The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  “There is no contradiction,” he said. “God’s power is one. There can be no contradiction.”

  All during the long evening of revelry, I found my thoughts going back to his words, and to his new band of knights. They would be dressed all in white, except for a black cross sewn across their surcoats and painted on their shields. Its shape was their Christian icon; its color would remind them they were God’s unto death, vowed to chastity, obedience, and the defense of the Church.

  It took a great deal of money to become a knight— money I did not have, although I knew I could borrow it from my father. One had to buy horses and weapons and mail, and this last especially cost a small fortune. There was my poverty, holding me back. There was also Karelian. I did not want to leave his service, not even for the Knights of Saint David.

  Night after night, when the feasting and dancing was finally over, and the duke’s court was scattered with bodies like a battlefield, when even Karelian had found his bed — his own bed, I mean, which was rarely the first one he fell into — even then I would sit awake, with my arms around my knees, and think about those white-clad knights, and wonder why I could want so much to follow them, and still want to stay here.

  Loyalty, I told myself, was the highest of all virtues. It was right for me to honor my liege, and choose to stay with him.

  But was it really loyalty? asked another part of my mind— the harder, colder part. Or was it simply worldliness? Life in Lys was good. The count was generous, and moreover he was mowing down his rivals on the tournament field like so many blades of grass. Everyone envied me, serving so splendid a lord.

  Was I weak, perhaps, weak and nothing more? Weak like I had always been, like my father always told me? Your spine is made of porridge, Pauli. Get some iron into you, or you will never amount to anything.

  * * *

  Better than all the feasts of the summer, and all the wild hunts, best of everything we enjoyed in Stavoren was the great tournament of the emperor. For two weeks Gottfried’s court was centered on the jousting field, a narrow stretch of flatland beyond the castle, ringed about with banners and a small, splendid city of tents. There the knights of the Reinmark tested their valor and their skills against each other, and against all who came to challenge them: from the royal court in Aachen, from Bavaria, from Saxony, even from the courts of the Franks. More than two hundred knights had followed Ehrenfried’s long journey across the empire, hungry for fame and silver marks and the kisses of women.

  Gottfried himself did not take part. It was a tradition in the Reinmark that a host never competed against his own guests, for no matter which man won, he would seem to offer a discourtesy to the other.The emperor, of course, was too old now for jousting, but his personal champion was there to win honor on his behalf, and so was his son Prince Konrad.

  It was not the sort of tournament Karelian fought in during his youth with Lehelin. Those had been sheer wild melees, with few rules and less honor, and with no object except profit: the capture of horses and equipment, and the taking of captives for ransom. They had been mock battles with all the chaos of real battles, not least the victimization of the innocent. More than one peasant saw his crops trampled to ruin; more than one village saw a tourney end in a wholesale rampage of rape and plunder; and more than one honest man judged the word knight as nothing but another word for bandit.

  This was different. The knights here fought in an enclosed field, according to the strictest rules of chivalry. They used blunted weapons, but it was still desperately perilous, and every man rode onto the field knowing he might be carried from it gravely hurt, or dead.

  God, I was proud of Karelian those long, fierce days, proud to aching in the depths of my bones. There was no man there who looked more splendid than he did, all in blue and black and silver, with the winter tree stark on his shield and that strange black ribbon flying from the tip of his lance. It was Acre all over again, the sun burning, all the horizons shimmering with heat, the ground rocking with the sound of hooves. Lances shattered like dry reeds against the painted shields. Men went down, and horses. I think I prayed; I know my heart stopped more than once before it was over. But day after day it was the same; no one broke more lances than he did, or left more rivals lying on the field. And no one unhorsed him, not even once.

  We will all look to you to cover the Reinmark in glory…!

  He had never fought in the emperor’s lists before, in such high company and for such high stakes. And now he wanted to win. Though he claimed he had his fill of warfare, all the things which made him good at warfare were still with him: the daring, and the cool judgment, and the will to win. He was thirty-eight, and he was still good, and he took a surprisingly fierce pleasure in demonstrating it. So what if I was only the last left-over son of a fool? I was better than any of them, and one day they would all know it…!

  And yes, I gloried in it with him. I polished his shield and his trappings until they glistened. I followed him everywhere, in case he might need me for some small service. I strutted like a little godling among the other squires: Just wait! Just you wait until my lord meets yours…! I handed him his shield and his lance as I might have handed a priest the vessels of the Eucharist. And when he smiled at me, as he did sometimes, before he veered the horse away — Wish me luck, Pauli! — I felt like I carried the world in the curve of my fingers.

  There were women everywhere, all of them loving the ferocity of it. Any man who thinks females are the gentler sex has never seen them at a tournament. Their eyes hung on their favorites with the adoration of lovers, and glittered like the swords on the field. As far as they were concerned, each knight fought for one thing only— for the woman whose token he carried, for the smile she would give him, or the kiss, or the hour in her bed. Every shattered lance was a tribute to her beauty. Every man who knelt on the field had been brought to his knees for her. And it was the same no matter who the woman was. They all chose some man to honor with a token, and they gloried in the certainty that he would dare for her more than he would dare for himself, or for his king, or for his God.

  The sad thing was, they were so often right.

  Karelian never told me why he wrapped that piece of black silk around his lance, and I never asked. I never had to. He smiled at the women in Stavoren, and wore their favors, and he took more than one of them to bed. But she was there, always there in some quiet place in his mind, in some always unsated hunger of his body. You will forget nothing, Karelian of Lys….

  It was for her that he fought in Stavoren. For the glory of it, yes, and for the pride of coming home a hero and a lord, and flaunting it to all of Germany — a man who had been nobody, who had bought his first knightly accouterments with money borrowed from a prostitute, and spent most of his life trading his sword in the same fashion — oh, yes, he was letting the whole world know he was no longer just a whelp of the weathervane of Dorn. There was all of that. But there was something else, too, something softer and darker which I noticed in his unguarded moments. A confusion. A sense of indirection, of loss, of empty longing, which his triumphs on the field did not assuage— quite the opposite. The closer he came to victory the more I knew what he really wanted from it, more than the bag of golden coins or the adulation of all Germany. He wanted to offer it to her.

  * * *

  All of what I have written here is true: I was happy in Stavoren, and filled with admiration for my lord. But I was also troubled, and neither my happiness nor my admiration was complete. Doubts hung often in the back of my mind— doubts and guilt and wondering, and a growing ambivalence about who I was, and what I was going to become.

  The Church forbade tournaments. Gottfried’s fresh-dubbed knights of Saint David did not take part. Monks and bishops spoke openly against the practice, mocking the lords of Christendom for turning combat into a game, and knighthood into a mere badge of rank:

  What are you doing here, fighting among yourselves? Dressing yourselves in fine silks, and feasting, and letting yo
ur hair grow long like women, and wearing perfumes? You are the swordsmen of God; why are you not abroad with your swords in your hands, riding against his enemies?

  I thought about those questions, too, sometimes, and I did not like the answers. I liked them least of all the day I found my master in his tent with the margravine von Uhland.

  It was the second last day of the tournament. Karelian had done well, defeating among others the duke of Thuringia, who had been many times a champion himself. But it was a hard-won victory. He had been battered to raw exhaustion, and we had to help him from the field, Reinhard on one side of him and I on the other, a whole band of our men following, all of them clamorous with triumph.

  In the tent, I quickly removed his helmet and heavy armor. He almost groaned with relief, and sank wearily onto the cot. His hair was dank and stained with rust. He no longer looked like a tawny German at all, but like one of those carrot-colored Irishmen with flaming locks and freckles.

  I brought a huge basin of water and some towels, and he washed off the worst of it and took a long, grateful drink of water.

  “Thank God the emperor only comes once every five years,” he said.

  “I thought you were enjoying this, my lord,” Otto said.

  He laughed roughly. “I’m enjoying every minute of it. Just don’t hold your breath until I do it again.”

  He was hurting, and quite a lot. I helped him out of his shirt and his boots; his body was savaged with bruises, gathered over days of combat. The worst of them were fresh, and for the first time he was no longer moving easily. His experience was one of his finest assets, but the years which allowed him to acquire it were beginning to show.

  He did not want well-wishers, just then; he did not even want wine; he wanted nothing except rest. We left him and went to eat.

  “Shall I bring something back for you, my lord?” I asked, just as I was going out.

  “The margravine,” he said. “But later. Much, much later.”

  I did not have to bring him the margravine. She found her way there all by herself. When I went back to his tent just after vespers, I found him lying on his cot,entirely naked, his body gleaming with oil. The margravine knelt beside him, bending as she kneaded his shoulders and back with long, supple fingers, over and over, moving with exquisite slowness— a movement which would take her right to his feet. And back again, searching out all the hurts, all the spent and knotted muscles, coaxing back their grace, their potency, all without haste, without a trace of uncertainty. She glanced up at me as I came in, without much interest. She might have been playing cards for all the difference my presence made. My presence, or that of her serving woman, or that of Otto, sprawling in a chair and nursing a cup of wine with brazen envy in his eyes.

  Karelian moaned once or twice, with sheer gratitude for the gift.

  “An hour of that,” he sighed, “and I might live to joust again.”

  She laughed softly, and kept on, her hands slipping over his ribs, very gently, yet still pressing— hungering almost, as if she could find the pain and pluck it away like a thorn.

  “You had better live to joust again,” she said.

  Yes, I thought bitterly, so afterwards you can dance and smile and strut around before the whole court of Germany, finally, on the arm of a champion!

  We all knew about her, Arthea von Uhland, a whore who was no less a whore for being a lady, who had slept with half of the Holy Roman Empire, and still had a place in the courts.

  Her husband doesn’t care. It was Otto’s squire who told me, the knowledge garnered no doubt from his master, who had a taste for scandal. Why should he care? he went on. He’s slept with half the empire, too, and apparently it’s pretty much the same half….

  I looked around the tent. There were maybe a dozen men there, all talking of the jousts, sitting on the floor, drinking, making wagers perhaps, as if they were nothing more than peasants at a bear-pit.

  And I thought of Rome.

  Not our Rome, the sacred city of the popes, but the old Rome, pagan and corrupt, with its circuses and its glittering champions. Its gladiators. Men who fought for the pleasure of it, or for the price of a good whore. Most of them had been soldiers once, mercenaries; gold was gold, after all. A good day in the arena, and then wine and camaraderie and the hero tended, his fine body oiled and massaged and honed for fresh glories— and why not? Without it he was nothing.

  The margravine’s hands were edging downwards from the small of Karelian’s back. I turned without a word and left them.

  Outside, people were everywhere, walking, sitting in clusters, gathered around chess boards or minstrels, talking about everything under the sun but mostly talking about the tournament. About the count of Lys. I left them too, and finding no place where I could be alone, I went finally to the chapel.

  The stained glass windows were muted brilliance against the early evening sun; light fell through them in high poised spears, but everywhere else the chapel was dark. The sanctuary at the far end was a cave with a single unsteady crimson light, the kneeling worshipers were only silhouettes of black on grey. Then slowly, as my eyes adapted to the dimness, I made out the forms of two servants, the face of a duchess from Bern, who was said to be gravely ill. And, close to the altar, kneeling utterly alone and in the deepest stillness of prayer, Gottfried von Heyden, duke of the Reinmark.

  How can I describe what I felt then? Everything around me seemed to stop, and turn, and become something different. The bright day shrouded, and this dark place became suffused with light. The silence filled with meaning, and the thousand voices beyond dissolved into a babble of stupidity, just dust and clashing swords and drunkenness and lust. Just the world, the same world as always, failing us as it failed us in Jerusalem. Angels led us to the Holy City, angels and visions and the prayers of all Christendom— but once we had taken it, once the infidels were slain and the city was ours, we filled it with taverns and brothels and market stalls and baths, with all the foulness of the world, as though it were merely another captured town, as though Christ had never walked upon its stones.

  Why?

  I wanted to weep with longing. Why could men not be what they were meant to be, chaste and devoted and true? Why was Karelian not here, kneeling in prayer like his liege, instead of lying in his tent with a whore? He had so much courage, so much strength of hand and will. Yet what did he earn with his gifts? A bit of gold, a bit of glory, some harlot’s hands between his thighs. That was all. It was such a waste.

  I watched Gottfried. How serene he looked— troubled, in a fashion, and yet serene. For weeks I thought nothing could be more splendid than being part of the tournament, and yet now, suddenly, I was glad he was not in it. He was above it, untouched by all its gaudy violence.

  Men could be different, I thought wistfully. They could be like Gottfried, like the young knights he was training to follow him, with their white surcoats and their shining faces. Ehrenfried was wrong. The warrior monk was not a contradiction in terms. The warrior monk was the only warrior in whom there was no contradiction at all. Worldly men did violence for pleasure, or gold, or self-advancement. Only a man who fought for God could be whole and sound and clean. He could be more than a man; he could be the very arm of God. He could be the man Karelian should have been, the man I always wanted to serve.

  Did I really think those things, thirty years ago, on a melancholy afternoon in the chapel of Stavoren? Or do I now merely imagine I did, because of everything which happened afterwards? I know the heart can play strange tricks upon the memory.

  But it was that day, I think, that strange and beautiful and troubled day, when I first began to hear a whisper, like grasses trembling in a summer wind. A whisper new and different in the quiet of my soul. A name, stern and majestic and separate from all the world around it.

  Gottfried.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Golden Duke

  Then he thought of how Parzival once said

  it was better to trust women than
God.

  Wolfram von Eschenbach

  * * *

  I fell into sin in Stavoren. One single mortal sin, in all the history of the world, was enough to cause the suffering and death of Jesus Christ. Who can say what my sin caused? Because of it I learned a thing I was never meant to know, and everything I did thereafter was shaped by my knowledge.

  I do not remember the wench’s name; she belonged to the retinue of the Empress Theresa. She had a very fine body, and a way of moving which constantly drew attention to it. If the empress had permitted such shamelessness, I am sure she would have dressed herself like the witch of Helmardin.

  She was always smiling at me, following me about, asking me questions, finding excuses to move close to me. Once as I sat in the courtyard engrossed in my own duties, she came over to me, flirting with me and teasing me about my virtue. She pretended to catch sight of a pretty butterfly, and leaned across me to reach for it, so that her breast touched the side of my face. I reddened with shame, and she laughed.

  “Poor Pauli,” she said. “You’re in sore need of tending.”

  She could not have been a day past sixteen, yet she set out deliberately to seduce me. Twice she pursued me so as to find me alone, and the second time I fell. I can blame this only on my weakness, for I did not like her. I did not even want her. She never lingered in my thoughts, neither before nor after; it was the darkness of a moment.

  She found me, the second time, in a hallway in the duke’s palace; I was returning from delivering a message for Karelian. It was nearly dusk. The light was failing, and I was absorbed in my own thoughts. A door opened just ahead of me; I recognized her voice and her scent before I could make out her face in the dim light.

  “Pauli? Oh, I am so glad it’s you! Can you help me?”

  You may well call me a fool for believing her. She said there was a kitten trapped in a closet, and I followed her into the room to rescue it. Of course, there was no kitten. There was only her laughter, her body pressing against me, her mouth all over my face and her hands sliding over my back. The suddenness of it, the rawness, was both compelling and awful. I found the strength to seize her wrists and push them back, trying to shove her away.