The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  “The Holy Roman emperor will be replaced. I will replace him as high king of Germany and leader of Christendom.”

  Karelian poured himself more wine.

  “You, my good friend and kinsman,” Gottfried went on, “will have first place at my side. Every honor a king can offer to his best-loved vassal— every one of those honors will be yours. Other men will follow me; I know because I’ve already spoken with them. But to you will go the richest fiefs, and the highest rank among my captains. And that, I admit frankly, is quite selfish on my part; you’re the best man in a fight I’ve ever seen.”

  “My lord—”

  “One word more. I have given this a great deal thought, and a great deal of prayer. Christendom needs leadership now, as it hasn’t for centuries. God gave us Jerusalem as a sign, Karelian, as a portent of his will. This is not the time for strong men to stand idle, and let his kingdom go to wrack and ruin.”

  “More than one man in history believed he was doing the will of God, and turned out to be deceived.”

  The duke shook his massive golden head.

  “God does not deceive men. Such men deceive themselves.”

  “Exactly so. And why — saving my respect for your lordship — why should I think you aren’t one of them?”

  “You know my line is descended from Clovis,” Gottfried snapped. “From the very first Frankish kings.”

  “Your pardon, my lord, but I don’t know it. I know only that you and your father and your grandfather always said so. Many men make similar claims, yet there isn’t a house in Christendom which can trace its lineage back so far except in legend. I will not consent to treason on the authority of a legend.”

  Gottfried was on his feet.

  “Damn you, Karel—!”

  Karelian rose as well, and continued heedlessly. “And even if you were descended from the Merovingian kings, I wouldn’t consider it reason enough to plunge the empire into civil war, and to unleash upon the Reinmark God knows what flood of misery and ruin.”

  Very slowly, Karelian reached across his body with his left hand, pulled his sword from its scabbard, and placed it on the table, the hilt turned to Gottfried’s hand. He bowed faintly.

  “Judge the matter as you see fit, my lord.”

  Gottfried turned away from him with an angry gesture, paced briefly, and settled back into his chair.

  “When God sent Noah’s flood, Karelian, he should have left the vale of Dorn under a thousand feet of water. Nothing grows there but trouble. Put your sword away, for Christ’s sake, and sit down.”

  The count obeyed. I stared at Gottfried, bewildered by his manner. He did not seem especially angry, and he certainly did not seem surprised. If he had known how Karelian would respond, why had he opened the discussion at all? And what would he do now to a man who knew he was plotting rebellion, and would not join him?

  “I have offered you great honor, and the highest place among my followers. Isn’t that enough?”

  “I’ve already answered you, my lord.”

  “God’s blood, you are pretentious!”

  “No,” Karelian said. “I’m tired. I’m damnably tired, and I’m disillusioned with men’s ambitions. And most of all, though you may not believe it, I am loyal to you, and unwilling to see you make a tragic and irrevocable mistake.”

  There was another long silence. I could hear my own heart pounding, so loudly I feared they might hear it, too.

  “And suppose I could prove it’s not a mistake?” Gottfried said at last. “Suppose I could show you it’s both wise and necessary?”

  “We don’t know the future, my lord, and short of knowing it, I don’t see how such proof is possible.”

  “But if it were?”

  “Then….” Karelian made a small, appeasing gesture. “Then I suppose I would look at the matter differently, my lord.”

  Gottfried relaxed a little, then, and picked up his wine cup.

  “I would as soon lay siege to Jerusalem again, as to that piece of rock you call your honor. I hope you realize there’s not another man in all the world I would argue with like this?”

  “I know how much you favor me, my lord. And I’ve always been grateful.”

  “You have an odd way of showing it. But never mind. You want proof, so be it. I will give you proof. And it’s not by knowing the future, my friend; it’s by knowing the past.”

  Silence. I was aware of the roughness of my own breathing, of the sweat running down my body. At first I had not wanted to listen; now if God had appeared and offered me a miraculous escape, I might well have refused it.

  “You’re not a man whose mind needs to be coddled,” Gottfried said. “So I will tell the matter straight. I learned many things in the Holy Land, many things about its history, and about the Church which was born there. Jesus was not a carpenter’s son. That’s a lot of poor people’s nonsense— rather like the Christmas song where Mary rocks her baby to sleep on a Silesian mountaintop. Jesus was a prince, an heir to the house of David, and his goal was not merely a new faith, but a whole new kingdom of Israel.

  “That’s one thing I learned. I also learned it was unheard of for a Jewish rabbi not to have a wife. If Jesus had been unmarried when he began to teach, he would have been criticized for it as he was for so many other things, like healing on the sabbath and keeping company with low life. Yet we don’t hear a word about it in the gospels. Or anywhere else. Therefore it’s reasonable to think he was a married man, without any further evidence.

  “But there is further evidence. There are traditions, legends, secret books, knowledge treasured from generation to generation, from century to century, more carefully and more faithfully than any knowledge has ever been preserved in the history of the world. Not only was he married, but he had children. The marriage feast at Cana was the wedding of Jesus Christ himself. His wife was Mary Magdalene; like Jesus she was descended from the house of David, and David himself was of an even older blood. But that is another story.

  “After the Crucifixion, the followers of Jesus scattered all over the world. His mother, with Joseph of Arimathea and Magdalene, came by sea to Gaul. His children came with them; we know there were at least two. And there, in great secrecy, the sacred line was preserved. In very great secrecy, as you may imagine. First from imperial Rome, which feared the prospect of yet another Jewish king challenging the empire. And then in even greater secrecy from the popes, who could hardly go on claiming to be Christ’s heirs if his real heirs were still living in the world.

  “This line established itself with great care among the highborn of Gaul. Clovis, the first of the Merovingian kings, was one of its sons.”

  Karelian’s breath caught as though he had been struck. He unclenched his hands from his goblet, and placed it carefully back on the table. His face was pale.

  “My lord….” He paused, shaking his head. “My lord, forgive me, but do you really expect anyone to believe that?”

  Gottfried laughed, wonderfully, like a boy.

  “All the time we’ve been having this argument, I’ve been asking myself: Why did I bother? Why did I bring this arrogant, stubborn man here and open my heart to him? Now I see why. Half the men I know would be jumping up and down, pointing their fingers at me and yelling ‘Heretic!’ at the top of their lungs. And the other half would be stammering and slithering and wondering what it might be safe to say. You look me cold in the eye and say: ‘Really my lord, do you expect anyone to believe it?’”

  He leaned back, smiling. “That’s what I admire in you, Karel. You have a mind like a crossbow and nerve to match it. So tell me, of all the things I’ve just told you, which do you not believe?”

  “Without proof, I believe none of it.”

  “What would you accept as proof?”

  Karelian moved as if to speak, and paused. “I’m not sure. God coming down out of heaven, perhaps, with scrolls and trumpets. Anything less….” He shook his head. “The past is gone, my lord. It’s buried under centuries o
f war and plague and migration; under lies told out of fear and lies told out of love; under the manipulations of every pope and king and rebel who had a reason to manipulate it— which is all of them. You can’t hope to prove a thing like this.”

  “To men who are determined not to believe, Karel, no proof is ever proof enough. Why else would the world be full of pagans and infidels? But men who want to know the truth, and who are willing to look honestly at the facts— they will find much to consider here. Do you think I was easy to convince? It’s my life in the balance, after all, and my soul.

  “I have documents, more than fifty of them. Most of them came to me in the Holy Land, in a manner too unusual to be a coincidence. I believe I was meant to have them. A few more have been acquired since, in the south of France, by a trusted friend.

  “One of these documents speaks of Clovis’s ancient and sacred lineage, of his having ancestors among the chosen of God. It’s a letter written in the year 483, from an abbot in Mont Clair to a local lord, urging him to support Clovis for the kingship. I see you’re smiling. Of course. Men write such letters all the time, urging support for one lord or another, and listing all his virtues to make their case.

  “But this is what’s so remarkable. The letter hardly mentions his virtues; it talks about his blood, his lineage. A sacred lineage, Karel. Not noble or valiant or honorable or any of those other things we usually say, and which would seem a great deal more reasonable. Men aren’t usually described as sacred; why this man? And why the references to an ancient and distant kingdom?

  “I have another document, a marriage contract between a certain Louise Meire, a knight’s daughter, and a young lord named Jacques of Arles. There is a curious clause in this contract; it stipulates that if Louise Meire does not bear children, her husband — notwithstanding the laws of the Church — shall take a concubine, and her issue shall be his legitimate heirs, raised in his house. No blame or censure shall fall on him for this, neither from his wife nor from her family. The reason given: his line, which is most ancient and especially blessed by God, must be preserved. His grandfather was the illegitimate son of a Merovingian prince.”

  “Men do all sorts of things to assure their inheritance and lineage,” Karelian said. “Taking a concubine is hardly unusual.”

  “But writing it into the marriage contract? In advance? Assuring, so to speak, that it would be done, done openly and even honorably, with no blame or censure? Come, Karelian! That is most unusual!”

  The count shrugged. “So be it. It’s unusual. What does it prove?”

  “It doesn’t prove anything. It’s merely a link in the chain.” The duke leaned forward. “Both of these documents were in a sealed casket in Jerusalem, along with thirty-one others. Three of them deal with matters in the east; all the rest deal with Gaul. All of them, in one way or another, deal with questions of dynasty. Now tell me, my good friend, what are they doing in the Holy Land? Why would anyone in Palestine care who had married whom, or was allied to whom, or gave birth to whom, among a bunch of warring barbarians on the other side of the world? And why was I, Clovis’s heir— why was I, by the sheerest chance, the one who found them?

  “Wait before you answer,” the duke went on quickly. “What you said a moment ago is true. Much of the past is gone. Hard proof I don’t have, and I may never have it. There are gaps in the record. But I have a great deal of evidence, and I haven’t made any of it up. The first time a man told me Christ’s descendants still lived in the west, I laughed in his face. I have come to this slowly, with many doubts and fears, and many prayers.

  “The point is not to ask what evidence is missing. The point is to realize how much evidence is left— evidence which has survived against all the odds, across enormous passages of distance and time. Evidence for which no other credible explanation is possible, except strings of endless and overwhelming coincidence.”

  “Then let me suggest some explanations,” Karelian said. “People migrate. They scatter in wars, taking their treasures with them. They bury gold under their houses, and seal parchments in their foundation stones. They die in plague, they’re slaughtered by invaders, they’re carried off as slaves. The gold, the documents, the lock of somebody’s hair, lie under a pile of ruins, preserved for centuries by simple fate. In Lorraine my men went out to dig a privy and found a tin box with a hundred Roman eagles in it, fresh minted by the emperor Trajan; I don’t think they were left there for us.

  “Maybe Christ was married and had children. In this whole wild tale, it’s the one thing which seems to me halfway possible. But to say the line endured, and can still be traced? No. That I don’t believe.

  “In our own world, every detail of a prince’s birth is a public matter — the marriage, the pregnancy, the confinement, everything — so there can be no errors, no uncertainties, no deceptions. And even so, now and then, strange things happen. Very strange things, which cast the leadership of an entire kingdom in doubt.

  “How do you maintain a royal genealogy in secret, my lord? If too many people know, the heirs will be betrayed. If too few know, a single accident, a single epidemic, a single massacre in a small war, and it’s all over. Even if one or another of the children survives, what will it matter, if no one knows who they are? I have seen enough wars, my lord; I know what happens in them.”

  Karelian picked up his cup, drank briefly. The duke waited, watching him with riveted attention.

  “Consider what you must assume, my lord,” the count went on. “You must assume that in every generation for eleven hundred years, at least one child of this line grew up, and had children in turn. You must assume that no wife upon whom the line depended ever bore a bastard. That no dead infant was ever replaced with someone else’s child. That every person entrusted with the knowledge of a child’s lineage lived and passed the knowledge on. You must assume that Clovis was in fact born from this line, and that your ancestors were born from his. One mistaken assumption among all of them — only one — and the entire structure collapses like a house of cards.”

  “Easy, Karel,” Gottfried said sharply. “Don’t put words in my mouth. The knowledge wasn’t always passed on among the heirs— though it was preserved elsewhere. Some of the later Merovingian princes were headstrong and violent, and they could not be trusted with the secret of their ancestry.

  “I knew I was bred of the house of Clovis, but I knew nothing of the rest until I went to Jerusalem. There were hints, of course— whispers and legends. We were always said to be different, a much older, a much more revered and splendid house, even when we held no crown, when we held nothing at all but a few provincial fiefs. We all grew up knowing of a treasure in Jerusalem which belonged to us. My father assumed it was an ordinary treasure, and so did I, until I was shown the documents.”

  Even from where I hid, I could see the disbelief on Karelian’s face.

  “You’re telling me,” he said, “that the line itself was preserved in Europe, but its identity was preserved in Palestine? On the other side of the world, among people of another culture, another language, another faith? For bloody centuries until you, the rightful heir, happened to march to Jerusalem and discover it? From documents which you admit are not proof but merely links in a chain? Your case depends on that, on top of all the other improbabilities I’ve just mentioned? No. Forgive me, my lord, but no. It will not hold. You assume too much.”

  I was not prepared for Gottfried’s answer, although it was the only answer possible.

  “And you, Karelian of Lys, are assuming God took no interest whatever in the matter. You think the Holy Family is no different from any batch of peasants in a hut.”

  He stood up, began to walk a little, restlessly. I could feel his frustration like a wound.

  “The world always asks the same questions,” he went on. “Why did God make so sinful a human race? Why did he wait thousands of years to send a redeemer? Why is the Church beset on all sides with enemies? I don’t know the answer to those questions. God do
es what he does for reasons of his own. I don’t know why the truth was hidden for so long, why this hour was chosen for its discovery, why it fell to me to pick it up. I know only what I’ve seen. I didn’t seek this out, my friend; I fled from it. And it pursued me.”

  His voice held me motionless, like blinding light. I had looked upon many splendid men, but never before upon one who seemed so utterly and so effortlessly a king.

  “You marched with us to Jerusalem,” he said. “You remember how many times we acted on faith. We were finished a dozen times over— finished and beaten by the standards of any reasonable man, except the one who judges by his heart. The one who says: I know this is right. Not because I can prove it, but because I know. Either God works in history or he doesn’t, Karel. And if he does, then nothing I’m assuming is difficult to believe. The line is unbroken. I know it in my blood. I know it as I know my name, as I know the sun rises in the east.”

  There was no arrogance in his assertion, and no uncertainty. Whatever doubts he had had — and surely he must have had many — he had worked them through before he spoke to anyone.

  “The whole of Christendom will call it heresy, my lord,” Karelian said.

  “We shall see. It’s obvious we can’t throw this willy-nilly into the world. Many lords have joined me against Ehrenfried, but only you and two others know my true reasons. The others are my sons. That should tell you where you stand in my esteem.”

  Karelian wrapped his hands around the stem of his cup and stared at the patterns in the marble.

  “Don’t you think the empire has had enough of war, my lord?” he said at last, softly and bitterly.

  “Yes,” Gottfried said. “More than enough.” He walked back to the table, and placed his hand on the count’s shoulder.

  “But this will be the last war,” he said. “Of all my purposes, my friend, this is the greatest— to create peace. Stability and peace. Not just here. Everywhere, across the length and breadth of the world. Byzantium as well, and the Saracen lands, and all the pagan lands, wherever they may be. We will build God’s kingdom, and this time it will last. No more petty kings, no more ravening hordes spoiling for war, no more cities turned into armed camps, hating each other across empty roads and burning fields. No more. We’ll have one Christendom, one king, and one law— God’s peace over all the earth. Are you with me, Karel?”