
Phillipe nodded, his mind filling with the heroic exploits of his comradeship with Navarre. He would tell her how . . .
Isabeau turned her sorrow-filled face away toward the wall. Her white, slender arms, which had not felt the sun’s warmth in two years, rested limply on the furs.
Phillipe realized suddenly that what was as commonplace as waking up in the morning for him was impossible for her . . . that she could never ride at Navarre’s side, see his face, hear him speak. And in that moment he knew in his own heart what it must be like to live as she had lived—never seeing the sun, or the colors of the day, never holding or even touching the man she loved so desperately. She had been torn from a gentle, peaceful world and thrown into the life of a hunted fugitive . . . forced to live with a curse that had stolen away half of her humanity and Navarre’s; not knowing if their cursed existence would ever end, or if they would truly live on that way until eternity . . .
Phillipe swallowed the lump in his throat that kept him from speaking. His hands knotted together between his knees as he looked up at her again. Finding his voice, he whispered, “ ‘You must save this hawk,’ he said to me. ‘For she is my life, my last and best reason for living.’ ”
Isabeau stirred, turning her face to him again. Her green eyes searched his own with the fierce passion of a hawk’s.
He met her stare. “And then he said: ‘One day we will know such happiness as two people dream of, but never have.’ ”
“He . . . said that?” she whispered.
Phillipe nodded. She gazed at him for another long moment, and then at last she smiled, her face brightening with hope and resolution. She settled back among the furs and closed her eyes, at peace again. Phillipe rose from her side and went quietly out of the room.
Out in the hallway, he pressed his back against the closed door, and sighed. He had been a quick and skillful liar all his life . . . but this was the first time he had ever been proud of it. He smiled with satisfaction and contentment. “Phillipe the Brave,” he murmured. And knew that his heart and life were Isabeau’s from that moment on, for as long as there was night and day.
Shortly before dawn Jehan led two guardsmen to the crest of another ridge in the endless range of hills. After the latest escape of Navarre and the thief, they had been ordered by the Bishop to continue their search around the clock. Jehan knew that Navarre had been badly wounded—that he could not have traveled far. But they had sear
ched every inch of the surrounding area in vain. Jehan looked down, studying the rocky ground by torchlight for any sign of a trail.
“Look! Over there!” One of his men pointed.
Jehan looked up again. In the distance, silhouetted by moonlight, lay the ruins of an abbey. And below it, the flickering pinpoint of light that marked a fire. Jehan’s mouth thinned into a smile.
Phillipe joined Imperius by the garden bonfire moodily. Isabeau’s sorrow had become his own, as his heart had become hers. The old monk sat at the table with his tankard of wine, drunk as usual, playing with apples and oranges. Phillipe squatted down on the crumbling terrace. Imperius took another long draught of the wine as Phillipe watched him with sullen eyes. “Does she know?” Phillipe asked at last.
Imperius glanced up at him over the tumbler’s edge. “What?” he said testily.
“That you’re the priest who betrayed them?” Once Isabeau had known Imperius well, and trusted him far too well . . .
Imperius hurled the tankard down; it clanged across the cobblestones. “God has declared an end to it!” he shouted. “He has given me the knowledge to undo what I have done!”
Phillipe frowned. “Make yourself clear. If you can.”
Imperius struggled to his feet, glaring darkly at him. “For two years I sat here, staring up into the sky, waiting for some indication that my life and service to God hadn’t all been wasted and destroyed. The sign never came . . .” He looked up into the star-filled night. “But I began to see other things.”
“Once—when I was drunk—I saw myself as King,” Phillipe said sourly.
“Quiet, you wretched illiterate!” Imperius snapped. He turned back to the table and the carefully arranged pieces of fruit. “There are glowing objects in the night sky which seem to be prominent,” he said slowly, searching for words to describe a thing that no one had ever described before. “This star here”—he touched an orange—“and the moon . . .” He reached out, then drew his hand back, biinking like an owl. “Where’s the moon?”