The Black Chalice (31 page)

“So I will go to Lys. Because if I’m right, then he is truly one of us, and there’s a bond between us worth saving at any price. And if I’m wrong….”

She stood up, motioning them all to remain. “If I’m wrong, then my instincts are gone, and my judgment, and every claim I ever had to the wisdom of a sorceress. Then I no longer have the gifts of one who would be queen of Car-Iduna, and you should look to someone else.”

They stared at each other, and some of them stared at the fire, or at the floor, but none of them disputed the truth of her words.

“Helrand,” she added, “if you will bring a party to Lys, as quickly as you can, I would be grateful. Bring Marius, and as many of the Seven as you think best. And send word to Wulfstan, if you can find him; he has his own ties to the house of Dorn.”

Aldis spoke again, with obvious reluctance.

“Lady, if you’re determined to do this, and it seems you are, there is something we must know. What secrets and what powers have you entrusted to the count of Lys?”

“He knows how to find this castle. He has a talisman to summon me, without spells. He has healing potions, and all the charms against the weapons of enemies I could give him. And he has the shells of deception; I thought he might have need of them.”

“The wyrdshells? You gave him those? Sweet gods of Valhalla, you have been generous!”

“Yes.” To their considerable surprise, the queen of Car-Iduna smiled. “I tried to be. Now, let us unclose the circle, and be gone.”

* * *

“You are too weary for this journey, lady,” Marius said.

She did not answer, but she made herself eat the food he placed carefully before her, and drink the potent brew of herbs.

“Why don’t you sleep for a few hours?” he persisted. “You’ll travel better for it after.”

“If I
could
sleep, Marius, I would be tempted. But there’s no hope of it. And you know that, so be quiet.”

“Yes, lady. May I ask you something?”

“If I said no, you’d ask me anyway.”

“Are you as sure of him as you said in council?”

“I’m not a fool,” she said. “He may well have done exactly what Aldis thinks he’s done: thought it over, and decided that a privileged place with the would-be king of the world might be a very nice place to have.”

“And if it turns out to be so?”

She stopped eating, and he looked away.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “I’ve said too much again, as usual.”

“If it turns out to be so, then he’ll wish he were still Gottfried’s enemy, instead of mine.”

She drained the cup, and got slowly to her feet. “But I won’t believe it until I must. And perhaps not even then.”

“For what it’s worth to you, lady, I liked him uncommonly well myself.”

“You should learn to shape-shift,” she said. “What good is a steward I have to leave behind whenever I’m in a hurry?”

He chuckled, but there was a note of sadness in it. “If I could shape-shift, I would soon find myself a better shape than this one, and keep it.”

“You couldn’t, my friend. When our strength fails we change back again, whether we want to or not. A great peril, that— and sometimes a great protection.”

She wrapped her cloak around her shoulders. “I will see you in the vale of Lys.”

He bowed his small, humped body very low. “Iduna keep you, Lady Raven.” And then he walked with her to the east rampart of Car-Iduna, and watched as the autumn light around her melted and changed, and her cloak fell away, and the soft silk which draped her shimmered into blackness, blacker than her hair, a soft blur of blackness and smallness and power. And then she was no more. A raven stood there, perched for the briefest moment on the wall. Then it flew, making a slow spiral above the fortress, and turning southeastwards like an arrow.

For a time she was aware of the world below, of the rabbits and the birds; of the soft hum of life in the forests, and the passions in the houses of men. She was aware of the altars, Christian and pagan both, where the presence of their deities still lingered. She felt the quiet sorceries, fashioned over pools and fires and deathbeds, some evil and some good, all of them touching an echo in her, as images hit mirrors, seen but unchanged. The Reinmark was alive with mysteries, with hungerings and secrets, with dreams. In a peasant house, a girl-woman wound strands of her hair around the clasp of her lover’s tunic, so he would not leave her. Priests blessed the filling granaries, and cast out devils from the sick, and the devils shrugged and looked for otherwhere to go. Old women rocked infants to sleep with tales of war among the gods, and young women begged fertility from the virgin of Jerusalem.

For a long time she heard their whisperings, and saw their ritual places, and felt the power in their yearnings. Then she grew weary, and no longer noticed. There was only distance in the world now, only forest and rivers and villages and endless forest again. She rested sometimes in the arms of a great tree, or on a high outcropping of rock, and while her body restored itself, her mind strained against the distance. She sought him, searching and hungering, and found only silence.

Karel, why? I gave you everything I promised you, and more. Why do you not answer me?

Finally, against her will, she had to return to human shape, and sleep. Thereafter she flew with all her strength, until at last the heights of the Schildberge lay to her right. She followed them for what seemed like hours. Late in the afternoon she saw, still far away, the first scattered villages as the land leveled off into the broad valley of the Maren. Rich fields followed, and high-steepled churches, then an abbey and winding roads scattered with carts and horsemen. All this was the domain of Lys: Karelian’s lands, Karelian’s forests, Karelian’s vassals in their walled manors and quiet, tucked-in towns. And still he did not answer her.

It was half-dusk when she came over the last of many woodlands and saw the town of Lys itself, and some leagues beyond it, the famous manor of its lord.

Had she not been so weary, she would have known before she saw the place that Gottfried was already there. She would have felt his presence a thousand times more strongly than the small sorceries of the common folk, or the god-breaths from their altars. But she was spent to exhaustion; every fragment of her strength was pounding in her wings, holding in the boundaries of her altered self.

So she saw it unexpecting: the great field of tents, the cook-fires of fighting men, the guarded enclosures filled with huddled people, too far away to identify even as male or female, only as heaps of ragged fear.

The ravens.

Not the ravens of Helmardin, who served her, but the common ravens of the world, circling idly, resentfully, waiting for the endless coming and going of men and horses to stop, for the dead to be abandoned. They lay in piles outside the walls of the manor, quietly guarded until the living would have time to bury them.

Inside, in the heart of its stables and granaries and tanneries and huts, the splendid great-house of the lord of Lys still smoldered in its ruins.

TWENTY-FOUR

In the Schildberge

And imagine to yourself just how ridiculous,
how completely monstrous it is to be in love.

Erasmus

* * *

We were hunting the day Gottfried came to Lys— hunting in the hills below the great fortress of Schildberge. It was one of the most famous warrior castles of the empire, built more than a hundred years before by Otto the Great. In those years the Maren had been his eastern border— by summer a highway for Danish warships, by winter a frozen plain over which any army could march, without so much as a tree to bar the way.

Now a different and distant river lay at the edges of Christendom, between the hunger of the west for dominion, and the hunger of the east for land. But the great fortress remained, built on a splendid and solitary cliff, with a single narrow road climbing hard to its gates. From its seven towers, Otto once boasted, a hundred men could hold off an army. He called it the Shield of the Reinmark, and in a strange reversal of custom, the mountains came to be named for the castle built among them.

They were not high mountains, as Germans would judge the matter: nothing like the Alps, or even the Pyrenees. But they were wild and unpredictable, given to strange storms and stranger legends. Men tended to avoid them, as they avoided the forest of Helmardin.

They were pretty that day. Above Karelian’s fortress the sky was blue and clear. And on the mountain beneath it, the wind-twisted firs stood almost black among faces of grey rock and scatterings of flowers. The flowers were the last of the season, bright flashes of color rivaled by the first turning leaves.

It was a splendid day, chilly with the first taste of autumn, but invigorating; a day when ordinary folk could ride and sing and laugh without a care in the world, simply for the pleasure of being alive. But I was sorely troubled. It was growing harder and harder to live divided as I was, committed to God and bound to Karelian, torn apart with guilt no matter what I did.

Earlier in this chronicle, I said he did not change at all, but it isn’t really true. He was strengthening in evil, shoring up the walls of his soul even as he strengthened the castles of his domain, using the power of his rank to fashion himself a world where God mattered less and less. And he was enjoying it, taking pleasure in what he thought of as his freedom. I think it was the hardest thing of all for me to bear— that he felt no guilt. I, who tried so hard to be good, suffered such unbearable distress, while he, having sold his soul, had no regrets at all.

We hunted all morning, and then as the sun turned westerly we built a great fire to roast the rabbits we had killed, and warmed ourselves around it, and told stories. Except for myself, everyone was in the best of spirits, especially the countess Adelaide. Frail though she was, she loved to ride and hunt. The wind and the open sky put color in her face, and the closest thing to happiness any of us ever saw in her eyes.

Father Thomas slid off his horse with some difficulty, and sank against the trunk of the nearest tree.

“A pleasant little rabbit shoot you called this, my lord? Really. I’m half starved, and I’m cold, and I’m covered with bruises. If you ever undertake a journey you expect to be
un
pleasant, please don’t invite me along.”

Karelian laughed, and pulled a flask of mead from his saddle pack. It was good mead, sweet and strong, passed from hand to hand without much regard for rank, until it was gone. By then the fire was roaring and the rabbits spitted and beginning to turn brown. Thomas felt much better.

“The trouble with you, Thomas,” Karelian said, “is you spend too much time with your books and your lyre.”

“No, my lord. I don’t. The trouble is, there isn’t enough time in the world. A man ought to have all the time he wants for books, and time for hunting, too. Unfortunately, God decided otherwise.”

“You should become an elf,” the countess said lightly. “Then you’d live for hundreds of years, and have time enough for everything.”

“I know a marvelous tale about a man who became an elf,” the priest said. “And it’s from these mountains, too. From the Schildberge.”

“Is there any place from where you
don’t
know a marvelous tale?” Reinhard asked dryly.

“Oh, one or two, perhaps. But in the Schildberge are the lairs of the hunter elves— the caves where they first were made, and where they go to die. Did you know that?”

Adelaide’s pale face went rigid— all except her eyes, which leapt towards Thomas with the quickness and ferocity of an arrow. Only those of us who had made the journey from Ravensbruck knew why— Reini and Otto and me. And Karelian, who looked darkly at the priest, and then at the fire. I thought for a moment he might silence the storyteller, but it was too late. Thomas had already begun.

“They say there is one among the hunter elves who was born human,” he was saying. “I won’t claim it’s true, for it’s difficult to know how such a thing is possible. But I’ll tell you the story, and you may judge it for yourselves.

“You all know, of course, about the great massacre at Dorn, when the soldiers of Henry the Second wiped out the last supporters of the Saxon rebel Wulfstan. Wulfstan himself had been flayed and hanged outside the castle gates the summer before, and his body carried in a cart through all the valley for everyone to see— a stupid thing it was, for it only made the resistance worse. So in the end they put all of Dorn to the sword. All the pagans were killed, as well as many Christians who were their friends and kinsmen. And the emperor’s men rode on towards Ravensbruck to deal with some trouble there, and disappeared in the forest of Helmardin, and were never seen again.”

“But some of the pagans from Dorn survived,” Karelian said. “They fled into the mountains— or so it was always said, though no one knew what became of them after.”

“Yes. There were three, according to this story. Two men, whose names were Rudolf and Widemar, and a woman named Alanas, who was Wulfstan’s wife; she was a priestess and a witch. They lived for a time in great misery, for they had nothing but the garments on their backs, and Widemar was injured, and the woman was with child. And by October it was already snowing in the mountains. It was a fell year, when even strong men died of cold.”

I will give Thomas credit for one thing: his voice was riveting. He could tell a story so it came to life all around you. If he spoke of a cold wind blowing, you felt it shiver on your neck; if he spoke of treachery, your own hand crept unwitting to your sword, as if to ward off a secret blow.

“One night,” he went on, “in a bitter storm, Widemar gave up his soul to death, and they could do nothing but leave him for the wolves. Sick of heart, and certain they would die before the morning, the others went deep into a ravine, hoping to find a bit of shelter from the wind. And they saw, faintly through the trees, a glow of light, muted and faint. They sought it out, not caring whose it might be; it was their only hope of life.

“The light came from deep inside a cave. It was a cave such as you and I have never seen, for the floors and walls were all of polished stone, like the inside of a great cathedral, and the fire which burned there gave no smoke. It was empty, but it was clearly inhabited; cloaks and weapons hung on the wall, and there were fresh-killed rabbits lying by the fire, waiting to be skinned and roasted.

“Needless to say, the fugitives did not ask whose cave it was, or whose meat. They warmed themselves and ate like ravens. But the shelter came too late for Alanas. In the night she gave birth to her child, and died of her bearing. Rudolf put the babe beneath his cloak and fell asleep, exhausted. When he woke the elves had returned, and stood before him with their swords in their hands.

“Now elves are very proud, and hunter elves more than any. It’s a very foolish human who goes into their demesnes uninvited, and eats their food, and scatters about the disorder of a birthing and a death. They were all for killing Rudolf, or at the very least driving him out to starve, when the child was wakened by their voices and began to cry. ‘What is that?’ demanded the elf leader. Rudolf took out the babe to show to them, a boy-child, fair-haired and beautiful. ‘Who does it belong to?’ asked the elf. ‘It is the son of the woman who died,’ he said, ‘and of Wulfstan the Saxon.’

“Elves have few children, as you know, because they live so long. And those they father on the veelas they can’t keep; the nymphs will never give them up. So they take human babies when they can, and raise them, and teach them to hunt and to ride the night wind. They feed them on nothing but flesh, and the spirits they make from bracken, so they grow lean and fierce, and can see in the dark, and become in every way like elves, except they have a human life span, and the hunger for a human mate. Or at least, that’s what is said.”

“Pagan rubbish,” one of the knights said. “It makes for great storytelling,” he added quickly, as several faces turned to him at once, all of them scowling. “But there are no such creatures, and never have been.”

“Who can tell?” the priest replied amiably. “In my father’s house, they say, are many mansions—”

“Please,” said the countess. “Go on with the story.”

He bowed towards her, faintly.

“Thank you, my lady. Rudolf knew he was in the greatest danger. So he tried to bargain with the elves: ‘Let me shelter here for the winter,’ he pleaded, ‘myself and the child. I’ll be your servant, and do whatever tasks you set me. I’ll fetch the wood, and make the fires. I’ll mend your garments and your bows. I’ll do anything you wish. In the spring, when the snow is gone, we’ll go away and leave you in peace.’

“‘We have no need of servants,’ the elf said. ‘We would scarcely trust a human among our sacred trees with an axe, and as for mending our bows, they don’t break. You have only one thing we want. Let us have the child to raise, and you may live. We’ll let you keep this cave; we have many others. We’ll hunt for you and bring you game, until the winter breaks. Then you must go and not come back.’

“Rudolf had no choice but to agree. The elves took the infant, and went away. True to their word, they brought him food, and so he lived all winter in the cave, sharing their bounty. But he never saw them again. They would leave their kills outside the cave, silently, and the wind would cover their tracks. When the spring returned, they were gone. They vanished as only those of the Otherworld can vanish, without a trace, almost without a memory. I don’t know if Rudolf grieved because the child was gone forever, or if he thought it for the best, for the story says no more of him.

“The child of Wulfstan grew up fierce and brave. His human name was that of his father, which Rudolf gave him, but what the elves called him is known to no one. He loved the forest, and the life of the wild hunters.They taught him everything they knew, and soon he was as skilful as they were. But he aged quickly, like a human, and he was flaxen haired and fair beside those dark and secret bodies. And they laughed at him for it. ‘Look at you,’ they said. ‘A star’s light is enough to see you by. You might as well go hunting with torches and shawms as with that hair of yours.’”

Otto interrupted the storytelling with a rough chuckle. “He may have been a hunter, that one, but he was no fighting man. It’s a simple enough thing to spread your hair and face with dirt for camouflage.”

“Aye, it is,” Father Thomas agreed. “But no elf ever born would lower himself so. They are beautiful and proud. They would die before they’d make themselves dirty on purpose.

“There was only one thing for the lad. He began to dream of becoming an elf. A real elf. Needless to say, he didn’t tell his comrades, for they would have laughed all the more. He left the mountains and came down to the Maren, to search for the veelas, who were said to have many strange and magical powers. He found one soon enough, for he was half grown by then, and singularly beautiful. She followed him, and courted him, and offered to pleasure him as much as he wished.

“He was dreadfully tempted, but he refused to lay with her until she made him a gift. ‘So be it,’ she said. ‘I will make you any gift you like. You please me very well.’

“So he said to her: ‘I want to be an elf.’ She laughed so hard she fell into the river. But she wanted him nonetheless. We know how determined a woman can be when she chooses a man. Imagine then what a veela is like. It’s said they will tear down mountains, and overturn castles, and stop armies in their tracks… what’s the matter, Pauli? Do you doubt the powers of the female?”

“Not in the least, Father Thomas,” I said. And I tried to compose my face, for I was thinking of Helmardin, of how beautiful she had been, how resolute. How little chance Karelian ever had.

“Well,” the priest went on, “the lad was stubborn, as heroes must be. Finally she stopped laughing, and grew angry with him. ‘You’re a fool,’ she said. ‘Do you really imagine I have the power to make you into an elf? No one could do that except the gods!’ ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘you must tell me how to summon the gods.’

“Weeks passed, and the lad would not give up; so at last she showed him how to make an altar, and what sacrifices he must bring, and what spells to cast upon them, and all the other things which only veelas know. And he called forth Tyr the hunter, who is the keeper of the elves. Some say great Tyr appeared as a stag, and others say he came as wind, or marsh lights, or mounted on the clouds, which shimmered with a strange orange light. But come he did, and he spoke to the son of Wulfstan the Saxon: