The Wine of Dreams (17 page)

“She needs it, Master Wieland,” Noel said, quietly. “Believe me, I beg you—she really does need it.” Marcilla’s eyes had fluttered open, but only for a
moment. She sighed deeply as she closed them again, and then she sank back
again, returning to sleep. She did seem more at ease now, and not quite so hot.

“You see,” said Brother Noel. “She really did need it. I do not say that it
will cure her, but it will make her far more comfortable.” The tone of his voice
had not changed at all, but his words seemed to Reinmar to have taken on a
distinctly ominous edge.

“Thank you,” Reinmar said, uncertainly. “You’re very kind.”

“You may try the wine yourself if you wish,” Noel went on. “It will likely be
stronger and sweeter than any you have tasted before, but I think you will find
it rewarding. Your companion obviously has the greater need of it, but you seem
to have suffered a little yourself. It is a marvellous aid to recuperation. It
cannot undo a wound, but it can revive the spirit and ease distress, and you do
seem to stand in need of some such treatment. At the very least, you will find
it interesting, in your professional capacity.”

Reinmar swallowed hard. Anxiety had made his throat dry, and he certainly had
a thirst, but he felt sure that this was the wine in which his father had always
refused to trade. The arguments that had come to mind when the wine was offered
to Marcilla were as sound now as they had been then, and he knew that he could
not possibly continue to maintain his pose as a possible buyer of the wine if he
refused even to taste it, but he knew that this moment of decision might be the
most crucial he had ever faced in his life.

He knew that his father would have insisted that he refuse; he knew, too,
that his grandfather would have urged him to try it for himself. In the end,
though, it was his own decision and no one else’s.

“I’ll need to clean my palate,” he said, eventually.

Carefully, he drained the last dregs of the wine that the farmer’s wife had
set out for him before pouring himself a draught of water. This he swirled
around in his mouth, as any expert taster would before turning to a new vintage.
By this means he established that he only intended to sip the wine that was
being offered to him, and would then spit it out.

Brother Almeric removed the loosened stopper from his bottle for a second
time, and poured a parsimonious fraction of its contents into the waiting cup.

Reinmar looked into the interior of the wooden vessel, but its sides were so
darkly stained that it was impossible to judge the colour of the liquid it now
contained. The fluid was slightly viscous, and had a remarkably heavy fragrance—sweet but rather cloying—which he did not find entirely pleasant.

I am my own man, he thought. From now on, I make my own decisions, and I am
true to my own dreams.

Then he took a tiny sip of the dark wine, and let it linger for a moment on
his tongue.

Reinmar really had intended to spit the drop of wine into the fire when he
had tasted it, but as its taste unfolded and extended the unexpected complexity
of the sensation gave him an altogether pleasant shock. He let the liquid lay
upon his tongue for a moment longer, and then another, until its warmth and
fragrance had suffused the whole interior of his mouth.

When he finally did spit, there was hardly anything left to emerge, and the
drop of sputum that sizzled briefly in the fire seemed almost derisory.

The aftertaste that the liquor left behind on his tongue reminded Reinmar of
the scent of certain exotic flowers which the gardeners of Eilhart received as
bulbs and seeds from distant Tilea, to whose cities they had allegedly been
brought by spice-caravans. He decided that it was far more pleasing than he had
anticipated, and could easily imagine why some men thought it a taste worth
recapitulating.

“It is rather fine, is it not?” Noel said. “It is a vintage once treasured in
many of the noblest houses of the Empire, although the troubles which presently
afflict the realm have all but destroyed the steady commerce we once enjoyed. No
one outside the monastery knows the secret of its making.”

Reinmar inhaled deeply, letting the air cool his tongue and drawing a last
breath of that curious fragrance into his lungs. He felt a shock of brief
intoxication like nothing he had ever experienced before. He did not quite know
what to say, but felt that some comment was necessary. “It is very unusual,” he
murmured—but was instantly ashamed of the inadequacy of the adjective. To
cover his embarrassment, he said: “I am surprised that it is not better known in
Eilhart.”

“We had assumed that it was still valued there,” Brother Almeric murmured,
“but we live sheltered lives.”

Is he claiming innocence? Reinmar wondered. Is he trying to persuade me that
he has no inkling of the reputation that dark wine has in the world beyond the
valley?

“It is not so very surprising that you do not know the wine, even though you
are a vintner,” Noel put in, as if to clarify this point. “In the seclusion of
our valley we have lost any real sense of the extent and complexity of the
world. We leave it to others to disseminate the meagre surplus we produce as
they see fit, although we obtain real benefit from it as an aid to meditation
and communion with the god to whom our order’s service is dedicated. To a
successful businessman like you, our hidden valley and its little secrets must
seem tiny and remote, hardly worthy of interest in a commercial sense.”

“I would not say so,” Reinmar answered, thinking that he might as well be
bold. “Chance and misfortune brought me here, but the product of your secret
process might yet turn my misfortune to our mutual advantage.”

Brother Almeric did not seem convinced of Reinmar’s sincerity, but Brother
Noel was still looking at him with all apparent benevolence. “You would be
welcome to visit the monastery tomorrow, Master Vintner, if you have the time,”
he said. “I hope that the maid is not as seriously hurt as she seems to be, but
if perchance you were to be further delayed…”

“I would like that,” Reinmar said.

Brother Noel and Brother Almeric bid him good night then, although their
clothes were still not dry, and they left him huddled over the fire.

As they drew the door shut behind them, Noel called back: “We shall see you
tomorrow, Master Wieland. We’ll return to see how the girl is faring, and we’ll
take you to visit the monastery afterwards, if you care to come.”

“I shall look forward to it,” Reinmar promised—and having done so, wondered
whether he ought, after all, to be reckoned a bold adventurer, or something more
akin to a fly that had wandered into a spider’s web. He ran his tongue around
his mouth one last time, but the taste of the dark wine was already exhausted.
Then he looked down at the lovely face of the gypsy, which seemed even lovelier
now than it had before.

She stirred slightly, but not as if she were disturbed or anxious. If she was
still dreaming, her dreams must have become far more tranquil—but the wound on
her head seemed uglier now than it had ever been, and he realised that Noel had
been right to judge that it was even worse than Godrich had estimated.

“Sleep well, my love,” he said, recklessly. “You have done what you were
required to do, and I can only pray that you’ll be safe.”

After a few minutes’ silence Marcilla stirred again, more vigorously this
time. Reinmar bent over her anxiously, but there did not seem to be any cause
for alarm. Her eyes opened and she peered at him intently, as if she were trying
to remember who he was. Then she looked sideways at the fire, and down at the
rug on which she lay. He had stretched the pallet out beside her but had not yet
had a chance to interpose it between her body and the rug.

“We had to take shelter,” he told her. “We are in a farmhouse in a valley,
not far from a monastery.”

She nodded as if in reply, but he was not convinced that she understood what
he had said. The mention of a monastery certainly drew no reaction.

“Two monks brought you medicine to drink,” Reinmar went on. “It seems to have
helped make you a little better.”

Mention of something to drink drew a more positive response, and the gypsy
girl looked around until her eyes lighted on the cup. Reinmar poured a little
water into it and offered it to her. She was able to take it in her hand and put
it to her own lips. Perhaps because she had seen him pour the water she paused
in surprise when she sipped. He guessed that there must have been a little of
the monks’ wine still clinging to the cup’s interior, which the water had
absorbed. Marcilla drank more deeply, and more greedily. Reinmar watched as the
initial shock passed and her surprise was displaced by dissatisfaction.

“Is there no more?” she asked, weakly.

He reached out for the water-jug, but that was not what she meant. She shook
her head.

“It was some kind of sweet wine they gave you,” he said, guardedly. “I had
never tasted it before.”

“It is very sweet,” she murmured, passing her tongue over the inside of her
mouth. “Very sweet indeed.” She passed the empty cup back to him and he put it
aside. She seemed dazed, as if her mind were balanced on the very edge of
reality. He coaxed her into rolling sideways on to the pallet. He would have
been glad to talk further, but by the time she had made herself more comfortable
she was drifting off to sleep again. He was so very tired himself that he could
not regret the necessity of postponing further discussion until morning. He laid
himself down beside her on the rug, not caring that her body shielded him from
the direct radiation of the fire.

He fell asleep almost immediately.

Although he slept as deeply as might have been expected, given his
extraordinary exertions, Reinmar’s slumber was troubled from the very outset by
strange dreams.

He had put the encounter with the beastmen firmly out of his mind while he
pursued the day’s subsequent adventures, but the guard he had put upon the
memory collapsed as soon as he lost consciousness, and the moment he began to
dream he was revisited by the day’s horrors.

He remembered the first awful sight of that initial bestial face, and its
instant compounding with the knowledge that there was a whole pack of such
creatures, advance scouts of a monstrous army.

He remembered the leap that had carried the first beastman into awful
collision with his father’s steward, and the sickening thud as Godrich’s head
had hit the iron hoop supporting the wagon’s ill-fitted canopy.

He remembered the way the beastman’s bowels had opened as Sigurd had made the
most of his killing grip, and the way Matthias Vaedecker’s shirt had soaked up
the stink of the alien creature.

He began to remember all these things at once, so that the memories piled up
like a heap of autumn leaves, shed by the day’s experience but not yet
shrivelled into the mulch of experience. One by one they had been difficult
enough to bear, but detached from time and whipped into such awful confusion they seemed ten
times worse. They told him not merely that his life would never be the same
again, but that the sixteen years he had so far lived had been spent behind
walls of ignorance: walls that had always been under siege by all the monstrous
lusts and hazards in the world, even though he did not know it.

Reinmar resisted the images as best he could, by mustering all his will to
the task of remembering Marcilla’s beautiful, innocent, sleeping face—but all
he contrived to do was to interpose a frail and translucent veil between his
frightened eyes and the frame in which all his horrors were contained.

To understand his past in this new light—or to fall a little way short of
understanding, as is often the way in dreams—was almost too much for him to
bear, and it was not in the least unnatural that he should have begun to dream
of other things: of the possibilities of the future rather than the burden of
the past.

Alas, the potentialities of the future had been transformed along with the
legacies of the past, and Reinmar’s dreams became even more phantasmagoric when
they turned in that direction.

The beastmen of his earlier dream had seemed fearsome enough, but they were
poor things by comparison with the chimeras of his subsequent dreams, which had
horned heads like bulls or bison, and extra limbs which ended in claws instead
of hands. But the most terrifying thing about them was something he could not
see but only suspect, which was that beings of their kind concealed an awesome
intelligence beneath their monstrous masks, and were capable of hearing words
that were spoken anywhere in and out of the world.

He kept trying with all his might to use more comforting imagery as a ward
against the horror, but every time he tried to conjure Marcilla’s beauty it
lasted for but an instant before metamorphosing into something far more
terrible. Her eyes would inflate until they were huge and green, and her flowing
black hair would turn vivid white, and her body would manifest all kinds of
bizarre decorations, tattooed as well as painted. Her hands would turn into
long, scissor-like claws and her hindquarters would sprout a remarkable tail,
terminating in a barbed fluke.

It was all too much to bear, but the only way in which he could refuse to
bear it was to shatter the images into countless shards of thought, reducing the
fugitive coherency of his dream-consciousness to a mere dust of madness—and
even in that panic-stricken retreat he glimpsed a possibility more awful than
any he had ever glimpsed before, because he realised that something similar
could happen to a waking mind. To shatter a nightmare was of no permanent
consequence, but to shatter the waking mind in like fashion was to give way,
irrecoverably, to madness.

Reinmar had never suspected himself of any tendency to madness, and had never
considered himself ready prey for such a fate—but he knew now that there was
no man alive who was free of such potential, or immune to such a fate.