The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  It was impossible to hate her; it always had been. The abyss of power between them was too great. It was impossible to love her, probably, for the same reason.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes, my lord. Thank you.”

  He wiped his face. He wanted to berate her, but it would be like clubbing a wounded man lying on the ground. Anything he might say to her she already knew. She had no right to do this to him. She could not expect him to accept it. He ought to throw her out on the road, and her brat with her.

  She already knew. She acknowledged it with a pitiless honesty, as one acknowledged the existence of the sky. She had made a choice, and the rest followed. And she did not regret her choice. Deep down, in the private core of herself which the world had never touched and never would touch, she did not regret anything. That required courage, a courage all the more proud and astonishing because she was only a young girl.

  Another reason it was impossible to hate her.

  She spoke again, so softly he could barely hear. “What are you going to do, my lord?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You won’t kill him? Please? Please, my lord, give him away to someone, to the holy sisters, they’ll take care of him, please—!”

  He stood up. This much at least he could answer.

  “I won’t kill him,” he said. He would kill no more children, not for any cause on earth.

  But what would he do? He could send it away. No one would blame him, not in the least; they would judge him a better man than most for never having used his sword. Only what if Matilde was right?

  The child might, after all, grow up tawny as a stag. And even if it didn’t, it might still be his. Europe was full of mingling tribes. Rudi Selven got his own dark looks from somewhere; who could say what strange blood might also run in the veins of Brandeis? Karelian had not spent all those hours arguing with Gottfried for nothing. His own stubborn logic was still lying soft in the back of his mind: You can’t be sure about blood, you can’t ever be absolutely sure…!

  What if he sent the child away, and it was his? The thought made him cold to his bones.

  There was that. A tiny, tiny thing, a remote possibility, but enough to make him pause. There was Adelaide, who would grieve to lose her child. The right and wrong of it was quite beside the point, she would grieve. And that made him pause, too, because he would have to live with it.

  And there was Gottfried….

  He walked towards the window, aware of her eyes following him. He looked back, and said it again. “I give you my word, Adelaide, I won’t kill him.”

  He needed to bathe. He needed food and twenty hours of sleep. Whatever choice he made he would not make it now.

  Or tomorrow either, probably.

  The broad sweep of the valley of Lys lay golden with August; the Schildberge were beginning to darken as the sun moved west. He stood for a long time by the window, letting his eyes caress the fields and wander to the woods and the wilderness. Southwards, across the curving mountains, lay Dorn, and the ducal lands of Stavoren. To the north, far beyond the edges of the world, lay the wood of Helmardin.

  He was not a fool; he knew where his inclinations were leading him. To refuse to act was to act nonetheless. A decision made by default was still a decision. He would probably never send the child away, because there would always be a reason for not doing it today.

  And maybe that was all right. There was only war ahead of him now, war and darkness and very little time. Maybe there wouldn’t be any other children, only this one, and this one was whole and healthy and grinning at him, and really, did it matter so very much? He would have raised Saracen babes once and thought nothing of it. Life was too precious to throw away now; he was almost forty and going to war with the lord of the world….

  No, probably he would never send the child away. And it wouldn’t matter much, not even to his honor. The world would soon have darker things to judge him for.

  * * *

  He tried to wait for the full moon, but his days dragged intolerably, and his nights were raw with longing. Once he knew he would go to her — and he knew it the moment he looked into the willstone — every delay became unbearable. Her love was his only hope of happiness, her power his only hope of life.

  He rode to the great river in a waxing moon. He thought about her, and about Car-Iduna; and all the time, even when he was thinking about her, he was thinking also about Gottfried.

  He had hated men before, and more than one of them. But the hatred he bore now towards his liege astonished even himself. It was villainy enough for Gottfried to plunge the Reinmark and the whole German empire into civil war for the sake of his own real or imaginary royal lineage. But this other thing — this fantasy of holy blood and world dominion, woven not out of madness but out of arrogance and sheer self-worship, with a perfectly rational mind — this made Karelian’s head spin, and made him angry as few things had made him angry in his life.

  Gottfried had so many gifts. He was healthy and strong; he had a large and prosperous domain. He had the treasure of the great temple of Jerusalem, plundered with his kinsman’s considerable help. He had promised: I will make the Reinmark into the jewel of the empire. And Karelian had believed him. All those eighteen months in the Holy Land, after the sack of Jerusalem, when all he wanted in his despair and revulsion was to go home, he stayed with Gottfried because it still seemed worthwhile. Worthwhile to secure the fledgling state— having taken it at such cost, he thought, the least they could do was keep it. Worthwhile to strengthen his own bonds with his liege, a man he did not trust entirely or like very much at all, but for whom he felt a genuine respect. Worthwhile to finally have a place in the world, to have the valley of Lys and a woman sitting at his table and an end to the wandering and the blood.

  And now Gottfried would take it all away again. Because no matter what happened, the count of Lys was still just a pawn on a game board. Still expendable. If Gottfried went down, all his chief supporters would go down with him. And if he won it would be worse, because then there would only be more wars— against the Franks, perhaps, or the Lombards, or the Byzantines. And Karelian could fight those wars for Gottfried, one after another. (We will all look to you to cover the Reinmark with glory!) He could kill and burn and plunder for Gottfried until finally, in one muddy field or another, he was struck down. Or until, in spite of all the odds, he went home battered and exhausted to a wife who no longer knew him, children he had hardly ever seen, apple trees he had never eaten from, to watch the golden fields of Lys pour their harvests into Gottfried’s war coffers, summer after summer, so it could go on. And on. And on.

  No.

  No, and again no. He wanted nothing more to do with war, any war at all, but if Gottfried forced him into one, then it was Gottfried he would fight, Gottfried who would discover just how good a knight he was, and how dangerous a man.

  The river was black and silver, with pieces of scattered moonlight dancing on its back. It was a warm night, and the smells of the forest were rich and musky. The Maren sang as though it were alive— alive, and restless with melancholy, like an abandoned nymph.

  The moon was high now. By its light he made his offerings and built the fire, and laid upon it the talisman the queen of Car-Iduna had given him. Burn this by moonlight, in a circle of seven stones, within sight and sound of the Maren….

  And then he waited, wondering desperately if she would come. Or if, when she came, he would be sorry. Perhaps it had all been sorcery and delusion, and now she would show herself to him as she really was, monstrous and evil, or perhaps just pathetic, just an aging whore who knew a few tricks. What if he looked at her now and saw someone he no longer wanted and dared not trust? He felt vulnerable as a babe, prisoned between darkness and darkness, between Gottfried and the unknown— but the unknown was still Car-Iduna, was still Raven, was still possible….

  Was she truly beautiful?

  She moved through the shadows towards
him, more beautiful than anything that lived. Utterly as he remembered her; there was no delusion, she was all grace, all goddess, her black hair tangled in the wind, her breasts shimmering in the moonlight, her silken garments clinging to the curves of her loins.

  “Karel.”

  Perhaps there was a catch in her voice, a tiny sob of desire. He did not know and he did not care. Her arms closed around him, and he held her as he would have held his life.

  * * *

  “That was a lovely way to say hello, my lord count.” She stood away from him, wrapped in her power and the heavy shawl she wound deliberately, protectively about her shoulders. “But why have you sent for me?”

  “Because I want to make love to you. Right here under the fir trees.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  “In a better world, it would have been. In this world, no.”

  So be it.

  “I sent for you to offer you my fealty. And my heart. And my sword.” He looked at her, sorcerous and splendid in the moonlight, and left nothing unsaid. “And to ask for your help. I need your help, queen of Car-Iduna.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To stop Gottfried.”

  She smiled. It troubled him, her smile of raw triumph, but there was nowhere else for him to go, no one else to trust at all.

  “Swear then,” she said softly.

  He knelt, and swore his fealty, and then he truly would have bedded her under the fir trees, but she laughed, and pulled away from him again. She was no longer twenty, she said, she preferred a bed. Marius was setting up her tent less than a bowshot down the river.

  “I will stay for three days. If you will be my guest there….” She smiled, and offered him her hand. The shawl had fallen loose again, and she left it so, the gesture even more an offering than her words.

  “If you will be my guest there, any pleasure you might wish for will be yours.”

  He took her arm as they began to walk. “I find it marvelous, lady, that you could come from Helmardin in so little time.”

  “And is it the fighting man who finds it marvelous, I wonder, or the lover?”

  “Both.”

  “I could come from Helmardin faster than you might imagine, Karel. But not this fast. And not with my steward and my tent. We’ve been in the Schildberge for several days. I wanted to be here when you came back from Stavoren.” She reached, and brushed her fingers across his cheek. “Just in case.”

  Her tent was small but beautifully appointed, close to the riverbank, lying in a circle of seven stones. Marius fished for them, and trapped small birds, and gathered berries. Once or twice Karelian saw water veelas prowling the green banks, and other watchers deep in the trees, but most times it was as if they were utterly alone.

  The sun rose, and fell, and rose again; he had no sense of time. He took her in her silken bed, and on the riverbank, and against the trunks of trees, and it was not enough. He took her with his hands and with his mouth, and gave himself up to the worship of her own, and it was not enough. His body kindled again and again, with a marvelous potency he had not enjoyed since his early youth. Maybe it was sorcery; they said veelas would sometimes do that for a man, if they liked him especially well. But they said a lot of things about veelas. Maybe it was sorcery. Or maybe flesh itself could turn sorcerous sometimes, and pull fire from the sun and the earth and the burning wind, and turn it into passion.

  They swam naked in the Maren, and sat by its banks as the moon rose, wrapped only in their cloaks. They wandered in the dead heat of noon into the forest, the air heavy with roses and humming with drunken bumblebees rolling from flower to flower. Once she took off her gown there, and the great shifting oaks patterned light and shadow on her flesh until he would have sworn she was a hind, or a wild cat.

  And then quite suddenly she was. He caught his breath as the edges of light around her began to ripple, to dissolve. She was no longer there, and a golden creature was padding through the grass, supple and powerful and perilously fanged, moving towards him as if he were prey.

  “Jesus!”

  He backed away; for a moment he was terrified and utterly appalled; then Raven’s arm was slipping around his neck, and she was laughing, a woman again, her dark eyes wantonly amused.

  “Did I frighten you, my lord?” she said.

  “A little.” He closed his hands on her soft bare shoulders, wondering how they could possibly be anything but what they were now, graceful and vulnerable. “If you have it in mind to eat me, lady, I hope you choose to do it in a more conventional fashion.”

  She smiled. “I’ll say one thing for you, Karelian Brandeis. You’re a steady man under fire.”

  “So I have been told.”

  “What are you going to do about Gottfried?”

  “Raise an army, and place it and myself at the emperor’s disposal. There’s not much else I can do.”

  “You think like a soldier.”

  “Well, you’ll have to forgive me for it. I’ve been one for twenty-two years.”

  “If you want to defeat a man like Gottfried von Heyden, you’ll have to start thinking like a witch.”

  But he was not thinking like either at the moment; he was thinking like a hot-blooded boy in a grove with a shepherdess. The sun played strange shades of blue into her hair, and glitters of silver. The trees moved forest shadows across her throat, across the ivory grace of her thighs. He followed the shifting patterns with his fingertips, slowly, wherever they led. First with his fingertips, and then with his mouth.

  “You are insatiable, Karel.”

  Her breasts were exquisite, thrust out like a wanton girl’s, with a faint upward curve. They leaned into his hands like purring cats, the sweet copper tips rising delightfully to his tongue.

  “I am insatiable?” he said. “Now the raven is calling the poor, muddled magpie black.”

  “Magpie indeed. You don’t have a whisper of white plumage on you anywhere.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Do you think there’s any bit of you I haven’t already seen, and touched, and tasted?”

  “That was hours ago. The world is very changeable. You’re a shapeshifter; for all you know I might be one, too.”

  She laughed and pressed close to him, kissing his mouth for a very long, delicious time.

  “Tell me,” he murmured, “how a witch would make war against the lord of the world.”

  * * *

  They spoke of him the first time over Marius’s offerings of fresh trout and bread, in the smoky dawn of the first of those three days. Karelian was tired from his vigil, and she from her long journey. But they were not tired enough to sleep, not just yet, with the excitement of pleasure still clinging to their bodies, and so many things needing to be said.

  “So what has he done, our Golden Duke?” she asked.

  Marius knelt beside them, opening the slender fishes with great care, peeling away the nets of bones and carving the flesh into pieces small enough to eat.

  Karelian hesitated, and she said, with a smile towards the steward, “You may speak freely, Karel. Marius is more loyal than my shadow.”

  “It seems our duke is a blood descendant of Jesus Christ, and therefore should be king. First of the empire, and then of the world.”

  Raven — may all the gods cherish her forever — Raven did what he had longed to do in the pavilion at Stavoren. She laughed. It spilled out almost before he’d finished speaking, a wonderful fit of helpless, shameless, dark-in-the-throat laughter.

  “Karel, no?” she whispered between gulps of it.

  “Yes.”

  “Jesus Christ? The original, one and only Jesus of Nazareth? Gottfried is his son and heir?”

  “Well, his many times great great grandson and heir. By way of the Merovingians, needless to say.”

  “Oh, tell me, Karel! Tell me how he’s worked all this out!”

  She seized a piece of fish and bit into it eagerly, her eyes equal
ly eager on his face.

  “Well, as best as I can remember it; it wasn’t too clear to start with….”

  He had been hungry as a wolf, smelling the fire, the rich promise of frying fish. He was, quite suddenly, no longer hungry. He told her everything Gottfried had said, aware of the scorn in his voice, of the coil of hatred knotting in his belly.

  When he finished, she said simply:

  “He can’t possibly get away with it. Against the Church, the whole of Christendom, a Christian emperor? There’s not a hope of it; they’ll burn him at the stake before a week is out. Gottfried is not a fool, Karelian; there’s something wrong here—”

  “He’s not going to make that part of it public yet— the holy blood part.”

  “But then he’s just a traitor. They won’t burn him, they’ll hang him— and the Reinmark can pay in blood for his ambition.”

  “He thinks he can win.”

  “All traitors think so.”

  “He has some grounds for it.”

  She looked up sharply. “The princes of Germany won’t back him in an unprovoked rebellion. Some may, but not enough of them to topple Ehrenfried. The pope tried twice, and he couldn’t raise enough support to topple Ehrenfried.”

  “He has a… a device he brought back from Palestine. A crystal pyramid; he can call up images in it—”

  “The willstone? He has the willstone?” Raven’s face turned ashen in the pale dawn light. “So that’s it, dear gods! No wonder he’s become so bold.”

  He was as astonished as she had been a moment earlier. “You know about this stone?”

  “Yes. I know about it.”

  “What is it then, can you tell me? He said it belonged to the kings of Israel, and many things in the Bible were done by its power.”

  “He may well be right. The stone is very old, Karel; even in Car-Iduna we don’t know its origins. But we think it was made far in the east, by men who served a sky god likeYahweh. The pyramid was the most sacred of all their sacred symbols. It was the shape of the world they were building: linear, unyielding, and ruled by an absolute power.”