The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  “Just because there are men out there,” I said, “it doesn’t mean he isn’t a sorcerer.”

  “So what did he do? Put a hex on the count of Ravensbruck to get all his knights?”

  “It’s not impossible.”

  “Do you think witchcraft would even take on that old Viking-killer? Or on all those fat burghers in Karn?” He laughed a little, shaking his head. “No, Pauli. No. Let’s be sensible.”

  He sounded so much like my father just then, I wanted to scream.

  “What about Schildberge fortress?” I demanded. “How did he get from Konrad’s camps in Franconia all the way here, right up to our noses, and nobody knew anything about it?”

  He shrugged. “There are ways. The world’s mostly forest, you know. March by night, in small groups, stay disciplined, stay quiet… you can go a long way without being seen. I know. I did it once. With Prince William, in Lombardy. We gave the Normans one hell of a surprise.

  “You told me yourself the man’s a good strategist. Well, if he is, what’s he going to do with all this demon-talk? He’s going to take bloody good advantage of it, isn’t he? Move fast, strike fast, make strange noises in the night. If it was me, I’d wear a set of fangs and paint myself bright purple. The more enemies you can scare to death, the fewer you have to fight.”

  “Are you defending him?” I demanded. It was a stupid question. But I was angry at his blindness, his refusal to see what any honest child could see.

  All my life I would encounter it, even in my failing years, even here in the monastery. Years after the events in the Reinmark were over, I happened to be sitting one night by a campfire in the Holy Land. We talked of many things, and drifted by chance to the terrible day in the courtyard at Lys: to Karelian’s capture, and his flight, and the wolves.

  And I stared, open-mouthed and bewildered, as another man in our group said calmly:

  “There weren’t any wolves.”

  It was just a wild story, he said; a story with a kernel of truth, embroidered by fantasy and exaggeration and outright lies, until it turned into a legend. Karelian and his men had been out hunting, he said; the dogs had their blood up, and went crazy in a courtyard packed with too many strange men and horses. Panic and close quarters did the rest.

  I stared at him. He was neither a boy nor a fool. He was a knight and a crusader, an experienced fighting man born of a renowned and noble house.

  “They were wolves,” I said to him. “I saw them. I was there.”

  “So was I,” he said.

  I had no answer for him then. But for days after I thought about it. First I thought only of the astonishing way in which men could delude themselves. Then I found myself wondering if perhaps it was what he had seen. Some seventy men, I reminded myself, had ridden into Helmardin, and lodged in the castle of a witch, but only two of them remembered it. Why then should we assume that an act of sorcery was a single thing? Perhaps it was many things, even layers of things, in which the final layer could not be distinguished from reality itself?

  I grew very cold, thinking about it, and tried to put the question out of my head. Ordinary men could not hope to understand such things. That was why we had the Church and its priests: so we should always know precisely what was real. I knew what had happened at Lys. And I knew Karelian was a sorcerer, whether Wilhelm could see it or not.

  He rubbed the stump of his arm, the way he always did when he was angry.

  “I’m not defending anyone,” he said. “I’m trying to keep a level head on my shoulders. You’d be wise to do the same.”

  He paused, and his voice softened again into the mentor-like tone he often used with me.

  “I’m not saying he doesn’t know any devil’s tricks; maybe he does. It isn’t a subject I know much about. I do know about war, and one thing I’m sure of, sorcery or no, we’ll still have to fight them as men.”

  He grinned, and added: “Unless you want to start casting spells or something.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said.

  “Just a suggestion,” he said mildly, and slapped me lightly on the shoulder. He was only trying to cheer me up. We were all on edge, and fearful, and more than a little bewildered. None of this was supposed to have happened. The war had scarcely begun, and in any case it was far away. How had we come to be here, facing this totally unforeseen disaster?

  * * *

  I was asleep when it happened. I was dreaming, as I often did, of my wanderings in the forest when I searched for Karelian. The dark things which never found me in the wild always did so in my dreams; more than once I woke up screaming. So for a moment I thought the shouting belonged in my dream, with the black darkness and the smell of fog.

  Then I woke, and saw it was the middle of the night. Torches were leaping everywhere to life and the whole of Stavoren was a-clamor. The alarm bell was ringing, and outside in the barracks yard someone was yelling “Treason! Treason, my lords, treason!” at the top of his voice.

  I ran out like the others. A crowd had already gathered by the gate, and everyone was shoving and shouting.

  — What is it? What’s happening?

  — I don’t know! I can’t see!

  — I think they’ve caught a traitor!

  — A traitor? Dear God, who is it?

  — One of the sentries! They say it’s one of the sentries!

  Then Theodoric came, and as a pathway opened for him, I saw something of what had occurred.

  Three or four bodies were lying near the gate. One man was being restrained by the guard, a young soldier I vaguely recognized. A great mailed arm was wrapped around his throat; two others pinned his own arms behind his back. But he was no longer fighting. An arrow was lodged in his shoulder, just high enough to have missed the lung.

  “My lord.” The captain of the guard stepped forward, bowing briefly to the prince. “This man… this damnable dog… has slaughtered the night watch, and was trying to open the gates!”

  Theodoric seized a torch and lifted it close to the traitor’s face. I was sure I had seen him before, a commoner whose name I was trying to remember even while something different was nudging itself into my mind, something out of the darkest places of my dreams. I swayed on my feet, foreseeing it an instant before it happened, before I could put words to it, or even thoughts. There was no time for thought, only for sheer, bone-melting terror.

  The man’s face was changing. He fought for a moment — fought with a terrible and desperate strength — so briefly and so hopelessly that I cannot say for certain if I saw a thing, or only a possibility, a shadow trying to take form, a flutter of wings, a greyness. Then his strength gave out. His armor melted like shavings in a flame, dissolved into blackness, into silk. The body beneath it was a woman’s; the hair black, the face pale and spent and beautiful.

  How can the same moment contain both clamor and silence? In the background, the alarm bell was still ringing, the cries of treason still answering each other in the night. But around us there were only soft gasps of terror, and the name of God whispered over and over: God save us, sweet Jesus preserve us from evil…!

  Then the prince’s voice struck like a crack of thunder: “Von Ardiun, come here!”

  Theodoric waved me on, impatiently, until I stood at his side, directly in front of her. The arrow which brought her down had been broken off, but not removed; blood streaked her gown and ran from a cut on the side of her head. Theodoric reached and lifted her face. She was conscious; I saw at once that she knew me.

  And I knew her.

  I felt a brief stab of confusion. She had been a tall and powerful creature in her witch-court at Car-Iduna. Now, surrounded by all these men in the full armor of war, she seemed ordinary. Ordinary and utterly defenseless. Just a woman, caught in the path of an army.

  “Well, von Ardiun?” Theodoric demanded. He had her jaws in one great hand, turning her face this way and that, as though I needed to see its every contour in order to be sure.

  “Is this the witch of He
lmardin?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “You will swear to it? This is the traitor’s necromancer, and his whore?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Good. Bring her.”

  He sent for a messenger, and motioned me to follow him. Shouts erupted all around us as we moved through the courtyard. The word was spreading like wildfire. Witch! It’s a witch! They have Karelian’s witch! Not only the garrison was out now, but the servants as well, sleepy grooms and terrified kitchen maids, running from their pallets and shoving through the crowd, greedy for a look at the sorceress— but most of them backed away when they saw her. Everyone was shouting. Everyone knew the best way to deal with witches: water and earth, fire and air. Drown them, bury them, burn them and watch them fly.

  Under the fury and the triumph, though, was a clear note of fear. Even in the voice of Theodoric.

  “What powers does she have, Paul?” he demanded. “What special devices should we use?”

  “My lord, I have no knowledge of these things—”

  He stopped in his tracks, and stared at me.

  “You were in Car-Iduna, you damned fool! What did you see there?”

  How could I tell him what I saw? It was all so uncertain. Oh, the power was real enough, the peril — but the forms it took, the possibilities — they melted even as you tried to give them names.

  But Theodoric wanted names, and so I answered him:

  “She is a shape-shifter, my lord, as we saw. And she can make things appear and disappear. After we left her castle, we couldn’t see it; there was nothing around us but forest. They say she can turn men into creatures—”

  “What about her demons? Her protectors?”

  “I don’t know, my lord.”

  “Christ, you don’t know much about anything, do you?” He threw up his hands, and asked me nothing more.

  We went into the castle keep, into the depths of the dungeons. For a while we clustered outside the door of a cell, while Theodoric decided how it might be safely guarded. He settled on a guard of fifty, ten by the door where we stood, ten more at the foot of the stairs, ten more at the top, and so to the gates, all of them bearing crossbows as well as swords.

  No one wanted that guard duty, no matter how many of them there were, or how fiercely they were armed. What could any weapon do against the devil’s power? Against a sorceress who turned men into gibbering birds and squeaking mice? Their faces were set; their eyes looked carefully at anything except the eyes of their fellows. Some of them audibly prayed.

  I thanked God when they had all been chosen, and I was not one of them. I forgot he would take guards inside the cell as well.

  The messenger he had summoned came, bowing deeply, and asked for his assignment.

  “Listen well,” Theodoric said. “I don’t want this message to be misunderstood.”

  The young man bowed again.

  “Go out to the camp of the traitor Karelian, and tell him I have his witch. Tell him he has two days to surrender the fortress of Schildberge, and to yield his army and his person to the emperor’s justice, or she will be burned alive. Tell him he has two days, but if he’s wise, he won’t wait that long.”

  He took his dagger and slashed away the gold belt around the witch’s hips.

  “Give him this.”

  The messenger went pale.

  “He will kill me, my lord,” he whispered.

  “He might. But if you disobey me, I’ll do it instead. Get your horse now and go!”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  The prince was not even looking at the messenger any more. He was looking at the witch of Helmardin. At Karelian’s whore.

  “So, witch. We’ll see how strong your spells are now.” He motioned to the guards to drag her inside. And as God is my witness, he smiled.

  He made me follow with the others. Because I had been to Helmardin, he said. Because I had some experience of her power and her ways. Perhaps he spoke the truth. Perhaps under his martial arrogance he was just as frightened as everyone else, and really hoped I might have some knowledge the others didn’t have, some ability to warn him of danger.

  Or perhaps he merely thought it would do me good to see the ways of men.

  They gathered around her, and the place got very still. There was a moment, how long I cannot say, a moment of uncertainty, of breathless tension. Wounded though she was, the two guards still held her in an iron grip. I could not see the prince’s face as he approached her. I did not have to. Everything was clear in his words, in his motions: the strange mixture of fear and riveted fascination as he stared at her body.

  You who read this may well think me naive, but until that moment I believed the prince’s taunt to Karelian was only a taunt. A lady’s girdle was an acknowledged symbol of her honor; to take it from her, and send it to her lord, was the sort of gesture Theodoric could not resist. Once it was your privilege to take her clothes off; now it is mine. A sexual insult, I thought, cruder than a king’s son should stoop to, but nothing more. They were Christian men. They were God’s most favored knights. Theodoric was Gottfried’s son.

  Gottfried’s son. Gottfried’s blood, and heir to the kingdom of Christ….

  “They say forcing a witch is the surest way to undo her power,” he said.

  “If she’s a virgin witch, my lord,” someone replied. “Only if she’s a virgin.”

  He laughed. “I don’t think it matters. I can use the same rod to tame a filly or a mare. Isn’t that so, witch?”

  He pulled at her gown, and she cried out as it wrenched across the shaft in her shoulder.

  “Isn’t it?” he said again, savagely.

  She looked at him. There were tears of raw pain in the corners of her eyes, and a kind of icy terror. Yet she defied him nonetheless.

  “You will regret it,” she said.

  “And who will make me? Do you have some little fiend hiding with you, waiting to leap on my throat? Do you think we won’t find him?”

  I turned away as he began to maul her, tearing at her clothing, forcing his huge hand between her thighs.

  “Where is the little devil, then? Is he here? No? How about here? He’d fly straight back to hell if he knew what was coming at him, wouldn’t he, my friends?”

  I tried to pray. I tried not to listen, not to look when they twisted her to the floor and pulled her legs apart. I tried not to hear him grunting and mocking her as he did it. I kept telling myself no, it was not happening, he would not lower himself to this, he would not…. Finally I heard him laugh, and growl a few words. I looked up; he was on his feet, wiping his arm across his face, and someone else was hunched over her in the torchlight.

  They all took her, one after another while the others watched. And after a while I stopped trying to pray. I stopped trying to pretend it was someone else there, not Gottfried’s son. I stopped trying not to hear her cries. Because I came to understand how it was possible— indeed, except for my conscience, I would say it was inevitable. And it was not because of lust.

  Oh, certainly there was lust; she provoked it in men like a fever. There was a blind greed to possess her, to degrade her as an enemy; and even more, perhaps, a wish to degrade Karelian. But there was something else, and it was the most important thing of all. She was a witch. She was the disobedience which lurked forever at the edges of their consciousness, the loathsome carnality they resisted but could never free themselves from, not even now. She belonged not simply to an enemy in war, but to the lords of darkness, the enemies of Christ. To break her power — to break her — was somehow also a religious act. Sinful, yes, sinful and sickening, the endless heaving and thrusting of flesh, the sport they took in it, watching and laughing and urging each other on. Yet they all knew she was more than a woman, and it was more than a rape. Their laughter had a terrible edge, and their very greed had a ritual quality to it.

  I cannot say it was not wicked. And yet there was something in it which I understood, as I understood why our knights walked a
nkle deep in blood through the streets of Jerusalem. Because of what they do to God, and to us.

  They finished, finally, and dragged her to the wall. Heavy iron manacles hung there, cemented into the stone; they fastened these around her wrists, her ankles, her neck.

  — I’ll wager we’ve pounded the devil out of that one, my lord…!

  More laughter. A few blows, to make sure.

  — I thought they said witches feel no pain.

  — Hey, Pauli, don’t you want a go?

  — Not a chance, Pauli’s going to be a monk, aren’t you, Pauli?

  The dungeon was more than twenty feet below the surface of the ground. It had no windows, and as we left we rammed shut behind us a solid oak and-iron door, with an iron bolt as thick as a man’s arm. Nothing less than an army was going to get into her cell, and nothing less than a demon was going to get out.

  Before we left, Prince Theodoric had a last word for the lady of Helmardin. He stood over

  her, and took a torch from one of his knights. She was still conscious, though perhaps barely. There was hate in her eyes, a kind of bottomless malevolence which reminded me quite suddenly of someone else, a woman in Ravensbruck, a Wend slave who slunk around the edges of Count Arnulf’s court with the same burning darkness in her eyes. She too, they said, was a witch.

  “My father spoke of you once or twice,” Theodoric said. “The last of the whores of Odin, he called you. Then you corrupted his kinsman Karelian, and he spoke of you a great deal more. Do you know who my father is, witch?”

  I caught my breath, not believing he would speak so. I looked at the other knights, milling about in the aftermath of their lust, wanting to be gone. I saw the question meant nothing to them— only to me.

  And to her.

  “Your father,” she whispered, “is the son of a scorpion, and the sire of a dog.”