Chapter Thirteen

In the descending gloom, Reinmar could not judge exactly what manner of farm the buildings and their surrounding land might constitute, but he was too tired to worry unduly about matters of detail. He could smell the smoke of chimneys, lightly flavoured with the odours of recent cooking. He could also hear the clucking of chickens away to the left of the house—a sound which was deeply reassuring.

The door of the house opened long before he had a chance to announce his presence, and a thickset man—presumably the farmer—came out to watch him approach. The man carried no weapon, but there was a measurable tension in the way he held himself. After surveying Reinmar from top to toe, as best he could given the fading light and the obscuring effect of the unconscious girl, the farmer relaxed a little—but only a little.

“I am Reinmar Wieland, wine merchant,” Reinmar told him.

“Are you, indeed?” the farmer said. “My name is Zygmund. What is your business here?”

“I lodged last night in a village half a day’s ride east of here,” Reinmar explained, “with my steward and my servant. We saved the lives of a gypsy girl and her brother, who had been attacked by local ruffians, but we were not in time to save them from a beating. When the wagon was bogged down by a sudden storm the girl wandered off. She was delirious from a blow to the head, and did not know what she was doing. I followed her till she fell, utterly exhausted—but it is too late now to make my way back to the wagon, and I have no food or water. If you could spare a little, and let us rest in front of your fire until our clothes are dry, I’d be very grateful. I fear that the girl might die in my arms if I cannot set her down soon.”

There was little change in the stout man’s manner, which remained tense and suspicious, and Reinmar grew similarly tense while he waited for a response.

“Wieland, did you say?” said the farmer, eventually, as if he were struggling to recover some faded memory from his long-lost youth. “I believe I know the name. Come in—and welcome.” The belated addition of the last phrase eased Reinmar’s anxiety slightly, although it did not sound entirely sincere.

The main room of the farmhouse was tidier than the room in which Reinmar had talked to Albrecht, but its whitewashed walls and crude furniture were very similar. Reinmar deposited his burden on the hearth-rug, and Marcilla responded by stretching herself out to catch the heat of the fire, although she was still asleep and dreaming.

Zygmund had an equally sturdy wife, who disappeared into the kitchen when asked to find food, while her husband went out to fetch more logs with which to build up the fire. The day had never become warm and the rainstorm had cooled the air considerably, so there was a chill in the dampened air, but it disappeared when the farmer returned and reset the fire so that it would blaze up again.

Their host retired again, eventually coming back with a loosely-packed pallet and two thick blankets. “It’s none too soft,” he said, apologetically, “but the straw is clean and reasonably inanimate. The blankets will keep her safe and warm, if you take her wet clothes off. You’ll have to sit by the fire until your own clothes dry on your body.”

Reinmar accepted the offerings gratefully. He took off Marcilla’s dress, having covered her with one of the blankets to protect her modesty, and hung it over the arm of a wooden chair.

The farmer’s wife brought half a loaf of bread and the remains of a haunch of venison. Reinmar immediately began slicing the meat with his knife, then broke the bread into more manageable chunks. By the time he had finished this dissection two cups of wine had been set by the hearth. Reinmar took one up and tasted it. He was surprised at first to find it reasonably good, until he realised that it must have been obtained from the very same vineyard that he had visited earlier that day.

“Not the worst of the vintage, by any means,” he murmured. The farmer had withdrawn again, and could not hear him—in fact, Reinmar slowly realised, he must have gone out again.

The woman brought in a pitcher of water. “Would you like me to help you feed the maid?” she asked. “The poor thing seems worn out.”

Reinmar shook his head, bitterly regretful of the fact that poor Marcilla was far worse than merely worn out. “Did I see another building in the valley?” he asked, absentmindedly.

“Aye,” the woman said, slowly. “That’s the monastery. Zygmund’s gone there to ask for help for the maid. The monks have some skill in curing.”

“Monastery?” Reinmar queried, remembering what Luther had said about further rumours relating to the dark wine’s source. “How many monks live there?”

“Don’t rightly know. No more than sixty, at a guess.”

Sixty! It was a larger figure than Reinmar had expected to hear. So far as he knew, monks were more given to brewing beer than making wine, but they had perforce to be able to turn their hands to anything—and monks, it was said, had first discovered the trick of distillation that allowed wine to be converted into stronger liqueurs. It was plausible that the wine of dreams might be the invention of monks—but was it blessed Sigmar these monks worshipped, or some other deity? And how much more truth might there be in the tales that Luther Wieland had gleaned while he searched for the source of the wine of dreams?

Reinmar noticed that the woman was studying him with a curious expression that had a little anxiety in it as well as a little perplexity. He turned his head away, hoping that it did not seem to be a guilty gesture. Either way, she took it as an invitation to leave, and he continued feeding himself morsels of bread and slivers of venison. He persuaded Marcilla to take a little water in spite of her unconsciousness, and even a little wine, but when he soaked a piece of bread in water she could not take it into her mouth.

Although he was worried, and did not feel at all safe, Reinmar found himself relaxing as exhaustion sapped his wakefulness. Once he had finished the half-loaf he would almost certainly have drifted off to sleep had he not heard the door of the house opening yet again.

He looked up blearily, expecting to see Zygmund, but the farmer was not with the two men who came in. They were clad in monkish habits, with satchels thrown over their shoulders. They must have been abroad during the earlier rainstorm, because their robes were still wet. The dampness of the dark grey cloth caused the habits to emit a musty odour like nothing Reinmar had ever scented before.

The monks were both tall and thin of face. When they eased back their damp cowls to expose the tonsures hollowed in their thick jet black hair Reinmar saw that they both had eyes which were as uncommonly bright as they were uncommonly dark. There was something peculiar about that brightness, but Reinmar could not tell exactly what it was.

The two newcomers looked quickly round the room, then came to the fireside where Reinmar sat and Marcilla lay.

With barely a nod to Reinmar, one of the monks set his satchel aside and knelt beside the girl. He laid his hand upon her forehead, then against her cheek. He seemed genuinely concerned—but his companion was studying Reinmar with great care and obvious curiosity.

“She’s feverish,” the kneeling monk reported. “This head wound has hurt her badly, and I fear for her life. You did well to find shelter, young man—I only hope and pray that it is not too late to save her. Did you have to carry her far?”

“Quite a way,” Reinmar said, his anxiety greatly renewed by the monk’s uncompromising diagnosis. “I was very lucky to find the farmhouse, because I was utterly lost. I’m sure that I couldn’t have found my way back to my wagon. Is she so very ill? My steward thought that she would recover, although that was before she went wandering off after the storm had soaked her clothes.” He made room so that the two newcomers could dry their wet robes in the full heat of the flames, while the monk who had remained standing threw more wood to the hungry fire.

“It’s a bad day to be out and about,” the kneeling monk remarked. “The storm caught us all by surprise, it seems, and it certainly has not helped your friend. She has been wet through, and then exhausted. If she was not in mortal danger before, she is now. I’m Brother Noel, by the way, and my companion is Brother Almeric. Our house is on the far side of the lake. Perhaps you caught a glimpse of it as you came down the slope.” His tone was amicable enough, but slightly guarded.

Reinmar knew that the two men did not know quite what to make of him, although Zygmund must have told them his name and profession. He repeated it anyway, for the sake of emphasis as well as politeness.

“I’m Reinmar Wieland, wine merchant of Eilhart. The girl is named Marcilla, so her brother told me. She has hardly said two words herself since we rescued her from the louts who had attacked her in a nearby village.” He looked down fearfully, knowing that he had no experience on which he might base an accurate assessment of her plight.

“Wieland the vintner?” Brother Almeric said, thoughtfully. “We used to know a man of that name once, did we not, Brother Noel?”

“We did,” his companion confirmed. Reinmar wondered whether “we” was supposed to signify the two monks themselves, or merely their community.

“My grandfather Luther used to visit these parts regularly,” Reinmar informed them. In spite of his concern for Marcilla he knew that he must keep in mind that he had another agenda to follow. “Unfortunately, he fell ill and had to resign the management of the business to my father Gottfried before my father had been fully trained, and he lost contact with some of our former suppliers. Now that I am old enough to play my part, we hope that we might regain some of the trade that we lost.”

“Indeed?” said Brother Noel. “We are inexperienced in matters of trade, I fear. We ourselves have little intercourse with the villages in neighbouring valleys, although the man whose house we are in has always been a good neighbour. He does a good deal of bartering on our behalf, and we have other friends in the region.” He spoke as straightforwardly as Reinmar had, but Reinmar was sure that he knew perfectly well what “the trade that we lost” might mean.

“I fear that I have eaten all the bread,” Reinmar said, “but there is a little meat, and the cup of wine the farmer’s wife brought for Marcilla is virtually untouched.” He was still looking anxiously down at the girl, and he reached out a hand to touch her troubled face as he spoke her name. She was very feverish, now that the fire had warmed her again.

“We have bread of our own,” Almeric retorted, gruffly, “and wine too. Better wine than this.”

“Indeed?” said Reinmar. “I thought this an unusually pleasant vintage. I bought a healthy fraction of the crop from which it came this very morning.” He only hesitated for an instant before adding: “If you have better, I’d be glad to taste it.”

Brother Almeric did not seem enthusiastic to respond to that request, but he looked to his companion for advice.

“Did you, perchance, come here in search of the monastery, Master Wieland?” Brother Noel asked, lightly but warily. “Our wines had a certain reputation once, among connoisseurs of sweet liqueurs as well as those who knew their medicinal value.”

“I had no idea that the monastery existed,” Reinmar assured them. “Had the gypsy girl not led me such a dance I’d have passed the valley without ever knowing that it was here—but I’m always interested in good wines. I am, as you will readily appreciate, a mere apprentice still in the process of learning the trade, but I’m eager to build the family business up to its former profitability and esteem. Can you help her? Zygmund said that you had some skill in curing—that is why he fetched you, is it not?”

While Reinmar was making this careful speech Almeric had opened his satchel and had taken out the end of a stick of bread, somewhat begrimed, and a small stone bottle. The bottle’s stopper was securely clamped in place with leaden wire.

“We can help her,” Noel said, “if you will consent to allow Brother Almeric to give a modest draught of this liquor to the girl. I do not think that it will enable her to recover her senses now, but it will work to her advantage in the long run. It has remarkable powers of revivification, and the members of our order have always enjoyed unusually good health.”

It was not until these words were spoken that the full import of what he was doing came home to Reinmar. He had been playing his part in spite of his anxiety, and had led himself into a trap. What Marcilla was being offered, he realised, must be one of the dark wines. If the judgement of Gottfried Wieland and Machar von Spurzheim could be trusted, he was being asked to let the monks dose her with the very essence of evil. On the other hand, he thought, the only people he knew who had actually tasted the dark wine were Luther and Albrecht, both of whom spoke of it in far warmer terms and both of whom were still alive to tell the tale. Neither, it seemed, had become a hopeless addict, and neither had come to any swift or permanent harm as a result of its use.

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.