The Black Chalice (20 page)

“That’s not religion any more, it is tyranny. It’s not the pope’s place to make such judgments, to bring whole nations to such a pass.”

He took a peach which a servant offered to him and broke it in half, speaking more calmly.

“The Church is forgetting God, my friends, and setting its eyes on the world. They may call it reform, but it’s really a drive for power. And that’s why, after a thousand years of teaching peace, now we’re teaching war, and telling men it’s Christian to fight. It’s never Christian. It’s sometimes necessary, but it is never Christian.”

“My lord,” Gottfried said, “you spoke earlier of a contradiction in terms. Surely to say a thing is necessary, and then to say it’s not Christian— surely that’s the greatest contradiction in terms we could imagine. Wait — I beg you, my lord, let me finish — I think you’re right; there is a pattern here. A pattern which has been unfolding ever since the days of Constantine.

“Why shouldn’t the Church turn its eyes to the world? Charlemagne brought half of Europe under his rule, and so to the rule of Christ. Was that unchristian? We took back Jerusalem; was that unchristian? If it’s honorable and worthy to go to war for one’s king, isn’t it a thousand times more honorable and worthy to go to war for the king of heaven? The popes aren’t overturning Christian teaching, my lord; they are finally acknowledging what has always been Christian practice. We are men who fight for God.”

“And who was Charlemagne, Duke Gottfried?” Ehrenfried demanded. “Was he the king or was he the pope? There used to be a difference, you know. Christ told us to render to Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and to God the things which are God’s. The popes want to rule over God’s things, and over Caesar’s, too.”

The abbot of Saint Stephen’s leapt into the fray. “But God must always be the final authority in the world, my lord,” he said.

“Yes,” agreed Ehrenfried. “Acting through his lawful and anointed agent, the Christian king.”

“No, my lord,” said the abbot. “With all due respect. Acting through the authority of Peter, who is Christ’s heir, and lord over all kings.”

“I think,” Karelian said dryly, “we are on the brink of another twenty years of war.”

Everyone laughed, willing to let the tension dissolve. It was a feast, and the matter had been argued over many times before. Only Gottfried, I noticed, did not let it drop, following on quietly with his duchess and his son, with the circle of men around them. I heard only his first comment, before a fresh conversation and women’s laughter drowned him out.

“There is no contradiction,” he said. “God’s power is one. There can be no contradiction.”

All during the long evening of revelry, I found my thoughts going back to his words, and to his new band of knights. They would be dressed all in white, except for a black cross sewn across their surcoats and painted on their shields. Its shape was their Christian icon; its color would remind them they were God’s unto death, vowed to chastity, obedience, and the defense of the Church.

It took a great deal of money to become a knight— money I did not have, although I knew I could borrow it from my father. One had to buy horses and weapons and mail, and this last especially cost a small fortune. There was my poverty, holding me back. There was also Karelian. I did not want to leave his service, not even for the Knights of Saint David.

Night after night, when the feasting and dancing was finally over, and the duke’s court was scattered with bodies like a battlefield, when even Karelian had found his bed — his own bed, I mean, which was rarely the first one he fell into — even then I would sit awake, with my arms around my knees, and think about those white-clad knights, and wonder why I could want so much to follow them, and still want to stay here.

Loyalty, I told myself, was the highest of all virtues. It was right for me to honor my liege, and choose to stay with him.

But was it really loyalty? asked another part of my mind— the harder, colder part. Or was it simply worldliness? Life in Lys was good. The count was generous, and moreover he was mowing down his rivals on the tournament field like so many blades of grass. Everyone envied me, serving so splendid a lord.

Was I weak, perhaps, weak and nothing more? Weak like I had always been, like my father always told me?
Your spine is made of porridge, Pauli. Get some iron into you, or you will never amount to anything.

* * *

Better than all the feasts of the summer, and all the wild hunts, best of everything we enjoyed in Stavoren was the great tournament of the emperor. For two weeks Gottfried’s court was centered on the jousting field, a narrow stretch of flatland beyond the castle, ringed about with banners and a small, splendid city of tents. There the knights of the Reinmark tested their valor and their skills against each other, and against all who came to challenge them: from the royal court in Aachen, from Bavaria, from Saxony, even from the courts of the Franks. More than two hundred knights had followed Ehrenfried’s long journey across the empire, hungry for fame and silver marks and the kisses of women.

Gottfried himself did not take part. It was a tradition in the Reinmark that a host never competed against his own guests, for no matter which man won, he would seem to offer a discourtesy to the other.The emperor, of course, was too old now for jousting, but his personal champion was there to win honor on his behalf, and so was his son Prince Konrad.

It was not the sort of tournament Karelian fought in during his youth with Lehelin. Those had been sheer wild melees, with few rules and less honor, and with no object except profit: the capture of horses and equipment, and the taking of captives for ransom. They had been mock battles with all the chaos of real battles, not least the victimization of the innocent. More than one peasant saw his crops trampled to ruin; more than one village saw a tourney end in a wholesale rampage of rape and plunder; and more than one honest man judged the word knight as nothing but another word for bandit.

This was different. The knights here fought in an enclosed field, according to the strictest rules of chivalry. They used blunted weapons, but it was still desperately perilous, and every man rode onto the field knowing he might be carried from it gravely hurt, or dead.

God, I was proud of Karelian those long, fierce days, proud to aching in the depths of my bones. There was no man there who looked more splendid than he did, all in blue and black and silver, with the winter tree stark on his shield and that strange black ribbon flying from the tip of his lance. It was Acre all over again, the sun burning, all the horizons shimmering with heat, the ground rocking with the sound of hooves. Lances shattered like dry reeds against the painted shields. Men went down, and horses. I think I prayed; I know my heart stopped more than once before it was over. But day after day it was the same; no one broke more lances than he did, or left more rivals lying on the field. And no one unhorsed him, not even once.

We will all look to you to cover the Reinmark in glory…!

He had never fought in the emperor’s lists before, in such high company and for such high stakes. And now he wanted to win. Though he claimed he had his fill of warfare, all the things which made him good at warfare were still with him: the daring, and the cool judgment, and the will to win. He was thirty-eight, and he was still good, and he took a surprisingly fierce pleasure in demonstrating it.
So what if I was only the last left-over son of a fool? I was better than any of them, and one day they would all know it…!

And yes, I gloried in it with him. I polished his shield and his trappings until they glistened. I followed him everywhere, in case he might need me for some small service. I strutted like a little godling among the other squires:
Just wait! Just you wait until my lord meets yours…!
I handed him his shield and his lance as I might have handed a priest the vessels of the Eucharist. And when he smiled at me, as he did sometimes, before he veered the horse away —
Wish me luck, Pauli!
— I felt like I carried the world in the curve of my fingers.

There were women everywhere, all of them loving the ferocity of it. Any man who thinks females are the gentler sex has never seen them at a tournament. Their eyes hung on their favorites with the adoration of lovers, and glittered like the swords on the field. As far as they were concerned, each knight fought for one thing only— for the woman whose token he carried, for the smile she would give him, or the kiss, or the hour in her bed. Every shattered lance was a tribute to her beauty. Every man who knelt on the field had been brought to his knees for her. And it was the same no matter who the woman was. They all chose some man to honor with a token, and they gloried in the certainty that he would dare for her more than he would dare for himself, or for his king, or for his God.

The sad thing was, they were so often right.

Karelian never told me why he wrapped that piece of black silk around his lance, and I never asked. I never had to. He smiled at the women in Stavoren, and wore their favors, and he took more than one of them to bed. But she was there, always there in some quiet place in his mind, in some always unsated hunger of his body.
You will forget nothing, Karelian of Lys….

It was for her that he fought in Stavoren. For the glory of it, yes, and for the pride of coming home a hero and a lord, and flaunting it to all of Germany — a man who had been nobody, who had bought his first knightly accouterments with money borrowed from a prostitute, and spent most of his life trading his sword in the same fashion — oh, yes, he was letting the whole world know he was no longer just a whelp of the weathervane of Dorn. There was all of that. But there was something else, too, something softer and darker which I noticed in his unguarded moments. A confusion. A sense of indirection, of loss, of empty longing, which his triumphs on the field did not assuage— quite the opposite. The closer he came to victory the more I knew what he really wanted from it, more than the bag of golden coins or the adulation of all Germany. He wanted to offer it to her.

* * *

All of what I have written here is true: I was happy in Stavoren, and filled with admiration for my lord. But I was also troubled, and neither my happiness nor my admiration was complete. Doubts hung often in the back of my mind— doubts and guilt and wondering, and a growing ambivalence about who I was, and what I was going to become.

The Church forbade tournaments. Gottfried’s fresh-dubbed knights of Saint David did not take part. Monks and bishops spoke openly against the practice, mocking the lords of Christendom for turning combat into a game, and knighthood into a mere badge of rank:

What are you doing here, fighting among yourselves? Dressing yourselves in fine silks, and feasting, and letting your hair grow long like women, and wearing perfumes? You are the swordsmen of God; why are you not abroad with your swords in your hands, riding against his enemies?

I thought about those questions, too, sometimes, and I did not like the answers. I liked them least of all the day I found my master in his tent with the margravine von Uhland.

It was the second last day of the tournament. Karelian had done well, defeating among others the duke of Thuringia, who had been many times a champion himself. But it was a hard-won victory. He had been battered to raw exhaustion, and we had to help him from the field, Reinhard on one side of him and I on the other, a whole band of our men following, all of them clamorous with triumph.

In the tent, I quickly removed his helmet and heavy armor. He almost groaned with relief, and sank wearily onto the cot. His hair was dank and stained with rust. He no longer looked like a tawny German at all, but like one of those carrot-colored Irishmen with flaming locks and freckles.

I brought a huge basin of water and some towels, and he washed off the worst of it and took a long, grateful drink of water.

“Thank God the emperor only comes once every five years,” he said.

“I thought you were enjoying this, my lord,” Otto said.

He laughed roughly. “I’m enjoying every minute of it. Just don’t hold your breath until I do it again.”

He was hurting, and quite a lot. I helped him out of his shirt and his boots; his body was savaged with bruises, gathered over days of combat. The worst of them were fresh, and for the first time he was no longer moving easily. His experience was one of his finest assets, but the years which allowed him to acquire it were beginning to show.

He did not want well-wishers, just then; he did not even want wine; he wanted nothing except rest. We left him and went to eat.

“Shall I bring something back for you, my lord?” I asked, just as I was going out.

“The margravine,” he said. “But later. Much, much later.”

I did not have to bring him the margravine. She found her way there all by herself. When I went back to his tent just after vespers, I found him lying on his cot,entirely naked, his body gleaming with oil. The margravine knelt beside him, bending as she kneaded his shoulders and back with long, supple fingers, over and over, moving with exquisite slowness— a movement which would take her right to his feet. And back again, searching out all the hurts, all the spent and knotted muscles, coaxing back their grace, their potency, all without haste, without a trace of uncertainty. She glanced up at me as I came in, without much interest. She might have been playing cards for all the difference my presence made. My presence, or that of her serving woman, or that of Otto, sprawling in a chair and nursing a cup of wine with brazen envy in his eyes.

Karelian moaned once or twice, with sheer gratitude for the gift.

“An hour of that,” he sighed, “and I might live to joust again.”

She laughed softly, and kept on, her hands slipping over his ribs, very gently, yet still pressing— hungering almost, as if she could find the pain and pluck it away like a thorn.

“You had better live to joust again,” she said.

Yes,
I thought bitterly,
so afterwards you can dance and smile and strut around before the whole court of Germany, finally, on the arm of a champion!