The Black Chalice (25 page)

She left him. Afterwards he could not remember how, if she changed into another creature or simply walked out the door.

He tried to pray, but the words were empty and mechanical; they were dry mouthings into a dry void. He took off his habit, took the lash of knotted thongs beside his bed and scourged himself until he could not bear it; it made no difference. God did not hear him, or see him, or care. God was as distant as the stars.

He went to his table, took fresh parchment, pressed the quill into his palm and began to write again.

* * *

It was August when we returned to Lys. We made a quick journey, despite the summer heat. Karelian was often lost in his own thoughts, and the men whispered that he was thinking of his wife, wondering about the child she would bear soon. He was worried about her, said some. No, said others darkly, he was worried about what the nestling would look like when it hatched.

But I knew he wasn’t thinking about her at all. He was thinking about Gottfried, about the destiny which lay before us. It troubled me to see his mood so dark, although I fancied I knew why. He was tired of war. Only surely, I thought, surely he could see this was different. The life of a good knight was an honorable life. It was he himself who had soiled it, making war as he was paid to do, without conscience, like a whore who opened her legs to any scoundrel with a coin, until finally she could no longer see the difference between her own corruption and the sanctity of a marriage.

He would come to value his knighthood again; I was sure of it. I still had faith in him; indeed, when he smiled at Gottfried, and raised his cup, and made his promise, I loved him almost as fiercely as before.

At times I could barely contain my soaring excitement. I longed to tell him I knew, to sit with him beside a night fire and talk about it, softly and perilously, talk about how strange and wonderful it was, how glad I was that Gottfried had chosen him, and he had chosen Gottfried.

I was a boy then; what more can I say? I was a boy who could forget in an hour every dark thing he had learned about his master, and remember only that he was a hero.

* * *

The child was three days in the world when we came to Lys. They tried to smile when they told him, and to say all the happy things: “The countess was delivered of a boy, my lord, a fine, healthy son….” But few would meet his eyes. And when he had gone, arms and dust and all up the narrow staircase to their chamber, Otto almost took the steward by the throat.

“Well?” he demanded.

The man shook his head. “Dark as a Turk,” he said sadly. “And enough black hair on his head to cover yours.”

“Damn little bitch,” Otto said bitterly— and not very softly, either.

To my considerable surprise, the steward called him for it.

“She is mistress here, my lord,” he said calmly. “You won’t speak ill of her in my presence.”

“I won’t
what?”

In another context I might have grinned at them. An armed knight looming over an aging willow of a servant, slender enough for Otto to snap in pieces with his huge arms. The steward looked up at the warrior without a flicker in his eyes, as if to say: Well, and what precisely are you going to do to me? Remember, I answer to
them.

“Get us some beer,” Otto said.

Most of the household was protective of Adelaide; I never understood why. Her extreme youth was a reason, perhaps: her strange moods, her gratitude to Karelian— a gratitude which I found too shamelessly flaunted to be real, but which others admired, particularly the women. She was generous with gifts and favors, too, small trinkets, a handful of coin on a saint’s day, a free afternoon to meet a lover in the village… oh, yes, she knew how to survive.

Karelian did not say a word about the child. Everyone assumed he would quietly send it away, and we waited for the thankful whisper from whoever would be the first to know:
Yes, it is gone. Last night, to the monks in Brochen….

Instead we heard nothing but rumors of war.

That very night, Karelian addressed his household and his men. There was concern, he said, over growing unrest beyond the Reinmark’s eastern borders. There might be a new invasion from the Baltic. The tribes there fought in snow as though they were born to it — which indeed they were — and when they came west they came in wintertime, when the great barrier rivers were sheets of ice and the armies of Christendom huddled in their castles.

It was only talk, the count said. But he would prepare nonetheless. By noon the next day his armorers were on the road to Karn to order weapons and mail, and Reinhard himself was sent out to the taverns and the tournament fields to look for men. The best men you can find, Karelian told him, for honor or for gold. Messengers went out to all the knights who held land under his authority, ordering them to report to him within the fortnight. The serfs were called in from their fields to build up the walls of the manor, and to carry food stores and supplies to the fortress in the Schildberge.

Gottfried’s plan was already underway— wonderfully, gloriously underway. And so when my lord left the manor house of Lys late at night, four days after we came there, without taking myself or any other man along, I knew without a doubt that he was going to meet one of Gottfried’s allies, or someone else who was in some way bound to our great enterprise.

Nothing had ever touched me as this did. I had wept to go along on the eastern crusade, but its splendor and promise were small compared to Gottfried’s hope. That had been Jerusalem; this would be the world. I was determined to be part of it, as much a part of it as I possibly could be.

So I followed the count of Lys to the Maren that night, under a brilliant three quarters moon. I did not intend to be discovered, but if by chance I were, I would throw myself at his feet. I would swear loyalty, secrecy, absolute obedience, anything he wanted, just to have a place with him, to be allowed to serve.

I was not surprised when he went to the river, rather than to another manor house or to the town. Everything would of course be desperately secret. Nor was I surprised when no one waited for him there; whoever was meeting him would soon come.

But then he did a strange thing. He took something from the pack behind his saddle— several things, one of them a spear. It was too dark to see what the other things were. He cleared a place beside a great fir tree and put the smaller things there, kneeling to arrange them very carefully— I would have said reverently, if I could have thought of any reason for using the word. Then he rose, gripping the spear in both hands, holding it high above his head. He shouted— one single word, one defiant cry in the shimmering darkness.

“Tyr!”

And then again, and once again. Three times he shouted it, and all my blood ran cold.

I knew then. Even before I watched him gather the stones and make the fire, I knew what he would do. My mind fought against it.
No,
I told myself,
it’s only a campfire, the night is chill….
The fire leapt high in its circle of stones, and its glitter caught the gold in his armbands as he reached and took the black feather from the pouch around his neck. He held it a moment, as if swept by doubt, by a terrible unwillingness to give up his talisman, his lady’s gift. Then he touched it to his lips and threw it in the fire.

I don’t know what I thought would happen, but for a long time nothing happened at all. He crouched beside the fire, turning at every small sound in the night, waiting, turning back to the fire again when no one came, poking at it with a purposeless, weary unease. The moon arched slowly westward, yet he clearly did not mean to leave.

I shared that long vigil with him, and through it all I fought against believing what I saw. It was not happening. He could not have come here to summon the witch of Car-Iduna. He simply could not, not
now…!

I knew he lusted after her; he had never stopped lusting after her. But dear God, he was not a fool. It had been one thing to amuse himself with her in Helmardin; all he risked there was his soul. But kingdoms were at stake now, and history itself. It was reckless beyond imagining to send for her now.

Then I thought why he might do so, and I caught my breath as though I had been struck with an arrow. Even today I can’t say which overwhelmed me more: the horror of it, or the drenching relief.

The child!

Of course! Oh yes, of course, the child. He had something now to trade for her favors: Rudi Selven’s sin-begotten bastard. Maybe he had brought the boy with him. Maybe that was what he had lain so carefully beside the fir tree.

It was a chilling thought, chilling and utterly evil, and it sickened me; yet even as I cringed from it and crossed myself and said no, he wouldn’t do it, he wouldn’t give a child to witches, he would kill it first— even then I was glad. Because it was an answer, and once I had one answer I did not need to seek another.

She emerged from the woods without a sound, a lithe shadow moving into the firelight, within reach of his hand before he saw her, so intent was he on his own thoughts, and so silent her approach.

He rose quickly, eagerly. She was as I remembered her — and no doubt as he did — all shimmer, all pale flesh and pale silk, reaching to embrace him, pressing herself into his arms before a word could be said, staying there and staying there, coiling against his mouth and his loins until I thought they would mate where they stood.

But no. She drew away, pulled her loose shawl up over her shoulders and wrapped it close. They spoke then, quietly, too quietly for me to hear. I did not want to hear. I wanted him to go and fetch the child from where he had lain it— for by now I was as certain of its presence as if I heard it cry. He would give her the child, and she would take it and go. Bed with him first, maybe, but go. And then, horrible though it was, it would be over. He would go back to Lys and to Gottfried and it would be over.

He drew his sword.

Oh, how my heart leapt with hope then! He wouldn’t give her the child, he wouldn’t give her anything, he would kill her where she stood…!

He dropped to one knee, and placed the weapon at her feet.

No!

He raised both hands, his palms pressed together. Her own hands closed over them. It was an action as familiar in our lands as the signing of the cross, and almost as meaningful— the action by which men swore allegiance to their lords.

No no no no no, it was not possible, no…!

Not this.

Not Karelian. Not after he had promised: On the cross, my lord, and on my hope of heaven!

Not this, not ever, and, dear God, not
now…!

I think I wept. I know my youth died that night, and all my love for him, and all my loyalty. His promise to Gottfried was a lie. Everything he had ever been was a lie, ruined and betrayed in Car-Iduna. He sold himself to her, and then he came bold and smiling to Gottfried, pretending loyalty, pretending opposition, pretending consent, drawing out of him his most dear and desperate secrets, so he could betray them to her.

Or so he could, perhaps, use them for himself…?

I went colder still, thinking thus. However fiercely the heathen powers would crave Gottfried’s defeat, there was one thing they would crave even more— a lord of their own to take his place. One who had the same blood, who could claim the same powers and the same dominion. Oh, how Karelian would love that, God damn him, with his taste for ermine and silver, with his insatiable appetite for whores!

I thought my mind would break. I went plunging down a bottomless shaft, tumbling from darkness to darkness. Never before or since have I felt such hatred. I wish to God my crossbow had been hanging from my saddle that night, as it often was when I went abroad. I might well have killed him then, and the world would now be different.

But I had no bow. I had only my hatred and my tears. I crawled away, cursing him over and over, calling him every foul name I knew and finding there were none foul enough. I made my way back to the manor house of Lys, slowly, as the witch moon fell into the western hills and the dawn began to redden.

I did not see the serfs already dragging rocks to his walls in the first morning light, or the sweep of hills beyond, black with pathless forest. I saw only the road, the road which went on forever, to Stavoren and Aachen and Rome and Jerusalem, to heaven and to hell. One road, one God, one duty for us all. My mind had calmed by then, and I knew what I would do. It was no sin to work harm against the wicked; no betrayal to turn treason back against the treasonous. I rode through the gates of Lys with my head held high, the thought of Gottfried pure and shining in my mind.

NINETEEN

In a Circle of Seven Stones

Those who commit perjury and practice sorcery
shall be cast out forever from the fellowship of God….

Laws of Edmund — 10th Century

* * *

The maid Matilde was a steady woman, too steady to be going on like this, lifting the blankets piece by piece and folding them fussily, gathering up the little handful of wrapped baby and babbling like a market wife:

“Oh, he’s a lovely tyke, my lord, just a darling little boy, healthy as can be, and always laughing. A bit dark, but that’s babies for you, my youngest sister was black-haired as a gypsy when she was born, and you ought to see her now, she’s fairer than I am. Isn’t he just a little princeling, my lord?”

Karelian took the child from her arms, and then, uncertain what to do with it, laid it down again on the foot of the bed. He unwrapped the swaddling clothes and watched the baby kick and grin at him. A fine boy, like she said, pretty and perfectly made. Without a trace of Brandeis in his eyes or his coloring. With so much dark hair— not wisps of it, like most babies had, but a fine headful, as though it were nothing to be ashamed of. As though he were flaunting himself to the world.

“He hardly cries at all, my lord,” Matilde went on. “He’s a sturdy one, he’ll grow up brave as a stag and just as tawny, I’ll bet on it, I’ve seen it twenty times before—”

“For Christ’s sake, stop prattling,” he said.

The silence fell like ash. He ignored it. He was exhausted. The dust of the long road from Stavoren still clung to his clothing and burned against his eyes, and his bitterness was raw as a wound. It would be war again, nothing but war, damn Gottfried von Heyden, damn the world.

Damn Adelaide.

A girl child he could have borne with, or a second child— dear Christ, he could have borne with almost anything, he was hungry enough to just live. But a firstborn son was the heir. Everything Karelian had, his rank, his wealth, his rich fields and orchards and cattle, would all go to this boy. The crystal streams shimmering with fish, the apple trees, the deer. The life he had bought at so high a price he could rarely bear to think about it… all for this black-haired stranger.

He looked across the child’s body towards Adelaide. She was small as a child herself in the big, canopied bed, small and unmoving with fear.

Your first fief, Karelian Brandeis; your colors hang from a house of blood; so they will again; so they will forever….

Gottfried. And now this. He had sworn no road on earth would lead him back to Jerusalem. He wondered now if any road existed which would lead him away.

“Matilde, if you will be so kind, put the child back in his cradle, and leave us,” he said.

She obeyed like a ghost.

He went to sit on the edge of the bed beside Adelaide. She looked feverish and exhausted. All her strength had gone into making her child; she had nothing left now. She watched him with the soft, darting eyes of a cornered animal.

It was impossible to hate her; it always had been. The abyss of power between them was too great. It was impossible to love her, probably, for the same reason.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes, my lord. Thank you.”

He wiped his face. He wanted to berate her, but it would be like clubbing a wounded man lying on the ground. Anything he might say to her she already knew. She had no right to do this to him. She could not expect him to accept it. He ought to throw her out on the road, and her brat with her.

She already knew. She acknowledged it with a pitiless honesty, as one acknowledged the existence of the sky. She had made a choice, and the rest followed. And she did not regret her choice. Deep down, in the private core of herself which the world had never touched and never would touch, she did not regret anything. That required courage, a courage all the more proud and astonishing because she was only a young girl.

Another reason it was impossible to hate her.

She spoke again, so softly he could barely hear. “What are you going to do, my lord?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You won’t kill him? Please? Please, my lord, give him away to someone, to the holy sisters, they’ll take care of him, please—!”

He stood up. This much at least he could answer.

“I won’t kill him,” he said. He would kill no more children, not for any cause on earth.

But what would he do? He could send it away. No one would blame him, not in the least; they would judge him a better man than most for never having used his sword. Only what if Matilde was right?

The child might, after all, grow up tawny as a stag. And even if it didn’t, it might still be his. Europe was full of mingling tribes. Rudi Selven got his own dark looks from somewhere; who could say what strange blood might also run in the veins of Brandeis? Karelian had not spent all those hours arguing with Gottfried for nothing. His own stubborn logic was still lying soft in the back of his mind:
You can’t be sure about blood, you can’t ever be absolutely sure…!

What if he sent the child away, and it was his? The thought made him cold to his bones.

There was that. A tiny, tiny thing, a remote possibility, but enough to make him pause. There was Adelaide, who would grieve to lose her child. The right and wrong of it was quite beside the point, she would grieve. And that made him pause, too, because he would have to live with it.

And there was Gottfried….

He walked towards the window, aware of her eyes following him. He looked back, and said it again. “I give you my word, Adelaide, I won’t kill him.”

He needed to bathe. He needed food and twenty hours of sleep. Whatever choice he made he would not make it now.

Or tomorrow either, probably.

The broad sweep of the valley of Lys lay golden with August; the Schildberge were beginning to darken as the sun moved west. He stood for a long time by the window, letting his eyes caress the fields and wander to the woods and the wilderness. Southwards, across the curving mountains, lay Dorn, and the ducal lands of Stavoren. To the north, far beyond the edges of the world, lay the wood of Helmardin.

He was not a fool; he knew where his inclinations were leading him. To refuse to act was to act nonetheless. A decision made by default was still a decision. He would probably never send the child away, because there would always be a reason for not doing it today.

And maybe that was all right. There was only war ahead of him now, war and darkness and very little time. Maybe there wouldn’t be any other children, only this one, and this one was whole and healthy and grinning at him, and really, did it matter so very much? He would have raised Saracen babes once and thought nothing of it. Life was too precious to throw away now; he was almost forty and going to war with the lord of the world….

No, probably he would never send the child away. And it wouldn’t matter much, not even to his honor. The world would soon have darker things to judge him for.

* * *

He tried to wait for the full moon, but his days dragged intolerably, and his nights were raw with longing. Once he knew he would go to her — and he knew it the moment he looked into the willstone — every delay became unbearable. Her love was his only hope of happiness, her power his only hope of life.

He rode to the great river in a waxing moon. He thought about her, and about Car-Iduna; and all the time, even when he was thinking about her, he was thinking also about Gottfried.

He had hated men before, and more than one of them. But the hatred he bore now towards his liege astonished even himself. It was villainy enough for Gottfried to plunge the Reinmark and the whole German empire into civil war for the sake of his own real or imaginary royal lineage. But this other thing — this fantasy of holy blood and world dominion, woven not out of madness but out of arrogance and sheer self-worship, with a perfectly rational mind — this made Karelian’s head spin, and made him angry as few things had made him angry in his life.

Gottfried had so many gifts. He was healthy and strong; he had a large and prosperous domain. He had the treasure of the great temple of Jerusalem, plundered with his kinsman’s considerable help. He had promised:
I will make the Reinmark into the jewel of the empire.
And Karelian had believed him. All those eighteen months in the Holy Land, after the sack of Jerusalem, when all he wanted in his despair and revulsion was to go home, he stayed with Gottfried because it still seemed worthwhile. Worthwhile to secure the fledgling state— having taken it at such cost, he thought, the least they could do was keep it. Worthwhile to strengthen his own bonds with his liege, a man he did not trust entirely or like very much at all, but for whom he felt a genuine respect. Worthwhile to finally have a place in the world, to have the valley of Lys and a woman sitting at his table and an end to the wandering and the blood.

And now Gottfried would take it all away again. Because no matter what happened, the count of Lys was still just a pawn on a game board. Still expendable. If Gottfried went down, all his chief supporters would go down with him. And if he won it would be worse, because then there would only be more wars— against the Franks, perhaps, or the Lombards, or the Byzantines. And Karelian could fight those wars for Gottfried, one after another.
(We will all look to you to cover the Reinmark with glory!)
He could kill and burn and plunder for Gottfried until finally, in one muddy field or another, he was struck down. Or until, in spite of all the odds, he went home battered and exhausted to a wife who no longer knew him, children he had hardly ever seen, apple trees he had never eaten from, to watch the golden fields of Lys pour their harvests into Gottfried’s war coffers, summer after summer, so it could go on. And on. And on.

No.

No, and again no. He wanted nothing more to do with war, any war at all, but if Gottfried forced him into one, then it was Gottfried he would fight, Gottfried who would discover just how good a knight he was, and how dangerous a man.

The river was black and silver, with pieces of scattered moonlight dancing on its back. It was a warm night, and the smells of the forest were rich and musky. The Maren sang as though it were alive— alive, and restless with melancholy, like an abandoned nymph.

The moon was high now. By its light he made his offerings and built the fire, and laid upon it the talisman the queen of Car-Iduna had given him.
Burn this by moonlight, in a circle of seven stones, within sight and sound of the Maren….

And then he waited, wondering desperately if she would come. Or if, when she came, he would be sorry. Perhaps it had all been sorcery and delusion, and now she would show herself to him as she really was, monstrous and evil, or perhaps just pathetic, just an aging whore who knew a few tricks. What if he looked at her now and saw someone he no longer wanted and dared not trust? He felt vulnerable as a babe, prisoned between darkness and darkness, between Gottfried and the unknown— but the unknown was still Car-Iduna, was still Raven, was still possible….

Was she truly beautiful?

She moved through the shadows towards him, more beautiful than anything that lived. Utterly as he remembered her; there was no delusion, she was all grace, all goddess, her black hair tangled in the wind, her breasts shimmering in the moonlight, her silken garments clinging to the curves of her loins.

“Karel.”

Perhaps there was a catch in her voice, a tiny sob of desire. He did not know and he did not care. Her arms closed around him, and he held her as he would have held his life.

* * *

“That was a lovely way to say hello, my lord count.” She stood away from him, wrapped in her power and the heavy shawl she wound deliberately, protectively about her shoulders. “But why have you sent for me?”

“Because I want to make love to you. Right here under the fir trees.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“In a better world, it would have been. In this world, no.”

So be it.

“I sent for you to offer you my fealty. And my heart. And my sword.” He looked at her, sorcerous and splendid in the moonlight, and left nothing unsaid. “And to ask for your help. I need your help, queen of Car-Iduna.”

“For what purpose?”

“To stop Gottfried.”

She smiled. It troubled him, her smile of raw triumph, but there was nowhere else for him to go, no one else to trust at all.

“Swear then,” she said softly.

He knelt, and swore his fealty, and then he truly would have bedded her under the fir trees, but she laughed, and pulled away from him again. She was no longer twenty, she said, she preferred a bed. Marius was setting up her tent less than a bowshot down the river.

“I will stay for three days. If you will be my guest there….” She smiled, and offered him her hand. The shawl had fallen loose again, and she left it so, the gesture even more an offering than her words.

“If you will be my guest there, any pleasure you might wish for will be yours.”

He took her arm as they began to walk. “I find it marvelous, lady, that you could come from Helmardin in so little time.”