The Wine of Dreams (6 page)

“If Wirnt has fled Marienburg there must be further trouble in the city,
completing the disruption of the dark wine’s supply. If a witch hunter and
soldiers are mere hours behind him, the trouble in question is presumably a
crusade of sorts. Whatever Wirnt might have told you, I doubt that it is filial
affection that has brought him here. He is more likely to be searching for the
source of the wine of dreams. He might even be hoping that Luther can tell him
where to continue his search.”

“He did ask for Luther before he asked for you,” Reinmar confirmed.

“He will probably come here too,” Albrecht said, mournfully. “He is likely to
go anywhere and everywhere in search of a clue, and he will draw the witch
hunter after him. I only hope that someone can persuade him that the secret lies
beyond the mountains. He will do less harm hereabouts if he goes in search of
the famous secret pass without undue delay.”

“My grandfather does not believe that there is any such pass,” Reinmar
commented.

“Nor does any man who knows the mountains,” Albrecht agreed. “But it has been
a convenient fiction for centuries—and the truth is that no one knows where
the wine of dreams and its kin are made, or by whom, or by what process. Its
makers guard their secret well, and wisely so.”

“What kin?” Reinmar questioned. “How is other dark wine different from the
wine of dreams?”

“The wine of dreams is one of several vintages allegedly produced by the same
growers,” Albrecht said, uneasily, “but the others are even rarer, and cater to
more exotic tastes.”

“My father seems to think that dark wine really is evil,” Reinmar said,
hoping to provoke further revelations.

“Your father has never tasted it,” Albrecht retorted, with a sigh. “Perhaps he
is wise, although I have never admired that narrow kind of wisdom. It is as well
that he has kept you clear of it, if there are witch hunters abroad. Luther
might be a stronger man today if it had never passed his lips, but I cannot
regret the visions I obtained from it. I am a scholar through and through and I have always been willing to pay a price for insight and inspiration.
The witch hunter will find nothing here if he comes calling, and my crimes, if
crimes they were, are too distant now to interest him. If you see Wirnt again,
tell him that I would be glad to see him—but beg him to be careful, for all
our sakes. You had best go now. If honest men are not abed when they should be
it excites suspicion, and I dare say that you have duties to perform by day.”

“I have,” Reinmar agreed, dolefully. He had hoped to learn more, but he did
not have the time.

“Come again, when this is over and done with. Your father disapproves of me,
I know, but we are kin and he thinks worse of me than I deserve.” Albrecht stood
up as he spoke, and Reinmar stood too, allowing himself to be ushered back to
the door.

Reinmar removed the bar himself, although he had seen that the old man
handled it without difficulty. “I will come again,” he promised. “I’ll bring
news, when there is more to bring.”

“Be careful,” Albrecht advised. “Can you find your way by starlight? The
moons are but crescents, alas.”

“I have good eyes,” Reinmar assured him, “and there will be light enough in
the streets, once I am among the houses again.”

He took the advice he had been given, and trod carefully until he was sure of
his way—and even then he took pains to move discreetly, lest there was anyone
nearby who had been told to stand watch and take note of his passing. He saw no
one, but the trees were dense enough to conceal a dozen inquisitive watchers.

When he arrived back home the house seemed quiet. His ascent to the first
floor window was as awkward as the descent, but he contrived to wriggle through
the narrow window-frame without doing overmuch damage to his jerkin.

One of the servants had set a lamp beside the bed, although the wick had been
compressed so tightly that the blue flame was hardly brighter than the starlight
outside. Reinmar had already decided to go straight to his bed, so he did not
bother to turn up the light—but he had barely knelt down to unfasten his shoes
when he heard soft footfalls on the floor above.

Reinmar’s first thought was that it must be Godrich or one of the other
servants, but he moved to the door nevertheless, then slipped outside into the
corridor in the hope that he might be better placed to hear. He closed the door behind him to cut off the glimmer
of the light and held himself perfectly still while he listened hard.

The quality of the shuffling steps changed as whoever was abroad reached the
head of the staircase leading down to the first floor, and Reinmar deduced from
the sound that whoever was coming down was less sure of his footing than any of
the servants would have been. A servant about his business would, in any case,
have been carrying a candle—and this person was not.

Reinmar did not know what to do. If he stayed where he was, outside his
bedroom door, the intruder—if it was an intruder—would have to pass by him
to get to the stair which led down to the shop. In all probability, the man—if
it were a man—would walk right into him. He was tempted to call out and wake
the household, but did not like to do so while he had no idea what might be
happening, so he waited while the footsteps approached.

He did not move, but he could hardly stop breathing, and the footfalls
stopped abruptly while the other was still two paces away from Reinmar’s
station. There was a windowslit at the far end of the corridor, but the faint
light that filtered through it was insufficient to let him make out a shadow
unless or until the other placed himself directly in line with it, and the man
seemed instead to be pressing himself against the wall, using it to guide him.

When he could bear the suspense no longer, Reinmar said: “Who’s there?” He
felt direly foolish, for he was hardly likely to obtain a meek reply if the
other had no right to be where he was, but it would have been worse to leap upon
the other and engage in a tussle if it turned out to be Godrich or Gottfried.

The reply he actually obtained was an urgent “Shh!”—a syllable which was
inadequate to give him any clue as to the accent of the voice. Within a second
or two, though, the sound was followed by urgent action, as Reinmar felt hands
groping for his neck. Fearful that he was about to be strangled he tried to
wrestle, but the other man was much stronger than he, and within three seconds
he was tightly held, with a hand clamped over his mouth.

“No need to wake the servants, cousin,” a voice hissed in his ear. “The fewer
people know that I was here the better. Where’s the door of your room?”

The hand relaxed to permit him to reply, although it remained poised to
reassert its grip if he should try to call out.

“We have only to step to the side, Cousin Wirnt,” Reinmar assured his captor,
extending his free hand to push the door inwards.

Wirnt bundled him through it, then let him go. After the darkness of the
corridor the lamplight did not seem so dim, although it lent an eerie tint to
the dark man’s features. “Who told you my name?” he demanded.

“Great-Uncle Albrecht,” Reinmar told him. “Did my grandfather not tell you
that I had gone to warn him?”

“Uncle Luther told me far less than I had hoped,” said Wirnt, bitterly. “He’s
scared half to death, perhaps because von Spurzheim still has your father. How
did they catch up with me so soon? That barge must have been even slower that it
seemed, and von Spurzheim must have hired horses so that he and his favourites
could ride ahead of the troop. Do you know how many locks there are between here
and Holthusen?”

Reinmar knew exactly how many locks there were between Eilhart and Holthusen—the taming of the river’s flow was a great source of pride in the town—but
he did not bother to number them. “You must go,” he said. “Great-Uncle Albrecht
said that he would be glad to see you in other circumstances, but that he cannot
give you what you seek or tell you what you want to know. If you go up into the
hills you will find it exceedingly easy to lose yourself. When the witch hunter
has gone there will be time enough to renew old acquaintances.”

“To renew old acquaintances,” the dark man repeated, with a sneer in his
voice. “That is not why I came, cousin—nor did I come to hear nonsense about
secret passes to Bretonnia. I must make contact with the vintagers, for their
sake as well as mine. Vaedecker’s platoon is the advance detachment of a much
larger company, and von Spurzheim’s spies are already abroad in the region.
There has been treason in Marienburg and the authorities there know far too much—more than 1, and more than your grandfather is yet prepared to admit.”

“You are not safe here,” Reinmar said, stubbornly. “And while you are here,
neither are we. You must go.”

Wirnt’s expression was twisted with anger as well as anxiety, and for a
moment Reinmar thought he would refuse—but then he relaxed. “Aye,” he
muttered. “So I must. Will you come down with me, to let me out and bar the door behind me? I climbed up the same way
I watched you climb down, but I nearly got caught half way in and half way out
of the window, and I wouldn’t care to try it again.”

“With pleasure,” Reinmar assured him, insincerely, as he turned to pick up
the lamp. “I hope you won’t take it amiss if I say that I hope I shall not see
you again for quite some time.”

The other man laughed dryly. “No, cousin,” he said, as he followed Reinmar
out of the room. “I won’t take it amiss. Now that I’ve seen Uncle Luther I know
how the land lies—but don’t think that this affair will be over when you bar
the door behind me. Von Spurzheim won’t stop searching, and it won’t be easy to
convince him that none of you can point him in the right direction. You’ll be
carefully watched, so you’d best not put a foot wrong.”

“How can I,” Reinmar protested, as he made his way to the shop door, “when I
know nothing?”

“That might not save you,” Wirnt said, while he waited for the bar to be
removed. “When witch hunts begin, all kinds of old resentments surface. Your
neighbours might be denouncing all three of you as addicts of the wine and
active sorcerers even as we speak. You might soon have to make new estimates as
to who your friends are—and you might regret your rudeness to me.”

Reinmar decided then that he did not like his cousin Wirnt, and regretted
that he had accidentally shown him a way into the house—a way that he could
obviously use in spite of his generous girth.

“We are honest tradesmen,” Reinmar said, stiffly, as he held the door open to
let out his unwelcome visitor.

“I’ll be sure to remember that,” Wirnt promised—but the promise was a sneer,
ill-befitting a man who had just exposed his kin to danger, and had refused to
warn them when he had the chance, because they could not give him what he
sought. Reinmar watched him until he had vanished into the night, and then took
himself swiftly to bed.

Tired as he was, he could not sleep. It seemed to him that within the space
of a few hours his whole world had been turned upside-down. Everything was
different: his father, his grandfather, Eilhart and the wine trade. Every one of
them had seemed so straightforward when the day dawned, dull and settled and secure. Now, they had all exposed to his sideways glance the
suggestion of a darker underside, as ominous as it was mysterious. How could
that be factored into his life? And how could it be factored into his dreams?
Was there hope in this sudden upsurge of mystery as well as danger? Was there
opportunity as well as threat?

Of one thing he was certain: he must discover more. And he must not do so
meekly, waiting for others to tell him what they cared to when they cared to do
it. He must work on his own account, with his own aims and his own ambitions. He
was a child no longer, and he must reach his own accommodation with the
enigmatic wine of dreams and its even darker kin. He would take nothing as
given, no man’s word as final. He must be his own man now—but he must discover
more, if he was to be the kind of man he was anxious to become.

In spite of the sleep-denying effect of all the ideas seething in his brain,
Reinmar contrived to rouse himself in time to open the shop at the designated
hour. He was almost immediately swamped by customers who had far more on their
minds than a simple exchange of coin for jugs of wine. Several of them assured
him that they had been expecting “this” for years, although they were
disinclined to specify exactly what “this” might be. None of them mentioned dark
wine in so many words, but more than one commiserated with Reinmar over the fact
that the legacy of Luther’s sins now seemed to be descending to his son and
grandson.

“Not that the old man ever meant any harm,” Frau Walther assured him, “or even
that stuck up brother of his—but meaning no harm isn’t the same as doing none,
and chickens always come home to roost. There are evil things abroad in the
forest now, so they say. The poachers always say so, of course, but when the
woodcutters join in you have to take it seriously. You stick fast to the roads,
now, when you go off on your tour of the vineyards, and watch out for the
gypsies.”

“More soldiers are coming,” he was told by one of the constables’ wives. “All
well and good for your trade, I suppose, but where there’s soldiers there’s trouble. They’ll pass through, it seems, as
soon as they’ve figured out where to head for next, but they’ll be back when
they’ve done whatever they’ve come to do, dragging trouble in their wake. There
are advantages to being at the limit of the river’s navigability, you know—this has always been such a decent town. We never needed soldiers here. Never.”

Gottfried still had not returned by the time the first rush was over, and
Reinmar was becoming worried, although one of his loyal customers would have
been sure to pass on the news if his father had actually been arrested. When
Marguerite turned up, hungry for news, he had not the slightest idea what to
tell her.