The Black Chalice (30 page)

“Again,” he said.

Soft rustling as the book closed and another was taken up; a tiny, breathless silence. Theodoric read again.

“And the prince that is among them shall bear upon his shoulder in the twilight, and shall go forth; he shall cover his face that he see not the ground with his eyes. My net will I spread upon him, and he will be taken in my snare: and I will bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans; yet shall he not see it, though he shall die there.”

Gottfried looked down. No ambiguity remained, none whatever, neither to guilt nor to punishment. It was not the boy then, but the lord, the prince. And he would die for it.

For the first time, Gottfried allowed himself to feel the anger of a king betrayed. And the bewilderment of a man who had made, in absolute certainty of his good judgment, a serious mistake.

Or had he?

Did I overtrust you, spawn of Dorn? Did I — for all my knowing better — did I come to admire you, as others do, for your beauty and your skill with arms and your graceful, cunning words? Did I want you as my warleader because it would enhance my honor in the world? Or was it myself I overtrusted, my own subtlety, my knowledge of your worldliness, my certainty that you would serve the highest bidder as every whore will do? Perhaps I forgot how much my enemy can offer.…

Or was I led to this because God wills it so? Because your treachery, like that of Judas, must yet fulfill the law?

“One last time, my friends,” the duke whispered.

The blind lad took into his hands the New Testament, and opened it, and Theo read as he was bidden.

“Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God who justifies.”

Only to my Father, then, will I answer for what I do now….

Silence again, and small shafts of dawn light lying in spears across the altar. He heard his son’s voice, low but harsh: “Go now, and hold your foolish tongue; this is God’s affair, and not a matter for servants’ talk.” He heard the young man’s clumsy, groping steps, the opening and closing of the door, Theodoric coming to stand beside him. The young man’s face was drained and bitter.

“Are you satisfied, my lord?”

Gottfried rose. He was aging; he had spent three days without food, ill-clothed and on his knees. Yet his body straightened like a bowstring, easily, gracefully. He was still one of the most feared fighting men in the empire, and that was in itself a miracle.

“Yes,” he said. “I am satisfied.”

“Then I would ask you a favor, my lord.”

“Yes?”

“Give me the charge of bringing him in.”

“Why do you hate him so much?”

“He’s a viper in your bosom, my lord. Are you telling me I shouldn’t hate him?”

“You hated him before you knew that.”

“Give me some credit, my lord,” Theodoric said coldly. “Consider the possibility that I’ve always known it.”

I am considering it. I’m also considering how he shone at the
Königsritt.
How everyone admired him. How the women, especially, admired him, and offered him their tokens. You are still worldly, Theodoric. Worldly in your pride, and in your flesh. You hate him because, as the world judges things, he has all its gifts, and you hunger for them entirely too much. In a part of your soul, you would still rather have his gifts than mine. Worse, for all your hatred, you do not see the danger in him, even now….

He placed a hand on Theo’s shoulder.

“He will be lawfully taken and lawfully tried— not for personal vengeance, but for the honor and righteousness of God. And God’s wrath is wrath enough for any man.”

“And after he is tried?”

“I will fulfill the law. To the last word and letter. I will bring him to Babylon to the land of the Chaldeans; and he shall not see it, though he shall die there.”

“My lord?”

The duke did not answer. He genuflected, and then turned and walked purposefully towards the door.

TWENTY-THREE

The Queen of Car-Iduna

No man has ever beheld me but that I could have had his service.

Wolfram von Eschenbach

* * *

They gathered in the high-domed chamber of the gods, on the day which in the Christian world was called the Feast of Saint Callistus. It was mid-October, autumn in the Reinmark, but there were no seasons here, or rather, the seasons passed unmarked by the ordinary sun. The air was sweet with roses; the fountains laughed among budding gentians which would never see the fall of snow.

They were a fearsome gathering — or so the world would have judged it — for they were without exception women and men of extraordinary power. The aging Nine in their sheaths of silver, the Seven in arms, the Five young and eager to be proven, the Three without rank.

And she the One, crowned and potent, Lady of the Mountain, guardian of the Reinmark, keeper of the Grail of Life, Raven the sorceress, queen of Car-Iduna. She wore a gown of mottled and dissolving colors; gold wrapped her wrists and her loins; seven stones flashed rainbows from her hands. No person of her own world or the Other ever looked at her and judged her anything but beautiful. Only a few failed to entertain — at least for a few unguarded moments — some image of their own surrender, some wish to yield up whatever treasure they had to hand, in return for her favor, or even just the hope of it. She had many gifts, and this was not the least of them: she kindled desire in all its shapes and forms. She embodied it, and so held it out as infinite and barely imagined possibility.

They gathered in silence. They bowed to the Black Chalice high on its bier, the Grail of Life which Maris brought to safety from the vale of Dorn, so long ago that no one remembered exactly when, even in their stories. They bowed to their shimmering, power-wrapped queen. And then, with great solemnity, they closed the circle.

It was said that when they met so, storms broke across the empire, and ships went down at sea, and great men blundered into death, and even the pope could neither sleep nor pray. It was said also that the crops flourished after, and lovers were reconciled, and prisoners unexpectedly set free. But many things were said of Car-Iduna. Perhaps none of them were true, or perhaps they all were.

A small fire burned in a stone at the heart of their circle. Each one knelt, and cast into it an offering of their own choosing. Beside the fire was a flower-draped altar. Raven lifted from it the ceremonial cup, and the horn which lay over it, and held them between her jeweled hands.

Down through the years they thought of her more as veela than as woman. It was an easy mistake to make, for she had the Otherworld’s uncanny beauty, and powers far beyond the scope of ordinary human sorcery. But she had been bred of a human father — they remembered it quite clearly now — a black-haired man from the steppes, with a taste for wandering and strange adventures. He could neither stay with his inconstant mistress nor forget her, and so he came back, and came back again, haunting the wild Maren like a ghost, until time and despair took him to his death.

They watched her, and they remembered him now, and they knew. It was human eyes which held such bitter shadows, human fingers which closed around the cup like talons of steel. She had not slept for days. She had spent herself to breaking, and after all the reasons of politics and power had been accounted for, there was still another reason.

She raised the cup high. Her voice was harsh— and that, most of all, was how they knew.

“May the gods keep safe the world, and may the world keep safe the gods!”

They spoke after her, all of them, in a single voice:

“So let it be.”

She dipped the horn into the cup and drank from it, and passed it on. The wine was dark and bitter.

She sought for words to begin, and could not find them. It was Aldis, first of the Nine, who finally spoke:

“Lady Raven, you have called us here for counsel. I know why, but some of us do not. And time is short now. Shall we not begin?”

“Yes,” Raven said, and then still said nothing more.

What is power in the heart of the circle is death on the cliffs of the pyramid. I have always known that. But what are we to do who are caught between them?

She let her eyes travel around the circle. She did not love them all, but every one of them she trusted. She began then, quietly, leaving nothing unsaid.

“I’ve tried, with all my strength and skill, to contact the count of Lys, and I cannot do so. Either Gottfried has cast a net around him more powerful than either of us can break… or else Karelian himself has turned against us, and refuses my command.”

“Or he is dead,” added Helrand, first of the Seven.

“No,” she said. “If he were dead, I would know.”

No one disagreed, though two or three of them exchanged glances of surprise.
So. It’s as serious as that, then? She hasn’t loved anyone for so long… but of course, those are always the ones who break their necks when they fall….

“There is more,” she went on grimly. “Gottfried is riding north from Stavoren, with upwards of a thousand men. They are moving quickly, and they are armed for war. The ravens followed him deep into the pass of Dorn; he can be heading nowhere now except to Lys.”

“Then it has begun,” murmured Marius.

“If Gottfried is powerful enough to detect Karelian’s bond with us,” the queen went on, “and then to block our contact, even from the castle of Stavoren, then he is far more powerful than we knew, and the danger he presents is desperate.”

“He may think he is a god,” Aldis said archly. “I for one don’t believe it. He doesn’t have such power, lady.”

“We never thought so,” Raven agreed. “We may have been wrong.”

“Wrong about him? Or wrong, perhaps, about our ally in Lys?”

There was a brief silence. They had all shared in the decision to lure Karelian to Helmardin, but it was Raven, most of all, who had insisted on it. It was Raven who had seen in his ensorceled image a man who could be won, a man already halfway theirs, who was skilful, and experienced, and dangerous. “He belongs to us!” she had insisted. “He is blood heir to all the great witches of Dorn, and soul heir to its enduring history of defiance. I tell you, he is ours!”

Aldis spoke again.

“Karelian Brandeis spent his life at war, serving any lord who’d offer him a place. Serving even in that utterly savage and unprovoked campaign of butchery they call their great crusade. And for his service there Duke Gottfried gave him Lys. Is it not so, Lady Raven?”

“It is.”

“Then it’s no great leap of the imagination, I think, to wonder if he has gone back to Gottfried’s standard. Or indeed, if he ever left it. The great problem with turncoats, lady, is keeping track of how many times they’ve turned.”

You objected to his coming from the first— you and Helrand both. His reasons I understand; he’s a fighting cock like any other, and jealous of his place. But you are too old for such foolishness, and too wise…. Were you right then, from the start? Was I the fool? He was beautiful, tawny and proud-limbed as a stag. Was his beauty the only thing I saw?

“You may be right,” the queen agreed. “But whatever the facts turn out to be, we must act now. If Gottfried is riding to war against the emperor, and if Karelian means to ride with him, then the Reinmark and all of Germany is at risk. And if Karelian is still loyal, then he must be warned, and if necessary, defended. We have to know. We can’t stay here in Car-Iduna and wait for events to unravel.”

“It is late in the year, lady,” offered Riande, who like Helrand was one of the Seven, the warriors of Car-Iduna. “Too late, I would think, to begin a war against the emperor. And surely he won’t take on King Ehrenfried with just a thousand men?”

“Well, he’s not riding to Aachen, we may be sure of that,” Helrand agreed. “An open uprising can’t possibly succeed. He has no grounds for it, and no matter how many men he can put into the field from among his own allies, most of the German princes will oppose him. Whatever he is planning against Ehrenfried, I’m sure it’s something different, and for that, a thousand men may be quite enough. Indeed, they may be too many.

“I won’t pretend to know what the count of Lys is thinking, or where his loyalties are. But as for Gottfried, this sudden march to Lys does not strike me as the beginning of his rebellion. I think it has to do with affairs in the Reinmark itself— something between the duke and Karelian, or between them and someone else. Unfortunately, it was Karelian’s task to tell us all these things, and he is silent.

“I agree with you in this much, lady. We can’t wait any longer; we must act. Let me take a party to Lys—”

“You can’t get there before Gottfried,” Raven said grimly. “Not any more. He is two days’ march away, or less.”

“Two days? Perhaps an elf can ride across the Reinmark in two days, if he has a mind to. But no one else can.”

“I can.”

Every gaze fastened on her, each with a different, unbelieving look of protest.

“Lady,” Helrand said, “there is but one way you can make so swift a journey, and if you choose that way, none of us can go with you. None of us have the power. And you can’t possibly go into such danger alone.”

“Can I not?”

“You are the queen,” Aldis said grimly. “Your duty is to Car-Iduna. All your gifts were given you so you might keep this castle safe, and shield its powers!”

“I know my duty, by the gods!” the queen cried. “If all we were meant to do was shield the Grail, we wouldn’t have it! The elves would, or the veelas. Their lairs are safer, and their hearts yield to nothing. But it was given to us, because we care about the world! Or we used to. What would you have us be now, lady Aldis— just a band of vine-draped sorcerers hiding in the woods?”

There was a long and painful silence.

“That was uncalled for, High One,” the crone said quietly.

Raven looked at the Chalice before her, black as the fecund earth, studded with jewels, embracing the curved horn. In that image of female and male were the images of all difference, of all the divine contradictions which made possible the richness of the world.

“We had power once,” she said. “All our kind, whether we came to our power by blood or by learning. The gifted ones, they called us, before the priests of the empire came, and claimed all our gifts for themselves. Or broke them.

“The world had a place for us. It had a place for many things— many gods, and many ways of knowing, and many kinds of truth. Now there is only one. One God, one priesthood, one people, one right way to pray and to think and to dress and to couple and to wipe your miserable nose.

“And for what? Love, they said, and promptly made love a crime. Peace, they said, and we have wars now such as Odin never dreamt of. There is no end to the empire’s greed for land, and no bottom to Rome’s craving for dominion in the empire. We’ve seen centuries of it, and we’ll see more.

“Yet however ruinous it is to have Church and empire tearing the world apart between them, it will be worse if they are made one. That is what Gottfried von Heyden wants. And if it happens, then I think we’ll all wish for chaos again, for priests and kings snarling at each other’s throats. Whatever else, they check each other’s power, and a few things slip from their grasp, and go free. When there is only one power left, and that one claims to speak for God— where does anyone turn then? Who will even believe, after a while, that any other kind of world is possible?

“Gottfried must be stopped, and I will leave nothing undone — nothing! — which may serve to bring him down!”

“You see the matter rightly, lady,” Aldis said. “But—”

“Then I am going to Lys. Whatever the duke’s purpose is, he’s moving with extraordinary speed. Why such haste, unless he knows we are watching him? Unless he’s afraid we can still warn Karelian before he gets there?”

“You assume the count’s innocence,” Marius observed. He spoke without a hint of criticism in his voice; he was stating a simple fact.

“Yes,” Raven said. “I do. And as for my being the queen, and having no right to fly off on such a reckless enterprise alone, I will say only this. It’s true that I’m bound to protect Car-Iduna. From many things, my friends— and quite possibly from myself. Wait! This time you will listen till I’m finished.

“When we chose Karelian Brandeis for this task, to be our agent in the camp of the duke, some of you disagreed with our choice, and you had good reasons. Others of us, mostly for the same reasons, judged him the best man we could hope to find. I haven’t wavered from my judgment.”

She paused, looking from one to the other. Her voice softened to a riveting purr.

“Let me be very clear. I have no doubts about Karelian Brandeis. None whatever— and I have delved deep to find them. Yet neither fire, nor absinthe, nor dreams, nor the smallest whisper in my blood— nothing speaks of anything except his bond to me. I’m well aware of such facts as we have. I will say aloud that the harshest of your judgments may be right. But inside, I say no. Inside I know him as he is, my lover and my ally, a man I would trust with any weapon, and any secret. If he walked through the door this moment, it would scarcely matter what strange tale he might tell to explain his silence, I would believe it.