The Wine of Dreams

One of the first things Reinmar Wieland had learned after assuming his adult
duties was that the early afternoon was always a quiet time in a wine
merchant’s. Eilhart was a town dominated by convention, and convention dictated
that the housewives of the town did their shopping early, while the milk and
meat were still fresh and the best vegetable produce was still to be found on
the stalls in the market square.

Wine did not, of course, need to be bought while it was fresh. Quite the
contrary, in fact; the very first of the many slogans that his father Gottfried
was attempting to drum into Reinmar’s head held that “good wine matures well”.
Like all the other slogans it was subject to all kinds of exceptions, the value
of an individual flask depending on its source as well as its age, but that did
not prevent Gottfried Wieland from intoning the words as if they were holy writ.
Nor did it inhibit the housewives of Eilhart from shopping for their measures of
Reikish hock at the same time as they shopped for all the day’s goods, in the
early morning.

The consequence of that habit, for Reinmar, was that he had to rise at six
and take his station at the counter before the bell in the tower of the corn
exchange chimed seven. This would not have been so terrible had he been able to bolt the door of the shop when
the market stallholders packed up their goods and trestle tables and set off
home, which they invariably did before four in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the
wine shop always had a second busy period at dusk, when labourers, journeymen
and apprentices would begin to wend their way home from their various kinds of
work. This was the time when all those among them who fared for themselves—the
unwed and widowed who were inconveniently boarded—would provision themselves
for the evening.

Wine was twice as necessary to customers of the second kind as it was to the
members of larger and more careful households, because they had to eat the worst
meat and the most worm-ridden vegetables. A swig of wine between mouthfuls of
food lent great assistance to their palatability.

In the Empire’s great cities, Reinmar’s father had informed him, all manner
of spices were available to disguise the rottenness of poor meat, but such
luxuries were much harder to come by in Eilhart than in Altdorf or Marienburg.
“For which you and I should be profoundly grateful,” Gottfried Wieland had
added, “for it increases demand for our product, and hence its value. You will
doubtless hear other traders wondering aloud why the Wielands have never
attempted to extend the scope of our business further north than Holthusen, but
the towns further down the Schilder are easily reached by the riverboats that
ply their trade along the Reik—and lie, therefore, on the fringe of a much
bigger and much more competitive marketplace. Whenever you hear our own boatmen
cursing the difficulty and tedium of steering barges through the locks between
Eilhart and Holthusen—and you will, when you learn that aspect of the trade—you ought to give thanks, for that is what secures our virtual monopoly of local
business, and keeps at bay the spices that would reduce demand.”

It was, alas, hard for Reinmar to be grateful when the chief effect of this
second wave of daily custom was to delay closing the shop until he was sorely
tired. It was not so bad in the depths of winter, when dusk fell before the
market bell chimed five, but in summer the light lasted for a full
three-quarters of the day and outdoor labourers were kept so hard to their work
that they would still be staggering through the door—invariably carrying a
fearsome thirst—at three hours to midnight.

Reinmar had, of course, suggested to his father that the shop could be closed
for a few hours early on summer afternoons without any noticeable loss of
profit, but Gottfried Wieland was not the kind of man to take such suggestions
well.

“Close the shop!” he had exclaimed, as if the notion were the rankest heresy.
“No noticeable loss of profit! What kind of tradesmen would we be if we were not
available to our customers at any hour at which they cared to call? This is the
Empire, my boy, not Estalia or Tilea. We are civilised folk, and industrious
too. Can you possibly think that life is difficult because you must sometimes
stand at a counter for fifteen hours in a day? What of the folk who toil in the
fields and the forges? What of the men who load and unload the barges, or the
men who go up to the forests to cut wood and burn charcoal? Our life, Reinmar,
is extraordinarily good and easy by comparison with the great majority of men,
and it is honest toil that has made it so. We are not aristocrats, to be sure,
but there is a dignity and purpose in trade which cannot be valued too highly.
Carpenters make chairs, cobblers make boots and tanners make saddles, but
tradesmen make money. There are men abroad in the world who resent tradesmen and
affect to despise them as usurers in disguise, but it is our great fortune to
live in Eilhart, where even the common folk recognise that no finer thing can be
said of any man than:
he makes money.
And of all the wares in which a man
might trade, there is none finer than wine. Cheap wine makes life tolerable to
the poor, and good wine is the best of all the pleasures available to the
comfortably off.”

Gottfried Wieland always emphasised the first word whenever he pronounced the
phrase “good wine”. He was so besotted with his merchandise that he seemed to
consider its finest fraction to be virtue in liquid form. The local constables
and the town magistrate had been known to take a different view of the poorer
fraction favoured by the town’s admittedly tiny criminal element, but their low
opinion did not impress Gottfried in the least. “Drunkards will drink no matter
what,” he would say, waspishly. “Better they should intoxicate themselves with
honest wine than anything worse.”

Reinmar did not know exactly what the words “anything worse” were supposed to
signify, but he knew that the Wieland shops did not stock schnapps, and that
Gottfried always pronounced the words “Bretonnian brandy” as if he were spitting acid. To
Reinmar, Bretonnia was a fabulous place—the substance of travellers’ tales.
Its boundaries lay no more than forty leagues to the south, as the eagle flew,
but one had to be an eagle to get there because the Grey Mountains were
virtually impassable hereabouts; there was no convenient pass nearer than the
Axe Bite, which lay forty leagues to the east.

One day, Reinmar knew, he might go downriver as far as the Schilder’s
confluence with the Reik—but no further than that, if he were content to be a
dutiful son. In the daydreams with which he whiled away the slow afternoons,
however, he often toyed with the notion that once he had gone so far from home
it would be easy enough to take a westbound boat to Marienburg or an eastbound
one to Altdorf. Perhaps he would never see Bretonnia, but he would see
civilisation at its finest: a world in which a free man might make the most of
his freedom.

In his daydreams, Reinmar longed to be free. In his daydreams, he yearned for
a better world than one in which achievement was measured in honest toil and
virtue in good wine.

The hope of one day being able to defy his father’s sterner advice was what
carried Reinmar through every lonely hour that he had to spend standing by a
counter in an empty shop, and that hope increased with every year that went by
as his fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays passed. As he grew older,
his duties were further extended, and so was the intensity of his frustration.
“It’s always the way,” his grandfather would say, when he took leave to
complain. Even his grandfather, who seemed to be perpetually at odds with
Reinmar’s father, had become grudging with his sympathy of late—but he was an
old and sick man, who regularly demanded far more sympathy than he was prepared
to offer. Reinmar’s nearest neighbour and closest childhood friend. Marguerite,
was infinitely more generous but had lately become far less imaginative.

“But it is always the way,” she told him. “That’s what life is like.”

Reinmar’s seventeenth year was the first in which manning the shop had become
a full-time occupation with no allowance for any part of his education. Even his
training in the arts of self-defence, which he had always enjoyed, was now considered to be complete.
From now on, if Gottfried Wieland had his way, Reinmar’s work would be Reinmar’s
life. Sometimes he wondered whether he might not do better to take his skills to
the city and become a soldier in the Reiksguard. Reinmar had, of course, always
known that the family business would become his work, but while he still had
opportunities to play he had not anticipated the crushing weight with which
responsibility now seemed to bear down upon him. As the days of his seventeenth
year lengthened from winter to spring and from spring to summer the shop was
transformed in his imagination into his prison, and he began to fear that once
he was fully committed to it he would never be released.

Apart from his daydreams, however, there was one prospect to which he could
look forward and whose anticipation saved him from despair. When the crops had
ripened in the summer sun and the harvest was gathered in he would go up into
the hills with Godrich, his father’s steward, taking sole responsibility for the
very first time for the purchase of this year’s vintages.

The time soon came when he began to count down the days to this expedition,
and the countdown in question inevitably came to seem exceedingly slow, but
Reinmar could not help thinking of it as the countdown to a moment of decision:
the moment when he would have to settle his own mind once and for all as to
whether he would accept the life that his father had designed for him, or
whether he would hazard everything in following one or other of his speculative
dreams.

He always assumed, as he mulled this matter over, that the choice was his
alone and that it would be freely made—but he had known no life other than the
everyday life of the townsfolk of Eilhart, and he had innocently taken it for
granted that a life of that kind was an unchanging and unchangeable ritual, safe
from all disruption.

That assumption was, of course, quite false.

The afternoon on which Reinmar’s countdown reached single figures for the
first time was a particularly vexatious one. The weather was exceedingly warm
and sultry, and the atmosphere in the shop seemed as thick as soup. The morning
rush had ended early because the town’s housewives had not wanted to linger too
long outside on such a day.

To make matters worse, Reinmar had offended Marguerite two days before. He
had charged her with “pestering him with trivia”, and he knew from long
experience that unless some powerful motive intervened she would avoid him for
at least three days. Although he and Marguerite had been the best of friends
since the beginning of his memory, Reinmar was far from certain that he wanted
their friendship to develop further in the way that everyone—not least
Marguerite—seemed to expect. She was a pretty girl, after her bland and blonde
fashion, but not as pretty as the dark girls with exotic eyes that Reinmar often
saw in the square on market days, selling metal trinkets and medicinal charms.

While Marguerite stayed away, though, there was no relief from boredom
available to Reinmar but daydreaming, and even his daydreams seemed to have
grown stale from recent overuse. The comfort that he usually found in fantasies
of flight and adventure was not to be found on that particular day, and in the
absence of that comfort he had grown irritable and desperate. By the time the
customer came into the empty shop, when Reinmar should have been glad for any
distraction, his mood was too bad to be lightened by anything so slight.

Had the customer seemed more interesting in himself, Reinmar might have been
able to rouse himself from his ill humour, but the only interesting thing about
the man, at first glance, was that he was a stranger. Reinmar had plenty of time
to study him while he prowled the racks, peering at the goods on offer. He was
short—hardly half a hand’s-breadth taller than Reinmar—and somewhat stout.
His hair was dark, but not uniformly black, and there was two days’ growth of
black beard staining his jowls. The quality of his clothes suggested that he was
more likely to have arrived in Eilhart by barge than in a carriage, although he
was not costumed as a stevedore. His hands did not seem to be marked by habitual
use of ropes or tools, nor did his face have the leathery appearance given by
long exposure to the sun, but he certainly did not have the look of a gentleman.

Reinmar was not good at guessing any man’s age, but this one posed a
particular puzzle; he might have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. His
eyes were narrow, dark brown in colour but startlingly bright whenever they
caught the shafts of sunlight that filtered through the narrow windows.