The Friar's Tale, стр. 44
"Then we have to deal with his wife."
"True, but the prince could put somebody else in as regent."
"Yeah. The sheriff."
Robin was so likely to be right that Tuck let him have the last word. He stood and left, heading to the area he was using as a chapel of sorts. Most believed God could only be found in a church. Francis claimed that all creation was His temple.
Tuck had always thought that more likely. He murmured, as he walked, words he had not used in far longer than he should have. The words of the Prayer of St. Francis.
Words that helped pull him into the state he had had so much difficulty achieving of late. Not grace, not quite, but...focus. Yes. Focus was the word. His mind was on God, but the Blue Lady hovered at the edge of it, smiling slightly.
16
The next day, he found Clorinda at her own prayers. He stayed back, not wanting to interrupt. She spoke softly in Norman...not some old tongue of this land. But then, she was Norman. Easy enough to forget...most of the outlaws were Saxon blonde, but some others were dark, too.
The English, a German knight had told him, are mutts. Perhaps he was right.
She finally stood up. Softly, "How long have you been there, Friar?"
"Not long. I didn't want to interrupt."
"You show almost too much respect."
"What's the alternative? You're hardly likely to do anything but walk away if I tell you you're wrong."
"Or do you show respect because you aren't sure?" She stood up, rising gracefully to her feet. Her eyes met his.
He shook his head, breaking the contact quickly.
"You aren't sure, not anymore. Come on. Let's go for a walk."
"Will won't think..."
"Will knows you're not my type." She did not touch him, but rather headed along a deer trail away from camp. She moved with quiet grace, and silent. Every time his own footsteps made a noise, he flinched from the contrast.
"I don't have a type."
"So, you really have been celibate your entire life?" She stopped where a tall rock thrust out from the trees.
It seemed, for a moment, to shimmer a little. A gate to Faerie? "Yes, I have."
"And not just, I suspect, because of your vows."
He considered that. "I joined the church so I would not be expected to marry." He took a deep breath. "So I would not have to force myself to join with a woman when I have never wanted to."
"No choices. No thought that people might have choices. Is that really what your God is all about?"
He hesitated. "I don't know anymore." An admission that came close to an admission of guilt. He did not know anymore. He did not know who he was. What he was. What he could do about who he was.
"Have I ever denied the existence of your God?" she asked, finally, not approaching the stone, but rather regarding it.
He placed it in his mind...the Hemlockstone. Associated with witches. Unsurprising, thus, that it would also be associated with the fay. It was carved by the wind, the trees drew back from it. More than anything else, it looked like a large, squat house, with brick walls and a dark roof...as if it was roofed not with thatch but lead. That was it, it looked like a lead roof. Like a church would have. "No. But the Bible tells us there is only one true God, that all others are shades or demons."
"Is that what you believe?" She tilted her head. "Is that why you think when you see a goddess, that it has to be your God's mother?"
"I have wondered if what men call gods are, in truth, the lords of the Fae."
"Not a bad thought. Not a bad way around your dilemma." She glanced at the stone again. "I believe the old gods are real, but that they no longer walk the Earth as they did. Your beliefs have pushed both them and the fae into small corners. Tight ones. Into spaces where they have little room. One day, they will push back."
"I don't like that thought."
She laughed a little. "Tuck, it would not destroy your God...but rather the bindings your Church places on the world."
Tuck thought for a long moment. He did not look at her but remained silent. Wind unleashed by the absence of trees flowed around him, causing his robe to pull around his legs. "Bindings..."
"Can you stand there and tell me you would have chosen the Church had you not been forced?"
He could not answer that straight away. He closed his eyes, heard the call of the birds. Somewhere, a fox yipped a warning. Perhaps there was some stray dog. Perhaps some stray human. Finally, "It beat all the possible alternatives."
She nodded. "But what would you have chosen? Were you truly free, what would you do?"
"I have no idea." It was the truth. These people were freer than most, but it was a freedom that had its own boundaries.
A freedom circumscribed by the laws they had broken, but a freedom nonetheless. "I have never known anyone who is truly free. The king is a slave to the kingdom, the serf to his land, the abbot to the Church. We just have to make the best of things within the boundaries placed around us."
He wished, for a moment, that were not the way of things, but it was, and nothing he could do or say would change it.
"What if we could build a world in which people were?"
"It wouldn't work, Clorinda." He turned towards the stone. "If everyone was free to do what he or she wanted, then the important stuff would never get done."
Who would sweep the streets if he could choose not to do so? No. You had to give people incentives, or simply force them to do as you desired. Hence the levy. "The system works. We just need to do something about the people abusing it."
"You're right. But I wish such