The Wine of Dreams (18 page)

His subsequent nightmares were as disordered and senseless as nightmares ever
could be. By the time he finally awoke they were already beginning to slip
through the net of memory, but there were certain images which were sufficiently
powerful to be deeply graven upon his returning consciousness. Before he opened
his eyes to greet the new day, Reinmar was all too easily able to recall some of
these fugitive moments to mind.

At one point in his dream, he thought, he had been trying with all his might
to scale a rough-and-ready mountain path, which led to a castle in the clouds. A
terrible wind had made every step difficult, plucking at him as though with
savage claws and bloodying his arms when he raised them in his defence.

More than once, he was certain, he had managed to reach the closed door of
the dark citadel, and had cried out to be let in. On each occasion the door had
opened, though only by the merest crack, to let the bright light within spill
out upon his face—but he had not been made welcome. The light that had bathed
him had been cold and cruel, cutting into him like the invisible claws which had
assailed him on the path, and driving him back. Somehow, though, he had gained
entry to the enigmatic fortress, and had scurried into the shadows clustered
about a great hall, like a mouse in fear of the household cat.

At another point in the dream, he remembered, a beautiful woman had come to
him while he lay upon a broad bed. She had been far more beautiful of face than
his beloved Marcilla, but that was only to be expected because—as he had discovered upon turning towards her—she was not entirely a woman, but was
at least in part a daemon. She had a forked tongue like a serpent and legs which
ended in monstrous, two-taloned claws, and her torso was decked in polished and
multicoloured scales, whose dominant hues were pink and blue. This white-haired
succubus had pleaded with Reinmar—most urgently, it seemed—to desert his
appointed bride and go with her to share a better kind of ecstasy.

Although he had felt the force of temptation he had resisted. At least, he
was sure when he tried to remember the dream in the morning that he must have
resisted… although he could not quite remember what he had said to this
awesome siren, or what he had done to detach himself from the pressure of her
deadly green gaze and the avidity of her embracing arms. He could remember the
sheen of her silver-white hair, like the gloss on a swan’s wing, and the exotic
promise of her swaying, voluptuous body, and the hungry smile which showed the
points of her pearly teeth, but no matter how hard he tried he could not
remember how he had escaped his awful predicament.

Nor could he remember now how he had escaped the invisible claws that had
harried him incessantly while he attempted to attain the fortress of his desire—except that he was not sure that they had always remained invisible. He could
conjure up the briefest imaginable flashes of chimeras even worse than the
bison-headed beasts, compounded out of scorpions, vile reptiles and vaguely
humanoid limbs.

Was this, he wondered, after he had woken up but before he had opened his
eyes, the kind of dream which visited all adults once in a while, from which
only youth had kept him safe? Or was it the kind of dream which only visited
those who had taken a sip of the dark wine and failed to follow through the
intention to spit it out?

Memory failed him then, when he tried to recapture more of the fugitive
dream, and he consented to open his eyes instead. Then he sat up and stretched
himself, looking sideways at the recumbent gypsy girl.

She was very still, and silent.

At first, he thought that Marcilla was still suffering the effects of
exhaustion. It was only by degrees that he realised, while he tried to rouse
her, that hers was a much deeper sleep than any mere tiredness could cause. Her flesh was unnaturally cold in spite of the
fact that the last embers of the fire still gave out a little heat.

Several minutes passed while Reinmar shook her harder and spoke to her in
increasingly louder tones. His voice must have become hysterical, for Zygmund’s
wife flew into the room in a panic, as if expecting to find the pallet on fire.
The woman knelt down to look at Marcilla and touch her fingertips to the
sleeping girl’s forehead. Then she called out to her husband, who came bustling
into the room in his turn.

Reinmar took up Marcilla’s arm, holding it by the wrist, but he could find no
pulse at all.

“She was supposed to get better,” Reinmar insisted. “She cannot be dead. She
was only cold, and wet—and we set her before the fire, with a warm blanket.
She was getting better.”

By this time Zygmund had joined him on his knees beside the pallet. The
farmer tried to find a pulse, as Reinmar had, and apparently failed. His wife
passed him a lacquered box, which he polished briskly on his sleeve before
putting it to her lips—after which the shiny surface remained quite unclouded.

The farmer rocked back on his heels, putting his weight on his ankles, and
looked down at the slender body.

“She is a gypsy,” he observed, fatalistically. “She heard the call, but the
effort of obedience was too great for her.”

“She cannot be dead,” Reinmar insisted. “She cannot! I love her!”

“I fear that she is, whether you loved her or not,” Zygmund told him wearily.
“There is nothing to be done.”

It seemed to Reinmar as if the minutes that followed were a renewal of his
nightmare—that part of it, at least, when the very air and light had cut him
like knives, and there had been no respite. They were like a dream in another
sense too, for they made little permanent impression on his memory or his
intelligence. They seemed to flow in a very disjointed fashion, and when he
tried to collect himself in order that he might take charge of the flow of
events, he could not do it.

“She is not dead!” he exclaimed, although he knew by now that saying it could
not and would not make it so.

“Alas, my son,” said the farmer, gently, “she is.”

“Then she must have been poisoned—poisoned by that cup of wine which the
monk gave to her!” Reinmar knew that it was a dangerous thought to voice in his
present company, but it was the only possible cause for his terrible distress
that his distraught mind could seize upon.

The farmer shook his head, seemingly more in sorrow than in anger. “You drank
from the cup yourself, I dare say,” he said. “I fear that the girl was not as
strong as you hoped. Whatever left the dark bruise on her head injured her
badly. Her heart has failed her, and there is no more to it than that. The exertions of yesterday must have drained the last dregs of her strength.”

It occurred to Reinmar that this explanation put the blame partly on him, and
he was about to deny it hotly, claiming that Matthias Vaedecker was the one who
had insisted on letting her go where she wished, but his common sense reasserted
its authority over his tongue. The heat of his anger was transformed on the
instant into an icy chill of despair.

Marcilla was dead, and no matter what cruel stroke of misfortune it was that
had stolen her soul away, she was lost and gone forever. That was the whole
truth of it. She was lost, and gone forever—and he had wasted the last
opportunity he had had to talk to her, and perhaps to make love to her.

While he was still lost in grief, Noel and Almeric returned, as they had
promised to do. They too examined the gypsy girl, and Noel confirmed that she
was dead. They immediately set about making preparations for a funeral, while
Reinmar sat numbly by, unable to assist or protest.

Four more monks eventually came with a stretcher, ready to carry Marcilla’s
body away. With Brother Noel and Brother Almeric beside him, Reinmar followed
them as they trudged through a small wood to the shore of the lake and then
moved around it to the burial-ground which the monks had established on the near
side of the complex of buildings that constituted their monastery.

Time seemed to have stopped, and Reinmar felt that he was moving through a
new kind of dream, in which he was reduced to utter helplessness by the flow of
events. His body moved mechanically, as if he were in a trance, barely conscious
of what was happening. Somewhere deep inside him was a more vivid fraction of
his soul, which was far too conscious, but it could not assert its empire, bound
and pinned down as it was by grief.

On another day, Reinmar might have taken note of the fact that the lake was
rather beautiful, deep blue in the reflected light of a clear sky from which the
cloud had retreated in order to take a much tighter grip on the peaks of the
Grey Mountains. On another day he might have found much to delight him in the
water-lilies and bulrushes which grew profusely in the shallows. Today, however,
he was as blind to the water as he was to the meagre fields surrounding it.

A grave had already been dug, within ten yards of the cracked and mossy wall
surrounding the burial-ground, whose only markers were wooden. The
moss-encrusted wall had a curiously musty odour suggestive of antiquity and ruin—a subtle stench which might have been more offensive had it not been for the
competing reek of the freshly-turned earth, which seemed to Reinmar to be
dreadfully heavy and dank. The nearest building to the burial-ground was a
temple—dedicated, Reinmar supposed, to Morr, the ruler of the underworld.

Reinmar watched numbly while the girl’s shrouded body was laid in the grave.
When the burial was over and done with, however, he did not have the slightest
idea what to do with himself. Although he was now but a stone’s throw from the
monastery, its grey walls seemed frightful and forbidding, like the ominous
citadel of his dream, and he no longer wanted to go there, although Brother Noel
and Brother Almeric renewed their invitation. Almeric tried to press him, but
Noel drew his companion away.

“The boy has had a shock,” he said. “I think he needs some time to himself.”

Almeric conceded the point, and it was Noel who said to Reinmar: “We have
other duties to attend to. When you are ready, come to the door of the main
building and ask for me. I will leave instructions that you are to be admitted.
We are very sorry for your loss.”

Reinmar could contrive no better response than a mere nod of the head, and
the monks withdrew, leaving him alone in the burial-ground. He soon decided that
he could not stay there, and began retracing his steps towards the farmhouse.
All the vague plans he had made in the course of the previous evening seemed to
have been rendered redundant by the tragedy of Marcilla’s death, and his one
remaining impulse was to go home—which meant, in the first instance, finding
his way back to the wagon and rejoining Godrich and Sigurd.

He had hardly made up his mind that that was what he must do, though, when he
was thrown into confusion all over again. Almost as soon as he left the shore of
the lake and moved back into the small wood to the south of the farmhouse he was
seized by the shoulders and dragged from the path by Matthias Vaedecker.

Vaedecker drew Reinmar into the shelter of a clump of trees, looking this way
and that to make sure that no one had seen him. The monks had returned to their
huge grey house, and there was no sign of Zygmund or his wife, or any of the
labourers who helped maintain the farm.

“What happened?” the sergeant demanded.

Reinmar had hardly been able to speak to the monks, but Vaedecker suddenly
seemed to him to be a friend: someone in whom he could confide. His dumbness and
stupidity evaporated, and he began to weep.

“She seemed to be improving again once we had reached shelter,” Reinmar told
the sergeant, trying to scrub away the tears with his sleeve. “She even managed
to speak a few words, but when I awoke this morning I found her deeply
unconscious. I think her heart stopped while I watched. The monks who came to
the house last night gave her something to drink—the dark wine, I suppose it
must have been—but it seemed at the time to be helping her.”

“Did you take any?” Vaedecker asked, sharply.

Reinmar had a denial ready on the tip of his tongue, but his resolve wavered
before the soldier’s penetrating gaze. “The merest sip,” he admitted. “I had
told them that I was a wine merchant, and could hardly refuse to taste their
wares. I did not swallow it.” The return of his instinctive defensiveness made
him feel as if he were standing before his father, trying to justify some minor
sin of omission. Mercifully, the illusion had the effect of stemming the
embarrassing flow of his tears.

“Forgive me, my friend,” the sergeant said, taking due note of his distress,
“but I must ask you these questions. Did you recognise the taste of the wine—and did you dream after tasting it?”

“No to the first,” Reinmar said. “I’ve never tasted anything like it before.
Yes to the second—I certainly dreamed, but my dreams were nightmares, not at
all the kind of experience that would make me avid to drink more deeply of their
cause. In fact, I wish…”

But he did not know exactly what he wished, and the futility of bringing his
confused desires into focus brought him to silence again.

“Perhaps it is time we began to trust one another a little better,” Vaedecker
said. “How much has your grandfather told you about the dark wine, its
properties and its source?”

Reinmar laughed briefly. “Not nearly enough,” he said. “I wish I had been told
enough to make a sensible response to customers who came enquiring for it. I
wish I had been told enough to make a sensible response to witch hunters who
came looking for the customers. In fact, I was told nothing at all until even my
father conceded that my ignorance was more dangerous than a little knowledge. I
think you know at least as much as I do. You read as much into Marcilla’s
delirious mutterings as I did, so you must know the tale which says that the
source of the dark wine can only be found by those who have heard a call, and
their companions. Doubtless you have also heard that it provides a special
intoxication and that it preserves the appearance of youth. If you know more,
I’d be glad to share your wisdom—or does the trust of which you speak work one
way only?”