For several seconds he was in an agony of indecision so intense that he could not form a syllable of protest when the decision was taken out of his hands. Almeric had knelt down beside his companion, who moved aside. The stopper had already been removed, and Almeric put the neck of the bottle directly to Marcilla’s mouth.
She had been unable to take more than a tiny sip of water or ordinary wine, but as soon as this liquor touched her lips she raised her head slightly, and when the liquid entered her mouth she drank it greedily. Reinmar extended a hand as if to stop him, but there was no real force in the gesture and Brother Noel reached forward to take his wrist, gently but firmly.
“She needs it, Master Wieland,” Noel said, quietly. “Believe me, I beg you—she really does need it.” Marcilla’s eyes had fluttered open, but only for a moment. She sighed deeply as she closed them again, and then she sank back again, returning to sleep. She did seem more at ease now, and not quite so hot.
“You see,” said Brother Noel. “She really did need it. I do not say that it will cure her, but it will make her far more comfortable.” The tone of his voice had not changed at all, but his words seemed to Reinmar to have taken on a distinctly ominous edge.
“Thank you,” Reinmar said, uncertainly. “You’re very kind.”
“You may try the wine yourself if you wish,” Noel went on. “It will likely be stronger and sweeter than any you have tasted before, but I think you will find it rewarding. Your companion obviously has the greater need of it, but you seem to have suffered a little yourself. It is a marvellous aid to recuperation. It cannot undo a wound, but it can revive the spirit and ease distress, and you do seem to stand in need of some such treatment. At the very least, you will find it interesting, in your professional capacity.”
Reinmar swallowed hard. Anxiety had made his throat dry, and he certainly had a thirst, but he felt sure that this was the wine in which his father had always refused to trade. The arguments that had come to mind when the wine was offered to Marcilla were as sound now as they had been then, and he knew that he could not possibly continue to maintain his pose as a possible buyer of the wine if he refused even to taste it, but he knew that this moment of decision might be the most crucial he had ever faced in his life.
He knew that his father would have insisted that he refuse; he knew, too, that his grandfather would have urged him to try it for himself. In the end, though, it was his own decision and no one else’s.
“I’ll need to clean my palate,” he said, eventually.
Carefully, he drained the last dregs of the wine that the farmer’s wife had set out for him before pouring himself a draught of water. This he swirled around in his mouth, as any expert taster would before turning to a new vintage. By this means he established that he only intended to sip the wine that was being offered to him, and would then spit it out.
Brother Almeric removed the loosened stopper from his bottle for a second time, and poured a parsimonious fraction of its contents into the waiting cup.
Reinmar looked into the interior of the wooden vessel, but its sides were so darkly stained that it was impossible to judge the colour of the liquid it now contained. The fluid was slightly viscous, and had a remarkably heavy fragrance—sweet but rather cloying—which he did not find entirely pleasant.
I am my own man, he thought. From now on, I make my own decisions, and I am true to my own dreams.
Then he took a tiny sip of the dark wine, and let it linger for a moment on his tongue.
Chapter Fourteen
Reinmar really had intended to spit the drop of wine into the fire when he had tasted it, but as its taste unfolded and extended the unexpected complexity of the sensation gave him an altogether pleasant shock. He let the liquid lay upon his tongue for a moment longer, and then another, until its warmth and fragrance had suffused the whole interior of his mouth.
When he finally did spit, there was hardly anything left to emerge, and the drop of sputum that sizzled briefly in the fire seemed almost derisory.
The aftertaste that the liquor left behind on his tongue reminded Reinmar of the scent of certain exotic flowers which the gardeners of Eilhart received as bulbs and seeds from distant Tilea, to whose cities they had allegedly been brought by spice-caravans. He decided that it was far more pleasing than he had anticipated, and could easily imagine why some men thought it a taste worth recapitulating.
“It is rather fine, is it not?” Noel said. “It is a vintage once treasured in many of the noblest houses of the Empire, although the troubles which presently afflict the realm have all but destroyed the steady commerce we once enjoyed. No one outside the monastery knows the secret of its making.”
Reinmar inhaled deeply, letting the air cool his tongue and drawing a last breath of that curious fragrance into his lungs. He felt a shock of brief intoxication like nothing he had ever experienced before. He did not quite know what to say, but felt that some comment was necessary. “It is very unusual,” he murmured—but was instantly ashamed of the inadequacy of the adjective. To cover his embarrassment, he said: “I am surprised that it is not better known in Eilhart.”
“We had assumed that it was still valued there,” Brother Almeric murmured, “but we live sheltered lives.”
Is he claiming innocence? Reinmar wondered. Is he trying to persuade me that he has no inkling of the reputation that dark wine has in the world beyond the valley?
“It is not so very surprising that you do not know the wine, even though you are a vintner,” Noel put in, as if to clarify this point. “In the seclusion of our valley we have lost any real sense of the extent and complexity of the world. We leave it to others to disseminate the meagre surplus we produce as they see fit, although we obtain real benefit from it as an aid to meditation and communion with the god to whom our order’s service is dedicated. To a successful businessman like you, our hidden valley and its little secrets must seem tiny and remote, hardly worthy of interest in a commercial sense.”
“I would not say so,” Reinmar answered, thinking that he might as well be bold. “Chance and misfortune brought me here, but the product of your secret process might yet turn my misfortune to our mutual advantage.”
Brother Almeric did not seem convinced of Reinmar’s sincerity, but Brother Noel was still looking at him with all apparent benevolence. “You would be welcome to visit the monastery tomorrow, Master Vintner, if you have the time,” he said. “I hope that the maid is not as seriously hurt as she seems to be, but if perchance you were to be further delayed…”
“I would like that,” Reinmar said.
Brother Noel and Brother Almeric bid him good night then, although their clothes were still not dry, and they left him huddled over the fire.
As they drew the door shut behind them, Noel called back: “We shall see you tomorrow, Master Wieland. We’ll return to see how the girl is faring, and we’ll take you to visit the monastery afterwards, if you care to come.”
“I shall look forward to it,” Reinmar promised—and having done so, wondered whether he ought, after all, to be reckoned a bold adventurer, or something more akin to a fly that had wandered into a spider’s web. He ran his tongue around his mouth one last time, but the taste of the dark wine was already exhausted. Then he looked down at the lovely face of the gypsy, which seemed even lovelier now than it had before.
She stirred slightly, but not as if she were disturbed or anxious. If she was still dreaming, her dreams must have become far more tranquil—but the wound on her head seemed uglier now than it had ever been, and he realised that Noel had been right to judge that it was even worse than Godrich had estimated.
“Sleep well, my love,” he said, recklessly. “You have done what you were required to do, and I can only pray that you’ll be safe.”
After a few minutes’ silence Marcilla stirred again, more vigorously this time. Reinmar bent over her anxiously, but there did not seem to be any cause for alarm. Her eyes opened and she peered at him intently, as if
she were trying to remember who he was. Then she looked sideways at the fire, and down at the rug on which she lay. He had stretched the pallet out beside her but had not yet had a chance to interpose it between her body and the rug.
“We had to take shelter,” he told her. “We are in a farmhouse in a valley, not far from a monastery.”
She nodded as if in reply, but he was not convinced that she understood what he had said. The mention of a monastery certainly drew no reaction.
“Two monks brought you medicine to drink,” Reinmar went on. “It seems to have helped make you a little better.”
Mention of something to drink drew a more positive response, and the gypsy girl looked around until her eyes lighted on the cup. Reinmar poured a little water into it and offered it to her. She was able to take it in her hand and put it to her own lips. Perhaps because she had seen him pour the water she paused in surprise when she sipped. He guessed that there must have been a little of the monks’ wine still clinging to the cup’s interior, which the water had absorbed. Marcilla drank more deeply, and more greedily. Reinmar watched as the initial shock passed and her surprise was displaced by dissatisfaction.
“Is there no more?” she asked, weakly.
He reached out for the water-jug, but that was not what she meant. She shook her head.
“It was some kind of sweet wine they gave you,” he said, guardedly. “I had never tasted it before.”
“It is very sweet,” she murmured, passing her tongue over the inside of her mouth. “Very sweet indeed.” She passed the empty cup back to him and he put it aside. She seemed dazed, as if her mind were balanced on the very edge of reality. He coaxed her into rolling sideways on to the pallet. He would have been glad to talk further, but by the time she had made herself more comfortable she was drifting off to sleep again. He was so very tired himself that he could not regret the necessity of postponing further discussion until morning. He laid himself down beside her on the rug, not caring that her body shielded him from the direct radiation of the fire.
He fell asleep almost immediately.
Although he slept as deeply as might have been expected, given his extraordinary exertions, Reinmar’s slumber was troubled from the very outset by strange dreams.
He had put the encounter with the beastmen firmly out of his mind while he pursued the day’s subsequent adventures, but the guard he had put upon the memory collapsed as soon as he lost consciousness, and the moment he began to dream he was revisited by the day’s horrors.
He remembered the first awful sight of that initial bestial face, and its instant compounding with the knowledge that there was a whole pack of such creatures, advance scouts of a monstrous army.
He remembered the leap that had carried the first beastman into awful collision with his father’s steward, and the sickening thud as Godrich’s head had hit the iron hoop supporting the wagon’s ill-fitted canopy.
He remembered the way the beastman’s bowels had opened as Sigurd had made the most of his killing grip, and the way Matthias Vaedecker’s shirt had soaked up the stink of the alien creature.
He began to remember all these things at once, so that the memories piled up like a heap of autumn leaves, shed by the day’s experience but not yet shrivelled into the mulch of experience. One by one they had been difficult enough to bear, but detached from time and whipped into such awful confusion they seemed ten times worse. They told him not merely that his life would never be the same again, but that the sixteen years he had so far lived had been spent behind walls of ignorance: walls that had always been under siege by all the monstrous lusts and hazards in the world, even though he did not know it.
Reinmar resisted the images as best he could, by mustering all his will to the task of remembering Marcilla’s beautiful, innocent, sleeping face—but all he contrived to do was to interpose a frail and translucent veil between his frightened eyes and the frame in which all his horrors were contained.
To understand his past in this new light—or to fall a little way short of understanding, as is often the way in dreams—was almost too much for him to bear, and it was not in the least unnatural that he should have begun to dream of other things: of the possibilities of the future rather than the burden of the past.
Alas, the potentialities of the future had been transformed along with the legacies of the past, and Reinmar’s dreams became even more phantasmagoric when they turned in that direction.
The beastmen of his earlier dream had seemed fearsome enough, but they were poor things by comparison with the chimeras of his subsequent dreams, which had horned heads like bulls or bison, and extra limbs which ended in claws instead of hands. But the most terrifying thing about them was something he could not see but only suspect, which was that beings of their kind concealed an awesome intelligence beneath their monstrous masks, and were capable of hearing words that were spoken anywhere in and out of the world.
He kept trying with all his might to use more comforting imagery as a ward against the horror, but every time he tried to conjure Marcilla’s beauty it lasted for but an instant before metamorphosing into something far more terrible. Her eyes would inflate until they were huge and green, and her flowing black hair would turn vivid white, and her body would manifest all kinds of bizarre decorations, tattooed as well as painted. Her hands would turn into long, scissor-like claws and her hindquarters would sprout a remarkable tail, terminating in a barbed fluke.
It was all too much to bear, but the only way in which he could refuse to bear it was to shatter the images into countless shards of thought, reducing the fugitive coherency of his dream-consciousness to a mere dust of madness—and even in that panic-stricken retreat he glimpsed a possibility more awful than any he had ever glimpsed before, because he realised that something similar could happen to a waking mind. To shatter a nightmare was of no permanent consequence, but to shatter the waking mind in like fashion was to give way, irrecoverably, to madness.
Reinmar had never suspected himself of any tendency to madness, and had never considered himself ready prey for such a fate—but he knew now that there was no man alive who was free of such potential, or immune to such a fate.
His subsequent nightmares were as disordered and senseless as nightmares ever could be. By the time he finally awoke they were already beginning to slip through the net of memory, but there were certain images which were sufficiently powerful to be deeply graven upon his returning consciousness. Before he opened his eyes to greet the new day, Reinmar was all too easily able to recall some of these fugitive moments to mind.
At one point in his dream, he thought, he had been trying with all his might to scale a rough-and-ready mountain path, which led to a castle in the clouds. A terrible wind had made every step difficult, plucking at him as though with savage claws and bloodying his arms when he raised them in his defence.
More than once, he was certain, he had managed to reach the closed door of the dark citadel, and had cried out to be let in. On each occasion the door had opened, though only by the merest crack, to let the bright light within spill out upon his face—but he had not been made welcome. The light that had bathed him had been cold and cruel, cutting into him like the invisible claws which had assailed him on the path, and driving him back. Somehow, though, he had gained entry to the enigmatic fortress, and had scurried into the shadows clustered about a great hall, like a mouse in fear of the household cat.
At another point in the dream, he remembered, a beautiful woman had come to him while he lay upon a broad bed. She had been far more beautiful of face than his beloved Marcilla, but that was only to be expected because—as he had discovered upon turning towards her—she was not entirely a woman, but was at least in part a daemon. She had a forked tongue like a serpent and legs which ended in monstrous, two-taloned claws, and her torso was decked in polished and multicoloured scales, whose dominant hues were pink and blue. This white-haired succubus had pleaded with Reinmar—most urgently, it seemed—to desert his ap
pointed bride and go with her to share a better kind of ecstasy.
Although he had felt the force of temptation he had resisted. At least, he was sure when he tried to remember the dream in the morning that he must have resisted… although he could not quite remember what he had said to this awesome siren, or what he had done to detach himself from the pressure of her deadly green gaze and the avidity of her embracing arms. He could remember the sheen of her silver-white hair, like the gloss on a swan’s wing, and the exotic promise of her swaying, voluptuous body, and the hungry smile which showed the points of her pearly teeth, but no matter how hard he tried he could not remember how he had escaped his awful predicament.
Nor could he remember now how he had escaped the invisible claws that had harried him incessantly while he attempted to attain the fortress of his desire—except that he was not sure that they had always remained invisible. He could conjure up the briefest imaginable flashes of chimeras even worse than the bison-headed beasts, compounded out of scorpions, vile reptiles and vaguely humanoid limbs.
Was this, he wondered, after he had woken up but before he had opened his eyes, the kind of dream which visited all adults once in a while, from which only youth had kept him safe? Or was it the kind of dream which only visited those who had taken a sip of the dark wine and failed to follow through the intention to spit it out?
Memory failed him then, when he tried to recapture more of the fugitive dream, and he consented to open his eyes instead. Then he sat up and stretched himself, looking sideways at the recumbent gypsy girl.
The Wine of Dreams Page 13
