The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2 Page 20

“Why, a story, of course,” she said.

  He and Brother Jacques laughed, and some of the tension left the room.

  “I can supply a story,” said Neville. “Never fear about that.”

  “She is lying,” said Jacques. He bowed to an image of the Virgin on the wall, and then crossed himself.

  Neville had flopped on the single straw mattress in the room. He knew Jacques would sleep on the hard wooden floor, so hadn’t offered the bed to the priest. He yanked his tall boots off and massaged his feet, scowling.

  “I don’t like to think that,” he said. “This is such a friendly place.”

  “Friendly? Of course - when you’re this isolated, you have two possible reactions to visitors. Friendliness is one of them. Makes no difference whether they’re really welcome or not.”

  “So what is she lying about? Her people being lettered?”

  “Oh no; they can count, but they can’t read. No, it’s this.” Jacques patted the cloth package that lay in the center of the room’s one table. “It’s not a game.”

  Neville glanced at it uneasily. “Devil’s work?”

  Jacques laughed. “Not at all. But more powerful than letters, I think.” He unwrapped the pages and sat on the floor next to the bed. “Do you know the writings of Tullius, Sir Neville?”

  “Only the First Rhetoric. My father deemed it unwise for me to learn too much.”

  “It’s a wonder you can read at all,” said Jacques wryly. Neville watched as he unbound the pages and started laying them out in a rough square. “If you’d read Ad Herennium, my dear Neville, you would know that this is a memory system. Look at the pictures: Judas hanging, the Moon, a wheel. They are simple images, but surrounded with strange details. The men who took this from Rodrigo assumed it was sorcery, and they beat the poor man almost to death because of it. In fact, it’s just an application of Tullius’s art of memory.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This is how the lady’s men are able to trade so well,” said Jacques. “They are committing everything they see and hear in the marketplace to memory. This memory.” He tapped the pages. “They know what is short and what in surfeit. They know the price of everything, even the names of all the guildsmen in all the towns they pass through. And the guildsmens’ dogs. If they were properly trained in the Art, they would not even need this prop,” he flicked the pages negligently, “but could memorize a hundred names if they heard them recited once - and they could recite them back to you perfectly a year later.”

  “I once heard of a man who could do that.” Neville rolled on his side and reached to pick up a page. On it were a man and a woman, chained together and holding hands. A crown floated above their heads. “So there is no sorcery here,” he said with relief.

  Jacques shook his head. “There is something. Else, why did she lie to us?”

  Genevieve Romanal was charming at dinner. She wore a fine green dress, and her hair was held in a lace bonnet. The dress revealed her bosom nicely, a fact that emptied Neville’s mind of serious thought whenever he took note of it. Especially because she smiled at him so much.

  She had invited the priest, Warrel, and her almister to dine with them. Calculated though the move was, it was also so obvious as to be disarming. Jacques had intended to interview the almister anyway, and now fell to discussing charities with the man over a haunch of venison, while Warrel looked on anxiously. It was evident that Genevieve gave a very large part of her wealth to the poor. Trading for profit was illegal, and Neville was happy to learn she avoided such sin.

  “And who is your guardian?” Neville asked as he helped himself to a third slice of venison.

  “My guardian?” She blinked at him.

  “Who is the master of this estate?” He’d thought it a perfectly obvious question.

  “Ah. Yes.” She fluttered her fingers over the slab of bread that held her meal. Tearing a corner from the bread, she used it to gather up a mouthful of vegetables and gravy. “In the absence of a male heir to the house, and until I am married, the land naturally belongs to the Duke.”

  “But who is in charge of day to day affairs?”

  “I am. That is,” she added quickly, “the house is headless, and I execute the commands of the Duke.”

  “Which must be infrequent and vague,” suggested Neville. “He lives a hundred leagues away. So you have no man in charge here?”

  “No.” She looked him in the eye. “The house is prospering, as you can see.”

  Neville nodded. He wasn’t altogether comfortable with the idea of a woman running an estate this size, but it had been common enough during the crusades and the Death.

  “I’m surprised the Duke hasn’t married you to some fine noble lad,” he continued.

  She actually blushed. “He hasn’t seen me since I was five. Perhaps he’s forgotten me.”

  “Well, a woman shouldn’t be unmarried,” he said.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  Neville turned back to his venison. “I was,” he said shortly.

  “Ah. I’m sorry.” She glanced at the clerics, who were debating some point. It seemed it was the almister’s turn to sit back and watch. “Tell me what happened,” she said.

  “I’d rather not.”

  Genevieve smiled. “Ah, but Sir Neville, you forget, you promised me a story earlier. And after all, you are the ones asking for the hospitality of the household. Tell me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because life is short, we may never meet again, and there is simply nothing worth discussing except the fundamental things: pain, love, meetings, and partings.”

  He laughed shortly. “I didn’t expect you to be so serious.”

  “Am I being serious? Maybe I just want to get the serious out of the way as quickly as possible so that we can be properly frivolous together.”

  Neville shook his head. She had all the usual strangeness of someone raised in isolation in the country. “I’ll tell you if you tell me something.”

  “No. Now tell me! I demand it.”

  He sighed. “There’s nothing much to say. We were married quite young, at fourteen years’ age. Cecile died at twenty.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Plague. Her mother died of it and she insisted on staying with her. I… could not bring myself to visit them. When she became ill, I… stood below her window and listened to her dying. I couldn’t go in.”

  “You were wise,” said Genevieve sympathetically. “But it must have been very hard.”

  “It wasn’t wisdom, it was common cowardice!” He raised his voice and the others fell silent. Neville glared at Jacques. “Custom would have us abandon those stricken with plague. But it’s just an excuse for cowardice.”

  Jacques shook his head gently. “You are alive to protect us now, Sir Neville. I’m sure your wife would have wanted that. I’m also sure it’s what God wanted.”

  It was too late; he remembered standing under her window, listening to her cry in her delirium, and learning the lessons of his own weakness. He pushed back from the table, his appetite quite gone.

  Genevieve laid her hand on his. “I am sorry if I upset you. But surely pain isn’t all you remember of your marriage?”

  He shrugged uncomfortably.

  “Then you haven’t properly mourned,” she said. “Do me one more favour, and I’ll release you from your promise.” He glanced up at her expectantly. “I am not being cruel,” Genevieve said, “but describe her to me. How tall was she? What color was her hair? Her eyes?”

  Despite himself, Neville told her, though he seldom spoke about Cecile to anyone but her own family. Jacques and the others listened intently; now that he was committed to speaking he didn’t begrudge their attention. Everyone’s life was everyone else’s business, after all. He simply treated his pain as inaccessible to relief, so never spoke of it.

  The rest of the evening was a blur. He and Jacques were very tired from the road, and it was a relief to retire to their small
room.

  As he lay in the darkness, watching the vapor of his breath appear and vanish in a shaft of moonlight, Neville found himself feeling homesick for the first time in years. He knew the lady had meant to be hospitable, but, “She is so strange,” he said aloud.

  Jacques grunted from the floor. “You only think that because you’re smitten with her.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes. Foolish of you; she may be dangerous. Now go to sleep.”

  Neville rolled over to peer at the black lump that was the inquisitor. “Brother Jacques, you are dangerous.”

  “Only to blasphemers, apostates, idolators, infidels, and heretics. Who would seem to be in the majority. Just now though, I would add to that list,” he yawned loudly, “those who insist on talking to people who are trying to sleep.”

  “Bah.” Neville lay back. He was still awake long after Jacques had begun to snore.

  In the morning Jacques went with the almister to examine the estate’s accounts, leaving Neville alone with the lady. She took him on a tour of the estate. He and Jacques had been quartered in the main house, a large, white stuccoed building with two wings, two storeys, and a number of outbuildings. Its walled enclosure nestled at one end of a narrow, tall valley. Beyond the hills rose the Alps. At the center of the valley was a small lake, surrounded by her peasants’ fields. There was a smithy nearby, and her masons and ostlers had been born and raised here.

  “There was a period,” she said, “when we had no visitors for decades at a time. They say that this villa was built by a Roman senator, and after Rome fell he and his family hid themselves here, having no commerce with the outside world for over a century.”

  “I can believe it,” said Neville. He could see from the window where they stood how the roads made a circle in the valley; none led out. He and Jacques had walked narrow deer paths for much of their journey here. Had they not been told where to find the place, they would never have come this way.

  “Eventually bandits started nesting in the hills.” She pointed. “So we had to call on outside protection. Otherwise, we might be hidden still.”

  He turned away from the window. “You would prefer that?”

  Genevieve shrugged. “We have everything we need. Come with me.” She led him through a number of rooms. Her people looked up from their work at looms and benches as they passed, and they smiled at Neville.

  They entered a room that held no less than a dozen books, none of them Bibles. He murmured his appreciation.

  Genevieve laughed. “I thought you were an untutored knight. What do books matter to you?”

  He shrugged awkwardly. “The Bible is a book. I respect them, and I do try to read when I have the chance.”

  “Would you like to read these?”

  “I would be honored.” He opened one thick volume and peered at the spidery Latin text. “I know this.” He smiled, remembering his conversation with Jacques yesterday. “This is Tullius.”

  “Cicero, you mean.”

  “Who?”

  “Cicero. That is his Roman name.” She motioned for him to join her at a table by the room’s one window. “Here. I wanted to give you this.”

  What she held was a single velum page, the same size as the ones that made up Jacques’s captive memory. On this, some sure hand had painted the figure of a very young woman. She had the hair, the eyes, and the dress Neville had described to Genevieve last night. Her gaze was compassionate. Over her head hung a glowing crown, above that a dove. Her left hand proffered an olive branch.

  Aside from pictures of the Virgin, Neville had seen no portrait of a woman in several years. He took this one gingerly from Genevieve, his eyes brimming with tears as he looked at it.

  “It is she,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “From your story,” she said, “it seemed evident that you needed your wife’s forgiveness.”

  Genevieve had included a loom, a dog, a book, and a cluster of grapes in the picture - all details about her life that the lady had pried out of him, with some difficulty, last night. The image seemed to burn in his hands now; he had not pictured Cecile at her loom in years.

  He wiped his eyes. “I will treasure it.”

  “Just don’t show it to Brother Jacques,” she advised. “Lest he confiscate that, too.”

  “This is like the pages we saw last night,” he said. “Did you paint those too?”

  She nodded.

  “We know the pages are a memory system,” Neville said gently. “It’s not an unheard of thing; Jacques understood it at once.”

  “Oh.” Genevieve frowned at the wall for a moment. “So much knowledge has been lost. Sometimes we forget how much has been kept. I didn’t know the Church had preserved the Art of memory.”

  “The Church knows everything,” he said sincerely.

  “Of course.” But her smile, as she said this, seemed a bit sad.

  Brother Jacques was waiting when Neville returned from his daily ride. The inquisitor was full of febrile energy; he kept glancing around himself, and his fingers repeatedly touched the cross hung around his neck. “There you are!”

  “I was looking for you earlier,” said Neville. He dismounted and patted his stallion’s neck. “Where were you?”

  “Seeing with my own eyes that something we had been told was true.”

  “What do you mean?” Neville pulled the horse’s reins and headed for the stables.

  “Hush.” Jacques looked around. There was no one nearby. “It was something we learned from this Rodrigo. Tales of a secret grotto, here on the estate. It seemed too fantastical to be true, and yet it is! I have just been there. Neville, it is a place of the devil. We must leave here at once.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “There is a pagan temple in the hillside. It is being cared for by someone. This lady, no doubt. What else has she been doing with her money? We must leave now. This is too much for us to deal with. The proper authorities must be called.”

  “Wait.” Neville put a hand on his arm. “I’m sure the lady has nothing to do with it. We can learn more if we remain good guests of the house than if we bring in troops.”

  Jacques peered at Neville oddly. “I see. Do you really think so?”

  “I think these people’s troubles have more to do with a conflict with the Duke, than with the Church. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if there were some old pagan ruin in the hill - Lady Romanal tells me this was once a Roman senator’s villa. And aren’t some of the most sacred shrines in Rome built atop pagan temples?”

  “Sir Neville, this temple is in use.” He hesitated, then said, “there is more.”

  Neville led his horse to the stable and began to groom him. They’d had quite a run this morning, and Neville himself was feeling hot and irritable. The act of washing the horse would make him feel better, as if he had bathed himself.

  Jacques hovered outside the stall. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you everything about this case before,” he said. “But the theology is not your concern. You are our protector, true…”

  “Who needs to know when to protect.” Neville sighed. “What else haven’t you told me?”

  “One of the witnesses against Rodrigo was a man who claimed to have participated in a Satanic rite led by Rodrigo. We think Lady Romanal’s merchants are spreading such filth under the guise of merchanting, and by means of her almister.”

  Neville laughed shortly. His horse blew and nickered at him as if in agreement. “An evil almister? I find it hard to believe a man can be doing evil by giving money to the poor.”

  Jacques watched the horse suspiciously. “They’re not just giving alms, Neville. They’ve been educating people. Romanal has endowed schools, and her men have visited those schools. We believe they are conducting their rites there. Education is dangerous to begin with. It is an open window for the devil to enter your soul.”

  “Maybe.”

  “So we must leave.”

  Neville shook his head. “Your
caution is admirable, Jacques. But you employ me to be incautious. I won’t leave until I’ve heard about this from the lady’s own lips.”

  “But Neville,” whispered Jacques, “we are alone here. Isolated.”

  Neville laughed out loud as he scrubbed the horse’s flank. “Don’t be a coward, Brother Jacques.”

  “Fear of the devil is not cowardice,” said Jacques, and with that he walked away.

  Watering and feeding the horse calmed Neville somewhat. Still, his mind was a jumble of conflicting impulses as he went to find the lady. On the one hand, he did not doubt that Jacques had found what he claimed. On the other, he could not reconcile such a thing with his impressions of Lady Romanal.

  He found Genevieve working her loom with some of her maids. He bowed, and she gestured for him to sit next to her.

  “Brother Jacques is making serious accusations against you,” he said. “Your situation is going from had to worse.”

  She sighed heavily, and dismissed her maids. A couple of them glared at Neville as they left.

  “Tell me,” she said simply.

  “He says there is a pagan temple on the hill. That it is in use.”

  Genevieve swore in an unladylike manner. “You were right. I should have admitted to what the Theatre was in the first place.”

  “Then it’s true?”

  “No, not at all! But… it’s impossible to explain. Ah, what a disaster.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I can prove to you that we are not worshipers of the devil. Tonight,” she said. “But do not bring Brother Jacques. Each man requires a proof that fits his own soul. Jacques would not understand what we will show you.”

  “I’m not sure I should trust you.”

  “No harm will come to you. Jacques can judge in the morning whether you are possessed,” she said, smiling slyly. “And tomorrow night we can prove our case to him.”

  “Why not both together? Why not right here and now?” he demanded. “Do you take me for a fool, to walk into some trap?”

  “Neville,” she said seriously, “if we wished to compel you, we could do that - right here and now. It’s hard to explain, but you’ll see. Put it this way: Brother Jacques did not find a temple in the hill, he found a theatre. And tonight we will perform for you.”