The Balance Ch. 13-18

"I do not seek to impugn the High Priest, my lord king," said the bishop, nervousness making his voice unsteady, "but I am sure that you know that there are...rumors...about members of your faith."

The king sighed. "They are not rumors, Lambert. They are fact. Those called to serve the Deity do not chain their desires when they enter Her service. Neither, however, are they permitted to force their desires on the unwilling. To do so is the blackest heresy our religion recognizes, and the act is punishable by expulsion, castration, or death, depending on the severity of the crime. Sister Angela, and Brother Paul, for that matter, are safe from the unwanted attentions of the high priest and priestess."

At this, Sister Angela looked up, and Abiron caught her glance. A long look passed between them, but he could not tell what it meant.

Lambert backed a step, and his face had regained its usual diplomatic passivity. "Of course, your highness. Please excuse my words. I had forgotten that our ways are not yours. Yet."

"Never," came a clear voice, and Abiron did not even have to look to know that it came from Hannah. "Never," she said again, and in her eyes was a challenge as she looked at the entire delegation. "I have heard tales, my lord Lambert, of soldiers who have fought in battle, and who have taken their death-wound, and fought on all unknowing. You have lost, and do not even know it yet. Take care not to fight too long."

"Silence," said the king, with a quelling look at the princess. "My lord Lambert, two hours shall be set aside in the morning and the evening for these four to become acquainted one with the other. To converse, to contest, and to determine the fate of this land. My guards shall protect their conferences, so that they shall not be unduly influenced by outside forces. If any shall feel that they are in danger, all that need be done will be to report this to the least of my men, and on hearing of this, I shall declare a forfeit. Is this clear?" he asked, with a look at Brother Ulf.

"It is, my lord," said the bishop.

"Then I declare this audience over. The contest will commence tomorrow. May blessings fall upon those who are in the right."

*****

The next morning found Abiron walking through one of the smaller gardens in the complex, looking for Sister Angela. The day was cool, but a bright sun and little wind made it seem warmer than it was.

Abiron's mind was busy. Two weeks to convince one dedicated to her god to renounce her faith. How could he do it? Even though he believed, as he had said the night before, that Sister Angela was not firm in her faith, the magnitude of what he and Ariana were attempting overwhelmed him. And the stakes of this game were enormous. If he or Ariana failed, the consequences would be terrible. In the last several days, he had acquainted himself more thoroughly with the teachings of his opponents, and the parts that did not terrify him repulsed him. The thought that any assembly of people would choose to live under the moral code that these did chilled him to his core.

Contemplating the challenge before him, he passed a turn on the pathway on the garden and saw Sister Angela.

Her beauty, as before, struck him senseless. Hers was different from the beauty of Ariana. His mother-wife had an attraction that was rooted to the earth that all people sprang from. With her dark hair and full breasts, she could have been an earth goddess of old days come to life in a later era. Angela was otherwise. Her pale hair and blue eyes, coupled with her fair skin, made her seem transient and ethereal, a being born of air and sunlight.

Until she turned her face to him, and he could see the scorn in her eyes.

*****

"Well, priest, it seems that I have no choice but to spend a goodly portion of my day with you for the foreseeable future." He words could have been ice, for all the warmth they contained.

Gently, he thought. This one has not had a chance to learn gentle speech from my lady mother. And you know how well she likes men. Treat her kindly and she may give you a chance. Meet despite with despite and you will lose her forever.

"Truth indeed, my lady. But to me it will seem no hardship. Please, may I join you here?" he gestured to the wooden bench that she sat on, overlooking a small formal garden, brown now with winter's frost.

"Do as you will. I care not. But be warned. If you think to woo me to the side of your pagan deity, I will not yield. Beyond my disinterest in your impossible faith, I have been promised the ability to choose my own path following this embassy. I doubt that you can say the same."

And now the game begins, though Abiron. Angela, unknowing or not, had given him a valuable bargaining chip mere moments after the contest had begun. The power to choose her own path was undoubtedly of importance to her. If he could bore through her steely exterior, the knowledge that the women of this land had far more control of their lives than did the women of her own country might have a profound effect on her.

"Very well, my lady. At least let me look upon you. I must own, coloring of your sort is very rare in my world. May I ask where you first hail from?"

Angela sighed, as if a tribute to her looks had been made so often that it had passed beyond the merely trite and into the tiresome. "My father farms the land near Tuckborough." In response to Abiron's blank look she said, "In Suffolk." To Abiron's continued confusion she said, "In England. Are you dense? Did the lady priestess choose a pretty face to be her paramour? She did not seem a fool, but I have been wrong before."

"No my lady. I know where the Angla-land lies. And you are abnormally perceptive. Not many know of the relationship between the lady High Priestess and myself."

"Any one who is not a fool could see it. But we seem to have a surfeit of fools these days." She muttered some more words under her breath that Abiron could not catch.

"That must be the language of your own land. It is like unto you, my lady. Beautiful in places, but hard as stones underneath. I will own that I was mistaken when I first saw you. I see know that you are not an angel..."

"...But an Angle," Angela's voice was sardonic, "Thank you. I have heard this joke before. Please stop before you prove yourself tiresome."

Abiron spread his hands. "What will you then, my lady?"

Angela's voice rose and she clenched her fists. "STOP CALLING ME THAT!"

A silence fell. Angela's head was bowed. Abiron waited for a few moments, and when Angela said nothing more, he spoke in a soft voice.

"Forgive me, my...," Angela's head rose and there was murder in her eyes. "Forgive me, Sister. I did not mean to offend. I have little liking for titles myself, only having been addressed as 'Abiron' until

these few weeks past, and only becoming a high priest recently. Let us make a bargain together. I will call you 'Sister' or 'Angela', and you will call me 'Abiron', and we will both be comfortable, and I will not call down your wrath upon my head."

Abiron saw her take a deep breath,and the golden head rose from where it had been bowed over her lap, "A bargain then," and for the first time that morning, something approaching a smile graced Angela's face. "I apologize for my show of temper. I do not like being addressed by a title which I do not hold."

But one you once had, perhaps? Abiron did not let his suspicions show. "Since we have agreed on courtesy, Sister, what knowledge of me and my folk will you have? We have some hours together today, and unless you wish to sit in companionable silence, I think the time would pass quicker if we shared our thoughts."

Angela let out a sigh, "Until a few months ago, I had never been more than thirty miles away from my home. I was picked for this embassy by virtue of my wits and because I had caused more trouble in my cloister than my continued presence was worth. I had never heard of your faith before. I would like to know more of it, if we are to contest with each other."

Abiron smiled to himself. Now we come to it. Despite her protestations, Angela was curious about his land, its people, and the Deity who protected them. This was his chance to begin to win her to his side.

"Well, to begin with, I suppose I should tell you a story about a young girl named Margaret..."

*****

Elsewhere...

Brother Paul, escorted by two members of the palace guard, waited outside the rooms given over to the priests of the Deity. Despite the coolness of the air, he sweated inside of his monk's robe. He was terribly nervous about the idea of being left alone with a lady of such singular beauty. Tales of the perfidious lusts of the priests and priestesses of this land had been hammered into his head by Ulf and Lambert, and while his faith was strong and his vows new-minted, he still feared, as all men fear, the beautiful woman beyond the door.

When the portal opened, he was comforted. Rather than the scene of debauchery he feared, the High Priestess was dressed as any well-to-do matron of his acquaintance might be. She wore a sensible woolen dress, somewhat finer than the norm, but warm against the chill that no amount of fireplaces could drive from the palace in winter. Only the necklace around her throat distinguished her from any once of a hundred ladies of middle years.

That, and her beauty, which could not have been disguised were she wearing burlap and sackcloth.

"Please, enter." Her voice was as lovely as her body, and he would have happily opened his veins to hear her say more. "May I offer you refreshment? Food? Wine?" She gestured to a nearby table, where a laden tray was waiting.

"No, thank you," Paul said. Then reflecting that it may be discourteous to refuse the High Priestess' generosity, "Perhaps some water?"

"Of course," Ariana said, moving to a side table and filling a glass from a pitcher there. She handed it to Paul with a smile. "Please, sit." She took a seat on a couch several feet away.

"Well, here we are. Two people of opposing faiths, and a land hangs in the balance," she smiled sadly. "Before we go hacking at each other with the unsheathed swords of our wits, perhaps you can tell me about yourself."

Paul paused, nonplussed. He had thought that he was going to have to defend his church and his faith. He was not prepared for a gentle inquiry into his past. "I am a foundling. I was left at the gates of an abbey near Edinburgh in Scotland nearly twenty years ago. No one knows who my parents are. They could have been nearby, or they could have been travelers with no time or ability to care for another child. As happens with most foundlings, I was raised by the brothers at the abbey. We are not required to take vows, but I found a vocation and happily chose to do so."

"No dreams of a wife and children? You seem a likely enough lad. Did none of the girls near your abbey set their eye on you?"

"The presence of women was not encouraged," Paul said stiffly. "I have had little time with them, and for a woman to interfere with the calling of a man to serve in the church would result in the highest possible disapproval."

"Hmmm. Very well." Her look was unsettling. "Since you value scholarship so highly, and since we are to strive against each other, what can I tell you of our faith? You will need to know what we believe," she said with a smile, "before you can tell us why we are so terribly wrong, and doomed to eternal damnation."

"Start at the beginning," and now Ariana saw that his diffident exterior was a mere mask for the ravening scholar underneath. She saw what she sometimes saw in Abiron, or, more rarely, herself. The desire to know.

"The beginning," she mused. "Well, and why not? We can at least begin there, and if our talk grows too tedious, we can always move onward.

"Like most stories that are worth listening too," she said with a smile, "even yours, it begins with a child.

"Tell me, Paul. When you were a little boy, did you ever have an imaginary friend?"

*****

"...she was a small girl whose family lived in the north of this land, or so our oldest tales say," said Abiron to Angela, "and like many children, both before and since, she told her parents and older siblings about a playmate only she could see and talk to. Another little girl she called 'Deety...'"

"...who knows how many gods and goddesses begin this way, in the imagination of a child," continued Ariana. "But her parents took little note, being full of business of their own. Sowing and reaping, waking and sleeping, eating and drinking and loving and living. Until they noticed something odd."

"...the things that this child wished for came true. Not once or twice, but repeatedly. So often so that the mother noticed and remarked upon it. And then one autumn, the father grew ill. Desperately ill, and no one, not the mother, who could only bathe her husband's fevered brow with water, not the various neighbors with their folk-cures, or even the wise-woman from the next village, could do anything to help him.

"Finally, in desperation and grief and terror with what her life would be like if her mate should die, she did what seemed to her to be the pinnacle of foolishness. She offered a prayer, heartfelt and pure, to her daughter's imaginary friend."

"...and her husband recovered. Miraculously, some might say," said Ariana. "It was the beginnings of faith. Our theologians have long disagreed whether the faith created the Deity, and if the miracles which are sometimes performed in His name are an outward manifestation of our faith, or if the Deity existed beforehand, but needed a child's faith to be able to take a hand in the material world. To me it is one and the same. I care little for the hair-splitting. I know that the Deity is real."

"And you believe that your god came into the world in this fashion?" asked Paul.

"I don't believe that the Deity came into the world in one way or the other," said Ariana. "I don't even particularly care. I only know that He is.

"So when the mother told her acquaintances of how her husband had been cured, something curious happened. Or perhaps not, when you consider the vagaries of human nature. Other people of that village also began to pray. Sometimes the prayers were answered. Eventually, word began to spread. Passing merchants told the tale as an amusing anecdote to villages up and down the road. And as people will do, some chose to believe and pray.

"And after a great many years, the worship of this one Deity, which had begun with a small girl in a village which no longer exists, had spread to every corner of this land, crowding out the faiths of whatever gods had been there before. After a somewhat longer time, the land itself had been unified under one ruler. And the Deity has guarded the land and His faith ever since."

"Until very recently. When your king chose to risk all on the negligible chance that either Sister Angela or myself will abandon our faith for your Deity," his voice was hard. "I have to wonder if he is as good a steward of his people as he pretends to be, if he is willing to gamble this with their futures."

Ariana leaned back on her couch, completely unfazed by his tone and words. "I have known the king most of my days. He does not make bets he does not expect to win."

"Everyone expects to win when they gamble, my lady priestess. Otherwise, why would anyone do so? Not every wager is a wise one. To expect that either myself or Sister Angela, whose faith is as strong as mine, would willingly throw over our Lord for this false godling of yours is laughable."

Again, Ariana did not rise to the bait. "False? Whoever gave you that idea? Who decides what gods are real and which are not? Is there a review board for deities which I was not made aware of?" Her smile was wicked. "Dear me. I hope that we are not in arrears on our yearly dues. Otherwise there might be some penalty."

"You know what I mean, my lady. I know you are complemented with a full set of wits. Please do not try to appear foolish. Our texts state that thou shalt have no other gods before the One God."

"But your texts do not state that no other gods exist," Her voice and her eyes were now as sharp as knives. "Your god did not deny that other gods existed. He merely forbade their worship. Do you not remember the story of Baal? What you call false we call other."

Paul faltered for a moment, racking his brain. Was what the High Priestess said true? He recalled the story of Baal and of Moses coming down with the commandments in his hand. He knew he had the words of the commandment right. But could the conclusion he drew from them be wrong?

"Remember the words of scripture, dear boy," her look was half pitying, half mocking, " 'I, the Lord your God, am a jealous god'. What need to be jealous if you are the only god? The command to worship no other gods only makes sense if there are other gods."

Outflanked and rattled, Paul decided that the only alternative now was a strategic retreat.

"I should go," he said, hating the fact that he was beaten before he had begun.

"I look forward to seeing you tomorrow," said Ariana, walking him to the door. He turned to wish her farewell, and found her hand on his cheek. She rose up and softly kissed the corner of his mouth. "Until next time, dear boy."

*****

"A pleasant story," said Angela, "It has all the charm of a fairy-tale, with none of the pain of reality. Good and decency triumph, evil is defeated, and everyone goes home happy."

"No one said anything about evil being defeated," said Abiron comfortably. "We know that evil is only driven back at great cost, and grows again whenever decent people are content to do nothing. This is merely our own tale about how our Deity came to be. It is, if you will forgive me, more logical that how your god was in place before the world began, created it, made humanity and all the flora and fauna that exists, and then destroyed it like a child throwing a tantrum."

Angela ignored the jibe. "Is that how you see our people, as evil?"

Abiron began to give a glib answer, then paused, considering the look in her eyes. This was a question that meant much to her. To answer it with mockery would do damage here. She was listening to him. And though she had dismissed the story as a fairy-tale, she had not stormed off, shouting of heresy as Ulf would have done. Or simply ignored it as the superstition of unlettered peasants, as Lambert would have.

"Not evil, no," he said slowly. "Not in and of yourselves. I see no evil in you or in Brother Paul, little though I know him. Bishop Lambert though, could allow evil to be done, if it advanced what he saw as the greater good, though he would not dirty his hands directly. He is ambitious, that one, and if you were allowed into our country, and if someone resisted the raising of one of your churches, and if that person was killed as an example, I do not think his conscience would be overly exercised.

"Ulf, though," he paused. "Ulf frightens me. Not in the manner you think," he said, catching her look. "I do not fear for myself or for my own safety. When my time comes, it will come. And I do not fear that he would attack me openly, before witnesses, or even covertly, for fear of his own skin.

"I fear what he might do in the name of his church if he had power of his own. He is like a vicious dog on a short leash. He is always pulling on the chain and gnawing on the stake. Lambert keeps him under control, for now. But what if the chain should break or the stake snap? And what if the leash itself was taken away? What if he was under no one's direct control, and no one to answer to between here and Rome? He would do ill. Especially if challenged. He is the sort of man who would wreak vengeance tenfold for every slight done to him. I fear that the Old Testament is far more to his liking than the New. He may very well throw a tantrum. Rather than destroying a world, he would destroy a nation. That would suit him well, I think."