The Black Chalice (36 page)

He stood up, and carried the pouch some distance from his fire, and placed it under a heavy rock at the base of a tree. And then he waited as the sky closed ever more deep around him. Perhaps she would answer him now. But only owls spoke in the night, and distant wolves, and sparks exploding briefly against the darkness.

Just a trifle more briefly, perhaps, than the proud-borne life of a man….

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Meeting

My face was pale and my frame chilled with fasting;
yet my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust
kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead.

Saint Jerome

* * *

There were many days in my life I would willingly forget, but those days when I searched for Karelian were the worst I ever lived through. I was not good at hunting, not even for hares. I had no eye for the forest, and no heart for it, either. Even at the best of times it seemed to me an alien place: mysterious, unpredictable, and dangerous.

Sometimes I saw bands of Gottfried’s knights; they were hunting for him, too. And day upon day I saw ravens, great black and wheeling ravens, circling the forest (searching for carrion, my father would have said; I knew better). But Karelian had vanished utterly, and finally I began to believe that he was dead.

Oh, there were stories enough. The whole of the Reinmark was alive with stories, each one stranger than the last, and all of them third-hand or worse. “Oh, no, my lord, I didn’t see it myself, my lord. It was in Karn I heard it.” Or in Schafsburg, or Saint Magdalene, or the little inn by the abbey of Dorn. The demon lord of Lys, I was told, had been fetched out of the Schildberge by Lucifer himself, and carried off to hell. On All Soul’s night, at midnight exactly; there was a long path of burnt forest where the prince of darkness had dragged him. Others laughed at the stories, and said surely he must have gone to Aachen, like any wronged lord would do, to appeal to their common liege the king. Still others assured me he had gone to Compostela, to beg forgiveness for his sins. Aye, and with his head shorn bare, and in rags, and eating only thorns. He had gone to the Holy Land, too, of course, and depending who was telling the tale, he had gone as a crusader to defend the Christian kingdom, or as a rebel to lead the infidel in a great uprising against God.

I learned only one useful thing from all those stories. I learned that people will believe anything about a man — good or evil as it suits them, but anything at all — once he has sparked their passions, once he is seen as someone different from themselves.

I wandered about the Schildberge for more than a fortnight, but I found no trace of the man I sought. Finally, in desperation, I circled around to Karn. I did not expect to find him there, either, but I wanted to be sure. His friend Lehelin fed me and gave me fresh supplies, and cursed Gottfried for a butcher and a dog— in the privacy of a bolted room, of course, and in the dead of night. But it was clear he knew nothing of his old comrade in arms, and I went back to the wilderness.

It was mid-November by then: a mild autumn by Reinmark standards, but still autumn, edging hard into winter. The trees were naked; in the high country, clouds drifted southward just above their tips; in the valleys, little herds of grey fog huddled among them until noon.

It was a day like any other when the dirge bell began. I thought nothing of it at first, thinking someone must have died in a village nearby. I walked on, and heard from the west another bell, distant, carried faintly on the wind. I ignored it, too, at first, but it went on all day. And in the morning it began again, before the Angelus, a steady tolling which clamored against the overcast sky and the dark hills, and hung in the air with a pitiless, hammering melancholy: Doom… doom… doom…. The bells were rung thus only when a great lord was dead.

Gottfried…?

The thought came with a gulp of fear, and a collapsing in the pit of my stomach. I ran down into the valley, sliding on wet rocks and stumbling over broken trees, praying that Gottfried wasn’t dead, he could not be, he could not! Even to imagine it was to imagine the world utterly undone.

The first man I met was a peasant dragging bundles of firewood, walking with his head down, bent against the wind. He knew the reason for the mourning bell. The whole world knew, I think, except me.

Ehrenfried, lord of the Holy Roman Empire and king of the Germans, was dead.

“Oh.”

Oh, thank God, it isn’t Gottfried, thank the Lord…!
I tried to hide my shattering relief, but I don’t think I succeeded, for the peasant was looking at me oddly. I lowered my eyes and quickly signed the cross.

“God have mercy on him,” I said.

“Aye, master,” the peasant said. “And on us all.”

I barely heard him, overwhelmed by my own emotions. First that simple animal flood of thankfulness, so intense I almost cried. And then surprise, remembering the stocky, scholarly-looking man who sat just a few months ago at Gottfried’s feast table, not yet fifty, and hale as a well-fed merchant. None of us, I thought, knew the hour of our going, not even kings.

And even with those reactions came the other, the sudden wild leap of possibility, the moment of breath-catching hope. Was this the time? Would Gottfried be king now, just as he had promised in the pavilion of Stavoren?
Ehrenfried is a fool, a prattling dreamer with his head full of scrolls, good for nothing but chess games and prayers. I will replace him!

But Ehrenfried had a son, I reminded myself, young and skilful in arms, with no taste for chess games and less for prayers. He was highly thought of among the high lords of Germany.

My heart sank into my boots, remembering Prince Konrad. Gottfried might have had some hope of deposing Ehrenfried, an aging king whose moral authority had been permanently weakened by his defiance of Rome, and by the resulting twenty years of civil war. But a young king? A legitimate heir whom no one hated, with the warrior talents and the warrior temperament Germans so admired… dear God, I thought, what hope would my lord have now?

“Konrad will be elected king, then,” I said.

“Might be,” the peasant said. He fidgeted with the harness straps on his shoulders, and made as if to move on with his burden.

He looked… afraid. Afraid the way men are in the presence of great evil or terrible uncertainty. It was contagious. The question leapt into my mind like an arrow.

“Wait!” I said. “How did the king come to die?”

“You haven’t heard, master?”

“I’ve heard what you just told me, nothing else.”

“They say he was murdered.” He crossed himself. “In his own chamber, they say.”

“Murdered? Dear God, by whom?”

“How could I know that, master?”

I could get nothing more from him. I had to find an inn, and some men who had been drinking for an hour or two, before anyone would repeat what was clearly being whispered from one border of the empire to the other. Ehrenfried had indeed been murdered in his chamber, by someone he must have trusted, someone who could get close enough to stab him in the back while he drank a cup of wine. And Prince Konrad had quarreled with his father— bitterly, publicly, repeatedly. He was in the palace at the time the king was attacked, but no one seemed to know where.

None of these lowly folk, even with their bellies full of ale, would say anything more in public. But it was clear enough what they were wondering, what everyone in Germany must be wondering. Was it the prince, perhaps, who had slain his father? And if he had — or even if he hadn’t — what would such a possibility do to the succession?

Gottfried and the other princes of Germany had already been summoned, and were already traveling to Mainz with all possible haste to choose a new king. Normally, if the emperor left behind a worthy son, the crown passed to him without much question. But there would be questions now. And if the questions were not resolved, there was likely to be blood. For one thing was well-known, even among the common folk: the young prince was arrogant, strong-willed, and hungry for power.

One man sat, with two huge hands knotted around his tankard, and his elbows on the table, glowering at a spot somewhere beyond us on the wall.

“It be Konrad,” he said, “or it be war.”

He was grim and troubled. But my own heart rose the more I thought on these events, the more I listened. I saw in all of it the clear hand of God, the shape of an inevitable pattern unfolding, where even the worst deeds by the worst of men fell into place like pieces of mosaic. I felt sorry for these grumbling peasants, dull-witted people thinking of nothing but their crops, their little jars of coin. They were so afraid of what a war might cost them; they could not imagine what splendors it might bring.

I was never bloodthirsty. I never wanted war for its own sake, as some men did. But I was not afraid, and I wanted to tell the people so, and I wanted to tell them why.
It will be a war like no other, and after it will come the kingdom! It’s all part of God’s design, and the last thing we should wish for is to stop it!

But I couldn’t say a word. I could only listen, and wrap myself at last in a filthy blanket, and wait for morning. Then I went back to my bitter searching, to the one place left for me to go. I took the road for Ravensbruck, as we had all done one fateful dark November, and I haunted the ragged hills below the wood of Helmardin.

Karelian would come there sooner or later. If he still lived at all, he would come.

It was snowing the night I found him. I was cold and hungry, and my courage was almost gone. I had been in the area for weeks, and I had found nothing. Oh, there were occasional abandoned campsites, but they could have been made by any forester or bandit. And there was talk sometimes of strangers. Lone travelers passed through the inns, ate their meals with half-hooded faces and went away, but what of it? They had been doing so for a hundred years. Once I found a peasant who remembered selling bread and sausages to a traveler who paid him in gold. This seemed promising, for a while, but the traveler left no traces thereafter, neither in the wilds nor on the roads.

Through every hour of it I lived in terror. Even as humans traveled it, I was only a few day’s journey from the edge of Helmardin. From the very lair of witches and demon-creatures who could fly and change their shapes; who rode on the night winds and trod the darkness with feet which never made a sound; who did not die from the wounds of ordinary weapons; who stalked men, and strangled them with vines and drowned them in marshes. Who sought always and especially to undo their souls, to make them numb or blind, to lure them with music or lust or promises of gold into a dark and endless enslavement.

Many a night I sat shivering and sleepless, catching my breath at every sound, swearing that with the first hint of daylight I would go back to Stavoren, and throw myself on Gottfried’s mercy:
Do with me as you will, my lord, but please don’t send me back there; I will go mad!
But with daylight it was always a little easier.
Maybe
, I would tell myself,
maybe
I’ll find him this very day. Maybe tonight I’ll sleep in an inn. Maybe I’ll find out he’s already been captured.
I had to go on. If I wanted to ever have Gottfried’s favor, I had to go on.

I did not sleep that night in an inn. It began to snow late in the afternoon: a light snow, the flakes small and hard-edged, spun about in bitter gusts of wind. I sought what shelter I could in a gully, under the lee of a cliff. I made an ill-burning fire, and scorched a bit of meat on it, and ate it without noticing what it was. Finally, too frightened to sleep and too exhausted to stay properly awake, I curled into a ball beside my fire and dreamt of dying.

And woke to the whisper of steps on the frozen earth, the glint of a sword in the firelight, a very real sword, poised mortal inches from my throat.

“Get up,” a voice said.

I was dazed with sleep and terror, and the wind was gusting snow into my face. I stumbled to my feet. The man with the sword stayed carefully back from the fire; he was just a darker shape against the darkness.

“Please,” I said. “I have nothing to steal, I’m a pilgrim….”

“Pauli…?”

He did not sheathe his weapon, but with his other hand he reached and flung the hood back from my face, and then he laughed.

“Pauli! What in God’s name are you doing here, lad? I all but cut your throat for one of Gottfried’s hounds!”

And even then, though I knew his voice, and his laughter, and even the scent of his body, and though my eyes were waking to the light, still it took me a moment to recognize him. Because of the wind lashing snow in my face. Because I had been waiting so long, and seen him so many times when he was not there. Because he no longer looked like a nobleman at all, but like a common bandit.

“My lord…?”

His cloak was dark-stained and torn in many places; ridges of snow clung in the fouled and matted tangles of his hair. His boots were in ruins, and the rest of his garments looked as though he had been chased by hounds through a hundred leagues of swamps and rocks and briars.

“Pauli.” His voice was warm as I had rarely heard it, and it all but undid me with guilt. “I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life. But how did you get here? What’s happening in Lys?”

“I escaped, my lord.” I could not keep my voice from shaking. It was better so, perhaps. “I knew you were wounded. The duke’s men boasted of it; they said you were probably dead. But I didn’t believe it.”