The Black Chalice (13 page)

Selven wiped his face with the back of his hand. Then, for no reason Paul could imagine, he glanced once, with a terrible bitterness, towards Karelian of Lys.

“I forgot I was carrying it, my lord.”

“You remembered again right quickly when you wanted to. Give it here.”

Unwillingly, Selven approached his lord. From the day of his arrival Paul disliked the man, though at first he could not have said why. Now perhaps he could. Rudi’s arrogance, for one thing: the hard-edged, chip-on-his-shoulder arrogance which bristled against everything it met. The sullen demeanor as well; the watchfulness, the thin face hung with ragged hair, too young a face to be so knife-like and hard. The threat of coiled violence in his body, which made even his most innocent movements seem predatory and dangerous. He was a man to walk circles around, just like his liege.

He handed the dagger to Count Arnulf, casually, hilt first.

Arnulf examined it as though it were a gift.

“Pretty,” he said. “You’ve always wanted one of these, Peter. You can have it.”

The count’s squire, greedy little rat that he was, took it eagerly.

Rudolf’s face tightened a fraction more, but he only bowed faintly, said good night, and stalked away.

Arnulf sank into his chair.

“Best man I have,” he said to Karelian, wearily. “But always pushing the edges. Always. And snarly as hell. He’s got nerve, though, Christ. There’s only oneman in the Reinmark with more balls than Rudi Selven. And that one is me.”

* * *

It was not the German way for men and women to live or work apart. From the smallest serf’s hut to the great palace at Aachen, the sexes mingled freely. They ate at the same board, and often from the same plate. They did their different tasks side by side, and slept in the same rooms. Squires and pages bedded down on pallets beside their masters’ marriage beds. Any man rich enough to own a bath was served there by the household maids; they washed his hair and scrubbed his back and draped him in his towels. Paul’s own father, being a singularly chaste man, kept a linen cloth tied around his loins in his bath, and the canopy closed around his bed, but otherwise he lived as did his peers, and thought nothing of it.

Neither did Paul think anything of it until he saw something of the world. Even infidels were appalled by the Germans’ disgraceful lack of modesty. They assumed, as the Byzantines had, that every man in the Roman west was a savage, and every woman a whore— an outrageous assumption, considering their own decadence. At least the Europeans kept only one wife, and utterly forbade perversions against nature.

But Paul learned one thing from the eastern world nonetheless: the appearance of virtue mattered as well as the substance. It created a climate of morality. It made the idea of sin more unacceptable, and the possibility of it more difficult. Human carnality and wickedness being what they were, men were wise to keep their women sheltered.

How Arnulf of Ravensbruck reached the same conclusion Paul could not imagine. Perhaps it was because of his very shamelessness, his own intensely predatory sexuality. He knew better than anyone why his daughters should not sit through the long evenings in his feast hall with a horde of drunken knights; why they should not go hunting and riding all over the countryside like the daughters of his peers did; why they went nowhere, not even to the cathedral of Ravensbruck for Christmas Mass, without armed guards. The violence of the borderlands was a factor, of course: the insecurity, the possibility of sudden and pitiless attack. But the world everywhere was dangerous— surely nowhere more dangerous than on the long march to Jerusalem, where hundreds of men, even many of the highest rank, took along their wives.

Fear alone did not account for Arnulf’s caution. He kept his women from the world because he knew the world. Every time he looked at it, he saw himself.

Because of this, Karelian had very little contact with his bride. Once, very discreetly, he asked if they might spend an afternoon together— with servants present, of course, or the countess herself. He was nearly forty, he said, and the girl but seventeen; he had spent most of his life abroad; they had a great deal to learn about each other.

He did not mention it, of course, but he was also thoroughly bored with Arnulf’s company.

The count of Ravensbruck laughed.

“God’s blood, Karelian, it is clear you’ve never been married. You’ll see more than enough of her in the years to come.”

“That may be, my lord. Still, I would rather we didn’t marry as total strangers.”

“Why on earth not? There are only two things you need to know which matter, and you won’t learn either of them sitting by the window.”

The women, he went on, had a great deal of work to do preparing for the wedding, and the countess was not well.

“Yes, of course, I understand,” Karelian said. “It was a frivolous request. Forgive me.”

They went hunting instead. They exercised their horses in the count’s huge barracks yard, and practiced their swordplay. The days passed, short days heavy with low-hanging cloud, long evenings endless with war-talk. The winter closed, falling towards the solstice.

Karelian tried, without success, to drink himself into oblivion.

* * *

Maybe, Paul told himself, maybe it was just the season after all, the heaviness of winter. Maybe it was just his memories of Car-Iduna making him see evil everywhere, making him afraid. For today the sun was out, and their horses raced across the frozen ground with boundless energy, and they laughed, watching the pack animals grow laden with hares and partridges and small deer, riding and shooting and wishing the sun might never go down.

Karelian reined in his horse, letting the others go. He pulled a chunk of bread out his saddle pack, broke off half and gave it to Paul, and bit heartily into the other.

“They will lose us,” Paul said.

“Good.” The count chewed off another mouthful, and pointed casually to the southwest. “Look.”

For a moment Paul saw nothing except forest, bits of clearing, the lines of the distant hills. Then his eyes caught motion, and focused. Far away, almost too far to identify, a great stag moved among the scattered, naked trees.

“That one,” Karelian said quietly, “is mine.”

“Is there anything you don’t see, my lord?” Paul asked.

“Not much.”

They rode on slowly, quietly. A brisk wind was in their faces, carrying off the sound of their approach. Closer now, Paul could see the stag was magnificent, and his breath quickened with excitement. This would be a prize to set all of Ravensbruck a-marveling. Karelian slowed his horse and reached for his bow.

That was when the raven came. It swung in a soft black arc across the valley, graceful and silent. For a moment Karelian was distracted, his eyes following the bird. He smiled faintly, taking its appearance as an omen of good luck.

But for Paul the brightness of the day vanished in a breath, as though a huge black cloud had rolled across the sky. The tug in the pit of his stomach was no longer simply the thrill of the hunt; it was a soft whisper of fear. The same fear as before, the same certainty of danger which followed him everywhere in Ravensbruck.

Without haste, Karelian dismounted, braced the crossbow with his feet and drew it taut, aimed it, following the restless motions of the animal with infinite patience.

The raven circled, stark and shimmering against the winter sky.

For Christ’s sake, my lord, take your stag, and let us be gone from here…!

Karelian pulled the trigger. It was a splendid shot; the deer bolted, took two great leaps into the trees, and crashed to the earth. The count leapt onto his horse with a shout of triumph; and they raced towards their prey, ducking branches and bounding over deadfall.

“God, would you look at him!” Karelian said proudly as they approached. “We’ll feast like kings tonight.”

The raven screamed.

It was a terrible sound, a cry almost human in its ferocity. Karelian reared his mount to a halt, looking skyward for the bird. The smile of triumph vanished from his face and his hand closed on the hilt of his sword.

“My lord, what is it?” Paul whispered, every drop of his blood turning into ice.

The count did not answer. The raven shrieked again, then broke from its lazy flight like an arrow, diving low above a patch of heavy woods.

And so they saw in those woods a shadow, a fallen pine, the bent form of a man leveling a crossbow, other shadows close around him….

Karelian cursed, whirling his horse and bending low across its back.

“Ride, lad!” he shouted. “Ride for your life!”

Paul did not answer, or question, or look back. He lunged after Karelian, spurring his mount and praying without knowing that he did so. How foolish they had been, going off alone in this perilous country for such a frivolous prize as a stag; dear God, what empty vanity…! Then an arrow whistled past his shoulder and he thought only of wanting to live.

But they were not shooting at him. The first arrow thudded into Karelian’s saddle. Several others flew wild. The last (from a careful marksman, like Karelian himself?) struck the count high in the back. He faltered a little, but kept going; it was Paul who cried out, a blind cry to God that it could not be, a man like Karelian could not die like this, after so many glories, after Jerusalem itself, not like this, in a wretched little ambush in a miserable border mark, for the sake of a stag.

No!
He was sobbing in his throat, over and over,
no, no, no…!
Then the trees were around them, hundreds of trees, great black firs shutting out the sun and the arrows. They rode on for some time more, until they were sure they were not being followed. Karelian pulled up then, straightening, his face rigid with pain.

“Oh, my lord… here, let me help you…!” Paul started to dismount, meaning to draw the count from his saddle and tend his wound, but Karelian stopped him with a gesture.

“Break the damn thing off, Pauli. I don’t want to bleed all the way back to Ravensbruck.”

His voice was surprisingly strong; indeed he looked angry more than hurt. The shaft had struck high— too high to kill, unless the tip was poisoned or the wound went bad. And his heavy leather hauberk had absorbed most of the arrow’s force. Paul reached for the hideous thing, and suddenly he could not bear to touch it.

“A quick snap, Pauli, that’s the easy way,” Karelian said.

He wanted to do it. It was a perfectly reasonable, necessary thing, and no more painful than the surgeon’s care would be later. Instead he slid his hand over Karelian’s shoulder, and bending, pressed his face against his back.

It was only for a moment, the tiniest of moments. It meant nothing, only thankfulness. Why should he not be thankful that his lord was safe, and feel pity for his pain? It meant nothing evil, and if Karelian thought it did, well, that was Karelian’s own cynicism. Worldly men read sin into everything.

He felt tears against his face. He straightened, and broke off the arrow. He said inane things: “It’s just a tiny wound, my lord, are you sure you can ride?” He did not look at Karelian’s face, or meet his eyes, but it was only because he was ashamed of being maudlin. Only because of that.

They met up with the rest of the hunting party less than a league away. Rudolf of Selven was not with them; nobody knew where he was.

Karelian made light of the attack, blaming it on bandits, and asked if some of the men would be so kind as to fetch in his stag.

“You know where it is, Paul; show them. We can wait for you here.”

“My lord, let’s go back to Ravensbruck, and have your wound tended.”

“I want that stag.” He smiled then, his wonderfully charming smile which no one ever could resist. “It cost me enough.”

He wanted also to wait for Rudolf of Selven, Paul thought; to see from which direction he came, and what he might have to say for himself.

He came from the east, nearly an hour later, with lathered horses and no game. He had nothing to explain, and he did not much like being asked. He had picked up the trail of a boar, he said, and he did the same thing Karelian did. He went after a prize kill— only he hadn’t been as lucky.

Having said that, he sat on his horse with his thin face arrogantly set, his manner and his mood both defying Karelian, or anyone else who had any doubts about him, to go ahead and make something of it. No one did.

TEN

The Marriage

How much time did Adam and Eve spend in paradise?
Seven hours.

Why not any longer?
Because hardly was woman created when she sinned.

Honorius of Autun

* * *

We hunted no more that day. We took Karelian back to Ravensbruck, where his wound was carefully tended. Arnulf was furious. He swore a group of armed men would go out the next day and look for any sign of bandits, and hunt them down. But it snowed overnight, and the searchers found nothing, and the matter was soon brushed aside. Karelian accused no one. There was no evidence other than circumstance, and Ravensbruck was too tense and violent a place to make unfounded charges against anyone. But he watched his back very carefully thereafter, and he went nowhere without his men.

I was not entirely satisfied with Arnulf’s response. So I lured Peter into the back of the stable with the promise of a gold buckle from Damascus, and questioned him again, and found myself more troubled than before.

Karelian was not in his quarters where I sought him, after I had spoken with Peter. Nor was he with Arnulf in the great hall, or anywhere in the courtyard. The day was nearly gone by then; the last light failing. Finally one of the servants, laden down with a great armful of wood, made a simple gesture with his head towards the towering ramparts.

I ran all the way up, and when I came out on the roof the icy wind all but took my breath away. He was standing alone by the wall, staring to the southwest, to the distant hills of Helmardin. Wind rippled the furs on his collar and tugged at his hair. He heard my footsteps, and turned, and I saw the black feather trembling in his hand.

Strangely, it was I who felt embarrassed. He put the talisman away, without haste, without a trace of shame, and leaned both elbows on the castle wall, looking off towards the hills as before. I went to stand beside him.

“It will snow tonight, I think,” I said.

“Probably.”

I waited for him to speak further, to give me some kind of opening, but he did not, and finally I began again.

“I’ve just had a long talk with Peter, my lord.”

“And what does Peter have to say?”

“He says Rudolf of Selven had his heart set on marrying Adelaide himself.”

Karelian turned quickly. Too quickly, I thought. “Was there an agreement?” he demanded.

“No. None whatever. But Arnulf married three of his other daughters to local lords, and since the count always favored Rudi, apparently he took it for granted he’d have the same privilege. God knows he has a singular opinion of himself.”

Karelian turned back to the hills. He looked cold, and I thought perhaps he was in pain.

“How is it possible,” he brooded, “that a man can reach the age of nearly forty, and live through all manner of dangers, and see much of the world, and still be as naive as a boy?”

“Naive, my lord?” I protested, even though I had described him the same way in my private thoughts, more than once.

“Yes. To leap into one folly after another, and tell himself each time it’s going to be different. I haven’t even made this alliance yet, and already I regret it. I wish to God I had thanked Gottfried for his trouble, and ridden home to Lys, and found myself a widow with a pretty laugh and a big feather bed and a tavern.”

“You’re not serious, my lord.”

“I have rarely been more serious.” He paused, brushing fallen branches off the wall, into the tumbling wind. “This place stinks of death.”

“My lord, there are reckless, ambitious men everywhere—”

He looked at me, and looked away, and I could read his thoughts as clearly as if he had spoken them aloud:
You don’t know what in God’s name I’m talking about, do you, lad?

Stung, I tried to pursue it. “My lord, I don’t like it here, either. It’s disputed land, as most borders are, and Arnulf is a harsh and vulgar man. And if it was Selven who attacked us, then he’s nothing but a cutthroat. Even so, I don’t think it’s very different from a lot of other places—”

“Precisely,” he said.

“My lord, the world is the world. There is nowhere it’s different, except in a monastery.”

“Is that our choice, then? To be eunuchs or killers? My father said as much when I was twelve, every time I wanted something: Go be a monk. I never cared for the idea at the time, and I still don’t.

“Do you have any idea how weary I am of it, Pauli? Since Jerusalem I’ve been waiting for it to end. Waiting to live, to go home and spend the rest of my days listening to minstrels and admiring my apple trees.”

I lowered my eyes quickly, for I did not want him to see my disappointment— indeed, my disbelief. This was the greatest knight in the land, save for Gottfried himself. Past his prime as a fighting man, perhaps, but not by much, and what he had lost with age he more than made up for with experience. How could such a man be thinking about apple trees?

“I know,” he went on. “It all sounds strange to you, what I’m saying. You can’t wait to be a knight yourself, and ride off to some scarred field and earn your own glory. I was the same for a long time. I wanted to fight. And God knows I was good at it. So what if I had nothing but my horse and the mail shirt on my back? So what if I was only the last leftover son of a fool? I was better than any of them, and one day they would all know it.”

He smiled, a cold, drawn smile in the failing light. “There’s one great advantage in being good, Pauli. You might stay alive long enough to finally figure out what’s going on. We were just another breed of serfs, the lot of us. Highborn serfs in shining armor, killing each other for our keep, for the hope of a noble marriage or a piece of land. Only a handful of the wars I fought in were honest wars, led by good men with a good cause to fight. A handful, Pauli. The rest were for gain, or for malice, or for the sheer love of fighting.”

But my good lord, no one forced the sword into your hand. No one bound you to serve evil men. You bound yourself, for payment, for those things of the world which you are still attached to, quite as much as ever….

“My lord, that is the way of men, and it always has been. If you would offer your sword only to God—”

He laughed, harshly and scornfully, and the rest of my words dissolved in my throat.

“God’s swords are the bloodiest of all,” he said. “And the most dishonest.”

I studied the cracks in the grey stone wall.

“Then all those things you said in Car-Iduna, my lord— you meant them?” My words were part question, part statement, part blind pleading.

“Meant them?” He was genuinely astonished. “Of course I meant them! Whatever did you think?”

I did not answer, and he laughed again, but softly.

“I was not ensorceled, Pauli. My mind was quite my own, and it still is.”

He took out the feather once more, ran one finger softly over the black silk.

“She saved my life today, Pauli. You realize that, don’t you?”

“My lord, you can’t possibly believe—”

“How do you see it, then? Do you think the raven’s coming, and its warning, was all a singular coincidence?”

“I think if you were saved, my lord, it was God’s doing, and God’s will.”

“God and I are no longer on very good terms.”

“You may see it so. God may not.”

“God is a realist, I think. He knows me for what I am.”

I was never going to be close to him. And I understood it for the first time, I think, there on the windblown tower of Ravensbruck. The distance between us was too great— not the distance of years or rank, but the moral distance.

He told me once, not long before we left the Holy Land, that nearly every close friend he’d ever had was dead. He was drunk, and somewhat maudlin, but his loneliness was real enough. And I imagined I would be his friend. Not just his squire, not just a vassal or a comrade-in-arms, but a friend, the man to whom he would pour out his heart, with whom he would share his cloak in the rain, and his last crust of bread.

I marvel now, here in the quiet of my monastery cell, I marvel at my own continuing innocence. He was not the only one who was naive. A handful of our stumbling conversations should have been enough to make me see the truth, for every time we spoke it was the same. Every time we reached out to each other, we crashed against the walls of his worldliness and his dark unbelief. And each time, he turned away. He withdrew into his disappointment in me, his shrugging assumption that I was just a boy— an overzealous boy with a lot of monkish rhetoric and not much knowledge of the world. And yet I kept believing I could reach him, and earn his love, and bring him back to God. Such is the presumption, the terrible blindness of youth.

It was dawn. The candle guttered in its own ruins. Outside, it was June, the valley quivering with birdsong. In Paul’s cell it was dead winter, pitiless and cold, and death birds circled endlessly over the black towers of Ravensbruck.

They were all gone now, to God or to darkness: Arnulf and his wretched women, and Selven, and the Golden Duke who, that very winter, had been only months away from the dazzling center of their lives. All dead, or worse than dead.

Karelian too.

Paul’s body ached from hunger, from lashings, from cold, and yet all those hurts could not silence the other hurt. All those years, thirty-one of them, spent first in warfare and then in solitude— nothing, neither time nor prayer nor the undoing of worlds, would erase from his consciousness the face or the voice of Karelian Brandeis.

Twice during the long night he flung the quill away, and took the pages he had written and held them to his candle. They fluttered there, shimmering, the words only clearer for being framed against the light. They would not burn.

How terrible was sorcery, when it could violate the laws of nature, and compel him to remember things which had never been, and to experience in his memories monstrous desires which he had never felt. If he ever doubted the devil’s power, he could not doubt it now.

And the outcome for himself was inevitable. He saw it again and again in the horrors which came with his sleep. Fire. Billowing, windblown fire, like the long-ago burning of Ravensbruck. Fire and black terror, men and horses in flames, and Karelian with the arrow in his back, riding towards him, fire in his hair, reaching for him, laughing, their bodies meeting, mating, entangled in a horrid, irresistible embrace.

He slept as little now as his flesh could endure. More than once, groping for consciousness in panic and dismay, in the half-world between dream and waking, he had seen the succubi scurrying away— the demons who came and defiled men in their sleep. But he did not have to see them to know they had come. There was proof enough in the bed, and in the desolate, icy weakness of his body.

He found no respite in prayer. The sacred words dissolved into other words, the images of divine things into other images. Even the slow Gregorian chants, which to his brothers seemed so peaceful, so utterly monastic and pure and not of this world— to him they were sensual now, an exquisitely seductive rising and falling of sound which made him both languorous and tense. It made him think of dancers: lean, slow-moving dancers whose faces kept changing, whose naked bodies sank into the music and emerged again, always different. And always with Karelian. Circling his hard, tawny body and writhing against him and pulling him down, right there in the chapel, right in front of Paul. He would shudder and fling the images away, and they would come back. He would press his knees into the stone until they screamed with pain, and fasten his eyes on the crucifix, and it would be all right for a moment, a small moment, until the singing washed over him again and the face on the crucifix smiled and it was Karelian’s face, Karelian’s voice, soft amidst the chanting:

It’s no great matter, Pauli; I’ve known for a long time….

Week after week it went on like that. Finally, in early May, Anselm had given him some hope. There was a priest in Mainz who was known to have remarkable success in exorcising demons; he was also politically safe.

“He’s been one of the staunchest supporters of the great reform,” Anselm said. “He’s devoted to the pope. I am sure he’ll have no qualms about acting behind the abbot’s back. I’ve sent for him to come as soon as he can manage it.”

“You didn’t…?” Paul faltered. “You didn’t write anything down, I trust?”

“I sent a messenger, who will somehow have to be infinitely persuasive without saying much. Fortunately Father Wilhelm knows me slightly. I’m sure he will come, Paul.”

Anselm looked at him then, very hard, and went on: “Why don’t you ask to go to the infirmary for a few days? Bleeding might help, and some rest certainly would. You look quite terrible, my friend.”

“Nothing will help,” Paul said. “Not until it’s gone.”

That had been weeks ago. Six weeks, to be exact; he knew because the church counted the days, allotting a special ritual to each. Otherwise he would not have known. The days and hours he lived by were those of a distant winter; they were days of storm, of wind and witchcraft and darkfall at Ravensbruck.

* * *

There is so little good in the souls of women.