The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  “But when they constantly mingle truth with lies, how will you make sense of it? How will you know what is true?”

  “God will give us the wisdom to know. Why else did he send his Church into the world?”

  Paul sat numb. It had been a terrible risk, asking for help. He had always known it. But even in his darkest moments he had not feared an outcome as perilous as this.

  “You can’t mean to leave me to them?” he said harshly. “My soul is utterly in their hands!”

  “Your soul is in your own hands, as are those of all men. I can’t exorcise a man who isn’t sincerely penitent, who will not in full humility lay bare his soul. Truly, I marvel at your arrogance in sending for me. Did you think you could escape them and still hold yourself back from God?

  “If you want to be saved — if you really mean it — you know exactly what to do. Renounce all your sorceries and corruptions, not just the ones you’ve grown afraid of. Come with me to Rome. Dictate your history to the Holy Father’s scribes, under oath and in the presence of witnesses. Answer truthfully every question that’s put to you, and confess every sin. You will be forgiven.”

  “Come with you to Rome, Monsignor?” Paul said numbly. “That isn’t possible.”

  “If it isn’t possible, then clearly your soul is not your first concern. So how can I or anyone possibly help you?”

  He stood up. “I’m keeping the document you’ve produced so far. I will take it with me, and I will suggest to the Holy Father that you be called before the Inquisition. You have a great deal of knowledge— knowledge which could advance the Church’s work, and save countless Christian souls. Knowledge you must share with us, if you’re to have any hope of God’s mercy.”

  He paused at the door of Paul’s cell, and looked back.

  “I will pray for you, my son.”

  Then he was gone, stern and upright into a stillborn day. Paul sat for a long time, letting the summons of the monastery bells pass unheeded. He missed lauds; he missed nones. It did not matter. He would be reprimanded and punished. It did not matter.

  He was alone now. He had no allies in the world; he had abandoned it. He had no allies in the Church; it had abandoned him. They would pursue him now on an uncontested field, all of them, like Saracens chasing a single, beaten knight across the sand.

  They would pursue him, but they would not close and kill… not yet. The desert was vast, and he had nowhere to hide, and the story was only just begun.

  SIXTEEN

  Stavoren

  Leave Babylon behind you and fight

  for the kingdom of heaven.

  Carmina Burana

  * * *

  Twice every decade the Holy Roman Emperor made the long journey across his empire, through all his feudal domains to visit all of his chief vassals. The Königsritt took months; it was high summer when he came to Stavoren to be feasted and honored in the palace of Duke Gottfried. All of the duke’s vassals were there, too, summoned by his command, so he might, in the full glory of his court, offer proper homage to his king.

  There they met again, Gottfried and Karelian, and there the dream was born, the dream I have carried all these years in the silence of my heart. The dream I dare not speak of, not even to the Church where it finally and properly belongs. It is too late now, and too soon. For in the great affairs of history, as in all other things, there is a time and a season, an hour when the tide is at flood, the ship in full sail, the captain chosen and peerless among men, the wind right and the stars in their places. If it sails, the world will be changed forever. If it is run aground, years will pass, or centuries, before the hour comes again.

  * * *

  A few months earlier, we left Karn, and arrived at Lys in the flower of its spring. There is no fairer place in all the Reinmark, not even the vale of Ardiun where I was raised. The trees were hung with blossom; small creeks were singing everywhere, running headlong into the deep embrace of the Maren. Lambs bounded in the fields, and the sun burned warm in our faces. For a while it seemed as if the world was good.

  Karelian loved his lands. Day after day he was out walking in the orchards in the first morning light, or hunting in the woodlands, or visiting with the master brewer and the master miller, with the stewards and the gamekeepers, with the gardeners and the serfs, wanting to know everything they did, and how they might do it better.

  As for my lord’s wife, I would as soon not speak of her. Everyone, of course, knew of the scandal in Ravensbruck, or soon was told about it. There was a good deal of whispering in the sculleries and the stables, but Karelian went about his life as though nothing whatever was wrong with it. He turned the household and the running of the manor over to Adelaide. He made her generous gifts. He accepted her strange, soul-scarred moods, her whispers of madness, her sudden offerings of passion, when she would embrace him in full view of anyone who might be about, and kiss his mouth and hang her arms around his neck like a besotted courtesan. What he thought of it he did not say, and no one else dared to say anything at all.

  Did she truly come to care for him? Or did she merely offer him the same perfected sham of loyalty she once had offered to her father? To this day I do not know, and I do not think Karelian knew, either. At unexpected moments I would see him looking at her, uncertain and a little sad, as though he did not entirely understand how he had gotten himself into such a strange situation, or where it would lead him, or how he would ever get out.

  She did not come with us to Stavoren. She was by now visibly with child, and more fragile than ever. She wept when we left, and stood in the open gate until we were lost in a whisper of dust across the valley. Every night while we were gone — so I learned later from the servants — she burned lights in the chapel, and spread flowers and witch-charms and medals of the Virgin all over Karelian’s pillow. But when she rose, and walked in the sleep of madness from her bed, the name she murmured to the shadows was not his.

  It is enough; I will speak of her no more.

  As for myself, between me and my lord nothing changed on the surface, and I think for him nothing changed at all. He was as kind to me as always. He never spoke of what passed that night in Karn, not even once; nor did he offend against my honor again, not in the smallest word or deed. It was as though none of it had happened. I had all but forgiven him when we raised our banners yet again, and marched southwest to Stavoren to pay our homage to the king.

  Gottfried entertained us with lavish generosity. As lord of all the Reinmark, he was one of the five great German princes whose domains made up the empire. This was the first Königsritt since his return from Jerusalem, and thus it was his first opportunity to impress upon both his vassals and his liege how much he had accomplished in the east, how magnificent he was now, and how well served.

  I have spoken little of him in this chronicle, for in truth until the meeting in Stavoren he was to me a stern and distant figure, majestic and revered, but distant, a lord so far above me in rank and so outstanding in his achievements that I simply felt awed in his presence, like a stableboy in the presence of a king. I had met him several times in the Holy Land, and as Karelian’s squire I made the long journey home in his retinue, yet I never overcame my feeling of awe. The Golden Duke was always a man apart, a man above the common measure of his peers.

  I realize now, with the wisdom of long years, that my sense of his superiority rested only partly on his rank and his accomplishments. There were other highborn dukes in the world, after all. There were other knights whose shields were hung with laurels, whose names were known in every court in Europe. There was Ehrenfried himself, emperor of all the Germans, who stirred no such awe in me, even on the first day I met him.

  Gottfried was different from them all. Everything about him stood in contrast to the qualities of lesser men, even the fact that he was difficult to know. He had nothing of Karelian’s common touch. He would never sit in a rough chair in a dirty inn, and laugh at crude jokes and put his feet up and pet the innkeeper’s cat. He
was not arrogant, but he never lowered himself, even for a moment; he never forgot who he was.

  He was a man of immense physical stature, well over six feet, with massive shoulders and a great, leonine head. Not beautiful at all, in the immediate, sensual way we think of beauty. His neck was too thick, and his nose too large. His mouth was a hard slash across a plain, blunt face. His golden hair was straight and thinning from the forehead. Yet he needed only to walk into a room to be admired. He needed only to speak and conversations around him would fall silent, and men would turn and listen.

  It was an evening late in June, the first evening of our arrival. Others had come before us. The summergreen fields below the duke’s castle were now a city of tents, crowded to bewilderment with highborn guests and their retinues. And though the duke was gracious to everyone, from the very first Karelian was favored more than any man there. Gottfried greeted him as a brother, and honored him with several splendid gifts, not least a beautiful grey stallion, an Arabian, one of the finest horses I have ever seen.

  “He loves the chase even more than you do,” the duke told Karelian. “I think you will enjoy him.”

  Karelian was pleased, and very flattered. It always surprised him a little, I think, to be reminded that he’d finally made his place in the world.

  “You are very generous, my lord. Thank you.”

  “We’ll go hunting tomorrow, and you can try him out,” Gottfried said. “The emperor will not arrive for a few more days.”

  Karelian handed the horse’s reins to me, and fell in step beside his liege.

  “He’s bringing over two hundred knights,” the duke went on. “And of course Prince Konrad will be here. So it will be a particularly good tournament, this one. Since I can’t take part, we will all look to you to cover the Reinmark with glory.”

  The emperor Ehrenfried arrived with his queen and his court about a week later. I had never seen him before, and I suppose it was unfair of me to expect him to be physically magnificent, or to be disappointed because he was not. But I was very disappointed. He did not look like a king. He was only of medium height, plump as a merchant, with stubby pink fingers and very little hair. He liked to laugh.

  Sometimes, when he had passed out of earshot, I would hear the occasional sullen whisper against him, or see men exchange dark looks. The civil wars had been over for some years, but the wounds they left were still raw. On the surface, all was friendship, but there was more than one lord visiting at Gottfried’s court who hated the king.

  He wore splendid garments, and he always behaved with dignity. Yet from the day he came until the long festival was over, I could never stop feeling that it was Gottfried, and not the king, who was the greatest lord. More and more it was Gottfried I found myself watching. I began to admire the very qualities which had intimidated me when I was younger— his separateness, his personal reserve, his extraordinary power. He dwarfed the men around him, princes and champions and emperor alike. All of them, and Karelian too.

  It saddened me a little to admit it. But Gottfried was lord to me, too, lord to all of us. I thought myself a very fortunate young man, being able to serve and honor them both.

  * * *

  Oh, there was glitter that summer in Stavoren! It was the last joyful summer of my life, and, until it ended in one black hour, it was the best. There was feast after feast in the duke’s great hall, with such food as I have never tasted since; there were minstrels and dancing; there were magnificent, clamorous hunts along the wild edges of the Silverwald.

  And, a few days after Ehrenfried arrived, there was the birth of a new order of knighthood. Gottfried planned it before he ever left the Holy Land. Years later the Church would carry on the idea, creating first the Knights of Saint John and then the Templars, but it was Gottfried who first saw the possibility— the glorious possibility of finally linking warfare and faith. Of creating a true Church Militant, an army of warrior monks.

  Only seven to start with, hardly an army, but oh, God, I envied them, those chaste, golden-haired youths in their white garments, keeping vigil through the long night in the chapel of Stavoren. They were the first of the Order of Saint David. In the end Gottfried would drop the word “saint” from the name, and call them, at least among his friends, simply the Order of David, which was what he had always had in mind: the followers of David who slew Goliath, and swept the heathen lands, and took them for God.

  The emperor did not approve.

  “A warrior monk is a contradiction in terms,” he said. He sat at the head of Gottfried’s feast table. When he sat thus, greying and thoughtful, with his elbows on the table, he looked far more like a scholar than a king.

  They said he was a fine soldier in his prime, and I believe it, for he fought two civil wars to keep his crown, both of them under the ban of excommunication. He was very bitter now against the pope. He sent no men on the great crusade, and offered its leaders only token gifts of money. Thus Germany, largest of all the Christian nations, took almost no part in Christianity’s greatest adventure.

  “I don’t understand how they think in Rome,” the emperor went on. “For a thousand years the Church said warfare was wrong. Oh, God knows we Christians haven’t always lived by it, but it’s what we were taught. Thou shalt not kill. Blessed are the peacemakers. If thy enemy smite thee on one cheek, turn him the other.”

  Gottfried’s son could barely contain himself. He was the eldest son, the duke’s heir, a golden-haired giant named Theodoric who seemed an exact, youthful copy of his father.

  “And if we lived by such principles, my lord,” he demanded, “how many Christians would be left in the world? The pagans slaughter us, the infidels slaughter us—”

  “And we slaughter each other,” the emperor interrupted calmly. “It’s beside the point.”

  “How can it be beside the point?” Gottfried demanded.

  “Because the Church’s business is men’s souls. Not warfare. Not politics. The popes are no longer interested in souls, it seems to me. They’re interested in power. Power here, in the world. And they’re turning Christ’s teaching on its head in order to get it. In thirty years we went from ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to a holy war, and in ten years more to an order of warrior monks. That’s not a Church any more, it’s a rival empire.”

  He paused, looking grimly at the faces which lined his table.

  “Am I the only one who’s noticing a pattern here? God knows some of you are old enough to remember the Saxons who fled to us after William took England. They filled our courts for twenty years. They were scattered all over the world, driven from their lands with nothing but the cloaks on their backs. All because an ambitious Norman poured sacks of gold into the coffers of the Church, and an even more ambitious priest decided that he, and not the people of England, should choose the English king.”

  Ehrenfried’s bitterness was almost physical; it darkened his face, and made his voice hard as granite.

  “The same priest who sat behind the papal throne and urged his pope to support the invasion of England and overthrow King Harold— that same priest became pope himself, and then did the same thing to me! My crown was promised to another, just like Harold’s. I was excommunicated, just like he was — I and every man who might dare to raise a sword in my defense. What’s an honest citizen to do, faced with such a choice — turn against his lawful king, or turn against his God? Whatever choice he makes he must feel himself condemned.

  “That’s not religion any more, it is tyranny. It’s not the pope’s place to make such judgments, to bring whole nations to such a pass.”

  He took a peach which a servant offered to him and broke it in half, speaking more calmly.

  “The Church is forgetting God, my friends, and setting its eyes on the world. They may call it reform, but it’s really a drive for power. And that’s why, after a thousand years of teaching peace, now we’re teaching war, and telling men it’s Christian to fight. It’s never Christian. It’s sometimes necessary, but it is nev
er Christian.”

  “My lord,” Gottfried said, “you spoke earlier of a contradiction in terms. Surely to say a thing is necessary, and then to say it’s not Christian— surely that’s the greatest contradiction in terms we could imagine. Wait — I beg you, my lord, let me finish — I think you’re right; there is a pattern here. A pattern which has been unfolding ever since the days of Constantine.

  “Why shouldn’t the Church turn its eyes to the world? Charlemagne brought half of Europe under his rule, and so to the rule of Christ. Was that unchristian? We took back Jerusalem; was that unchristian? If it’s honorable and worthy to go to war for one’s king, isn’t it a thousand times more honorable and worthy to go to war for the king of heaven? The popes aren’t overturning Christian teaching, my lord; they are finally acknowledging what has always been Christian practice. We are men who fight for God.”

  “And who was Charlemagne, Duke Gottfried?” Ehrenfried demanded. “Was he the king or was he the pope? There used to be a difference, you know. Christ told us to render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things which are God’s. The popes want to rule over God’s things, and over Caesar’s, too.”

  The abbot of Saint Stephen’s leapt into the fray. “But God must always be the final authority in the world, my lord,” he said.

  “Yes,” agreed Ehrenfried. “Acting through his lawful and anointed agent, the Christian king.”

  “No, my lord,” said the abbot. “With all due respect. Acting through the authority of Peter, who is Christ’s heir, and lord over all kings.”

  “I think,” Karelian said dryly, “we are on the brink of another twenty years of war.”

  Everyone laughed, willing to let the tension dissolve. It was a feast, and the matter had been argued over many times before. Only Gottfried, I noticed, did not let it drop, following on quietly with his duchess and his son, with the circle of men around them. I heard only his first comment, before a fresh conversation and women’s laughter drowned him out.