The Drawing of the Dark

'You'll know soon enough,' Aurelianus said pleadingly. 'This is the sort of thing it's no use telling you about until you've more than half figured it out already. If I explained everything now, you'd laugh and say I was crazy. Have patience.'

Duffy was tired, or he might have pursued the point. As it was, he just shrugged: 'Let it lie, then. I'm fast losing interest in all this anyway.' 'His decision to flee with Epiphany had given him a pleasant sense of dissociation with all of Aurelianus' schemes and theories. 'More beer here, Anna! This pitcher's suddenly empty. Oh, by the way, Aurelianus, when do they draw the Herzwesten Dark?'

Aurelianus blinked. 'Who in hell have you been talking to? Bluto, would you leave us for a moment? This is a private business.

'Certainly, certainly!' Bluto stood up and went to another table, intercepting, to the Irishman's chagrin, the new pitcher.

'Who,' Aurelianus asked earnestly, 'told you about the Dark?'

'Nobody told me. I-heard a noise in the cellar and found some red-haired fellow wandering around down there. I followed him through the door in the wall, and saw that huge vat. Is all Herzwesten beer drawn from that?'

'Yes. Do you.. .have any idea who he was?' The old man's voice quivered with suppressed excitement.

'Me? No. He disappeared in the vat room. I looked all

over for a secret door, but couldn't find one.' Duffy laughed. 'I figured he must have been a ghost.'

'He was. Did he speak?'

'No. You've seen him yourself?' Duffy didn't relish the ghost idea, and wanted to establish the intruder's identity.

'I'm afraid I haven't. I've only heard him described by those who have.'

'Who,' Duffy asked, 'is he?'

Aurelianus sat back. 'I'll tell you that. But first let me mention that the vat you saw has been in operation ever since this brewery was started three and a half thousand years ago. Parts of it have been replaced, and it's been enlarged twice, but we. they.. .always kept the beer that was in there. It's a lot like the solera method of blending sherry. We pour the new wort in at the top and draw the beer out further down, so there's always a blending and aging process going on. In fact, there are probably still traces of the first season's barley in there, thirty-five hundred years old.'

Duffy nodded civilly, reflecting, though, that the surest way to get Aurelianus to talk about chickens was to ask him about cheese.

'Ordinarily,' Aurelianus went on, 'such a vat would have to be cleaned annually. We've avoided that necessity by leaving out the bottom boards entirely, so that the staves, and the beer, rest directly on the naked earth.'

Duffy gagged and set down his cup. 'You mean the beer is mixed right in with the mud! God help us, I never thought -'Relax, will you? The beer seeps down into the dirt, yes, but the dirt doesn't rise. We don't stir it. We just gently drain off the beer at various levels, and the mud isn't riled. Have you ever tasted better beer?'

'Well, no.'

'Then stop acting like a kid who just learned what tripes are.' The old man squinted critically at Duffy. 'I hope you're ready for all this. You ask questions and then get all upset at the beginnings of an answer.'

'I'll be quiet,' Duffy promised.

'Good enough. The man you saw was a ghost. Sorry. When you saw him he was returning to his grave.' He leaned forward again. 'By Llyr, I'm going to give it to you direct - it was the ghost of Finn Mac Cool, returning to whatever remains today of his earthly dust. Finn is buried, you see, six feet directly below that fermenting vat.'

Duffy blinked. 'And there's no bottom to it? He must be absolutely dissolved in beer.

'Right. And the beer upward is saturated with his ...essence and strength, the lower levels most strongly.'

'Then this Dark, being the lowest, must be nearly Finn-broth.'

'Spiritually speaking, that's right,' Aurelianus agreed. 'Though physically it's just unusually heavy, superaged beer. Don't get the idea that it clots, or that we get bones and teeth clogging the spigot.'

'Oh no!' Duffy said airily, though privately resolving never to drink any of it. 'So when is it drawn? I've never heard even a hint of it.'

'That's because the last time the Dark was drawn was in the year 829; when the Sons of poor Emperor Louis were turning against him, as I recall. We'll draw it again on the thirty-first of October of this year. That's right, we let every drop of Dark age seven hundred years.'

'But good Lord,' Duffy exclaimed, 'beer can't age that long. Brandy or claret couldn't age that long.'

'Well,' Aurelianus admitted, 'you can't really call the stuff beer after all that time, that's true. It becomes something else. Something similar in many ways to the wine you drank in Bacchus' tavern, in Trieste. And you

noticed, I assume, that the Dark spigot was only a few inches above the dirt floor? Only the next three or four inches above that are drawn at a time, so the Dark is always a terribly limited quantity.'