ESTHER M. FRIESNER

HALLOWMASS

Esther Friesner reports that her recent efforts include a collaborative novel
with Mercedes Lackey, as yet untitled, and that her fourth "Chick" anthology,
The Chick Is in the Mail, will be out in January.

This new fantasy story was inspired by a trip to Chartres cathedral At one
point, Esther heard "beautiful, silvery threads of music that seemed to spiral
down from no visible source in the shadows above." Further examination, however,
revealed a young man playing a flute ,in front of the cathedral and some trick
of acoustics obviously drew the melody into the building.

Read on and see how our Connecticut bard transmuted this small scene into a
lovely yarn.

MASTER, THE HEART OF THESE things came to pass in the autumn of the year that
the great cathedral neared completion. Beyond the town walls the fields were
nearly bare and the forest put on splendor. Bright leaf crowns of bronze and
purple, scarlet and gold flung themselves over the secret fastnesses of the wood
where terrors crouched. In the shorn fields asters winked blue among the
stubble. And everywhere, in the streets and on the narrow track slipping between
the hills to the outlying villages, there was song.

The countryfolk sang because their harvest was done and the war had slithered
its huge, armored body far into the south that year. Mothers sang cradle songs
to cradles where for once no spectral hand of famine or illness or whetted steel
had crept to touch and take their babes. Farmers bellowed drinking songs in the
taverns because singing drowned out the noise of backbones that creaked and
snapped when honest working men at last unbent their spines from the labor of
reaping and stacking, threshing and winnowing the grain.

Giles was a man who made his songs with stone. He was well past the middle years
of Adam's sons, his raven hair streaked and stippled with gray, his beard blazed
silver like the back of a badger. When he first arrived, over fifteen Easters
agone, no one in the town knew where he came from or who paid out his wages. He
presented himself to the widow Agnes who had a small house hard by the
cathedral's growing shadow and offered her a fair price for the rental of a
room, food to fill his belly, and the free use of her modest yard. The yard
stood behind the house and was supposed to contain the widow's humble garden,
but the plastered walls of the house itself hoarded sunlight from what few
plants struggled their way out of the sour soil, and in time the cathedral's
rising walls shouldered aside almost everything but shadows.

The widow Agnes therefore did not complain too loudly when the nature of Giles's
intent for her property was made known. The very next day after his arrival, a
dust-faced man named Paul the Brown presented himself at her door driving a cart
with a load of fresh timber. She recognized him as one of the bishop's
lowest-ranked servants and kept her thoughts to herself when Giles rushed out to
greet him eagerly. Together the two men transported the lumber into the widow's
yard and from it built a spacious, slant-roofed shed on ground where flowers
often had been planted but never had lived to bloom.

In the days that followed, the widow Agnes witnessed more strange shipments
arrive on her doorstep for her new boarder. There was a small, sturdy table, a
stool standing on four fat legs, a coarse hempen sack that clanked demons out of
the widow's white cat Belle, and lengths of sailcloth, thick with pale dust and
neatly folded. All of these effects were trundled out to the shed in the yard
where some were put in place and others put into ironbound chests of wood that
locked with a snick-clack sound like jackdaws laughing. Last of all came the
stones.

A squadron of servants showed their yellowed teeth to the widow when she
answered their thunderous summons on the day the first more-than-man-size block
of stone arrived. As with the first servant, Paul the Brown, their faces were
all familiar to her--work-creased vizards of skin glimpsed in passing on market
day, or when the widow's curious eye wandered during mass, or in the shadow of
the tavern sign.

The leader of that burly crew doffed a cap frosty with dust and asked, "Where'll
Master Giles have it?" He gestured to the block of raw-hewn stone on the cart
behind him.

"Master Giles?" the widow echoed. Her commerce with the man until this had been
scant and small (and she a woman whose inquisitive tongue could winkle out a
fellow's life history in the time it takes to break a tinker's promise!). She
knew him by that name but not that title.

"Aye, this is the first of 'em," the servant said. He might have said more, but
Master Giles was there, white Belle a mewing ghost at his ankles. He spoke with
brief courtesy to his landlady, begging her pardon for not having forewarned her
of this visitation while at the same time telling her no more about it. Then he
hustled forward to direct the men to move the block of stone into the widow's
yard, under the shelter of the shed.

Some days later the widow Agnes found the form of a man emerging from the great
stone. Crude as God's first tentative pinchings in the red clay that would be
Adam, Master Giles's man lacked the features of a face (unless the first hint of
a high-bridged nose could be reckoned to that credit) and could be said to
possess human hands only as a courtesy to the lumpy mass of rock at the ends of
what might have been arms.

Master Giles saw the widow staring at his work and grinned. His thick hair and
beard were now all white with the breath of chiseled rock, as if the stone were
sucking away his alloted lifespan, but he worked bare-armed and bare-chested in
the pleasant summer weather and the knotted muscles moving sleekly beneath the
skin cried liar! to any who dared to call him old.

"Good day to you, goodwife," he said, still swinging the hammer, still holding
the steel-edged cutting tool to its task. The tapping blows and the chinking
sound of the stone's thousand small surrenders underlay his words in a smooth,
steady rhythm. "What do you think of my Saint Clement?" He lowered the hammer
and gestured at a protruding lump of rock with the chisel. "Here's the anchor
that dragged him to a glorious martyr's death. I would have given him a
stonecutter's tools, but my lord bishop would discover my vanity all the earlier
then." His hearty laugh was for himself and for all the petty conceits of a
fragile world.

The widow crept nearer, but she could see neither the offered anchor nor the
stonecutter's point. His smile did not mock her when she confessed herself
either bewildered by the light or merely bewitched by her own ignorance.

"You will see the anchor in time," Master Giles said kindly, setting his tools
down on the worktable and taking her plump hand in his calloused palm. "The
saint is still being born. You see, my lord bishop has brought me here for the
cathedral's sake. I am to adorn the south porch below the great rose window with
twelve figures in stone, and since Master Martin whose province is the north
porch has already laid claim to the Twelve Apostles, I have a free hand in the
choice of my saints. I thought to begin well by invoking the protection of Saint
Clement. He has always been a friend to those of my trade. The Emperor Trajan
tore him from the papal throne and sent him as a slave to the marble quarries of
Russia, but even there he made conversions and worked miracles. Once, they say,
his faith called forth water from a rock for the sake of his fellow-slaves'
thirst. Soon after, he was flung into a great sea, the anchor around his neck.
The angels themselves built him a stone tomb beneath the waves. That is beyond
me, so I do this, to his glory."

The widow Agnes bobbed her head. She loved the tales of saints' lives, for she
was a devout woman--all the more so since her husband had gone to sleep in a
churchyard bed. He took with him to eternal rest the staff with which he used to
beat his bride, but he forbore to fetch away his money. If this was not proof of
divine grace, it would do for the widow Agnes. "Which saints will you choose for
the other--" She did a quick tally"--eleven?"

"I don't know," said Master Giles. "Saint Barbara, perhaps, to keep the peril of
fire far from the holy place, and Saint George to aid the farmer and protect
good horses. Who can say?" His smile was whiter than the fresh-cut stone as he
glimpsed Belle's pointed face staring boldly out at him from behind the widow's
skirts. "I might even carve a likeness of Saint Anthony to mind the fortunes of
some small animals in need of watching."

The widow Agnes laughed out loud and told him he was a sorry rogue, and that she
would warn my lord bishop of the jackanapes he'd hired for the adornment of the
south porch. Then she brought Master Giles the good wine from the cellar and
when the sun's setting cheated the eyes of gossips everywhere, she took him to
her bed.

The years ran and the cathedral grew. The shapes of saints blossomed in the
widow's yard and were duly bundled away to their places in the niches of the
south porch. The widow and Master Giles lay down together many times with only
simple human comfort in mind and awoke one morning startled to find love had
slipped between the sheets. They did not marry, for the talk would crumble
Master Giles's favor with the bishop as surely as it would destroy the widow's
fame for piety and prayer. There did come a time in that first mad year when the
widow had cause to travel south to settle a matter of inheritance among her
distant kin, but she returned within a six-month and all was as before.

The little white cat Belle birthed many litters and died, leaving the wardship
of the widow's house to her daughter Candida, who was also furred with snow. And
one hot August day the widow died of a sweating fever that carried off many
souls besides her own, leaving the care of her house to a distant relative and
the care of Candida to Master Giles.

The distant relative turned out to be a spinster of the breed that seem born
crones from their mothers' wombs. She was called Margaret, dead Agnes's
far-removed cousin, a woman who had never married and therefore begrudged the
joy of any woman who had. She was able, for charity, to forgive those who found
themselves bound in miserable, loveless matches, and so for a time she had made
Agnes her favorite. But when Agnes's husband died leaving the lady young enough
and rich enough to live on sweetly content, Margaret came near to choking on the
injustice of it all. Or perhaps it was only her own bile that rose to fill her
throat.

Margaret lived with her parents in a village whose chief product was stink.
After they died, Agnes sent her cousin plentiful support, the only fact which
allowed Margaret to reconcile herself somewhat to Agnes's good fortune. She had
less trouble reconciling herself to her own when the news reached her of Agnes's
death and her own inheritance.

She arrived on a raw December day when Master Giles was just finishing work on
his ninth saint. She came mounted on a fat donkey, purchased with the first
portion of Agnes's bequest. (A clerk of the cathedral was guardian and messenger
of the widow's estate. He it was who took word of Agnes's death and final
testament to Margaret, along with a sum of money to finance the spinster's
journey to her new demesne. Agnes had made a sizable gift to the cathedral as
well as to her cousin, and so it was plain courtesy to see that good woman's
affairs well settled.)

Margaret drove the donkey on to the timpani of her bony heels against the
animal's heaving sides, a stout stick in her hand playing counterpoint on his
rump. The poor beast's brayed petition of mercy to heaven roused every street
through which they passed. So loud was her advent, and so well heralded by the
urchins running along beside her, that Master Giles himself was lured from his
beloved stone to see what nine-days' wonder was invading his emptied life.

When she drew up abreast of the late widow Agnes's house, the spinster Margaret
jerked on the donkey's rope bridle and slid from the saddle-blanket with poor
grace. The throng of merrymaking children who had joined in her processional
swarmed around her, offering to guide her, to hold the donkey's bridle, to
perform any of a dozen needless errands to justify their continued presence
underfoot. Master Giles saw with horror how the woman raised her stick,
threatening to treat the children after a fashion that was unfit to treat a
donkey.

"Go home, children," he said gently, stepping into their midst and placing his
towering body as a shield between them and Margaret's stick. "Off with you now,
you're wanted home." The children giggled and darted away, all save one.

"Who are you?" Margaret demanded of the stonecutter, her lips thin as meat cut
at a poor man's table.

"I am Master Giles, in the service of my lord bishop."

"Oh." Her mouth was small and hard as a prunepit. "You. The clerk said you pay
rent and you work to finish the cathedral. My lord bishop would rather not have
you moved."

"My lord bishop is kind," said Master Giles in such a way that he let her know
how alien he thought kindness was to her heart.

"My lord bishop may command me," Margaret said drily. "So you are to stay, then,
since it does nothing to inconvenience him. How much longer must you live here?"

"Until I have finished birthing my saints."

"Birthing? How dare you speak so of the holy ones?" Margaret squawked like a
goose caught under a style. "As if they were slimed with the foulness of a
sinful woman's blood? Ugh! I will report this blasphemy to the bishop and you
will be made to leave my house before another sun sets."

Master Giles's eyes lost their tolerant warmth. "You may say what you like into
whatever ears will hear it. I will deny it all. Do you think my lord bishop will
risk the promised beauty of his cathedral for the sake of a lone woman's
rantings?"

"I have truth to speak for me," Margaret said, stiffer than the carven draperies
that clothed Master Giles's stone children.

"That's as may be," he replied. "But I have my saints, and my saints have my
lord bishop's ear." He turned from her proudly and almost sprawled over the
huddled body of the boy who crouched against the doorframe of dead Agnes's
house.

"Go home, child," Master Giles told him. "Why do you linger here?" The boy
looked up at the stonecutter with eyes as stony and unseeing as those of the
master's carved saints and a face as beautiful as heaven. A blind man's staff
leaned against his hollow shoulder but he did not have the shabby air of a
beggar. His garb was well worn, simple, sufficient, and there was a bundle of
belongings at his feet.

Margaret gave a harsh sniff. "This is Benedict," she said, and she siezed the
boy roughly by the wrist and thrust the lead-rope of her donkey into his hand.
She barged into the widow Agnes's house without another word, leaving Master
Giles to stare at the boy as blankly as if he himself were the sightless one.

The boy leaned on his staff and got to his feet, holding fast to the donkey's
rope. "Is there a stable?" he asked, stooping to juggle rope and staff so that
he might hold these and still take up his bundle.

"I will take care of the beast," Master Giles said, his tongue stumbling over
the words as a score of unasked questions struggled for precedence. He tried to
disengage the boy's hand from the donkey's lead, but Benedict refused to
relinquish it.

"This is my work," he said. "I am always the one with the beasts."

Master Giles considered the boy's reply as no stranger than his bearing. He did
not seem a servant, yet Margaret did not treat him as kin. "This way, then," he
said at last, and set his hand on the boy's shoulder to guide him to the shack
that served dead Agnes's house for a stable.

The house that once had warmed itself with love now steeped itself in ice. The
house that once had rung with the sweet tempo of iron on stone, keeping time to
a well-loved woman's morning song, now sheltered only silence. Margaret provided
Master Giles with food and shelter and free use of the yard in accordance, to
the letter, with dead Agnes's first agreement with the man. No less. Certainly
no more. The stonecutter could find no matter for complaint in the quality and
quantity of his victuals, and yet he rose from the table empty, burning with a
hunger of the heart, a thirst of the soul.

As promised, the boy Benedict was the one with the beasts. He took care of the
donkey and later, when Margaret purchased a family of chickens and a brown
milk-goat, he looked after these too. He was up early each day, leading his
charges off to graze on what few mouthfuls of dry grass the town green afforded
in the harsh weather. Master Giles heard his staff tap across the paving stones,
falling into its own cadence somewhere between the quicktime of the goat's
hooves and the steady clop of the donkey's feet.

Winter closed over the town. It was a cruel season. Work on the cathedral
slowed, with labor limited to only those artisans whose hands touched the
interior of the sanctuary. Unfinished walls put on a penitent's shirt of thatch
to keep the bitter weather from setting its teeth into the stone. Master Giles
set up canvas walls around his shed and worked on in all weathers, so long as
the frost did not grow deep enough to affect the fiber of the rock.

One morning soon after Candlemas, before even the whisper of dawn had touched
the sky, he was roused from his lonely sleep by the voice of the stone. The hour
was too early even for country-bred Margaret to be padding about. Master Giles
tossed aside his blankets, did up his hose, and pulled on a woolen smock over
his tunic. His bones cried out for a cloak, but he hushed them with the reminder
that work would warm them soon enough.

He loped silently down the stairs and came into the kitchen. A breath of light
from the fading moon silvered the edges of the shutters. Master Giles fetched a
small iron pot and filled it with coals plucked from the hearth's neatly banked
ashes. This would be all the heat he'd have in the shed, for a greater fire
might cause the stone to split. It was enough to keep his hands from stiffening
at his art, and that was all he asked.

The house was very still He felt as if he were Lazarus leaving the tomb.
Margaret kept the place clean as boiled bones, yet she did not speak with Master
Giles except to return his perfunctory salutations, to summon him at mealtimes,
to give him messages from the cathedral, and to answer any questions he might
ask. But while she tithed her words to him, the boy Benedict paid out none at
all.

There was frost on the earth. Master Giles stood in the yard with his back to
the house and raised his eyes to the great cathedral. "Five years or six and it
will be done," he said, weaving white veils with his breath on the darkness.
"Two years or three and it may be consecrated to use while the last touches are
made on the outside. Had you lived to see it, Agnes--!" And his leathery thumb
brushed the tears away before they could freeze into stars against the gray and
black cloud of his beard.

It was then he heard the song. Thin and reedy, borne on a voice wobbling over
words and music like a newborn calf trying its legs, it came so softly to the
sculptor's ear that he almost doubted he heard it. But it was there. It was
coming from the shed.

Master Giles felt something brush his leg. He looked down into Candida's
flower-face. The white cat mewed inquisitively and he, feeling only a little
foolish, motioned for her to keep still. He moved with the cat's own stealth to
where the canvas walls were pierced by a loose-hung flap of sailcloth that kept
out the wind. The song praised God for His all-sheltering love as the
stonecutter crept through the doorway.

The boy Benedict sat on a heap of straw that warmed the feet of Master Giles's
newest saint. The carven lamb that pressed itself against the carven lady's
robes permitted thin young arms to wreath its rocky neck, made no objection to a
dark head pillowed on its curlicued flank, did not protest the tears staining
its gray fleece like the tracks of the rain. The boy sang through tears, his
voice leaping and falling, trembling on a cusp of music and slipping from the
precarious perch of a high note not quite grasped.

Master Giles held the music in his mouth and let the lovely, imperfect taste of
it melt sweetly over his tongue. He could not take his eyes from the boy. His
mind did not want to know the things his eyes finally told his heart. The stone
face of the saintly virgin Agnes smiled down on the bowed head of a child whose
face was the image of her own.

The white cat was not enthralled by human music. She ambled past the
stonecutter, bright eyes of gold on the small, gray, squeaking temptations which
all that straw might hide. Seeing a tuft tremble, she crouched, haunches
bunched, tail stiffly twitching, lips silently writhing over her race's
ceremonial curse upon the whole tribe of vermin. Then she sprang.

If there had been a mouse in hiding there, he escaped her, but the boy's foot
did not. Benedict shouted with surprise and flung himself backward as Candida's
paws captured his ankle. His whole weight struck the statue.

Master Giles shot through the doorway, throwing himself forward to embrace the
boy with one arm and to steady the statue with the other. Straw flew up in a
sunburst of golden dust. The boy yelled again to feel Master Giles's strong hand
on his arm. He flailed his limbs wildly, fingers groping for his staff.

"Ouch!" cried the stonecutter as the boy's heel struck his thigh. "Hush, hush,
don't be afraid, it's only me." His words worked. The boy was still. Empty eyes
could yet hold questions. Master Giles replied, "I couldn't sleep, so I came out
here to work. When I saw the cat pounce on you, and you hit the statue, I was
afraid you were going to knock...it...o .... " Realization stole over him as he
spoke, and he saw the same dawn on the boy's face as a smile.

The statue was nine feet of solid rock, Benedict a scant five feet of flimsy
flesh and bone. "Me knock her over?" the boy asked lightly, dimples showing in a
smile that belonged to the beloved phantom of the house.

"Why, yes," Master Giles said, falling gladly into the straight-faced fool's
part. "With all your muscle, my poor saint would never have a chance to stand
against you." And they both laughed.

He could tell the boy what he knew, then; what he had just then come to know.
Shared laughter made shared hearts easier. The evidence of Master Giles's eyes
did not come as much news to Benedict.

"I never knew you were my father, but I knew she was my mother," the boy said.
"Margaret called me bastard so often when I was small that I grew up thinking it
was my name. But when I knew the difference and heard her call her cousin Agnes
whore, I knew that must be another way for Margaret to say that Agnes was the
bastard's mother."

"I'll kill her." Master Giles forced the words out between gritted teeth.
Benedict could not hope to see his father's knuckles whiten, but he could not
help feel the stonecutter's corded arms tense with cold rage.

"Let her be," said Benedict softly, and his voice held the peace of Christ. It
was then that Master Giles knew there would never be anything he could refuse
his son.

"She never told me she was with child," the stonecutter said, stroking the last
of the tears from Benedict's cheeks. "If she had--" He shook his head
regretfully for all things small and lost and loveless. The two of them sat in
the straw at the feet of the stone Saint Agnes. Her arms reached out, turning
her cloak to sheltering wings above them. The irreverent cat bounded onto the
table and thence up to perch on the saint's crown of martyrdom. Cold dawn paled
the canvas walls.

The boy ran his hand over the lamb's petrified curls. "You are carving this for
her."

Master Giles nodded, then realized such silent signs were useless with his son.
"Yes," he said. "This saint is hers. She will stand with Saint Clement and Saint
George, Barbara and Anthony, Martin for my good friend Master Martin, Giles in
thanks to my patron saint for his many blessings, Mathurin for all the fools of
this world and sweet Saint Cecilia for music."

"Music," breathed the boy.

"You sing--you sing well." Master Giles was in at ease with compliments. Even in
dead Agnes's arms he could not put his tongue to lovers' words but let moans and
kisses and the touch of hands speak her praises for him. "I heard you when I
came out here this morning. I did not know the song."

"She taught it to me," said Benedict.

"Margaret?" He could not fathom that dry stick teaching a child anything but a
catechism of bitterness.

Benedict laughed. "Can you really think such a thing? No, no, I mean the other."

"Your...mother?" Master Giles cudgeled his brains, trying to recall another time
besides the secret months of Benedict's awaited birth when his lost love had
left the town. He could bring none to mind.

The boy said, "No. I mean the lady." And he said no more, as if having said this
was enough.

Master Giles felt like one of good Saint Mathurin's protected fools. "What lady
is this? The wife of the lord of Margaret's old village? His daughter? A
kinswoman?"

Benedict snorted all of these away. "If you could hear her sing, you would know.
I met her in the woods, when Margaret sent me there to pasture the pigs. There
were tumbled stones, and the broken tooth of a ridged column. In springtime I
could feel tiny chips of rock like little slick scales under my bare feet, and
places between them where the mortar had cracked and violets grew."

"A ruin," said Master Giles, who had passed many such places as he moved from
town to town, following his calling. One time he had thought to spend the night
in the shelter of half-vanished walls, sleeping on a mosaic of dolphins and
vines, until his eye fell upon a toppled statue in the empty basin of a
fountain. Lichens crawled across enameled eyes, moss clothed wanton nakedness,
and still this work of a dead man's hands outshone Master Giles's finest
endeavors. He fled the place, ashamed and aching with envy.

"She was there," the boy said. "I didn't know, at first. Then I heard the music.
The words praised God, yet sounded...I cannot say how they sounded, not truly.
Can praise hold sorrow? I called out, 'Who's there?' The music stilled. All I
could hear was the snuffle and grunt of Margaret's pigs. I thought I'd
frightened the lady away."

"How could you tell she was a lady?" Master Giles asked. "She might have been a
peasant's daughter sent, like you, on an errand."

"You would not say so if you'd heard the daintiness of her song. A voice like
that never called pigs home or shooed chickens," Benedict countered. "Besides, I
caught her scent, all flowers, dewy and clean. When she returned, she gave me
reason not to doubt, proof of what I already knew."

"She returned?"

"That very day. The wood was growing cooler; it must have been near sunset. I
was whistling up my pigs--they're bright, obedient beasts or Margaret never
would have trusted them to me--when I heard her song again. This time it was a
different one, a hymn to the Virgin. I'd never heard the like. There was a year
when the pigs bred so well, Margaret allowed me to accompany her to a fair at
Saint Jerome's abbey. I heard the monks in choir and stood captured by the sound
until Margaret gave me a knock on the head to hurry me along. I thought then
that there could be nothing more beautiful in all the world than the sound of so
many voices interwoven so perfectly." A wistful look crossed his face. "I was
wrong."

There was something in his son's expression that troubled Master Giles to the
heart. Blind, his boy must keep company with fancies more than most. Some
fancies fevered the brain, bringing madness. What was all this talk of ladies
met in the wildwood? The forest was no haven for the gently bred. It welcomed
none.

The woods around this town were shrouded in dark legends, tales of the Fey with
their cold immortal beauty who begrudged men their frail immortal souls. Their
chief delight was robbery, pure and simple, snatching away the precious few
comforts mortals could claim. With their deceiving ghost-lights they robbed the
weary workman of his way home to rest when he crossed their lands by night.
Their heartless swains led maidens to believe themselves beloved, let them wake
to find themselves abandoned. Not even the innocent babe in the cradle was safe
from their malice, their schemes at once bereaving mother of child and child of
human love.

Was stealing a poor blind boy's sanity beyond them?

"My boy," said the stonecutter, trying to hold his voice as steady as he held
his chisel. "My boy, think. What would a lady do in such a place, so late, so
lone? Are you sure of what you heard? Perhaps it was the wind."

"Does the wind sing Christ's hosannas?" The saintly stone children born of
Master Giles's hand had faces less set and stern than Benedict's.

"I mean, perhaps the wind brought you the sound of human voices from a
distance," the man suggested. "There are convents in the wood, and the holy
sisters-"

"I touched her sleeve. It flowed over my fingertips like water. I touched her
hand. It was softer than the muzzle of a newborn foal."

"How did she come to permit these liberties?"

"The second time I heard her song, I rushed forward calling on her to reveal
herself, in Christ's name. I couldn't bear to have that sound taken from me
again. I imagined that if she was a Christian, she must heed my plea, and if she
was not then the power of Our Lord's name would break her glamour and hold her
where she stood." His look was rueful as he added: "When I ran, I tripped over a
pig."

The agitation of Master Giles's spirit almost broke free as laughter. He
smothered it. "She came to your aid, then'" The boy confirmed this. "And was
that when you learned who this lady was?"

"She said she was called the lady Oudhalise." The boy pronounced the outlandish
name as easily as if it were plain Mary. "She told me that her kin lived nearby,
but that I had found her at home."

"At home! In a ruin? A place with no stone left atop another? She must have been
mad." The stonecutter was aghast at the thought of his son in such company.

Fresh tears trembled in the boy's milky eyes. "Then I wish I were as mad as
she."

Master Giles cast his arms around Benedict and held him tight. "Don't speak so!
For the sake of your soul, don't."

The boy was stiff in his father's embrace. "For the sake of my soul, she taught
me her songs. We sat there until the night was cold around us and she sang for
me until I had them all by heart. She told me, 'The women here once heard a man
who told them that they could not enter heaven except as children. I can never
be a child, but I long for the promise of your heaven. My songs are my offering
to the Lord I seek, though the lord I serve would destroy me if he knew I give
them to you. Take them into your heart. Take me with you to the gates of
paradise.'"

Master Giles shook his head. Madness, he thought, but all he said was: "Poor
lady."

"Yes," the boy agreed. "I have her face here, in my hands. She let me touch her
face and left me after. I came back to that same place in the forest many times,
but I never met with her again. All I have left is what she gave me." And now he
loosed the longing of his tears.

Later that day Margaret could do nothing but mutter "Lackwit, madman, fool,"
when Master Giles announced he'd taken the blind boy to be his apprentice.
Others said the same when the news went 'round.

"How can you do this thing?" Master Martin demanded as the two stonecutters sat
in the tavern over wine. Outside the wind howled early March's chill damnation
and blew away lost souls' last grasp on their graves. "He can't see the stone.
How will he shape it?"

"You mind your Apostles and leave me to mind my saints," was all Master Giles
replied.

All that he knew was the need to shelter his son from a world that would destroy
him if it heard his tale of the lady in the wood. The only way he could see to
prevent this was to take the boy into his care, and the one path open to him
there was to name him apprentice.

In time, it might have been forgotten, but for Margaret.

The bishop did not care if Master Giles apprenticed himself a wild dog so long
as his chisel continued to shape saints for the glorification of the cathedral.
He praised the sweetness of Master Giles's Saint Agnes and could not commend the
sculptor's skill highly enough when his next creation, the beautiful Saint
Sebastian, drew the hearts as well as the eyes of all who saw it. (And if the
saint's face was the image of the man's apprentice lad, what of that? Time
enough to inquire into such matters after all twelve niches of the south porch
held their treasures.)

It was Margaret kept things on the boil, Margaret whose tongue wagged free in
the marketplace, the tavern, the church, the street. When Master Giles took
Benedict for his apprentice, he stole away not only that woman's unpaid servant
but the butt at which she shot her wormwood-tipped barbs. How could the loveless
woman feel superior to the beloved dead if she could no longer hurl abuse at
love's living proof? Her tongue had lost its whetstone and its target. All that
remained to her was to hound Master Giles with a madman's reputation as
punishment for his having taken away her sport.

"Let him be as mad as Nebuchadnezzar," said the bishop. "But let him give me
saints." So Master Giles gave him next Saint Catherine of Alexandria. "That
face!" the bishop cried when the sculptor and his workmen brought the finished
statue to the cathedral grounds. "Twisted as an old grapevine's root. The holy
legends rated her a beauty, but this is a shrew."

"Ah well...." Master Giles shrugged. "So many centuries, looking after the
affairs of spinsters--" He patted the spiked wheel of her martyrdom. "That would
turn nectar to vinegar, my lord, given the temperament of some of her
congregation."

The bishop squinted up at the saint. "That face...Do I know it?" And weeks
later, when his processional happened to pass Margaret in the street, the way he
stared at her became her shame and the talk of the town for days.

Saint Catherine was Master Giles's eleventh saint. There was now only one niche
below the great rose window of the south porch that wanted its tenant.

How strangely it all turned out! One day the boy who could not see to swing a
hammer against a chisel's head came across a lump of raw clay on his father's
workbench. It was Master Giles's habit to mold his creatures out of clay before
giving them their bodies of stone. Benedict felt the cool, pliable earth beneath
his fingers and began to work it. As he worked, he sang one of his alien songs.
His voice had mellowed with the years, learned steadiness, could hold to a tune
the way a good hound held to a trail. It was a pleasure to hear him so
melodiously praising all things holy, even if the music that fell from his lips
was like nothing that ever rang out beneath the church rafters nor in the
taverns nor in the distant fields.

"What's this?" cried Master Giles, coming up behind his boy and seeing the red
mass under his hands. He reached over Benedict's shoulder and plucked the nearly
finished figure from its creator's grasp. The stonecutter sucked in his breath
in awe. The face of an infant angel dimpled up at him.

It was perfection. He had never seen the like. That cherub's countenance
contained just enough of the earthly child's essence to give a man hope that
even his stained soul might someday soar with the hosts of heaven.

"Is it good, Father?" Benedict asked softly.

"Is it good...." Master Giles could only stare at his son's handmade marvel
while tears of wonder brimmed his eyes. "I will copy it out in stone, my boy,
and lay it before my lord bishop himself."

So he did. The bishop was a canny man who knew the work of each of his cathedral
worker's hands the way a falconer knows each of his birds by flight, when they
are no more than specks against the sun. The bishop knew this angel was not
Master Giles's work.

Master Giles said, "It was made by my apprentice, who is blind. He worked it in
clay. All I did was give it a body of stone."

"The Lord closes only the eyes of the body," the bishop replied. "In His mercy,
He has opened for this lad the eyes of the soul. Bring him to me. I am minded to
see this miracle."

Master Giles did as he was bidden, his heart light. He knew, you see, that soon
enough his work on the great cathedral would be done. Already he was considering
the final saint he must carve, and once that was accomplished there would be no
further call for him in this town. If it fell out that another town had use for
his skills, all would be well, but if not -- He had gone the roads in idleness
before this, sometimes for weeks, sometimes for months, once for over a year.
When there was only himself to think of, the roads held no terror, but now --

Now the devil's fork held him: He could not subject a blind boy to the road. He
could not abandon his son to the absent mercies of Margaret.

A miracle, my lord bishop calls him, he thought. Let it be so! What churchman
would not be proud to keep a tame miracle in his court, especially now that
there is a great cathedral to support? The relics of the saints will bring some
pilgrims, but many more will flock to see beauty spring from the hands of the
blind. Then and there he resolved to do everything he could to advance Benedict
in favor with my lord bishop.

The first thing that he did was to bring the lad before the bishop, as the
bishop had commanded.

"Well, my child, you must tell me how you did it," the bishop said, seated on
his great chair of state while Master Giles helped his son to kneel and kiss the
ring and rise again.

"What would you have me tell?" Benedict asked.

"Why, how you came to do this." The bishop held up the cherub's head. Then he
realized that the lad could not know his meaning, lacking sight. "How you knew
to make so exquisite a thing as this angel," he amended.

"Oh," said Benedict, nodding. "That was easy. She sang him for me."

The bishop sat a little straighter in his chair. "She?" he asked, and also:
"Sang?"

Master Giles's hands tightened on his son's shoulders. "It is a true miracle, my
lord bishop," he said hastily. "The lad himself told me of it. The Virgin Mary
appeared to him in a vision of the soul, for which no man needs eyes, and sang
of the glories of heaven. Thus he was divinely inspired."

"Ah." It was the bishop's turn to nod. He was a man willing to understand
miracles, but not wonders. "And do you think this was a solitary vision, or
might we expect more?"

"More," said Master Giles emphatically. "God willing," he added, seeing the
bishop's eye turn hard and cold and narrow as the chisel's blade.

"Let us pray that so it may be," the bishop said drily, and laid aside the
angel. "It were a pity to spend all the inspiration of a vision on grasping so
small a portion of heaven."

Later, as they were walking home, Master Giles asked his son, "What rubble was
that you gave the bishop? 'She sang him for me'? He will think you a lunatic."

"She did." The boy was sullen. "My lady of the forest. I slept and saw her. It's
happened before this, only I never had cause to speak of it. She was seated at a
fountainside, singing praise to God. Oh Father, the colors! How sweetly they
sounded on my ear!" His sulky look melted in the bliss of his remembered vision.
"With her voice alone she built a stair of silver and gold to the very throne of
glory, and up and down its length the angels climbed. Father, I think that I saw
my mother among the blest. My lady sang her face for me so that I could feel it
to my heart!" He embraced himself as if wings of joy had enfolded him. Then his
shoulders sagged, his head drooped. "But she is dead, my poor lady of the
forest, and kept from hope of heaven. Her songs of praise and her salvation are
locked away from her Redeemer as deeply as if they were encased in stone."

Master Giles pressed his calloused hand to the boy's brow. "Have you fever?" he
asked, feeling his heart drum panic. "This is no holy vision, but a sending from
the damned. Don't speak of it! Not before any, man or woman!"

"But you asked," the boy replied simply. "And so did the bishop. I tell you,
that is how I came to make the angel. Her song opened the vault of heaven to my
eyes and left the shapes of all the saints and angels in my hands. I cannot
forget them. I cannot forget her, or her pain, or her song."

"I am your father," Master Giles said severely. "I command you to forget." They
walked the rest of the way home in silence.

Like most parents, Master Giles mistook silence for consent. So it was that by
the time they reached dead Agnes's house he was convinced that his child was in
no further danger of being branded mad for the indiscretions of his tongue.
Indeed, the stonecutter felt secure enough in his dominion over the boy to
revert to planning for Benedict's future.

"My son," he said the next day, "here is clay." He placed the boy's hands on a
lump of the stuff that was at least five times as big as the quantity he was
used to employ to make his models. "Make a saint."

"Father...?" Benedict turned toward Master Giles's voice.

"The twelfth saint for the south porch," Master Giles went on. "I want it to be
of your design, just as you made the angel. Then I will carve it. You can do
this, my boy." You must do this, for your life's sake, his heart implored
silently.

Benedict sighed and rested his hands on the clay. "I can try," he said. And he
began.

There passed a shiftless several weeks for Master Giles. Unable to work until he
had Benedict's model before him, he roamed the town, fidgety as a dog with a
skinful of fleas. He was not used to idleness, and so made himself a pest on the
cathedral site, diverting the workmen with japes and stories, discussing
problems in design with the master architect that had not been problems until he
suggested otherwise. Mostly he knew the tavern.

But at last there came a morning when Benedict shyly asked his father to see
what it was that lay hidden beneath the damp rag on the worktable in the shed.
Master Giles removed the clay-stained cloth with the reverence a lover might
accord the last veil between himself and the enjoyment of his lady's favors.

And then he stood as one taken by the immanence of angels.

Words flew through the town streets, darting from house to house like a flight
of swallows. Rumor soared and dipped beneath a hundred roofs, coming at last to
nest in the bishop's palace: The last saint was more than stone, more than
flesh. The last saint of Master Giles's carving was the beauty of a blessed soul
made visible.

Oh, how many came to see her, this incredible apparition! Hard Margaret stood
ward at the gates of the house and used her broom to shoo away all comers save
the highest as if they had been poultry. The bishop's grace she admitted, of
course, though that churchman still had the tendency to steal shuddersome
sideways looks at her in a way that got beneath her skin and itched.

"Magnificent!" the bishop breathed when Master Giles swept aside the cloth he'd
used to shroud the last saint from prying eyes. "Is it Magdalen you've chosen to
bless our final vacancy?"

"My apprentice chose her," Master Giles replied, growing fat with pride in his
son's accomplishment and the bishop's obvious approval. But had that worthy of
the church been paying any sort of heed, he might have heard that Master Giles
did not truly answer his inquiry as to the identity of this wonder caught in
stone.

And so the bishop's servants came to carry off the last of the twelve statues
and set her in her place along with all the rest, above the south porch of the
cathedral. With her came the news that the holy place might now be consecrated,
and all the town rejoiced with preparations for the great day.

Master Giles sat with his son in the now-empty shed. "The bishop is much taken
with your work, Benedict," he said. A bowl of blushing grapes and shiny apples
sat on the table between them, the first fruits of the coming harvest. "He would
have you move into his palace and work for him."

"How shall I do that, Father?" Benedict asked, his fingers wandering over the
boards until they encountered a plump grape and popped it into his mouth. "I can
only work the clay."

"There are plenty of men who can copy out in stone what others make in clay,"
Master Giles replied. "There are precious few who can copy out in clay what
exists only in visions. My lord bishop knows talent and has the power to shape
the world around you into a most comfortable place indeed, if you will simply
place that talent in his service. Your saint has stolen his heart."

"As she stole mine," the boy murmured. His father bit into an apple then, and
the crisp report of teeth in white flesh kept him from hearing Benedict's words.

So it came to be, in that harvest season, that the countryside buzzed louder
than a hundred hives with the great doings of the town. (The highborn must be
called purposely, but the poor always hear the chink of alms and follow.)
Peddlars and mountebanks and wandering priests carried the news out of the
gates, into the fields. (Who would not come who could? Which farmer's dreary
nights and drudging days would not be enlivened for his being able to boast, in
after years, I was there!) Word spread from the stone walls over the ploughlands
and into the darkest recesses of the wildwood, where once a blind boy had
pastured pigs among ruins. (In the twilight of a day that saw the town roads
thick with travelers bound to witness the next dawn's consecration rites, a tall
figure of inhuman slenderness and grace rose from his place beside a shallow,
harebell-covered grave and called his vassals home.)

On the day of the consecration, Margaret rose grumpily from her bed and stumbled
to the window, scrubbing the smut of sour-hearted dreams from her eyes. She
pushed the shutters open and gave a cross look down into the street where
already the populace was flooding the narrow thoroughfare, heading for the
cathedral. Somewhere the bell of a smaller church was ringing. Water sloshed
over stone. Roosters stretched their necks to the blade of the rising sun and
crowed mortality's defiance of death.

Margaret tossed her woolen gown over her head and went downstairs without the
formality of a face-wash.

Master Giles and Benedict were already up and about their business. Margaret's
chill eye swallowed the boy's beauty as an insult to all her fixed ideas of sin
and punishment. Not even his blindness could assuage her offended sense of
morality this day. He was going to live in the bishop's palace-- a bastard to
live in luxury and ease who should have suffered and died for his mother's sins!
Was this fair? Was this the reward her stale virginity had earned in this world?
Only by setting her thoughts on the pious hope of fiery eternal torment awaiting
the child hereafter was she able to enjoy her breakfast.

The three ill-sorted souls, whose only common ground was the shelter of dead
Agnes's roof, walked out that morning in company. Together they made their way
to the open space before the cathedral where the ceremonies would commence.
There was a special place set aside for certain of the bishop's favored ones--
Master Giles and Benedict among them. For this reason alone Margaret consorted
with them, sticking so close they could not hope to escape her. She smiled
grimly, knowing that a real man would have sent her on her way with a cuff, but
that this great fool of a Master Giles never would do, because he was weak and
silly.

It was as splendid a spectacle as ever any townsman could have hoped. The
villeins who had come to gawp were well content with all there was to gawp at.
Highborn men were there, and ladies so white they looked like milk poured into
samite skins. Faces like painted eggs nodded beneath headdresses of terrifying
weight and unpredictable balance. Gusts of musk and spiced orange puffed from
tight-laced bosoms, little cloth-caged breasts seeming hard as cobblestones.

There was to be a procession, it was said. Sweet-voiced children garbed in white
would march with pure beeswax tapers in their chubby pink hands, singing hymns
and anthems. The bishop would come gowned in music, every glint of his jeweled
robes tossing a garland of notes against the sky. Or so the whispers ran.

There were many whispers, many murmurings. The crowd bumped and jostled all
along the route the bishop and his suite were supposed to follow. The nobles and
the peasantry alike would not be still for fear that they might miss the chance
to pass along the all-important cry of "There they are!"

As it happened, they need never have worried.

Where did it come from, that uncanny hush that fell so suddenly over all the
town, like the stillness before a thunderstorm? The ripe, red-gold sunlight of
October drained to gray. Men looked up and could not tell the stone bastions of
the cathedral from the sky that stood behind. Even the rooks who had haunted the
cathedral since its inception were quiet. A lady dropped her rosary. Pearls
clattered over the stones like the bones of martyrs tossed out of their tombs.

And then, a lone, sharp cry to shatter the stillness: "There they are!"

There were horses. There were never supposed to be horses. The bishop's
procession was supposed to be afoot, a show of humility for the people to
remember. Yet here were horses! Indeed, for an instant those who saw the tall,
proud mounts doubted their eyes, for the beasts made no sound at all as their
silver-shod hooves passed over the pavement. The open space before the cathedral
filled with them -- black and smoke and roan -- and the richness of their
trappings would have left the bishop's robes looking like a beggar's rags had my
lord bishop been anywhere in sight.

Where was he? No one thought to ask; no one cared to answer. The eyes of all
present were devoured by the sight before them, for if the mounts of that eerie
parade were worth noting, the riders were impossible to ignore.

High and haughty the lords of elven sat their gemmed and lacquered saddles. Hair
like hoarfrost streamed down in gossamer fails that overlay their horses'
trappings with a mantle more glorious than any weaving from a mortal loom. Lords
and ladies of the Fey came riding, tiny winged dragons perched on their slim
wrists as ordinary men might sport a favorite falcon. They rode up to the very
steps of the cathedral and there they stopped and stayed.

"What blasphemy is this?" boomed the bishop. He seemed to have come out of
nowhere, all his splendor made invisible by the awe which the Fey had conjured
so casually from the people. He was not a man who relished being overlooked. He
stood between the elven host and the bulky fortress of his faith, gilded crozier
in hand, as if to offer them battle. "Begone, you soulless rabble! May the devil
claim his own!"

"May we all claim our own this day," said the foremost elvenlord, and his soft
words lilted with such melody that the bishop's promised childchoir would have
sounded like a clash of copper pans beside him.

"What do you seek here?" the bishop demanded, eyeing the elvenlord with the
narrow mind's suspicion of beauty.

"We know our quarry," came the cool reply. And the elvenlord flicked the bridle
of his mount just enough to make it resume its leisurely pace around to the
south porch of the cathedral.

The crowd did not seem to move, and yet somehow the passage of the Faerie host
drew mortals along with it the way a stream in flood will carry all manner of
oddments along in its course. Master Giles certainly did not know how he came to
be there, yet there he was, in full sight of the south porch with his son's
shoulder under his guiding hand and even Margaret's stack-o'-sticks body a
comforting presence at his side.

The elvenlord was pointing up. His slender hand made bright with diamonds, blue
and white, was pointing at the row of saints above the porch, below the rose
window.

"Give her back to us," he said, "and we will go."

They knew whom he meant, mortals and elves alike. There was no need for him to
stipulate. She stood apart from her eleven companions as a dove among jackdaws.
Her lips were parted as if her stony body were a spell that had overcome her at
her prayers, freezing on her tongue all her pleas for divine clemency, her
petitions for heaven's compassion.

Not for herself, that mercy she implored, no, much as she might require it.
There was that in her face to tell any with heart (if not eyes) to see that all
her unsaid, unsung prayers were for the outcast, the helpless, the one who does
not even know he stands in need.

"Do you know," the bishop was heard to remark, "on second glance I don't think
that's the Magdalen after all."

"She is my sister, the lady Oudhalise," said the elvenlord. "A fool, but still a
lady of the Fey. She broke her heart with hankering after your mortal talk of
heaven. There was no need for her to perish. We are immortal, when we own the
wit to enjoy immortality. Still, she died, she pined and died, fading from our
court like a frost-struck flower. She lies buried in woodland earth, poor
witling, and there let her lie. This likeness is an insult and a desecration."

"I never thought I'd stand in agreement with an elf," the bishop muttered.

"Give her back," repeated the elvenlord.

"Take her, then," the bishop spat. But his venom was all in his eyes, and these
were aimed elsewhere. Master Giles saw the poisonous look he and his son
received from my lord bishop, and he felt his bowels go cold.

"I may not," the lady's lordly brother replied. "If it were so easy, would I
have troubled your petty rites? She may not be taken unless she is freely
given."

"Well, then, consider it so. I give her back to you more than freely gladly!"
The bishop used his crozier in the same style that Margaret had used her broom
to shoo away unwanted visitors. A child in the mob giggled.

Still the elvenlord demurred. "She is not yours to give." His eyes scanned the
press and met eyes that could not tell that they were sought. "She is his. Let
him give her up and we will go."

They tore Benedict from his father's grasp and hustled the lad before the
bishop, before the Faerie host. The boy's unseeing gaze rose as the elf-lord
uttered his demand again: "Release her, boy, and we may yet depart leaving you
as we found you."

Master Giles wrung his hands, for he knew his son's response even before the
words left Benedict's lips: "That I will not. I can't give what isn't any man's
to hold."

They fell upon him with words at first -- both sides of the quarrel, elven and
mortal. The bishop and all his suite exhorted the lad not to be a fool, to speak
sense, to give this unholy congregation of visitants whatever it took to effect
their banishment. Only do that, they told him, and his insane blasphemy (Whoever
heard of an elvenlady in the company of saints? Merciful God above!) might in
time be absolved. On their side the elves spoke less and said more. Would he
choose to give them what they asked or did he want to die? It was that simple.

Then all fell silent again, and Benedict replied, "I've already said all I can
say: I can't give what isn't mine. Her soul is her own, God have it in keeping.
I have only offered it a haven, a shell of stone it must outgrow, soon or late,
as surely as the flower breaks the seed that holds it safely through the
winter."

The elvenlord's laughter was like perfect music with the heart torn from it, all
a fair seeming, but meaningless. "You speak of souls in the same breath with our
kind, boy? Are you so ignorant, or do you play some idiot game? I am in no
sportive mood, I would be gone quickly. I tell you, it is like an agony of cold
iron in my eyes to have to remain in your midst, seeing the crudeness of your
mortal cities, the ugliness of your mortal faces. I have not come here for
pleasure; I have come for my own."

"If she were your own, you'd have her," the boy replied mildly.

"Come now!" the bishop cried, thumping Benedict smartly on the shoulder with his
square-fingered hand. "It's common knowledge that these creatures of fire and
air are soulless as stone!"

The boy turned his face toward the bishop's voice and said, "Then this knowledge
is very common, but knows nothing at all, either of souls or stones." His head
swung back vaguely in the direction of the elvenlord. "You were her kin, yet you
never knew her. If you dreamed you loved her at all, you loved her as a mirror
of yourself. But I -- I have no use for mirrors. I held her image not before my
eyes, but in my heart. She knew love, forgiveness, mercy, prayer. Knowing all
these, could she help but know God? Could she do other than own a soul? I have
heard it preached how the rich man Dives turned the beggar Lazarus from his
palace gate and burned in hell for his sins. Will the same God who judged Dives
thus for uncharity lack charity Himself? Will He turn her from the gate of His
cathedral now?"

"Boy, you walk dangerous ground," the bishop said harshly. "Who taught you it
was your place to speak of Scripture? Your elven woman is of no importance to
our Lord. How can He even be aware of her presence, when it takes a human soul
to call upon His mercy and be seen?"

"I do not ask Him to see," said Benedict. "Nor did she. Only to listen." And he
closed his sightless eyes, pressed his hands together, and opened his mouth in
song.

It was the song that Master Giles had heard the boy sing while his fingers
worked the clay. It entered his body not by the ears but by the bones, the
blood, the pulsing of the heart. Note by tremulous note, it was a song meant to
ascend the golden steps of Paradise.

And then it was gone, sharply, abruptly, with no warning. Benedict sprawled
face-down on the stones before the south porch of the cathedral, a little
trickle of blood running from his head. Over him stood Margaret.

"Damn you, you bastard limb of Satan, give this creature what it wants and let
it be gone!" she shrieked, waving the cudgel with which she'd struck the boy. It
was a piece of wood garnered from the trash of the street, bristling with
splinters. Master Giles stood as one lightning-struck, unable to believe the
brutality he'd just witnessed. Margaret ranted on at the unconscious boy:
"You'll have us all killed by faerie magic, else turned over to the Church
courts for harboring a heretic like you!" She whirled to face the elvenlord.
"Take your sister! Take her! Have no more dealings with the boy -- he's mad! I
am his guardian and I speak for him. Take her! She is freely given!"

The paralysis left Master Giles's limbs in a rush of red hate. He leaped forward
with a roar, hands hungering for Margaret's skinny neck. She shrieked and threw
herself for the bridle of the elf-lord's steed, hoping perhaps to merit his
protection as his good and faithful servant. The elf-lord merely tugged at the
reins and caused his mount to step primly back, out of the way between Master
Giles and Margaret. The stonecutter's hands met the woman's papery flesh and
closed tightly around her windpipe. The egg-faced highborn ladies chirped and
twittered, fine hands fluttering like doves in delight over the unexpected treat
of spectacle and death.

And then the miracle.

They could not tell -- none of them who stood there in the great cathedral's
shadow that day -- they could not say just when they first heard the music. It
was simply there, like the air and the sunlight and the smells of the town. Some
claimed it fell from heaven, a shower of angelic voices. Some raised
work-hardened hands to thick, ungainly lips and dreamed that the voices they
heard were their own, transformed by some greater power, raised in a song whose
words and music they had never been taught but had always known.

It was a healing, that music. It stole Master Giles's hands from around
Margaret's neck and set them to raise up the body of his son instead. It set the
bishop's heart and not just the words of his mouth on forgiveness, love,
salvation. It was a song kin and child of many songs: A mother's voice rejoicing
over a blessed cradle; a husbandman's rough cheer over a day's work done and
well done; a virgin lass weaving dreams of love into the melody that springs
unbidden to her lips when she first sees a young man's smile that is meant for
her alone; an old woman crooning a low, contented tune by the fireside where
even her dwindling life is beloved and welcomed by those around her.

Master Giles was the first to recognize the true source of that song. "The
statue!" he cried. "The statue is singing!" He held his son's limp body to his
breast with one strong arm and with his free hand gestured wildly at the stone
he had carved to match his son's clay model, the saint who was called soulless
sister to a lord of Faerie.

His words said all and said far too little. More than a single miracle had put
on a skin of music there that day. More than the single statue molded prayer
into melody as a blind boy molds beauty into clay. The lady's image did not sing
alone. All the stone saints sang together with her, and all the people of the
town, and all the stones of the cathedral too until the heavens could not help
but hear the sweet, pious petition of one yearning heart.

All the people of the town? No. Margaret stood cold and still as any stone,
unmoved by the chorus of life and love surging up around her. "Fools!" she
bellowed, red-faced, into the faces of the noblewomen. "Idiots!" she roared into
my lord bishop's own enraptured gaze and moving lips. "Break this spell, shatter
this glamour, burst this evil enchantment into a thousand pieces!"

But all that broke was the twelfth statue in its niche. It burst from the inside
out, like a bubble, and something small and pure and brilliant flew from its
shattered core and soared into the waiting smile of heaven.

Silence held the square before the great cathedral, silence and all its awesome
host, flourishing their smoke-streaked banners. Neither elf nor mortal dared to
break the holy reign of that innumerable army that laid ghostly swords to living
lips and stole away all chance of speech.

But all sounds are not speech, and often it is the unarmed scout who steals from
the city gates and breaks the encircling army's hold. A sob rang out in the
bright fall air, and the sound of a man falling to his knees on stone, in his
arms the still, pale body of his son.

It seemed like such a little hurt, the blow cold Margaret dealt blind Benedict.
Yet who has the eyes capable of seeing beneath the skin? Whose sight can discern
the tracings of mortality's doorways on the smiling skull? Who among us can tell
at which of these gates of blood and bone a single knock will open a wide way
for the dark-winged angel of death?

Benedict sagged in his father's arms, the warmth fast leaving those thin limbs,
his lips still parted in a song he would never finish. Master Giles cradled him
close and let his tears water eyes now sightless forever.

At length his raw grief eased and he became aware of a slim, strong hand on his
shoulder. Reluctantly he lifted his face from his boy's stone visage and turned
to meet the gaze of the elvenlord.

"Mortal man," said the master of the Fey, holding his wondrous steed by its
golden bridle, "I do not pretend to understand your miracles. As I am soulless,
I have no need of your heaven, no fear of your hell, and all your past and
future are a single summer's day to me. I have never tried to understand your
kind any more than your kind have tried to see the world through the eyes of the
cow you drive to the slaughter, or the donkey whose back you break with burdens,
or the stray dog you kick away from the fire. And yet --" His voice, so
flawless, caught itself upon the bramble of a sob. "And yet this -- this I think
I understand."

Master Giles, voice rasped over the elvenlord's words. "What good is all your
understanding when I have lost my son?"

They gathered around him then, all the lords and ladies of Faerie, all the
masters of the Church, the people of the town. Some kissed his cheek, some only
touched his hand, some begged blessing of dead Benedict's fragile corpse, others
stared at the little body with the relic-hunter's apacious hunger, biding time
and opportunity. Those mortals who could not find a way through the press to
reach the body looked angrily about for the hand that had struck down the child.
Not because to take so small a life was horror enough; for them such losses were
a common thing, an immutable face of life's harsh rule, to be clucked over and
tidily forgotten when they raised a stick against their own younglings. No,
these good folk wanted Margaret's blood because she had robbed them of a living
saint, of fresh miracles his song might have made their due, of the chance for
their own reflected glory. A great clamor arose from the crowd, a cry of hounds.

It was a very lucky thing for Margaret that the bishop's entourage ringed her
first, or she would have been raw strands of flesh and bloody bone by the time
the mob was through with her. She stood between two men-at-arms -- shaking with
fear, weeping for her own fate -- until the stronger of the two dealt her a
backhand blow to buckle her knees and make her keep still.

The bishop called for peace, but all he got was silence. His robes, stiff with
their fine embroidery of gold and silver and pearl, cut a furrow through the mob
like a plough's wooden tooth tearing up the soil. He stood over Master Giles and
said, "God's mercy is great, His judgments beyond question. For your son's life,
we have purchased sight of a miracle."

"Sight...." The word rang hollow in Master Giles's throat and the laughter that
followed left many men thinking of the echoing grave.

The bishop was not one to be belittled by his servant's inattention. He meant to
do a great thing here, before his new cathedral, so that ever afterward his
action might be linked to the miracle and his name remembered. "Life is God's to
give," he said with proper solemnity. "We cannot restore what He, in His wisdom,
has chosen to take. Yet this much I can do. You shall cut me a new statue to
stand in the twelfth niche and it shall be the image of your son." He beamed
down on the desolation of Master Giles's heart as if further tears from the
stonecutter would an act of basest ingratitude.

Ingrate that he was, Master Giles wept on.

The bishop's smile shriveled. "What ails you, man? What more would you have of
us? I tell you, life lies beyond my power to restore! The woman who has done
this shall be punished, be assured of it. We will hold her imprisoned until your
son's image has been raised to its proper place, then carry out her sentence on
these very stones, so that her death may be under his eyes!"

The ruler of the Fey, once more astride the saddle, moved his steed a few steps
nearer to my lord bishop's bejeweled person. The churchman's blazing splendor
dwindled to an ailing firefly's light beside the elf's cool beauty. "I too would
make a remembrance of this day," he said.

The elven lord spoke words like the sounding of glass chimes and a cold, silvery
mist fell over the square.

Master Giles gave a small, sharp cry and rose to his feet, his arms empty. The
mist drew in, gathering itself over Benedict's dead body like a winding sheet of
frost-struck churchyard moss, molding itself to breathless flesh until all the
child's seeming was gray and cold.

And then the mist was gone, and Master Giles knelt again beside his lost love's
child to touch his fingers to a smile now forever set. "Stone," he breathed. "He
is stone."

He only half-heard the Faerie spell that next touched the image. The stone
figure of the blind boy rose upon the hands of a thousand airy servants to
settle itself at last into the embrace of the vacant niche below the great rose
window. So lovingly did they bear the boy's frozen shape that they barely
stirred the shining rubble that remained from that other, shattered statue. In
truth, only a single fragment of stone fell when they set Benedict in his final
resting place.

It was very small, that bit of rock, but it had far to fall. Some say it fell.
Some say it flew, guided by a ghostly hand, to strike its only proper target:
Margaret. Fallen or flung, it struck her hard enough, where she stood between
the bishop's men. It brought her down.

At first they thought she was dead, but that might have been because her heart
had hardened itself pulseless long ago. Then someone felt her breath against his
skin and cried out, "She lives!" There was a murmur from the crowd then, a
confused grumble of voices. They did not know whether to be disappointed that
she had not died outright or pleased that she was still theirs to hold for the
burning.

Then she opened her eyes. They were stone. Not blind, my lord -- I mean no
clever jongleur's trick of words and meaning-- but stone as hard and gray and
smooth as a carved saint's hand. Here was another miracle, but one the people
fled, even the hosts of the Fey, even my lord bishop's men, whose swords had
known the taste of blood in Christ's name.

Only Master Giles remained behind with Margaret. None know what he said to her,
or if words passed between them at all. All know that when the next day's
dawning came, she crept out of dead Agnes's house, her hand on the stonecutter's
arm. And so it was each day until he died.

She begs before the cathedral now, a clump of rags and sorrow seated beneath the
niche that holds blind Benedict's image. Bereft of Master Giles's aid she was
soon the prey of every passing rogue, every marketplace sharper, a summer sheep
swiftly shorn of all she had. No man or woman of this city ever raised a hand to
prevent this, piously pointing out that it would be wrong to interfere in
heaven's manifest judgment against the woman.

There are always too many, Master, who will harp readily to no other verse than
God's vengeance. And yet these are the same who stood before the great cathedral
and witnessed proof of His unbounded mercy! Ah, me.

Some say her punishment came as holy penitence, others whisper how it was a
shifty trick of the Faerie host, done more by way of mischief than morality. Who
knows? Give her some coins, Master, if your heart is not made of the same stuff
as her eyes, and listen to the ringing sound the coppers make when they drop
into her begging bowl. And then, as she is blind, be blind yourself and let your
charity also fall into the empty bowls of all who huddle in the shadow of God's
house for mercy's sake.

There. Do you hear it? Some say it comes from the dead child's image, that sweet
song, the soul's own, the melody that breaks open the hard shells that hold us
here, that shatters the stone that forms around our hearts, that anchors us to
earth when we yearn for heaven: The song of the soulless who truly know the
value of a soul.

Or do you not hear it yet? Will you ever hear it at all? I have heard the wise
men teach that in the Gospel's tongue charity is but another word for love. More
coins, my lord-- an open hand, an open heart. Let them fall like angel voices,
let them chime out the hope of a full belly, a warm cloak, a roof against the
rain. From those few notes must arise that wondrous melody that rises from us
all whenever we give the poor more than a rag or a dish of scraps or the cold
lecture that they are themselves to blame for their poverty. More love, my lord,
more kindness, more music of the soul redeemed!

And that is all my song.