The Wine of Dreams (24 page)

“It is Reinmar, come to save you!” he shouted at her, although her scream had
died by now and he did not need to yell in order to be heard. “We must run for
our lives!” So saying, he began to run himself, keeping such a tight hold of her
wrist that she had to follow him or fall.

Immediately there formed in front of him a ragged rank of three newly-arrived
priests, but he held the staff before him like a spear. He was eager to thrust
and slash at them. Had they been fighting men of any kind—soldiers, or common
ruffians, or even careful tradesmen—he would not have stood a chance, for
their makeshift weapons, which amounted to two massive clubs and a rusty
cleaver, would have been worth far more than his slim wooden shaft, but these
were not fighting-men at all, and the violence which they had already seen must
have seemed to them to be the most outrageous sacrilege imaginable. It was not
that they did not wish to impede and capture him—indeed, they probably wished
it as avidly as they could—but they did not know how to act in concert to achieve that end. None
of the three, it seemed, could quite grasp the fact that he was part of a
potentially powerful company; each and every one of them displayed in his eyes
the consciousness of being face-to-face with an armed madman, and each one was
caught up by hesitation and uncertainty.

Reinmar crashed through them boldly and recklessly, swinging his puny weapon
as bravely and boldly as if it were Sigmar’s mighty warhammer. Not a hand was
laid on him as he went past, bringing the bedazzled Marcilla behind him. Once he
was past them, however, they were quick to turn and eager to make up for their
failure to check his charge. Reinmar could not help but howl out his exultation
when he realised that he and Marcilla were free of immediate danger, but it was
only exultation and not triumph. He knew that the priests would pursue him and
harry all the more determinedly because they had failed to stop him when they
had the chance.

He turned sideways, and with a single fluid motion swept Marcilla up on to
his left shoulder—and such was the fever of his excitement that she seemed to
weigh no more than any of the ordinary burdens which he hoisted thus a dozen
times in every working day. Then he set off, moving away from the enemies who
were still clustered about Matthias Vaedecker, trying to dodge his busy sword.

As he ran in what seemed to be the safest direction, Reinmar was only vaguely
aware that the path he had taken was not the one that had brought him to the
spot where Marcilla’s violation was taking place. It was not one of the two
branches of the fork that would have taken him deeper into the underworld, but
he knew it would not take him directly back to the entrance. Given the way it
was angled, though, he felt sure that it would take him back to the wall of the
cavern, so that he and Vaedecker could make their way along it and could make a
stand against it if they had to. In the meantime, Reinmar raced along the
meandering and uncertain path as fast as his legs would carry him, hurdling one
encroaching root-ridge after another as a hunted stag might bound through a
forest’s leafy glades.

He was so completely absorbed by the necessity to put distance between
himself and the pursuing priests that he must have taken a hundred expansive
paces before he realised that Vaedecker was not running after them. He realised too that, burdened as he
was, he had no hope of outstaying his pursuers for more than a few fleeting
minutes.

As soon as Reinmar realised that they had been separated he shouted Matthias
Vaedecker’s name, but the three priests who were pursuing him had set up a
clamour of their own, and the echoes of more distant cries were resounding from
the bright-lit ceiling in such awful confusion that Reinmar could not tell
whether he would be heard or not. He dared not hesitate, and was quick to
convince himself that the best thing to do was to follow the path until he
reached the boundary of the cavern and then to turn to his right, working his
way along the wall until he came to the tunnel that led to the spiral stair.
Vaedecker would surely make his own way back to the same place.

Reinmar did not doubt that he could outfight his pursuers if he did not
exhaust himself too soon. He was young, well-nourished and thoroughly used to
hard work. Although his principal duty was to man a counter, he had moved more
than his fair share of casks up and down the steps to his father’s cellar. He
had also been schooled in fighting. These priests, whose god of death and dreams
was known to them in the flowers of this horrid field of unnatural death, were
much older men than he, and their thinness was obvious to the most cursory
glance. The two who carried oversized clubs—which must surely be pestles,
normally used to crush and pound vegetable pulp in a mortar—seemed barely able
to lift them, and certainly would not be able to wield them as if they were
cudgels. The three undoubtedly toiled as other men toiled, but their strength
had been sapped by the austerity of their vocation. The most dangerous man,
Reinmar decided, was the one armed with a cleaver. When he reached the wall and
had to turn, he decided, that must be the one he put out of action first.

For a further fifty strides Reinmar managed to maintain the distance he had
put between himself and his pursuers, but then, in spite of their obvious
tiredness, they began to gain on him. His own legs were beginning to grow
leaden, and he knew that they would buckle soon. He tried again to cry out for
Vaedecker, but he could not do it; his breath was too desperately needed to
sustain his flight. Remembering that he was only a man after all, with a man’s
limitations, he began to feel the true weight of the burden that he carried on his shoulder, and the true
strain upon his aching legs.

Had he not reached the cavern’s boundary at that moment he would have been
forced to make his stand on the path, with the heads of the dreadful flowers
nodding all around him, but he saw the wall looming up ahead. Even better than
that, he saw a gap in the wall: a shadowy covert whose interior was not
illuminated by the appalling white light of the underworld but by ordinary
yellow candlelight.

Reinmar’s first thought was that the covert must be a way out, even though it
was not the entrance through which he had come. His second was that if it
offered a way out it must also offer a way in, where more enemies might be lying
in wait for him. For that reason, he did not make directly for it, but decided
instead to make his stand with a solid glowing wall at his back.

He laid Marcilla down beside the wall, telling her to be still, and
immediately turned to face the three monks. He saw the expression of triumph in
their weirdly-glowing eyes as they converged upon him, but he knew that it was
premature.

Holding the raven-headed staff before him as if it were a half-pike, Reinmar
charged without waiting for his assailants to come to a standstill. It was the
right move; they tried to stop when they saw him coming but they had too much
momentum and their efforts only made them ungainly. One stumbled and fell,
carried forward in spite of himself by the momentum of his unwieldy club. The
one who came on most recklessly of all, though, was the man with the cleaver,
who raised it as if to strike Reinmar’s head from his shoulders.

He never got the chance. Reinmar slammed the head of the staff into his
breastbone with all the force he could muster, and the priest was stopped in his
tracks. The cleaver flew from his hand and soared harmlessly past Reinmar’s left
shoulder to rebound from the cavern wall.

Reinmar immediately swung the staff around so that its blunter end thumped
into the midriff of his third opponent, and bought just enough time to turn and
pluck up the cleaver from where it had fallen.

No one was shouting any longer, and the echoes that had resounded from the
ceiling of the underworld a few moments before were silent now. Reinmar used the
cleaver to slash at the throat of the man he had winded. He expected the blade to shear right through
the soft flesh, but it was nowhere near sharp enough. It stuck and stuck fast,
and as the man fell his weight wrenched the weapon from Reinmar’s hand. He still
had the staff, but he was well aware of its limitations.

While his two remaining opponents struggled to recover from the blows he had
already struck, Reinmar finally found the opportunity to use his skilled right
hand to loose the knot that held his own blade in place. He drew it from its
scabbard just as they came forward again.

Had they been fighting men, they would have known what to do, but they were
not. It was absurdly easy, even for a man who had never killed a human being
before that day, to inflict mortal cuts on both of them. Reinmar struck one
about the head, the other full in the chest—and it was fortunate, as it
happened, that the first blow was so effective, for he had to put his foot on
the second man’s rib-cage and heave with all his might to free his blade again.

Then there was silence, and an appalling stink.

Marcilla was rising to her feet, her eyes full of horror. She was dumbstruck,
but her hands were fluttering. At first, Reinmar thought that she was reaching
out to him. Then he realised that she did not know who he was, and was trying,
ineffectually, to ward him off.

He loved her, and she did not even know who he was. She had said once before
that she had seen him in her dreams, but she did not seem able to remember that
now.

“It’s all right, Marcilla,” he assured her, surprised by the hoarseness of
his voice. “I’m a friend, and these men were your enemies. This way!” He caught
her right wrist in his left hand and drew her towards the shadowed covert and
the candlelight within. She resisted, but only for a second; it seemed that she
took the decision to trust him, perhaps by virtue of the kindness in his tone
and perhaps because she remembered, dimly, that she had seen him before.

When he first saw that the space within the covert was a blind cave, with no
means of egress from the underworld, Reinmar felt a stab of fear in his belly—but the fear was quickly overwhelmed by wonder as he realised what the covert
was.

Five stone vats were arranged in a rough arc against the right-hand wall of
the space. These, it seemed, were the mortars which partnered the pestles that the two monks had tried to use as
dubs. Three of them were brimming with wet pulp, but the other two were less
than half-full. At the rear of the cave, near the ceiling, a spring of water
gushed from the rock, the waterfall descending to a shallow pool. The overflow
from the pool ran into a crack that carried the excess water away into the
bowels of the underworld, but water had been drawn off into a number of large
open barrels. There were more barrels positioned near the vats, with huge
filter-funnels set atop them.

Reinmar had no difficulty deducing that when the pulp had been crushed in the
mortars it was filtered into these barrels, producing a solution. There was no
sign of yeast, either physical or odorous, and he concluded that although the
filtered solution was probably a mere substrate, the process by which the wine
of dreams was made did not involve orthodox fermentation.

The wooden shelves that skirted the left-hand wall of the cave were not
entirely full, but they were laden with various small sealed casks and stone
jars, and a considerable number of glass bottles. Many of the bottles were empty
but some were not, and what they held was a dark fluid whose odour could not be
entirely confined, and whose sweetness overwhelmed the much more delicate scent
of the pulp in the mortars. There were also a number of smaller phials, set in a
position of privilege in a covert-within-the-covert. All but two of these were
empty, or nearly so, but those last two were nearly full.

Reinmar picked up one of the phials and carefully removed the stopper. The
perfume that rushed into his nostrils was so incredibly powerful that he
immediately replaced the stopper, and then had to stand stock still while his
head cleared. His eyes had begun to weep, and he felt utterly helpless—but
once the fluid was safely confined again he recovered soon enough.

This, Reinmar realised, was where the wine of dreams was actually made. The
substances dissolved from the pulp obviously gave it some of its texture and
some of its complexity, but the eventual product was obviously highly diluted—and the most active ingredient of all was that which was kept in the phials and
added drop by drop to the bottled liquor. He was sure now that it was the nectar
of the uncanny flowers, patiently gathered by the monks.

Luther’s assumption that the making of the wine of dreams must be subject to
the same seasonal cycle as any other vintage was quite wrong, Reinmar realised.
Here there was probably no alternation of day and night, let alone an
alternation of winter and summer. That was why Almeric had said that the
monastery could supply wine three or four times a year—but the process by
which the nectar was produced must be slow, for this store was far nearer empty
than full.

Marcilla had drawn back against the unadorned wall to the left of the
entrance, but when Reinmar dropped her hand she made no attempt to run, or even
to move further away from him. He took off his stolen cloak and gave it to her
so that she could cover her body. She hesitated, perhaps because its skirts were
so liberally stained with blood, but she put it on regardless.

“I’m a friend,” Reinmar said again. “Stay close to me, and I’ll defend you
with my life. Only trust me, and we’ll win through.” In the meantime, his gaze
flicked back and forth along the row of vats and the huddled masses of the
barrels, and he wondered what he ought to do now. Had the vats been made of wood
he might have been able to overturn them, but they were stone, and he knew that
even Sigurd would have laboured in vain to upset one. Even the laden barrels
were too heavy to be easily overturned—but the bottles were brittle as well as
light, and the phials were lighter still.