The Wine of Dreams (42 page)

“What about your sons?”

“My family are all well,” Godrich said. His relief was obvious. “We’ll be
safe now, I think.”

“I suppose so,” Reinmar said, as they moved into the kitchen. “It was von
Spurzheim they wanted dead. Vaedecker told me that he would be replaced, but
that his replacement wouldn’t have his knowledge, or his particular obsession.
They’ll search for the valley, but when they fail to find it, they’ll go on to
something else. The Reiksguard will maintain a presence in the town for a while,
but they’ll find better things to do soon enough. It’s not over, by any means—but things will soon be back to normal, for those of us who survive.”

“The road to Holthusen is already open,” Godrich told him, as if it were
proof. “The river route will have to await the repair of the locks, I fear, and that will have to wait till the water runs a good deal
cleaner than it does now, but more soldiers have already arrived to help with
the clearing up. No one’s taking tally of the enemy casualties, but ours—the
town’s, that is, not including soldiers—number a few hundred. Not as many as a
thousand, thankfully. The soldiers lost hundreds too, of course, but the new
forces will compensate for that. The fires were not quite as bad as they seemed,
although the quays and the storehouses nearby were devastated and a dozen homes
were gutted.”

By the time this speech was finished Godrich was filling Reinmar’s cup again,
from a pitcher. “Take care, sir,” the steward added. “Drinking water’s in direly
short supply.”

Reinmar felt a slight stab of guilt at the realisation that he had already
emptied the cup. “Where’s my father?” he asked.

“Gone to look for your grandfather.”

Reinmar frowned at that. “Gone where to look for my grandfather?”

“Albrecht’s house. You should eat something, sir. It looks unappetising, I
know, but you should eat.”

Reinmar looked at the “meal” that Godrich had laid out. There was no bread
and no meat, and the boiled vegetables were not in the least inviting, but he
knew that Godrich was right. He ought to eat while he could. There would be such
hunger in the days and weeks to come that even this would come to seem, in
memory, an enviable feast—but there were more important things to worry about.
“Is the way to Albrecht’s house safe?” Reinmar demanded, as he sat down and
picked up a spoon. “Is the house still standing, for that matter?”

“I don’t know, sir,” Godrich told him. “But Gottfried believes that if Luther
is to be found at all, that is where he will be.”

“Wirnt will surely draw the same conclusion,” Reinmar murmured. “That bastard
stole my sword—and he may still have Marguerite. I ought to-”

“Eat first,” Godrich finished for him, nudging Reinmar’s spoon in the
direction of his mouth. “I urged your father not to take the risk, but… well,
sir, there is a matter between the two of them that has been unsettled for many
years, as you probably know.”

“The matter of the dark wine,” Reinmar said.

“The matter of authority in the business,” Godrich countered. “The matter of
self-determination, and the power to achieve it. Sometimes, sir, children are not as dutiful towards their parents as custom
and morality demand.”

For a moment, Reinmar thought that he was being accused, but he realised that
Godrich was referring to matters between Gottfried and Luther. He spared a
thought too for Wirnt and Albrecht—and for Valeria. Whatever else the wine of
dreams might give to its consumers, it was obviously very unhelpful to family
feeling.

“Do you have any idea what happened to Marguerite?” Reinmar asked, as he
continued forcing food into his mouth. There was turnip in the mess that had
been piled on his trencher, and cabbage, but nothing that he could think of as
pleasurable eating. Even so, he was hungry, and his stomach appreciated the
bulk. “She was with me in the cellar. Cousin Wirnt held a knife to her throat in
order to compel me, but the gypsy boy knocked him out. Wirnt must have recovered
consciousness while I was still asleep, and if Marguerite was still there, for
whatever reason…”

“I haven’t seen her,” Godrich said, “but you should ask at her home before
jumping to ominous conclusions. Change your clothes first, though—for your own
sake as well as her mother’s.”

“He has my sword,” Reinmar repeated, sullenly. “Perhaps he has the nectar too—but if he did take Marguerite, he must think that there is still something to
be won by bargaining, so I must assume that Marcilla took the phial.” He had
finished as much of his meal as he was capable of putting down his throat, and
he rose to his feet again.

Godrich obviously did not think he had eaten enough, but made no move to stop
him.

“You’re right about the clothes,” Reinmar said, as he turned to go to his own
room—but he paused on the threshold and said: “Did I do wrong, Godrich? Was it
my foolishness that spoiled Eilhart?”

“I do not know what you did, sir,” Godrich pointed out, with a politeness so
scrupulous as to be almost insulting. “You did not confide in me.”

“I wasn’t supposed to find my way into the underworld beneath the monastery,”
Reinmar told him, flatly. “The fact that I discovered the secret of the dark
wine’s manufacture was of no particular importance—but I spilled their
vintages and I stole a vital ingredient that might have been used to make more. I robbed a
dark god of a small fraction of his power to do evil. Should I have let that
power alone, to continue in its subtle work of evil?”

“I cannot tell,” Godrich said. “I wonder, though, why you did not tell anyone
else about the nectar you removed.”

“I was angry and outraged,” Reinmar confessed, “and I wanted to make my mark.
I wanted to make my wrath felt, but I also wanted a secret to keep, a power of
my own. I did not know who to trust, but that was not the reason for my refusal
to trust anyone. I wanted to be a player in the game, not a pawn. Because of
that, Eilhart was nearly destroyed.”

“Not because of that,” Godrich said. “Those things which came last night have
no other reason for being than to maim and destroy. Had they not fallen on
Eilhart they’d have done the same work elsewhere. Eilhart is fortunate in having
such passionate defenders. The world is the world, Master Reinmar. It is not
your fault, or mine, that there is evil in it. We fight it as best we can. That
is what you did.”

Reinmar nodded. “Thank you,” he said, before ascending the stair to his
bedroom.

Once there he went immediately to his closet and his trunk. He had spoiled so
many clothes of late that he was lucky to have any left at all, especially since
Luther had stolen his best suit, but it was Reinmar’s good fortune to be the
scion of an unusually prosperous family. The outfit he decided to put on was a
little too small as well as inelegant, but it had to do.

The water left by his bedside for washing had not been changed for two days,
and he did not suppose that it would be changed for another fortnight, so he was
more careful than usual in trying to clean the worst of the muck from his hands
and face. He succeeded well enough, although he still seemed a slightly sorry
sight when he looked at himself in the mirror.

When he turned away from the mirror he intended to go to the door, but some
unaccountable impulse made him hesitate on the threshold. He waited for a
moment, trying to figure out what it was that had made him stop. Then, still
without being certain, he turned back.

He went to his favourite hiding-place, in which he had secreted the phial of
nectar before it was stolen by Luther. It had not been there when he had
replaced the strip of mortar, but as soon as he removed the fragment again he saw that the hidey-hole was
no longer empty.

Someone had replaced the phial, from which no more than a couple of drops had
been removed.

“Marcilla,” he muttered. But he knew now that Marcilla was not wholly
Marcilla, and that it was the other part of her—her possessor—that had put
the phial back where Wirnt had already looked for it and failed to find it.

Everyone in the world, it seemed—and perhaps one beyond it—was determined
that he should be a wine merchant, no matter how hard he might try to avoid that
fate.

He took the phial, and put it in his pouch. Then he went back to Godrich and
asked him for the loan of a sword.

Godrich told him that there was no weapon of any kind in the house, all of
them having been requisitioned by von Spurzheim. “I suspect, however,” the
faithful servant said, “that if you care to use your eyes as you cross the town
boundary, you might well find something you can use.”

This prophecy proved correct, although Reinmar was careful to visit
Marguerite’s house before putting it to the test. Her mother had not seen her,
and was extremely displeased to discover that she was no longer safe in
Gottfried Wieland’s house. There was nothing Reinmar could say in reply but that
he was sorry, and to swear on his life that he would bring her safely home.

The soldiers and the townsmen had been busy all morning gathering everything
that might be of further use, but there were far too many stinking corpses lying
outside the barricades to have been properly examined. The blade that Reinmar
eventually appropriated was crude, blunt and rusted, but he needed the
reassurance of its weight far more than the keenness of its blade. He kept it in
his hand while he marched steadfastly over the ridge and into the fir wood
surrounding Albrecht Wieland’s house.

There was smoke above the wood, but it was coming from the chimney of the
house, not the embers of its timbers. The enemy that had fallen upon the town
with such reckless fury had not been here, and no remnants of the hideous army
seemed to be lurking in the wood, even though von Spurzheim’s sentries had been
withdrawn more than a day before. Reinmar never ceased to look about him as he
went along the path, continually glancing over his shoulder to make sure that no
one was sneaking up behind him, but the fir wood seemed utterly lifeless. No
birds sang, no wind rattled the leaves, and the greenery seemed oddly faded.

When he came in sight of the door of the house, though, he saw that it stood
open. That seemed to him to be a bad sign, and he gripped the hilt of his stolen
sword more tightly. He approached stealthily, making sure that his boots made no
sound as they trod on the soft leaf-litter beside the crudely-laid path that led
to the door. When he came to the threshold he paused, listening intently, but he
could not hear voices.

He slipped in quietly, and saw soon enough why no voices had been raised. For
the time being, at least, the fighting was over.

If Albrecht’s sitting room had been a mess before, it was pure chaos now. The
table had been overturned and the chairs flung aside. Wherever there had been a
pile there was now a mere scattering of individual objects, some crushed and
some shattered.

The five combatants in the struggle had separated now that its fury was done,
seemingly to count its cost—although one was so still that he was more likely
to be numbered among the counted than the counters, and one so well-confined
that she probably ought not to have been reckoned a combatant at all.

Marguerite would probably have cried out when she saw Reinmar, had she not
been gagged. She was trussed too, her hands tied behind her and her ankles roped
together. She had been set in a corner, probably upright to begin with, but had
sunk into a crouch. Albrecht, the apparent corpse, was lying to the left of her,
not four feet away.

The man was huddled into an almost-foetal position, his hands having clutched
at his belly when he was cut and his knees having been drawn up in agony, so
that his hands and thighs shared the work of trying to confine his entrails to
their proper place. His brother, Luther, still seemingly young and still
seemingly mad—though perhaps no madder, now, than Wirnt—knelt beside him,
displaying his empty hands as if appalled by their helplessness.

Reinmar had no doubt at all that the sword that had slit Albrecht’s abdomen
was his own, wielded by Wirnt. Wirnt still held it, and still seemed ready to
use it, but for the moment he had taken a defensive stance, setting his back
against the other wall that extended from the corner where Marguerite crouched.
He did not appear to have been injured, but he was panting hard. In his left
hand he was holding a flask, which Reinmar recognised as the one that the monks had given to Valeria, and which Valeria
had left behind half-full. It was not half-full now, but if Reinmar read the
expression of Wirnt’s face correctly, the rest had been spilled rather than
drunk.

Until Reinmar came in, Wirnt’s eyes had been fixed on Gottfried Wieland, who
was supporting himself against the opposite wall, still upright but hurt by a
long cut extending from his left shoulder almost to his midriff, which had
leaked so much blood that Gottfried’s shirt and trousers were soaked. Reinmar
judged that the cut had scored half a dozen ribs, and must be very painful, but
even though the blood-loss seemed massive, it was probably not life-threatening
in itself. If infection set in, then Gottfried would certainly have to fight for
his life, but for now he was very much alive and fully conscious. Had he a
weapon in his hand, he might have made a formidable opponent for Wirnt, who was
smaller and less athletic, but he had been forced to drop his sword in the
course of the brawl, and it lay beneath Wirnt’s foot. For that reason, if for no
other, Gottfried was content to keep his back to the wall, offering no obvious
threat to his mad nephew.

Marguerite and Gottfried both looked imploringly at Reinmar when they saw
him, but neither spoke. Marguerite was silent because she had no option;
Gottfried, presumably, because he did not know what to say.

Wirnt did.