"Kurtz, Katherine - Heirs of Saint Camber 01 - The Harrowing of Gwynedd" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kurtz Katherine)

Niallan snorted. "Poor Queron, walking into the lion's den. Do you think he knows?"
Ansel chuckled mirthlessly. "Well, if he doesn't, I suspect he'll find out, soon enough."

Indeed, Queron Kinevan certainly knew that soldiers were looking for Deryni by then, even if he did not know the particular reason. He had been dodging mounted patrols for days. The night before Joram made his report to his Dhassa confederates, Queron had taken refuge from soldiers and a gathering snowstorm by hiding in a rickety barn, burrowed deep inside a haystack. He was still there, curled in a tight, miserable ball, as dawn lightened a slate-colored winter sky.
He knew he was dreaming, but he could not wake himself to stop it. In the fortnight since the nightmare's first occurrence, he had never yet succeeded in doing so. Fueled by his own memories, the dream seemed to have lost none of its potency. And whether he tried to sleep by day or by night, some part of it always found him, always in heart-gripping detail.
It was dusk in the dreamЧa haunting dusk, two weeks before, as the fires finally died down in the yard at Dolban. From where Queron crouched to watch in disbelieving horror, just at the crest of a hill overlooking the abbey, he could almost imagine that none of it had happenedЧfor the soldiers had spared the buildings.
But not its brethren. And therein lay the basis for the quarrel that, for a time, had set Queron at odds with the younger man hunkered at his side. The first flames already had been licking skyward on that cold December afternoon when he and Revan scrambled to the top of the rise above the abbey, in the wake of an excited band of Willimite brethren from the campsite the two had just left. Partway down the slope on the other side, some of the Willimites had started singing a militant, off-key hymn whose major theme was hatred of magic, exhorting God's faithful to be His scourge to rid the land of the undoubtedly evil magic of the Deryni. And in the yard beyondЧ
"Jesu Christe, what are they doing!" Queron had gasped, stumbling to his knees in the snowЧthough at least he had had the presence of mind to keep his voice down.
For the soldiers in the yard below seemed to have taken the Willimites' hymn very much to heart. Dozens of stakes had been erected in Dolban's yard, most of them unwillingly embraced by men and women in blood-soaked grey habitsЧfor the soldiers had bound their wrists above their heads and were scourging them with weighted whips that rent mere cloth and laid open the victims' backs with each new stroke. Queron quailed at the spectacle, hardly able to believe his eyes, for he had been abbot to these innocent folkЧthe Order he himself had founded, to honor the blessed Saint Camber. Only by chance had he not been among them on this Childermas of 917, three days past ChristmasЧfittingly called the Feast of the Holy Innocents, he had realized, days later.
Knives and pincers figured in the treatment of some of the prisoners, and a great deal of blood, but Queron mercifully was too far away to see exactly what was being done. However, there was no mistaking the bundles of faggots the soldiers had begun piling around the base of many of the stakes. A few already sprouted flames among the kindling, and rising shrieks of agony began to float up on the cold winter air.
"My God, this can't be happening," Queron sobbed. "Revan, we must stop it!"
But young Revan, not Deryni or highly trained or even of noble birth, had shaken his head and set his heart, knowing with that certainty of common sense so often lost or buried in those of more formal erudition that any intervention by just the two of them was futile.
"There's nothing we can do, sir," Revan had whispered. "If we go down there, we'd only be throwing our lives away. You may be ready to die, but I have a responsibility to Lord Rhys and Lady Evaine. I'm willing to die for them, but I don't think they mean it to be at Dolban."
Queron had refused to let the words make sense, something akin to madness seizing him as the outrage unfolded below.
"I can do something!" he had whispered. "I'll blast them with magic! I shall make them taste the wrath of Saint Camber, through his Servant. Magic can be wovenЧ"
"And if you do weave magic against them, what then?" Revan said, grasping Queron's sleeve and jerking his face closer. "Can't you see that you'd be doing exactly the thing that the regents say Deryni do? Is that what you want?"
"How dare you presume to instruct me?" Queron snapped, icy anger keeping his words all but inaudible. "Take your hands off me and stay out of my way. Do it now, Revan!"
Wordlessly Revan had released him, apparently cowed. But as Queron sank back on his heels, preparing to unleash magical retribution, Revan had shifted the olivewood staff hitherto nestled in the crook of his arm and cudgeled Queron smartly behind the left ear. Queron crumpled into the snow without a sound, his vision going black, and Revan's voice had seemed to come from a long way off.
"Sorry, m'lord, but throwing your life away is stupid!" Revan had murmured, as he rooted in Queron's scrip for a Healer's drug kit. "Gabrilite or not, I can't let you do that."
That had been the end of their quarrel. With the sedative Revan gave him in melted snow, Queron had drowsed the afternoon through, never quite unconscious, but too groggy to offer further resistance of any kind. He had dreamed then, too, haunted by the images of his brethren being tortured and killed, the nightmare embellished and intensified by the sounds that floated up from the yard beyond.
Gradually, the winter shadows lengthened. Slowly the heart-wrenching screams and the gabble and gurgle of dying gave way to the hungry crackle of the flames and then the softer whisper of a rising wind and the feather of new snow falling, mercifully muffling some of the horror.
More wind wailed somewhere outside Queron's present dream, and he bit back a groan as he stirred in his haystack hollow. Again he tried to claw his way up to consciousness, out of the nightmare, but still it held him fast. He whimpered a little as it dragged him into its depths again, not wanting to remember what he had learned from Revan when he woke that other time, there on the slope above Dolban.
УIt's over now,'' Revan had said softly, leaning heavily on his olivewood staff and looking for all the world like some latter-day John the BaptistЧwhich was precisely what Revan intended. Suddenly Queron had found himself wondering whether that made any more sense than what the men below had done.
"I know it doesn't make any sense," Revan had said, when Queron did not speakЧas if he somehow had caught Queron's very thought, though the Healer knew that was impossible. "What possible sense could there be, much less any modicum of justice, to burn to death more than three-score men and women simply because they chose to honor and revere the memory of a man they believed holy?"
"Is that why they did it?" Queron had whispered, his vision blurring anew as he gazed down at the blackened stakes in the yard, and the soldiers moving among them.
"More or less." Revan had turned his head to look Queron in the eye. "I spoke with several of my Willimite 'brethren' while you were asleep," he said quietly. "They, in turn, had spoken with several of the soldiers down below. Apparently, the orders came directly from the bishops in council at Ramos. Go ahead and read the details for yourself. I'm not afraid."
And Revan was not afraid, though a lesser man might have had ample reason to be, after physically assaulting a Deryni of Queron's ability. As Queron lightly touched the younger man's wrist and began to focus, trying not to make the physical contact too obvious to anyone watching, he was surprised and humbled by the younger man's fearless trust. Though Revan could not have stopped his doing anything he wanted, Reading was always easier with the subject's active cooperation.
But the wonder of that discovery was blunted almost immediately by what Queron had learnedЧthat the abbey's own patron saint was at least indirectly responsible for the attack. The men now gaining ascendancy in Gwynedd, regents for the twelve-year-old King Alroy, had declared Dolban's patron, the Deryni Saint Camber, to be no saint at all, but a heretic and traitorЧand therein lay Dolban's fate.
Nevermore was the name of Camber MacRorie to be spoken in Gwynedd, on pain of consequences almost too terrible to comprehend. Henceforth, a first offense would merit public flogging, with the offender's tongue forfeit for a second utteranceЧwhich accounted for the pincers and knives Queron had seen. And only that special death reserved for heretics would answer for further intransigence.
Not that Saint Camber's Servants at Dolban could have known in time how they transgressed the lawЧor would have cared, had they known, for their devotion to the Deryni saint had been unswerving for more than a decade. The edict rescinding Camber's sainthood and declaring the penalties for defying that edict had only been promulgated the day before, many miles away in Ramos. Their enemies had never intended to give them any advance warning. The first inkling of their plight would have been when the regents' soldiersЧepiscopal troops, at that swarmed into the abbey yard and began taking prisoners.
All surely had heard the edict read as the floggings began, however, and had ample time to contemplate the full measure of the edict's horror as the executioners began their grisly work with pincers and knives. Tongueless, the condemned could not even plead ignorance of the law, or recant, or beg for mercy, as the soldiers piled the kindling high around the rows of stakes and passed among them with their torches.
Stunned at the legalism behind the savagery he had witnessed, tears streaming down his cheeks, Queron had withdrawn from Revan's mind, burying his face in his hands to weep silently.
"Forgive me for my earlier lapse," he finally had whispered, mindful that the breeze had shifted upwind of them and would carry sound down to the guards belowЧthough at least it no longer brought them the stench of burned flesh. "You were entirely correct that magic would not have been the answer.''
Wiping at his tears with the back of his hands, he had summoned the courage to look up at Revan humbly.
"Rhys taught you well," he went on quietly. "If I'd been thinking clearly, I suppose I should have expected you might hit me over the head. But I never thought to be drugged from my own Healer's kit."
Revan managed a hint of a bitter smile, turning his light brown eyes on Queron only briefly. УBe thankful I didn't dose you with merasha. YouТd still be out of action. I couldn't let you go to certain death, though, now could I?"
"I suppose not."
Sighing, Queron fingered the end of his grey-streaked Gabrilite braid where it had escaped from under his hood, knowing that a painful decision was approaching.
"I think I've been away from my Gabrilite Order far too long,'' he had whispered. УIt becomes all too easy to forget that I swore never to kill. I suppose that goes for killing myself as well as other menЧthough there are a few down below who could do with killing."
He glanced at the dimming yard below, at the torches moving among the burned-out stakes as the guards patrolled the last of the dying fires, then looked back at Revan thoughtfully.
"It will be dark soon. I think it might be healthiest for both of us if I went on alone.''
"Why?" Revan had asked. "No one suspects who you are."
"Not who, no." He held up the end of his braid. "But if anyone were to see this, they might suspect what. It isn't necessarily true that only Gabrilites and the Servants of Saint Camber wear braids more or less like this, but in this vicinity, given what's just happened down there, it strikes me that such a symbol might causeЧahЧdangerous questions to be asked. I wonder, are your barbering skills as good as your medical ones?"
Revan had blinked and looked at him strangely.
"Beg pardon, sir?"
"I want you to cut it off for me, Revan." Queron pulled the braid over his shoulder. "I've had this a long time, and losing it will not be without cost, but I'm afraid it's become more of a liability than an asset. Our founders never meant it to be a betrayal unto deathЧmine or yours."
Revan shifted uneasily, but he pulled from his belt the little knife he used for cutting bread and cheese, fingering its edge uncertainly as Queron turned his back.
"Go ahead," the Healer murmured. "Don't worry about finesse. Just hack it off. We haven't got all night."
He tried to make himself relax as Revan gingerly took hold of the braid and worked his fingers up toward the base of Queron's neck where the plaiting began, sensing Revan's surprise and curiosity when he discovered that the braid was composed of four strands rather than the more common threeЧthough Revan did not ask about it.
"We call the braid a g'dula," Queron said quietly, taut as a catapult as Revan began sawing across the wiry mass with his knife. "The four strands have a special symbolism for us. I mayn't tell you what it is, beyond the obvious connection with the four Archangels and the four Quarters, but since I'm sure you noticed, it seemed only fair to tell you." He sighed heavily and suppressed a shudder. "No blade has touched my hair since I took my first vowsЧit's been nearly twenty-five years ago now. The braid will have to be ritually burned, when time and place permit.''