Blood 20 Read online

  They were huge heavy doors too, with valves of iron like black stone. We went in, and there was the castle yard, save it was not. It was this garden.

  The snow was on the ground, and on the steps that went to the towers, and to the central place with its tall snowy roof. But out of the snow of the yard, the flowers climbed on their briars up the high walls, up to the very tops, a curtain of dark green and lavish reds, of smoky pinks and peaches too, of murrey and magenta and ivory.

  Here and there the snow had even touched the faces of these flowers, but it had not burnt them. It was only like a dusting of white spice. And they had scent. In the cold static air it was rich and heady.

  Gilles said, ‘Oh God, it’s beautiful. Will it poison us?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Festus. He wrenched out his knife and made a move toward the rose-vines. Johan caught his arm.

  Lutgeri said softly, ‘Better not. You might anger … someone.’

  ‘Who?’ snapped Festus.

  ‘God, perhaps,’ said Lutgeri. ‘If He’s gone to so much trouble.’

  In the middle of the yard was a stone well, orn­amented with upright stone birds. I crossed to the well, Johan and Arpad coming with me. Deep down the water was shining green as a Pope’s jasper ring, though along the coping speared icicles.

  Up on the battlements nothing stirred but a trace of wind, blowing off a spray of snow, and perfume.

  ‘Is it magic?’ said Gilles.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bollo. ‘Like the virgin sleeping in her garden, and only the kiss of God can wake her.’

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Yens. ‘My guts are changing into snakes.’

  ‘That door is open too,’ said Arpad, pointing up at the central building just over from the well. He strode off toward it. ‘A nice virgin in a bower. That’s no threat to me.’

  Festus, knife still drawn, went after him.

  Johan said, ‘What do you want to do, Maurs?’

  ‘Look and see. Perhaps the inside is good, too.’

  Arpad and Festus had gone through the door. Then Arpad gave a shout, and we ran, all of us, getting the blades free as we did so.

  As we burst through the door, it became a silly clowns’ performance, for bringing up short Johan, Gilles, Lutgeri and I were collided with by Yens and Bollo.

  Arpad and Festus were in the midst of the castle hall, just stood there and gazing about. There was something to look at.

  I have seen the house-halls of wealthy dukes and counts and other princes of the world, here and otherwhere. But none better, and few so fine. And probably not one like that one.

  There were carpets on the walls from the East, wonderful scarlets and saffrons, and high up the walls were carved, and the ceiling, with beasts and birds. And these were very strange, mythical, women things with the tails of fish and serpents, winged horses, lions with three heads, horned bears, birds with the faces of ancient bearded men. Out of the ceiling dropped brazen lamps on long chains, and they were alight, giving to the wide chamber a deep burnished glow broken only by the flutter of a large and burning hearth. The fireplace was fronted with rosy marble that ran off into a floor formed of squares of this rose marble and another that was of russet. A stair ascended between two statues. The figures were taller than a man, one of a woman holding up a gilded shield or mirror before her countenance, and one of king Death, a robed creature with the head of a skull crowned by gold. The windows that ran above the hall had glass in them, and in each pane was a single ruby jewel. The sun had got now behind three of these, and the bloody drops fell down to the room, directly on Death’s diadem and robe. We took this sour omen in like vinegar.

  Near the hearth, however, was a table set with chairs. The table was also laid with flagons and jars and jugs, with plates and knives, and the light danced on the gold-work. There were roasts on that table, pork and hare, a wide side of beef. And on the plates piled up the plaited pies and loaves, the sweetmeats you see and never taste, the mounded summer fruits like balls of enamel and gold. The fruit was fresh and ripe, the bread and meat were hot, you could smell them.

  ‘What is it?’ said Gilles.

  ‘It’s the Devil,’ said Yens.

  Arpad had wandered to the table and stretched out his hands.

  ‘No, fool,’ I shouted. ‘No.’

  Arpad put his hands down by his sides. He blushed.

  Bollo said, ‘It’s so miraculous it might be sound. It might be a gift from on high.’

  ‘But is it?’ I said.

  Bollo shrugged.

  Festus said, ‘Well, what do we do?’

  ‘We’ll search this hold,’ I said, ‘and then we’ll see if it’s fit to banquet in.’

  And so we searched the building, the hub of the little castle on the plain of snow, the castle of summer and lit lamps and bright fire and new-cooked food.

  It was uniformly splendid. It was beautiful. Everywhere the carvings, that had to do it seemed with every myth and fantasy of the Earth. Wherever there was a window, it was glass, and in many of them was a gem of coloured vitreous, or the delicate pattern of grisaille. Tapestries and carpets on the walls, gleaming with lustre and tints as if sloughed from the loom only yesterday. Above the hall was a library with old, old books and scrolls in Latin and in Greek, and some even in the picture writing of earlier lands. An armoury there was, its door open like all the rest. The weapons were antique and modern, well-cared for, the leather and lacquer oiled and rubbed, the iron shined. Bows of horn, bronze maces, lances notched like the swords from use …

  There were side chambers with sumptuous beds, and carved chests that, when they were easily undone, revealed the clothes of lords folded among herbs, and belts inlaid with gold. In caskets were found the jewelleries of queens and kings, corals and pearls, amethysts like pigeons’ blood, brooding garnets, crosses of silver pierced by green beryl, and from the East again armlets of heavy gold, headdresses of golden beads and discs, things the Herods might have looked on, worn.

  ‘Take none of this.’

  ‘No, Maurs,’ they said.

  Johan said, ‘I think it is a spell after all.’

  ‘Yes, a stink of a spell, to entrap us.’

  We said we would be better going at once, hunting the lean hills for mice, sleeping in the snow about a pale fire. Yet we were in love with the castle, as if with a beautiful woman. She may mean you no good and yet you hang about her. Perhaps you can charm the bitch, perhaps her heart is fair like her face, and needs only to be persuaded.

  From the upper chambers we glared out beyond the castle walls, and the snow was teeming once again. The day was dark now as evening, and how thoughtful the sorcery of the castle was, lighting all its lamps for us, in every room, and on the stairs the torches in their ornamented brackets.

  At last we were weary of it, sick of it. Too many sweets and none to be eaten.

  Then, we reached a door that did not give.

  ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It could lead into that tower we spied,’ said Johan, ‘so I’d guess. With the pretty window.’

  Glancing up, I saw, carved in the stone above the door, the words: Virgo pulchra, claustra recludens.

  ‘Lovely maiden, undo the bolt,’ translated Bollo.

  ‘Does it only mean a girl?’ said Yens. ‘Isn’t it invoking the Mother of God?’

  ‘It’s all we need,’ said Gilles, ‘lovely maidens.’

  ‘No, one other thing,’ said Lutgeri.

  ‘Blood,’ I said.

  There was a silence, under the locked door.

  ‘Perhaps this place will give us that, too,’ said Johan. ‘Since it offers everything else.’

  We examined each other.

  Arpad’s eyes glittered, and the eyes of Gilles were heavy. Yens frowned and gnawed his lip, Festus had turned away, and Bollo was blank as a worn page in one of the ancient books. Lutgeri and Johan seemed to be thinking, gazing down some tunnel of memory or the mind. And I? I recollected Pierre. And after him, the girl in the house a
t Bethelmai, who had wanted the impossible to be spared rape, to keep her bracelet.

  ‘We’ll go down,’ I said.

  ‘The food –’ said Arpad, and Yens added, ‘I’m hungry enough I’d risk hemlock.’

  When we regained the hall, the fire was still as bright, its logs and sticks had not burnt up, and the lamps were glowing. But on the table, quite naturally, the feast had turned a little cold and greasy. We cut off chunks of meat and sliced the fruits and broke off the caps of the crystalline castle. There was no smell or appearance of anything bad, no taste, no evidence. We drew lots, and Arpad and Yens gladly tried the dishes, a mouthful of this and that. We would be likely to save them, if they had not had much. But then they did not sicken, and by the time the occluded sun had passed over to the other windows, we sat square at the table and gorged ourselves like the poor slaves of life we were.

  I woke afraid. But that is not so unusual.

  There are dreams, unrecalled. There are noises heard in sleep, quite innocent, that remind the floating brain of other times when they were not –

  I pushed myself up and my head rang slightly from the draughts of precious wine. Then it cleared and I remembered where I had lain down, and why, and that to fear might be quite wise.

  Yes, the very image before me was one of alteration and so perhaps of warning.

  The lamps had all gone out, and the changeless fire was sunken low, livid hovering lizard tongues on the remn­ants of the wood like blackened bones. Outside, beyond the enchanted castle, the weather seemed purified. The snow had been vomited out, and the sky was a sheer thin blackish-blue, threadbare with stars. This, through the high up windows of the hall, gave the light the lamps now withheld. The moon must be up.

  I scrutinised the vast chamber and saw it all congealed in slabs of lunar ice. The great table ruined by our orgy of hunger. The carvings and the carved cupboards, the carpets hung on the walls with here and there some sequin of pallor, a hand, a unicorn, a skull.

  No-one was in the room but I, yet someone had been there. Who? Most of my brotherhood had gone up to slumber in the haughty, luxurious beds of the castle. I had put Johan to watch at the stair-head, and Lutgeri and Festus to stroll the passages in a pair. The hall door we had bolted. And I had rolled myself to sleep before the fire in my cloak, with one of the fancy cush­ions under my head.

  If something had happened, I would have heard a commotion.

  But, by the Christ, something had happened. My heart and my soul knew it, if my stupid mind did not.

  I got on my feet all the way, and went to the table. The wine had been unvenomous, and I took a drink of it, to steady me.

  What had been in the hall with me was a whisper, a gliding sigh. Probably not that which had woken me at all, this cobweb of nothingness, this ghost. No, some deep instinct, clamouring, had reached me finally after a long while. It was as if a bell had been clanging in my blood and I had only just heard it – then, it stopped.

  I did not call for the sentries, Lutgeri, Festus, Johan. Surely they should have woken me by now, and Yens and Bollo, to take our turn?

  How silent the castle, and the land beyond. Rarely is anything so dumb. The wind calls, and the beasts that roam the night. And in the dwellings of men the rats and vermin move about, the timbers stir, the furniture creaks. Here – not a note. Only I had made a sound, and that not much.

  I drew my sword, and my knife for the left hand. Then I climbed the stair, between Death and his Lady, noiseless, seeing.

  Johan was not above. That was not like him. If he had gone from his post it was because something had summoned him. And then, certainly, he would have alerted me.

  ‘Johan,’ I said, quietly. And he would have heard. But there was no answer, and beyond the windows there, the dark was full.

  I went into it, that dark. One learns to use one’s eyes, and so sight grudgingly came. I beheld the twisting passageway, and there a door. And there, something lay on the threshold.

  For more than three hundred years, I knew him. He did not sleep unless he might. And now, he did not sleep. Across the door of the room Arpad had chosen, Johan lay dead.

  This was not new to me. Yet never does it grow stale. To find your friend and brother is a corpse.

  I bent over him, one ear, one eye upon the dark, and tried him.

  Oh Christ – Oh, he was not a human thing anymore. No, no. He was a sack of emptiness. A rattling sack filled by loose bones. Like the picture of Death, whose cart is stacked by the skeletons of the dead that have a tiny, immodest fragment of skin on them. Like that. Johan. So.

  I let go of him, and held down my screaming. I am practiced. And since that night, better.

  There were no muscles left in his body, no flesh. I had no true light, and yet I knew. No blood.

  In the dark, some demon had come, and sucked him dry. Oh, not as we do. Not like that. You give us sustenance like a maiden at a well, raising the bucket brimmed with water. Like the lord at the dinner, offering us wine. A drink. The drink of life. And with the woman or boy who sucks the smooth sword of our cock, tender and cunning, careful and fierce and honey in the dark, and with the girl who takes in our seed at her other mouth, and grows in the closed garden of her womb a rose: so it goes back to you. But not like this.

  He had been drained. As the fire does it. Like Pierre. Save that burnt inward, and this, out.

  No longer Johan.

  I turned, and opened Arpad’s selected door, and stepped into the chamber.

  Moonlight streamed here on the floor and over the bed, in a white mirror from the window, and in its heart a black cicatrice lay from the decaying window jewel the moon could not rouse.

  Arpad sprawled half from the majestic bed he had chosen. His head drooped to the floor, and one arm, and when I tried him, Arpad, who had been sparks and pepper, hot iron and strong drink, Arpad was another flaccid sack on the cart of Death.

  Then a fear came over me I had never felt. Not once, in all my long life. I have been pent and pinned, they have promised me all sorts of torture, and Hell after, and never once, no never had I felt this fear. It was born in me that night. Shall I ever be free of it?

  I left Arpad, and Johan, and walked out along the passage.

  In their brackets the kind torches had guttered out. Only the moon slid through the narrow slits, each with that mole of dark on it from its jewel, or else weird shapes from the painting on the flags. And then the corrid­or turned any way, and the moon had gone behind a wall. White Face they called her, long ago. She is fickle, and not your helpmeet. A betrayer, Dame Moon.

  I came on Festus not long after. And then Lutgeri. Festus too was in the bone cart of Death. And I gave Lutgeri a shake, like a rat, but I hated him because he was dead. And then I heard him breathing, rasping and interrupted, like a rusty machine, some windmill, or thing of the old sieges they cannot make anymore.

  ‘Lutgeri – Lutgeri –’

  ‘Hush,’ he said. ‘Calmly, my boy.’

  I held him in my arms.

  ‘If you die, you shit-rat, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘I know you will, Maurs. I’ll try not to.’

  I wept on his shoulder, which had the feel of life and humanity. One whole second. Then I was myself again.

  ‘What did this?’

  ‘How many?’ he gasped.

  ‘Arpad. Festus – Johan –’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Johan.’

  Then he lost consciousness and I squeezed on his neck, against the vein, to haul him back.

  ‘Tell me, Lutgeri.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t – something came from the shadow. It was like – no, it was like nothing at all. It didn’t croon. And it hurt me. Christ’s soul. It’s teeth went in my breast – And the blood was ripped from me, Maurs, like my living organs, before I could struggle. And no voice in my throat.’

  ‘How do you survive?’ I said. I was numb.

  ‘God knows. Perhaps my old ichor wasn’t to its taste, or a little did for more.
’

  ‘The others,’ I said.

  Lutgeri whispered, ‘Arpad? Festus – yes. Yens and Gilles – they must be gone if it came to them. Bollo, perhaps – old alligator. He might –’

  His head fell back. He had fainted again, but still lived. I crushed my wrist between his teeth. ‘Drink it, you swine, you shit-heart. Drink it.’

  In his stupor, he took a morsel from me.

  Then, in my arms, he drew his sword.

  ‘Leave me here, Maurs. I’m ready for it now. If it returns. But you must –’

  ‘Yes.’ I got up. I raised him and slung him over my shoulder and took him into the library. Its lamp was out. I fetched down a book and pressed it on his hand. ‘When the weight changes, if it grows –’

  ‘I know, Maurs. Then I’m lighter. I have the sword. Go find them. Go.’

  Bollo had gone to sleep in the armoury. That was, he had told me he would be there, to examine the weapons alone. He had not meant to sleep, and took with him a jar of the wine from the table. He could go days and nights, up to ten, without sleeping. I had seen it. But then, why battle the god of slumber here? I ran, up the stairs, up into the height of the place, to reach Bollo.

  When I was near the door, something laid hold of me, and made me pause. I went slowly after that, the drawn sword and knife before me. I crept to the door of the armoury, and it was partly open, as all the doors of the castle seemed to wish to be, but one, the virgin door to the tower.

  I eased the armoury door inward. So I saw.

  Lovers making love cannot always stop.

  There was a window, and the moon was in it, it was an arch of light, with only the dark Mark of Cain upon its forehead from the intercepting jewel. More than enough light to see.

  Bollo sat at the table, one of the old books open in front of him from below, and a mace, and a candle that had been burning and that had gone out. Moonlight described the weapon, and the book, a great capital of gilding and indigo, and on it a gem of blackness that, in daylight, would have been red.

  The eyes of Bollo were wide, and stiffly, like the cogs of a machine, they crawled in their sockets, till he could look at me. He knew me, he was coherent, but paralysed.