The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

He cursed savagely, and kicked her; it evoked a small gulp of pain, nothing more. He could have beaten her to death in her irons, and it would not have changed her eyes, or her inhuman defiance.

  I wanted to warn him then, to tell him the devils had not left her. They would never leave her; she was too much theirs, too old and too hardened in their ways.

  “You will burn, witch,” he said grimly. He held the torch close to her face; she cringed away, the light dancing and shimmering in her hair. “The Reinmark is befouled while you are in it, and you will burn!”

  Then do it now, my lord! You can’t bait Karelian; you’ll gain nothing by waiting. Do it now!

  I wanted to say it. I even opened my mouth. But I was only Pauli, Pauli who was going to be a monk; Pauli who was loyal, no doubt, and maybe even brave, but who was not their equal as a man; Pauli who was too pure to hump a witch, Pauli who took everything too seriously, especially his conscience…. The words faltered in my throat, and stayed there. We left her to the darkness and her fiends.

  When we emerged from the dungeon, we found the messenger had just returned from the lord of Lys. He did not bow to Theodoric and the empress. He knelt.

  “The count ordered me to repeat his words, majesty, but they were terrible. Shall I do so, or say only that he will not yield?”

  “We will hear his words,” the empress said.

  “He spoke thus. Tell the son of von Heyden I can surrender nothing. My fortresses, my soldiers, my life itself belongs to the king. But heed me, Theodoric: I will win this war. If you treat my lady with honor, and keep safe her life, I will return you favor for favor. Harm her, and the earth will not stretch wide enough, nor eternity long enough, to let you escape from my vengeance. I will call on heaven, and I will call on hell; I will destroy you and your blood; I will wipe your names off your tombstones, and cover your graves with salt. Carthage will rise again sooner than the house of von Heyden. Heed me, by whatever gods you choose, for it will be so!”

  The messenger bowed his head almost to the floor. Perhaps he expected to be kicked, and perhaps he would have been, except that none of us could move.

  The face of the empress was ash. “You dare?” she whispered. “You dare to repeat so foul a curse upon my husband’s blood, before my very face?”

  She rose. For just a moment she faltered, and her maid rushed forward to take her arm. She steadied herself, and looked bravely at Theodoric.

  “She will burn, Theodoric. Pay no attention to this arrogance. God gave her into our hands, so we could rid the Reinmark of her evil. He will not allow us to be harmed. Call the chaplain. We will hear Mass, and exorcise this demon lord’s words.”

  * * *

  Only once in my life did I encounter what seemed to me a miracle. It was at first light the next day, when our watchmen looked out sleepily across the sloping fields below the castle, and stared, and called their comrades over, and ran to other vantage points and wiped their eyes, and stared again. It took minutes before anyone really made sense of what they saw, before anyone ran down into the courtyard shouting for their lord, to tell him what they themselves could neither comprehend nor entirely believe. We had exorcised more than the demon lord’s words. Where his tents and his long lines of tethered horses had been, grass rippled idly in the wind. The sky was empty of banners. A few spent fires smoldered in the pre-dawn light, and the great siege towers stood naked and abandoned. Karelian was gone.

  Fled in the night like the fell creature he was, swift and soundless and defeated. Gone.

  Theodoric, more cautious than I had ever imagined Theodoric could be, sent out twenty scouts, and pulled the drawbridge up behind them. But this time he had no cause for fear. They came back quickly, unharmed and unpursued. The fields were truly empty, and the army we so dreaded was vanished like a dream.

  Or rather, the scouts told us, most of it had never been there.

  “He had a thousand men outside our walls, my lord, or fewer—”

  “A thousand knights, you mean?”

  “No, highness. A thousand men, counting them all — knights, squires, foot-soldiers, grooms, servants — aye, and add in the dogs as well, maybe. You could set up a jousting field between one of his tent-sites and the next.”

  “What the devil are you trying to say?” Theodoric demanded.

  “I don’t know what I’m trying to say, my lord. But the army we thought we saw… wasn’t there.”

  “And Ravensbruck? Were the men of Ravensbruck there?”

  “Perhaps a few, my lord. Certainly not all of them.”

  “None of them were there. None of them! It was all sorcery!”

  Theodoric rarely laughed, but he laughed now. It was a ringing, triumphant roar, half savage, half purely joyous.

  “Don’t you see? It was the witch’s doing! He had nothing, just rabble from Konrad’s army, and mercenaries from Karn, and whatever leavings he could bully out of his brother the margrave. He had nothing and he is nothing, only the tool of a sorceress who’s had her powers clipped! Dear Christ, we could have sent a sortie out of here and eaten him for dinner!”

  He turned sharply to the scouts.

  “Which way did they go?”

  “East, my lord, towards Dorn.”

  “Yes, of course. And through the pass and back to Schildberge castle, where I’ll have to smoke him out. Be damned to it, if I’d had my way in this he would be raven’s meat by now!”

  Perhaps, I thought. Perhaps. I edged away from the others, and looked across the empty, autumn-mellow fields of Stavoren, and I stood breathless, marveling at the audacity of Karelian Brandeis.

  There is no other word to use. I marveled. He was evil, he was dangerous, he was Lucifer’s own child, but dear Christ, he was brilliant. Because it might have worked. And if it had, the sorcery would never have been obvious. Our confusion over his numbers and his movements would be credited to his own tactical skill. Our opened gates and lowered drawbridge would seem a simple act of treachery from within. The lord of Ravensbruck, presented with an accomplished fact, would come to heel. Given credit and rewards for the victory, he’d be the last man alive to mention that his men weren’t actually there. Oh, I thought, it was wonderfully clever and bold, and in a part of me… in a part of me I halfway wished….

  I caught myself, and made the sign of the cross. It was a devil’s thought, but I halfway wished I were still with him. A devil’s thought, and ridiculous besides. He was finished now. He could run for his mountain fortress, and take refuge there until Gottfried starved him out. Or he could run back to Konrad, who would have less use for him now than ever. No, I told myself, I wanted no part of him. I had made my choice, and he had made his. He had chosen sorcery, and sorcery had failed him. As it always would. Men were never brilliant when they stood against the power of God. They only seemed so— and only for a while.

  Theodoric sent out more men, several hundred this time, to drag in one of the abandoned siege towers. It would make a magnificent stake, he said, sturdy and high and splendidly appropriate.

  “Let the witch die on her demon lover’s handiwork.”

  He looked eastward. He had given Karelian two days to surrender, but Karelian was not going to surrender, and in any case it did not matter— not any more, not when we knew he had no army worth mentioning. Theodoric probably did not even want his surrender now. He wanted to run his enemy down. He had held back and held back, and now he wanted blood.

  “We will do it today,” he added grimly. “At Vespers. See that everything is ready.”

  So we had a single day of triumph. One day in which every fragment of the world was fallen into place, and everything we believed in was vindicated. Gottfried had been proven right, if only by a thread. But that too was God’s doing, that one sentry who was not in his accustomed place, who neither challenged the witch, nor approached her, but stood riveted in his tracks, watching long enough to be sure, and then taking his crossbow and firing.

  We feasted in Stavoren castle, and we lau
ghed. Some men drank too much; others made generous thanks to God. All of us watched the tower being prepared, and many talked about the coming execution.

  Witches were always burned naked, so no demons could hide inside their clothes and succor them, so full and absolute justice might be done. But many of my comrades looked forward to the fire for reasons which had nothing to do with justice. Everyone had heard about the Lady of the Mountain, everyone knew she was beautiful, everyone knew she was a great harlot. And there was a pleasure in the eyes of some at the thought of her burning, an eagerness so sharp and so physical it seemed to me no different from lust. Indeed, some of them used the words of lust when they spoke of it— how the flames would caress her, how the arms of the tower would hold her fast. What they waited for was yet another rape. And it would be absolute this time, unlimited; the fire would violate what even they could not. And when it was done, there would be nothing left. The flesh would be ash; the soul would be in hell. The great harlot of the mountain would be gone.

  And those same watchers would drink themselves into a stupor after, savagely sated and savagely empty. It would be days, perhaps, or weeks, before they noticed that she was not gone, that they lusted for her still….

  Paul von Ardiun put his quill down, and laid his head back against his chair.

  Write what you will, he thought, it doesn’t matter. I know what is true. Maybe a few men felt that way, a tiny few, but most of us wanted only for the Reinmark to be free. What we did was for God, all of it, for the kingdom of God and for the right of Christian men to walk through the world without fear.

  “And what was it they were so afraid of, Brother Paul?”

  He did not look up at her voice; he did not even open his eyes. He waited. She would say what she had to say, and then she would leave. And he would write again. Nothing else mattered. He would write, and come finally to the end of it. The end of everything.

  “I’ll grant you this,” she said. “It wasn’t quite the same for you as for the others. It wasn’t me you desired, after all. But you were willing enough to see my body degraded and destroyed — the same body which enchanted Karelian, and rolled about with his in so much sinful pleasuring… full and absolute justice for that, dear gods — the flames wouldn’t be halfway cruel enough.”

  “You were a witch,” he said.

  “Oh, certainly. But you never thought to pity me for Karelian’s sake?”

  “We don’t pity the damned in hell; why should we pity them here?”

  “Well said, Pauli. Why indeed? If your God takes such stern and righteous pleasure in destroying human flesh, those who serve him can hardly do less. That follows, I suppose. But you will understand, then, why some of us consider him unfit to be a god?”

  He crossed himself quickly. He felt cold in the presence of this blasphemy.

  “Yes, unfit,” she said, “and don’t bother to be so offended. You called our gods fiends for no reason at all. We honored yours when he first came here, because we honored them all, and he paid us back with broken altars, and massacres, and exile. And a bonfire now and then, for the stubborn ones, the ones you called the whores of Odin.”

  She moved close to his chair.

  “Tell me,” she murmured, “were you with them when they came to the dungeon to fetch me?”

  “No.”

  “How disappointing.”

  No. Others had gone, a great number, he could not recall how many. And a priest went with them, not for the witch’s sake, but to protect her guards and executioners— though of course if she had proven repentant, he would willingly have heard her confession, and given her absolution before her death. Even to one such as she, God would be merciful.

  They went laden with weapons and warnings. She must be carefully searched, they were told, and carefully chained, and carefully guarded. All the inhabitants of the castle were by then in the courtyard, waiting, as well as hundreds from the villages below. The air was thick with anticipation, and hostility, and fear.

  The guards came running back, white-faced and babbling. The dungeon was empty. The door was still bolted; the iron manacles still locked and rooted in the wall. But there was nothing in the cell except its few scatters of rotting straw, its stench of rats, its bloodstains.

  And one thing more. Caught in one of the manacles was the small, blood-stained feather of a wren.

  “All magic can be turned back upon itself by those who know how.”

  She spoke softly, as if she really wanted him to understand. He recognized the tactic. It was what Karelian always did, too— tempting him with cunning words, pretending to have some deep and secret gift of knowledge.

  “Your master took so many precautions— the stone cell, the chains, the armed guards. But there were other powers there, powers of magic as old as the world. And he forgot about them, your Theodoric von Gottfried von Heyden von Clovis von Godfather Almighty. He didn’t believe in magic; none of you did. You believed in devils, and that’s not the same thing at all.

  “It wasn’t fiends who carried me off,” she said. “If there were any fiends in Stavoren, they all worked for the duke. Pick up your pretty quill, Pauli, and I’ll tell you how it was.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The Turning

  Regard everything as poison which bears within it the

  seed of sensual pleasure.

  Saint Jerome

  It was after sin that lust began.

  Saint Augustine

  * * *

  All magic can be turned back upon itself by those who know how. Darkness wrapped her, darkness deeper than the deeps of the world, darker than the lairs of the hunter elves when they died, when the last coals of their fires melted out and their caves were lost forever.

  But it was an evil darkness, fouled with rot and desolation, with memories of blood and murder breathing from the stones. There were no elves here, now or ever in the past, no crystal and ruby walls; only the souls of dead men weeping, and dead women too, all of them nameless and broken and gone.

  For a long time there was only darkness and pain, and a fog of numbing disbelief. She could not believe the world had come undone so easily, so brutally. A small misjudgment, a tiny moment of inattention was all it took. What did it mean to be queen of Car-Iduna, if this were possible— this black failure, this terrible degradation?

  Nothing is promised. The strands are woven and unwoven. We make of them the best we can, and what remains is shadow. Nothing is promised….

  She could not think; it was barely possible to pray. All she had strength for was the gathering-in of self; whether for action or for death, it did not matter. She would be whole; she would stand before them whole, as woman and as priestess of her gods.

  Karelian, heed me! If you have ever loved me, heed me now! Take your men and go! Don’t be foolish, don’t try to save me, there’s no hope of it! You must go! Go, my love. Just go. It’s Gottfried who matters, only Gottfried, I command you to go…!

  It was a long time, that time of pain and silence, but soft at the edges of it was a quiet, gathering knowledge. There was power here, ancient and mysterious and full of possibility. The power was not hers; hers was utterly exhausted and gone. It was theirs, twisted and befouled, reeking of cruelty and hate, but still magical. And all magic could be turned. All power was raw power in the hands of a witch, and the power of sexuality was very great.

  From the very beginning, the Church understood that. Sex was humankind’s great bond to the earth. Over and over it drew them back to her, back to the loyalties of kinship and passion, and away from the loyalties of rank and order and dominion.

  Like so many of the sky gods who came before him, the god of the Christians was hungry for dominion. He dealt with the limitations of life by saying life did not matter. He had something better to offer than life: he had immortality. Before he came, the others had offered immortality in the world— monuments and empires, names graven into history, great lines of kings sired by a single conqueror. Now, for thi
s last of them, the Christian, the world and all its glories were only rubbish; he offered immortality in heaven.

  And yet in their blood all creatures born knew they died, and knowing it they craved to live. They did not want to build kingdoms, neither for gods nor for men, or to shiver night after night on their knees, grieving for sins invented in a book, living in terror of a hell none of them had ever seen. They did not want the transcendence of escape, the dream of a distant heaven where flesh and dying did not matter. They wanted the transcendence of connection. They wanted to know that flesh and dying had meaning in themselves, and that that meaning lay at the center of the world.

  It was love which brought them back, love and lust and pleasuring, the enchantment of the ever-present body, and the ever-present possibility of delight. It was their own flesh, and the flesh of the other who must be cherished and not killed, which held them firmly to the earth, to the truths and the gods of the earth.

  The Christians were quite right about it, and so were those pitilessly reasonable Greeks: the body was dangerous. The body interfered with the orderly obsessions of philosophers; it broke the icy mind-nets of priests; it rebelled against the endless war-mongering of kings. It reminded people that the world was here, and life was now, and if they had no rights over their own flesh, then they had no rights at all.

  Worst of all, perhaps, the body remembered that once, not very long ago, sex had been a holy and magical thing. It was not sinful but sacred; it was the power of the gods in the world. Its fire was their hunger to connect and to create, its lawlessness their endless trying out and making new. And its wild and driven ecstasies were the measure of its sacredness; something so exquisite and so forceful could come only from the gods.

  That was why the Christians hated it so much. How could lust be the work of their own Lord— their Lord who was not of this world? It was of the old gods, just like the people believed; and it was demonic, just like the gods were.

  So it was forbidden, in every way it could be, and what the churchmen could not forbid they wrapped in shame. They said it was the most dangerous of sins, more to be feared than cruelty or violence or war. They said in Eden it never existed. They said God intended men to breed as they laced up their tunics, matter-of-factly, without a throb of passion or a thought of carnal lust. Only a fallen human being, rotten with sin, could possibly desire that.