The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  The young man went absolutely rigid. He was beyond further anger. Had he been facing anyone except the man who was both his father and his liege, he would have struck him.

  “You saw Karelian as duke of the Reinmark? In my place? And you took it as a sign from God?”

  “You have too little faith, my son. In truth, sometimes I think you don’t have any. We’re speaking of kingdoms here, of worlds. What is the duchy of the Reinmark? One small German state; there are fifty like it in Europe alone. Long before I make a man like Karelian a duke, I will have made you a king.”

  Theodoric began pacing again.

  “You never wondered, father,” he said finally, “if the image might have been some kind of warning?”

  “Why should God warn me against something I never thought of doing?” The duke shook his head. “No. It was… it was an invitation. The offering of a possibility. I couldn’t ignore it.”

  “And now?” Theodoric snapped. “Does it seem like such an attractive possibility now?”

  Gottfried made a small, dismissive gesture. “The squire may be lying. There is something foul about the little wretch; I can all but smell it. I’ll wager you five marks he’s a catamite, and has fallen out with Karelian because of it.”

  “And if he’s told the truth?”

  Gottfried looked at his son. Hard.

  “Do you think the ways of God are always clear? To any of us? Do you think the path is always straight? If God has given Karelian a role to play in this, then he will play his role, and the plan will still unfold as it should.”

  “In other words, any decision you make becomes the right decision, simply because you’re the one who made it? That may be fine religion, my lord, but it’s damnable strategy!”

  “Strategy will not restore God’s kingdom,” the duke said. “Not by itself. Everyone seems to have forgotten that, even the popes. God’s kingdom is God’s will. Nothing more, and nothing less. You will see as much one day. So will Karelian of Lys.”

  He flung his cape back across his shoulder, and waved at the distant grooms to bring their horses.

  “For three days we will fast and pray, and I will cast the sortes sanctorum. Then we will know.”

  The younger man met his eyes, and looked away.

  “Don’t you trust God to guide us?” the duke asked calmly.

  “We’re speaking of treason here, my lord. It might be wiser to trust heated iron.”

  “And when men are put to the question, who do you suppose gives the innocent the strength to endure, and breaks the will of the guilty? It is still God.”

  Theodoric said nothing.

  “I counted the years,” Gottfried said. “Exactly one thousand, from the birth of the first heir with Frankish blood, to the spring of 1105. Exactly a millennium. The kingdom looks to dawn, my son.”

  In the west, black clouds were sinking fast, drowning the light, dissolving the boundaries of earth and sky. He spoke again, as if to himself, or to God. He was not looking at Theo.

  “It may be harder this way, if he is against us. Harder and bloodier, but cleaner in the end. When they are all gone. When all the enemies of God have spoken, and identified themselves, and fallen still. There will be no true kingdom until then.”

  * * *

  It was dawn of the third day. Outside the duke’s private chapel in the castle of Stavoren, the white-clad knights of Saint David kept an armed vigil. Within, two men knelt before the altar. For three days they had knelt, wearing only pilgrims’ hemp shifts, their feet bare and their knees raw against the stone. Now they were bathed and anointed and dressed in clean garments, waiting to hear God’s words of judgment.

  The sun was not yet risen. The only light in the chapel was from candles, the ever-burning lights which once the heathens placed in their wayside temples, and which burned now only to the glory of God.

  So would all things be brought under his dominion, Gottfried reflected. So would unbelief surrender to truth, and flesh to the eternal soul. So would the earth be ruled by the sky.

  Father, we do not come to you in pride, demanding to know your hidden things. We do not come as the heathens do, to work foul magic with the rot of tombs on their garments, and the filthy bones of animals in their hands. We do not call the dead from their unrest so they might speak to us. We seek truth only where you yourself have placed it, in your eternal words.

  Gottfried picked up the sacred books, one by one, and pressed them against his body.

  You have shown me I am your son. Tell me your will, that I might fulfill it. Speak your blessing upon your servant Karelian, or speak your curse. We will hear. We will obey. Guide the blind man’s hands, and let him touch your truth. Amen.

  No priest was present at the ritual, for none was needed. The door opened, the blind servant stepped inside, and stood uncertainly as the door closed behind him. He was a young man, blind from birth, and considered simple. He was bewildered by his fine new garments, for he kept touching them, and smiling.

  Theodoric went to him and took his arm.

  “You are in the chapel, Hansli. Show proper respect.”

  The lad genuflected quickly, and stopped smiling.

  “Do you believe in God, Hansli?” the duke’s son asked.

  “Oh, yes, my lord.”

  “Then come with me. I will place into your hands the sacred books of the Proverbs, the Prophets, and the New Testament. You will hold each one for a moment, and ask God to guide you, and then you will open it. Anywhere, Hansli, on the first page or the middle or the end, it doesn’t matter. Open it where God tells you to open it, and place your finger on the page. I will read the passage you have chosen. And then you will do it again, with each book. Three times you will do this. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Come then.”

  They moved slowly towards the altar. They knelt. For a small time nothing moved, not even the wind, or the sun creeping slowly towards the edge of the world. It seemed God himself was poised and waiting.

  “Rise,” Theodoric said, “and take the first book, and open it.”

  Gottfried did not look at either of them. He knelt a small distance away, his face pressed against his knotted hands.

  God, maker of the world and lord of the universe, you who scattered the infidels like broken reeds, and spilled their blood like water on the sand; you who brought us safely to our own lands again, and filled our hands with riches; I beg you, God and father, out of the same infinity of power, out of the same unfailing justice towards the righteous and the false, name him as he deserves, as enemy or friend!

  Theodoric read aloud.

  “For at the window of my house I looked through my casement, and I beheld among the simple ones a young man void of understanding, passing through the street near her corner; and he went the way to her house. In the twilight, in the evening, in the black and dark night: behold there met with him a woman attired like a harlot, and subtle of heart.”

  Gottfried lifted his head, but he did not look at the others, only at the cross high above his head.

  So, it is true then. They went to Helmardin, and found her there… or she found them— lured them there, perhaps? I know her ways, and her hatred of Christian men. But which of the two is the youth void of understanding? The squire Paul, who is in truth a lad? Or the count who despite his years knows as much of God as a half-taught boy, and cares less? Which one was seduced there to betray his lord?

  “Again,” he said.

  Soft rustling as the book closed and another was taken up; a tiny, breathless silence. Theodoric read again.

  “And the prince that is among them shall bear upon his shoulder in the twilight, and shall go forth; he shall cover his face that he see not the ground with his eyes. My net will I spread upon him, and he will be taken in my snare: and I will bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans; yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there.”

  Gottfried looked down. No ambiguity remained, no
ne whatever, neither to guilt nor to punishment. It was not the boy then, but the lord, the prince. And he would die for it.

  For the first time, Gottfried allowed himself to feel the anger of a king betrayed. And the bewilderment of a man who had made, in absolute certainty of his good judgment, a serious mistake.

  Or had he?

  Did I overtrust you, spawn of Dorn? Did I — for all my knowing better — did I come to admire you, as others do, for your beauty and your skill with arms and your graceful, cunning words? Did I want you as my warleader because it would enhance my honor in the world? Or was it myself I overtrusted, my own subtlety, my knowledge of your worldliness, my certainty that you would serve the highest bidder as every whore will do? Perhaps I forgot how much my enemy can offer.…

  Or was I led to this because God wills it so? Because your treachery, like that of Judas, must yet fulfill the law?

  “One last time, my friends,” the duke whispered.

  The blind lad took into his hands the New Testament, and opened it, and Theo read as he was bidden.

  “Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God who justifies.”

  Only to my Father, then, will I answer for what I do now….

  Silence again, and small shafts of dawn light lying in spears across the altar. He heard his son’s voice, low but harsh: “Go now, and hold your foolish tongue; this is God’s affair, and not a matter for servants’ talk.” He heard the young man’s clumsy, groping steps, the opening and closing of the door, Theodoric coming to stand beside him. The young man’s face was drained and bitter.

  “Are you satisfied, my lord?”

  Gottfried rose. He was aging; he had spent three days without food, ill-clothed and on his knees. Yet his body straightened like a bowstring, easily, gracefully. He was still one of the most feared fighting men in the empire, and that was in itself a miracle.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am satisfied.”

  “Then I would ask you a favor, my lord.”

  “Yes?”

  “Give me the charge of bringing him in.”

  “Why do you hate him so much?”

  “He’s a viper in your bosom, my lord. Are you telling me I shouldn’t hate him?”

  “You hated him before you knew that.”

  “Give me some credit, my lord,” Theodoric said coldly. “Consider the possibility that I’ve always known it.”

  I am considering it. I’m also considering how he shone at the Königsritt. How everyone admired him. How the women, especially, admired him, and offered him their tokens. You are still worldly, Theodoric. Worldly in your pride, and in your flesh. You hate him because, as the world judges things, he has all its gifts, and you hunger for them entirely too much. In a part of your soul, you would still rather have his gifts than mine. Worse, for all your hatred, you do not see the danger in him, even now….

  He placed a hand on Theo’s shoulder.

  “He will be lawfully taken and lawfully tried— not for personal vengeance, but for the honor and righteousness of God. And God’s wrath is wrath enough for any man.”

  “And after he is tried?”

  “I will fulfill the law. To the last word and letter. I will bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans; and he shall not see it, though he shall die there.”

  “My lord?”

  The duke did not answer. He genuflected, and then turned and walked purposefully towards the door.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Queen of Car-Iduna

  No man has ever beheld me but that I could have had his service.

  Wolfram von Eschenbach

  * * *

  They gathered in the high-domed chamber of the gods, on the day which in the Christian world was called the Feast of Saint Callistus. It was mid-October, autumn in the Reinmark, but there were no seasons here, or rather, the seasons passed unmarked by the ordinary sun. The air was sweet with roses; the fountains laughed among budding gentians which would never see the fall of snow.

  They were a fearsome gathering — or so the world would have judged it — for they were without exception women and men of extraordinary power. The aging Nine in their sheaths of silver, the Seven in arms, the Five young and eager to be proven, the Three without rank.

  And she the One, crowned and potent, Lady of the Mountain, guardian of the Reinmark, keeper of the Grail of Life, Raven the sorceress, queen of Car-Iduna. She wore a gown of mottled and dissolving colors; gold wrapped her wrists and her loins; seven stones flashed rainbows from her hands. No person of her own world or the Other ever looked at her and judged her anything but beautiful. Only a few failed to entertain — at least for a few unguarded moments — some image of their own surrender, some wish to yield up whatever treasure they had to hand, in return for her favor, or even just the hope of it. She had many gifts, and this was not the least of them: she kindled desire in all its shapes and forms. She embodied it, and so held it out as infinite and barely imagined possibility.

  They gathered in silence. They bowed to the Black Chalice high on its bier, the Grail of Life which Maris brought to safety from the vale of Dorn, so long ago that no one remembered exactly when, even in their stories. They bowed to their shimmering, power-wrapped queen. And then, with great solemnity, they closed the circle.

  It was said that when they met so, storms broke across the empire, and ships went down at sea, and great men blundered into death, and even the pope could neither sleep nor pray. It was said also that the crops flourished after, and lovers were reconciled, and prisoners unexpectedly set free. But many things were said of Car-Iduna. Perhaps none of them were true, or perhaps they all were.

  A small fire burned in a stone at the heart of their circle. Each one knelt, and cast into it an offering of their own choosing. Beside the fire was a flower-draped altar. Raven lifted from it the ceremonial cup, and the horn which lay over it, and held them between her jeweled hands.

  Down through the years they thought of her more as veela than as woman. It was an easy mistake to make, for she had the Otherworld’s uncanny beauty, and powers far beyond the scope of ordinary human sorcery. But she had been bred of a human father — they remembered it quite clearly now — a black-haired man from the steppes, with a taste for wandering and strange adventures. He could neither stay with his inconstant mistress nor forget her, and so he came back, and came back again, haunting the wild Maren like a ghost, until time and despair took him to his death.

  They watched her, and they remembered him now, and they knew. It was human eyes which held such bitter shadows, human fingers which closed around the cup like talons of steel. She had not slept for days. She had spent herself to breaking, and after all the reasons of politics and power had been accounted for, there was still another reason.

  She raised the cup high. Her voice was harsh— and that, most of all, was how they knew.

  “May the gods keep safe the world, and may the world keep safe the gods!”

  They spoke after her, all of them, in a single voice:

  “So let it be.”

  She dipped the horn into the cup and drank from it, and passed it on. The wine was dark and bitter.

  She sought for words to begin, and could not find them. It was Aldis, first of the Nine, who finally spoke:

  “Lady Raven, you have called us here for counsel. I know why, but some of us do not. And time is short now. Shall we not begin?”

  “Yes,” Raven said, and then still said nothing more.

  What is power in the heart of the circle is death on the cliffs of the pyramid. I have always known that. But what are we to do who are caught between them?

  She let her eyes travel around the circle. She did not love them all, but every one of them she trusted. She began then, quietly, leaving nothing unsaid.

  “I’ve tried, with all my strength and skill, to contact the count of Lys, and I cannot do so. Either Gottfried has cast a net around him more powerful than either of us can break… or else Karelian himself
has turned against us, and refuses my command.”

  “Or he is dead,” added Helrand, first of the Seven.

  “No,” she said. “If he were dead, I would know.”

  No one disagreed, though two or three of them exchanged glances of surprise. So. It’s as serious as that, then? She hasn’t loved anyone for so long… but of course, those are always the ones who break their necks when they fall….

  “There is more,” she went on grimly. “Gottfried is riding north from Stavoren, with upwards of a thousand men. They are moving quickly, and they are armed for war. The ravens followed him deep into the pass of Dorn; he can be heading nowhere now except to Lys.”

  “Then it has begun,” murmured Marius.

  “If Gottfried is powerful enough to detect Karelian’s bond with us,” the queen went on, “and then to block our contact, even from the castle of Stavoren, then he is far more powerful than we knew, and the danger he presents is desperate.”

  “He may think he is a god,” Aldis said archly. “I for one don’t believe it. He doesn’t have such power, lady.”

  “We never thought so,” Raven agreed. “We may have been wrong.”

  “Wrong about him? Or wrong, perhaps, about our ally in Lys?”

  There was a brief silence. They had all shared in the decision to lure Karelian to Helmardin, but it was Raven, most of all, who had insisted on it. It was Raven who had seen in his ensorceled image a man who could be won, a man already halfway theirs, who was skilful, and experienced, and dangerous. “He belongs to us!” she had insisted. “He is blood heir to all the great witches of Dorn, and soul heir to its enduring history of defiance. I tell you, he is ours!”

  Aldis spoke again.

  “Karelian Brandeis spent his life at war, serving any lord who’d offer him a place. Serving even in that utterly savage and unprovoked campaign of butchery they call their great crusade. And for his service there Duke Gottfried gave him Lys. Is it not so, Lady Raven?”