“Master Wieland is right,” he said. “The scoundrels who set upon these folk
last night are probably lurking in the pines, brooding on their defeat and
awaiting their opportunity. We have to keep the boy and the girl until we’re
well away from here.” Without waiting for Godrich to comment he addressed Rollo
directly, saying: “Tell your elders that we’ll look after them well until they
can be collected in perfect safety.”
It sounded like generosity, but Reinmar knew better. The sergeant had heard
from the witch hunter what Reinmar had heard from his grandfather: that the
source of the dark wine might be protected by magic, but that a way thereto
could be opened for those who “heard a call” and anyone who accompanied them “to
see them safely to their destination’.
Reinmar did not feel able to criticise the soldier for his deceptiveness,
given that he was keeping his own counsel, but he did feel that his own motives
were far purer. He wanted to know what all the fuss was about, and he was
determined to keep an open mind about all the matters of which Vaedecker seemed
so fearfully certain.
“Very well,” said Godrich, accepting defeat. “I suppose we shall be able to
conduct our business just as well—and if your assurances are to be trusted,
our guests have already played their part in guaranteeing us a good return in
these parts. We shall be glad to do as you ask, Rollo.”
“A thousand thanks,” the gypsy said. “You are good men, and we shall not
forget this.”
“How is the girl, really?” Godrich asked the sergeant, when Rollo had gone.
“Very poorly,” Vaedecker admitted. “But Reinmar may be right. If we can keep
her well wrapped up, she might well be safer with us for the next day or two
than anywhere else in this treacherous land—and she’s a rare beauty.” He cast
a knowing sideways glance at Reinmar as he made the last pronouncement, but
Reinmar looked away and pretended that he had not heard.
By the time the horses had been fed, watered and hitched to the wagon Reinmar
could see that Godrich’s mood had darkened somewhat. The breakfast they had
eaten, while by no means good, should have made him feel better, but any effect
of that sort had been more than outweighed by his gloomy contemplation of the
early morning weather. The northern sky, from which the last traces of night had
still to be erased, was clear enough, but the grey pall that had squatted down
upon the mountain peaks the night before had intensified even further. In the
west it was so dark as to seem black even by day; in the east, with the sun
directly behind it, its leaden gloom was only slightly alleviated by an ochreous
yellow tint.
“Storms are gathering,” the steward opined. “The clouds will spit them out
like great gobs of catarrh. If we run into one this afternoon, after we’ve left
the vineyard-”
“We’ll pull into the shelter of the pines and raise the canopy,” Reinmar
said. The underside of the cart was fitted with three iron bands which could be
removed and arched over the body of the wagon, secured in slots on the
side-walls to serve as a frame for a protective awning. The awning would be able
to withstand a buffeting wind, provided that the wind’s force was broken by surrounding trees, and it would keep rain and hail at bay if it had
a little help from the overhanging crowns of mature conifers.
“It would be better by far if we did not need to,” the steward muttered.
“Still, the storms are always localised, and usually brief. The likelihood is
that they will miss us altogether, and will not trouble us for long if we are
unlucky enough to run into one.”
Although Reinmar had been obliged to volunteer to walk with Sigurd and
Sergeant Vaedecker in order to lighten the draught-horses’ load he was not very
enthusiastic to do so. He was relieved when the soldier assured him that he and
Sigurd had bodyweight enough between them to render his slim measure irrelevant.
Ulick also pronounced himself capable of walking, but Vaedecker disagreed with
that too, so Reinmar and the gypsy boy ended up sitting to either side of the
unconscious Marcilla, helping to make sure that she was not thrown about
whenever the wagon-wheels slipped from one rut into another, or had to negotiate
a fallen branch.
They were so high in the hills by now that carts were relatively scarce, and
those used by the local farmers had all been home-made, usually with scant
regard to the imperial standard gauge. The result of this was that the deep ruts
that were worn by conventionally-built carts into the fabric of
conventionally-built roads, which ordinary traffic followed like inset rails,
were replaced hereabouts by a confusion of different rut-patterns. Even that
would not have been so bad had the roads not been mostly used by riders and men
afoot, whose hoof- and boot-prints blurred and broke the ruts. Although
pack-trains were uncommon this far from the nearest pass through the mountains
their occasional passage had wrought even greater havoc with the surface, the
weight of the packs having forced the iron-shod hooves of the mules deep into
the rain-softened surface, creating a vast and disorderly expanse of shallow
pits. This made the labour of the two horses pulling Reinmar’s cart that much
harder, and made Godrich’s task as driver four or five times as difficult as it
was at the best of times.
The continued threat of the clouds would probably have made the steward’s
mood very dark indeed by early afternoon had they not had such a good morning at
the vineyard. As Rollo had promised, the harvest had been more abundant than the quality of the season had led them to expect, and the work that had gone
into the making of the wine had been artful as well as neatly-timed.
“This is wine that will mature very well indeed,” the steward confided to
Reinmar. “It is for vintages such as this that cellars were intended. This will
be a real investment.”
The grower knew this too, of course, but Reinmar had not forgotten what
Gottfried had told him about the value of their virtual monopoly. He felt that
he had given his generosity quite enough indulgence for one day. He struck what
seemed to him—and to Godrich—to be an exceptionally good bargain for an
exceptionally large purchase.
The success required a good deal of rearrangement in order that Marcilla
could still be comfortably accommodated, but that was accomplished without
requiring too much of Sigurd’s mighty shoulders, and the party was on its way
again a few hours after noon.
By this time, the girl seemed a little better, and Reinmar was somewhat
reassured that he had done the right thing. She opened her eyes briefly when
Ulick fed some water to her, but she was not yet ready to take anything solid.
There was no sign of her other relatives.
“Where will you go for the winter, when you are all united again?” Reinmar
asked the boy, when they were once again making steady progress southwestwards,
towards the furthest of the vineyards at which they were due to call.
“I don’t know,” Ulick said. “Sometimes we make a winter camp and provision it
before the snows arrive, but the hunting has been so bad this year that we would
have too little meat to salt away. We might make a trek northwestwards, to join
up with other clan-members, or we might go due north into the lowlands to find
what lodgings we can in the towns. People do not like us there, but they are
never as violent as those madmen last night.”
The boy did not sound sure of any of these possible objectives, and he left
Reinmar with the impression that there were others carefully unmentioned.
“Winters are usually mild in Eilhart itself,” Reinmar observed. “If the
uplands have a bad time, though, we feel the effects in spring when the
meltwater swells the Schilder. River traffic can be halted for days on end, and
if the thaw comes quickly to the hills the river always bursts its banks somewhere. My father and I have never
been flooded ourselves, but the parts of the town below the docks are sometimes
swamped. Can you still tell whether your sister is dreaming?”
Ulick looked at him a little sharply, but accepted the question as common
curiosity.
“She is calm,” he said, “except…”
After a few moments’ silence, Reinmar said: “Except what?”
The boy shook his head, but he obviously knew how discourteous it would seem
if he refused a reply, so he said: “There is something she and I must do when
she is well enough.”
Reinmar knew that it was a risk, but he decided to be bold. “She has heard a
call,” he said. “You and she have work still to do, bringing in another
harvest.”
The boy looked at him suspiciously. “I am in the trade,” Reinmar reminded
him. “My grandfather is Luther Wieland, whose task it once was to start the wine
of dreams on its long journey to Marienburg, via the Schilder and the Reik. My
great-uncle went to Marienburg to become a scholar, guided in his ambition by
dark wine.”
“Why is the soldier with you?” the boy asked.
“My father thought the cart needed extra protection. There are rumours of
monsters abroad in the hills.”
For a moment or two he feared that the boy would dismiss the rumours, and the
reason with them, but Ulick’s eventual reaction was more surprising than that.
“Yes,” he said. “I suppose that was wise. We have as much to fear as anyone
else, it seems, although I do not know why they are gathering. Do you?”
“Do I know why the monsters are gathering?” Reinmar repeated, not sure he had
grasped the true significance of the question. “How would I?”
Ulick shrugged. “Perhaps no one does,” he said. “Marcilla is calm enough, I
suppose. I think she would sense it if we had anything to fear… although she
gave us no warning of that mob last night. Perhaps, since she heard the call,
she has grown deaf to aught else.”
“What kind of monsters are gathering?” Reinmar asked. “The rumours that have
reached Eilhart are vague.”
“The kind that cannot be safely glimpsed except at the limit of vision,” the
boy replied, unhelpfully—but then he added: “Beastmen of a wolfish stripe.
More dangerous in packs than those which have no discipline at all, though not as reckless. This is
wineland, after all, and the very heart of it.”
“Have you seen them?” Reinmar asked, wondering why his jaw suddenly felt
slightly numb.
“Only in my dreams,” the boy replied, glumly. “The worst place of all, some
would say—for I could not see them so clearly in my mind’s eye were I not
fated to look into their actual faces. It were best, I think, if we could obey
the call quickly, but Marcilla is hurt and my father has not managed to catch up
with us. Who could have thought that foresters with axe-handles and farm-boys
with rakes and pitchforks could disrupt the plans of masters such as ours? What
a world we live in!”
“What a world,” Reinmar agreed. His mouth had gone so dry that he had to take
a swig of water from the jug he kept beside him. He offered it to Ulick, but the
boy shook his head, pointing instead to his sister. Reinmar nodded, and tried to
bring the neck of the jug to her lips.
She had responded before, but weakly. This time, she did more than open her
lips reflexively. As the water splashed upon her teeth she opened her eyes, and
was able to raise her head slightly. Reinmar immediately reached out to help
her, and with his support she managed to raise herself up even further, so that
she could drink more deeply and more comfortably. By the time she had slaked her
thirst she was definitely awake.
She did not attempt to say anything, but she looked up into Reinmar’s face,
met his eyes, and did not look away. She looked at him as if she had always
known him and always trusted him. It seemed to Reinmar, in fact, that she was
looking at him as if she loved him.
He knew that it must be wishful thinking, but he was convinced that it was
not entirely so. She was definitely looking at him, languidly and very tenderly.
He felt his heart lurch in response, and felt a lump form in his throat, and
knew that he loved her too. If this was how it felt to be the victim of a magic
spell, he thought, it was not so bad—but he did not think that love could
really be reckoned a kind of magic.
“We’re safe, Marcilla,” Ulick said. “This is Reinmar Wieland, son of the wine
merchant to whom the vintage we helped prepare was promised. He has collected
his portion of the crop, having stepped in to save us when the local louts set
about us last evening. Father will collect us as soon as he is able, but for now we
are in good and sympathetic hands. We shall do what we need to do when we can.”
Marcilla smiled, but paused for a moment longer before testing her voice. “I
have seen him in my dreams,” was what she murmured.
She said it lightly, as if it were of little significance, but Reinmar had
just been listening to Ulick’s account of what his own dream visions might
signify. “Well,” he said, “you can see me now in the flesh. The dream has come
true.”
“Not yet,” she murmured.
What Reinmar inferred from that was that she had seen more in her dreams than
his face. However deaf the call that she had heard might have made her to other
influences, it obviously had not made her blind to other possibilities. “You
have nothing to fear,” he assured her. “While you are with me, I will do my
utmost to see that you come to no harm, and if there is anywhere you wish to go
I shall do my very best to see that you reach your destination safely.”
“Thank you,” she said, faintly, “but I have not so far to go, now, and time
is not yet pressing.”
Her flawless face still seemed perfect, even in the unkind light, but her
flesh was suddenly startled by the fall of a raindrop, which struck her upon the
cheek. As it ran away like a tear another caught her on the forehead.
Reinmar suppressed a curse as he looked up in some alarm. The cloud directly
overhead seemed as featurelessly leaden as ever, but he could see darker vapours
snaking across the sky from the south in the grip of some high capricious wind,
and he guessed what was about to happen. At the same time, the realisation
struck his steward.