I studied the cracks in the grey stone wall.
“Then all those things you said in Car-Iduna, my lord— you meant them?” My words were part question, part statement, part blind pleading.
“Meant them?” He was genuinely astonished. “Of course I meant them! Whatever did you think?”
I did not answer, and he laughed again, but softly.
“I was not ensorceled, Pauli. My mind was quite my own, and it still is.”
He took out the feather once more, ran one finger softly over the black silk.
“She saved my life today, Pauli. You realize that, don’t you?”
“My lord, you can’t possibly believe—”
“How do you see it, then? Do you think the raven’s coming, and its warning, was all a singular coincidence?”
“I think if you were saved, my lord, it was God’s doing, and God’s will.”
“God and I are no longer on very good terms.”
“You may see it so. God may not.”
“God is a realist, I think. He knows me for what I am.”
I was never going to be close to him. And I understood it for the first time, I think, there on the windblown tower of Ravensbruck. The distance between us was too great— not the distance of years or rank, but the moral distance.
He told me once, not long before we left the Holy Land, that nearly every close friend he’d ever had was dead. He was drunk, and somewhat maudlin, but his loneliness was real enough. And I imagined I would be his friend. Not just his squire, not just a vassal or a comrade-in-arms, but a friend, the man to whom he would pour out his heart, with whom he would share his cloak in the rain, and his last crust of bread.
I marvel now, here in the quiet of my monastery cell, I marvel at my own continuing innocence. He was not the only one who was naive. A handful of our stumbling conversations should have been enough to make me see the truth, for every time we spoke it was the same. Every time we reached out to each other, we crashed against the walls of his worldliness and his dark unbelief. And each time, he turned away. He withdrew into his disappointment in me, his shrugging assumption that I was just a boy— an overzealous boy with a lot of monkish rhetoric and not much knowledge of the world. And yet I kept believing I could reach him, and earn his love, and bring him back to God. Such is the presumption, the terrible blindness of youth.
It was dawn. The candle guttered in its own ruins. Outside, it was June, the valley quivering with birdsong. In Paul’s cell it was dead winter, pitiless and cold, and death birds circled endlessly over the black towers of Ravensbruck.
They were all gone now, to God or to darkness: Arnulf and his wretched women, and Selven, and the Golden Duke who, that very winter, had been only months away from the dazzling center of their lives. All dead, or worse than dead.
Karelian too.
Paul’s body ached from hunger, from lashings, from cold, and yet all those hurts could not silence the other hurt. All those years, thirty-one of them, spent first in warfare and then in solitude— nothing, neither time nor prayer nor the undoing of worlds, would erase from his consciousness the face or the voice of Karelian Brandeis.
Twice during the long night he flung the quill away, and took the pages he had written and held them to his candle. They fluttered there, shimmering, the words only clearer for being framed against the light. They would not burn.
How terrible was sorcery, when it could violate the laws of nature, and compel him to remember things which had never been, and to experience in his memories monstrous desires which he had never felt. If he ever doubted the devil’s power, he could not doubt it now.
And the outcome for himself was inevitable. He saw it again and again in the horrors which came with his sleep. Fire. Billowing, windblown fire, like the long-ago burning of Ravensbruck. Fire and black terror, men and horses in flames, and Karelian with the arrow in his back, riding towards him, fire in his hair, reaching for him, laughing, their bodies meeting, mating, entangled in a horrid, irresistible embrace.
He slept as little now as his flesh could endure. More than once, groping for consciousness in panic and dismay, in the half-world between dream and waking, he had seen the succubi scurrying away— the demons who came and defiled men in their sleep. But he did not have to see them to know they had come. There was proof enough in the bed, and in the desolate, icy weakness of his body.
He found no respite in prayer. The sacred words dissolved into other words, the images of divine things into other images. Even the slow Gregorian chants, which to his brothers seemed so peaceful, so utterly monastic and pure and not of this world— to him they were sensual now, an exquisitely seductive rising and falling of sound which made him both languorous and tense. It made him think of dancers: lean, slow-moving dancers whose faces kept changing, whose naked bodies sank into the music and emerged again, always different. And always with Karelian. Circling his hard, tawny body and writhing against him and pulling him down, right there in the chapel, right in front of Paul. He would shudder and fling the images away, and they would come back. He would press his knees into the stone until they screamed with pain, and fasten his eyes on the crucifix, and it would be all right for a moment, a small moment, until the singing washed over him again and the face on the crucifix smiled and it was Karelian’s face, Karelian’s voice, soft amidst the chanting:
It’s no great matter, Pauli; I’ve known for a long time….
Week after week it went on like that. Finally, in early May, Anselm had given him some hope. There was a priest in Mainz who was known to have remarkable success in exorcising demons; he was also politically safe.
“He’s been one of the staunchest supporters of the great reform,” Anselm said. “He’s devoted to the pope. I am sure he’ll have no qualms about acting behind the abbot’s back. I’ve sent for him to come as soon as he can manage it.”
“You didn’t…?” Paul faltered. “You didn’t write anything down, I trust?”
“I sent a messenger, who will somehow have to be infinitely persuasive without saying much. Fortunately Father Wilhelm knows me slightly. I’m sure he will come, Paul.”
Anselm looked at him then, very hard, and went on: “Why don’t you ask to go to the infirmary for a few days? Bleeding might help, and some rest certainly would. You look quite terrible, my friend.”
“Nothing will help,” Paul said. “Not until it’s gone.”
That had been weeks ago. Six weeks, to be exact; he knew because the church counted the days, allotting a special ritual to each. Otherwise he would not have known. The days and hours he lived by were those of a distant winter; they were days of storm, of wind and witchcraft and darkfall at Ravensbruck.
* * *
There is so little good in the souls of women.
Yes, I know some of you will say I am unjust, and some will want to argue with me, as Karelian did once. I have neither wife nor mistress, you will say, and so I speak without experience. But that is nonsense. A man does not need to be bitten by a snake to know it’s poisonous. Nor did I need a wife or daughters of my own to see how much enduring grief could be brought upon a man by the women of his house.
I was as much deceived by Adelaide as the others were; I admit it. She was pleasing in appearance, although not strikingly beautiful. She spoke softly, and kept her eyes down; she behaved always with the utmost delicacy. She did not thrust herself into men’s conversations, or act flirtatiously to attract their attention. More than one of our men, commenting quietly among themselves, thought Karelian had done very well for himself, and I was the first to agree.
I do not know what Karelian thought of her at the outset, for other than saying she was sweet and pretty and — as he put it — rather too young, he told us nothing. Why he seemed surprised at her youth I cannot imagine, for Gottfried told him everything about her, including her age. Perhaps after so many years of warfare and wandering he had forgotten what youth and innocence were like.
But whatever he thought
of her, or of his future kin, he treated Adelaide with courtesy and charm. He was a polished man, and he knew that he was handsome; all his life he had enjoyed the admiration of women. He courted her as much as the restraints of Arnulf’s harsh world permitted. She smiled at him sometimes; she never laughed.
Only afterwards did we know why. She was terrified of Karelian, of any man who might come to her as husband, and so find her unvirgin and despoiled.
Quite soon after we arrived — before the ambush in the forest — Arnulf summoned his chaplain, and a lawyer and two scribes from the town, and gathered his family around his table so the marriage contract could be drawn up and signed.
Countess Clara was there, splendidly dressed; a heavy, slow-moving woman with unfeeling blue eyes. Helga was with her, the youngest of her living children, a pretty girl of fourteen. She was not precisely flirtatious — no daughter of Count Arnulf would have dared to be flirtatious in his presence — but she was bold enough to steal repeated and admiring glances at Karelianof Lys.
First at Karelian. Then, even more covetously, at his gifts. He had brought splendid presents for his bride. Jewels for her throat and gold plate for her table. Bolts of silk, shimmering with colors the grey northern marches had never seen. Strange treasures from the east: jewel cases and carvings of exquisite materials and bewildering design, so lovely that soft ohhhs went all around the table, and even Arnulf of Ravensbruck, rough-hewn soldier though he was, reached out once or twice to pick up one object or another, and turn it approvingly in his calloused hands.
Countess Clara’s thin line of mouth grew thinner. I watched her for a moment, remembering Peter’s words to me the day before, when I told him she looked ill.
“The countess is angry about the marriage,” he said. It was his first of many indiscretions.
“But it’s an excellent match,” I had protested.
“Of course. That’s why she’s angry. She wanted Lord Karelian for her own daughter, for little Helga. The one with the greedy eyes.”
I listened to him, of course, but I didn’t think much about it at the time. Mothers always preferred the advancement of their own children, rather than those of some other, earlier wife.
But there was real bitterness in Clara’s expression, I saw now. Even Arnulf, who otherwise paid little attention to her, noticed it, and gave her a scowl or two of his own.
Karelian detailed for them his holdings at Lys. The county lay along the Maren, in one of the Reinmark’s safest and most sheltered regions. He had in fief over three hundred knights, and God alone knew how many serfs, and a magnificent manor house to live in. Nearby in the Schildberge was the splendid fortress of Otto the Great, a stronghold which had never yet fallen in any war. In the valley were sheep and cattle and swine; there was a mill and a brewery; there were apple trees, and streams full of fish, and acres of gardens….
Karelian had his faults, God knew, but puffing himself up was not one of them. I knew he wasn’t trying to brag, or to make an impression on Count Arnulf; he wanted to reassure Adelaide. She sat by her father’s side with the pale face of a nun, and the uncertain glances of a bewildered child. It was for her benefit, this catalog of riches. It occurred to me, ungenerously, that in a certain sense he was trying to buy her affection.
Look. All these things are mine to offer you. God knows I came by them hard, but they are mine now; you will have a good life there.
Will you not smile at me, then, not even once?
They were married eight days after the New Year, on a stormy, winterswept morning. It was a wedding much like any other, with plenty of revelry and improper jokes, so I will not say much about it. The exchange of vows was brief and simple, but after there was feasting and dancing long into the night, in which all of Arnulf’s knights and their ladies took part. Rudolf of Selven was there, too, in such black and sullen humor that everyone must have noticed. But when I commented on it once or twice, discreetly, all I got for answer was a shrug. Rudi’s always like that….
Two weeks later, to my unutterable relief, he would be summoned home to Selven. His father the baron had died; he was to return to take care of the family and take possession of his lands. My only regret was that it had not happened sooner. His mere presence in a room made me tense, and through the whole long day of Karelian’s wedding I was troubled and on edge.
It is the only day I can remember when the castle of Ravensbruck was truly cheerful. The count of Lys, to my considerable surprise, drank very sparingly. He paid a great deal of attention to his bride, now that he was finally allowed to do so. Whenever I glanced at her I saw the same fragile image as before, the same modest grace overlaying fear. Yet, when she sat at Karelian’s side, she seemed different to me, and to my own great bewilderment, I no longer thought well of her. I cannot say why. I suspected her of no wrongdoing, not then— at least not in my conscious mind. She was behaving perfectly; she listened to everything he said; she thanked him for his compliments, and returned his toasts. She looked up sometimes, very briefly, to study him, and even I could read the question in her eyes: What kind of man is this? What manner of life will I have with him?
When he caught that look, as he mostly did, he would smile at her, a wonderful smile which might have melted rocks and glaciers, and once he reached and touched her cheek with the back of his hand, very softly. I felt his presence wrap itself around her like a shield, as though her youth and her terrible vulnerability had caught something in himself, and closed on it, and was holding it fast. The look in his eyes was not love, nor even lust; I had seen both in him, more than once, and I knew the difference.
It was… it was a kind of keeping, of sheltering, and it had in it something of Karelian’s power, of his lordship, something new which I had never seen before.
I knew men were expected to offer such protectiveness to women, but I could see he was offering too much, and offering it much too readily. Already I was afraid he would waste himself on her — in a totally different fashion than he would have wasted himself on the witch of Helmardin — but waste himself nonetheless, because she was female, and by that very fact had the power to demand more than she deserved.
After, when she betrayed him, I was only half surprised.
ELEVEN
Darkfall at Ravensbruck
Would I might go far over sea,
My love, or high above the air,
And come to land or heaven with thee
Where no law is, and none shall be
Against beholding the most rare
Strange beauty that thou hast for me.
Marie de France
* * *
The strange thing about fear was the way it could matter more than anything, and yet not matter at all. Through all of Adelaide’s life, fear was present everywhere: in the wind, in the shadows of the fire, in the sounds which tore up the quiet of the night— so many sounds, war talk and drunken laughter and fights and sometimes killings. And the other sound, the one no one ever talked about, the sound she heard most often when they came back from a war, when they brought women with them. Long into the night she could hear it, down below in the great hall and up here too, in the chamber just next to their own, just next to where Clara slept with her daughters and her women servants. She would cover her head at the screaming, cover it with her pillows and her arms and everything she could find. And then she would think about the stories Sigune told her. She would think about the hunter elves, and the women who lived in the sea, and the warriors who could never be defeated, not ever, not by anybody; and one of them would find the princess in the castle and she would go with him to his own lands and no one would take her away again, there would be walls there as high as the moon….
She used Sigune’s stories to shut out the sounds. And after a couple of weeks, the worst of the sounds would stop. The strange young women learned not to scream, just like she learned not to tell on Clara. They learned it was better to be quiet and dream about getting away, or getting even, or maybe just ge
tting old.
But the watching in Clara’s eyes never stopped at all. And that was another fear, those bitter eyes, those eyes which always followed her, hunting like hungry falcons for her smallest mistakes and her tiniest insubordinations. And then struck, and struck again. Clara wanted her to die. Oh, she pretended not to, she pretended to be concerned: You look so sickly, child, do you have a fever again? Perhaps you shouldn’t eat anything, it will make you throw up. My sister died of plague when she was your age…. Clara had witch things in her jewel box, hidden way at the bottom where she thought no one would know. For a long time Adelaide believed she was using them to make her sick. Clara wanted her to die because she was pretty, because one day she would ride away with the hunter elves and Clara would have to stay behind; they would just laugh at her: Wicked, wicked, stay there and die!
But when finally she told Sigune, the scarred woman only laughed.
“Clara can’t do anything to you,” Sigune said. “Not that way. She doesn’t have the power.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know, that’s all.”
“Then why does she have those things?”
“Everybody has them. They’re charms, that’s all, like a medal of the Virgin.”
“Then why does she hide them?”
“Because the priests say it’s bad. They say everything is bad. They say there are no elves, no women in the sea. They say it’s wrong to talk about them; all you should talk about is Jesus up there on his cross.”
“I’m afraid of him.”
Sigune looked away then, far away into some dark place where Adelaide had never been and did not want to go. When she spoke again it was not to the child; it was to herself.
“Aye, and so am I. So are we all.”
So many things to fear, and one far greater than them all, and that was her father. Nothing made a dent in her terror of him. His gifts, his occasional expressions of bluff affection, his brazen favoring of herself over Helga— they were all irrelevant, as meaningless as old leaves blowing over the cage of a rabbit.
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