Chapter Twenty-Two

They passed through the wood without incident, marching steadily in spite of their wretched state. They found a dozen gypsies waiting with the mended wagon, including Rollo and Tarn. The travellers were astonished and displeased to see the manner in which Marcilla was dressed, but Godrich—seeing the parlous condition that Reinmar and Vaedecker were in—asked them to wait for an explanation.

Exhaustion caught up with Reinmar almost as soon as he reached the cart, but he managed to give the steward a muttered and sketchy account of what had occurred.

The sergeant confirmed his story at every stage with swift nods. “We must go, and go quickly,” Vaedecker said, when Reinmar had finished. “The monk poured scorn on the notion that they might chase us, but the attendants of the underworld were only too ready to fight, even when they had no weapons to hand. If they stay where they are it will be because they can work greater mischief there. Can you persuade the gypsy and his chieftain to let us take his son and daughter with us—or, better still, to come with us to Eilhart himself?”

“I’ll try,” Godrich said. “But you must let Sigurd see to your wounds while I do it.”

Until that moment, Reinmar had not noticed that he was wounded, but when he took stock his bruises and grazes seemed trivial enough.

Vaedecker asked for water in which they might both bathe, and insisted that Reinmar clean himself. “We must put on our spare clothes,” the soldier said. “A man who keeps the blood and filth of his enemies about his person is asking for infection. Ulick, you must ask one of the women to see to it that Marcilla is bathed and properly dressed.”

The boy nodded, and drew Marcilla away while Godrich went into a huddle with Rollo, Tarn and an older man. By the time that Reinmar was washed and dressed in clean clothes the discussion was over, and Godrich was able to report back to him. Reinmar had put on his belt again, and his pouch with it, although both were flecked with drying blood. He had no intention of leaving the pouch to one side, or transferring its contents to another, while it still held the phial that he had taken from the storehouse in the underworld. Nor had he any intention of telling Vaedecker or Godrich that he had the phial. For the present, it was his secret and his alone.

“They’re scared,” Godrich eventually reported, meaning the gypsies. “They’ve seen the body of the beastman. They know that the local people will think them in league with the monsters, even though the elder has no more idea what the monsters are, or why they are here, than we have. I have managed to persuade him—not without difficulty—that there is no privilege in being chosen, and that the path to the hidden valley leads only to death and destruction. He says that we can look after Ulick and Marcilla, since we are willing, but that Rollo and Tarn have work to do, spreading the word of what has occurred among the gypsy folk. There must be a meeting of some sort, it seems—and petty magic to be worked, I dare say. They do not know what the result will be, but Rollo says that he will come for his kin as soon as he can, when the time is right. I agreed to that—don’t contradict me, Master Reinmar, I beg of you, whatever your own intentions may be. We must go, and swiftly. I don’t know what we shall find at home, but we must hope that your father has the situation under control.”

Vaedecker, who had been listening, said: “Whatever control is exerted now, there will surely be trouble soon. What we must hope is that von Spurzheim has gathered an adequate fighting force and that it is ready to march. This is war, my friend, and the crucial conflict will be upon us far sooner than we had expected.”

Godrich contented himself with a nod byway of reply, and he went back to the gypsies to bid them a friendly farewell. Then he got up onto the cart, and called out that anyone who intended to ride should get aboard. The only one who did not respond was Sigurd; Matthias Vaedecker was far too tired to walk.

Almost as soon as they were under way it began to rain again, but it was a mere drizzle compared with the storm that had hurried them into their confrontation with the beastmen. The four who were riding on the cart with the casks found shelter enough under pieces of the ruined awning, which they draped over their shoulders. It was not strictly necessary for them to huddle together, but Ulick and Marcilla wanted to be as close as possible, and Reinmar wanted to be close to Marcilla, so the three of them ended up side by side.

As the horses picked up speed Marcilla asked Reinmar what had happened to her before she awoke in the underworld and put on the bloodstained robe. Reinmar was not certain at first how much he ought to tell her, but in the end he decided that she might need to know the truth, so he told her the full story, in as much detail as he could remember. Ulick listened raptly—and so did Matthias Vaedecker, although he kept his eyes half-closed.

“I remember the flower,” Marcilla confessed at one point. “I thought I had dreamed it, and that in my dream I was a flower myself, with no desire but to meet and merge with my mate.”

“It was the wine of dreams,” Reinmar said. “It is seductive, but it is evil. Whatever you have been told by its consumers is a lie.”

“But you are in the trade yourself,” Ulick objected. “You told me so.”

“So I did, and so I am,” Reinmar agreed, quietly. “But I am no consumer. I am beginning to understand now, what a wreck the wine of dreams has made of my grandfather, and I do not think that it has done his brother any good. Had my father been less of a man than he is, I too might have had the sickness in me that might have called me to the valley.”

“You found it,” Ulick reminded him. “It’s said-”

“Because I was with Marcilla,” Reinmar was quick to put in. “She was the one who led us there, as you led Sigurd.”

“Who was it that brought the message while you were tasting the wine, Master Wieland?” Matthias Vaedecker said suddenly. “Anyone could have told them that I had entered the valley, and that I am a soldier without colours—but who told them that I am Machar von Spurzheim’s man?”

“I did not see the messenger; only the monk who conveyed the news to Brother Noel,” Reinmar answered. “Rumour moves rapidly in these parts. It isn’t surprising that news of von Spurzheim’s arrival in Eilhart travelled as quickly as we did. Anyone could have carried it.”

“Your great-uncle’s housekeeper is a gypsy,” Vaedecker reminded him unnecessarily “She was not there when we arrested him.”

“Eilhart is a market town of two thousand souls, and an important river port,” Reinmar reminded the soldier, in his turn. “There are always travellers passing through—hundreds of them, brought by road and river alike. Anyone could have brought the news.”

“Including Albrecht’s son, Wirnt,” Vaedecker said. “Could it have been him?”

Reinmar was momentarily at a loss for words. By the time he realised that his silence might be as eloquent as any confession it was too late to speak.

“Don’t worry, Master Wieland,” the sergeant said. “I mention the name because I trust you now, not because I don’t. You have proved yourself to me, and I’ll gladly tell von Spurzheim that we can rely on you. I don’t blame you for letting the name rest unspoken, given that you are kin—but I think you know now how dangerous that kind of kin might be.”

“I think I do,” Reinmar agreed.

“When it comes to a fight, Master Wieland—and it will—you had better remember that danger. The greatest power our enemies have is not that they can release daemons upon the world, but that they can twist their knives inside the hearts of those we know and love, turning cousin against cousin, brother against brother.”

While he spoke, Reinmar felt Marcilla’s head slump against his shoulder, and knew that she had gone to sleep again. That made him very anxious, for there was no way to know how natural her sleep might be or what dreadful dreams might visit her therein—but he knew that he ought to pay attention to what Vaedecker was saying.

“Can men like Noel and Almeric really release daemons upon the world?” Reinmar asked, wonderingly.

“They are pawns in the game,” Vaedecker told him. “As are you and I—but even pawns are sometimes granted an insight into the greater reality that underlies the surface of the world we know. You and I have been granted an insight of sorts today, although I don’t know whether we should count ourselves lucky. We have seen a kind of garden, tended by men on behalf of something far more powerful and far more playful.”

“Playful?” Reinmar questioned. “You think that a nightmare like that might only be play?”

Vaedecker’s half-closed eyelids widened for a moment. “Do you take encouragement from a word like that?” he said. You should not. Quite the reverse, in fact. It might not matter so much to a world like ours that there are evil gods, no matter how powerful they might be, were they not playful as well.

“I have heard the table talk of fat shopkeepers and petty aristocrats, my friend. If there are evil gods, they say, who have the power to snuff out our lives with a breath, why do they not do so? If they can unleash daemons upon the world, why do they not send forth irresistible armies of them? If they have powerful sorcerers at their beck and call, why are such magicians not forever knocking on our doors and demanding tribute? If they delight in turning men into beasts and monsters, how is it that there are men in the world at all, let alone men who eat and drink as well as we do, and enjoy such respect from our servants and our neighbours?

“The real tragedy, my newly-hatched hero, is not that the evil gods are powerful but that they are playful. I do not know whether they hate us or love us, or which of those possibilities ought to be reckoned the worse, but I do know that they like to tease us and tantalise us and test us and terrify us. Yes, they can send daemons into the world, but they do so with exceeding discretion. Yes, they delight in turning men into beasts and monsters, but they delight even more in confusion. Yes, they have powerful sorcerers at their beck and call, but they delight in letting men of that kind hope and believe, absurdly, that they are the masters, and gods and daemons their servants. They are playful, and that is the most horrible thing about them, for all the terror we experience and all the blood we shed is but play to them.

“I think you saw today exactly how playful the evil gods can be, even if you did not understand the significance of what you saw. If you think we have escaped the god who made that garden, think again. You might be more securely in his playful grip now than you would have been had you drunk your fill, and more, of the wine the monks tried to sell you.”

“You did not seem to think so while we were climbing that stair,” Reinmar answered him. “You seemed to think that escape was possible then, and I did not see you pause before seizing the opportunity.”

“I have been in the game for a lifetime,” Vaedecker said, wearily. “I know nothing else—and I know, too, that once a man has taken arms against the dark gods he had better do everything he can to stay in the game and win what victories he can, else he will suffer more terribly than he can imagine. I am trying to warn you that you will not always find the fight as easy as it was today. All you have really accomplished is to raise the stakes for conflicts yet to come.”

“Now you sound like Brother Noel,” Reinmar retorted. “I would never have taken you for one of those profoundly solemn men who think that the best thing of all is not to be born, and after that to die young!”

“I’m not,” Vaedecker said. “I’m a pawn who understands what it means to be a pawn, a fighting man who knows how desperate a real fight is. So far, Master Wieland, you have killed a few old men armed with garden tools—but you’ll find that you cannot stop at that. Even if you had not insisted on bringing the girl away, the powers ranged against us would never let you stop at that. The real fight is yet to come, and when it comes to you, you’ll have to watch out for the enemy within and the enemy behind as well as the enemy before you.”

Reinmar realised that the soldier was indeed trying to give him the best advice he could, not to frighten him but to prepare him. But he realised, too, that the kind of fight the soldier was anticipating was not the only one he had to look forward to. There would be a conflict of a far more intimate kind awaiting him at home, when his father would want an account of everything that he had brought back with him, and every transaction he had made with suppliers of every kind. That was, for the moment, the prospect that filled him with greater trepidation, for it seemed far more vexatious than any business that could be conducted with a bloodstained sword.

“If they will not have us in Eilhart,” he murmured in the ear of the sleeping gypsy, far too softly to be heard by anyone else, “then we shall try our luck in Marienburg.”

He was astonished when Ulick immediately spoke out, as if in reply, but when he heard what was said he realised that the boy had been listening as carefully as he to everything that Matthias Vaedecker had said.

“You should not have come here, sir,” the gypsy boy said to the soldier. “You should not have followed my sister when she answered the call. This may be a game to you, but it is life and death to us. You should not have interfered.”

“If we had not interfered,” the sergeant replied, “you and she might be lying dead in the shadow of a barn, beaten to death by louts. If we had not continued to interfere, your throats might have been torn out by wolf-men. And if we had not insisted on interfering till the very end, your sister’s guts would be incubating a monstrous plant while her flesh turned slowly to stone. A little gratitude would not come amiss.”

“You don’t understand,” the boy said, although he spoke uneasily. “Our kind is not your kind.”

Your father thinks well enough of my kind to entrust you to my care,” the soldier pointed out. “Whatever he thought before of calls and choosings, he has a different opinion now.”

“But you have said yourself that it is not finished,” Ulick countered. “Because of what you’ve done, there will be a terrible fight. You’ve brought a curse upon our heads.”

“No,” Reinmar said. “That isn’t so. What I did, I did in order to lift a curse—and if I must fight again to save us, I shall do it. And again, and again, and again. I have found something worth fighting for.”

Mercifully, Vaedecker did not challenge him as to whether he had indeed lifted any curse, or who might be included in the word “us’. Instead, the sergeant let his heavy eyelids descend all the way. Even though the cart was rattling more than it usually did as it raced down a slope and the rain beat relentlessly upon the cloth that covered his shoulders, the soldier let his head fall forward upon his knees.

Reinmar knew that the sergeant could not possibly be any more tired than he was himself, but his own thoughts were too confused and restless to allow him even to contemplate sleep—so he sat where he was, keeping very still for Marcilla’s sake, and tried with all his might to think of the future, and all the possibilities it held. When his right hand began to tremble, he told himself that it was only the chill of the rain, but he knew that it was a lie. He did not feel cold at all.

So what if I have killed a man, he said to himself? And if there were three, how is that any worse than if there were only one? Would they not have killed me, had I paused to think of mercy, however weak and badly armed they were?

But the hand continued to tremble, and would not stop no matter how he hugged it to his breast.

It was a long way home, and it seemed much longer. He fretted in this manner through every tedious inch of it—but in the end, he did come safely into sight of the lights of Eilhart. Reinmar knew that he would find his father worried and anxious, and not at all prepared to welcome a gypsy as his son’s beloved, and he knew that the battle of wills that lay ahead of him at home would be long and hard—but that was a battle he knew how to fight. As for the others of which Vaedecker had warned him, there was nothing he could do but wait until they began, and learn to fight them as he went along, as best he could.