[Warhammer] - The Wine of Dreams

by Brian Craig - (ebook by Undead)

  “We had best do likewise,” Vaedecker murmured, and Reinmar agreed.

  All of Reinmar’s confused ambitions had been reawakened by the suspicion that the girl’s delirious mutterings were connected with the strange tale his grandfather had told him before he had set out, but there was no possibility of keeping sleep away after the exertions and privations of the previous few days. He fell unconscious as soon as he laid his head down—but he dreamed extravagantly while he slept and he awoke before any of his immediate companions, with a sense of urgency and anticipation already upon him.

  Ulick and Marcilla both appeared to be sleeping soundly and peacefully, although the boy seemed to have become very cold. Reinmar’s gaze lingered far longer over the girl, whose features were now possessed by a serenity he had never seen in any human face. Her skin was very smooth, quite flawless in every respect.

  Marguerite’s skin had the usual bloom of youth, but close inspection showed up a host of tiny blemishes: freckles, small patches of dead skin, blocked pores, unruly hairs a shade darker than those upon her head. Marcilla’s loveliness was subject to none of these minuscule compromises. She was so neatly formed, so seemingly polished, that it was hard for Reinmar to believe that she was a product of nature. She was more like a statue brought to life—not one of the military memorials carved from grey stone or cast from bronze that could apparently be seen outside the town halls of every Schilder port but something lovingly formed from Tilean marble, like the ancient busts which were occasionally displayed inside the town halls, as treasures plundered in the course of centuries-old military expeditions.

  Her helplessness added to her charm, and the longer Reinmar looked at her the more protective he felt towards her.

  He reached out a hand to stroke her face, and her eyelids slowly lifted to display a pair of eyes so wondrously dark as almost to be black rather than brown. The eyes were staring straight at him, but Reinmar was not convinced that the girl had really awakened. There was little or no consciousness in the incurious stare, and he had the strangest feeling that something other than her everyday mind might be using her eyes to appraise him.

  Apparently, he passed the appraisal. A slight smile began to ease the corners of her mouth.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered. “You’re safe.”

  Her lips stirred, very slightly—far too slightly, he would normally have assumed, for any audible words to have escaped them. And yet, he did hear words, whether they were spoken or merely imagined.

  “I have heard the call,” she seemed to say. “I must obey.”

  “So you must,” he murmured, as her eyes fell shut again and she relaxed back into a deeper sleep—but as he continued stroking her cheek he noticed that her flesh had taken on a sudden chill. He took up the cloak under which he had been sleeping and draped it over her body.

  Matthias Vaedecker raised his head then, his eye immediately attracted by the swirl of the cloak. “Is she awake?” he asked.

  “Not yet,” Reinmar said. “She seems well enough, given the nature of her injury. I think she’ll live, if she is given time enough to recover.”

  “That’s good,” the sergeant acknowledged. He frowned slightly before adding: “I suppose it would complicate things for us if her kinsfolk cannot collect her.”

  Reinmar went to the outhouse behind the inn to relieve himself, then continued to the barn to see if Godrich and Sigurd were awake. They were—and Sigurd was already in conversation with the gypsy spokesman of the night before. They were arguing, but not fiercely.

  “Reinmar,” Godrich said, as soon as the steward clapped eyes on his master. “You remember Rollo. The two within are brother and sister, it seems, and they have a cousin even younger who was also hurt last night. Their father has sent Rollo to ask us whether we will keep the two of them with us until we are well away from the town, so that he can collect them from a far safer place. That would allow him to avoid any further trouble with locals who are still intent on giving the rest of his family a battering. I am not so sure, however, that the girl is fit to travel on roads as bad as those hereabouts in a cart that’s already overloaded. She shouldn’t really be moved at all.”

  Godrich obviously wanted support for his own view, but Reinmar knew that there were times when it could be an advantage to seem naive. He pretended not to understand what was required of him.

  “I think the boy will be much better today,” he said. “As for the girl, we’ve taken on no more than half our intended cargo, so I think we can make room for her. Since the roads are so ill-made, it will probably be best in any case if Sigurd, the sergeant and I walk behind. We can wrap the girl up well enough to prevent her taking a bruise from every lurch.”

  “We have business to transact,” Godrich protested. “We are not nursemaids—and she really was badly hurt.”

  “We saved these people from being murdered,” Reinmar stated. “We have an obligation to see that they remain safe from their would-be murderers. We shall keep them with us until it is safe to let them go, even if that requires us to shelter them for several days.”

  If the steward expected any support from Matthias Vaedecker he was sorely disappointed. The sergeant had come into the barn while they were talking, to tell them that the innkeeper had brought fresh water from the well and an allegedly-new loaf of bread. When he heard what Reinmar was saying he became thoughtful—but by the time the steward turned to him he was quick to add his own endorsement.

  “Master Wieland is right,” he said. “The scoundrels who set upon these folk last night are probably lurking in the pines, brooding on their defeat and awaiting their opportunity. We have to keep the boy and the girl until we’re well away from here.” Without waiting for Godrich to comment he addressed Rollo directly, saying: “Tell your elders that we’ll look after them well until they can be collected in perfect safety.”

  It sounded like generosity, but Reinmar knew better. The sergeant had heard from the witch hunter what Reinmar had heard from his grandfather: that the source of the dark wine might be protected by magic, but that a way thereto could be opened for those who “heard a call” and anyone who accompanied them “to see them safely to their destination’.

  Reinmar did not feel able to criticise the soldier for his deceptiveness, given that he was keeping his own counsel, but he did feel that his own motives were far purer. He wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and he was determined to keep an open mind about all the matters of which Vaedecker seemed so fearfully certain.

  “Very well,” said Godrich, accepting defeat. “I suppose we shall be able to conduct our business just as well—and if your assurances are to be trusted, our guests have already played their part in guaranteeing us a good return in these parts. We shall be glad to do as you ask, Rollo.”

  “A thousand thanks,” the gypsy said. “You are good men, and we shall not forget this.”

  “How is the girl, really?” Godrich asked the sergeant, when Rollo had gone.

  “Very poorly,” Vaedecker admitted. “But Reinmar may be right. If we can keep her well wrapped up, she might well be safer with us for the next day or two than anywhere else in this treacherous land—and she’s a rare beauty.” He cast a knowing sideways glance at Reinmar as he made the last pronouncement, but Reinmar looked away and pretended that he had not heard.

  Chapter Ten

  By the time the horses had been fed, watered and hitched to the wagon Reinmar could see that Godrich’s mood had darkened somewhat. The breakfast they had eaten, while by no means good, should have made him feel better, but any effect of that sort had been more than outweighed by his gloomy contemplation of the early morning weather. The northern sky, from which the last traces of night had still to be erased, was clear enough, but the grey pall that had squatted down upon the mountain peaks the night before had intensified even further. In the west it was so dark as to seem black even by day; in the east, with the sun directly behind it, its leaden gloom was only slightly alleviated
by an ochreous yellow tint.

  “Storms are gathering,” the steward opined. “The clouds will spit them out like great gobs of catarrh. If we run into one this afternoon, after we’ve left the vineyard-”

  “We’ll pull into the shelter of the pines and raise the canopy,” Reinmar said. The underside of the cart was fitted with three iron bands which could be removed and arched over the body of the wagon, secured in slots on the side-walls to serve as a frame for a protective awning. The awning would be able to withstand a buffeting wind, provided that the wind’s force was broken by surrounding trees, and it would keep rain and hail at bay if it had a little help from the overhanging crowns of mature conifers.

  “It would be better by far if we did not need to,” the steward muttered. “Still, the storms are always localised, and usually brief. The likelihood is that they will miss us altogether, and will not trouble us for long if we are unlucky enough to run into one.”

  Although Reinmar had been obliged to volunteer to walk with Sigurd and Sergeant Vaedecker in order to lighten the draught-horses’ load he was not very enthusiastic to do so. He was relieved when the soldier assured him that he and Sigurd had bodyweight enough between them to render his slim measure irrelevant. Ulick also pronounced himself capable of walking, but Vaedecker disagreed with that too, so Reinmar and the gypsy boy ended up sitting to either side of the unconscious Marcilla, helping to make sure that she was not thrown about whenever the wagon-wheels slipped from one rut into another, or had to negotiate a fallen branch.

  They were so high in the hills by now that carts were relatively scarce, and those used by the local farmers had all been home-made, usually with scant regard to the imperial standard gauge. The result of this was that the deep ruts that were worn by conventionally-built carts into the fabric of conventionally-built roads, which ordinary traffic followed like inset rails, were replaced hereabouts by a confusion of different rut-patterns. Even that would not have been so bad had the roads not been mostly used by riders and men afoot, whose hoof- and boot-prints blurred and broke the ruts. Although pack-trains were uncommon this far from the nearest pass through the mountains their occasional passage had wrought even greater havoc with the surface, the weight of the packs having forced the iron-shod hooves of the mules deep into the rain-softened surface, creating a vast and disorderly expanse of shallow pits. This made the labour of the two horses pulling Reinmar’s cart that much harder, and made Godrich’s task as driver four or five times as difficult as it was at the best of times.

  The continued threat of the clouds would probably have made the steward’s mood very dark indeed by early afternoon had they not had such a good morning at the vineyard. As Rollo had promised, the harvest had been more abundant than the quality of the season had led them to expect, and the work that had gone into the making of the wine had been artful as well as neatly-timed.

  “This is wine that will mature very well indeed,” the steward confided to Reinmar. “It is for vintages such as this that cellars were intended. This will be a real investment.”

  The grower knew this too, of course, but Reinmar had not forgotten what Gottfried had told him about the value of their virtual monopoly. He felt that he had given his generosity quite enough indulgence for one day. He struck what seemed to him—and to Godrich—to be an exceptionally good bargain for an exceptionally large purchase.

  The success required a good deal of rearrangement in order that Marcilla could still be comfortably accommodated, but that was accomplished without requiring too much of Sigurd’s mighty shoulders, and the party was on its way again a few hours after noon.

  By this time, the girl seemed a little better, and Reinmar was somewhat reassured that he had done the right thing. She opened her eyes briefly when Ulick fed some water to her, but she was not yet ready to take anything solid. There was no sign of her other relatives.

  “Where will you go for the winter, when you are all united again?” Reinmar asked the boy, when they were once again making steady progress southwestwards, towards the furthest of the vineyards at which they were due to call.

  “I don’t know,” Ulick said. “Sometimes we make a winter camp and provision it before the snows arrive, but the hunting has been so bad this year that we would have too little meat to salt away. We might make a trek northwestwards, to join up with other clan-members, or we might go due north into the lowlands to find what lodgings we can in the towns. People do not like us there, but they are never as violent as those madmen last night.”

  The boy did not sound sure of any of these possible objectives, and he left Reinmar with the impression that there were others carefully unmentioned.

  “Winters are usually mild in Eilhart itself,” Reinmar observed. “If the uplands have a bad time, though, we feel the effects in spring when the meltwater swells the Schilder. River traffic can be halted for days on end, and if the thaw comes quickly to the hills the river always bursts its banks somewhere. My father and I have never been flooded ourselves, but the parts of the town below the docks are sometimes swamped. Can you still tell whether your sister is dreaming?”

  Ulick looked at him a little sharply, but accepted the question as common curiosity.

  “She is calm,” he said, “except…”

  After a few moments’ silence, Reinmar said: “Except what?”

  The boy shook his head, but he obviously knew how discourteous it would seem if he refused a reply, so he said: “There is something she and I must do when she is well enough.”

  Reinmar knew that it was a risk, but he decided to be bold. “She has heard a call,” he said. “You and she have work still to do, bringing in another harvest.”

  The boy looked at him suspiciously. “I am in the trade,” Reinmar reminded him. “My grandfather is Luther Wieland, whose task it once was to start the wine of dreams on its long journey to Marienburg, via the Schilder and the Reik. My great-uncle went to Marienburg to become a scholar, guided in his ambition by dark wine.”

  “Why is the soldier with you?” the boy asked.

  “My father thought the cart needed extra protection. There are rumours of monsters abroad in the hills.”

  For a moment or two he feared that the boy would dismiss the rumours, and the reason with them, but Ulick’s eventual reaction was more surprising than that. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose that was wise. We have as much to fear as anyone else, it seems, although I do not know why they are gathering. Do you?”

  “Do I know why the monsters are gathering?” Reinmar repeated, not sure he had grasped the true significance of the question. “How would I?”

  Ulick shrugged. “Perhaps no one does,” he said. “Marcilla is calm enough, I suppose. I think she would sense it if we had anything to fear… although she gave us no warning of that mob last night. Perhaps, since she heard the call, she has grown deaf to aught else.”

  “What kind of monsters are gathering?” Reinmar asked. “The rumours that have reached Eilhart are vague.”

  “The kind that cannot be safely glimpsed except at the limit of vision,” the boy replied, unhelpfully—but then he added: “Beastmen of a wolfish stripe. More dangerous in packs than those which have no discipline at all, though not as reckless. This is wineland, after all, and the very heart of it.”

  “Have you seen them?” Reinmar asked, wondering why his jaw suddenly felt slightly numb.

  “Only in my dreams,” the boy replied, glumly. “The worst place of all, some would say—for I could not see them so clearly in my mind’s eye were I not fated to look into their actual faces. It were best, I think, if we could obey the call quickly, but Marcilla is hurt and my father has not managed to catch up with us. Who could have thought that foresters with axe-handles and farm-boys with rakes and pitchforks could disrupt the plans of masters such as ours? What a world we live in!”

  “What a world,” Reinmar agreed. His mouth had gone so dry that he had to take a swig of water from the jug he kept beside him. He offered it to Ulick,
but the boy shook his head, pointing instead to his sister. Reinmar nodded, and tried to bring the neck of the jug to her lips.

  She had responded before, but weakly. This time, she did more than open her lips reflexively. As the water splashed upon her teeth she opened her eyes, and was able to raise her head slightly. Reinmar immediately reached out to help her, and with his support she managed to raise herself up even further, so that she could drink more deeply and more comfortably. By the time she had slaked her thirst she was definitely awake.

  She did not attempt to say anything, but she looked up into Reinmar’s face, met his eyes, and did not look away. She looked at him as if she had always known him and always trusted him. It seemed to Reinmar, in fact, that she was looking at him as if she loved him.

  He knew that it must be wishful thinking, but he was convinced that it was not entirely so. She was definitely looking at him, languidly and very tenderly. He felt his heart lurch in response, and felt a lump form in his throat, and knew that he loved her too. If this was how it felt to be the victim of a magic spell, he thought, it was not so bad—but he did not think that love could really be reckoned a kind of magic.

  “We’re safe, Marcilla,” Ulick said. “This is Reinmar Wieland, son of the wine merchant to whom the vintage we helped prepare was promised. He has collected his portion of the crop, having stepped in to save us when the local louts set about us last evening. Father will collect us as soon as he is able, but for now we are in good and sympathetic hands. We shall do what we need to do when we can.”

  Marcilla smiled, but paused for a moment longer before testing her voice. “I have seen him in my dreams,” was what she murmured.

  She said it lightly, as if it were of little significance, but Reinmar had just been listening to Ulick’s account of what his own dream visions might signify. “Well,” he said, “you can see me now in the flesh. The dream has come true.”