The Wine of Dreams

by Brian Craig - (ebook by Undead)

  She was very still, and silent.

  At first, he thought that Marcilla was still suffering the effects of exhaustion. It was only by degrees that he realised, while he tried to rouse her, that hers was a much deeper sleep than any mere tiredness could cause. Her flesh was unnaturally cold in spite of the fact that the last embers of the fire still gave out a little heat.

  Several minutes passed while Reinmar shook her harder and spoke to her in increasingly louder tones. His voice must have become hysterical, for Zygmund’s wife flew into the room in a panic, as if expecting to find the pallet on fire. The woman knelt down to look at Marcilla and touch her fingertips to the sleeping girl’s forehead. Then she called out to her husband, who came bustling into the room in his turn.

  Reinmar took up Marcilla’s arm, holding it by the wrist, but he could find no pulse at all.

  “She was supposed to get better,” Reinmar insisted. “She cannot be dead. She was only cold, and wet—and we set her before the fire, with a warm blanket. She was getting better.”

  By this time Zygmund had joined him on his knees beside the pallet. The farmer tried to find a pulse, as Reinmar had, and apparently failed. His wife passed him a lacquered box, which he polished briskly on his sleeve before putting it to her lips—after which the shiny surface remained quite unclouded.

  The farmer rocked back on his heels, putting his weight on his ankles, and looked down at the slender body.

  “She is a gypsy,” he observed, fatalistically. “She heard the call, but the effort of obedience was too great for her.”

  “She cannot be dead,” Reinmar insisted. “She cannot! I love her!”

  “I fear that she is, whether you loved her or not,” Zygmund told him wearily. “There is nothing to be done.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  It seemed to Reinmar as if the minutes that followed were a renewal of his nightmare—that part of it, at least, when the very air and light had cut him like knives, and there had been no respite. They were like a dream in another sense too, for they made little permanent impression on his memory or his intelligence. They seemed to flow in a very disjointed fashion, and when he tried to collect himself in order that he might take charge of the flow of events, he could not do it.

  “She is not dead!” he exclaimed, although he knew by now that saying it could not and would not make it so.

  “Alas, my son,” said the farmer, gently, “she is.”

  “Then she must have been poisoned—poisoned by that cup of wine which the monk gave to her!” Reinmar knew that it was a dangerous thought to voice in his present company, but it was the only possible cause for his terrible distress that his distraught mind could seize upon.

  The farmer shook his head, seemingly more in sorrow than in anger. “You drank from the cup yourself, I dare say,” he said. “I fear that the girl was not as strong as you hoped. Whatever left the dark bruise on her head injured her badly. Her heart has failed her, and there is no more to it than that. The exertions of yesterday must have drained the last dregs of her strength.”

  It occurred to Reinmar that this explanation put the blame partly on him, and he was about to deny it hotly, claiming that Matthias Vaedecker was the one who had insisted on letting her go where she wished, but his common sense reasserted its authority over his tongue. The heat of his anger was transformed on the instant into an icy chill of despair.

  Marcilla was dead, and no matter what cruel stroke of misfortune it was that had stolen her soul away, she was lost and gone forever. That was the whole truth of it. She was lost, and gone forever—and he had wasted the last opportunity he had had to talk to her, and perhaps to make love to her.

  While he was still lost in grief, Noel and Almeric returned, as they had promised to do. They too examined the gypsy girl, and Noel confirmed that she was dead. They immediately set about making preparations for a funeral, while Reinmar sat numbly by, unable to assist or protest.

  Four more monks eventually came with a stretcher, ready to carry Marcilla’s body away. With Brother Noel and Brother Almeric beside him, Reinmar followed them as they trudged through a small wood to the shore of the lake and then moved around it to the burial-ground which the monks had established on the near side of the complex of buildings that constituted their monastery.

  Time seemed to have stopped, and Reinmar felt that he was moving through a new kind of dream, in which he was reduced to utter helplessness by the flow of events. His body moved mechanically, as if he were in a trance, barely conscious of what was happening. Somewhere deep inside him was a more vivid fraction of his soul, which was far too conscious, but it could not assert its empire, bound and pinned down as it was by grief.

  On another day, Reinmar might have taken note of the fact that the lake was rather beautiful, deep blue in the reflected light of a clear sky from which the cloud had retreated in order to take a much tighter grip on the peaks of the Grey Mountains. On another day he might have found much to delight him in the water-lilies and bulrushes which grew profusely in the shallows. Today, however, he was as blind to the water as he was to the meagre fields surrounding it.

  A grave had already been dug, within ten yards of the cracked and mossy wall surrounding the burial-ground, whose only markers were wooden. The moss-encrusted wall had a curiously musty odour suggestive of antiquity and ruin—a subtle stench which might have been more offensive had it not been for the competing reek of the freshly-turned earth, which seemed to Reinmar to be dreadfully heavy and dank. The nearest building to the burial-ground was a temple—dedicated, Reinmar supposed, to Morr, the ruler of the underworld.

  Reinmar watched numbly while the girl’s shrouded body was laid in the grave. When the burial was over and done with, however, he did not have the slightest idea what to do with himself. Although he was now but a stone’s throw from the monastery, its grey walls seemed frightful and forbidding, like the ominous citadel of his dream, and he no longer wanted to go there, although Brother Noel and Brother Almeric renewed their invitation. Almeric tried to press him, but Noel drew his companion away.

  “The boy has had a shock,” he said. “I think he needs some time to himself.”

  Almeric conceded the point, and it was Noel who said to Reinmar: “We have other duties to attend to. When you are ready, come to the door of the main building and ask for me. I will leave instructions that you are to be admitted. We are very sorry for your loss.”

  Reinmar could contrive no better response than a mere nod of the head, and the monks withdrew, leaving him alone in the burial-ground. He soon decided that he could not stay there, and began retracing his steps towards the farmhouse. All the vague plans he had made in the course of the previous evening seemed to have been rendered redundant by the tragedy of Marcilla’s death, and his one remaining impulse was to go home—which meant, in the first instance, finding his way back to the wagon and rejoining Godrich and Sigurd.

  He had hardly made up his mind that that was what he must do, though, when he was thrown into confusion all over again. Almost as soon as he left the shore of the lake and moved back into the small wood to the south of the farmhouse he was seized by the shoulders and dragged from the path by Matthias Vaedecker.

  Vaedecker drew Reinmar into the shelter of a clump of trees, looking this way and that to make sure that no one had seen him. The monks had returned to their huge grey house, and there was no sign of Zygmund or his wife, or any of the labourers who helped maintain the farm.

  “What happened?” the sergeant demanded.

  Reinmar had hardly been able to speak to the monks, but Vaedecker suddenly seemed to him to be a friend: someone in whom he could confide. His dumbness and stupidity evaporated, and he began to weep.

  “She seemed to be improving again once we had reached shelter,” Reinmar told the sergeant, trying to scrub away the tears with his sleeve. “She even managed to speak a few words, but when I awoke this morning I found her deeply unconscious. I think her heart stopped while I watch
ed. The monks who came to the house last night gave her something to drink—the dark wine, I suppose it must have been—but it seemed at the time to be helping her.”

  “Did you take any?” Vaedecker asked, sharply.

  Reinmar had a denial ready on the tip of his tongue, but his resolve wavered before the soldier’s penetrating gaze. “The merest sip,” he admitted. “I had told them that I was a wine merchant, and could hardly refuse to taste their wares. I did not swallow it.” The return of his instinctive defensiveness made him feel as if he were standing before his father, trying to justify some minor sin of omission. Mercifully, the illusion had the effect of stemming the embarrassing flow of his tears.

  “Forgive me, my friend,” the sergeant said, taking due note of his distress, “but I must ask you these questions. Did you recognise the taste of the wine—and did you dream after tasting it?”

  “No to the first,” Reinmar said. “I’ve never tasted anything like it before. Yes to the second—I certainly dreamed, but my dreams were nightmares, not at all the kind of experience that would make me avid to drink more deeply of their cause. In fact, I wish…”

  But he did not know exactly what he wished, and the futility of bringing his confused desires into focus brought him to silence again.

  “Perhaps it is time we began to trust one another a little better,” Vaedecker said. “How much has your grandfather told you about the dark wine, its properties and its source?”

  Reinmar laughed briefly. “Not nearly enough,” he said. “I wish I had been told enough to make a sensible response to customers who came enquiring for it. I wish I had been told enough to make a sensible response to witch hunters who came looking for the customers. In fact, I was told nothing at all until even my father conceded that my ignorance was more dangerous than a little knowledge. I think you know at least as much as I do. You read as much into Marcilla’s delirious mutterings as I did, so you must know the tale which says that the source of the dark wine can only be found by those who have heard a call, and their companions. Doubtless you have also heard that it provides a special intoxication and that it preserves the appearance of youth. If you know more, I’d be glad to share your wisdom—or does the trust of which you speak work one way only?”

  “You’re the only ally I have in this place,” Vaedecker pointed out. “If I cannot trust you, I’m in trouble. I cannot help feeling that you might be in more danger of suffering the dark wine’s worst effects than most, given your family history, but I suppose I must hope that you’re your father’s son and that he is the man he seems to be. I have been told a little more, and although I dare not treat any item of information as certain, I’m prepared to act on the assumption that what I know is true. There is one thing I certainly ought to share with you. In spite of appearances, the girl might not have been dead.”

  Reinmar felt that he had been struck. “If you thought that,” he said, in a terribly dry voice, “why did you not say so before they set her in the ground.”

  “If I am right,” said the sergeant, grimly, “she will not remain in the ground for long. I think they will wait to see what you do before proceeding, because they do not know as yet whether you are a potential ally or an enemy—and I suspect that they might consider you a prize worth capturing, even if there is a certain risk involved. They cannot be certain, you see, whether the girl was the only one who was guided here by a supernatural instinct. They may suspect, given your family history, that you also might have heard a call of sorts.”

  “I didn’t,” Reinmar said, flatly.

  “I believe you,” Vaedecker said. “But it might be a good idea to let the monks think that you did, if they want to.”

  “And why should they want to?”

  “I have no more idea than you how the dark wine is made, or from what kind of fruit,” the sergeant said, “but Machar von Spurzheim has had cause to interrogate a good many gypsies during the last few years. The magic which brings the chosen few to the valley is no mere matter of recruiting carriers to bear it away into the world. The gypsies who hear the call are special children, marked for some kind of sacrifice. They come here never to return, I have been told, but not to die—at least, not as we normally understand death. They come here to be transformed.”

  “Into what?”

  “Into things not human, or only partly so.”

  “Like the beastmen we fought yesterday?” Reinmar asked, quickly—but the image which had sprung immediately to mind was one of the creatures he had glimpsed in his dreams.

  “Worse, I think. Those seemed to me to be mere creatures, capable of fighting but not much else. If they are daemonic at all, the daemonic part of their natures is not very active. Von Spurzheim’s reluctant informants have spoken of more terrible compounds of human and animal attributes, whose daemonic glue is much more powerful. They also speak of a second stage of metamorphosis, which is fundamental to the manufacture of the dark wine and other equally sinister concoctions. Did you grandfather mention those?”

  “He said that the makers of the wine of dreams produce other liquors, geared to more esoteric tastes.”

  “Esoteric? Is that how he put it? Did he offer any further explanation?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” said Vaedecker, “the wine that is so popular in certain quarters of every town between Eilhart and Marienburg is peddled as the ultimate luxury of consumption, and the bloom of youth which it preserves as the ultimate luxury of life—but luxuries pall when they become familiar, and the greatest luxury of all is the one which remains just out of reach. Some of those to whom the dark wine becomes overfamiliar eventually demand more piquant sensations. Dreams are not enough. Youth is not enough. The inner daemons which make them increasingly avid for the dark wine eventually make them avid for something even darker. Luxury never leads to satiation, but always to cruelty, and overindulgence in dreaming always leads, in the end, to a love of horrors. For some of its consumers, at least, the wine of dreams is but an introduction to its more demanding kin—but none of the dark wines can be made without human sacrifice, and children like Marcilla are part of the price the gypsies pay for the favour of darker gods than are worshipped by civilised men.”

  The longer Reinmar pondered this speech, the less clear its import became. “What, exactly, are you saying?” he asked. “That the monks intend to disinter Marcilla, and revive her from her deathlike trance in order that she might complete her metamorphosis into some kind of half-human monster? That she will then undergo some further transformation, in the course of which the dark wine will somehow be extracted from the substance of her flesh and the essence of her soul?”

  “So we have been led to believe,” the soldier confirmed. “It might be that those we questioned had no real knowledge, but had to invent something under the pressure of our questions. There was talk of a monastery too, and of a secret in its cellars, but nothing explicit.”

  “My grandfather said that he had heard some such talk,” Reinmar admitted.

  “We have heard his name mentioned more than once,” Vaedecker admitted in his turn. “When Luther Wieland became too fond of the dark wine, it is said, and subsequently fell ill for lack of it, his father and his son conspired to break an important link in the supply-line which led from this valley to Marienburg. The missing link was by-passed soon enough, but the whole chain has now been shattered by von Spurzheim and his allies, working back upriver from Marienburg. If the monks hope to rebuild the traffic they can only begin from here—and Eilhart is a ready-made site for a first base. Luther’s father is long dead, and the monks must be attracted to the notion of instituting a new conspiracy of grandfather and grandson to undo the work of the old.

  “I think they will come to you again, Reinmar, if you do not go to them—and they will take far more interest than they appeared to do last night. They will probably flatter you, and make what appears to be a generous proposition. If you will trust my judgement you will appear to be tempted—but you mus
t go along with them just so far, and no further. You must win their confidence, as far as you can, and then you must betray it. Our real purpose must be to find out everything we can about what goes on here, and then to escape, marking our path as we go, so that no mere spell of concealment can blind us to its approaches when we return with an army at our backs.”

  “You don’t ask much,” Reinmar observed, sarcastically. “I’m my own man, not a servant of the witch hunter.”

  “I ask what was asked of me, if the chance arose,” Vaedecker told him, sharply. “The chance has arisen, far more readily than I could ever have hoped. I must make the most of it, or fail in my duty—and I am not the kind of man who is given to failing in his duty. I need your help, and I am asking for it as one virtuous man to another. You are your own man, but you are also your father’s son, and a citizen of the Empire. I’m very sorry that you grew to like the girl so much, and then saw her die, but I have a mission to fulfil and so have you. Are you with me, or against me?”

  Reinmar hesitated, but not for long. “If this is the source of the wine of dreams,” he said, “we must find out what we can. And if there is the slightest chance that Marcilla is not really dead, we must certainly find out.”

  “Good,” said Vaedecker. “Go now, while I hide myself again—but when they come for you, keep your wits about you. Wear your sword.”

  When Reinmar eventually returned to the farmhouse Zygmund and his wife did not ask him whether he would soon be on his way. They seemed to assume, in fact, that he would be with them a while longer. The woman gave him food, somewhat better than the bread and meat they had provided when he and Marcilla had arrived, and a jug of the same good wine.

  While he was still eating, the two monks came in again and sat down with him. “Well,” said Brother Noel, “we have now offered our prayers to the god of death and dreams for the safe deliverance and good care of the gypsy girl. We are very sorry for your misfortune.”