The Black Chalice (26 page)

“And is it the fighting man who finds it marvelous, I wonder, or the lover?”

“Both.”

“I could come from Helmardin faster than you might imagine, Karel. But not this fast. And not with my steward and my tent. We’ve been in the Schildberge for several days. I wanted to be here when you came back from Stavoren.” She reached, and brushed her fingers across his cheek. “Just in case.”

Her tent was small but beautifully appointed, close to the riverbank, lying in a circle of seven stones. Marius fished for them, and trapped small birds, and gathered berries. Once or twice Karelian saw water veelas prowling the green banks, and other watchers deep in the trees, but most times it was as if they were utterly alone.

The sun rose, and fell, and rose again; he had no sense of time. He took her in her silken bed, and on the riverbank, and against the trunks of trees, and it was not enough. He took her with his hands and with his mouth, and gave himself up to the worship of her own, and it was not enough. His body kindled again and again, with a marvelous potency he had not enjoyed since his early youth. Maybe it was sorcery; they said veelas would sometimes do that for a man, if they liked him especially well. But they said a lot of things about veelas. Maybe it was sorcery. Or maybe flesh itself could turn sorcerous sometimes, and pull fire from the sun and the earth and the burning wind, and turn it into passion.

They swam naked in the Maren, and sat by its banks as the moon rose, wrapped only in their cloaks. They wandered in the dead heat of noon into the forest, the air heavy with roses and humming with drunken bumblebees rolling from flower to flower. Once she took off her gown there, and the great shifting oaks patterned light and shadow on her flesh until he would have sworn she was a hind, or a wild cat.

And then quite suddenly she was. He caught his breath as the edges of light around her began to ripple, to dissolve. She was no longer there, and a golden creature was padding through the grass, supple and powerful and perilously fanged, moving towards him as if he were prey.

“Jesus!”

He backed away; for a moment he was terrified and utterly appalled; then Raven’s arm was slipping around his neck, and she was laughing, a woman again, her dark eyes wantonly amused.

“Did I frighten you, my lord?” she said.

“A little.” He closed his hands on her soft bare shoulders, wondering how they could possibly be anything but what they were now, graceful and vulnerable. “If you have it in mind to eat me, lady, I hope you choose to do it in a more conventional fashion.”

She smiled. “I’ll say one thing for you, Karelian Brandeis. You’re a steady man under fire.”

“So I have been told.”

“What are you going to do about Gottfried?”

“Raise an army, and place it and myself at the emperor’s disposal. There’s not much else I can do.”

“You think like a soldier.”

“Well, you’ll have to forgive me for it. I’ve been one for twenty-two years.”

“If you want to defeat a man like Gottfried von Heyden, you’ll have to start thinking like a witch.”

But he was not thinking like either at the moment; he was thinking like a hot-blooded boy in a grove with a shepherdess. The sun played strange shades of blue into her hair, and glitters of silver. The trees moved forest shadows across her throat, across the ivory grace of her thighs. He followed the shifting patterns with his fingertips, slowly, wherever they led. First with his fingertips, and then with his mouth.

“You are insatiable, Karel.”

Her breasts were exquisite, thrust out like a wanton girl’s, with a faint upward curve. They leaned into his hands like purring cats, the sweet copper tips rising delightfully to his tongue.

“I am insatiable?” he said. “Now the raven is calling the poor, muddled magpie black.”

“Magpie indeed. You don’t have a whisper of white plumage on you anywhere.”

“How would you know?”

“Do you think there’s any bit of you I haven’t already seen, and touched, and tasted?”

“That was hours ago. The world is very changeable. You’re a shapeshifter; for all you know I might be one, too.”

She laughed and pressed close to him, kissing his mouth for a very long, delicious time.

“Tell me,” he murmured, “how a witch would make war against the lord of the world.”

* * *

They spoke of him the first time over Marius’s offerings of fresh trout and bread, in the smoky dawn of the first of those three days. Karelian was tired from his vigil, and she from her long journey. But they were not tired enough to sleep, not just yet, with the excitement of pleasure still clinging to their bodies, and so many things needing to be said.

“So what has he done, our Golden Duke?” she asked.

Marius knelt beside them, opening the slender fishes with great care, peeling away the nets of bones and carving the flesh into pieces small enough to eat.

Karelian hesitated, and she said, with a smile towards the steward, “You may speak freely, Karel. Marius is more loyal than my shadow.”

“It seems our duke is a blood descendant of Jesus Christ, and therefore should be king. First of the empire, and then of the world.”

Raven — may all the gods cherish her forever — Raven did what he had longed to do in the pavilion at Stavoren. She laughed. It spilled out almost before he’d finished speaking, a wonderful fit of helpless, shameless, dark-in-the-throat laughter.

“Karel, no?” she whispered between gulps of it.

“Yes.”

“Jesus Christ? The original, one and only Jesus of Nazareth? Gottfried is his son and heir?”

“Well, his many times great great grandson and heir. By way of the Merovingians, needless to say.”

“Oh, tell me, Karel! Tell me how he’s worked all this out!”

She seized a piece of fish and bit into it eagerly, her eyes equally eager on his face.

“Well, as best as I can remember it; it wasn’t too clear to start with….”

He had been hungry as a wolf, smelling the fire, the rich promise of frying fish. He was, quite suddenly, no longer hungry. He told her everything Gottfried had said, aware of the scorn in his voice, of the coil of hatred knotting in his belly.

When he finished, she said simply:

“He can’t possibly get away with it. Against the Church, the whole of Christendom, a Christian emperor? There’s not a hope of it; they’ll burn him at the stake before a week is out. Gottfried is not a fool, Karelian; there’s something wrong here—”

“He’s not going to make that part of it public yet— the holy blood part.”

“But then he’s just a traitor. They won’t burn him, they’ll hang him— and the Reinmark can pay in blood for his ambition.”

“He thinks he can win.”

“All traitors think so.”

“He has some grounds for it.”

She looked up sharply. “The princes of Germany won’t back him in an unprovoked rebellion. Some may, but not enough of them to topple Ehrenfried. The pope tried twice, and he couldn’t raise enough support to topple Ehrenfried.”

“He has a… a device he brought back from Palestine. A crystal pyramid; he can call up images in it—”

“The willstone?
He has the willstone?”
Raven’s face turned ashen in the pale dawn light. “So that’s it, dear gods! No wonder he’s become so bold.”

He was as astonished as she had been a moment earlier. “You know about this stone?”

“Yes. I know about it.”

“What is it then, can you tell me? He said it belonged to the kings of Israel, and many things in the Bible were done by its power.”

“He may well be right. The stone is very old, Karel; even in Car-Iduna we don’t know its origins. But we think it was made far in the east, by men who served a sky god likeYahweh. The pyramid was the most sacred of all their sacred symbols. It was the shape of the world they were building: linear, unyielding, and ruled by an absolute power.”

She fell silent for a moment; a piece of bread lay unnoticed in her hand; after a moment she put it back on the plate. The curve of her mouth was hard and bitter.

“Are you sure he has it, Karel? Did you see it?”

“Yes, I saw it. I saw him use it to conjure images.”

She was a powerful woman; he was not used to seeing fear in her eyes. But fear was there now, quiet and icy.

“It’s very evil, then, this stone,” he said. The words were not quite a statement, not quite a question.

She shook her head. “It’s not evil in itself; it’s only a thing. And things do no evil, Karel; they simply are. Only… only as it is in the nature of the circle to connect, and of the spiral to return, so it is in the nature of the pyramid to do neither. The pyramid knows only how to layer and to climb, to press more and more of the world beneath its weight for the glory of an ever smaller and more distant pinnacle.

“The willstone is rightly named; it’s a thing of pure power, power which is not connected to anything except its user. And so it has served far more often for evil than for good. The kings of Israel may well have used it. They waged a long and bitter war there against Astarte, against the gods in the world and the world of circled magic. The willstone would have suited them, as it suits Gottfried. But all magic can be turned back on itself by those who know how.”

“He says no one can use the crystal but himself; he considers it the proof of his divinity—”

“He may say so, but he’d never dare to let anyone try.”

“Actually, he has. Several different men, in fact.”

“Really? He’s a good deal bolder than I judged him, then.”

“And very shrewd. I can see why he’d want to know, no matter what the risk. He even gave it to me.”

She seemed almost to freeze, like a woodland creature in the shadow of a hawk.

“Did it make images for you?”

“No.” He paused, savoring his next words. “But it took every fragment of strength I had to prevent it.”

“You can command it?” she whispered.

“I think so. I would have to be able to use it freely to be sure, but yes, I think so.”

She laughed, softly and triumphantly. “By all the gods, Karel, you delight me. You utterly delight me.”

She reached impulsively to run her hand into his hair, across the line of his cheekbone. And then, quite suddenly, her smile was gone.

“He would have killed you, you know that?” she said. “If the surface of the stone had shown so much as a ripple, you’d have never left Stavoren alive.”

“Yes. I know.” He was moved by the warmth in her warning, the tenderness. He caught her still lingering hand and kissed it even more lingeringly.

“If I hadn’t known it, lady, I couldn’t possibly have resisted the image I wanted to call up.”

“Which was?”

“Yourself. Without a thread of raiment on, I might add.”

She smiled. She was very pleased with him, and the taste of it was good. Too good. He might be willing to do most anything, he reflected, to keep such fierce admiration kindled in her eyes. For as long as he could. For as long as there might be of days and hours before they brought him down.

Sunrise fell to moonrise, moonrise to day. For a while it rained, small drops pattering endlessly on the roof of the tent and running in small rivers down its sides. Sexual languor melted into voluptuous sleep, and sleep into waking languor. The world smelled of water and flowers and wind. They went swimming, and ate again. They sat by the Maren as the sun rose to noon. Sometimes, for as much as an hour, she would fall silent, lost in her own sorcerous thoughts, searching out answers, and he would go off by himself, or chat with Marius if he was nearby.

Marius, as it happened, was plucking the last feathers out of a pair of partridges he had trapped. He held up the naked birds with a smile of satisfaction.

“Supper, my lord. Nice and fat and tasty.”

Karelian smiled. “You take very good care of us, Marius.”

The dwarf smiled, too. His smile was sly and worldly and ever so slightly sad.

“I’m deformed, my lord count. Even in Car-Iduna. There are many things I wanted in my life which I will never have.” He spoke without self-pity; a fact was simply a fact. “So I take my pleasure in seeing other people happy. Especially my lady, and those who delight her. Which you must do, my lord, singularly well; I can’t remember when she ever spent so much time in bed.”

To Karelian’s own surprise he flushed faintly, and the dwarf laughed with mischievous glee.

“You are presumptuous,” Karelian said, but he said it without rancor.

“Dreadfully so,” Marius agreed. “But I’m also irreplaceable. Would you like these baked, my lord, or shall I roast them on a spit?”

One day passed, and then another. There were only two things they cared about very much, here in the circle of seven stones: their hunger for each other, and their hatred for the Golden Duke, around whose name they brooded like hunting falcons, circling and moving off and circling back again.

“There’s one thing in this I still don’t understand,” he said.

“Only one?” she responded dryly.

He ignored her reply. From the start his mind had snagged on this question. He considered it a dozen times, only to abandon it in pure bewilderment.

“Gottfried is a Christian, Raven; I know him well enough to know that. He may have gone to Jerusalem for glory and power, but he also went for the Church and for God. Nothing he’s ever said, or ever done, has caused me to wonder about his faith.

“He told me he prayed over this, and frankly, I believe him. He told me he didn’t want to accept it. It’s completely heretical, after all. Something in all of it….” Karelian made a brief but eloquent gesture of frustration. “Something just doesn’t make sense.”

“The trouble with you, my lord of Lys, is your admirable and uncommon tendency to think straight.”

She smiled. “A little too straight, sometimes. Why can a Christian not be sorcerer?”

He stared at her. “A sorcerer? Gottfried?”

“Yes. He imagines he has royal blood from the Merovingians, and sacred blood from Jesus Christ. What he has, in fact, is witch blood from Dorn.”

“You’re going to have to explain that.”

“Your lines are crossed twice, Karelian. Three generations back, your great grandfather married Maria von Heyden, which makes you an heir of Gottfried’s house—”