The Black Chalice (48 page)

“East, my lord, towards Dorn.”

“Yes, of course. And through the pass and back to Schildberge castle, where I’ll have to smoke him out. Be damned to it, if I’d had my way in this he would be raven’s meat by now!”

Perhaps, I thought. Perhaps. I edged away from the others, and looked across the empty, autumn-mellow fields of Stavoren, and I stood breathless, marveling at the audacity of Karelian Brandeis.

There is no other word to use. I marveled. He was evil, he was dangerous, he was Lucifer’s own child, but dear Christ, he was brilliant. Because it might have worked. And if it had, the sorcery would never have been obvious. Our confusion over his numbers and his movements would be credited to his own tactical skill. Our opened gates and lowered drawbridge would seem a simple act of treachery from within. The lord of Ravensbruck, presented with an accomplished fact, would come to heel. Given credit and rewards for the victory, he’d be the last man alive to mention that his men weren’t actually there. Oh, I thought, it was wonderfully clever and bold, and in a part of me… in a part of me I halfway wished….

I caught myself, and made the sign of the cross. It was a devil’s thought, but I halfway wished I were still with him. A devil’s thought, and ridiculous besides. He was finished now. He could run for his mountain fortress, and take refuge there until Gottfried starved him out. Or he could run back to Konrad, who would have less use for him now than ever. No, I told myself, I wanted no part of him. I had made my choice, and he had made his. He had chosen sorcery, and sorcery had failed him. As it always would. Men were never brilliant when they stood against the power of God. They only seemed so— and only for a while.

Theodoric sent out more men, several hundred this time, to drag in one of the abandoned siege towers. It would make a magnificent stake, he said, sturdy and high and splendidly appropriate.

“Let the witch die on her demon lover’s handiwork.”

He looked eastward. He had given Karelian two days to surrender, but Karelian was not going to surrender, and in any case it did not matter— not any more, not when we knew he had no army worth mentioning. Theodoric probably did not even want his surrender now. He wanted to run his enemy down. He had held back and held back, and now he wanted blood.

“We will do it today,” he added grimly. “At Vespers. See that everything is ready.”

So we had a single day of triumph. One day in which every fragment of the world was fallen into place, and everything we believed in was vindicated. Gottfried had been proven right, if only by a thread. But that too was God’s doing, that one sentry who was not in his accustomed place, who neither challenged the witch, nor approached her, but stood riveted in his tracks, watching long enough to be sure, and then taking his crossbow and firing.

We feasted in Stavoren castle, and we laughed. Some men drank too much; others made generous thanks to God. All of us watched the tower being prepared, and many talked about the coming execution.

Witches were always burned naked, so no demons could hide inside their clothes and succor them, so full and absolute justice might be done. But many of my comrades looked forward to the fire for reasons which had nothing to do with justice. Everyone had heard about the Lady of the Mountain, everyone knew she was beautiful, everyone knew she was a great harlot. And there was a pleasure in the eyes of some at the thought of her burning, an eagerness so sharp and so physical it seemed to me no different from lust. Indeed, some of them used the words of lust when they spoke of it— how the flames would caress her, how the arms of the tower would hold her fast. What they waited for was yet another rape. And it would be absolute this time, unlimited; the fire would violate what even they could not. And when it was done, there would be nothing left. The flesh would be ash; the soul would be in hell. The great harlot of the mountain would be gone.

And those same watchers would drink themselves into a stupor after, savagely sated and savagely empty. It would be days, perhaps, or weeks, before they noticed that she was not gone, that they lusted for her still….

Paul von Ardiun put his quill down, and laid his head back against his chair.

Write what you will,
he thought,
it doesn’t matter. I know what is true. Maybe a few men felt that way, a tiny few, but most of us wanted only for the Reinmark to be free. What we did was for God, all of it, for the kingdom of God and for the right of Christian men to walk through the world without fear.

“And what was it they were so afraid of, Brother Paul?”

He did not look up at her voice; he did not even open his eyes. He waited. She would say what she had to say, and then she would leave. And he would write again. Nothing else mattered. He would write, and come finally to the end of it. The end of everything.

“I’ll grant you this,” she said. “It wasn’t quite the same for you as for the others. It wasn’t me you desired, after all. But you were willing enough to see my body degraded and destroyed — the same body which enchanted Karelian, and rolled about with his in so much sinful pleasuring… full and absolute justice for
that
, dear gods — the flames wouldn’t be halfway cruel enough.”

“You were a witch,” he said.

“Oh, certainly. But you never thought to pity me for Karelian’s sake?”

“We don’t pity the damned in hell; why should we pity them here?”

“Well said, Pauli. Why indeed? If your God takes such stern and righteous pleasure in destroying human flesh, those who serve him can hardly do less. That follows, I suppose. But you will understand, then, why some of us consider him unfit to be a god?”

He crossed himself quickly. He felt cold in the presence of this blasphemy.

“Yes, unfit,” she said, “and don’t bother to be so offended. You called
our
gods fiends for no reason at all. We honored yours when he first came here, because we honored them all, and he paid us back with broken altars, and massacres, and exile. And a bonfire now and then, for the stubborn ones, the ones you called the whores of Odin.”

She moved close to his chair.

“Tell me,” she murmured, “were you with them when they came to the dungeon to fetch me?”

“No.”

“How disappointing.”

No. Others had gone, a great number, he could not recall how many. And a priest went with them, not for the witch’s sake, but to protect her guards and executioners— though of course if she had proven repentant, he would willingly have heard her confession, and given her absolution before her death. Even to one such as she, God would be merciful.

They went laden with weapons and warnings. She must be carefully searched, they were told, and carefully chained, and carefully guarded. All the inhabitants of the castle were by then in the courtyard, waiting, as well as hundreds from the villages below. The air was thick with anticipation, and hostility, and fear.

The guards came running back, white-faced and babbling. The dungeon was empty. The door was still bolted; the iron manacles still locked and rooted in the wall. But there was nothing in the cell except its few scatters of rotting straw, its stench of rats, its bloodstains.

And one thing more. Caught in one of the manacles was the small, blood-stained feather of a wren.

“All magic can be turned back upon itself by those who know how.”

She spoke softly, as if she really wanted him to understand. He recognized the tactic. It was what Karelian always did, too— tempting him with cunning words, pretending to have some deep and secret gift of knowledge.

“Your master took so many precautions— the stone cell, the chains, the armed guards. But there were other powers there, powers of magic as old as the world. And he forgot about them, your Theodoric von Gottfried von Heyden von Clovis von Godfather Almighty. He didn’t believe in magic; none of you did. You believed in devils, and that’s not the same thing at all.

“It wasn’t fiends who carried me off,” she said. “If there were any fiends in Stavoren, they all worked for the duke. Pick up your pretty quill, Pauli, and I’ll tell you how it was.”

THIRTY-SEVEN

The Turning

Regard everything as poison which bears within it the
seed of sensual pleasure.

Saint Jerome

It was after sin that lust began.

Saint Augustine

* * *

A
ll magic can be turned back upon itself by those who know how.
Darkness wrapped her, darkness deeper than the deeps of the world, darker than the lairs of the hunter elves when they died, when the last coals of their fires melted out and their caves were lost forever.

But it was an evil darkness, fouled with rot and desolation, with memories of blood and murder breathing from the stones. There were no elves here, now or ever in the past, no crystal and ruby walls; only the souls of dead men weeping, and dead women too, all of them nameless and broken and gone.

For a long time there was only darkness and pain, and a fog of numbing disbelief. She could not believe the world had come undone so easily, so brutally. A small misjudgment, a tiny moment of inattention was all it took. What did it mean to be queen of Car-Iduna, if this were possible— this black failure, this terrible degradation?

Nothing is promised. The strands are woven and unwoven. We make of them the best we can, and what remains is shadow. Nothing is promised….

She could not think; it was barely possible to pray. All she had strength for was the gathering-in of self; whether for action or for death, it did not matter. She would be whole; she would stand before them whole, as woman and as priestess of her gods.

Karelian, heed me! If you have ever loved me, heed me now! Take your men and go! Don’t be foolish, don’t try to save me, there’s no hope of it! You must go! Go, my love. Just go. It’s Gottfried who matters, only Gottfried, I command you to go…!

It was a long time, that time of pain and silence, but soft at the edges of it was a quiet, gathering knowledge. There was power here, ancient and mysterious and full of possibility. The power was not hers; hers was utterly exhausted and gone. It was theirs, twisted and befouled, reeking of cruelty and hate, but still magical. And all magic could be turned. All power was raw power in the hands of a witch, and the power of sexuality was very great.

From the very beginning, the Church understood that. Sex was humankind’s great bond to the earth. Over and over it drew them back to her, back to the loyalties of kinship and passion, and away from the loyalties of rank and order and dominion.

Like so many of the sky gods who came before him, the god of the Christians was hungry for dominion. He dealt with the limitations of life by saying life did not matter. He had something better to offer than life: he had immortality. Before he came, the others had offered immortality in the world— monuments and empires, names graven into history, great lines of kings sired by a single conqueror. Now, for this last of them, the Christian, the world and all its glories were only rubbish; he offered immortality in heaven.

And yet in their blood all creatures born knew they died, and knowing it they craved to live. They did not want to build kingdoms, neither for gods nor for men, or to shiver night after night on their knees, grieving for sins invented in a book, living in terror of a hell none of them had ever seen. They did not want the transcendence of escape, the dream of a distant heaven where flesh and dying did not matter. They wanted the transcendence of connection. They wanted to know that flesh and dying had meaning in themselves, and that
that
meaning lay at the center of the world.

It was love which brought them back, love and lust and pleasuring, the enchantment of the ever-present body, and the ever-present possibility of delight. It was their own flesh, and the flesh of the other who must be cherished and not killed, which held them firmly to the earth, to the truths and the gods of the earth.

The Christians were quite right about it, and so were those pitilessly reasonable Greeks: the body was dangerous. The body interfered with the orderly obsessions of philosophers; it broke the icy mind-nets of priests; it rebelled against the endless war-mongering of kings. It reminded people that the world was here, and life was now, and if they had no rights over their own flesh, then they had no rights at all.

Worst of all, perhaps, the body remembered that once, not very long ago, sex had been a holy and magical thing. It was not sinful but sacred; it was the power of the gods in the world. Its fire was their hunger to connect and to create, its lawlessness their endless trying out and making new. And its wild and driven ecstasies were the measure of its sacredness; something so exquisite and so forceful could come only from the gods.

That was why the Christians hated it so much. How could lust be the work of their own Lord— their Lord who was not of this world? It was of the old gods, just like the people believed; and it was demonic, just like the gods were.

So it was forbidden, in every way it could be, and what the churchmen could not forbid they wrapped in shame. They said it was the most dangerous of sins, more to be feared than cruelty or violence or war. They said in Eden it never existed. They said God intended men to breed as they laced up their tunics, matter-of-factly, without a throb of passion or a thought of carnal lust. Only a fallen human being, rotten with sin, could possibly desire
that
.

They were terrified of sex, and they had reason to be— they knew its power.

They knew. But centuries had passed, and they had also forgotten. Not even priests could keep telling lies forever, without losing sight of the truth.

Like the wombs of women, the seed of men was still magical. And Theodoric and his men had all forgotten that. They thought she could change them into mice, that she might have demons hiding in her loins or in her mouth or in her hair. But they never imagined she could take their savagery — their gift of life degraded into death — and circle it, and take the power from it, and use it to escape. Like a fallen Amazon whose sword is broken and whose quiver is empty, and who looks about in despair, and sees that she does, after all, have one arrow left, and the enemy has given it to her… so did she take their cruelty, and feed it on the rage of centuries, and turn it back, and make it fly.

* * *

The sun was low, the prince’s castle still clamorous with men and outrage, the valley below scattered with country folk going home disappointed. Karelian’s army had fled, but he had not. She sensed his presence even as she cleared the walls of Stavoren, and though she knew it was unwise, she was glad.

So, my love, there are bonds you will not break, even to save the world. I commanded you to go, as you would have commanded me. And you stayed, as I would have done. May Iduna remember it forever, as I will….

He was there, somewhere in the valley, but she had no strength to find him. She was wounded and already faltering; every pulse of energy she had went into staying changed, and trying to stay in motion. More than once she tumbled to the ground and simply huddled there, unable to go on, unable to think of anything except the thing she was, the small and feathered thing which must not change, must not,
must not!
or it would die.

They were safer now apart, both of them.

She flew on, north towards the forests at the base of the Schildberge. Veelas lived there, if she could only get close enough to summon them. She did not think about the distance. She noticed only the distance to the next stack of cut grain, the next village church, the next hedge where she could hide and rest.

A few search parties were out, first in Stavoren itself and then among the villagers. They stormed hither and yon to appease Theodoric’s anger. They made impressive amounts of noise, but it was obvious they did not expect to find anything. The devil himself had come and fetched her away, through bolted doors and chains, past scores of armed men. What was the point in searching?

Only she knew how perilously close they were sometimes. And there were other dangers: hawks in the sky and foxes in the shrubs. As darkness fell and the danger from men diminished, the danger from the wild increased. And the forest was still far away.

Lady Iduna, do not give up my life, I beg you, keep it yet a little while…!

The world turned black and silver in the moonlight. She kept going, so weary she never saw the owl, nor sensed its presence, until its shadow passed across the moon, a few arm’s lengths away. She dove into the swampland below, tumbling human into bracken and reeds. The hunter swept overhead with a small cry of bewilderment, and was gone.

She was a woman again, and she had no hope of changing back. No hope for anything now except her wild sisters. She struggled to her knees in the rank slough and wailed. It was a long and bitter cry, more eerie than a wolf’s, and it shivered across the vale of Stavoren, once, and then again, and then again. Would they hear her? In the hunched black houses of the valley, men crossed themselves, and children pulled their pillows over their ears. No door opened; no man stirred from his house. Only veelas had such a cry, and only veelas would ever dare to answer it.

The swamp was cold. She shivered, huddling naked in the darkness. She heard only silence, and the small animal sounds of night, frogs and distant cattle, an insect buzzing around her hair. No veelas answered her. She cried again. And then, very faintly from the north, from very far away, came a cry like her own. And then from the northeast, another, and still another. The wild nymphs heard the summons, and hearing it, passed it on, so that all the skies of the Reinmark quivered with it, as with aurora on a winter’s night; and even as they cried they came to her.

They came out of the forests and the lakes, out of the secret places of the Schildberge, out of the Maren shimmering by the golden fields of Lys. They came pale eyed and golden haired; they knelt and washed her wounds; they fed her healing herbs, and murmured charms of solace and revenge; they kissed her, and wrapped her in gossamer and down, and bore her home to Helmardin.

All but three of them went with her. Three she sent back into the valley of Stavoren.

“Go and find my lord Karelian, so he may know I’m safe. Tell him that so fiercely as I love him, so fiercely do I hate the son of Gottfried, and that is hate enough to burn a city. Tell him he shall find me where he sought me first,on the road to Ravensbruck.

“Send him to me, for I will do there a thing which few have the power to do, and fewer still the courage. But I will do it now, if the gods give me strength, and the house of von Heyden will be ash upon the wind.”