The Black Chalice (3 page)

Paul faltered, staring at him. There was warmth in Karelian’s eyes, but there was also a kind of weariness— the weariness of a man who was always stronger than the men around him, and who sometimes got tired of it.

There is no reason in the world to go back to Karn.
That was what Paul wanted to say.
We are men, we are warriors, we are lords. Are we going to be scared off by wood nymphs and ghosts?

And in another part of himself, he wanted even more desperately to say:
Oh, please, my good lord, let’s turn back! It’s dangerous there, and we’ve no reason to go, and everyone’s afraid…!

“It’s for your lordship to decide,” he said. He had meant to speak firmly, like a brave knight eager to follow wherever his liege might go. But his voice was small and dry, and gave him away completely.

“I see,” Karelian said. “Well then, listen, both of you, and I’ll tell you something, and maybe you’ll rest easier for it. Before we left the Holy Land, I went to see a mage in Acre, a man whom other knights had spoken of—”

Paul sank onto his heels, appalled. “A Saracen?” he whispered.

“He told me many extraordinary things, some of which I knew already, and some of which I still don’t understand. And he also told me this: I might go safely where other men saw danger, and I should most fear danger where other men believed they were safe. So….” He smiled, and tousled Paul’s hair lightly. “I don’t think we’ll have much to fear in Helmardin.”

“You trust the prophecy of a Saracen, my lord?” Reinhard asked harshly.

Karelian stood up, his easy mood broken in a breath, and the seneschal hurried on: “I’m only thinking of your welfare, my lord—”

“And so am I,” the count said grimly. He walked to the window, staring out at nothing, for the night was overcast and black. “I’ve looked for guidance in many places over the years, my friend, and I found precious little of it anywhere. I’ll take it where I can get it.”

Quite suddenly Paul felt cold, as though Karelian had flung back the shutters, and the icy night was spilling in.

“Surely God has guided you in all things, my lord,” he whispered.

Karelian turned then, and laughed. “Really? If he has, then men have little good to hope for in this world.”

It was a terrible thing to say. Paul dropped his eyes. His master was weary, and probably a little drunk. Even the noblest and most necessary wars would leave their mark on a man, and move him sometimes to say harsh and bitter things. Only later, looking back, did Paul understand: Karelian was already falling into the doom which awaited him. Year after careless year he had disarmed himself with doubt and worldliness, and he rode into Helmardin an easy target for his enemy. Like a rich man, Paul thought bitterly, or a stranger in a foreign city, walking late along the harbor without a sword.

* * *

It was still dark when they mounted for the road. In the harsh light of torches Karelian’s face was drawn and weary, and his mood was extraordinarily dark. Nothing was said about turning south again, and Paul knew nothing would be. Half asleep, the soldiers loaded the pack animals and climbed into their saddles. Reinhard approached the count, rubbing warmth back into his hands, his breath turning into coils of white fog.

“Everything is ready, my lord.”

For a tiny moment Paul thought he might protest one last time, but then, as if anticipating the possibility, Karelian paused, one hand on his horse’s bridle, and met his vassal’s eyes. The expression in his own was unyielding.
Not another word, Reini, if you value my good will. Not one more word….

This, too, was Karelian: a man whose smiles and easy words belied an astonishing hardness of resolve. He was the youngest of seven sons, bred to high rank and dismal prospects, living in war camps and trenches before Paul of Ardiun had been born. His father was Helmuth Brandeis, the margrave of Dorn, a lineage known equally for its excellent bloodlines and its unpredictable loyalties. Helmuth quarreled with the duke, and was reconciled with him again, more times than anyone could remember. Each quarrel left him poorer. Nonetheless he married three times, and had numerous children. By the time Karelian was born there were already six strapping older brothers waiting to gobble up the margravate’s lands, the margravate’s captaincies and baileys, the margravate’s carefully arranged marriages with its neighbors’ carefully guarded daughters. Karelian was going to have to make his own way in the world.

Go be a monk,
his father told him.
There is nothing for you here.

If that is so,
demanded the lad of twelve or thereabouts,
why did you bother to beget me?
From this bit of insolence he acquired three broken ribs, and a taste for soldiering in other lands.

He fought Angevins in Italy, Vikings in Normandy, Capetians in Flanders. And so many others. If he gathered together all the banners he had followed, he said once, they would cover all the walls in the great hall of Stavoren.

Then Pope Urban came in splendor through the empire, calling on the warriors of Christendom to gather and march east, to take back the Holy Land and destroy the infidel. One of the first to take the cross was Gottfried the Golden, duke of the Reinmark. And a scattering of the duchy’s free knights returned home to join him, Karelian among them. He was thirty-one then, and tired of the small and pointless wars which Europe’s princes kept fighting among themselves. He wanted something better. He wanted a place in the world, and land, and a future with something more in it than wandering and blood.

And he had it now, earned by his own hand. He had wealth, and a splendid reputation. He had the county of Lys, a territory larger and richer than the one his brother inherited. Helmuth, the weathervane of Dorn, was dead; and though his eldest son, Ludolf, was margrave of Dorn, it was Karelian who was seen now as the leader, the favored one, the ornament of the house of Brandeis.

He had travelled a long way, but he had left many things behind him on the journey— all his innocence, and most of his faith in God, and any trace of willingness to be directed by other men. He made his choices carefully, with a good deal of thought, but once he made them, it was wiser to stay out of his way.

And he had made his choice in this. Having survived perils which the simple folk of these highlands had never dreamt of, having grown used to judging danger by the standards of the battlefield, he saw no reason not to make a short journey through Helmardin, and meet his bride, and get on with his promising new life. Paul bowed faintly, and helped him to mount, and they rode silently into a day over which the sun would never rise.

Midday had barely passed when it began to snow. At first the flakes were thick and wet, and there was an eerie peacefulness in the low-hanging sky. The soldiers riding guard ahead were vague and silent shadows, fading and reappearing like horsemen in a dream.

But the land rose, and bare summits emerged here and there from the forest, and the wind began to cut like knives. They rode single-file then, bent low in their saddles, their hands and faces numbing in the cold. Grey-black clouds swept overhead, advancing and dissolving like swift-moving armies, more and still more of them rolling in behind. The trees, bare as they were, leaned in the force of the cruel wind, and howled. The innkeeper’s words echoed in Paul’s memory:
There be dead men
there, and veelas….

He took little comfort in the fact that he rode with armed men. He would have felt safer among a horde of pilgrims, in hemp shirts with crosses sewn across their backs. But in Stavoren Karelian had removed all of his insignia from the great crusade. He wore the colors of Lys now. His shield and his high banners bore a crest of Brandeis: a black tree without leaves, poised against a pale December sky.

Paul himself had painted the shield. He thought it a strange device, that winter tree, rather stark and gloomy for so splendid a lord, for a man who always outfitted himself like a prince. Even now, on this rough journey, Karelian wore a surcoat of embroidered blue samite, a dark velvet cloak lined and trimmed with ermine, and the finest boots which could be made. And all the trappings of his horse were of satin and silver.

So Paul had asked him, back in Stavoren:
What is this crest, my lord, and why have you chosen it?

It was, Karelian said, the winter tree of Dorn. There was a legend around it, a very old legend from pagan times. Once a magical tree had grown in the valley. It flowered in the wintertime and bore fruit in the snow. No one hungered then; the rains were soft; everyone laughed and life was long and good.

Then evil men rose up and tried to steal the tree, and so it was carried away and hidden; no one knew where. But one day, the legend said, it would be restored, and Dorn would be a paradise again.

And Paul was content. For surely this was the story of Eden lost by sin, and of the cross which restored men to everlasting life. If the story was so old, and found among a pagan people, well, it only proved how God’s truth was present everywhere in the world.

Or so he had believed in Stavoren….

* * *

He drew rein briefly, flexed his feet in their icy stirrups and wiped the snow from his face. It was full day now, the highlands murderous with storm. And as sane and sensible a man as he believed himself to be, he knew the storm had not happened by chance. It was not natural. Nothing here was natural, or Christian, or safe. Even Karelian’s wind-flung banners looked different to him now. The winter tree which he had painted so lovingly on his master’s shield was not a symbol of the cross at all. It was something from the wood of Helmardin.

He should have been glad when they left the highlands and began to move again into deep forest, where the road was shielded by close and thickly wooded hills. Yet, perversely, he felt still more afraid. A dozen times he thought he saw shapes moving in the snow-blind forest. Whether they were manshapes or beasts he was not sure, but every time he saw them they were closer.

So they travelled for many hours, and as the last light began to fail Karelian ordered lanterns to be carried all along the convoy, so no one might be lost. But he did not order a halt, and Paul was glad. He wanted nothing now, neither rest nor food nor shelter; he wanted only to be gone from here forever.

Once, for a while, when the storm seemed to have lessened for a time, some of the men began to sing. It was beautiful and strange, at once an act of defiance against the forest, and an offering to appease its anger. But the night was fiercely cold, and growing colder. Paul was afraid they soon might have to camp because it would become impossible to ride. The songs fell away, and the storm closed utterly on Helmardin.

He came alert with a start. He had not dozed, merely lost himself a little in his thoughts, and in the easy rhythm of the horse’s gait. He looked up abruptly as the animal stopped. Karelian and his advance guard were clustered in front of him, blocking the road. Beyond, lovely as paradise, rose a shimmering, snow-coiled haze of lights.

Marenfeld!
he thought, and for one blind and beautiful second he believed it. His body believed it, flooding with a sweat of relief, even while his mind was recoiling with bewilderment, with the terrible realization that it was not Marenfeld, it could not possibly be Marenfeld. They had passed no farms, no open fields; they were still deep in the forest. And no small, huddled peasant village showed lights like these in the depths of a wilderness, neither Marenfeld nor any other human place…!

He wiped his arm across his face, and forced his eyes to focus against the swirling snow. The lights outlined a fortress— a small fortress, with a single tower, with bright windows and flaming torches at its gates.

Karelian seemed as dumbfounded as the rest of them, but he recovered faster, and spoke grimly to the seneschal:

“What’s the meaning of this, Reinhard?”

“As God is my witness, my lord, I don’t know. I did nothing except follow the road.”

Karelian did not answer. He stared at the fortress, and turned once or twice in his saddle, looking at the empty night around them as though there might be some explanation there. When the lantern’s shimmer caught his face, Paul saw bits of snow clinging to his eyebrows, and ridges of it matting on the hair left uncovered by his helmet.

“Do you know this place, then?” he asked.

“There is no castle on the road to Marenfeld, my lord,” the seneschal said. He kept his voice carefully even, quieting his own fear. “There never has been, save for those the stories tell of. Those which are… unnatural.”

“We’ve been abroad for seven years,” Karelian said.

“Aye, my lord. But I don’t think we are looking at something new.”

Silence closed over them, broken only by the wind and the weary shiftings of their horses. Karelian looked again towards the lighted castle. Something drew him towards it, Paul saw, something quite small perhaps, something as small as curiosity, the willingness he had always had to see another kingdom or turn another card in the deck.
How have we been lured here, and why, and how will I ever know unless I go inside?

Reinhard saw it, too, and reached quickly to seize the bridle of Karelian’s horse.

“My lord, I beg you, let’s turn back! Whatever this place is, it’s a place of evil! It can be nothing else! Let’s go back!”

“You can’t even tell me where we are,” Karelian replied grimly. “To what shall we go back? It’s hardly a night to be wandering about like lost children in the woods.”

“My lord, I beg you—”

“Enough! Ride on, seneschal, before we are all frozen in our saddles.”

“As you wish, my lord,” Reinhard said, and led the way.

The castle appeared to be built into the base of a hill, as though the builders cared more for shelter from the wind than safety from their enemies. The gates were open, but a small group of armed men stood guard in front of them. One of these stepped forward as the convoy approached, and bowed very deeply.

“Welcome, my lords!” he said. He gestured broadly, generously, towards the courtyard within. “It’s my lady’s pleasure to offer you shelter on so bitter a night.”