“People are saying that it’s your grandfather’s fault,” she informed him,
hesitantly. “They say that he first got sick because he dabbled in magic. Some
even say that your Great-Uncle Albrecht is some sort of necromancer and that his
housekeeper is a witch.”
“That’s nonsense,” Reinmar assured her. “Albrecht’s just a harmless old man.
His housekeeper might be a gypsy, but she’s just a housekeeper. My grandfather
just got sick—magic had nothing to do with it.”
“I don’t think you should go out with the wagon next week,” she said. “It’s
not safe.”
“We’re wine merchants,” Reinmar said, patiently. “All but the dregs of this
year’s harvest will have been trampled and casked by now, and last year’s will
have matured in the wood. We need to restock the cellar. It’s just a matter of
doing the usual rounds, filling up the cart. I’ll have Godrich with me, and one
of the labourers—probably Sigurd. Godrich and I have both been schooled in
swordplay and Sigurd’s practically a giant. Nobody’s going to attack us—and if
there are Reiksguard cavalrymen and foot soldiers in the region the roads will
be even safer than usual. I’ll be back inside a fortnight.”
“There are tales of monsters in the woods,” Marguerite persisted.
“There have always been tales of monsters in the woods,” Reinmar countered,
“and monsters in the mountains, and monsters everywhere else, but who do you
know who’s ever been harmed by one? All travellers tell tall tales, Marguerite—I’ll probably bring back a couple myself—but the fact that they always live to tell them suggests that the danger isn’t quite as bad as they
make out. I’ll be fine.”
Marguerite would probably have said more, but the door to the shop opened
again, and when she saw that it was Gottfried she suddenly remembered whatever
errand she had been running for her mother and beat a hasty retreat, leaving
father and son alone.
“Have they let you go?” Reinmar asked, awkwardly.
“They never arrested me,” Gottfried was quick to insist. “They wanted my
advice, and I gave it freely.”
“They searched the cellars,” Reinmar pointed out.
“As I invited them to do. We have nothing to hide—nothing. I wanted to make
that clear.”
“Everyone says that more soldiers are coming,” Reinmar said, tentatively. “Do
you know why?”
“Politics,” Gottfried said, succinctly. “There is trouble in Marienburg, and
the Empire is always intensely interested in trouble in Marienburg. Even after
all this time, the secession still rankles. There are many in Altdorf who would
be exceedingly glad to welcome Marienburg back into the Imperial fold, even if
the opportunity were bought in blood. The witch hunter has friends in the
Reiksguard who are prepared to indulge his whims, it seems, and he thinks that
he might find something hereabouts to give him useful leverage over the burgers
of Schilderheim and Marienburg.”
“The mysterious source of the dark wine, in which we do not deal,” Reinmar
said.
Gottfried looked at him sharply. “You’ve been talking to my father,” he said
disgustedly. “What did he tell you?”
“That there is no secret pass through the mountains,” Reinmar said,
offhandedly, “and that the dark wine isn’t as black as some would like to paint
it.”
Gottfried scowled. “Old fool,” he said. “I’ve decided to bring forward the
buying trip. You leave tomorrow. It’s been a good summer—the harvest must have
come in on time, and the more industrious vintagers will be ahead of their
normal timetable. You won’t be expected so soon, so Godrich might have to
improvise a little, but he and I will plan a route tonight.”
“You want me out of the way,” Reinmar said, flatly.
Gottfried hesitated momentarily, but then nodded his head. “Yes, I do,” he
admitted. “We have nothing to hide and should have nothing to fear, but people hereabouts have long memories and agile
tongues. Von Spurzheim will want to talk to Luther, and Albrecht too—and they
may not find it easy to persuade him that they cannot help him. Old animosities
might flare up again, and things could become unpleasant. I don’t think anything
bad will happen, but I want you out of harm’s way, just in case.”
“I want to know what this is all about,” Reinmar told him, firmly. “If I’m
old enough to take a full part in the business, I’m old enough to be let in on
all its secrets.”
“There isn’t any secret.”
“Yes there is,” Reinmar insisted. “Or there was, once—and however dead and
buried it seemed to be this time yesterday, it’s definitely not dead and buried
now. You might be able to stop Luther talking to me, but you can’t stop Albrecht
and Wirnt—and if you won’t tell me what this is all about, they will.”
“Who’s Wirnt?”
“Your cousin. Albrecht’s son.”
Gottfried raised an inquisitive eyebrow, and seemed to be on the point of
asking how Reinmar knew that—but he had already deduced that Reinmar had been
talking to Luther. In the end, he sighed and said: “I’ve never known the half of
it myself, and I’ve always been glad of that—but I suppose the time has come
when it might be more dangerous to remain ignorant than to know what my father
knows, and perhaps what Albrecht knows too. The authorities in Marienburg seem
to have stamped out their end of the trade in dark wine, at least for the time
being, but they won’t be satisfied with that. They want the source eliminated,
and having traced it back as far as this they won’t be in any mood to stop short
of their goal. If we can’t help them, they’re likely to assume that the ‘can’t’
is really a ‘won’t’, so we must hope that we can. You’d better come with me
while I talk to my father—Godrich can mind the shop for an hour or two, given
that it’s so quiet.”
Reinmar felt a thrill of triumph as he realised that for the first time in
his life he had forced his father’s hand. He went up the stairs far more lightly
than his heavily-treading father, although he had only had a little more rest.
Luther seemed distinctly uneasy when his son and grandson confronted him—unsurprisingly, given that Gottfried was in such a grim mood. The old man’s gaze flickered uneasily from one to the
other. “I couldn’t help it,” he said defensively, shrinking back beneath the
coverlet. “It wasn’t me who let him in.”
Gottfried was startled, but not completely astonished. “The stout stranger
came back,” he quickly deduced. “Albrecht’s brat. He wouldn’t take no for an
answer—not from me, at any rate. He’s not still here, I hope?”
“No, he’s not,” said Reinmar. “I saw him as he left. He’s gone into the hills
to hide—unless he decided to call on his father first.”
“What did you tell him?” Gottfried asked of Luther.
“What could I tell him?” the old man retorted, resentfully.“ We have no dark
wine, and we don’t know where it’s made.”
“And what did he tell you?” Gottfried demanded.
“That his mother, when he found her, seemed hardly old enough to have given
birth to him—but that she did acknowledge him, and that he continued to see
her in spite of rumours that she was involved in dark magic. She was proud of
him, it seems, and told him not to hate his father too much for having gone away
and left him in the care of strangers. She introduced him to the wine. He said
that the dreams were like coming home—as if they filled a hole in his heart
that he had never quite been aware of before. It was as if he had never properly
begun to live, until that moment. It was as if… but you have heard such talk
before, and did not like it then.”
“I haven’t,” Reinmar put in, quietly.
Luther was still staring at his son, waiting for permission to continue.
Gottfried only hesitated briefly before he said: “Tell him everything.”
Luther nodded, and made an obvious effort to collect himself, then shifted
his gaze to his grandson. “The dark wine is also called the wine of dreams,” he
said, in a voice that was strangely dry as well as weak. “There are other wines
from the same source, all darker of hue than the sweetest Reikish and all of
which give rise to dreams, but those who know what they are about speak of dark
wine in the singular, and the wine of dreams likewise. A few who have had the
opportunity to tire of the wine of dreams manage to cultivate an appetite for
one or other of its peculiar kin, but their use has always been… esoteric.”
Reinmar wished that he might elaborate on that, but he did not.
“The wine of dreams is the kindest and most generous of the vintages produced
by its makers,” Luther continued, “and connoisseurs deem it the very essence of
luxury, because the greatest luxury of all is youth and dark wine is a veritable
elixir of youth. It has the power to preserve beauty, and zest, and a particular
kind of innocence that none but the guilty can appreciate. Is it magic? Perhaps.
Who can tell where nature ends and magic begins? All wine intoxicates, and it is
surely conceivable that dark wine is merely the finest and purest intoxicant of
all. Albrecht used to write to me, in the days when we were still as close as
brothers ought to be, that he had heard scholars swear there is no magic in dark
wine at all, while others praised it as the greatest magic known to man. A third
party damned it as a snare—an alluring gateway to unspeakable evil—but
Albrecht never kept company with men of that kind while he was pretending to be
a scholar in Marienburg. Nor did I, in Eilhart.”
The old man paused to take a drink; it was Gottfried who helped him with the
cup. This time, it was hock rather than water, but Luther still looked as if he
would have preferred something far stronger.
“You would not think to look at me now that I was once a man of superabundant
youth,” Luther went on, “but I was. I never thought any less of myself because
of it, although my father was a man of my son’s stripe—worse, in a way, for he
never allowed any kind of liquor to pass his own lips. It needs a sober man to
deal in wine, he used to say. Cultivate a liking for the stock, and you’ll pour
your profits down your throat. You might think your father’s love of moderation
stern enough, Reinmar, but you never had the opportunity to measure him against
a real pillar of rectitude.
“Albrecht took the brunt of our father’s wrath and disapproval, and it drove
him away. I was younger, and I learned to be sly. I was a drinker long before he
found me out, and once I had tasted dark wine I lost my appetite for most lesser
vices. But he did find me out, alas, and he was not an easy man to best in a
dispute. He had his way, although he had to steal my own son to secure his final
victory—and his gain was our loss, for my father never once considered the
possibility of refusing to trade in the dark wine and its kin, which is what
your own dear father did as soon as he had the whip hand.”
“It was the only way,” Gottfried muttered.
“Was it?” Luther asked, sceptically. “What consternation there must have been
in Marienburg when you made that decision! But only for a while. As the
Schilder’s assiduous lock-builders discovered long ago, the flow of a river can
never be entirely gentled. When the spring meltwater runs from the mountains the
gates must be opened wide, and the worst floods can only be diverted; you can
only protect land here by diverting the floodwater there. The dark wine was like
the Schilder; frustrated in its normal course, it only found other channels to
the Reik—and once there, it vanished into the irresistible tide of river
traffic.”
“This is no use,” Gottfried butted in. “We need something to give the
witchfinder. The only way to get him off our backs is to send him further along
the trail. You must have some idea where the dark wine is produced, and by
whom.”
“I don’t,” Luther said, stubbornly.
“I don’t believe you,” Gottfried said. “Albrecht went to Marienburg, but you
stayed here. You went up into the hills on yearly buying trips just as I have
always done. Don’t try to tell me that you never searched for the source of the
dark wine.”
“The agents of the dark wine’s producers always came to us.”
“And who were they? Where did they live?”
“They were gypsies—wanderers, without any permanent home.”
“People hereabouts blame such travellers for everything,” Gottfried said,
disgustedly. “Every time a chicken is stolen, the gypsies took it. Every time a
milk-cow dries up, it was cursed by the gypsies. If a man gets a bellyache, it
was never from eating unripe apples, but always because some gypsy crone looked
sideways at him. Now you tell me that the gypsies make dark wine—doubtless
from wild grapes gathered in some secret valley whose location is known only to
their elders.”
“I did not say that they made it,” Luther pointed out. “Merely that they
brought it from its source—of which they had nothing, or next to nothing, to
say.”
“But you did ask,” Gottfried said. “As often and as cleverly as you could,
given your fondness for the stuff. And you say they told you next to nothing.
Why the margin, father? What little did they tell you?”
The old man let his head flop back on to the pillow, but there was a wry
twist to his mouth as he realised that he had given himself away, and knew that he could no take refuge in his enfeeblement.
“Only that the source was magically protected—that a man might search for
years without ever obtaining a glimpse of it, because it was accessible only to
those of their own kind who heard the call and to those who accompanied them to
see them safely to their destination.”
“What call?”
“How should I know?” Luther protested, his voice becoming feeble again as he
wilted under his son’s fierce gaze. “I never heard it—and not for want of
listening.” The last phrase was muttered.
“How can I give this to the witch hunter?” Gottfried complained, speaking
more to Reinmar than to Luther. “It’s the kind of tittle-tattle you can hear on
any street-corner. Gypsies and calls—old wives’ tales, more like. It’s a lie,
put about to distract the gullible. You must know more.”