"Mary Jacober - The Black Chalice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jacober Mary)

Chapter II


HELMARDIN

Mankind is by nature wild and strange.
Wolfram von Eschenbach


FROM THE VERY START Paul's heart misgave him - from the very moment he
reached down to sweep Karelian s coin out of the dust, and followed after him into the
black November hills. Nothing thereafter was quite the same. The easy talk of the
soldiers began to annoy him, and the edginess of the servants annoyed him more. He
found himself looking at the sky and the forest like a fugitive watching for enemies.
He was not usually given to wild superstitions; his father had made sure of it. Unlike
many of his peers, the baron von Ardiun had learned to read and write, and to look upon
the world as something which could be studied and understood. He was a practical man,
hard-minded and hard-souled, without a trace of weakness in his being, and deeply
religious in the same practical way. He laughed at most of what passed for sorcery among
the common folk. Rabbits' feet and rubbish, he called it. God disposed of matters in the
world, he said, not old hags with broken teeth. God decided when it would rain. God sent
sicknesses to men and beasts, and God cured them. And that was the end of it.
Mostly Paul agreed with him, for he loved his father, and he feared him. But there
were times when troubling questions nudged into his mind, when it seemed to him that
life was stranger than his father was willing to acknowledge - stranger and much darker.
He might never have done more than wonder about it, though, if he had not gone to the
Holy Land. There he saw things which his father had neither seen nor dreamt of. The east
was full of magic. And the east was powerful тАФ powerful not merely in wealth and arms,
but in other, more disturbing ways. More than one good knight rode to Jerusalem a
devoted Christian, and was lured there into every kind of wickedness, and came home
again scarcely a Christian at all.
And from the day the count's retinue left Stavoren, and journeyed farther and farther
into the hinterlands, Paul found himself wondering if the Reinmark were Christian, either,
in anything but name. He thought again of all those things from his childhood which his
father had ignored. The old women mouthing incantations over leather boots and
hearthstones and marriage beds. The strange ointments they made, the secret potions,
the amulets. The Walpurgisnacht fires. The people who lived in the woods, without crops
or beasts or trades, and yet never went hungry.
Then Karelian tossed a silver coin, and left his fate to fortune, and a thousand dark
things seemed to ride with them now, as if invited. Black clouds, so heavy over the forests
there seemed to be no heaven there at all. Black birds in great, silent flocks, wheeling and
circling. Scattered farmhouses huddled in scattered patches of ill-cleared land, more
hostile, somehow, than the wilderness around them. Rough folk with ragged hair and
sullen faces, staring at the passing lords without a trace of human feeling in their eyes.
And the wind, howling in the dead trees, tugging at his hair, endlessly snarling and
laughing. It seemed to Paul the laughter of fiends, who remembered when there had been
no priests here, and no empire, and who would try with all their dark power to bring an
end to both.