Chapter Four

“At any rate,” Luther continued, when he could, “attempts were made downriver to stamp out the trade in dark wine, and we found it politic to get out of it. There was still demand in Marienburg, and we might have taken a good profit from the service of that demand, always provided that we exercised discretion, but your father never had any sense of adventure. If I , hadn’t fallen ill, I’d have taken the chance, but your father saw things differently. He’d married, and he intended to start a family. He knew that I took a little of the wine myself occasionally, but that only made him more determined. Now, I suppose, he’ll be more convinced than before that he was right.”

“He told the witch hunter that there was nowhere within ten leagues where the wine could be obtained,” Reinmar observed. “Was he right?”

“How should I know, stuck fast to my bed as I am? There was none for me, at any rate, and I doubt that Albrecht’s fared much better for all the sharpness of his thirst. I never knew where the vintage was trampled and stored—and it was usually bottled before it was delivered into my hands—but the fact that its producers used our family as agents suggests that Eilhart lay on the most convenient route to the Reik. If the dark wine and its kin no longer use the Schilder as a conduit, they must use another route, but how close it lies I cannot say. If certain rumours were true which said that the wines came from Bretonnia by means of a secret pass through the mountains, its makers may have had to go twenty or thirty leagues east or west in search of another such pass, but I never trusted that kind of talk. I always suspected that the source lay closer to home—in which case the present distribution route probably passes within a day’s walk of the town.”

“As close as Great-Uncle Albrecht’s house, perhaps?” Reinmar suggested.

That obtained a reaction from the old man, whose right hand twitched before forming a fist.

“Not as close as that, I think,” Luther said, in a low voice. “Albrecht was never cut out for the wine trade, and when I saw him last he certainly didn’t have the look of a regular drinker.”

“Why wasn’t he cut out for the trade?” Reinmar wanted to know. He had grave misgivings about his own suitability for a life in any sort of trade. “And what look does a regular drinker of the dark wine have?”

Luther chose to answer the first question and ignore the second. “Albrecht had no talent for moderation,” he said dourly. “The wine business may not require the iron discipline your father brings to it, but it does demand moderation.”

“Is that why you quarrelled—because his drinking was eating into the profits?”

“Is that what your father told you?” the old man parried. The conversation had obviously strayed too far into matters of which Luther was supposedly forbidden—presumably by Gottfried—to speak.

“Father never tells me anything that is not strictly related to the conduct of the business,” Reinmar answered, with more than a trace of bitterness. “It was a guess.”

“Not such a bad guess,” Luther admitted. “It was far more complicated, of course, but that was part of it. Albrecht always had a keen thirst, for wisdom as well as wine. He had ambitions to be a scholar, and more. Eilhart was never enough for him. He wanted to be a city gentleman, but his passion for prosperity far outstripped the patience that might have delivered it.”

“Is it such a terrible thing to want something more than Eilhart has to offer?” Reinmar asked, hesitantly.

“Perhaps not,” Luther replied, guardedly. “But there are no reliable short cuts to prosperity, any more than there are reliable short cuts to wisdom.”

“And that, no doubt, is why the dutiful burgers and housewives of Eilhart are so smug in their ignorance, their small-mindedness and the extreme urgency of their desire to obtain full measure from the local tradesmen,” Reinmar said.

Luther cackled. Reinmar could remember a day when the old man’s laugh had been far more robust, rumbling up from the belly instead of rattling in the throat, but time had taken its steady toll of the slowly-withering flesh. The family physician had despaired of finding any treatment that would even slow the progress of the sickness that was gradually but relentlessly consuming him.

“No doubt,” the old man agreed, his black cap bobbing as he nodded. “But it was as well, in the end, that I refused to be quite as reckless as Albrecht, else you’d have nothing to inherit in spite of all Gottfried’s industry and meanness. Albrecht never forgave me for it, but I was right.” There was a moment’s pause while Luther considered the import of this conclusion. He was still nodding his head, but much more slowly than before.

“What does this man who calls us cousins want of us, grandfather?” Reinmar asked, when the black cap finally ceased its bobbing.

“I don’t know,” Luther answered. “If he is who he says he is, then he probably wants the wine to serve his own appetite rather than to sell—but if he is a secret agent of the witch hunter, he will be searching for evil to discover and uproot. Men like that sometimes find what they seek, even when it is not there.”

“What should I do?” Reinmar wanted to know.

“Your father will certainly instruct you to do nothing, or less,” Luther observed, speculatively. “He would not thank me for offering different advice.”

“I would,” Reinmar admitted.

“Don’t be too quick to say so,” Luther advised. “But you could, if you so wished, go to visit your great-uncle. Whatever the situation is, Albrecht will doubtless be glad to be warned that there are witch hunters in the town, and I doubt that anyone else will take the trouble to tell him. If the man who claims to be his son is with him, he might well be glad of the warning too—and he is certainly the best person to explain why a man like Machar von Spurzheim might be looking for him.”

Reinmar was prepared to consider the possibility that had been set before him at his leisure, but there was still one question he wanted to ask.

“If one happened to have a flask of dark wine,” he said, casually, “how much would it fetch, in today’s money? My mysterious visitor wasn’t very enthusiastic to offer the full market price, but he said he was prepared to pay it.”

Luther let out a sound that was almost, but not quite, a laugh. “I haven’t handled money for ten years,” he said, “and I haven’t seen a flask of dark wine in twenty. How would I know what prices are being asked in the markets of Schilderheim and Marienburg? It might be twice what Gottfried asks for a bottle of his best vintage, or it might be a hundred times—but your customer might not have been thinking in monetary terms at all. If he came here looking for me as well as for Albrecht, he may think of me as a man who was too fond of money in his youth to pay a fuller price for the kind of reward he seeks. If you see him again, he may deign to explain himself—but if not, you might be better off not knowing. Gottfried would certainly say so, and I owe him too much to go against his wishes. You, of course, might make your own decision.”

“I came to you for answers,” Reinmar said, “not for more puzzles, each more enigmatic than the last.”

“We can’t always get what we want,” Luther whispered, letting his head sink back into his pillow again. “That should be the first lesson that every man learns from life—for it may be his last, if he learns it too late.” His eyelids had fallen shut.

Reinmar knew that he would get no more out of the old man that night. He also knew that he would have to be back at his counter at an uncomfortably early hour—but he knew, too, that if he put off visiting Great-Uncle Albrecht until the following night there would probably be no point in going at all. Machar von Spurzheim had all the daylight hours at his disposal, and would undoubtedly make full use of them. If Reinmar wanted to get to Albrecht before the witch hunter did, he would have to go now.

By the time Reinmar crept out of Luther’s room the hour was so late that the great majority of the townsfolk would be abed, but he was still fully charged with the excitement of the extraordinary day and he did not even pause to wonder whether Albrecht might be peacefully asleep. He dared not leave the shop door unbolted so he used a route of his own, which he had established in early childhood, clambering out of the narrow window of his bedroom on to the bay above the shop, then letting himself down by a series of foot- and handholds cut by the removal of mortar from the cracks between the blocks of grey stone that made up the walls of the house.

The descent seemed more perilous every time he used it, but he was still light enough and lithe enough to negotiate it safely.

Gottfried had said that Albrecht’s house was “little more than an hours’ walk” from the shop, but he had been thinking in terms of a leisurely stroll. Although he had no light but that of the stars to guide him, and it was not a route with which he was familiar, Reinmar contrived to make the journey in a few minutes less than the hour, arriving as the distant market bell chimed midnight.

It would not have been easy to find the house among the firs had it been unlit, but there was a lamp burning in an upstairs room which shone brightly through a gap in the conical crowns and guided Reinmar through the most difficult passage.

When he thumped the door with his fist there was no immediate response, and impatience made him knock again before the door was unbarred and opened a crack. It was not his gypsy housekeeper but Albrecht himself who answered it.

Albrecht Wieland must have been taller than his younger brother even in their youth, but Luther had been so wasted by his illness that Albrecht now seemed to have more than twice his brother’s mass. He was not quite as tall as the witch hunter, but he loomed over Reinmar nevertheless. He was obviously not used to visitors; he had a candle-tray in one hand and a cudgel in the other.

“Who are you?” he demanded roughly. He had thrust the candle forward so that Reinmar’s face was fully illuminated, but he obviously did not recognise his great-nephew.

“It’s me, great-uncle. Reinmar.”

Albrecht seemed startled by this news, and slightly dismayed. “Gottfried’s boy? What do you want? Is my brother dead?”

“No. Is there no one else here? Have you had no other visitor today?”

Albrecht still had not stood aside to admit Reinmar to his house, and the perplexity on his face suggested that he had not the faintest idea what Reinmar was talking about. If the man who claimed to be Albrecht’s son had set out to follow Gottfried’s directions, he did not seem to have completed his journey. “I never have visitors,” Albrecht stated, flatly.

“You’ll have some tomorrow, great-uncle,” Reinmar told him. “There’s a witch hunter in town. His men took my father away and then searched the shop. May I come in?”

At the mention of the witch hunter Albrecht’s ill-lit face had changed expression, anxiety banishing puzzlement on the instant. He had already begun to swing the door wide open and usher Reinmar in, and he looked fearfully out into the darkness before closing it again and replacing the bar in its slots.

“There,” he said. He was pointing to the poorer of a pair of rickety chairs. It stood beside a table strewn with the debris of at least three meals, half a dozen saucers pooled with sooty candle-wax, and various pieces of rotting parchment that might once have been deeds, letters or pages torn out of a book. Reinmar sat down gingerly, rocking the chair one way and then the other until he figured out which three-legged stance was the more comfortable. The room was suffused with a strong animal odour, although the scrawny cat asleep by the hearth seemed hardly big enough to be responsible. Albrecht’s housekeeper—of whom there was still no sign—did not seem to be overly attentive to her duties.

Albrecht took the other chair, which was somewhat sturdier and equipped with arms on which he could rest his own. “What would a witch hunter want with me?” he demanded.

“The man he is chasing told me that he is your son,” Reinmar informed him. “He also told me that he was coming to see you, although he doesn’t seem to have arrived.”

“Wirnt?” Albrecht seemed to be utterly astonished. “Wirnt is in Eilhart?”

“He did not tell me his name,” Reinmar said. “So you do have a son, then? My father didn’t seem to know it. The stranger came to the shop asking for dark wine, and was disappointed when my father told him that we had none. Perhaps it was as well, given that the witch hunter came so quickly on his heels. The witch hunter’s soldiers searched the cellars, although I cannot imagine that there is witchcraft in wine.”

“All wine is witchcraft,” Albrecht murmured, although his mind seemed to be elsewhere. “What else is intoxication but a gentle form of magic, a pleasing disorder?”

“According to my father,” Reinmar told his aged relative, “good wine is virtue incarnate, and even bad wine is a useful accompaniment to poor food. I am his apprentice, but he has never said a word to me of evil wine. That is the sense, I assume, in which this mysterious liquor is dark?”

“Wine comes in more colours than the burgers of Eilhart and Holthusen imagine,” Albrecht told him, still speaking rather absent-mindedly while he worried over possibilities that he was not yet inclined to share, “and the dreams it stimulates are far richer and more various than your father or his neighbours can imagine. Luther knows—but Luther was always a weakling and a coward. There is no evil in wine, but there is evil in men, and even the finest wine can sometimes draw it out. The wine of dreams may reveal more than some men find comfortable. It is always the way of witch hunters and priests of law to blame the magic rather than the man, but scholars have another way of seeing.”

“In Eilhart,” Reinmar observed, “the kind of learning you call scholarship is regarded with far more suspicion than wine.”

That remark brought Albrecht’s mind back into focus. “Do you think I need to be told that?” he demanded sharply. “It was to escape such ignorance that I went to Marienburg, and let my brother steal my share of your precious shop by slow degrees. If your father imagines that he can send a witch hunter after the rascal of the family while keeping his own house clean he is mistaken. If I am guilty, in the witch hunter’s eyes—and I am certainly innocent in my own—than Luther is guilty too, and if my past catches up with me your precious business is bound to be drawn into the enquiry. If Wirnt has any sense at all…”

He broke off, somewhat to Reinmar’s annoyance.

“I don’t understand what is happening, great-uncle,” Reinmar said. “My father will not tell me, and my grandfather insists on respecting my father’s wishes, for the time being—although he did suggest that I ought to forego my precious sleep in order to warn you that the witch hunter is here. Do you not think that I am entitled to know what danger I am in?”

Albrecht recoiled slightly under this assault, but he seemed to be made of stronger stuff than Luther. He drew his lips back to expose his yellow teeth, and teased the incisors thoughtfully with his tongue as he considered the matter.

“Although you would not know it to hear the gossip in the marketplace, we live in quiet times in a favoured place,” the old man said, eventually. “Tradesmen are always grumbling, but the tradesmen of Reikland know nothing of how hard life is in less prosperous parts of the Empire or how desperate it was in Reikland in other phases of our history. There are rumours of terrible events in distant corners of the Empire, and horrors in Altdorf itself, but nothing has happened in my lifetime to compare with the great conflicts of the past. The siege of Praag has always been the stuff of legend in Reikland, and the Vampire Counts of Sylvania are bogeymen fit only to frighten naughty children in these parts, but you and I have every reason to be grateful that we were not born in a worse place or in an earlier era. You have not the slightest idea how grim reality is in less favoured localities, or what evil lurks in the wastes of the far north.”

“Tell me, then,” Reinmar suggested.

Albrecht hesitated. “Your education is your father’s responsibility,” he said, after a few moments.

“Your brother thinks the same,” Reinmar observed. “He is too old, and too weak, even to think of defying my father by telling me things that my father would rather I did not know. But that is why I came to you: a scholar, and a man who can still stand upright. My cousin has come to Eilhart with a witch hunter at his heels. We are all under suspicion, it seems. My father has been taken away, and you may well be next. I need to know what is going on, and you are the only one who can tell me. You are the scholar of the family, are you not?”

Flattery, Reinmar had heard it said, would get a man anywhere. It was the flattery of being named the scholar of the family that loosened his great-uncle’s tongue.

“Very well,” Albrecht said. “Perhaps it is time that my nephew’s son knew the family secrets—and I believe that he will hear a more honest account from me than from my brother or his son. Listen, then!”

Reinmar listened, more enthusiastically than he had ever listened to any lecture delivered by his father.