[Warhammer] - The Wine of Dreams

by Brian Craig - (ebook by Undead)

  A WARHAMMER NOVEL

  THE WINE OF DREAMS

  Brian Craig

  (An Undead Scan v1.0)

  Chapter One

  One of the first things Reinmar Wieland had learned after assuming his adult duties was that the early afternoon was always a quiet time in a wine merchant’s. Eilhart was a town dominated by convention, and convention dictated that the housewives of the town did their shopping early, while the milk and meat were still fresh and the best vegetable produce was still to be found on the stalls in the market square.

  Wine did not, of course, need to be bought while it was fresh. Quite the contrary, in fact; the very first of the many slogans that his father Gottfried was attempting to drum into Reinmar’s head held that “good wine matures well”. Like all the other slogans it was subject to all kinds of exceptions, the value of an individual flask depending on its source as well as its age, but that did not prevent Gottfried Wieland from intoning the words as if they were holy writ. Nor did it inhibit the housewives of Eilhart from shopping for their measures of Reikish hock at the same time as they shopped for all the day’s goods, in the early morning.

  The consequence of that habit, for Reinmar, was that he had to rise at six and take his station at the counter before the bell in the tower of the corn exchange chimed seven. This would not have been so terrible had he been able to bolt the door of the shop when the market stallholders packed up their goods and trestle tables and set off home, which they invariably did before four in the afternoon. Unfortunately, the wine shop always had a second busy period at dusk, when labourers, journeymen and apprentices would begin to wend their way home from their various kinds of work. This was the time when all those among them who fared for themselves—the unwed and widowed who were inconveniently boarded—would provision themselves for the evening.

  Wine was twice as necessary to customers of the second kind as it was to the members of larger and more careful households, because they had to eat the worst meat and the most worm-ridden vegetables. A swig of wine between mouthfuls of food lent great assistance to their palatability.

  In the Empire’s great cities, Reinmar’s father had informed him, all manner of spices were available to disguise the rottenness of poor meat, but such luxuries were much harder to come by in Eilhart than in Altdorf or Marienburg. “For which you and I should be profoundly grateful,” Gottfried Wieland had added, “for it increases demand for our product, and hence its value. You will doubtless hear other traders wondering aloud why the Wielands have never attempted to extend the scope of our business further north than Holthusen, but the towns further down the Schilder are easily reached by the riverboats that ply their trade along the Reik—and lie, therefore, on the fringe of a much bigger and much more competitive marketplace. Whenever you hear our own boatmen cursing the difficulty and tedium of steering barges through the locks between Eilhart and Holthusen—and you will, when you learn that aspect of the trade—you ought to give thanks, for that is what secures our virtual monopoly of local business, and keeps at bay the spices that would reduce demand.”

  It was, alas, hard for Reinmar to be grateful when the chief effect of this second wave of daily custom was to delay closing the shop until he was sorely tired. It was not so bad in the depths of winter, when dusk fell before the market bell chimed five, but in summer the light lasted for a full three-quarters of the day and outdoor labourers were kept so hard to their work that they would still be staggering through the door—invariably carrying a fearsome thirst—at three hours to midnight.

  Reinmar had, of course, suggested to his father that the shop could be closed for a few hours early on summer afternoons without any noticeable loss of profit, but Gottfried Wieland was not the kind of man to take such suggestions well.

  “Close the shop!” he had exclaimed, as if the notion were the rankest heresy. “No noticeable loss of profit! What kind of tradesmen would we be if we were not available to our customers at any hour at which they cared to call? This is the Empire, my boy, not Estalia or Tilea. We are civilised folk, and industrious too. Can you possibly think that life is difficult because you must sometimes stand at a counter for fifteen hours in a day? What of the folk who toil in the fields and the forges? What of the men who load and unload the barges, or the men who go up to the forests to cut wood and burn charcoal? Our life, Reinmar, is extraordinarily good and easy by comparison with the great majority of men, and it is honest toil that has made it so. We are not aristocrats, to be sure, but there is a dignity and purpose in trade which cannot be valued too highly. Carpenters make chairs, cobblers make boots and tanners make saddles, but tradesmen make money. There are men abroad in the world who resent tradesmen and affect to despise them as usurers in disguise, but it is our great fortune to live in Eilhart, where even the common folk recognise that no finer thing can be said of any man than: he makes money. And of all the wares in which a man might trade, there is none finer than wine. Cheap wine makes life tolerable to the poor, and good wine is the best of all the pleasures available to the comfortably off.”

  Gottfried Wieland always emphasised the first word whenever he pronounced the phrase “good wine”. He was so besotted with his merchandise that he seemed to consider its finest fraction to be virtue in liquid form. The local constables and the town magistrate had been known to take a different view of the poorer fraction favoured by the town’s admittedly tiny criminal element, but their low opinion did not impress Gottfried in the least. “Drunkards will drink no matter what,” he would say, waspishly. “Better they should intoxicate themselves with honest wine than anything worse.”

  Reinmar did not know exactly what the words “anything worse” were supposed to signify, but he knew that the Wieland shops did not stock schnapps, and that Gottfried always pronounced the words “Bretonnian brandy” as if he were spitting acid. To Reinmar, Bretonnia was a fabulous place—the substance of travellers’ tales. Its boundaries lay no more than forty leagues to the south, as the eagle flew, but one had to be an eagle to get there because the Grey Mountains were virtually impassable hereabouts; there was no convenient pass nearer than the Axe Bite, which lay forty leagues to the east.

  One day, Reinmar knew, he might go downriver as far as the Schilder’s confluence with the Reik—but no further than that, if he were content to be a dutiful son. In the daydreams with which he whiled away the slow afternoons, however, he often toyed with the notion that once he had gone so far from home it would be easy enough to take a westbound boat to Marienburg or an eastbound one to Altdorf. Perhaps he would never see Bretonnia, but he would see civilisation at its finest: a world in which a free man might make the most of his freedom.

  In his daydreams, Reinmar longed to be free. In his daydreams, he yearned for a better world than one in which achievement was measured in honest toil and virtue in good wine.

  The hope of one day being able to defy his father’s sterner advice was what carried Reinmar through every lonely hour that he had to spend standing by a counter in an empty shop, and that hope increased with every year that went by as his fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth birthdays passed. As he grew older, his duties were further extended, and so was the intensity of his frustration. “It’s always the way,” his grandfather would say, when he took leave to complain. Even his grandfather, who seemed to be perpetually at odds with Reinmar’s father, had become grudging with his sympathy of late—but he was an old and sick man, who regularly demanded far more sympathy than he was prepared to offer. Reinmar’s nearest neighbour and closest childhood friend. Marguerite, was infinitely more generous but had lately become far less imaginative.

  “But it is always the w
ay,” she told him. “That’s what life is like.”

  Reinmar’s seventeenth year was the first in which manning the shop had become a full-time occupation with no allowance for any part of his education. Even his training in the arts of self-defence, which he had always enjoyed, was now considered to be complete. From now on, if Gottfried Wieland had his way, Reinmar’s work would be Reinmar’s life. Sometimes he wondered whether he might not do better to take his skills to the city and become a soldier in the Reiksguard. Reinmar had, of course, always known that the family business would become his work, but while he still had opportunities to play he had not anticipated the crushing weight with which responsibility now seemed to bear down upon him. As the days of his seventeenth year lengthened from winter to spring and from spring to summer the shop was transformed in his imagination into his prison, and he began to fear that once he was fully committed to it he would never be released.

  Apart from his daydreams, however, there was one prospect to which he could look forward and whose anticipation saved him from despair. When the crops had ripened in the summer sun and the harvest was gathered in he would go up into the hills with Godrich, his father’s steward, taking sole responsibility for the very first time for the purchase of this year’s vintages.

  The time soon came when he began to count down the days to this expedition, and the countdown in question inevitably came to seem exceedingly slow, but Reinmar could not help thinking of it as the countdown to a moment of decision: the moment when he would have to settle his own mind once and for all as to whether he would accept the life that his father had designed for him, or whether he would hazard everything in following one or other of his speculative dreams.

  He always assumed, as he mulled this matter over, that the choice was his alone and that it would be freely made—but he had known no life other than the everyday life of the townsfolk of Eilhart, and he had innocently taken it for granted that a life of that kind was an unchanging and unchangeable ritual, safe from all disruption.

  That assumption was, of course, quite false.

  The afternoon on which Reinmar’s countdown reached single figures for the first time was a particularly vexatious one. The weather was exceedingly warm and sultry, and the atmosphere in the shop seemed as thick as soup. The morning rush had ended early because the town’s housewives had not wanted to linger too long outside on such a day.

  To make matters worse, Reinmar had offended Marguerite two days before. He had charged her with “pestering him with trivia”, and he knew from long experience that unless some powerful motive intervened she would avoid him for at least three days. Although he and Marguerite had been the best of friends since the beginning of his memory, Reinmar was far from certain that he wanted their friendship to develop further in the way that everyone—not least Marguerite—seemed to expect. She was a pretty girl, after her bland and blonde fashion, but not as pretty as the dark girls with exotic eyes that Reinmar often saw in the square on market days, selling metal trinkets and medicinal charms.

  While Marguerite stayed away, though, there was no relief from boredom available to Reinmar but daydreaming, and even his daydreams seemed to have grown stale from recent overuse. The comfort that he usually found in fantasies of flight and adventure was not to be found on that particular day, and in the absence of that comfort he had grown irritable and desperate. By the time the customer came into the empty shop, when Reinmar should have been glad for any distraction, his mood was too bad to be lightened by anything so slight.

  Had the customer seemed more interesting in himself, Reinmar might have been able to rouse himself from his ill humour, but the only interesting thing about the man, at first glance, was that he was a stranger. Reinmar had plenty of time to study him while he prowled the racks, peering at the goods on offer. He was short—hardly half a hand’s-breadth taller than Reinmar—and somewhat stout. His hair was dark, but not uniformly black, and there was two days’ growth of black beard staining his jowls. The quality of his clothes suggested that he was more likely to have arrived in Eilhart by barge than in a carriage, although he was not costumed as a stevedore. His hands did not seem to be marked by habitual use of ropes or tools, nor did his face have the leathery appearance given by long exposure to the sun, but he certainly did not have the look of a gentleman.

  Reinmar was not good at guessing any man’s age, but this one posed a particular puzzle; he might have been anywhere between thirty and sixty. His eyes were narrow, dark brown in colour but startlingly bright whenever they caught the shafts of sunlight that filtered through the narrow windows.

  The stranger looked like the kind of customer who knew exactly what he was looking for, although he obviously could not locate it in the racks, but Reinmar’s mood was so bad that he let the man carry on looking for a full five minutes before his patience finally gave out.

  “May I help you, sir?” Reinmar said, four minutes later than politeness and good tradesmanship demanded.

  “You might,” the stranger said, coming to the counter as soon as the offer was made, “if you can fetch Luther Wieland.”

  Reinmar blinked in astonishment. Luther was his grandfather, and had been forced by his ill health to surrender the running of the business to Gottfried before Reinmar was born. The old man had been bed-ridden for the last six years.

  “That I cannot do,” Reinmar said. “My father—Luther Wieland’s son—is in charge of the shop nowadays, and even he is not at home at present. I fear that there is no one to help you but me, but if you care to tell me what it is you want, I am sure that I can find it. I know my way around the cellars.”

  The stranger stared at him, not in a hostile way but rather discomfitingly. “Gottfried’s boy,” he murmured, pensively. “Gottfried’s boy, and almost grown. What’s your name, lad?”

  “Reinmar.”

  “Reinmar, eh? Very well, Reinmar—are you telling me that Luther Wieland is dead and buried?”

  “No sir. But he has been in poor health for a long time. He takes no active part in the business.”

  “What about Albrecht?”

  Reinmar blinked again. Albrecht was Luther’s brother, but Reinmar could hardly remember the last time he had come to the shop, and Gottfried rarely visited his house, which stood some way apart from the town. There had been some trouble between them, although Reinmar had no idea what had caused it. His father did not seem to like or approve of Albrecht, but Reinmar had no idea why, because Gottfried never mentioned the subject.

  “Albrecht never had any part in running the business,” Reinmar told the stranger, uneasily.

  “But he has a stake in it, does he not?” the stranger was quick to say. “Albrecht is part-owner of the shop.”

  “I believe he was at one time, many years ago,” Reinmar admitted. “But to the best of my knowledge, my grandfather bought out his brother’s interest long before I was born. My understanding is that when my grandfather dies, my father will inherit everything—everything in this house, that is. Albrecht has his own house. I believe he lives alone, except for an old gypsy woman who serves as his housekeeper. I’m sure that I would have heard had he died, so I assume that you can find him at home if you want to see him, but he is even older than my grandfather and might be just as poorly. I haven’t seen him since I was nine or ten years old. I doubt that I’d recognise him if I ran into him in the market.”

  “A close family,” the stranger observed. “What a marvel of stiffness these little provincial towns are, where quarrels can last a lifetime and old friends can pass one another in the street every day, refusing to speak because of some long-forgotten insult that city folk would think utterly trivial.”

  The contempt in his voice was not calculated to improve Reinmar’s mood. “What is it you want, sir?” Reinmar asked, pronouncing the final word as if it were an insult rather than an honorific.

  The stranger took another step closer, and leaned across the counter in a confidential manner.

  �
�What I need, Reinmar Wieland,” he said, in a voice hardly louder than a whisper, “is a flagon of dark wine.”

  Chapter Two

  “I am prepared to pay the market price, since it seems to be required,” the stranger added. The tone of his voice suggested that he did not think it should be required.

  “I don’t know what you mean by dark wine,” Reinmar told him, flatly.

  “You said that you knew your way around the cellars,” the stranger said, resentfully.

  “So I do,” Reinmar replied, with equal asperity. In actual fact, he did not know his way around the cellars half as well as his father thought he should, but he was certain that Gottfried had never mentioned “dark wine”. The wines of Bretonnia, it was said, were red instead of white, but no one in Eilhart would ever have deigned to drink Bretonnian wine while good Reikish hock was available. The most colourful wines in the shop were sweet dessert wines made from grapes that had stayed on the vine till their skins had shrivelled to raisin-brown, but they were straw-coloured and Reinmar had never thought of them as “dark” or heard them described in such a fashion.

  The stranger had withdrawn slightly in the face of his uncertainty. “Boy or not,” he said, in a low voice, “you’re the heir apparent. You should know your stock.”

  “I do,” Reinmar insisted, again.

  “There’s nothing to fear,” the stranger said, leaning closer again. His dark eyes stared with a brightness that was surely unnatural, given that their lids were so heavy. “I’m your cousin, if you hadn’t guessed—or your father’s cousin, at any rate.”

  “My father has no cousins,” Reinmar retorted, annoyance giving him a steadiness that he might otherwise have lacked. “My grandfather had but one brother, and my grandmother was an only child. Albrecht never married.”

  “No,” the stranger said, his lips forming a humourless smile. “Not the marrying kind, my father—but he acknowledged me nevertheless. If I am not known here, even in rumour, it must be Luther that kept the secret, for I am certain that my father wrote to him from Marienburg to tell him the news. I’m your cousin, in truth—but I have already told you that I’m willing and able to pay the full market price for the goods. If you cannot bring Luther to me, then you must take me to him. He will set your mind at rest.”