The Black Chalice (2 page)

TWO

Helmardin

Mankind is by nature wild and strange.

Wolfram von Eschenbach

* * *

From the very start Paul’s heart misgave him— from the very moment he reached down to sweep Karelian’s coin out of the dust, and followed after him into the black November hills. Nothing thereafter was quite the same. The easy talk of the soldiers began to annoy him, and the edginess of the servants annoyed him more. He found himself looking at the sky and the forest like a fugitive watching for enemies.

He was not usually given to wild superstitions; his father had made sure of it. Unlike many of his peers, the Baron von Ardiun had learned to read and write, and to look upon the world as something which could be studied and understood. He was a practical man, hard-minded and hard-souled, without a trace of weakness in his being, and deeply religious in the same practical way. He laughed at most of what passed for sorcery among the common folk. Rabbits’ feet and rubbish, he called it. God disposed of matters in the world, he said, not old hags with broken teeth. God decided when it would rain. God sent sicknesses to men and beasts, and God cured them. And that was the end of it.

Mostly Paul agreed with him, for he loved his father, and he feared him. But there were times when troubling questions nudged into his mind, when it seemed to him that life was stranger than his father was willing to acknowledge— stranger and much darker. He might never have done more than wonder about it, though, if he had not gone to the Holy Land. There he saw things which his father had neither seen nor dreamt of. The east was full of magic. And the east was powerful— powerful not merely in wealth and arms, but in other, more disturbing ways. More than one good knight rode to Jerusalem a devoted Christian, and was lured there into every kind of wickedness, and came home again scarcely a Christian at all.

And from the day the count’s retinue left Stavoren, and journeyed farther and farther into the hinterlands, Paul found himself wondering if the Reinmark were Christian, either, in anything but name. He thought again of all those things from his childhood which his father had ignored. The old women mouthing incantations over leather boots and hearthstones and marriage beds. The strange ointments they made, the secret potions, the amulets. The Walpurgisnacht fires. The people who lived in the woods, without crops or beasts or trades, and yet never went hungry.

Then Karelian tossed a silver coin, and left his fate to fortune, and a thousand dark things seemed to ride with them now, as if invited. Black clouds, so heavy over the forests there seemed to be no heaven there at all. Black birds in great, silent flocks, wheeling and circling. Scattered farmhouses huddled in scattered patches of ill-cleared land, more hostile, somehow, than the wilderness around them. Rough folk with ragged hair and sullen faces, staring at the passing lords without a trace of human feeling in their eyes. And the wind, howling in the dead trees, tugging at his hair, endlessly snarling and laughing. It seemed to Paul the laughter of fiends, who remembered when there had been no priests here, and no empire, and who would try with all their dark power to bring an end to both.

More than once he straightened in his saddle, and wiped his face, and took himself in hand. It was November, he reminded himself; what other weather might a man expect? And peasants were a sullen, dirty lot, and always had been. As for the wind, and the birds, and the sounds in the forest, dear God, the world was full of such things; if he saw an omen in every leaf and feather he would drive himself mad.

Then they came to the inn, and his heart misgave him again.

The inn was the last habitation along this road, the last shelter they would find until they passed through the forest and arrived at Marenfeld, beyond the hills. He did not expect it to be a pleasant lodging, or even a comfortable one, but he was appalled at the gloomy look of it. It was low and rough-hewn and almost windowless, cowering against the base of a heavily wooded hill. It seemed to him less a hostel for travellers than a hideout for thieves.

The innkeeper and his servants were accommodating— indeed too much so. They fell over themselves scurrying to welcome such an extraordinary guest as the new count of Lys. But it seemed to Paul they smiled too much, and much too easily. The innkeeper had an ugly laugh and a vicious scar across his cheek. A long knife hung from his belt, and he wore a thong around his neck on which were threaded several heathen charms. All the country folk wore such things, and kept on wearing them no matter what the priests said. In some villages, Paul knew, the priests started wearing them, too. The innkeeper’s wife was the only woman in the place; she had a hard, unsmiling face, and sullen eyes. She rarely spoke, but when she did her words were clipped and bitter.

Karelian did not seem concerned at all. Over the years he had rubbed shoulders with many kinds of people, and he accepted his surroundings with an easy worldliness. After everyone had eaten, and the beer had flowed freely for a while, he put his feet up on the crate where the innkeeper’s cat was snuggled, and asked how the north had fared during the duke’s long absence.

The innkeeper shrugged and said nothing.

“We met some merchants on the way,” the count persisted, “who were turned back at Karlsbruck. They said many things have suffered from neglect.”

The innkeeper smiled. “That be true, my lord, but we knows the duke been fightin’ heathens, and winnin’ back Jerusalem. And God’ll shower favors on us for it, an’ make us rich in heaven. Won’t he, my lord?”

He spoke with perfect humility, but his hand while he spoke fingered some horrid animal thing hanging from his neck, and his eyes were not humble at all.

But Karelian showed no resentment. The cat stretched, eyed him for a moment, and wandered onto his lap. He reached to stroke it idly.

“The duke brought many riches back from the east,” he said. “He’s promised to make the Reinmark into the jewel of the empire.”

The innkeeper crossed himself. “Pray God I live to see it,” he said.

Paul shifted irritably in his chair, wishing Karelian would object to this carefully servile insolence. In the same breath he admitted that Karelian’s unruffled self-possession, his refusal to make quarrels out of trifles, his willingness to listen to almost anyone at least once— all were the qualities of a wise and steady man.

“My squire is growing weary,” the count said. “And in truth, so am I. We must make an early start in the morning.”

“You be headin’ back to Karn, then, my lord?”

“No. We’ll take the forest road, and go through Helmardin. It will be a rougher journey, but a quicker one. I was already expected in Ravensbruck some days ago.”

One by one the scattered voices in the room broke off, and Paul could hear the wind howling, and the crackle of fire in the hearth, and the harsh scrape of the innkeeper’s iron cup as he shoved it across the table.

“Be a strange place, Helmardin,” he said. “Some as goes there don’t come back.”

“We are well armed,” Karelian said. “Any bandits who attacked a company as large and skilled as ours would be foolish indeed.”

“It isn’t bandits you got to fear!” This was one of the hostlers, a young man, skinny and ill-kempt as a mongrel. “Leastways, it isn’t only bandits. I been in that place once, and I wouldn’t never go there again, not for all the gold on the streets of Jerusalem!”

“You’d be ill-rewarded if you went for that,” Karelian said dryly. “But surely many travellers must use the road, or there’d soon be no road left at all.”

“Many do,” the innkeeper said. “And most pass safe. But even those will tell you things as makes you shiver. There be dead men there. And veelas.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a veela,” Otto said lightly. His mind was always on lechery, and he was more than a little bit drunk. “I’ve heard said they’re pretty, and they don’t wear any clothes.”

A small ripple of laughter went around the room, a mixture of bawdy amusement and very real unease.

“You don’t want to see a veela,” the hostler said fiercely. “Not ever you don’t! They’ll kill you for anything. They say the woods is theirs. All I did was sit beside a tree to rest, and she come and tried to strangle me! Look!” He pulled open his rough shirt so they could see the mark on his neck, a thin, deep-cut mark like the scar from a garotte. “Best you don’t go to Helmardin, my lord! It be no place for Christian men!”

Karelian considered him in silence. It was Otto’s squire Dalbert, a youth Paul’s age and not easily frightened, who asked the obvious question:

“Well, if she was strangling you like that, then how come you’re here, and still very much alive?”

“The Virgin saved me.” Quickly and reverently the hostler crossed himself. “I called out to her with my very last breath, and she come in a flash of light, golden as the sun, and the veela screamed and let me go, and flew away.”

“But you were travelling alone, weren’t you?” Karelian said. “Veelas are solitary creatures. I’ve never yet heard of one appearing among large groups of men.”

“Be a great fool if she did,” the innkeeper’s wife said scornfully.

Her husband cast her a brief, unpleasant look.

“Veelas be the least of it, my lord,” he said. “There’s worse things in that devil’s wood. And armed men have come to grief there, too. Near fifty good knights they were, with their sergeants and men at arms along with them, in the time of Henry II, headin’ for Ravensbruck after the massacre at Dorn. They rode into Helmardin with all their banners flying, an’ none was ever seen again.”

“The witch got
them
in her castle,” one of the servants muttered darkly.

“And the bishop of Ravensbruck, too,” added another.

Paul shuddered faintly. The massacre of Dorn was nearly a hundred years ago, and the loss of the emperor’s men had been made into a legend. But the bishop of Ravensbruck disappeared not long before Paul was born, and his father talked about it many times. The bishop was a brave and a saintly man. Learning of pagan practices and heresies in the regions of Karlsbruck and Helmardin, he sent two of his priests to investigate. After the priests visited many villages, and spoke to many common folk, they returned by the forest road to Ravensbruck, strangely altered, and bearing an astonishing tale.

They had, they said, become lost in a fog, and after wandering for hours they came upon a splendid castle, with high ramparts and golden banners whose crests they had never seen before. They went to bang on the gates to ask where they might be, and how they might find their way back.

Inside was music, and tables laden with food, and knights and ladies in beautiful garments, and minnesingers, and wild animals which were friendly no matter how dangerous they looked, and many other wonderful things. Ruling this castle was a black-haired queen, more beautiful than any goddess, who gave them food and wine and spoke with them— but what she spoke of, they swore they could not remember. After some days, they begged to take their leave, and return to their duties. The queen gave them gifts of food, and let them go. When they stepped out of the castle gates, the forest road was before their feet, as though they had never left it, and when they looked behind where they had come, there was only woodland, shimmering with sun.

This tale they told to the bishop of Ravensbruck, who promptly ordered an escort of soldiers, and went in search of the castle. He would exorcise it, he said, and cast the woman out, for all this kingdom belonged now to Christ. Like the triumphant ravagers of Dorn, the bishop and his escort were never seen again.

But the two priests could not forget that magic place. However much they prayed and fasted and did penance, they could not free themselves from memories, or from their longing to go back again. One at last undertook a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and died in the journey. The other withdrew to an isolated monastery, where, according to the stories, he ended his days quite mad.

* * *

“Perhaps we shouldn’t go there after all, my lord.”

Paul’s heart leapt at the seneschal’s words, but he said nothing, his face lowered as he unfastened his master’s hauberk in their small, ugly room.

Reinhard was sitting with his back to the door, his arms resting lightly on his knees. He would spend the night there, perhaps lying down for a few hours of sleep, or perhaps not; but no enemy would enter the room without killing him first. A good man, Reinhard was, loyal and solid as a rock. But he was no match for Karelian in mind or in spirit, and he never would be— a fact which pleased Paul very much, though it shamed him to admit it.

“You’re very serious about this,” Karelian said.

“I fear no enemy I can see, my lord,” the knight said stoutly. “I think you know it well—”

“I do,” Karelian interrupted him, smiling faintly.

“But these evil things…! What harm would be done if we returned to Karn? Count Arnulf won’t blame you for the delay, knowing the bridge is gone. And besides, the wedding won’t be till after Twelfthnight.”

The count sat on his bed, and Paul dropped to one knee to begin tugging off his boots.

“Faithful Pauli,” Karelian said to him. “You haven’t said a word, but you also think we should go back to Karn, don’t you?”