The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  “Have you… have you seen our… future?”

  The elf smiled. “Which one?”

  “You’re a very difficult man to talk to sometimes.”

  “Do you really think the future is fixed? In a world with millions of beings, all of them colliding and changing and learning, becoming wise, becoming corrupt— aye, and not a few of them becoming mad? A single, pre-determined future with every gnat flying in his place, eaten at precisely the intended moment by the right, divinely chosen sparrow? Really, Karel.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “No. But it is that, or there are a million futures. If the gnat’s fate is uncertain, so is the sparrow’s. If the sparrow, so the hawk. If the hawk, so the hunter. Every place the gnat can fly is a future, and when he dies, every one of those futures has changed, and become another.”

  Karelian thought about his answer for a long time. It was one of the most frightening ideas he had ever contemplated, and at the same time, one of the most empowering. For it both affirmed the importance of human responsibility, and limited the responsibility to livable proportions.

  “There is no original sin, then,” he murmured. “No one damned the world, and no one saved it. And Christ wasn’t chosen— not for death nor for anything else. All of it could have been different.”

  “Aye. All different. And it can be yet. And it will be.”

  But not in our lifetime. I am only one hunter, and Gottfried a single hawk. Yet when one of us is fallen, a million futures will have changed, and become different. Forever. And there is the only eternity which matters.

  It was the following morning when he heard the partridges— the following morning or another; time was irremediably uncertain. He wakened, heard the wind fluttering dead leaves beside his head, and partridges clucking in the bushes. Bewildered, he dragged himself to sit upright against a tree, and saw that he still sheltered where he had fallen, in the depths of a gully, in a hollow shielded by deadfall. He could see the sky now; the sun had moved southerly a month or more. His pack was open, his belongings disordered, the balms and potions mostly gone, but there were no tracks in the woods around him— not of human nor of any other feet. No traces of the hunter elf, no sign that anyone had been there at all.

  But I live… wounded to death, and alone, and yet I live… more sign there, I think, than in anything else he might have left me.

  He was desperately hungry. He found his knife still safe in its sheath; he drew it, and waited for the partridges to grow used to his presence, and wander close again.

  It was a week before he could feed himself properly, a fortnight before he left the gully and began the long journey to Helmardin. He tired quickly, and covered very little distance in the first few days.

  But his body strengthened. And something else was happening, too, something he became aware of only slowly. It came first as a changing mood, like a lightening of the sky, even as the Reinmark darkened into winter. It sharpened as the days passed, becoming more and more distinct. Something was drawing away from him, something hard and evil. It was passing into distance like a caravan on an impossibly flat and unclouded plain, diminishing into ripples at the edges of the world.

  And then it was gone.

  Gottfried had left the Reinmark.

  There was no comfort in it once he thought about it, for almost certainly it meant mutiny and war. Yet for a moment he felt a rush of triumph more dazzling than in any victory he had ever won. Because he knew. It was as if he stood on the high border pass of Saint Martin and watched them go, their banners drenched with early winter rain. He could hear the hoofbeats sharp against the stones, the soldiers’ grumbling at their master’s unrelenting haste. And it was not instinct, or what he would have called instinct in his youth. It was the sharp, clear certainty of sight.

  He knew.

  That night, by a sheltered fire, he tried to summon Raven. But the sky remained empty, the forest melancholy and aloof. Owls cried, and distant wolves, and gusts of aimless, icy wind. There was nothing else abroad. His loneliness burned like a wound, deepening as his other wounds healed. Raven, Raven, Raven, I loved you beyond reason, I love you still, why don’t you answer me, why don’t you come?

  He sat for a long time, staring at the fire, wanting her with a double-edged, extravagant desire, as he had from the beginning. Wanting the sorceress as ally, the woman as lover, power and pleasure hopelessly entangled, as perhaps they were supposed to be, as perhaps they once were, long ages back, when power was not the measure of a man’s existence and pleasure was not a sin.

  The pouch felt heavy hanging from his neck, strangely heavy, for there was nothing in it now except a feather. He lifted it over his head, took out the talisman, black and shimmering like her hair, and touched it against his lips. The temptation to use it — to waste its potency simply to see her now, this very moment — was almost unbearable.

  He had not, he reminded himself, survived twenty years of soldiering by giving in to reckless impulses. He put it carefully back and tied the bag shut, noticing again how heavy it felt, almost as though… as though some power were pulling it down, pulling it away from him. He remembered with a flash of bitter anger how it had been slashed from his throat, snatched away by that white-clad puppy with a snarling face: Ha! And what sacred relic is this, I wonder?

  And for one moment, the one tiny moment when it was gone, when it did not touch his body, the powers of Car-Iduna had found him. Their searching, circling, hungering energies had leapt through some unknown opening and found him.

  And lost him again.

  Because he took the pouch back…?

  A gust of cold wind rippled the hair against his neck. He pulled his hood up, feeling cold to his bones. He would have paid a solid gold mark for a cup of heated wine, and twenty to have someone he trusted sitting by his fire.

  He laid the pouch flat across his thigh. Not this. This which I treasured above all my possessions, and shielded from every risk of harm or loss? It isn’t possible….

  But it was entirely possible. Now that he thought about it, it was one of the few possibilities which made sense, and the only possibility he wanted to face. Raven had not abandoned him. And Gottfried, powerful though he was, had not placed a barrier between them by the sheer force of will; he was not a god.

  He took out Raven’s feather and tucked it carefully into his pack. Then, with great care, he searched the bag for what else it might contain, and finally turned it inside out. There was nothing in it, only rubbish from his travels: dirt and scraps of leaf, a dead bug, the odors of sweat and bracken and blood.

  Nothing. No secret amulet, no charm, no thing of any kind. It had to be the pouch itself which was ensorceled.

  And if that were so, then by whom? No one had ever touched it except Pauli and himself. And Adelaide, perhaps, in the dead of night, while he slept.

  Adelaide….

  The old mage in Acre had warned him. You may go safely where most men fear danger, and you must fear danger most where other men believe they are safe….

  Adelaide who still mourned for her dead lover, slain so cruelly in Ravensbruck, because of Karelian Brandeis— neither by Karelian’s hand nor by his wish, but nonetheless because of him. Adelaide who kept silent while a sorceress plotted against her father’s life. Who kept silent also, perhaps, while Rudi Selven plotted against his.

  He fingered the pouch, thinking how easy it would have been. He had wakened so many times at unknown hours to find her cold and unsleeping, and blamed it on her strangeness, her youth, her bitter memories. What did he know about her, really, except that she was a liar and a whore?

  But even as the accusations took shape in his mind, they collided against his judgment, his experience. He had seen the savagery of Ravensbruck, the ongoing terror of living anywhere near Count Arnulf, even for a man. For a woman…. For a woman, God’s blood, what was left except recklessness and cunning? She had proven untrustworthy to those who left her no options. So would Raven, cor
nered thus. So would Karelian Brandeis.

  This was very different. This was raw treachery— not the desperate act of a frightened girl surrounded by peril and cruelty, but a calculated act of hatred. Had it succeeded, he would have fallen defenseless into Gottfried’s hands, and borne the full penalties for sorcery and treason: loss of lands and rank, degradation from knighthood, death by fire. And she would have been swept to ruin with him, she and her child both, for neither had an ally in the world.

  He shook his head. She did not hate him so much. In truth, he did not believe she hated him at all.

  Which left Pauli, and that was even more absurd. Pauli would never use sorcery. He was terrified of it; he considered it mortally sinful. And Pauli would never do him harm; it took an act of will merely to entertain the possibility. Pauli nursed him through fever in the Holy Land, kept vigil for his safety in Helmardin, wept when he was wounded in Ravensbruck. Pauli worshipped him. And he trusted Pauli more than he trusted anyone. Anyone at all.

  He ran his fingers softly over the pouch. It was finely made, like everything the boy did. He wondered where he might be, if he were Gottfried’s prisoner in Lys, or wounded, perhaps even dead. It seemed unjust even to suspect him. If he could not believe Adelaide guilty of this much hatred, how could he believe Pauli guilty of it?

  Perhaps the pouch was not ensorceled at all. Perhaps that moment in the courtyard of Lys had happened by chance. Perhaps it meant nothing. Perhaps Raven only mocked him with the promise of powers she did not have, powers which did not even exist.

  And if that is so, Karelian Brandeis, then you are finished; you are neither lord nor sorcerer nor lover; you are what you were as a boy, but without a boy’s hopes: a landless adventurer, trading blood for lodging and wine, your father’s true son at last: Go be a monk, in God’s name; there is nothing for you here….

  He nursed his melancholy for a time, because he could not make it go away. And then, as he had done so many times in his father’s house, and after in the traps and misfortunes of war, he wrapped it up like a wound, and pulled his thoughts down over it, and went on.

  Not yet. He wasn’t beaten yet. He had to work it through.

  You have many things to learn, and you can’t learn them all in a day. And this, no doubt, was one of the things he had to learn, one of the reasons Wulfstan left him to make his own way to Car-Iduna. Damned clever elf…. He began again. Was there someone else? Someone, anyone, in the household of Lys, with an old, half-forgotten grudge? Someone who might be a secret enemy, or a spy?

  Quite possibly there was, but no one had ever touched the pouch except Pauli and Adelaide.

  Suppose they had never touched it, had only seen it, and made another like it, and worked the spell upon the copy?

  Perhaps. Such things were done. But spells fashioned thus were always weaker; the object itself was always the most potent source of power. And this spell was potent indeed. The more he thought about the pouch, the more aware of its power he became, as though the thing pulsed here in the darkness, half alive.

  No, he thought. It had not been done by distance, nor by anything except contact— immediate, direct, and murderously personal, like a dagger in his back.

  One of them or the other. Pauli or Adelaide.

  Adelaide at least had a reason to turn on him. Pauli had none.

  Yet Pauli had gone home to Ardiun, and come back silent and troubled. Even Reini noticed it. “Something’s gnawing on the lad,” he had said. “I don’t like it.” And Reini was not a subtle man.

  Then there was the power of the spell itself. If it could stand between him and all of Car-Iduna, it surely carried more than ordinary magic, and therefore wasn’t fashioned by any ordinary witch. Did Adelaide, or anyone she knew, have powers which Raven could not overwhelm? Could Adelaide have done this, even if she hated him? Even if she were fey and wicked and utterly hated him?

  The question, once stated, answered itself. She could not have done it, and neither could Pauli. Only one person in the Reinmark had such extraordinary power. This was somehow Gottfried’s work.

  Ardiun was across the mountains from Lys, deep in the margravate of Dorn. A day’s hard ride from the ducal seat at Stavoren….

  But no, he thought, opportunity be damned. Pauli had no reason to do this. None. Pauli loved him. Indeed, Pauli loved him far too well, as the world would judge the matter.

  Play the paradox, worldling, if you want to win.

  Was it the sorcerer in him then who thought once more of Dorn? The dark, smoke-blackened manor house, the impoverished villages, the high house of Brandeis collapsing into a bitter and violent shadow of itself. His father Helmuth, drunken and coarse and unpredictable, fathering children like rabbits and caring about none of them, forgetting even their names. And Ludolf, the eldest, his half-brother, always watching him, with eyes as cruel as sharpened stones. Not even a clean cruelty, or an honest hate. Something worse. Ludolf watching Karelian and finding ways to make him hurt. Or not finding them, and watching still more carefully, until there was only one way left.

  And all of it was born of love… or what might have been love, had it not sickened and rotted in the cellars of Ludolf’s mind. Ludolf wanted Karelian’s mother, and could not have her. And because he could not have her, he began, day by day, to find fault with her, to suspect her of wrongdoing, to strike out at her in any way he could. He learned to hate her, and to hate especially the boy she cherished, simply because that boy was not himself.

  Karelian was truly cold now. He built up the fire again, but it did not warm him much. He knew this situation was not the same, not the same at all. It was a different place, different circumstances, profoundly different men. But he knew now there was a reason Pauli might have turned on him. A reason the boy would never acknowledge, no more than Ludolf ever had. What kind of man desired his father’s wife… or the love-bed of his liege?

  Not I, whispered the high-born Christian son, the high-minded Christian squire. Not I, not I, dear God, certainly not I…!

  Sweat ran down the sides of Karelian’s face and trickled onto his sleeves. He wiped it away. He was too exhausted to think any more, and almost too exhausted to care.

  He stood up, and carried the pouch some distance from his fire, and placed it under a heavy rock at the base of a tree. And then he waited as the sky closed ever more deep around him. Perhaps she would answer him now. But only owls spoke in the night, and distant wolves, and sparks exploding briefly against the darkness.

  Just a trifle more briefly, perhaps, than the proud-borne life of a man….

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Meeting

  My face was pale and my frame chilled with fasting;

  yet my mind was burning with desire, and the fires of lust

  kept bubbling up before me when my flesh was as good as dead.

  Saint Jerome

  * * *

  There were many days in my life I would willingly forget, but those days when I searched for Karelian were the worst I ever lived through. I was not good at hunting, not even for hares. I had no eye for the forest, and no heart for it, either. Even at the best of times it seemed to me an alien place: mysterious, unpredictable, and dangerous.

  Sometimes I saw bands of Gottfried’s knights; they were hunting for him, too. And day upon day I saw ravens, great black and wheeling ravens, circling the forest (searching for carrion, my father would have said; I knew better). But Karelian had vanished utterly, and finally I began to believe that he was dead.

  Oh, there were stories enough. The whole of the Reinmark was alive with stories, each one stranger than the last, and all of them third-hand or worse. “Oh, no, my lord, I didn’t see it myself, my lord. It was in Karn I heard it.” Or in Schafsburg, or Saint Magdalene, or the little inn by the abbey of Dorn. The demon lord of Lys, I was told, had been fetched out of the Schildberge by Lucifer himself, and carried off to hell. On All Soul’s night, at midnight exactly; there was a long path of burnt forest where the prince of d
arkness had dragged him. Others laughed at the stories, and said surely he must have gone to Aachen, like any wronged lord would do, to appeal to their common liege the king. Still others assured me he had gone to Compostela, to beg forgiveness for his sins. Aye, and with his head shorn bare, and in rags, and eating only thorns. He had gone to the Holy Land, too, of course, and depending who was telling the tale, he had gone as a crusader to defend the Christian kingdom, or as a rebel to lead the infidel in a great uprising against God.

  I learned only one useful thing from all those stories. I learned that people will believe anything about a man — good or evil as it suits them, but anything at all — once he has sparked their passions, once he is seen as someone different from themselves.

  I wandered about the Schildberge for more than a fortnight, but I found no trace of the man I sought. Finally, in desperation, I circled around to Karn. I did not expect to find him there, either, but I wanted to be sure. His friend Lehelin fed me and gave me fresh supplies, and cursed Gottfried for a butcher and a dog— in the privacy of a bolted room, of course, and in the dead of night. But it was clear he knew nothing of his old comrade in arms, and I went back to the wilderness.

  It was mid-November by then: a mild autumn by Reinmark standards, but still autumn, edging hard into winter. The trees were naked; in the high country, clouds drifted southward just above their tips; in the valleys, little herds of grey fog huddled among them until noon.

  It was a day like any other when the dirge bell began. I thought nothing of it at first, thinking someone must have died in a village nearby. I walked on, and heard from the west another bell, distant, carried faintly on the wind. I ignored it, too, at first, but it went on all day. And in the morning it began again, before the Angelus, a steady tolling which clamored against the overcast sky and the dark hills, and hung in the air with a pitiless, hammering melancholy: Doom… doom… doom…. The bells were rung thus only when a great lord was dead.