The Black Chalice (18 page)

And then we stopped laughing. His hand was still in my hair, his gaze still fixed on my face. But something had changed.

The camaraderie was gone. Our hilarity had melted into absolute silence. I could not think or speak or breathe. His hand played like a whisper of wind through my hair, searching and drawing away and searching again, the touch unlike anything I had experienced, not friendship at all now, something very different, tender and subtle and possessive.

“Pauli….”

His other hand, which had rested on my shoulder, was no longer resting there; it was opening and closing softly, wandering down my forearm and then across my back, every tiny shift of motion turning into a caress, an invitation….

I could not believe it was happening. I could not believe he would touch me so, and smile, and let his eyes grow smoky as they did when he went after a pretty whore — God knows I had seen the look before —
Yes, this one is nice; maybe she’ll come upstairs with me….

My breath choked in my throat; my flesh turned to water; so overwhelming was my outrage, my grief. It was not possible. It could not be happening. It simply could not.

My lord, no…!

I do not know if I spoke, or if the words died strangled on my lips. I had no strength, and it seemed I had no will; I was paralyzed with shame.

No man who is impure will enter the kingdom of God….

Years later, in one of the darkest hours of my life, I would speak to a holy man in the Alban Hills, in the great monastery of San Giuseppe. It was a great sin to entertain foul desires, he would warn me, and a far greater sin to act on them. But to stir up such desires in others was the greatest sin of all. More women would fall to damnation for it, he said, than for all the other evils in the world.

And what of men who do evil with men? I asked him.

The greatest sin done according to nature, he said, was less than the smallest sin done against it.

I bowed my head and said nothing, knowing it was true. I had known since my earliest boyhood. Even on my father’s strictly governed manor there were corruptions, some so vile they had no names; they were known only as negations.

Unnatural. Unspeakable. Unimaginable.

Unmale.

A man who did such a thing was more wicked than a murderer, more hated by God than a heretic, more despised by men than a traitor. He was no longer a man at all.

I ducked away from Karelian’s arm and almost ran across the room, grabbing at tasks I had already completed hours ago, the way a drowning man might grab at the wreckage of his ship. I seized upon anything which was handy to clean, or brush, or fold, or put away. He came and sat near me, saying nothing for a time, and finally I looked at him. I could not help it. He was always beautiful, more than any man I would ever know, and I understood now that part of his beauty had always been his powerful sensuality. Another man might have had the same fine features, the same splendid body, and yet not have seemed so desperately fair. Karelian’s flesh was unmastered, unconsecrated, free. It was not a temple to the Holy Spirit or to anything else; it was an animal, alive in its own right, and full of dark promise. The witch of Helmardin had seen it. She wanted his soul, yes, but she wanted his body, too.

“I’m sorry if I have offended you, Pauli,” he said. “But don’t wear such a dark face. There’s no harm done. I’ve known for a long time.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, my lord.”

He made a small, assenting gesture. “As you wish. But it’s nothing to grieve over, my friend, believe me. If we ever made public the names of all the high-born, glory-laden men who’ve warmed themselves in a comrade’s tent at least once in their lives, the world would go spinning off its moorings from the shock. And for what? In a life as full of pain as this one, a bit of pleasure is no great matter to the gods.”

No great matter?

The count smiled. He wanted to erase it, to make it into nothing, a small mistake of judgment for which a small apology would suffice. I said nothing, and it was he who finally turned away from the anger in my eyes. From my outrage that he, lord or not, would have dared. Would have spoken so. Would have expected
that!

Of me!

He stood up. When he spoke again there was an edge in his voice— not, I think, because I refused him, but because I blamed him, because I would not allow him to pretend it did not matter.

“Which do you think is a darker thing for a man, Pauli?” he asked bitterly. “To share his bed with a living man, or with a dead one?”

I did not answer. I was not going to be drawn in by his shabby excuses, his willingness to always find something or someone to blame for his sins: war and other men’s greed and the Church and probably God himself, and now of course his marriage, the same marriage which he could and should have ended in Ravensbruck where it began…. No, dear God, he was not going to get anywhere with that argument!

I did not know it at the time, nor for a long time after, but it was then, I think — that very night — when I began to hate him.

Lauds had rung, and then nones; Paul did not go to chapel. He sat as a man condemned, unaware of the moonset, or of the pink dawn lightening the walls of his cell.

The exorcist from Mainz had arrived eight days ago: a tall, robust man with steady eyes, riding on a mule. He was not just an ordinary priest, but a monsignor, and he arrived with a perfectly credible story. The Church, he said, was growing troubled about the practice of sorcery among the common folk, a practice which it no longer considered harmless. It was too easy for monks, shut away in the quiet sanctity of their lives, to ignore such things, or fail to notice them. They must become more aware, he said. He spoke in the chapel; he led prayers in the refectory; he heard confessions. And so, when the time came to sit alone with Brother Paul in his cell, no one thought anything about it.

He sat with his elbows on the small wooden table, his fingers carefully poised into a pinnacle. His name was Wilhelm von Schielenberg. He was the son of a Rhineland baron, and he might well have aspired to a bishop’s miter, or at the very least an abbey of his own.

“Well, Brother Paul?”

Paul knotted and unknotted his hands. He brushed dirt from his robe, and from the scarred wooden table. He was almost overwhelmed by panic, by a desperate wish to back away and run.

It is nothing, Monsignor. I’m a foolish man; I alarmed Brother Anselm over nothing. I had a few bad dreams, that’s all; it is nothing….

But if he sent this man away, he was finished, and he knew it. He could not defend himself— not against them, not against her. And no one else would listen to him after this, not even Anselm. The servants of darkness would come triumphant and howling with laughter. They would pull him down, and always further down, into the depths of his own corruption. And finally into eternal pain.

He had to speak to this man; he had to save himself. Only the risk was so terribly great….

He saw with sickening clarity what the witch of Car-Iduna had done to him. She had caught him between two pits, each more black and terrifying than the other. All he could do was stumble back and forth between them, like a rat in a burning cage.

“You wished to speak to me, Brother Paul?”

The priest had a strong face, with a clean line of jaw and deep, knowing eyes. It was a face to inspire confidence in anyone, even those who were utterly desperate. Those whose souls were no longer their own.

Paul began slowly, haltingly. He had served, many years ago, as squire to Count Karelian of Lys. He had been in the war—

“Which war, my son? There have been many.”

“The war against the Salian kings.”

“Ah, yes. Gottfried’s war. Go on.”

“I was asked to write a history of it. By the Holy Father. Only when I began—”

“Forgive me, Brother Paul. I mean no offense. But why would the pope ask you to write such a history? You were hardly one of the principals in the affair.”

“I wasn’t one of the principals, Monsignor. But because of my years of service with Karelian Brandeis, I knew things about him which most of the principals didn’t know— at least they didn’t know for sure. He served the powers of darkness, Monsignor, and he used sorcery and other abominations against his enemies. This was what the pope wanted me to write about. Only when I began, they… they put a spell on my quill. So now it writes what they wish.”

“They?”

“The witch of Car-Iduna. And her demons.”

Father Wilhelm linked his fingers briefly and then steepled them again. “And who is this witch of… of Carduna? What is her name?”

“I don’t know her name. She’s the witch of Helmardin. The Lady of the Mountain.”

The priest’s face did not change, but Paul could sense the fierce quickening of his interest.

“You’re saying it is she who bewitched you? How do you know? Many people say she’s only a legend.”

“I met her. I was there, inside her fortress in Helmardin. With Karelian of Lys. And she came here also, to my cell. The night I began my history. She took up my quill in her hand and she cursed it.”

“How extraordinary!” Wilhelm murmured. “Go on.”

“Please.” Paul wanted to kneel, to place his head between Father Wilhelm’s hands, and weep. “Please, will you rid me of them? Drive them out of my quill, out of this cell, out of me? My soul is in mortal peril.”

He looked up, half expecting the priest to rise, and wrap his stole around his neck, and take out the crucifix and the hyssop, and begin. But Monsignor von Schielenberg sat as calmly as before, and when Paul did not say anything further, he repeated his soft command.

“Go on, Brother Paul.”

“They torment me day and night,” Paul said desperately. “I dare not sleep for the evil things they put into my mind. I dare not close my eyes. I’ve even thought… I’ve even thought of self-destruction— oh, not willingly, dear God, no! They put the thought in my head; they whisper it in my ear: End it, Paul of Ardiun, end it and sleep…!” He shuddered. “Can’t you help me? In the name of God, can’t you help me?”

Wilhelm shifted a little in his chair.

“What is the nature of the torments they inflict on you?” he asked. “Do the demons cause you pain?”

“No.” Paul shook his head. “They fill my mind with evil thoughts.”

“What manner of thoughts?”

Paul looked at his hands. “Unclean desires. Images… vile images of the vilest deeds. I can’t speak of them, Father.”

“You must speak of them. How else can we learn how devils come into men’s souls? Or how to defend against them? Tell me exactly what happens when they appear, and what they do.”

Exactly? How was it possible, when their coming was all nightmare and fire, all shadow and mist? Voices in darkness, demon flesh melting even as the eye wakened to discover it? Heat rising up in his own loins, night after night unbidden? Dead men walking into his cell, laughing, brushing their hands through his hair, their blood spilling over him while his own flesh burst in a hideous mating of hatred and desire?

There were no words for such things.

But he had to answer the priest. He needed help. He had to find the words somehow.

“They… they provoke in me a terrible concupiscence. I can’t control it. They fill my mind with thoughts of sin— every kind of sin there is, Monsignor, between men and women, men and beasts, men and men. And then they….” It took all his strength to finish. “And then they… take me.”

“In what fashion?”

“Every fashion.”

“They assume human bodies?”

“Yes.”

“Women’s bodies?”

“Yes.” His head fell lower. “Sometimes.”

“And the other times?” Wilhelm asked.

“They have the bodies of men.”

“Most times, perhaps?”

“Yes. Most times.”

There was a brief, unbearable silence. Wilhelm got to his feet and walked to the window.

“The devil,” he said, “is an excellent strategist. It’s always his way to attack the soul at its weakest point. What have you done to draw this evil into your life? Are you one of those who foul themselves with their own kind? Who come on purpose into monasteries to live among their brothers and corrupt them?”

“Never! I swear to you, never—!”

“But you have been tempted,” Wilhelm said, turning back to him. “Sorely tempted.”

“No.”

No. To be tempted was to desire, and he had never been guilty of it; never. He had loved them purely, both of them. It was Karelian who saw everything through his own corrupted eyes….

“You have lived chastely in the monastery?” Wilhelm asked.

“Yes. Always.”

“And before?”

“Yes. Almost always. I tried very hard.”

The exorcist sat down again, and drummed his fingers softly on the table.

“It’s remarkable, you know, how many times I hear the same stories. Lust is in all men the great corrupter.”

He paused thoughtfully, and looked up. “Corruption begins with the passions of the body; it doesn’t end with them. There’s a great deal you’re not telling me, Brother Paul.”

Paul sat rigid, barely able to breathe. The exorcist picked up the quill and turned it in his hands.

“The Holy Father asked you to write an account of the war, of the sorcery practiced by Karelian of Lys and his allies?”

“Yes.”

“At the time, many men accused Karelian of such crimes. Those accusations reflected on the highest lords of the land— even on the king himself. If you knew the truth, Brother Paul, why didn’t you reveal it then?”

“I did speak of it, Monsignor, to such men as would listen. But I was only a knight of modest station. As you say, many other men accused him, and most of them were far more powerful than I. If the lords of Germany would not listen to their peers, or believe the evidence of their own eyes, nothing I could have said would have made any difference.”

“I’m not talking about the lords of Germany, Brother Paul. I know what they believe, and what they don’t believe. They do not concern me right now. I want to know why you didn’t take your knowledge to the Church.”

He paused. His voice was soft, almost fatherly, yet there was a threat in it, and a terrifying power. He spoke as one who spoke for God.