The Black Chalice (10 page)

“But my lord, we’ll have to confess—!”

“Confess what you please. Your sins are between you and God, if you have any, which I truly doubt. Do not mention Car-Iduna, and do not mention her.” His eyes held mine. “Your word, Pauli.”

“And what of you?” I whispered. “You were bewitched, I know, but still you must be shriven—”

“Must I? The last time I asked to be shriven, the priest assured me I had no sins worth mentioning. That was in Jerusalem, the day after we sacked it. If I was sinless then, I’ve been a veritable angel ever since.”

“My lord….”

“I loved her,” he said. “I regret only that it ended. Let’s leave it so. Give me your word you will be silent.”

It is astonishing, really, how men can delude themselves. I should have reported our adventure to the archbishop at Stavoren, perhaps to the duke, perhaps even to the pope. But instead I found every possible excuse for being silent. If I spoke he would be angry, I told myself, and he would harden in his sin. This way, with time, he would repent. He would marry and live a Christian life, and forget her, and repent.

My true reason, if I had known it, I could not have borne to face.

* * *

It was four days’ ride to Ravensbruck. The sun stayed with us for two; then the clouds returned, hanging almost on our banners, and the fogs sent knives into our bones. Karelian’s moods were as melancholy as the weather. He sought me out sometimes, in ways he had never done before, and told me things about his life. Dark things, as if to make me understand:
See, that was why I went to Car-Iduna, why I didn’t care what happened, why I loved her….
I didn’t argue with him, or tell him he had everything turned upside down. I listened, and was content to be chosen.

Before Car-Iduna, I almost worshiped the count of Lys. I thought him the finest man in the world, a man with every grace and virtue, a man whom it honored me greatly to serve. Now I saw he was only a flawed human being, cynical, debauched, and profoundly unhappy, a worldling without faith or purpose in his life. I saw, to my great bewilderment at the mere age of nineteen, that I was in many ways a stronger man than he was, and wiser about the world, and more honest.

It seemed indecent to have such thoughts, and terribly arrogant. I tried to put them aside. I tried to pray them away. But they remained, and I had to face them. Karelian was not the splendid, shining hero I had imagined him to be.

But he still could be, if he chose, and if I helped him. I could bring him back to God. But I mustn’t quarrel with him; no one ever got anywhere quarreling with Karelian. I would have to do it by example— by loyalty, by unfailing devotion, by having always the right words at the most appropriate moments….

Oh, I flattered myself. I had fantasies of his gratitude for the renewed gift of faith, fantasies of him kneeling in midnight vigils with tears running down his face, adoring the cross which he had served but never understood. I had fantasies of the honors he would receive in the world, of his praise on the lips of every Christian lord, God’s true knight at last, as he was meant to be.

And finally, when some years had passed and he had sons, he would make a last, perfect renunciation, and we would ride together in the vanguard of Gottfried’s new band of chaste knights, fighting wherever Christian men might need us, sworn to neither wife nor liege lord, only to God alone.

So I dreamt, crossing the ragged wilds of the northern mark, lying by his side in chilly manors with the wind tugging at the roofs, looking up finally at the bleak stone heights of Ravensbruck, at the castle which brooded like a sullen eagle over all its lonely world.

If there is a drearier place on earth than the one we found there, I never want to see it. It was border country, a harsh land made almost unlivable by war. Every village we passed was fortified, every farmstead walled or braced against a hill. Between settlements, we saw everywhere long stretches of abandoned land, overgrowing with scrub, scattered here and there with the charred skeletons of houses, with stark wooden crosses driven into the ground. Here men lived once, and here the Prussians came, the Frisians, the Latvians, the Danes. Or some angry vassal, spurred to rebellion by an insult. Or merely a kinsman, greedy for his brother’s power. Count Arnulf’s own son had warred against him here— and died, so the stories said, chained in a cellar without food.

We could see the castle for hours before we reached it, and the closer we came, the more forbidding it appeared. A few ragged banners flew from the turrets; unsmiling pikemen guarded the gates; rubbish and leaves clotted in the black waters of the moat. The knights who met us, even to the highest born, were splendidly armed, but otherwise ragged as barbarians.

“The border lords have a hard life.” So Duke Gottfried had said to us in Stavoren, speaking of Ravensbruck and Arnulf, the man they called the Iron Count. “But if they are loyal, they are the very bones of the land.”

I knew we would find no luxury here, no soft graces, and I didn’t especially care. My father thought every man alive should bathe, and cut his hair, and sweep away his leavings. “There is no excuse,” he used to say, “ever, for living like a pig.” But my father lived in the south, in a proper manor house, and I had come to judge the matter less harshly than he did. Still, I noticed the disorder in the courtyard, the stench, the snarling, ill-fed dogs. The tension. That I noticed most of all: the edge in men’s voices, the coldness in their eyes, the hints of savagery hanging in the air like bracken.

But I was still too thankful for our escape from Car-Iduna to mind anything very much, or to be half as alert as I should have been. Otherwise I might have paid more attention to the man who stood apart from the others, and did not come to greet us. A dark-haired man, rare enough among the Germans. Not much older than me in years, but a full-fledged knight, already perilous and steeped in blood. A dog without a shred of honor, whose name I will not write here because he does not deserve to be remembered.

Today — in the world I will no longer live in — today his son is count of Lys.

SEVEN

Sigune

Thus shall all my sorrows be utterly avenged.

The Nibelungelied

* * *

Sigune chose the day very carefully. As it happened, it was the day on which the count of Lys and his escort encountered the merchants on the road to Karlsbruck, and decided to continue on through Helmardin. She knew nothing of this, although the count and his intended marriage were very much on her mind. She chose the day by the moon; it would be full that night, hidden beyond the heavy northern clouds. Among her own people, this was judged an especially good time for sorcery— a time when the currents of power in the world were unsteady, and sensible men did not take unnecessary risks.

Arnulf of Ravensbruck had never been a man to worry much about risks. She would always give him credit for it; he was brave. But courage was a double-edged virtue; it could shade so easily into arrogance, into a brazen self-importance which refused to admit that other, lesser beings might be dangerous. Beings such as horses, and servants, and women….

They had warned him about the horse. Probably, over the years, some of them had warned him about her.
Get rid of that creature; there’s something strange about her, something deadly….
Her face alone was enough to do it, with its twisted nose and caved-in cheek-bone, with scars all over half of it. Anyone with a face like hers was probably a witch.

It was cold on the castle wall. The wind whipped her hair around her face, fine flaxen hair with the odd strand of white. She was forty, or something near to it. She counted the years indifferently. They varied little for a slave, until today.

Today everything would change. It began to change the moment Arnulf of Ravensbruck called for his hunting gear and his favorite stallion— the stallion they had warned him about, the one who was acting so strangely. From the ramparts she watched the count stride out with his squire and his best men, Rudolf of Selven among them, dark Rudolf who could hate almost as well as she could, which was saying a great deal.

Her eyes followed Arnulf, a great beast of a man in ragged skins and iron. He was not handsome. He was not even awesome, the way his liege lord Duke Gottfried was awesome. Arnulf was merely brutish and hard, the kind of man who was admired on a battlefield and hated everywhere else. The grooms brought out his horse, a splendid grey already fighting its bridle and tossing its head.

Sigune ignored the count now, watching the animal, calling to it with her thoughts. It was time now at last. All the spells had been cast, all the dark charms slipped into the creature’s grain, so many times, with so much care.

I am here, Silverwind. I am Sigune, do you remember me? Sigune who comes by night, and speaks a tongue you’ve never heard. Look at him, your master! See how ugly he is, and how cruel; see the sharp spurs on his boots, the iron in his eyes! I know you hate him, just as I do; our hatred is our strength.

A groom held the count’s stirrup. He vaulted into his saddle with impressive ease, considering his age and the armor he was wearing. He sawed at the horse’s reins, turning towards the open gates.

It happened very quickly— too quickly, after so many years of waiting. The animal reared and plunged, squealing with rage, slashing out with hooves and teeth at everything in reach. Sigune leaned forward; her fingers clawed at the stone battlement as the courtyard below her exploded into chaos. The grooms scattered with shouts of alarm; one of them, stumbling, was almost trampled. Chickens bounded in all directions, squawking and flapping. Men shouted commands and counter-commands, their own mounts panicking as the stallion lunged and screamed and struck.

Arnulf of Ravensbruck could ride anything that ran on four legs; so the talk went in the drinking halls. For a few brief moments it seemed true; he seemed rooted to his saddle. Even from here she could hear his curses. He was a Christian man, but he could curse to make his Christian devil blush. Then the horse went down, and the curses ended. The men of Ravensbruck never agreed, neither then nor ever after, if it fell from its own lunatic plunging, or if Arnulf, great brute that he was, had jerked its head back too far as it reared, and pulled it off its feet. She heard him scream— a long, agonized scream from somewhere on the ground, somewhere behind the heaving grey mass. The horse flailed to its feet and turned with a neigh of triumph. It would have reared again, and trampled him, but six hunter knights with crossbows brought it down. The stallion stumbled to its knees, speared with arrows. Only Sigune, from her vantage point on the wall, saw that Rudolf of Selven, the fastest and the finest shot in Ravensbruck, fired last of all… when it no longer mattered.

How they ran about then, shouting and blaming each other, shouting for a litter, for a surgeon, for the countess, for God and the Virgin Mary and whomever else they thought might be useful. Finally, of course, they would remember to shout for Sigune. She wiped her face, surprised in this cold weather to find it spattered with sweat, and went back to the wash-house where they would come to fetch her.

Like always, it was cold there, and bone-rotting damp. She filled the great hanging cauldrons with water, and laid wood carefully on the braziers— only a little wood, to make the water a little tempered. It was quite enough, the steward said. Why should she have more, when the countess herself had to beg for what she needed?

Maybe now, with the master shivering on his death bed, they would spend a few coins on wood.

* * *

He was not on his death bed, however; not nearly. His back was injured, and one leg was wrenched from its knee socket and horribly broken. The surgeon went on at great length that he would live, oh, certainly he would live, he would probably ride again, it was amazing how a strong man could recover from nearly anything.

What was really amazing, Sigune thought, was how fear made perfectly sensible people babble.

She drew as close as she dared among the cluster of huddling servants. Once, for a brief time long ago, she would have been the one to tend him, to cut away the mud-spattered garments and bathe his wounds, to hold him while the doctor bound his bones, to brew the herbs, and sit through the long night and hold the cup to his lips.

The countess did it now, the third countess, dutiful as a nun, flinching at the sight of his smashed leg, at the splinters of his bones sticking out like spikes of broken wood, wiping away the blood and crossing herself at his blasphemies. Sigune watched her without sympathy. Women came and went here— three wedded wives and God alone knew how many concubines and captives of war, all of them bedded and most of them made mothers and some of them dead. She had cared about a few of them over the years, but not this one. This one could go to the dark realms of Hel with her barbarous lord, and nothing furred or feathered or finned in the world would ever trouble itself to fetch her back.

She heard steps, a flurry of whispers. Adelaide was hurrying down the stairs, across the stone hall. The circle of armed men and servants parted respectfully to let her pass.

She was a slender girl, pale from too little sun, always fragile, and pretty the way fragile things always were. In another, gentler world she might have fashioned herself some kind of life. Here she would live as bluebells lived on rocks, flowering before the snow was gone— and dead, likely as not, before the trees were green.

She brushed past Sigune, pausing to stare at the bloodied wreckage of her father’s leg, creeping closer, her eyes wide with question and fear.

Everywhere, on every face, Sigune saw the same fear. He was lord over all of them. Nothing could happen to him without it mattering to them, and the mattering was likely to be hard.

He turned his face a little, saw Adelaide, and lifted his hand.

“Come here, girl.”

She edged to his side, took the outstretched hand obediently.

“Father…?”

“God damned horse,” he said roughly. “Don’t worry; I’ll see you wedded before I die. Aye, and with brats too, if this count of Lys is half his father’s son.”

She smiled. It was a small, obedient smile, the best she could manage, and all which was required. She was well-schooled at seventeen in the art of seeming, better known to women as the art of survival.

Sturdy men seized Arnulf’s limbs and head, pinning him to the table like a felon to be tortured. His squire placed a piece of wood between Arnulf’s teeth. The surgeon began his work, carefully, without haste. Small grunts broke from the count’s mouth; then, finally, a long, clenched wail of pain. The countess looked away.

Sigune did not.

She had wanted him dead. But the gods had been wiser, as they always were. It was much better this way. Better he should lie here for a while, and learn what it meant to be defenseless, and see everything go, see his world splintering shard by shard. Right here in his drinking hall. He was too injured, the surgeon said, to be carried up the steep and narrow staircase to his chambers. Yes, right here, without even privacy to shatter in, among dogs and brawling men and nothing else; what else was there in life for a warrior lord?

The ultimate vengeance, she reflected, was neither death nor maiming. It was knowledge. And indeed she should have guessed as much, even from the little she knew of Christianity. What God saved for his damned, even beyond the torments of fire, was the agony of truth.

All night, as the moon rose full behind the clouds, and even the most devoted of Arnulf’s kin and caretakers fell one by one asleep, Sigune sat near him and reflected on his truth.

No more battles for you, Arnulf of Ravensbruck. No more booty. No more glorious tales to tell, no more women to capture. It’s all over but the long dying. And I will be here till the end.

I will do everything they tell me. I will fetch the water, and drag in the wood. I will pack hot bricks at your feet, and clean up your vomit, and pour hot drinks for your countess, and listen to her sorrows. What better way could I find to watch you suffer?

How strange you all are, in your amazing arrogance! You think everything you did to me was simply forgotten— erased, like the wood huts of Kevra, swallowed in a gulp of flame. Nothing left but the plunder— a few cattle, a few sacks of grain, a few handfuls of jewelry. Seven women. Young enough to lust for, old enough to survive the terrible journey west. How far was it, Arnulf of Ravensbruck? I do not remember. Across two great rivers, I’ve been told, there live the Wends. The wild people, you call them; I wonder who you use to judge them by. You liked my looks, you said; you liked my spirit. It is with women as with horses, is it not, my lord? The sport is in breaking them. After that a horse is just another horse.

Do you have any notion how I hated you? No, you couldn’t have; such hatred is a man’s privilege. Malice we females are supposed to be capable of, oh yes, malice and spite, but the pure, deep-souled hatred of an enemy who lives to kill— you don’t think a woman strong enough for that. It wasn’t why you kept me so carefully under guard. You guarded me like you guard Adelaide, to keep me pure, to keep me away from other men. Or maybe you thought I would kill myself. A woman should, after all, should she not, since her honor is her life? And I did think about it, not for honor but for grief. For hating the tread of your boots in the hall, and the sound of your voice in the courtyard, and the weight of your body in my bed.

The wounded man shifted and groaned in his sleep, and a dog lying near perked up its head and whimpered. Sigune looked at the count, at the fire, at the scatter of bodies lying in the hall.

You never knew anything about me, not one of you in all your arrogance and armor. You least of all, my lord— I must call you lord, even in my thoughts; they are a slave’s thoughts still. Who else but a slave would have loved you in the end?

How do I explain it, even to myself? I know it happened, but I do not want to believe it, and I would not believe it, only I remember and I know I’m not mad. All I can say is this: finally I wanted to live, and there are things no one can live with. I could not look at my own life and believe it had been reduced to nothing. To less than nothing, just a slave’s bed and a dog’s whimper for bread. And so I came to love you— look, my lord, surprise! I can still choose, I can still be something human, it’s not so bad, I’m not a dog, I am your woman.

Madness? Yes, perhaps, a kind of madness. I don’t know who made the choice— myself, or something else inside myself, maybe a soul, maybe an animal, something which said: I will act, because I must. I will choose, because I must. And if there is only one choice possible, then I will choose it, and I will call it a choice, even though it isn’t… because I must.

But you never knew. When I began to smile and try to please you, I was just a slave learning to be good. When I began to take pleasure in your bed, well, it just proved what you always knew: women were all whores, and after they wept and struggled for awhile they came around to liking it, all of them; some just played the game longer than others, that was all. And no, I never told you; I had some pride left, and some sense. You would have found it amusing, such a word in my mouth. Love. I find it amusing now myself, dear gods. Look at you, stinking and blood-spattered, nothing but a pirate, a butcher. You murdered my family and I forgave you; I marked it down to fate and the fortunes of war. I even came to admire your glittering ferocity. Everyone feared you— didn’t that prove how bold you were, how splendidly male? I could take pride in it, and pride in myself. I was a match for you, I was your shield woman, your Brunhilde, your lioness….