The Black Chalice (17 page)

“Farewell, my lord,” Karelian said. He bowed again, and nodded to the rest of us to take our leave; we passed before the count of Ravensbruck one by one, mouthing empty courtesies; by the time the last of us had said good-bye Adelaide was at the doorway.

And Count Arnulf was on his feet.

“Harlot!” he shouted. “Treacherous whore, I’m not done with you yet!”

Karelian spun around like a cat, as if expecting a death-blow. More than one man’s eyes swept to the lines of weapons hanging by the door — theirs and ours — but no one moved. Except Adelaide, who neither paused nor looked back, who did not even seem to hear. I wondered then if she still walked within this world.

We strapped on our arms and followed her into the snow.

FIFTEEN

Of Love and Memory

He who defiles himself with a male shall do penance for fifteen years.
He who murders, ten or seven years.

Penitential of Theodore

* * *

We had come to Ravensbruck throbbing with drums and glittering with banners. We left like thieves in the night, with only lanterns raised against a black and starless sky. Adelaide and her servants rode in a small sleigh, with heated bricks piled under their feet, and ermine robes wrapped all around their bodies. She was better, but she was not well. I knew Karelian was sorely troubled, torn between his desire to get away before some small thing blew Ravensbruck apart, and ourselves with it, and his fear that she was unready for the journey.

But he had little cause for fear, as it turned out. We were not three hours out of Ravensbruck when the weather changed. The dawn clouds lifted and broke into patches of blue light. Soft winds came from the south; by mid-morning water was dripping from the branches of the trees, and the men rode with their cloaks flung back across their shoulders.

“God is with us,” Reinhard said. More than one man smiled and nodded and agreed with him. I was the only one who remembered Helmardin, who understood that strange and unnatural weather was not necessarily the work of God.

* * *

Karn was a market town, crowded and wild and far older than the Reinmark itself. Before the Germans came, Frankish tribes had traded here, and feasted, and built walls, and before them the Huns and even earlier the Celts. Small remnants of each race remained — bits of ruin, scraps of language, strange colorings of eyes and hair. When I first came to Karn as a boy, I had marvelled at its bewildering clamor, its pushing and shoving and endlessly acquisitive humanity, its dangerousness. It was the place where young men of the Reinmark went to find debauchery, where good fighting men and assassins both waited to hire out their swords, where thieves and prostitutes and jongleurs filled the taverns and the streets.

I saw bigger and more glittering cities afterwards, on my long journey to the Holy Land. But Karn still possessed for me an aura of excitement and worldliness and peril. We stayed there till the end of the winter. Our host was a baron named Lehelin. He was a kinsman of Karelian’s by virtue of having married a Brandeis cousin from somewhere in the Silverwald. Kinship was a formality, however; what they really had in common was soldiering. They had fought together in at least a dozen foreign wars, and while neither of them was especially interested in remembering the bloodshed, they positively reveled in remembering everything else, especially the taverns and the courtesans.

Lehelin’s barony was close to the city, and I swear we spent more time in Karn than in his manor house, most of it in a place called the White Ram, where the beer was particularly good and the entertainment often scandalous.

This was a side of Karelian I had already seen in the Holy Land, but which I had quietly forgotten. He loved revelry, be it a half-naked infidel dancing to a reed pipe in a perfumed room, or an inn full of drunken soldiers roaring out bawdy songs. He loved it all. And I suppose that is how men get, when they live so close to death, and have no solid core of faith to hold them steady. They rush to lose themselves in drink, in laughter, and above all in lust.

It was an evening in March when the jongleurs came to the White Ram, a particular group of jongleurs whom I will remember until I die. They entertained us well, I will admit; but that is not why I remember them.

I remember because of what happened after.

They were ratty people, dirty and ill-kempt, yet with a powerful and fascinating energy. At first we did not even realize they were acting out a play. A woman simply ambled in through the tavern door, hunched and dressed in black, wearing a witch’s cone hat and carrying a basket. Moments later a man stormed in after her, cursing at the top of his lungs.

“Damn you, woman!” he was shouting. “Damn you, I want it back!”

Conversations broke off; men turned in their chairs to see what was the matter. The woman paused and turned, peering at her pursuer as though she could not remember where she had seen him before.

“You want what back?” she asked.

“You know perfectly well!” He patted his crotch. “You miserable thieving hag, I want it back!”

“Oh, that. What a fuss you men make over trifles.”

“Trifles? God’s teeth, you call it a trifle? I might as well be dead. What am I supposed to tell my wife?”

“Tell her you lost it in a dice game. She’ll believe you.”

The man made as if to leap at her, and then thought better of it. He paced frantically, waving his arms about and cursing more.

Then he stopped.

“I’ll put an end to you, woman! I’ll tell the archbishop about you, just see if I won’t!”

“Go ahead; it won’t do you any good. Better you give me three copper pennies, and you can have your dinkle back.”

“Three pennies? God’s blood, you’re a thief twice over!”

“Well, there’s some aren’t worth three pennies, that be true. Never mind. I’ll keep it, and give it to some poor sot what’s lost it in the wars.” She shifted the basket on her arm, and began to walk away.

“No, you don’t!” He sprang past her, and stood square in her path. “I want it back!”

“Then shell out your three pennies. Nobody pays me any more; how’s an old whore supposed to live, will you tell me?”

“I can’t spare three pennies,” he wailed. “I’ll starve.”

“One way or the other,” she said. “You decide.”

The man looked about, as if expecting help from the tavern crowd. He received only laughter and rude joshing.

“All right,” he said. “Take your cursed money!”

She tucked away the coins he offered her, and opened her basket.

“Here,” she said. “Take your pick.” And spilled out on a table several dozen male members.

I could not tell how they had been made, but they looked quite life-like from a distance. A few poor fools in the audience gulped with shock, but most of them roared with laughter, and kept on laughing harder and harder as the man picked up one cock after another, turning them in his hands, and trying them on for size, joking all the while. He held up a tiny wizened member, not much bigger than a boy’s thumb: “Bet I know who this belongs to….” The tavern howled. Another one, long and stretched: “This fellow’s been in some strange places, don’t you think?” Then a great thick one, massive enough to equip a horse.

“Ah, yes. This will suit me just fine.”

The witch slapped him over the wrist, so hard that he yelped and dropped his prize. “No, you don’t,” she said grimly. “That one belongs to the archbishop.”

Everyone laughed harder than ever, and applauded the players as they went around the tavern accepting coins or offers of food and drink. The woman took off her cone hat and her cape, and flirted with the men like any other tavern whore. She was past her youth and rather shapeless, but there was an earthy sensuality about her; she would earn a few more coins before the night was over. Otto looked, and thought it over, and passed.

When she had moved on, Lehelin smiled and asked him:

“Did you recognize her?”

“No. Should I have?”

“I just wondered. She was on the crusade, you know. With the people’s army. She made it all the way, too. Claims she did a roaring business in Jerusalem, when it was all over.”

“Actually, you know who she reminds me of?” Karelian said. “The one in Rouen. The one Armand and Aric were always fighting over — do you remember — the one who emptied the chamber pots on people’s heads in the morning when they wouldn’t let her sleep?”

“Oh, yes, Jesus…. Bellefleur her name was, wasn’t it? Nothing very belle about that one.”

And they were off again.

It went on for hours. They talked, and the jongleurs entertained us more. Karelian laughed harder than anyone at their jokes, and drummed his fingers on the table in time with their songs. He was hungry for laughter, I knew; hungry for an escape from the dark things in his mind, and the thought of the woman he had married. A woman who laughed at inappropriate things and wept at even more inappropriate ones, who stared across roomfuls of strangers looking for a face which was never there, who went up to men sometimes with the innocence of a child, calling them by other peoples’ names, asking if they had seen the hunter elves, if they knew where the dark-haired ones had gone. A woman who smiled at him and stayed close by his side— and wedged colored stones into cracks in her hostess’s walls, and twisted the first spring flowers into tangled knots and hung them behind the tapestries.

He did not share her bed. She was still ill, the flush of fever still bright in her cheeks. She had the manor’s best room, and her maids with her day and night; the physician came every second day with fresh medicines and fresh advice. But it was not her illness, I think, which kept Karelian from her embrace; it was the ghost who walked beside her, the strange light burning in her eyes.

I was sorry for him, and yet in another part of my mind I was glad. She was not worthy of him. It was better if there was nothing between them, better if he would never love her, never be lured into trusting her again. Better if his heart and his mind could stay free to choose another, cleaner, and eternal love.

We returned to Lehelin’s manor in high spirits. After another flagon or two had been finished off there, and all the good nights had been spoken three times over, we found ourselves in our chamber without a thought in our minds of sleep; we were past it.

“All those places you were with Lehelin, fighting,” I said. “It must have been a long time ago.”

“A very long time ago. When we were both young and innocent.” He looked up, and added dryly: “And don’t look so skeptical, my friend. Hard as you may find it to believe, there was a time when I was young and innocent.”

He looked so very splendid then. I imagined him as a young knight, without the guilt and the cynicism. I envied Lehelin for knowing him then.

I suppose it was too many mugs of beer which put the next words into my mouth; I have no other excuse.

“Can I ask you something, my lord? I know it’s not my business, and I will quite understand if you tell me so. Only … only I keep wondering why you … why you did what you did at Ravensbruck.”

As soon as I had spoken I realized how outrageous it was, and I was afraid he might be terribly angry. But he was not angry at all. Neither was he honest.

He smiled. “Quite apart from any other consideration, Pauli, it was one of Count Arnulf’s daughters or the other. Imagine me married to little Helga.”

I did not want to imagine it at all.

“There is a story about Lehelin I must tell you,” he said, changing the subject rather obviously. “We were in Burgundy. We didn’t have a copper sou between us, and we’d borrowed to the point where no one would lend us anything more. We wondered if we’d have to start selling off our horses and equipment— after a man does that, God knows, he might as well carve himself a begging bowl.

“We heard about a tournament outside La Tour, so we went. It was absolute chaos; I have been in far more orderly real battles. All I managed to capture was three horses, and not very good ones, either. Lehelin got nothing. He was unhorsed, and lost his mount and his weapons. They were dragging him off by his feet when I rescued him.

“He wasn’t happy. We took a room in a ratty little inn in the town. All evening he pouted, and walked around feeling sorry for himself, until I was ready to heave him out the window. Then all at once he leaned out into the street, and shouted at me: ‘Come, Karel, come quickly!’ and went tearing down the stairs. I followed him, thinking either the Vikings had landed or Lady Godiva was riding through town.

“It was nearly dark; the tournament had been over for hours. And there, ambling down the street on a completely exhausted horse, was a wounded knight. He had lost both helmet and shield; he was bleeding all over his mount, and barely conscious. Lehelin grabs the bridle, and says to him very formally: ‘Sir, you are my prisoner; yield or die!’”

“My lord, you didn’t…?”

“Oh, but we did. We dragged the poor devil off his horse, and up the stairs, and into our room, and shackled him to the bed. We fetched him a surgeon, and we fed him, but we kept him prisoner there until he paid his ransom. Five hundred silver marks we got, too; he was a man of substance.”

Karelian was laughing at the memory.

“The best part of all was that he couldn’t remember a thing after his helmet was battered off his head. He really believed Lehelin had beaten him in combat, and he was very respectful to us. It seems no one had ever beaten him before. He even gave us presents when he left.”

“Which you took?”

“Which we took.”

I was laughing, too; I could not help it. I don’t know why. I would scarcely find the story amusing now. But at the time I was almost doubled over with giddiness.

“And that, my lord … was when you were … young … and … innocent…?”

We laughed over it the way he must have laughed with Lehelin, long ago in Burgundy, mauling each other and shouting like children in a summer field, being complete fools, complete friends, rank forgotten, everything forgotten except delight and triumph and sheer flamboyant energy.