The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  “It is.”

  “Then it’s no great leap of the imagination, I think, to wonder if he has gone back to Gottfried’s standard. Or indeed, if he ever left it. The great problem with turncoats, lady, is keeping track of how many times they’ve turned.”

  You objected to his coming from the first— you and Helrand both. His reasons I understand; he’s a fighting cock like any other, and jealous of his place. But you are too old for such foolishness, and too wise…. Were you right then, from the start? Was I the fool? He was beautiful, tawny and proud-limbed as a stag. Was his beauty the only thing I saw?

  “You may be right,” the queen agreed. “But whatever the facts turn out to be, we must act now. If Gottfried is riding to war against the emperor, and if Karelian means to ride with him, then the Reinmark and all of Germany is at risk. And if Karelian is still loyal, then he must be warned, and if necessary, defended. We have to know. We can’t stay here in Car-Iduna and wait for events to unravel.”

  “It is late in the year, lady,” offered Riande, who like Helrand was one of the Seven, the warriors of Car-Iduna. “Too late, I would think, to begin a war against the emperor. And surely he won’t take on King Ehrenfried with just a thousand men?”

  “Well, he’s not riding to Aachen, we may be sure of that,” Helrand agreed. “An open uprising can’t possibly succeed. He has no grounds for it, and no matter how many men he can put into the field from among his own allies, most of the German princes will oppose him. Whatever he is planning against Ehrenfried, I’m sure it’s something different, and for that, a thousand men may be quite enough. Indeed, they may be too many.

  “I won’t pretend to know what the count of Lys is thinking, or where his loyalties are. But as for Gottfried, this sudden march to Lys does not strike me as the beginning of his rebellion. I think it has to do with affairs in the Reinmark itself— something between the duke and Karelian, or between them and someone else. Unfortunately, it was Karelian’s task to tell us all these things, and he is silent.

  “I agree with you in this much, lady. We can’t wait any longer; we must act. Let me take a party to Lys—”

  “You can’t get there before Gottfried,” Raven said grimly. “Not any more. He is two days’ march away, or less.”

  “Two days? Perhaps an elf can ride across the Reinmark in two days, if he has a mind to. But no one else can.”

  “I can.”

  Every gaze fastened on her, each with a different, unbelieving look of protest.

  “Lady,” Helrand said, “there is but one way you can make so swift a journey, and if you choose that way, none of us can go with you. None of us have the power. And you can’t possibly go into such danger alone.”

  “Can I not?”

  “You are the queen,” Aldis said grimly. “Your duty is to Car-Iduna. All your gifts were given you so you might keep this castle safe, and shield its powers!”

  “I know my duty, by the gods!” the queen cried. “If all we were meant to do was shield the Grail, we wouldn’t have it! The elves would, or the veelas. Their lairs are safer, and their hearts yield to nothing. But it was given to us, because we care about the world! Or we used to. What would you have us be now, lady Aldis— just a band of vine-draped sorcerers hiding in the woods?”

  There was a long and painful silence.

  “That was uncalled for, High One,” the crone said quietly.

  Raven looked at the Chalice before her, black as the fecund earth, studded with jewels, embracing the curved horn. In that image of female and male were the images of all difference, of all the divine contradictions which made possible the richness of the world.

  “We had power once,” she said. “All our kind, whether we came to our power by blood or by learning. The gifted ones, they called us, before the priests of the empire came, and claimed all our gifts for themselves. Or broke them.

  “The world had a place for us. It had a place for many things— many gods, and many ways of knowing, and many kinds of truth. Now there is only one. One God, one priesthood, one people, one right way to pray and to think and to dress and to couple and to wipe your miserable nose.

  “And for what? Love, they said, and promptly made love a crime. Peace, they said, and we have wars now such as Odin never dreamt of. There is no end to the empire’s greed for land, and no bottom to Rome’s craving for dominion in the empire. We’ve seen centuries of it, and we’ll see more.

  “Yet however ruinous it is to have Church and empire tearing the world apart between them, it will be worse if they are made one. That is what Gottfried von Heyden wants. And if it happens, then I think we’ll all wish for chaos again, for priests and kings snarling at each other’s throats. Whatever else, they check each other’s power, and a few things slip from their grasp, and go free. When there is only one power left, and that one claims to speak for God— where does anyone turn then? Who will even believe, after a while, that any other kind of world is possible?

  “Gottfried must be stopped, and I will leave nothing undone — nothing! — which may serve to bring him down!”

  “You see the matter rightly, lady,” Aldis said. “But—”

  “Then I am going to Lys. Whatever the duke’s purpose is, he’s moving with extraordinary speed. Why such haste, unless he knows we are watching him? Unless he’s afraid we can still warn Karelian before he gets there?”

  “You assume the count’s innocence,” Marius observed. He spoke without a hint of criticism in his voice; he was stating a simple fact.

  “Yes,” Raven said. “I do. And as for my being the queen, and having no right to fly off on such a reckless enterprise alone, I will say only this. It’s true that I’m bound to protect Car-Iduna. From many things, my friends— and quite possibly from myself. Wait! This time you will listen till I’m finished.

  “When we chose Karelian Brandeis for this task, to be our agent in the camp of the duke, some of you disagreed with our choice, and you had good reasons. Others of us, mostly for the same reasons, judged him the best man we could hope to find. I haven’t wavered from my judgment.”

  She paused, looking from one to the other. Her voice softened to a riveting purr.

  “Let me be very clear. I have no doubts about Karelian Brandeis. None whatever— and I have delved deep to find them. Yet neither fire, nor absinthe, nor dreams, nor the smallest whisper in my blood— nothing speaks of anything except his bond to me. I’m well aware of such facts as we have. I will say aloud that the harshest of your judgments may be right. But inside, I say no. Inside I know him as he is, my lover and my ally, a man I would trust with any weapon, and any secret. If he walked through the door this moment, it would scarcely matter what strange tale he might tell to explain his silence, I would believe it.

  “So I will go to Lys. Because if I’m right, then he is truly one of us, and there’s a bond between us worth saving at any price. And if I’m wrong….”

  She stood up, motioning them all to remain. “If I’m wrong, then my instincts are gone, and my judgment, and every claim I ever had to the wisdom of a sorceress. Then I no longer have the gifts of one who would be queen of Car-Iduna, and you should look to someone else.”

  They stared at each other, and some of them stared at the fire, or at the floor, but none of them disputed the truth of her words.

  “Helrand,” she added, “if you will bring a party to Lys, as quickly as you can, I would be grateful. Bring Marius, and as many of the Seven as you think best. And send word to Wulfstan, if you can find him; he has his own ties to the house of Dorn.”

  Aldis spoke again, with obvious reluctance.

  “Lady, if you’re determined to do this, and it seems you are, there is something we must know. What secrets and what powers have you entrusted to the count of Lys?”

  “He knows how to find this castle. He has a talisman to summon me, without spells. He has healing potions, and all the charms against the weapons of enemies I could give him. And he has the shells of deception; I t
hought he might have need of them.”

  “The wyrdshells? You gave him those? Sweet gods of Valhalla, you have been generous!”

  “Yes.” To their considerable surprise, the queen of Car-Iduna smiled. “I tried to be. Now, let us unclose the circle, and be gone.”

  * * *

  “You are too weary for this journey, lady,” Marius said.

  She did not answer, but she made herself eat the food he placed carefully before her, and drink the potent brew of herbs.

  “Why don’t you sleep for a few hours?” he persisted. “You’ll travel better for it after.”

  “If I could sleep, Marius, I would be tempted. But there’s no hope of it. And you know that, so be quiet.”

  “Yes, lady. May I ask you something?”

  “If I said no, you’d ask me anyway.”

  “Are you as sure of him as you said in council?”

  “I’m not a fool,” she said. “He may well have done exactly what Aldis thinks he’s done: thought it over, and decided that a privileged place with the would-be king of the world might be a very nice place to have.”

  “And if it turns out to be so?”

  She stopped eating, and he looked away.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’ve said too much again, as usual.”

  “If it turns out to be so, then he’ll wish he were still Gottfried’s enemy, instead of mine.”

  She drained the cup, and got slowly to her feet. “But I won’t believe it until I must. And perhaps not even then.”

  “For what it’s worth to you, lady, I liked him uncommonly well myself.”

  “You should learn to shape-shift,” she said. “What good is a steward I have to leave behind whenever I’m in a hurry?”

  He chuckled, but there was a note of sadness in it. “If I could shape-shift, I would soon find myself a better shape than this one, and keep it.”

  “You couldn’t, my friend. When our strength fails we change back again, whether we want to or not. A great peril, that— and sometimes a great protection.”

  She wrapped her cloak around her shoulders. “I will see you in the vale of Lys.”

  He bowed his small, humped body very low. “Iduna keep you, Lady Raven.” And then he walked with her to the east rampart of Car-Iduna, and watched as the autumn light around her melted and changed, and her cloak fell away, and the soft silk which draped her shimmered into blackness, blacker than her hair, a soft blur of blackness and smallness and power. And then she was no more. A raven stood there, perched for the briefest moment on the wall. Then it flew, making a slow spiral above the fortress, and turning southeastwards like an arrow.

  For a time she was aware of the world below, of the rabbits and the birds; of the soft hum of life in the forests, and the passions in the houses of men. She was aware of the altars, Christian and pagan both, where the presence of their deities still lingered. She felt the quiet sorceries, fashioned over pools and fires and deathbeds, some evil and some good, all of them touching an echo in her, as images hit mirrors, seen but unchanged. The Reinmark was alive with mysteries, with hungerings and secrets, with dreams. In a peasant house, a girl-woman wound strands of her hair around the clasp of her lover’s tunic, so he would not leave her. Priests blessed the filling granaries, and cast out devils from the sick, and the devils shrugged and looked for otherwhere to go. Old women rocked infants to sleep with tales of war among the gods, and young women begged fertility from the virgin of Jerusalem.

  For a long time she heard their whisperings, and saw their ritual places, and felt the power in their yearnings. Then she grew weary, and no longer noticed. There was only distance in the world now, only forest and rivers and villages and endless forest again. She rested sometimes in the arms of a great tree, or on a high outcropping of rock, and while her body restored itself, her mind strained against the distance. She sought him, searching and hungering, and found only silence.

  Karel, why? I gave you everything I promised you, and more. Why do you not answer me?

  Finally, against her will, she had to return to human shape, and sleep. Thereafter she flew with all her strength, until at last the heights of the Schildberge lay to her right. She followed them for what seemed like hours. Late in the afternoon she saw, still far away, the first scattered villages as the land leveled off into the broad valley of the Maren. Rich fields followed, and high-steepled churches, then an abbey and winding roads scattered with carts and horsemen. All this was the domain of Lys: Karelian’s lands, Karelian’s forests, Karelian’s vassals in their walled manors and quiet, tucked-in towns. And still he did not answer her.

  It was half-dusk when she came over the last of many woodlands and saw the town of Lys itself, and some leagues beyond it, the famous manor of its lord.

  Had she not been so weary, she would have known before she saw the place that Gottfried was already there. She would have felt his presence a thousand times more strongly than the small sorceries of the common folk, or the god-breaths from their altars. But she was spent to exhaustion; every fragment of her strength was pounding in her wings, holding in the boundaries of her altered self.

  So she saw it unexpecting: the great field of tents, the cook-fires of fighting men, the guarded enclosures filled with huddled people, too far away to identify even as male or female, only as heaps of ragged fear.

  The ravens.

  Not the ravens of Helmardin, who served her, but the common ravens of the world, circling idly, resentfully, waiting for the endless coming and going of men and horses to stop, for the dead to be abandoned. They lay in piles outside the walls of the manor, quietly guarded until the living would have time to bury them.

  Inside, in the heart of its stables and granaries and tanneries and huts, the splendid great-house of the lord of Lys still smoldered in its ruins.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  In the Schildberge

  And imagine to yourself just how ridiculous,

  how completely monstrous it is to be in love.

  Erasmus

  * * *

  We were hunting the day Gottfried came to Lys— hunting in the hills below the great fortress of Schildberge. It was one of the most famous warrior castles of the empire, built more than a hundred years before by Otto the Great. In those years the Maren had been his eastern border— by summer a highway for Danish warships, by winter a frozen plain over which any army could march, without so much as a tree to bar the way.

  Now a different and distant river lay at the edges of Christendom, between the hunger of the west for dominion, and the hunger of the east for land. But the great fortress remained, built on a splendid and solitary cliff, with a single narrow road climbing hard to its gates. From its seven towers, Otto once boasted, a hundred men could hold off an army. He called it the Shield of the Reinmark, and in a strange reversal of custom, the mountains came to be named for the castle built among them.

  They were not high mountains, as Germans would judge the matter: nothing like the Alps, or even the Pyrenees. But they were wild and unpredictable, given to strange storms and stranger legends. Men tended to avoid them, as they avoided the forest of Helmardin.

  They were pretty that day. Above Karelian’s fortress the sky was blue and clear. And on the mountain beneath it, the wind-twisted firs stood almost black among faces of grey rock and scatterings of flowers. The flowers were the last of the season, bright flashes of color rivaled by the first turning leaves.

  It was a splendid day, chilly with the first taste of autumn, but invigorating; a day when ordinary folk could ride and sing and laugh without a care in the world, simply for the pleasure of being alive. But I was sorely troubled. It was growing harder and harder to live divided as I was, committed to God and bound to Karelian, torn apart with guilt no matter what I did.

  Earlier in this chronicle, I said he did not change at all, but it isn’t really true. He was strengthening in evil, shoring up the walls of his soul even as he strengthened the castles of his domain, using the p
ower of his rank to fashion himself a world where God mattered less and less. And he was enjoying it, taking pleasure in what he thought of as his freedom. I think it was the hardest thing of all for me to bear— that he felt no guilt. I, who tried so hard to be good, suffered such unbearable distress, while he, having sold his soul, had no regrets at all.

  We hunted all morning, and then as the sun turned westerly we built a great fire to roast the rabbits we had killed, and warmed ourselves around it, and told stories. Except for myself, everyone was in the best of spirits, especially the countess Adelaide. Frail though she was, she loved to ride and hunt. The wind and the open sky put color in her face, and the closest thing to happiness any of us ever saw in her eyes.

  Father Thomas slid off his horse with some difficulty, and sank against the trunk of the nearest tree.

  “A pleasant little rabbit shoot you called this, my lord? Really. I’m half starved, and I’m cold, and I’m covered with bruises. If you ever undertake a journey you expect to be unpleasant, please don’t invite me along.”

  Karelian laughed, and pulled a flask of mead from his saddle pack. It was good mead, sweet and strong, passed from hand to hand without much regard for rank, until it was gone. By then the fire was roaring and the rabbits spitted and beginning to turn brown. Thomas felt much better.

  “The trouble with you, Thomas,” Karelian said, “is you spend too much time with your books and your lyre.”

  “No, my lord. I don’t. The trouble is, there isn’t enough time in the world. A man ought to have all the time he wants for books, and time for hunting, too. Unfortunately, God decided otherwise.”

  “You should become an elf,” the countess said lightly. “Then you’d live for hundreds of years, and have time enough for everything.”

  “I know a marvelous tale about a man who became an elf,” the priest said. “And it’s from these mountains, too. From the Schildberge.”

  “Is there any place from where you don’t know a marvelous tale?” Reinhard asked dryly.

  “Oh, one or two, perhaps. But in the Schildberge are the lairs of the hunter elves— the caves where they first were made, and where they go to die. Did you know that?”