The Wine of Dreams (5 page)

“No doubt,” the old man agreed, his black cap bobbing as he nodded. “But it
was as well, in the end, that I refused to be quite as reckless as Albrecht,
else you’d have nothing to inherit in spite of all Gottfried’s industry and
meanness. Albrecht never forgave me for it, but I was right.” There was a
moment’s pause while Luther considered the import of this conclusion. He was
still nodding his head, but much more slowly than before.

“What does this man who calls us cousins want of us, grandfather?” Reinmar
asked, when the black cap finally ceased its bobbing.

“I don’t know,” Luther answered. “If he is who he says he is, then he
probably wants the wine to serve his own appetite rather than to sell—but if
he is a secret agent of the witch hunter, he will be searching for evil to
discover and uproot. Men like that sometimes find what they seek, even when it
is not there.”

“What should I do?” Reinmar wanted to know.

“Your father will certainly instruct you to do nothing, or less,” Luther
observed, speculatively. “He would not thank me for offering different advice.”

“I would,” Reinmar admitted.

“Don’t be too quick to say so,” Luther advised. “But you could, if you so
wished, go to visit your great-uncle. Whatever the situation is, Albrecht will
doubtless be glad to be warned that there are witch hunters in the town, and I
doubt that anyone else will take the trouble to tell him. If the man who claims
to be his son is with him, he might well be glad of the warning too—and he is certainly the best person to explain why a man like Machar
von Spurzheim might be looking for him.”

Reinmar was prepared to consider the possibility that had been set before him
at his leisure, but there was still one question he wanted to ask.

“If one happened to have a flask of dark wine,” he said, casually, “how much
would it fetch, in today’s money? My mysterious visitor wasn’t very enthusiastic
to offer the full market price, but he said he was prepared to pay it.”

Luther let out a sound that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. “I haven’t
handled money for ten years,” he said, “and I haven’t seen a flask of dark wine
in twenty. How would I know what prices are being asked in the markets of
Schilderheim and Marienburg? It might be twice what Gottfried asks for a bottle
of his best vintage, or it might be a hundred times—but your customer might
not have been thinking in monetary terms at all. If he came here looking for me
as well as for Albrecht, he may think of me as a man who was too fond of money
in his youth to pay a fuller price for the kind of reward he seeks. If you see
him again, he may deign to explain himself—but if not, you might be better off
not knowing. Gottfried would certainly say so, and I owe him too much to go
against his wishes. You, of course, might make your own decision.”

“I came to you for answers,” Reinmar said, “not for more puzzles, each more
enigmatic than the last.”

“We can’t always get what we want,” Luther whispered, letting his head sink
back into his pillow again. “That should be the first lesson that every man
learns from life—for it may be his last, if he learns it too late.” His
eyelids had fallen shut.

Reinmar knew that he would get no more out of the old man that night. He also
knew that he would have to be back at his counter at an uncomfortably early hour—but he knew, too, that if he put off visiting Great-Uncle Albrecht until the
following night there would probably be no point in going at all. Machar von
Spurzheim had all the daylight hours at his disposal, and would undoubtedly make
full use of them. If Reinmar wanted to get to Albrecht before the witch hunter
did, he would have to go now.

By the time Reinmar crept out of Luther’s room the hour was so late that the
great majority of the townsfolk would be abed, but he was still fully charged
with the excitement of the extraordinary day and he did not even pause to wonder whether Albrecht might
be peacefully asleep. He dared not leave the shop door unbolted so he used a
route of his own, which he had established in early childhood, clambering out of
the narrow window of his bedroom on to the bay above the shop, then letting
himself down by a series of foot- and handholds cut by the removal of mortar
from the cracks between the blocks of grey stone that made up the walls of the
house.

The descent seemed more perilous every time he used it, but he was still
light enough and lithe enough to negotiate it safely.

Gottfried had said that Albrecht’s house was “little more than an hours’
walk” from the shop, but he had been thinking in terms of a leisurely stroll.
Although he had no light but that of the stars to guide him, and it was not a
route with which he was familiar, Reinmar contrived to make the journey in a few
minutes less than the hour, arriving as the distant market bell chimed midnight.

It would not have been easy to find the house among the firs had it been
unlit, but there was a lamp burning in an upstairs room which shone brightly
through a gap in the conical crowns and guided Reinmar through the most
difficult passage.

When he thumped the door with his fist there was no immediate response, and
impatience made him knock again before the door was unbarred and opened a crack.
It was not his gypsy housekeeper but Albrecht himself who answered it.

Albrecht Wieland must have been taller than his younger brother even in their
youth, but Luther had been so wasted by his illness that Albrecht now seemed to
have more than twice his brother’s mass. He was not quite as tall as the witch
hunter, but he loomed over Reinmar nevertheless. He was obviously not used to
visitors; he had a candle-tray in one hand and a cudgel in the other.

“Who are you?” he demanded roughly. He had thrust the candle forward so that
Reinmar’s face was fully illuminated, but he obviously did not recognise his
great-nephew.

“It’s me, great-uncle. Reinmar.”

Albrecht seemed startled by this news, and slightly dismayed. “Gottfried’s
boy? What do you want? Is my brother dead?”

“No. Is there no one else here? Have you had no other visitor today?”

Albrecht still had not stood aside to admit Reinmar to his house, and the
perplexity on his face suggested that he had not the faintest idea what Reinmar
was talking about. If the man who claimed to be Albrecht’s son had set out to
follow Gottfried’s directions, he did not seem to have completed his journey. “I
never have visitors,” Albrecht stated, flatly.

“You’ll have some tomorrow, great-uncle,” Reinmar told him. “There’s a witch
hunter in town. His men took my father away and then searched the shop. May I
come in?”

At the mention of the witch hunter Albrecht’s ill-lit face had changed
expression, anxiety banishing puzzlement on the instant. He had already begun to
swing the door wide open and usher Reinmar in, and he looked fearfully out into
the darkness before closing it again and replacing the bar in its slots.

“There,” he said. He was pointing to the poorer of a pair of rickety chairs.
It stood beside a table strewn with the debris of at least three meals, half a
dozen saucers pooled with sooty candle-wax, and various pieces of rotting
parchment that might once have been deeds, letters or pages torn out of a book.
Reinmar sat down gingerly, rocking the chair one way and then the other until he
figured out which three-legged stance was the more comfortable. The room was
suffused with a strong animal odour, although the scrawny cat asleep by the
hearth seemed hardly big enough to be responsible. Albrecht’s housekeeper—of
whom there was still no sign—did not seem to be overly attentive to her
duties.

Albrecht took the other chair, which was somewhat sturdier and equipped with
arms on which he could rest his own. “What would a witch hunter want with me?”
he demanded.

“The man he is chasing told me that he is your son,” Reinmar informed him.
“He also told me that he was coming to see you, although he doesn’t seem to have
arrived.”

“Wirnt?” Albrecht seemed to be utterly astonished. “Wirnt is in Eilhart?”

“He did not tell me his name,” Reinmar said. “So you do have a son, then? My
father didn’t seem to know it. The stranger came to the shop asking for dark
wine, and was disappointed when my father told him that we had none. Perhaps it
was as well, given that the witch hunter came so quickly on his heels. The witch
hunter’s soldiers searched the cellars, although I cannot imagine that there is
witchcraft in wine.”

“All wine is witchcraft,” Albrecht murmured, although his mind seemed to be
elsewhere. “What else is intoxication but a gentle form of magic, a pleasing
disorder?”

“According to my father,” Reinmar told his aged relative, “good wine is
virtue incarnate, and even bad wine is a useful accompaniment to poor food. I am
his apprentice, but he has never said a word to me of evil wine. That is the
sense, I assume, in which this mysterious liquor is dark?”

“Wine comes in more colours than the burgers of Eilhart and Holthusen
imagine,” Albrecht told him, still speaking rather absent-mindedly while he
worried over possibilities that he was not yet inclined to share, “and the
dreams it stimulates are far richer and more various than your father or his
neighbours can imagine. Luther knows—but Luther was always a weakling and a
coward. There is no evil in wine, but there is evil in men, and even the finest
wine can sometimes draw it out. The wine of dreams may reveal more than some men
find comfortable. It is always the way of witch hunters and priests of law to
blame the magic rather than the man, but scholars have another way of seeing.”

“In Eilhart,” Reinmar observed, “the kind of learning you call scholarship is
regarded with far more suspicion than wine.”

That remark brought Albrecht’s mind back into focus. “Do you think I need to
be told that?” he demanded sharply. “It was to escape such ignorance that I went
to Marienburg, and let my brother steal my share of your precious shop by slow
degrees. If your father imagines that he can send a witch hunter after the
rascal of the family while keeping his own house clean he is mistaken. If I am
guilty, in the witch hunter’s eyes—and I am certainly innocent in my own—than Luther is guilty too, and if my past catches up with me your precious
business is bound to be drawn into the enquiry. If Wirnt has any sense at
all…”

He broke off, somewhat to Reinmar’s annoyance.

“I don’t understand what is happening, great-uncle,” Reinmar said. “My father
will not tell me, and my grandfather insists on respecting my father’s wishes,
for the time being—although he did suggest that I ought to forego my precious
sleep in order to warn you that the witch hunter is here. Do you not think that
I am entitled to know what danger I am in?”

Albrecht recoiled slightly under this assault, but he seemed to be made of
stronger stuff than Luther. He drew his lips back to expose his yellow teeth, and teased the incisors thoughtfully with his
tongue as he considered the matter.

“Although you would not know it to hear the gossip in the marketplace, we
live in quiet times in a favoured place,” the old man said, eventually.
“Tradesmen are always grumbling, but the tradesmen of Reikland know nothing of
how hard life is in less prosperous parts of the Empire or how desperate it was
in Reikland in other phases of our history. There are rumours of terrible events
in distant corners of the Empire, and horrors in Altdorf itself, but nothing has
happened in my lifetime to compare with the great conflicts of the past. The
siege of Praag has always been the stuff of legend in Reikland, and the Vampire
Counts of Sylvania are bogeymen fit only to frighten naughty children in these
parts, but you and I have every reason to be grateful that we were not born in a
worse place or in an earlier era. You have not the slightest idea how grim
reality is in less favoured localities, or what evil lurks in the wastes of the
far north.”

“Tell me, then,” Reinmar suggested.

Albrecht hesitated. “Your education is your father’s responsibility,” he
said, after a few moments.

“Your brother thinks the same,” Reinmar observed. “He is too old, and too
weak, even to think of defying my father by telling me things that my father
would rather I did not know. But that is why I came to you: a scholar, and a man
who can still stand upright. My cousin has come to Eilhart with a witch hunter
at his heels. We are all under suspicion, it seems. My father has been taken
away, and you may well be next. I need to know what is going on, and you are the
only one who can tell me. You are the scholar of the family, are you not?”

Flattery, Reinmar had heard it said, would get a man anywhere. It was the
flattery of being named the scholar of the family that loosened his
great-uncle’s tongue.

“Very well,” Albrecht said. “Perhaps it is time that my nephew’s son knew the
family secrets—and I believe that he will hear a more honest account from me
than from my brother or his son. Listen, then!”

Reinmar listened, more enthusiastically than he had ever listened to any
lecture delivered by his father.

“The relative peace that we enjoy was not cheaply bought,” Albrecht told
Reinmar. “The price my father’s generation paid was fierce repression. If the
scholars of Marienburg are right in their account of the world, much of that
repression was necessary and wholly justified, but the forces of repression
never know when to stop or relent. Trade in the wine of dreams—which is not the
only dark wine but the one most commonly used and the one to which most men
refer when they use the phrase—had been established for centuries before my
father’s time, but when it was investigated by agents of Magnus the Pious and
his Theogonists it was quickly limited, and then proscribed.

“Suppression of the trade was by no means welcome in Marienburg, and may even
have played some small part in the events leading to secession, but that was
before my time. The trade went underground thereafter, at least in the lower
reaches of the Reik, but it was tolerated by local people to whom it
was a matter of custom. The main effect of the notional ban was, in fact, to
increase curiosity among those who dealt in the wine as to the reason for its
bad reputation. Yes, I used dark wine myself—more freely, I dare say, than
Luther—and I would have continued to use it had I been able to stay in Marienburg or had I been able
to secure a supply of my own when I returned to Eilhart. Once the traffic was
taken out of the charge of our family, however, I found it as hard to come by as
anyone else and I am too poor nowadays to support expensive habits.