The Black Chalice (47 page)

“What powers does she have, Paul?” he demanded. “What special devices should we use?”

“My lord, I have no knowledge of these things—”

He stopped in his tracks, and stared at me.

“You were in Car-Iduna, you damned fool! What did you see there?”

How could I tell him what I saw? It was all so uncertain. Oh, the power was real enough, the peril — but the forms it took, the possibilities — they melted even as you tried to give them names.

But Theodoric wanted names, and so I answered him:

“She is a shape-shifter, my lord, as we saw. And she can make things appear and disappear. After we left her castle, we couldn’t see it; there was nothing around us but forest. They say she can turn men into creatures—”

“What about her demons? Her protectors?”

“I don’t know, my lord.”

“Christ, you don’t know much about anything, do you?” He threw up his hands, and asked me nothing more.

We went into the castle keep, into the depths of the dungeons. For a while we clustered outside the door of a cell, while Theodoric decided how it might be safely guarded. He settled on a guard of fifty, ten by the door where we stood, ten more at the foot of the stairs, ten more at the top, and so to the gates, all of them bearing crossbows as well as swords.

No one wanted that guard duty, no matter how many of them there were, or how fiercely they were armed. What could any weapon do against the devil’s power? Against a sorceress who turned men into gibbering birds and squeaking mice? Their faces were set; their eyes looked carefully at anything except the eyes of their fellows. Some of them audibly prayed.

I thanked God when they had all been chosen, and I was not one of them. I forgot he would take guards inside the cell as well.

The messenger he had summoned came, bowing deeply, and asked for his assignment.

“Listen well,” Theodoric said. “I don’t want this message to be misunderstood.”

The young man bowed again.

“Go out to the camp of the traitor Karelian, and tell him I have his witch. Tell him he has two days to surrender the fortress of Schildberge, and to yield his army and his person to the emperor’s justice, or she will be burned alive. Tell him he has two days, but if he’s wise, he won’t wait that long.”

He took his dagger and slashed away the gold belt around the witch’s hips.

“Give him this.”

The messenger went pale.

“He will kill me, my lord,” he whispered.

“He might. But if you disobey me, I’ll do it instead. Get your horse now and go!”

“Yes, my lord.”

The prince was not even looking at the messenger any more. He was looking at the witch of Helmardin. At Karelian’s whore.

“So, witch. We’ll see how strong your spells are now.” He motioned to the guards to drag her inside. And as God is my witness, he smiled.

He made me follow with the others. Because I had been to Helmardin, he said. Because I had some experience of her power and her ways. Perhaps he spoke the truth. Perhaps under his martial arrogance he was just as frightened as everyone else, and really hoped I might have some knowledge the others didn’t have, some ability to warn him of danger.

Or perhaps he merely thought it would do me good to see the ways of men.

They gathered around her, and the place got very still. There was a moment, how long I cannot say, a moment of uncertainty, of breathless tension. Wounded though she was, the two guards still held her in an iron grip. I could not see the prince’s face as he approached her. I did not have to. Everything was clear in his words, in his motions: the strange mixture of fear and riveted fascination as he stared at her body.

You who read this may well think me naive, but until that moment I believed the prince’s taunt to Karelian was only a taunt. A lady’s girdle was an acknowledged symbol of her honor; to take it from her, and send it to her lord, was the sort of gesture Theodoric could not resist.
Once it was your privilege to take her clothes off; now it is mine.
A sexual insult, I thought, cruder than a king’s son should stoop to, but nothing more. They were Christian men. They were God’s most favored knights. Theodoric was Gottfried’s son.

Gottfried’s son. Gottfried’s blood, and heir to the kingdom of Christ….

“They say forcing a witch is the surest way to undo her power,” he said.

“If she’s a virgin witch, my lord,” someone replied. “Only if she’s a virgin.”

He laughed. “I don’t think it matters. I can use the same rod to tame a filly or a mare. Isn’t that so, witch?”

He pulled at her gown, and she cried out as it wrenched across the shaft in her shoulder.

“Isn’t it?” he said again, savagely.

She looked at him. There were tears of raw pain in the corners of her eyes, and a kind of icy terror. Yet she defied him nonetheless.

“You will regret it,” she said.

“And who will make me? Do you have some little fiend hiding with you, waiting to leap on my throat? Do you think we won’t find him?”

I turned away as he began to maul her, tearing at her clothing, forcing his huge hand between her thighs.

“Where is the little devil, then? Is he here? No? How about here? He’d fly straight back to hell if he knew what was coming at him, wouldn’t he, my friends?”

I tried to pray. I tried not to listen, not to look when they twisted her to the floor and pulled her legs apart. I tried not to hear him grunting and mocking her as he did it. I kept telling myself no, it was not happening, he would not lower himself to this, he would not…. Finally I heard him laugh, and growl a few words. I looked up; he was on his feet, wiping his arm across his face, and someone else was hunched over her in the torchlight.

They all took her, one after another while the others watched. And after a while I stopped trying to pray. I stopped trying to pretend it was someone else there, not Gottfried’s son. I stopped trying not to hear her cries. Because I came to understand how it was possible— indeed, except for my conscience, I would say it was inevitable. And it was not because of lust.

Oh, certainly there was lust; she provoked it in men like a fever. There was a blind greed to possess her, to degrade her as an enemy; and even more, perhaps, a wish to degrade Karelian. But there was something else, and it was the most important thing of all. She was a witch. She was the disobedience which lurked forever at the edges of their consciousness, the loathsome carnality they resisted but could never free themselves from, not even now. She belonged not simply to an enemy in war, but to the lords of darkness, the enemies of Christ. To break her power — to break
her
— was somehow also a religious act. Sinful, yes, sinful and sickening, the endless heaving and thrusting of flesh, the sport they took in it, watching and laughing and urging each other on. Yet they all knew she was more than a woman, and it was more than a rape. Their laughter had a terrible edge, and their very greed had a ritual quality to it.

I cannot say it was not wicked. And yet there was something in it which I understood, as I understood why our knights walked ankle deep in blood through the streets of Jerusalem. Because of what
they
do to God, and to us.

They finished, finally, and dragged her to the wall. Heavy iron manacles hung there, cemented into the stone; they fastened these around her wrists, her ankles, her neck.

— I’ll wager we’ve pounded the devil out of that one, my lord…!

More laughter. A few blows, to make sure.

— I thought they said witches feel no pain.

— Hey, Pauli, don’t you want a go?

— Not a chance, Pauli’s going to be a monk, aren’t you, Pauli?

The dungeon was more than twenty feet below the surface of the ground. It had no windows, and as we left we rammed shut behind us a solid oak and-iron door, with an iron bolt as thick as a man’s arm. Nothing less than an army was going to get into her cell, and nothing less than a demon was going to get out.

Before we left, Prince Theodoric had a last word for the lady of Helmardin. He stood over

her, and took a torch from one of his knights. She was still conscious, though perhaps barely. There was hate in her eyes, a kind of bottomless malevolence which reminded me quite suddenly of someone else, a woman in Ravensbruck, a Wend slave who slunk around the edges of Count Arnulf’s court with the same burning darkness in her eyes. She too, they said, was a witch.

“My father spoke of you once or twice,” Theodoric said. “The last of the whores of Odin, he called you. Then you corrupted his kinsman Karelian, and he spoke of you a great deal more. Do you know who my father is, witch?”

I caught my breath, not believing he would speak so. I looked at the other knights, milling about in the aftermath of their lust, wanting to be gone. I saw the question meant nothing to them— only to me.

And to her.

“Your father,” she whispered, “is the son of a scorpion, and the sire of a dog.”

He cursed savagely, and kicked her; it evoked a small gulp of pain, nothing more. He could have beaten her to death in her irons, and it would not have changed her eyes, or her inhuman defiance.

I wanted to warn him then, to tell him the devils had not left her. They would never leave her; she was too much theirs, too old and too hardened in their ways.

“You will burn, witch,” he said grimly. He held the torch close to her face; she cringed away, the light dancing and shimmering in her hair. “The Reinmark is befouled while you are in it, and you will burn!”

Then do it now, my lord! You can’t bait Karelian; you’ll gain nothing by waiting. Do it now!

I wanted to say it. I even opened my mouth. But I was only Pauli, Pauli who was going to be a monk; Pauli who was loyal, no doubt, and maybe even brave, but who was not their equal as a man; Pauli who was too pure to hump a witch, Pauli who took everything too seriously, especially his conscience…. The words faltered in my throat, and stayed there. We left her to the darkness and her fiends.

When we emerged from the dungeon, we found the messenger had just returned from the lord of Lys. He did not bow to Theodoric and the empress. He knelt.

“The count ordered me to repeat his words, majesty, but they were terrible. Shall I do so, or say only that he will not yield?”

“We will hear his words,” the empress said.

“He spoke thus. Tell the son of von Heyden I can surrender nothing. My fortresses, my soldiers, my life itself belongs to the king. But heed me, Theodoric: I will win this war. If you treat my lady with honor, and keep safe her life, I will return you favor for favor. Harm her, and the earth will not stretch wide enough, nor eternity long enough, to let you escape from my vengeance. I will call on heaven, and I will call on hell; I will destroy you and your blood; I will wipe your names off your tombstones, and cover your graves with salt. Carthage will rise again sooner than the house of von Heyden. Heed me, by whatever gods you choose, for it will be so!”

The messenger bowed his head almost to the floor. Perhaps he expected to be kicked, and perhaps he would have been, except that none of us could move.

The face of the empress was ash. “You dare?” she whispered. “You dare to repeat so foul a curse upon my husband’s blood, before my very face?”

She rose. For just a moment she faltered, and her maid rushed forward to take her arm. She steadied herself, and looked bravely at Theodoric.

“She will burn, Theodoric. Pay no attention to this arrogance. God gave her into our hands, so we could rid the Reinmark of her evil. He will not allow us to be harmed. Call the chaplain. We will hear Mass, and exorcise this demon lord’s words.”

* * *

Only once in my life did I encounter what seemed to me a miracle. It was at first light the next day, when our watchmen looked out sleepily across the sloping fields below the castle, and stared, and called their comrades over, and ran to other vantage points and wiped their eyes, and stared again. It took minutes before anyone really made sense of what they saw, before anyone ran down into the courtyard shouting for their lord, to tell him what they themselves could neither comprehend nor entirely believe. We had exorcised more than the demon lord’s words. Where his tents and his long lines of tethered horses had been, grass rippled idly in the wind. The sky was empty of banners. A few spent fires smoldered in the pre-dawn light, and the great siege towers stood naked and abandoned. Karelian was gone.

Fled in the night like the fell creature he was, swift and soundless and defeated. Gone.

Theodoric, more cautious than I had ever imagined Theodoric could be, sent out twenty scouts, and pulled the drawbridge up behind them. But this time he had no cause for fear. They came back quickly, unharmed and unpursued. The fields were truly empty, and the army we so dreaded was vanished like a dream.

Or rather, the scouts told us, most of it had never been there.

“He had a thousand men outside our walls, my lord, or fewer—”

“A thousand knights, you mean?”

“No, highness. A thousand men, counting them all — knights, squires, foot-soldiers, grooms, servants — aye, and add in the dogs as well, maybe. You could set up a jousting field between one of his tent-sites and the next.”

“What the devil are you trying to say?” Theodoric demanded.

“I don’t know what I’m trying to say, my lord. But the army we thought we saw… wasn’t there.”

“And Ravensbruck? Were the men of Ravensbruck there?”

“Perhaps a few, my lord. Certainly not all of them.”

“None of them were there. None of them! It was all sorcery!”

Theodoric rarely laughed, but he laughed now. It was a ringing, triumphant roar, half savage, half purely joyous.

“Don’t you see? It was the witch’s doing! He had nothing, just rabble from Konrad’s army, and mercenaries from Karn, and whatever leavings he could bully out of his brother the margrave. He had nothing and he is nothing, only the tool of a sorceress who’s had her powers clipped! Dear Christ, we could have sent a sortie out of here and eaten him for dinner!”

He turned sharply to the scouts.

“Which way did they go?”