The Black Chalice Read online

“Whatever powers we choose to serve, Karel, those are the powers we unleash in the world. Pagan or Christian alike; it doesn’t matter; if the lords of heaven must always have their own way, and kill and wreak havoc to get it, the lords of earth will do the same. Odin has his place, but it was a small place once, and it should have stayed small. I acknowledge him, because he’s there. But I do not call him All-father, because he isn’t. And I bring my gifts to others. To Iduna of the golden apples, and to Tyr, who was earthmate and high lord of the Germans before Thor and Odin ever came here. They call him Aesir, too, but he’s of a far older breed, and proved it.

  “Do you know the story of Tyr, Karelian? Do you remember what happened when the gods of Asgard went to bind the Fenris wolf, the monster Loki fathered on himself?”

  “Yes,” he said. He knew the story; everyone did. It was Tyr who fed the monster when he was small, because no one else had the courage to go near him. And when Fenrir grew to be evil and dangerous, so was it Tyr who undid his power.

  Loki’s wolf-creature grew mean and strong— so dreadfully strong he might soon destroy the world. The gods brought different kinds of ropes to bind him, teasing him about his strength, wagering he could not break free. He always won. Only the last rope was different, a slender cord, woven from the sound of a cat’s footfall, and the beard of a woman, and the roots of a mountain, and many other things, woven in great secrecy, and with such skill that none of those things was ever seen again within the world. Fenrir was wary, and made them all swear an oath: if he failed to break the cord, they must take his wager and set him free. But even then he did not trust them. Very well, he said, you may bind me. But one of you must first put your hand into my mouth.

  “And not one of them would do it,” Raven said scornfully. “Odin the great fighter and Thor the great boaster and Loki the great liar all stood by, and looked at each other. Someone else could do it, sweet heaven— what would Thor be if he couldn’t pound his mighty hammer, or Odin if he couldn’t wield his sword? And so Tyr put his hand into the beast’s mouth, knowing he would lose it. And they bound Fenrir, and so he will be bound till the end of time. But it hardly made a tale for the drinking halls of Valhalla. No great battle there, no fields of dead. No glory in such a small, precious sacrifice. Tyr walks lonely in the world now.”

  “Some would compare him to Christ, for his sacrifice.”

  “Why should they?” she demanded sharply. “Did Tyr say afterwards: Now the whole world must bow to me, and follow me, and all the other gods must die?”

  Karelian said nothing.

  “Christ was his father’s son,” she went on. “He was never a god of the earth; he wanted no part of it. He tried to break the sacred circles of the world. Maybe his followers talked about peace, but they looked on life as something to conquer, just as the war gods did. Where else would they finish, except in the same camp?”

  He looked at her, aware even now of her body, of the long, sweet pleasure she had given him. Sinful pleasure. Or so the priests would say… the same priests who blessed him on the road to Jerusalem.

  It was true what she said; he no longer believed much in Christianity. But it had taken years for that to happen, and even more years for him to acknowledge it. He had been well taught, after all: God was God, and revelation was absolute, and the world’s order was fixed despite its bloody chaos.

  But he doubted nonetheless, at first against his will, and later with a quiet, almost self-destructive defiance. And it was his own religion, not the ancient one, which fed his doubts— doubts which went far beyond the obvious contradictions of his faith, beyond the fact that the Church taught love and brotherhood while Christian men, including priests and bishops and the pontiffs themselves, dealt century after century in discord, treachery, and blood. It went beyond the scandals of Rome, where corrupt popes rose up and deposed each other in dizzying succession, each one claiming to be anointed by God. It went beyond the facile argument of original sin. He was no longer content to be told that God was good and men were wicked, that Christians knew the truth but were too weak and false to follow it. Something else was wrong— utterly wrong in the very structures of the world.

  In Flanders, his liege lord hung an enemy’s small children out in cages in the dead of winter, and every day the bishop walked past the cages on his way to Mass, where he thanked God for bringing the ungodly to their punishment.

  In Sicily, victorious Normans sacked the fortress of Aldino; the men they hacked to pieces; the women they staked out in the courtyard and drove spears between their legs, and left them so, still living, and rode away, the cries of their victims barely heard above their songs.

  It never ended. The Christian princes of Europe fought each other like dogs in the streets. Pagan Vikings sailed their high-prowed warships up the long rivers of Germany and France, and where they passed the world was wrapped in smoke, and the earth stank of corpses. The Mongols and Magyars raided from the east, and the Saracens from the south.

  For some men, it was the thought of God which kept them from madness and despair. They needed God to bear it. They needed a dream of divine redemption, a hope of some other kind of life. But for Karelian, it became harder and harder to believe that God was not somehow implicated in all of it. Either God lacked the power to govern the world which he had made, or if he had the power, then he was malevolent and cruel, no God at all but a monster. Or, perhaps — and this was the last and the deepest of his doubts — perhaps God had not made the world at all. Perhaps the world was something quite different, and the order which lay over it was an order made by men, and God himself was part of their creation.

  They were not mature doubts, worked out into any sort of clarity; he was not a philosopher, and he had no access to formal learning. They were simply questions which never went away. He had nothing to draw on but experience, and his increasing reluctance to accept the upside-down ethics of a Church which gave its banners to marauding armies and sent men to hell for a kiss. He rarely confessed or took the sacrament. He drank a great deal. He bedded as many women as would have him— and bedded other knights, too, now and then; in war camps strange things happened between men, and love was by no means the strangest. What was left of his faith withered to the roots.

  Then Pope Urban came, preaching the great warrior pilgrimage to the east. Incredible as it seemed to Karelian now, he had believed in it. At least a little. At least enough to pray again, and dare to hope. Enough to delude himself that this war would not be like other wars. That he could wipe out, perhaps, some of the dark things of his past. That everything would be different.

  And it was different. It was worse. In Jerusalem he came to the center of God’s temple, and found it empty, an echoing place of blood and lies. From Jerusalem there was no way back. No way at all.

  “How well did you know me, lady, before you brought me here?”

  She smiled faintly. “A little. It’s exhausting, reading a man’s heart when he’s so many leagues away. And it’s not entirely reliable. So we did it three times, and burned up a great deal of sacred wood. I don’t know if you’ll be flattered by this or offended, but you were chosen with a great deal of care.”

  “Chosen for what purpose, lady? You keep promising to tell me, but you never do.”

  “I am about to. But first I want to explain something. It’s a dark time for Europe, and growing darker. More and more power is passing into the hands of the few, into the hands of the violent. You’re a man of the world, so probably you’ve noticed?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I’ve noticed.”

  “Here in Car-Iduna, our first task is to preserve the Grail of Life, and the wisdom of the earth gods which it carries. We can do little to shape the world beyond. We are too few, and many forces are ranged against us; and although we have allies, they are as vulnerable as we are. They have their own survival to consider, as we must consider ours.

  “We’re not gods, Karel. We have wisdom, and considerable power, but we’re still capable of
making fatal mistakes. So we move in the world with great care, and we let many things pass— many bitter things which will never be made right.”

  She moved towards him. “I can offer you so much. Armor to turn all but the most deadly blows. Potions to heal dreadful wounds. Animals to shadow your path, and give you counsel. Shields against wind and winter, against hunger and pain. Many gifts, my love, from the magic of Car-Iduna. All I ask is your fealty— the same oath any man swears to his liege, and the same loyalty.”

  “My lady, I am already sworn to Duke Gottfried—”

  “Duke Gottfried is a viper,” she said bitterly. “Such men eat the world, and spit out its bones to their dogs.”

  “I will not endure that, lady, not even from you.”

  “You will endure it from half of Germany before your hair is grey. Dear gods, are you telling me you don’t fear the man?”

  “I’ve never had any cause to fear him. He’s a valiant and honorable lord.”

  “Karel, we’re not in the courts of men.”

  He stared at her for a moment, and then made a small gesture of assent.

  “What do you want me to say, Raven? He’s a powerful man, and powerful men are always dangerous. I’ve seen him in combat; I know he can be pitiless. Am I a man to judge anyone else for that? He’s governed well. As for our wretched enterprise in the east, if anything good can come of it, perhaps it’s Gottfried’s wealth; he swore he’ll use it all to make the Reinmark flourish. I bound myself to him willingly enough, and I was well rewarded. I won’t leave his service. I was a mercenary for twenty years, Raven. I won’t go back to it, not even for you.”

  “I’m not asking you to leave his service.”

  “I can’t serve you both, for God’s sake!”

  “No.” Her voice was soft and dark as midnight rain. “You can’t serve us both. But you can serve me best at Gottfried’s side.”

  “I see.”

  He turned away from her, swept with anger, with a crushing sense of disillusionment and loss.

  “Women have long had a reputation for treachery and cunning,” he said. “I’m beginning to see why.”

  “And men have an equal reputation for stupidity, and it’s just as well-deserved. Gottfried was a cruel and dangerous man before he went east, but he’s far more dangerous now. Something happened in the Holy Land, Karel; something changed him. You say he’ll make the Reinmark flourish, but I rather fear he’ll make it bleed.”

  “But you have no evidence for it, do you?” he pointed out grimly. “And besides, you’re forgetting I have lands of my own now, and vassals; I will marry soon, and hopefully have children— what of my duty to them? My father spent his whole life quarreling with Gottfried’s father, and then with Gottfried himself, over one foolish thing after another. His family didn’t profit from it.”

  “I’m not asking you to start foolish quarrels; the Reinmark has quite enough of those already. I’m asking you to stay close to him. You have his confidence already; you’ll be one of the first to know if he turns his hand to something wicked. I may be wrong about him, Karel— but if I am, you’ll have lost nothing. And if I’m right, you’ll have all of Car-Iduna’s power to shield you.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “It’s dishonorable. It’s utterly unworthy, and whatever small virtues I have left to me, I am still loyal to those I serve.”

  “Whether they deserve it or not?”

  “Yes, if you put it so. Whether they deserve it or not. We can’t pick and choose in the world, as you can here in Car-Iduna; we must deal with the men who are there. Good men have served me, and you might well say I didn’t deserve their loyalty either, but I got it, and if I hadn’t, I would be dead. What will be left in the world, lady, when even that little bit of integrity between men is gone?”

  She had no answer for him, and having no answer made her angry. She threw out one hand in a quick, impatient gesture, paced a little, and turned back.

  “No one returns to Car-Iduna who is not sworn to my service, Karelian. The very stones of my walls will vanish behind you, and you’ll never find them again.”

  And I’ll never see you then, ever in my life, never lie with the silk of your hair draped against my throat, never hear your voice again, or your magic songs, not ever, till I die …. And all of this will be gone, too, whatever truth is here, whatever hope of truth….

  “I thought you didn’t bargain for your bed,” he said bitterly.

  “It’s not a matter of bargaining; it’s a matter of survival. How do you think Car-Iduna is kept safe, except by desperate caution? This is not a manor house, and I’m not some country widow entertaining the gentry.”

  She came to him, slipped her arms lightly around his neck.

  “All the eagerness you saw when I greeted you, all the pleasure I took in your talk and your company— none of it was feigned, Karelian. I often hunger for the world, more than you would believe, and more than my veela mother ever would forgive.”

  Her hands were soft in his hair, on his shoulders; soft and searching and utterly irresistible.

  “I will miss you, if you don’t come back,” she said.

  How sweet, those words, how perilously tempting…!

  “I won’t play Gottfried false,” he said. “If that’s the price of your love, Raven, then I can’t pay it.”

  “You’ll have very little happiness in the life he’s offered you.”

  “And who shall I thank for it? You, and the magic of Car-Iduna?”

  “No. I’ll do nothing to harm you. Gottfried and the world are both as they are, and I did not make them so.”

  He turned away from her, silent, walking aimlessly. He had lost his first love at twenty. He thought he would die, but in fact he recovered very quickly. He was no longer twenty; he knew he wouldn’t die. He also knew he was unlikely to recover at all. More things were at stake here than love, all of them so tangled together that he no longer knew, and indeed no longer cared, what he wanted from her most— passion, or wisdom, or shelter, or power. He wanted everything. And if he lost what he had found here, there was little hope he would ever find it again.

  “There was a house in Jerusalem,” he said. “They lived well there, and they had many servants. Some of them fought us, and some huddled against the walls; it made no difference. We killed them all. In the farthest room of the house I came upon a young woman with two small children. She was a beautiful girl, almost as lovely as you, and very young. I suppose in the great scheme of things it didn’t matter much — the young and the old, the beautiful and the ugly — they were all equally precious to God, or equally irrelevant. She was holding on to her children, and crying at me in a few words of broken Greek; for some reason she thought we were Byzantines. She tore open the front of her dress, as if to offer herself, and said over and over again — or so I understood — please, please don’t kill my children.

  “I never had a wife, or children of my own. They were pretty youngsters she was holding— rigid with terror, but so pretty. I thought perhaps I should keep her, and the children too; take care of them, raise them as my own. Why not? It was a fine house, and I was weary to death of my wars.

  “I won’t say the impulse was honorable or generous. I’m sure her Saracen husband, dead somewhere on the city wall, would not have admired me for it. But at least it was human; to slaughter them was something less. I stood looking at her, and I lowered my sword. I saw hope in her eyes. I wasn’t thinking clearly about what I would do; I suppose I wasn’t thinking at all. I was simply unwilling to kill them… so my men did it for me. They poured into the room behind me, and my sergeant swept past me with a great cry of rage, as if I had somehow been the one in peril, and drove his sword into her body. She fell to her knees, but she was still alive. Alive enough to see them grab the children, and hack them to death; their blood spattered into her face, and she let out a cry of anguish to melt the walls of Jerusalem, or the heart of any God, if he had one.
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  “And it was I, Raven, who couldn’t bear to listen to that cry, and struck down what was left of her life. The men took their bodies and threw them into the street, and hung one of my banners on the lintel— for whenever a knight took a house, he needed only to mark it and no one would touch his plunder. We were very honorable about things like that….”

  He looked at her, wondering what he would find in her eyes. Why am I telling you this? To make you hate me? To make it easier for me to leave?

  But her eyes were veiled. She waited for him to go on.

  “It seemed an omen, that banner. Here, Karelian Brandeis, is your first fief. Your colors hang from a house of blood, and so they will again. So they will forever.”

  There was a long silence. Raven spoke at last, very quietly:

  “What do you want from me, Karel? I can’t forgive you, or make it right. No one can. Only the wounded can forgive, if they choose to.The dead can’t speak, and no one can speak for them, not even the gods. Evil can’t be made right, Karelian; that’s why it’s evil. Otherwise it would be merely inconvenience. I think perhaps you know that, inside. It’s why you can’t serve your Christian God anymore.”

  Yes, he thought, just so. She read him very well, burning all her sacred wood.

  “What good has it done us,” she went on darkly, “this belief in heaven and hell and eternal life? It’s done nothing but unleash barbarism on the world. The God who infinitely punishes men requires it, and the God who infinitely forgives them will fix up all their mistakes. If the Saracens are truly damned, well then, we’ve done his work. And if by chance we were wrong, and slaughtered the innocent, he’ll be right there at the gates of death: Here, poor woman, it was all a terrible misunderstanding; let me brush away your tears, and show you all my castles; look, I have fine white robes for your babies, and pretty harps for them to play with…!

  “Don’t you think it’s easy enough for humankind to be cruel, my lord, without such encouragement from their gods?”

  No answer was necessary. He felt defenseless against her wisdom, and yet empowered by it, too. Nothing she said surprised him very much; only her sureness surprised him, the confidence with which she could stand apart from the whole of Christian reality, and say: There is something better.