The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

“Very well. You said you always thought well of Count Karelian; you believed he would come back to God. If it’s still possible, if he can be… dissuaded… from his attachment to this sorceress, then you’re the one person who can do it.”

  “Me, my lord? Everything I say to him, he laughs at—”

  “Not with words. God doesn’t always touch men’s hearts with words. Often the words come after, merely to explain what has already been made clear by faith.

  “I have a relic which came into my possession in Jerusalem. I do not part with it willingly, and yet for the good of a man’s soul — for a kinsman who’s served me as faithfully as Karelian — I will give it up. You are his squire; all his belongings are in your care. You must conceal it in such a way that he will carry it on his person. It has extraordinary grace. No devil can come near it, and no summons from any devil. No conjuring, no spells, no evil of any sort can cross its barriers.”

  He went to a cabinet and unlocked it, and took out a fine, jeweled chest which was also locked. From this he brought out a tiny cross. He touched it to his lips, reverently, and placed it in my hands.

  It was made of wood, but very thin, and shorter than my smallest fingernail. In its center was a tiny piece of crystal. I thought at once of the godstone I had seen him holding in Stavoren, the glittering pyramid he had brought back from the Holy Land. I knew there must be some connection between them.

  “It will be God’s shield around Karelian,” the duke said. “If he has still some love for Christ, some wish to save himself, this will give him strength. If he has fallen totally, beyond recall, then it still will lessen the evil he is able to do. Now go back to Lys, and stay there. Say nothing to anyone. Go on with your life exactly as before.

  “You may go now,” he added.

  For a moment I could only stare at him, holding the tiny, awesome thing, appalled at what he had asked me to do— utterly appalled and utterly admiring. If even now, confronted with peril and betrayal, he could think first of Karelian’s soul, then he was truly the man I believed him to be.

  “It will save him?” I said. “It will turn him away from her?”

  “Only he can do that,” Gottfried said. “But it will help.”

  If Karelian were saved, I thought desperately, if he came back to God, back to his liege lord and his rightful place, then I was not betraying him! And once he knew, once he understood, he would be grateful, we would be friends again, and everything would be like before….

  I saw Gottfried watching me curiously.

  “You are truly good, my lord,” I said. “I thank you for this. Pray God one day the count will thank you, too.”

  “We shall see.”

  “My lord, will you perhaps send for me later—?”

  He waved me to silence.

  “You are either very brave,” he said, “or unconscionably evil. One day I will know which. Believe me, lad, I will. And when I do, I will deal with you accordingly.”

  “Thank you, my lord. God keep you, my lord.”

  I bowed — I do not know how many times — and blundered away. I went into the woods and found a stream, and washed the peasant filth from my body, and changed back into my own clothing.

  And then for a long time I sat, clutching the tiny cross in my palm. It was so small, and so beautiful. No conjuring, no spells, no evil of any sort can cross its barriers. Could it save Karelian? And even if it could, how would I be able to fulfill Gottfried’s command, and conceal it somehow in my lord’s most personal belongings? Suppose he found it? How would I live, day after day by his side, waiting for him to find it?

  The night closed deeper and darker, and its whisperings began to trouble me— owls mourning in the treetops, and the small feet of night hunters rustling in the shrubs. I knew if I stayed there I would grow more and more afraid. I pulled myself together and fetched my horse, and headed back towards Dorn. From there I would cross the Schildberge mountains into Lys. I was exhausted, but I did not stop to eat or rest until the sun was high. I would do what the duke asked, however dangerous it was. I would do it for my soul’s sake, and for Karelian, too.

  But above all, I would do it for Gottfried himself. He was now my lord, my true lord,the one I would serve before all others. His was the image I held before me as I rode. I would do it for him… and for his favor, for the divine certainty of my reward.

  The monastery lay wrapped in fog; thick mists shut away every sound of the valley beyond, and sent their small white ghosts slipping in through the cell windows and wandering across the floors.

  Paul’s hand was bleeding. He put the quill down and watched the fog wisps endlessly dissolve and endlessly return— like guilt, he thought, like the unending, irremediable evil of the world. Only an infinitely good God could care about such a place, or about the vile creatures who lived in it.

  The night was cold, and its dampness had gone deep into his bones. He rose stiffly, and walked a bit to ease himself. He was in pain all the time; he only noticed when it grew worse.

  He had been strong and sturdy in his youth. He journeyed twice to the Holy Land to make war, and came home without wounds. Now his health was utterly gone. During the past winter he had frozen both his feet, and they festered where the toes were lost, stinking and horrible to look at. His right hand was completely crippled. He could not eat solid food unless it was cooked to mush. His bowels tormented him with alternating periods of constipation and flux. He rarely slept without evil dreams.

  Yet he took comfort from the fact that God continued to burden him, to break him down still farther into his human nothingness. It meant that God still loved him. God still judged him worthy of redemption. No, not worthy; no one was ever worthy of redemption. But still, at least, redeemable. Still capable of breaking free, of severing himself finally and forever from his despicable body and its passions, and soaring skyward to his Lord.

  It happened sometimes, briefly. Sometimes he caught the barest glimpse, gone in the catch of a breath. A glimpse of infinite peace, of infinite purity, a central stillness where nothing existed except God, and God was only soul. No flesh at all, no bones, no blood, no filth. Only soul. But the vision never lasted— or rather, it never really focused at all. It was always a shadow behind a shadow of something else, and he would yearn after it with the craving of a lover. He would meditate and pray, but always it eluded him.

  If only once, just once, he could actually see it…!

  He looked up sharply at the sound of movement, and caught his breath. A man was sitting in his cell— no, a devil, surely, a splendid devil wearing a surcoat of blue velvet, who put his feet up on the table as though he were entirely at home, and leaned back in his chair, and smiled.

  “Don’t you understand yet, Pauli?” he said. “You can’t see it because it isn’t there.”

  He had seen devils before. They came to him often, and took many shapes. This one seemed a knight, well-dressed and fully armed, in every way a man, except for a softly burning darkness where his face ought to have been. His voice was soft, and utterly familiar. Paul stumbled closer.

  “Karelian…?”

  The devil answered only with a smile, as if to say: If you know me, Pauli, why do you trouble yourself to ask?

  “Are you in hell, then?” Paul whispered, and wondered why the thought so utterly devastated him. It was only justice, after all.

  “There is no hell. There is no heaven, either. There is only this.” The devil waved his arm in an elegant, sweeping arc. “It’s all here, Pauli: the flesh and the spirit, the world and the gods. There is no otherwhere, only this. But why do I go on talking to you? It never made any difference before.” He paused. The smoldering image cleared a little, and Paul could see his eyes, dark with bitterness and a strange, remote pity.

  “It never made any difference at all.”

  “Go away from here!” Weakly, foolishly, Paul shoved at the table. “In the name of God, go, and leave me in peace!”

  The devil merely smiled, and crossed
his boots.

  “Think about it,” he said. It’s what Karelian always said, in the same soft, seductive, relentless voice. Think about it. Consider the possibility. What if you have it wrong? What if you’ve always had it wrong, all of it, all these long years…?

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Demon Lord of Lys

  He attacked our religion in a very villainous and ungenerous way,

  introducing into his persecution the traps and snares of argument.

  Saint Gregory of Nazianzus

  * * *

  What if there is no absolute, omnipotent God? No, Pauli, don’t close your mind yet, don’t tell me what we all think we know. Just consider it. The possibility. The tiny possibility that divinity, whatever it may be, is not outside the world, but in it. That there is no otherwhere. That the gods are bound up with the fate of the world: those we choose to serve grow powerful, and those we abandon grow weak, and so the world and the gods both become, in the end, what we make of them—

  My lord…!

  Just consider it, that’s all. For if it’s true, Pauli, then for more than a thousand years we’ve been chasing a phantom, and for its sake we have made bitter war against the finest things we have: our minds, our bodies, and the bounty of the earth.

  * * *

  I went back to the manor house at Lys, and passed on to the count the good wishes of my father. I told him how the crops were in the south, and how my family fared. I acted for all the world like the devoted young squire he believed me to be.

  It was a dark time for me. I could neither overcome my guilt — and my willingness, because of it, to do him every possible kindness — nor could I silence my simple longing to be elsewhere. I yearned to be with Gottfried, or perhaps in some distant, silent monastery, where I would be done with it all, and safe.

  For days I brooded over the relic, wondering how I might conceal it. It was my only consolation, my hope that things might yet turn out well. If it could, as Gottfried promised, block every demonic impulse, if the sorceries of Car-Iduna could no longer reach my lord and corrupt his mind, then he might yet retrieve his soul. In the end he would thank me. He would know I hadn’t really betrayed him.

  As it happened, his own vanity provided me with the opportunity I needed. He still wore the pouch I made for him on the road to Ravensbruck, where he had hidden the witch’s feather. What charms he kept in it now I did not know, but he never took it off, not even to sleep. It was soiled now, and showing wear. Would I, he asked, be so kind as to make him a new one?

  Which I did. A very fine one, and sturdy, as he requested, with the tiny cross stitched inside a folded seam, so subtly and perfectly hidden that only sorcery, or the most unlikely chance, was ever going to discover it. He thanked me for the pouch, and gave me a coin because it was so beautifully made, and hung it around his neck without a second thought.

  Nonetheless I was terrified, and for a while I slept very badly, and jumped like a kitchen maid at mice and shadows. I thought his every frown or moment of thoughtful silence meant he had noticed something wrong. But as the weeks passed I grew less afraid. Gottfried had been right. No deviltry was stronger than the cross. Just as the relic could shield Karelian from the powers of evil, so could it shield itself from discovery and harm.

  But it could not turn a man back to God, unless he wished it so.

  Karelian never flaunted his unbelief. It was unwise, even for a high-born lord, to become known as an apostate. But I was his squire, bound to him in a singular relationship of personal service and mentorship; we had for a time been very close. Indeed, he seemed to think we still were. He barely noticed how his own follies had wrecked the bond between us. And so he spoke to me sometimes of his thoughts of God and the world. There was no way I could escape those discussions; all I could do was shut my mind to them.

  What if there was no absolute, omnipotent God? he would ask me, moodily. What if there were many gods, or none at all? Why were all our virtues said to be God’s doing, when all our sins were said to be our own? Why were there so many sins? He had traveled a great deal, he said; he had known many kinds of men, good men, honorable and just, and some of them doubled over and howled with laughter at the Church’s list of sins. And how was it, he asked me, that a perfect, loving God created hell?

  “My lord, forgive me, but you must not think such things!”

  “Why mustn’t I?”

  “Because all God’s truth has already been revealed through Jesus and the Church, and proven by the resurrection, and by the miracles of the saints! It’s all there, my lord! We have the word of God himself!”

  “So do the Jews. So do the infidels. So, I suppose, does most everyone else. Either God is very confused, Pauli, or else we have only the words of men.”

  Then Karelian did a thing which raised questions in other minds besides my own. The summer had ripened into fall, and all over the golden fields of Lys the serfs and freeholders were gathering the crops. It had been a good year. The granaries were bursting; the wine presses running day and night. We lived well. For all his thoughts of war — or perhaps because of them — Karelian made sure we lived exceptionally well.

  It was, I remember, a Friday. We ate no meat, and the countess Adelaide ate nothing at all.

  She had turned eighteen that summer. She had also given birth to her first child, a black-haired boy-child fathered by her dead lover, Rudolf of Selven. Everyone knew about it, though of course in the count’s presence everyone pretended to forget. The girl was fragile and pretty; if he wished to keep her, and forgive her because of her youth, few men thought worse of him for it. But his decision to keep the child bewildered everyone. He seemed willing to turn the whole world upside down, I thought sometimes, merely for the pleasure of seeing it on its head.

  Our dinner was a lavish one, as usual. The servants carried in huge plates with fine baked fishes, and great pots of stew, and pasties stuffed with nuts and fruits; everything smelled of honey and garlic and butter. Adelaide sat with her hands on her lap. As each splendid dish was offered, she refused it— firmly at first, and then with greater and greater reluctance. Her last refusals were only small, sorrowful shakes of her pale blond head.

  I wondered about it, but only fleetingly. I did not like her, and my duty in any case was to serve my master, to fill his wine cup and his plate, to peel the skeleton from his trout and carve it into pieces.

  Karelian had put away the first fish and was starting on the second when he noticed his wife, at the far end of the table, still sitting before an empty plate.

  “You’re not eating, Adelaide.”

  “No, my lord.”

  “Are you ill?”

  The concern in his voice was real. He had brought her from Ravensbruck dazed with fever. He had sheltered her all winter in Karn, and ordered all manner of small luxuries for her here in Lys, so she would regain her health. It was not untypical. Whatever his vices, he took good care of his people.

  But in Adelaide’s case, there was something more than his usual sense of duty. I never quite knew what. He certainly did not love her. She had after all betrayed him, and his own heart was locked in Car-Iduna. But there was a stubborn loyalty between them, and sometimes a strange, uneasy kind of passion. She was halfway mad; sometimes she lived as though he were not there, as though none of us were there. Other times she followed him about and pleasured with him like a courtesan— once even in the apple orchard, not caring in the least if they were seen, giving shameless scandal to the peasants.

  “I’m not ill, my lord,” Adelaide said. “I’m fasting.”

  The count put his fish back onto his plate and his elbows onto the table.

  “Why,” he demanded, “are you fasting?”

  “Father Gerius said I must. For twenty-one days.”

  “Twenty-one days? That was my penance once for killing a man in a duel.” He paused, and looked around the table. “I see no one missing from the household, lady.”

  Everyone laughed— not least th
e countess herself. Karelian spoke again, and I sensed more than heard the hint of anger in his voice.

  “You’re not strong enough to fast, Adelaide. Surely Father Gerius can see that.”

  The pale fox face looked up very quickly. Very eagerly. “Do you forbid it, my lord?”

  “Yes. I forbid it. Greta, give the countess her dinner. I will speak with Father Gerius tomorrow. He will have to assign you some other kind of penance.”

  “Thank you, my lord.”

  He watched until Greta had served her and she began to eat, greedy as a starving child, playing on his sympathy as she played on that of the servants. Poor little thing, she’s barely had a mouthful all day, and she’s so pale….

  Karelian spoke to the manor chaplain the next day, as he promised. But first he spoke to Adelaide, and in the privacy of their bedchamber he learned the reason for her penance. (All this I was told later by the servants, who had it from Adelaide’s maid.) I have no idea what Karelian imagined, perhaps that the three-week fast had been imposed for her adultery, or for some secret, long-ago offense.

  But Father Gerius had, in the course of her confession, questioned her about her married life— as of course he had to do. Married life was the ordinary Christian’s primary occasion of sin.

  Did they engage in the carnal act on Wednesdays? On Fridays? On Sundays between midnight and Mass? In daylight? During her unclean times? During Lent or Advent, or on any Ember Day? Did they seek pleasure from it, rather than merely obey the requirements for bearing children? Did she allow her husband to see her unclothed body? Did they engage in lewd or unnatural acts?

  At this point the countess, already much distressed, asked him what was unnatural. He responded very carefully: “Describe to me what you do, and I will tell you if it is unnatural.” She did so, and was corrected sadly, each time with greater firmness: “My child, you and his lordship have gravely offended God.”

  Long before they finished, she began to cry.

  Karelian did not cry. He sat at his breakfast like a man contemplating murder, and the moment he had eaten, the tables were cleared and the manor chaplain was ordered to appear before him.