The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  She fell silent for a moment; a piece of bread lay unnoticed in her hand; after a moment she put it back on the plate. The curve of her mouth was hard and bitter.

  “Are you sure he has it, Karel? Did you see it?”

  “Yes, I saw it. I saw him use it to conjure images.”

  She was a powerful woman; he was not used to seeing fear in her eyes. But fear was there now, quiet and icy.

  “It’s very evil, then, this stone,” he said. The words were not quite a statement, not quite a question.

  She shook her head. “It’s not evil in itself; it’s only a thing. And things do no evil, Karel; they simply are. Only… only as it is in the nature of the circle to connect, and of the spiral to return, so it is in the nature of the pyramid to do neither. The pyramid knows only how to layer and to climb, to press more and more of the world beneath its weight for the glory of an ever smaller and more distant pinnacle.

  “The willstone is rightly named; it’s a thing of pure power, power which is not connected to anything except its user. And so it has served far more often for evil than for good. The kings of Israel may well have used it. They waged a long and bitter war there against Astarte, against the gods in the world and the world of circled magic. The willstone would have suited them, as it suits Gottfried. But all magic can be turned back on itself by those who know how.”

  “He says no one can use the crystal but himself; he considers it the proof of his divinity—”

  “He may say so, but he’d never dare to let anyone try.”

  “Actually, he has. Several different men, in fact.”

  “Really? He’s a good deal bolder than I judged him, then.”

  “And very shrewd. I can see why he’d want to know, no matter what the risk. He even gave it to me.”

  She seemed almost to freeze, like a woodland creature in the shadow of a hawk.

  “Did it make images for you?”

  “No.” He paused, savoring his next words. “But it took every fragment of strength I had to prevent it.”

  “You can command it?” she whispered.

  “I think so. I would have to be able to use it freely to be sure, but yes, I think so.”

  She laughed, softly and triumphantly. “By all the gods, Karel, you delight me. You utterly delight me.”

  She reached impulsively to run her hand into his hair, across the line of his cheekbone. And then, quite suddenly, her smile was gone.

  “He would have killed you, you know that?” she said. “If the surface of the stone had shown so much as a ripple, you’d have never left Stavoren alive.”

  “Yes. I know.” He was moved by the warmth in her warning, the tenderness. He caught her still lingering hand and kissed it even more lingeringly.

  “If I hadn’t known it, lady, I couldn’t possibly have resisted the image I wanted to call up.”

  “Which was?”

  “Yourself. Without a thread of raiment on, I might add.”

  She smiled. She was very pleased with him, and the taste of it was good. Too good. He might be willing to do most anything, he reflected, to keep such fierce admiration kindled in her eyes. For as long as he could. For as long as there might be of days and hours before they brought him down.

  Sunrise fell to moonrise, moonrise to day. For a while it rained, small drops pattering endlessly on the roof of the tent and running in small rivers down its sides. Sexual languor melted into voluptuous sleep, and sleep into waking languor. The world smelled of water and flowers and wind. They went swimming, and ate again. They sat by the Maren as the sun rose to noon. Sometimes, for as much as an hour, she would fall silent, lost in her own sorcerous thoughts, searching out answers, and he would go off by himself, or chat with Marius if he was nearby.

  Marius, as it happened, was plucking the last feathers out of a pair of partridges he had trapped. He held up the naked birds with a smile of satisfaction.

  “Supper, my lord. Nice and fat and tasty.”

  Karelian smiled. “You take very good care of us, Marius.”

  The dwarf smiled, too. His smile was sly and worldly and ever so slightly sad.

  “I’m deformed, my lord count. Even in Car-Iduna. There are many things I wanted in my life which I will never have.” He spoke without self-pity; a fact was simply a fact. “So I take my pleasure in seeing other people happy. Especially my lady, and those who delight her. Which you must do, my lord, singularly well; I can’t remember when she ever spent so much time in bed.”

  To Karelian’s own surprise he flushed faintly, and the dwarf laughed with mischievous glee.

  “You are presumptuous,” Karelian said, but he said it without rancor.

  “Dreadfully so,” Marius agreed. “But I’m also irreplaceable. Would you like these baked, my lord, or shall I roast them on a spit?”

  One day passed, and then another. There were only two things they cared about very much, here in the circle of seven stones: their hunger for each other, and their hatred for the Golden Duke, around whose name they brooded like hunting falcons, circling and moving off and circling back again.

  “There’s one thing in this I still don’t understand,” he said.

  “Only one?” she responded dryly.

  He ignored her reply. From the start his mind had snagged on this question. He considered it a dozen times, only to abandon it in pure bewilderment.

  “Gottfried is a Christian, Raven; I know him well enough to know that. He may have gone to Jerusalem for glory and power, but he also went for the Church and for God. Nothing he’s ever said, or ever done, has caused me to wonder about his faith.

  “He told me he prayed over this, and frankly, I believe him. He told me he didn’t want to accept it. It’s completely heretical, after all. Something in all of it….” Karelian made a brief but eloquent gesture of frustration. “Something just doesn’t make sense.”

  “The trouble with you, my lord of Lys, is your admirable and uncommon tendency to think straight.”

  She smiled. “A little too straight, sometimes. Why can a Christian not be sorcerer?”

  He stared at her. “A sorcerer? Gottfried?”

  “Yes. He imagines he has royal blood from the Merovingians, and sacred blood from Jesus Christ. What he has, in fact, is witch blood from Dorn.”

  “You’re going to have to explain that.”

  “Your lines are crossed twice, Karelian. Three generations back, your great grandfather married Maria von Heyden, which makes you an heir of Gottfried’s house—”

  “And of the Merovingians,” he added dryly. “And of God knows who else.”

  “Never mind. Two generations earlier, a very remarkable sorceress named Cundrie Brandeis married Martin of Helm. She had only one child, a daughter, and died on her childbed, so no one thinks about her much. Her daughter had a daughter, who married a Frankish count, and they had a daughter, who married Wolfram of Thuringia, and they had a daughter who married Albrecht von Heyden. The father of our Golden Duke.”

  “But surely Gottfried knows all that.”

  “Oh, he knows it, of course— when he thinks about it. But why should he think about it? It’s the female line. And who are the margraves of Dorn in any case? Impoverished gentry on the edges of the Silverwald, famous for nothing except their political unreliability— no offense, my love—”

  He shrugged.

  “It would never occur to Gottfried to think he owes anything to those ancestors. But he does.

  “He has sorcerous powers, Karel. I’ve known it for years. It’s why I’ve watched him so closely, and feared him so much. But how can a Christian possibly interpret such a gift? Your God allows only for the demonic or the divine, nothing else. And he can hardly believe himself demonic. He’s Gottfried the Golden, he’s a knight and a prince, he goes to Mass and to the sacraments, he’s been blessed by God with a faithful wife and fine sons. Your saints do works of magic and call them miracles, but they are priests and missionaries; they have some kind of excuse. He has no ex
cuse; he’s a man of the world, a soldier, the ruler of a duchy.

  “I don’t believe he was unwilling to accept this. I rather think he stared at it for a minute, and then he put it down, and said ‘No, really, it’s not possible.’ And then he walked about two steps away, and turned around and picked it up again.

  “It was an answer made for him. He didn’t want to give up his powers, or his faith. Quite apart from his own inclinations, it’s dangerous these days to be anything except a Christian. But he had all these gifts, he knew he did, and they had to come from somewhere — why not from the blood of Christ? With his terrible pride, his daring, his belief in his own superiority — oh, yes, Karel, the more he would look at it, the more obvious it would seem.”

  Karelian was not giving up just yet. “But… but damn it, Raven, it’s heresy. To a Christian it has to be heresy.”

  “Only if it isn’t true.”

  He stared at her. And then he laughed, unamused. “That’s what he said, too.” He picked up small stones, one after another, and threw them in the river.

  “It may look like heresy to you,” she said softly. “From where I’m sitting, it looks very Christian. Your whole world is full of men who claim to speak for God. They bind you in the smallest and most personal aspects of your lives, till you scarcely know what food you dare put into your mouths, or what garments on your backs. Till every human thought is dangerous and every human pleasure sin — except of course the exercise of power. Controlling others is a great Christian virtue, if only you can seem to be doing it for the Lord. You must admit our Golden Duke has solved that problem singularly well.

  “This is where the pyramid leads, Karel. Where it has to lead: to an endless scramble for the pinnacle, for the place where men can speak for God. And finally, for the place where one man doesn’t need to.”

  There was a long silence.

  “And your gods, Raven,” he said at last, “does no one claim to speak for them?”

  She smiled. “All the time. It’s a good day for planting today, the moon is right. The deer have moved west, into the hills. This child will grow up strong, give it a hunter’s name. This one has the gift of poetry, treat it gently. The winter will be long and cold, we must take offerings to the forest. The enemy advances; here is the place to wait, and make an ambush…. So do the gods of Car-Iduna speak, my love. Only so.”

  She brushed her hand across his face. “Perhaps they will speak to us tonight.”

  She built a small stone altar at the edge of the river, and when the moon was high they burned offerings there, mating while the flames leapt and shimmered, a long, wild mating which she would not allow to end: No, Karel, no, not yet, the longer we are bound, the more fiercely we burn, the stronger will be the spells I work here…. He thought he would die in her embrace, die of the fire in his loins and the fire in his mind, each kindling the other in an endless spiral of desire, a wildness which swept him deeper and deeper without direction or time. And then it steadied, and it held. He heard her laugh, softly, triumphantly; he heard his own name like an incantation in the wind, Karel, Karel, Karel…. He could have stayed so forever then, just so, aflame inside of her, content to burn, content with her wild kisses and her hair all over him, content with the knowledge that she was his— gods knew for how long or even for what reason, but his.

  So wild, so beautiful in the firelight, kneeling over him, bending to give him her mouth, her breasts, everything she could give and all of it animal with wanting; rocking against him for a reckless, unmeasured time, her breath hot and ragged, his name a sob in her throat as she came and kindled and came again, each time more quickly, until his own drowning surrender finally ended it. And the world returned, slowly, the sound of wind and water, the slow caress of her fingers stroking his hair. Her voice, warm and languorous against his throat, and faintly amused.

  “Sorcerer.”

  She dressed and knelt by the fire. Before he could protest, she had taken her dagger and pressed the point into her wrist; blood ran into the flames.

  “Raven…!”

  “Not a word, my lord,” she said harshly. “Bind this for me now, and then say nothing more, nothing until I’m done!”

  She swayed beside the leaping fire, chanted over it, sang to it, tossed into its black and red and golden mouth many strange things— some of them he truly hoped were not the things they seemed. Then, as the fire burned out and turned slowly into ash, she played her harp, until he thought the stars would be plucked from the sky and his heart would break. He ached to touch her, just a little, to stroke her hair or her pale cheek, just ever so little, with the back of his hand. But she was priestess now, and he knew he dared not.

  The fire was cold. She touched the ash to his face, all over him, ran it down the blade of his sword, over his helmet and the brightly painted iron of his shield. All the while she chanted spells, spells against the wood of lances and the iron of swords, spells against dagger and poison, spells against cold, spells to shield his strength and his cunning and his potency.

  Her palms lingered on his face. “I promised you all the gifts of Car-Iduna, Karelian of Lys. You have them now. You are not invulnerable; don’t ever dare to think so. But you are shielded with many strengths. Use them well.”

  From a small pouch she drew out three bright, smooth objects, tiny as wrens’ eggs, and offered them to him.

  “The red is of wolfsblood,” she said. “The green is of thorn. The black is the belly of the world. They say the first of these were made by Gullveig, before the days of men, and used in the great war between the Vanir and the Aesir.”

  He took them wonderingly, turned them in his hands. They felt hard as polished stone.

  “What are they for?”

  She smiled and kissed him. “When you need them, you will know.”

  Last of all she gave him another feather, black and shimmering like the first.

  “Use this only if you’re desperate, if there is no other hope. Toss it into the sky, that is all; I will come to you.”

  She kissed him yet again, softly. “I promise I will come.”

  She slept spent, tangling him in her limbs, in the black silk of her hair. He lay awake for a long time, listening to the river and the melancholy owls, to the easy wanderings of Marius who stood guard for them at night, out of courtesy more than out of need; there was more power here than any ordinary mortals were likely to disturb.

  He thought about his fate.

  Tell me, he had asked her, how a witch would make war against the lord of the world.

  Her answer had been clear, and pitiless, and sound. Every word lingered in his mind, as if they were speaking now.

  — Don’t go to Aachen, Karel. Don’t give Gottfried the smallest reason to mistrust you.

  — The emperor must be warned. Gottfried is perfectly capable of having him murdered in his bed.

  — I will see to it he’s warned. Stay with the duke. Learn everything you can about his plans.

  They were in the glade where she had changed herself, where she had rippled into that splendid golden predator. She was still naked; had she been younger, she might have seemed elfin there, and playful; instead she only seemed shamelessly beautiful. And perilous, he thought, more perilous than twenty knights in armor.

  — Most of all, Karelian, learn everything you can about the stone. I doubt we can steal it from him, but we may discover ways to block its power, or destroy it. And then we’ll see how divine he really is, our Golden Duke!

  It was night now; the glade where they had lingered was shadowed with foxes, the moon high, the altar stone black with ash, the woman spent and soft in his arms.

  And he was damned.

  If it was true. If the God of Rome and Jerusalem was real, then he was damned now, irrevocably and absolutely damned to those caverns of hellfire churning at the bottom of the world. All his other sins were forgivable— at least in the eyes of the Church, if not in his own. But from this circle of seven stones there would be no
way back, even if he should ever halfway wish for one. She would never let him go.

  More importantly, he had made his own choice, his own irrevocable act of unfaith and disobedience. He was not even sure when he had made it, if it had been in Stavoren or in Lys or here with her. But it was made, and it lay in his mind as a spear might have lain against his hand, pitiless and comforting.

  All he had wanted was to live. To have yet some kind of life, to live it in some measure of human decency.

  Gottfried von Heyden had forgotten what it meant to a man to sell his soul for a night’s good lodging, for a promise of land, for a handful of coins to pay for a bit of pleasure, to shut out the memory of how the coins were earned. Or rather, Gottfried von Heyden had never known those things; he had never needed to know them. He was one of those with lands to give away, and promises, and coins; he could buy a man and scarcely notice that he’d done so, and then smile and cross himself and walk away.

  Therefore Gottfried von Heyden could rob such a man of his last hope of peace, and never imagine he might be hated for it. Never imagine he might unleash against himself an enemy with absolutely nothing to lose, not even honor. Karelian’s honor had been bought and sold too many times for it to matter. Allegiance counted for nothing now, and rank for less; and as for God, he had not counted much for years.

  If it was treason, then so be it. If it was death on the field or on the gallows, then so be it. If it was hellfire, then so be it. He would bring Gottfried down. He would tear out his golden throat, and drag his banners in the mud, and ride his horse across his bones.

  And she would help him. She would shield him and counsel him and pour her sweet, dark passion into his blood; she would call forth the old gods, the gods of the earth who were all the gods any man needed to live.

  And he would take her gift of sorcery, take it with both hands, triumphantly, and love her better for it. It was magic and wildness and shimmering power; it was strength in his body and cunning in his mind; it was the hunger to live and the hope to win and it was sweet, sweet, sweet… sweet as her harpsongs, sweet as the taste of her flesh against his mouth. He would never go back to the other who was called a God, not ever; and there was fear in his resolve, like the fear which lay over the morning of a battle. Maybe this is my last sun, my last drink of water, my last word of friendship.