The Black Chalice (14 page)

Yes, I know some of you will say I am unjust, and some will want to argue with me, as Karelian did once. I have neither wife nor mistress, you will say, and so I speak without experience. But that is nonsense. A man does not need to be bitten by a snake to know it’s poisonous. Nor did I need a wife or daughters of my own to see how much enduring grief could be brought upon a man by the women of his house.

I was as much deceived by Adelaide as the others were; I admit it. She was pleasing in appearance, although not strikingly beautiful. She spoke softly, and kept her eyes down; she behaved always with the utmost delicacy. She did not thrust herself into men’s conversations, or act flirtatiously to attract their attention. More than one of our men, commenting quietly among themselves, thought Karelian had done very well for himself, and I was the first to agree.

I do not know what Karelian thought of her at the outset, for other than saying she was sweet and pretty and — as he put it — rather too young, he told us nothing. Why he seemed surprised at her youth I cannot imagine, for Gottfried told him everything about her, including her age. Perhaps after so many years of warfare and wandering he had forgotten what youth and innocence were like.

But whatever he thought of her, or of his future kin, he treated Adelaide with courtesy and charm. He was a polished man, and he knew that he was handsome; all his life he had enjoyed the admiration of women. He courted her as much as the restraints of Arnulf’s harsh world permitted. She smiled at him sometimes; she never laughed.

Only afterwards did we know why. She was terrified of Karelian, of any man who might come to her as husband, and so find her unvirgin and despoiled.

Quite soon after we arrived — before the ambush in the forest — Arnulf summoned his chaplain, and a lawyer and two scribes from the town, and gathered his family around his table so the marriage contract could be drawn up and signed.

Countess Clara was there, splendidly dressed; a heavy, slow-moving woman with unfeeling blue eyes. Helga was with her, the youngest of her living children, a pretty girl of fourteen. She was not precisely flirtatious — no daughter of Count Arnulf would have dared to be flirtatious in his presence — but she was bold enough to steal repeated and admiring glances at Karelianof Lys.

First at Karelian. Then, even more covetously, at his gifts. He had brought splendid presents for his bride. Jewels for her throat and gold plate for her table. Bolts of silk, shimmering with colors the grey northern marches had never seen. Strange treasures from the east: jewel cases and carvings of exquisite materials and bewildering design, so lovely that soft ohhhs went all around the table, and even Arnulf of Ravensbruck, rough-hewn soldier though he was, reached out once or twice to pick up one object or another, and turn it approvingly in his calloused hands.

Countess Clara’s thin line of mouth grew thinner. I watched her for a moment, remembering Peter’s words to me the day before, when I told him she looked ill.

“The countess is angry about the marriage,” he said. It was his first of many indiscretions.

“But it’s an excellent match,” I had protested.

“Of course. That’s why she’s angry. She wanted Lord Karelian for her own daughter, for little Helga. The one with the greedy eyes.”

I listened to him, of course, but I didn’t think much about it at the time. Mothers always preferred the advancement of their own children, rather than those of some other, earlier wife.

But there was real bitterness in Clara’s expression, I saw now. Even Arnulf, who otherwise paid little attention to her, noticed it, and gave her a scowl or two of his own.

Karelian detailed for them his holdings at Lys. The county lay along the Maren, in one of the Reinmark’s safest and most sheltered regions. He had in fief over three hundred knights, and God alone knew how many serfs, and a magnificent manor house to live in. Nearby in the Schildberge was the splendid fortress of Otto the Great, a stronghold which had never yet fallen in any war. In the valley were sheep and cattle and swine; there was a mill and a brewery; there were apple trees, and streams full of fish, and acres of gardens….

Karelian had his faults, God knew, but puffing himself up was not one of them. I knew he wasn’t trying to brag, or to make an impression on Count Arnulf; he wanted to reassure Adelaide. She sat by her father’s side with the pale face of a nun, and the uncertain glances of a bewildered child. It was for her benefit, this catalog of riches. It occurred to me, ungenerously, that in a certain sense he was trying to buy her affection.

Look. All these things are mine to offer you. God knows I came by them hard, but they are mine now; you will have a good life there.

Will you not smile at me, then, not even once?

They were married eight days after the New Year, on a stormy, winterswept morning. It was a wedding much like any other, with plenty of revelry and improper jokes, so I will not say much about it. The exchange of vows was brief and simple, but after there was feasting and dancing long into the night, in which all of Arnulf’s knights and their ladies took part. Rudolf of Selven was there, too, in such black and sullen humor that everyone must have noticed. But when I commented on it once or twice, discreetly, all I got for answer was a shrug.
Rudi’s always like that….

Two weeks later, to my unutterable relief, he would be summoned home to Selven. His father the baron had died; he was to return to take care of the family and take possession of his lands. My only regret was that it had not happened sooner. His mere presence in a room made me tense, and through the whole long day of Karelian’s wedding I was troubled and on edge.

It is the only day I can remember when the castle of Ravensbruck was truly cheerful. The count of Lys, to my considerable surprise, drank very sparingly. He paid a great deal of attention to his bride, now that he was finally allowed to do so. Whenever I glanced at her I saw the same fragile image as before, the same modest grace overlaying fear. Yet, when she sat at Karelian’s side, she seemed different to me, and to my own great bewilderment, I no longer thought well of her. I cannot say why. I suspected her of no wrongdoing, not then— at least not in my conscious mind. She was behaving perfectly; she listened to everything he said; she thanked him for his compliments, and returned his toasts. She looked up sometimes, very briefly, to study him, and even I could read the question in her eyes:
What kind of man is this? What manner of life will I have with him?

When he caught that look, as he mostly did, he would smile at her, a wonderful smile which might have melted rocks and glaciers, and once he reached and touched her cheek with the back of his hand, very softly. I felt his presence wrap itself around her like a shield, as though her youth and her terrible vulnerability had caught something in himself, and closed on it, and was holding it fast. The look in his eyes was not love, nor even lust; I had seen both in him, more than once, and I knew the difference.

It was… it was a kind of keeping, of sheltering, and it had in it something of Karelian’s power, of his lordship, something new which I had never seen before.

I knew men were expected to offer such protectiveness to women, but I could see he was offering too much, and offering it much too readily. Already I was afraid he would waste himself on her — in a totally different fashion than he would have wasted himself on the witch of Helmardin — but waste himself nonetheless, because she was female, and by that very fact had the power to demand more than she deserved.

After, when she betrayed him, I was only half surprised.

ELEVEN

Darkfall at Ravensbruck

Would I might go far over sea,
My love, or high above the air,
And come to land or heaven with thee
Where no law is, and none shall be
Against beholding the most rare
Strange beauty that thou hast for me.

Marie de France

* * *

The strange thing about fear was the way it could matter more than anything, and yet not matter at all. Through all of Adelaide’s life, fear was present everywhere: in the wind, in the shadows of the fire, in the sounds which tore up the quiet of the night— so many sounds, war talk and drunken laughter and fights and sometimes killings. And the other sound, the one no one ever talked about, the sound she heard most often when they came back from a war, when they brought women with them. Long into the night she could hear it, down below in the great hall and up here too, in the chamber just next to their own, just next to where Clara slept with her daughters and her women servants. She would cover her head at the screaming, cover it with her pillows and her arms and everything she could find. And then she would think about the stories Sigune told her. She would think about the hunter elves, and the women who lived in the sea, and the warriors who could never be defeated, not ever, not by anybody; and one of them would find the princess in the castle and she would go with him to his own lands and no one would take her away again, there would be walls there as high as the moon….

She used Sigune’s stories to shut out the sounds. And after a couple of weeks, the worst of the sounds would stop. The strange young women learned not to scream, just like she learned not to tell on Clara. They learned it was better to be quiet and dream about getting away, or getting even, or maybe just getting old.

But the watching in Clara’s eyes never stopped at all. And that was another fear, those bitter eyes, those eyes which always followed her, hunting like hungry falcons for her smallest mistakes and her tiniest insubordinations. And then struck, and struck again. Clara wanted her to die. Oh, she pretended not to, she pretended to be concerned:
You look so sickly, child, do you have a fever again? Perhaps you shouldn’t eat anything, it will make you throw up. My sister died of plague when she was your age….
Clara had witch things in her jewel box, hidden way at the bottom where she thought no one would know. For a long time Adelaide believed she was using them to make her sick. Clara wanted her to die because she was pretty, because one day she would ride away with the hunter elves and Clara would have to stay behind; they would just laugh at her:
Wicked, wicked, stay there and die!

But when finally she told Sigune, the scarred woman only laughed.

“Clara can’t do anything to you,” Sigune said. “Not that way. She doesn’t have the power.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know, that’s all.”

“Then why does she have those things?”

“Everybody has them. They’re charms, that’s all, like a medal of the Virgin.”

“Then why does she hide them?”

“Because the priests say it’s bad. They say everything is bad. They say there are no elves, no women in the sea. They say it’s wrong to talk about them; all you should talk about is Jesus up there on his cross.”

“I’m afraid of him.”

Sigune looked away then, far away into some dark place where Adelaide had never been and did not want to go. When she spoke again it was not to the child; it was to herself.

“Aye, and so am I. So are we all.”

So many things to fear, and one far greater than them all, and that was her father. Nothing made a dent in her terror of him. His gifts, his occasional expressions of bluff affection, his brazen favoring of herself over Helga— they were all irrelevant, as meaningless as old leaves blowing over the cage of a rabbit.

Arnulf was simply brute force to her, the absolute principle of violence at the center of the world. He was the bellow shattering the hall, the fist crunching bone, the certainty of destruction which awaited any man’s defiance— or any woman’s.

Arnulf would kill her for smaller things than loving Rudi Selven.

She loved him nonetheless. And that was the strangest thing of all: amidst so much fear, there could still be things over which fear had no power. Rudi was the son of the hunter elves, the warrior who would never be defeated, the prince who would take her to the sea. She was very young the first time he gave her a flower. She smiled and thanked him and went away again just as she was supposed to, and they all were pleased and said what a pretty child she was and forgot about it. Only she took the flower and sat alone with it in a corner where no one would find her, and smelled its sweetness and stroked its small petals one by one, and they changed into silver swords, they changed into birds, they changed into veils of coral silk which she would wrap around herself when she went with him into the forest.

No one could be allowed to know. She understood that from the first. So it was weeks until she managed to catch him by himself, in the courtyard, just for a moment. Long enough to ask him if he would be her knight, and love her and serve her faithfully forever.

He looked at her very strangely. She was small for her age, and delicate, but she was not a child, not inside. Maybe he realized it when she spoke to him, or maybe he had already known.

He rarely smiled; he was dark-souled even then, a stranger, a prince from some other, perilous land. But he smiled at her that day.

“I will always be your knight, lady Adelaide.”

For a long time she thought she would marry him. Then the messengers came from Stavoren; and Arnulf, beaming like a bandit with a bag full of gold, told her he had found a husband for her, a kinsman of the Golden Duke, a man with royal blood. She thanked him, as she was expected to do, and crept away. It was late October. The yellow hills were turning bare and dead leaves rattled all night against the stones of Ravensbruck, all night while the moon wept and the elves marched west into the forest, utterly silent, their faces bent and hooded. She knew they would not come back again.

Some nights she cried till the moon went down; some nights she lay shivering with fear. Who was this strange man who would come for her? A knight, but not like Rudi at all. Like her father, old and probably cruel. He would know he was not the first. They said a man could always tell. He would know and he would kill her.

She pleaded with Sigune:
You can do things, I know you can…!
She did not know, precisely, what things Sigune could do, but in the depths of her terror she did not care. Sigune was a witch. Sigune herself had those forbidden powers she once feared in Clara, which Clara did not have. Sigune would make him go away, make him change his mind, make him drown in the river.

But Sigune did not do it. She took Arnulf down instead. And the man from Lys did not kill her; he smiled, and gave her presents. The story turned strange, twisting like a deer path in a forest. Neither death nor life had any certainty now; either could melt in a moment like snow against her hand.

How was it possible, after all that black fear, to go to Rudi again? To walk to their secret room, holding her life like cupped water in her hands, one small stumble and it would be gone? It should not have been possible. It was simply necessary. She cringed at every shadow in the long passageway and listened for every tiny sound beyond. Her stomach hurt and her breathing was ragged; twenty times she thought of going back, but going back was equally unbearable.

It was over between them, even the stolen words, the gift of a look. It was a tale for the minnesingers now. He was leaving, and by spring the whole of the Reinmark would lie between them. Once in a while, in strange courts, in Stavoren perhaps, they would smile across a crowded room, or share a dance. Only that would be left, only that and his promise:
I will always love you, Heidi.

But they would say good-bye. They would touch each other this one last time. It was possible, just barely possible, with the countess shivering with ague in her bed, and Karelian and her father’s men all gone hunting halfway to Helmardin, and no one thinking anything of it that Rudi stayed behind. Of course he would stay; he was preparing for his long journey home, to take charge of his kindred and his duties.

She slid the storeroom door open very slowly, stepped inside. There was not even a flicker of light. She did not speak; she could not. What if someone else were there instead of him?

But it was Rudi, his arms circling her, hard animal warmth in the darkness, beautiful although she could not see him, utterly beautiful and graceful and wild, kissing her, his hands hungering inside her garments, opening them to a twin shock of fire and cold. They did not speak much; they never had. Time was always precious and brief, and words could be overheard. They lay on his cloak on the stone floor and mated. He was greedy, always greedy like beggars were for sweets, but he never hurt her. For a while there was no fear.

“Did he say anything?” His voice was a murmur in the darkness, troubled and hard-edged. “On your wedding night?”

“Nothing at all.”

“Probably he was too drunk to notice. Is he nice to you?”

“Yes. Very nice. He seems… kind. Generous and kind.”

There was a long silence.

“Do you wish he weren’t?” she whispered.

“Yes.”

Then, after a small time, she could feel him shaking his head. “No, I don’t. I don’t know what I wish, except to have married you myself.”

She burrowed her face into his neck, but said nothing. Twice she had begged him to run away with her, and each time his answer had been the same.
Run where, and to what?

Do you know what a man is who has no land, Adelaide? He is a beggar, a bandit, or a mercenary. Nothing more. And do you know what such a man’s wife is, if she’s young and pretty? She’s prey for every scoundrel, every band of robbers, every bullying lord who crosses his path. And if he has the bad luck to die, she’d better find another man before his bones are cold, or she’ll end in a brothel. I haven’t loved you all these years for that!

Still she would have run. She would have thrown their lives to fortune, to the gods of love and defiance. It seemed strange to her that Rudi, who would take so many other risks, would not take this one. Perhaps he knew the world too well. Or perhaps it was too terrible a surrender to let the lord of Ravensbruck drive him into exile, after so many other wrongs.

“There is one other thing I wish for,” he said. “I wish your father were dead and in hell. But I will settle with him one day.”

She knew what she should say, what the world expected of her— certainly the Christian world, and maybe all the others, too. She should defend her father.
No, you mustn’t say such things. He is your lord. He did what he thought best….
She should lie as the world lied, endlessly, kneeling before the feet of power.

“Don’t,” she whispered. “Not ever— not unless you’re sure of winning.”

“I’m not a fool, Heidi.”

“No. But you’re reckless sometimes.”

He laughed softly, ran his fingers down her throat to the tip of her breast. “God knows that is true. Or I wouldn’t be here.”

He was reckless beyond words, beyond all men’s forgiveness. Reckless to the death he had promised to die for her, because he was her knight and he would serve her forever. The door crashed open; torchlight spilled over them, torchlight and curses and the sound of iron striking flesh, and another sound which only long after could she identify, the sound of her own voice screaming, of her own body crashing into a wall of shelves, of pottery shattering around her, the last pieces falling with sad small tinkles into a sudden, inhuman silence.

And then the thud, scrape, thud of Arnulf of Ravensbruck moving from the doorway into the circle of light, dragging his lame foot and leaning on his cane.

She pulled herself to her knees, gulping terror, the scream still howling in her throat, voiceless now. She had no breath to scream, and no strength. She saw Rudi pinned against the wall, blood running from his face. Three men were holding him, one with a mailed arm around his neck. She saw his sword still lying on the floor beside his cloak, where he had so carefully placed it and then somehow not found it in the darkness. He was dishevelled and almost naked, his trousers clinging in a huddle around one foot.

Arnulf looked at her. The hatred in his eyes blackened into absolute contempt.

“Cover yourself, you damnable whore.”

She fumbled at the lacings of her dress, helplessly. Then, sobbing, she groped out for Rudi’s cloak, and dragged it around her shoulders— and she saw her lover, with his unutterable defiance, smile to see her do it.

Arnulf turned back to him. “You bastard,” he said bitterly. “I trusted you. More than any man alive, I trusted you.”

“That makes us even,” Selven said.

The count waved at one of his soldiers. “Bring me a brazier and some iron spars. Lots of coals, too, and my chair. We’re going to be here for a while.”

Adelaide moved unsteadily towards him, trying to find words and the courage to use them.