The Black Chalice

by Marie Jakober

  The prince had seated himself formally when the envoys came. Now he jumped to his feet.

  “Can’t pass through Karn? What the devil are you talking about?”

  “The city has made an alliance with Karelian.”

  “They’ve done what?”

  “They’ve gone over to him, my lord. He’s persuaded them that Konrad will be king, and told them they will lose their charters and their monopolies if they oppose him. His friend Lehelin has swayed the barons, and as for the merchants, they care for nothing except their trade. They’ve allowed Karelian’s men to garrison the bridge.”

  “God damn him!” Theodoric spat.

  “Did they allow you passage through to Ravensbruck?” the empress asked.

  “No, my lady. They told us to come back here, and tell you— shall I repeat it, lady, as they spoke it?”

  “Yes.”

  “They said we should tell Gottfried’s puppy there are wolves on the great bridge of Karn, and he should take care lest they bite his little head off.”

  “Indeed.”

  “We went west then, lady, to Karlsbruck. The bridge is gone there; it was swept away two harvests back, and has never been rebuilt. They have only rafts and homemade boats—”

  “Get on with it,” Theodoric snapped, pacing.

  “Forgive me, my lord. We crossed with a local boatman, and went on to Ravensbruck, and met with Arnulf. He was not… enthusiastic, my lord. He can’t use the bridge at Karn. And Karlsbruck has always been a dangerous crossing, even when there was a bridge. Now, to ferry his knights and destriers across on rafts, with steep wooded hills on all sides, where Karelian could hide his men and wait… he said he might as well hang them in his courtyard, and save them the march.”

  Theodoric glowered, but he did not disagree.

  “There’s another road south, you know,” he said grimly. “Or is Arnulf afraid of it, like the rest of this damnable country?”

  “He says he will march through Helmardin, my lord. But he has a price.”

  “He is our vassal,” the empress said grimly. “It’s not his place to set us terms.”

  “So I reminded him, my lady. And he reminded me that he was Karelian’s father-in-law. Karelian wants to play kingmaker, he said; if he succeeds, he will be powerful indeed. He will be duke of the Reinmark at the least. Forgive me, my lord, I only repeat what was said—”

  “Go on, Sir Friedrich,” the empress said, with a tired glance at her angry son.

  “Arnulf made a great show of his kinship with Karelian. You can hardly expect me to turn against so illustrious a son-in-law, he said, unless you offer me at least as much in return—”

  “He hates his illustrious son-in-law, God damn it!”

  “He does indeed. But it is Arnulf the man who hates him. Arnulf the border lord is pure survivor. He would like nothing better than to side with us. But he considers it a desperate risk, and he wants to be rewarded accordingly.”

  “Dear God, did you not offer him my daughter?” Radegund demanded. “What more does he want?”

  “He wants your son. Armund. He wants Armund to marry his daughter, the lady Helga.”

  “My son?” This time it was the empress on her feet. “She should marry my son, and be a princess of the empire? And if fate proves cruel to us, maybe the queen? The mother of our royal blood? Helga of Ravensbruck? The man is mad! You told him it was utterly out of the question, didn’t you?”

  “Is it?” Theodoric asked flatly.

  She spun towards him. “Yes! It’s absolutely out of the question!”

  Theodoric gave her a cold look, and addressed the envoy again: “Was there more to Count Arnulf’s message?”

  “No, my lord. But he says he will not take the field until Armund comes to Ravensbruck, and he sees them lawfully wed.”

  “The man’s gall is beyond belief,” Radegund said bitterly. “I suppose if Theodoric were not already married, Arnulf would have asked for him, and made his border baggage queen!”

  “I expect he would have,” Friedrich said unhappily.

  “You may go,” Theodoric said. “All of you, leave us.”

  So we left. What was said after I do not know, nor what message was sent back to Count Arnulf. As I went wearily towards my bed I thought about Helga of Ravensbruck, Adelaide’s sister. She was fifteen, as I recalled, and already greedy as a young she-dragon, and just as cold. But pretty, and not at all stupid. She had longed to marry the glittering lord of Lys, and betrayed her sister’s love-tryst in a futile attempt to replace her.

  She would be smiling now, I thought, seeing there were even higher men who might be captured than a count, even finer and richer palaces to live in than the manor house of Lys.

  It occurred to me, as I was drifting to sleep, that the empress might well call me to her council room again, and ask me what I might know about Count Arnulf’s other unadmirable daughter. In fact, she did, but by then it scarcely mattered; we were ready to pay any price for help from Ravensbruck.

  Karelian had crossed the mountains, and was riding into Dorn.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Dorn

  Lasting honor shall be his,

  a name that shall never die beneath the heavens.

  Widsith — Anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem

  * * *

  The valley looked even poorer than Karelian remembered it: the houses more scattered and more hunched, the cattle fewer and thinner, the peasants wearier. They looked up at him and his passing soldiery with unsmiling and unadmiring resignation. They knew what his arrival meant: more fighting, more blood, more tribute.

  But the landscape was as magnificent as ever, swept round by mountains on three sides, and shimmering in the late summer sun. Dorn had been rich once, richer than Lys, richer than Eden. It was the land of the winter tree, where the goddess-daughter Maris fashioned the Black Chalice of Car-Iduna, ages before, in the time of war among the gods.

  The sky gods conquered in Dorn, and after them came armies, and then empires, and then the one-God and his priests, and with each coming Dorn grew less.

  Now I come, he thought, and what do I bring them, except more armies? Once the pyramid of power is in place, how do you undo it, except with still more power?… gods, I would have this over, over and done with forever….

  He had returned to this valley only once since the day he left it. He was twenty-three, with a string of tournament victories and many battle honors to his credit, with silk on his body and gold in his belt. Everything he owned in the world was right there on his horse, and his honors were as unsubstantial as a dream. But his mother kissed him and praised him and laughed. She laughed as a woman might who had not laughed for many years. She wanted to believe he was halfway to a kingdom, and he let her believe it. In her presence he almost believed it himself.

  Only once he came. Not to the manor house. Not to Ludolf or to any of them, but only to her, to the moody convent of Saint Kathrin, where like so many good wives and widows of the Christian world, she went to live out the last of her empty, passionless days.

  I couldn’t stay with him, Karel. I couldn’t bear it after you were gone….

  Only once, to see his lovely mother. The world was broad. Its wars were scattered and went on forever, and some of them he lost. Before he could come again, she was dead.

  * * *

  He did everything very formally, with faultless attention to form. He drew up his men well beyond fighting distance, and sent envoys under a flag of truce, asking the margrave Ludolf Brandeis to meet with him, with full guarantees of safe conduct and honorable treatment.

  Ludolf, a great deal less formally, agreed. He sent a messenger of the lowest rank he dared, and obviously advised him to be blunt. The margrave would come, he said, but he would bring a proper escort, whether anyone approved or not. And he hoped his little brother would have the decency to provide a tent.

  “A tent?” Reinhard murmured, looking at the sky. There did not appear to be a rain cloud anywhere in
the length and breadth of Germany.

  “Tell the margrave he may bring as large an escort as he wishes,” Karelian said. “I will bring the same. We will set up a tent there—” he pointed— “below the hazel grove. I will meet him there in one hour.”

  “He can’t possibly be ready in an hour, my lord,” the messenger said.

  “Then he may have two hours. And if he can’t be ready to talk in two hours, then by God he’d better be ready to fight! Tell him so!”

  Ludolf came to the hazel grove after two hours precisely. They rode towards each other, it seemed, across half a world and half a lifetime. It astonished Karelian to see that his brother was old, to realize he must be over sixty. The last time they faced each other he, Karelian, had been fifteen. Strong, cunning, and singularly dangerous, but still only fifteen, still a boy, painfully aware of his brother’s authority. The Ludolf he expected to see was the Ludolf he remembered— a tall man, copper-haired, watchful and mean.

  The margrave of Dorn had a paunch now, and the pulpiness of too much wine about his eyes. He had lost much of his hair, and the rest of it was a yellowing grey. He had never been handsome. His father’s first wife had given her husband a splendid dowry, and proven singularly fertile as well, but beauty she brought neither to her marriage bed nor to her offspring. As for Helmuth himself, he had always been ugly as a boar.

  Ludolf resembled his father, now more than ever. But for all the signs of age about his body, his eyes had not changed at all. His eyes were still watchful and mean.

  He was scrutinizing Karelian intently, taking in every detail, from the fine boots to the fine, still-tawny hair. To his considerable surprise, Karelian felt vulnerable against his look. Memories of Ludolf’s brutality settled into the pit of his stomach like small stones, grinding away his calm, political resolve. It would be easy to forget he was here on Konrad’s behalf, not his own.

  Do I still remind you of her, Ludolf? Your father’s wife, younger than you the day he brought her home, so beautiful, and so hopelessly out of reach? Every time you looked at me you saw her. You saw your father rutting on her, wine-soaked and slobbering, and you hated us both.

  Ludolf was smiling, but without a trace of affection in the smile.

  “You dress well,” he said. “For a renegade.”

  Yes, Ludolf was still Ludolf in every way, most of all the malice— the dark, barely comprehended malice of a youth who had everything and nothing. He was the eldest, the heir, the one who mattered, yet he was coarse-made and clumsy and unloved. His father cherished no one, and his mother had eight more just like him and then died.

  And this brat was gifted with everything he never had: with a warrior’s body and a stag’s grace and — most unbearable of all — with her. For Karelian she was always in reach, year after cruel year; always lovely and jasmine-haired, picking him up out of the dirt no matter how many times Ludolf threw him there, wiping the blood away and telling him it did not matter, one day he would be better than any of them, one day he would be a proud and splendid lord….

  They dismounted and embraced, formal as statues, and went into the tent, and sat. Servants brought wine. The margrave raised his cup in an ironic salute.

  “You don’t visit me for twenty-five years, and then arrive at my gates with an army. What am I to make of that, kinsman?”

  “Consider it a gesture of nostalgia. For all the times I needed an army in your company, and didn’t have one.”

  Ludolf laughed, coarsely. “You always were a crybaby,” he said.

  Crybaby?

  It was astonishing, Karelian thought, how men could transform the world to suit their own imaginings. As a boy he rarely wept, even in the bitterest pain, and never where this one could see him.

  “I recall you made a bet once,” Karelian said. “With Wilhelm. You bet him a solid gold mark that you could make me cry.” He lifted his own cup, drank briefly, looked full into Ludolf’s ice and iron eyes. “As I recall, you lost.”

  On the day of that bet Karelian Brandeis, aged twelve, became a soldier: a person who would consciously decide to carry out the task before him, no matter what it cost. He would not cry, even if they rended him to pieces. A brutally pointless task, like so many of the ones which came after.

  You never went to Jerusalem, Ludolf, did you? I went there for you. For all of you, with your arrogance and your bottomless appetite for power. I cried then, but by then it was too late….

  Ludolf’s gaze had grown even more remote and cold. If he was so good at remembering things which never happened, no doubt he was equally good at forgetting things which had, and he did not like to be reminded.

  “What do you want, Karelian?”

  “I’ve been instructed, on the emperor’s behalf, to accept your oath of allegiance—”

  “Which emperor, little brother?”

  “There is only one. To accept your oath of allegiance, and also on the emperor’s behalf, your seal on this treaty of alliance—”

  He nodded towards one of his knights, who promptly approached the table and unrolled a parchment. Ludolf glanced only at the first couple of lines:

  In bounden duty to my liege and sovereign lord, Konrad, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Germany, etc., etc…..

  Then he shoved it aside, drank deeply, and wiped his sleeve across his mouth.

  “You think your princeling’s going to win, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do you think the Reinmark will get out of it? We’ll be third-rate citizens just like always. You haven’t any loyalty, Karelian. You never did have. Everything you are, Gottfried von Heyden made you—”

  “I made myself, Ludolf. Gottfried only bought me. Temporarily.”

  “And why shouldn’t he? You sold to everyone else. For the first time, ever, we have a chance here in the Reinmark. We can see our own man as emperor— our own cousin, for God’s sake. You could have been his closest ally. You could have done something for us finally, after spending your whole damn life serving everything and everyone except your own. Instead you stab him in the back, and offer the rest of us up as fodder for that high-handed Salian cock-sucker—”

  “Enough!”

  Karelian flung his chair back and leapt to his feet, slamming his cup down on the table. “Have you quite finished?” he said. His voice was low, but savage— more savage even than he had intended.

  Ludolf seemed about to plunge on. He had never been a subtle man. But it did not require a great deal of subtlety to notice how the atmosphere of the room had changed, how men had shifted their positions and moved their hands closer to their swords. He shrugged, and poured down another vast amount of wine.

  Dear gods, I think there is someone in the house of Brandeis who actually drinks more than I do….

  “There’s no point arguing with you,” the margrave said. “There never was. So what do you want? That I should swear allegiance to your… prince? Suppose I do? My oath will last as long as his pretensions to the crown. If he wins, so be it; I’ll bow to God’s will. If he loses, then God will have released me from my oath. Isn’t that so, little brother?”

  “I also want your seal on this treaty, and on everything it asks for. To start with, two hundred knights, fully armed and equipped at your expense.”

  “Two hundred knights? You’re out of your mind!”

  “Plus aid and sustenance for our attack on Stavoren: cattle, grain, wagons, tents, woolen cloth, oil, wine, candles — it’s all very carefully itemized, and based on the war tribute we claimed across the rest of the Reinmark, neither higher nor lower—”

  “But Theodoric has already taken everything!”

  “While you smiled and bowed and kissed his pretentious von Heyden arse, no doubt.”

  “There was nothing I could do! I won’t pay this! I can’t pay it!”

  “You don’t have any choice. Listen, Ludolf. Forget I’m your little brother and just listen to sense for a minute. Konrad is the lawful heir to the imperial crown, and i
n the end he will be king. He didn’t start this war. If you want to whine about the Reinmark’s hard luck, or your own, whine to Gottfried. He had everything a sane man could want and it wasn’t enough; he had to be king of the world.

  “Well, he won’t be. And there’s one thing about the house of Brandeis— however many mistakes we make, we usually end up on the winning side. I’d hate to see you break the pattern.”

  Ludolf banged his fist on the parchment. “I don’t have this kind of wealth, Karelian. Damn you, have you forgotten how much our father lost? The margravate is almost destitute—!”

  “And do you remember how he lost it? By being stupid. Don’t imitate him. You have plate and jewels you can sell; they will pay for half your knights at least. You can borrow the rest.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then I would have to take Dorn under my own authority. On the emperor’s behalf.”

  There was a long, ugly silence. Once, Ludolf had come within a sliver of killing him. More than once, if he counted the traps and the tricks which, except for his own resourcefulness, could easily have proven lethal.

  “So,” Ludolf said bitterly. “It’s like that, is it? You’ve sunk so low you’d make war on your own brother.”

  Karelian felt vaguely nauseous, and dangerously close to losing control.

  “Our father the margrave never minded when we fought among ourselves,” he said. “Don’t you remember? He said it would toughen us up. The best of us would prove our worth, and the rest… well, it didn’t much matter what happened to the rest, did it?”

  He bowed, just a little. “I will come for your answer tonight, my lord. Have it ready.”

  * * *

  She had been a Christian, his mother, and she was faithful still, sleeping under the eyes of a brooding Jesus and a chapel full of saints. Maybe that was why he had tried so hard to believe— so hard and for so many bewildered years, trying and quitting and trying again. Because she had been so good to him. How could she have loved a God less good than she was?

  The tomb was simple, a stone slab in the chapel floor, no effigy, no epitaph, just her name, Gudrun Rath von Brandeis, as befitted a last and insignificant wife, mother of a last and insignificant son.