Blood 20 Read online

  While it bent over him, obscuring him as a cloud will the moon. It was so filmy, so wraith-like, yet so real.

  What did I regard? The sight is printed on my mind. I can never forget, yet how to relate?

  It was old, ancient as nothing in the castle was, not even the scrolls penned before the Flood. It was like something made of rags and bones, filaments and tendrils, pasted together, strung, like a harp of the air. Moonlight passed through its wrappings, but not through itself, though dimly in it, stones in a frozen river, you saw the elements of its skeleton like the teeth of a comb. It was, or had been, of human shape. But of what gender, God knew. It held Bollo, beneath the arms, and its head, from which a hank of gauzy hair spun out, was bowed upon his chest.

  This looked like a deed of repentance. As if it had gone to him and sobbed on his breast. But I knew, for Lutgeri had told me, what it did.

  I rammed my sword into its back, up into the spot where the heart is come on.

  And it was like thrusting into snow.

  But at the blow it left him, it straightened up, and turning like a snake it gazed on me.

  Oh it had eyes. The eyes of wolves, our own, are human. But these were not. Like round black beads they shone, harder and more true than all the rest of it. Bits of night, but not this night. No night we will ever see.

  And then it gaped its mouth, and its sharp yellow teeth were there, and the swarthy tongue, pointed and too long. It hissed at me, and I fell back.

  My sword had come from it as if out of sticky vapour.

  I hung before it, not knowing what I must do. And then it seemed to me I should strike that weaving insubstan­tial head from its shoulders. But as I drew my arm for the stroke, it smeared away. It slid, rolled at the wall, moving as the snake does. And the wall parted, to let it by.

  Yes, like soft butter the stone gave way, and it slipped through. And then Bollo cried to me, as if he choked, ‘Maurs – there – there –’

  And in his eyes I saw the deaths of Yens and Gilles. I saw King Death himself, on his fish-white charger, pacing slowly. Then I turned and flung myself through the wall before it closed. After the vampire.

  I have done things in battle, many have, crazy things called after ‘brave’. But they are the madness of war. And this, this was not like them, for I was afraid going in through

  that wall, and yet could not keep back.

  It had come to me, this thing, or others of its kind. That had been the sigh, the whisper, in the dark. But I had woken, before its fangs could fasten into me. And why was that? But then, why ask? Each of us knows he alone is immortal, cannot die. And that whoever falls, he will survive it. Death may touch, but then he is gone.

  The corridor inside the wall was black as pitch, and yet I could just see, for as I said, I have learned to use my eyes, and besides, what went before me, invisible now in itself, gave off a faint luminescence, like the crests of waves, like fungus, such things.

  It progressed quickly, but not as if it went on legs or feet. And the elf-light flowed behind it, and now and then I was close enough a long trailing wisp of its garment, or perhaps itself, billowed around a turn of the passage, and I might have plucked at it, but I did not.

  How to kill it when I caught it? Would beheading do? We were vulnerable, but I had stabbed it through and it lived. Why then follow? I must. Or Bollo had put it on me that I must.

  It went somewhere, evidently. To some lair.

  Then the corridor began to branch. Constricted twisting routes led off this way and that, and it chose without hesitation, but now I was lost. We were inside the walls of the castle, in the very veins and arteries of it.

  The passage ended at the foot of a sort of chimney. I dropped back, and beheld the aura of the being oozing up a flight of straight and narrow steps, directly up, and its glow abated as it vanished from sight.

  The fear I felt was now so awful I could not for a moment or two more move or go after. And yet it was the fear itself, it seemed, that pushed me on.

  Presently I eased out, and looking up into the shaft where the stairway went, saw the thing had completed its climb and gone in at a slender archway above. There was a hint of light inside the arch, but not like the other, the phosphorous of the vampire. This was warm.

  I ran up the stair without a sound, and sprang into the arch. Within the vault of it, to the left, was another half-open door, and out of this stole the myrrh-soft shine. It was a gentle light, and by that I began to realise what might be there. Even so, when I had slunk to the doorway’s edge, I peered around the door, and found I had not been prepared.

  I grasped at once what chamber it was. None other than that upper room in the tower to which the lower outer door had refused us admittance. Lovely girl, undo the bolt. Up here, no doubt, she had done so, to let her creature in.

  But the room was beautiful, like a painting, so neat and pleasant, every little accessory in its place. The slim white maiden’s bed with its canopy of ashy rose, the tapestry of rainbow threads on its frame, the tiring table inlaid with different woods, the unguents and wooden combs, the trickle of a precious necklace from a carven box. There were little footstools with embroidered hounds and rabbits and birds, and on one of these, before her, the vampire I had pursued kneeled now, holding up its mealy hands. I learned here there had been others, three of them, who had taken the lives from my men. These vampires were like the first one, flimsy dolls of silver wire and thinnest samite, and crinkled now, folded over in strange shapes, like things that had no bones at all, like stiff clothing discarded.

  She had had their message and their gift already; she had emptied them in turn. And now she received the last of our ichor from the final creature, the one knelt in front of her, lifting its hands so she might bow her head and bite the powdery wrists and drink, from that transferring vessel, our blood.

  I moved into the doorway, and so into the room, and stood there, and looked on as she drained the wine-sack dry.

  The ceiling was painted violet, with little golden stars. Under the stained glass window, which was black and moonless, only the brazen lamps to give their dulcet light, a rose bush grew in a pot. The great red blooms were open wide and I could smell their scent, and over that the perfume of the girl.

  She had a skin like the snow, and hair like ebony, which fell all round her, with raven glints in it. Her gown was a pale sweet pink, the shade of fresh blood mixed into ice. There were rings on her fingers, gold, emeralds, and as she lifted her head and let her servant go – it folded, discarded, lifeless, like the others – I saw that around her white forehead passed a golden chain fashioned into tiny flowers.

  She had a lovely face. All of her was lovely. Not a flaw. There was not even any trace of blood on the petals of her lips, and her eyes were clear and innocent, the colour of dark amber.

  ‘At last you have come to me,’ she said. ‘I’ve waited so long.’

  ‘Have you, Lady?’

  ‘Many, many years.’

  I believed her. I understood it all and did not need a lesson. Nor did I get one. The castle was her web. Probably it was a ruin, and every tasteful glamor­ous thing inside mildew and muck. God knew what we had eaten off that banquet table. For the rest, when we were lulled, her emissaries came. They filled themselves from us like jars, then glided back to her and gave up every drop to make her strong and fair. What had she been before? A desiccated insect lying, wheezing and murmuring on her charming bed, which maybe was a stinking gaping grave.

  And one she wanted as her lover. Perhaps to continue her race through him, if she was the last of that particular kind. Or maybe only to ease her loneliness. Or to champion her, to take her out into the world beyond the web, where she could become a mighty sorceress, out in the thousand lands where blood runs in rivers.

  Yet she looked at me and I loved her. Such ador­ation. She was the Virgin Queen and the fount of all delicious sin. She was my mother and my child, my sister, my soul.

  Her magic was strong enough
, and she had fed.

  She held out her perfect hand to me, and I went forward.

  And the lamplight shone through her amber eyes, and I remembered the girl in the upper room, her little ring of silver on her roughened hand. ‘Don’t rape me. Don’t take my bracelet.’ And it came to me as if I heard the words, that the soldiers had found her, or she had stumbled amongst them. They had raped her, they had stolen her solitary treasure, they had thrown her down in the mud among the reeking corpses. So then I saw the corpse of Pierre, his black dust raked over in the dying pyre. I saw the battlefield in the snow, where we had sucked out the life of dying, crying men, the crimson winter roses, since we must. And into us had passed with their life the despair of their death, so the tears froze on our faces with the blood cold against our lips. All that I saw, there in the eyes of the lovely maiden in the tower, and so I saw my brothers she had fed on. Arpad and Yens, Festus and Gilles. Johan. And Lutgeri with the sword, and the book on his hand to remind him to live, and Bollo staring. And I saw myself before her, tall and sombre as a shadow, with the blade in my hand.

  God knows, He has ordained it, we prey upon each other. As the lion on the deer, the cat upon the mouse. There is no penance we may do to right this wrong. There is no excuse for that we live by killing, save only that we must. To survive is all. And she, the maiden, like us was vulnerable, for unlike the automata of her slaves, she was a thing of flesh and blood. My sister, as Pierre had been my brother and myself. And, so beautiful –

  The dawn was coming up, sluggish, like heavy iron. No colour on the earth. The roses would be burnt papers and the books grey flour, like all the stuff in the upper chamber.

  Lutgeri was sharpening his knife, slow. He did not speak to me of the cold grim rooms, the fallen areas and the rotted carpets. But Bollo, who had gone out and broken the thick corded ice of the well, informed me it stank, not fit to drink.

  I told them of the girl in the tower. They list­ened. Before we went to bury our dead in the hard soil beyond the castle, they asked what I had done.

  ‘I loved her, of course,’ I said. ‘I never loved any woman like that one. It was her spell.’

  ‘So you went to her,’ said Bollo, but Lutgeri held up his hand, mildly, as if to caution him.

  ‘I went to her,’ I said.

  ‘And then,’ Lutgeri said. ‘And then.’

  ‘With my sword I struck the head from her body.’

  IL BACIO (IL CHIAVE)[1]

  Roma, late in her 15th Century after the Lord, packed on the banks of her yellow river, had entered that phase of summer known by some as the Interiore. This being a kind of pun – interior place, or – frankly – entrails. It was a fact, Roma, brown and pink and grey and white and beautiful, ripely stank. Before the month was over, there might very possibly be plague.

  Once the red cannon-blast of the sunset, however, left the cool garden on the high hill, the dusk began to come with all its tessellated stars, and the only scent was from the grapevines and the dusty flowers, and the last aromas of the cooked chickens now merely bones on a table. Four men had dined. From their garments and their demeanour it was easy to locate their portion, the noble rich, indolent and at play. They had no thought of plague, even though they had disparagingly discussed it an hour before. They were young, the youth of their era – the oldest not more than twenty years – and in the way of the young knew they would live forever, and in the way of their time, as in the way of all times, understood they might die horribly in a month, or a day. And naturally also, since such profound and simple insight is essentially destructive where too often recognised, they knew nothing of the sort.

  There had, very properly, been talk of horses, too, and clothing and politics. Now, with the fruit and the fourth or fifth cups of wine, there came talk of women, and so, consecutively, of gambling.

  ‘But have no fear, Valore, you shall be excluded.’

  ‘Shall I? A pity.’

  ‘Yes, no doubt. And worse pity to have you more in debt to us than already you are.’

  ‘You owe me two hundred ducats, Valore, since the horse­race. Did you forget?’

  ‘No, dearest Stephano. I very much regret it.’ Valore della Scorpioni leaned back in his chair and smiled upon them with the utmost confidence. Each at the table was fine-looking in his way, but Valore, a torch among candles, far outshone them and blinded, for good measure, with his light.

  His was that unusual and much-admired combination of dark, red hair and pale, amber skin sometimes retained in the frescoes and on the canvasses of masters, a combination later disbelieved as capable only of artificial reproduction. Added to this, a pair of large hazel eyes brought gorgeousness to the patrician face, white teeth blessed it; while all below and beyond the neck showed the excellent results of healthful exercise, good food consumed not in excess, and the arrogant grace evolving upon the rest. In short, a beauty, interesting to either sex, and not less so to himself.

  Added to his appearance and aura, however, Valore della Scorpioni had the virtue of an ill name. His family drew its current rank out of an infamous house not unacquainted with the Vatican. As will happen, bad things were said of it, as of its initiator. Untrue as the friends and adorers of Valore knew all such things to be, yet they were not immune to the insidious attraction of all such things. No trace of witchcraft or treachery might be seen to mar the young man, scarcely 18, who sat godlike in their midst. That he, rich as they, owed money everywhere, was nothing new. It pleased them, perhaps excited them, Stephano, Cesco, Andrea, that this creature was in their debt.

  ‘Well,’ said Andrea now. ‘I, for one, have nothing left to put forward on the dice, save my jewels.’

  ‘And I,’ said Valore della Scorpioni, with a flame-quick lightness that alerted them all, ‘have only this.’

  On, the table, then, among the bones, fruit and wine cups, was set an item of black iron at odds with all. A key. Complex and encrusted, its size alone marked it as the means to some portentous entry.

  ‘Jesu, what’s this?’ Stephano cried. ‘The way into your lord father’s treasury?’

  Valore beamed still, lowering his eyes somewhat, giving them ground.

  ‘It’s old,’ said Andrea. ‘It could unlock a secret route into the catacombs –’

  And Cesco, not to be outdone: ‘No, it is the door to the Pope’s wine-cellar, no less. Is it not, Valore?’

  The hazel eyes arose. Valore looked at them.

  ‘It is,’ he said, ‘the key to a lady’s bedchamber.’

  They exclaimed, between jeering mirth and credulity. They themselves were unsure of which they favoured. The dark was now complete, and the candles on the table gave the only illumination. Caught by these, Valore’s beautiful face had acquired a sinister cast, impenetrable and daunting. So they had seen it before, and at such moments the glamour of evil repute, though disbelieved, seemed not far off.

  ‘Come, now,’ Andrea said at length, when the jibes had gone unanswered. ‘Whose chamber is it? Some harlot –’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Valore. He paused again, and allowed them to hang upon his words. ‘Would I offer you such dross in lieu of honest recompense for my debts?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Cesco. ‘Just so you would.’

  ‘Then,’ said Valore, all velvet, ‘for shame to sit here with such a wretch. Go home, Cesco, I entreat you. I’d not dishonour you further.’ And when Cesco had finished uneasily protesting, Valore picked up the great black key and turned it in his flexible fingers. ‘This, sweet friends, fits the lock of one, a lady of high birth. A lady most delectable, who is kindred to me.’

  They exhibited mirth again, sobered, and stared at him.

  Andrea said, ‘Then truly you make sport here. If she is your kin, you would hardly disgrace her so.’

  ‘She’s not disgraced. She will not be angry.’ In utter silence now they gazed on their god. Valore nodded. ‘I see you doubt her charms. But I will show you. This attends the key.’ And now there was put on the tab
le a little portrait, ringed by pearls, the whole no bigger than a plum.

  One by one, in the yellow candlelight, they took it up and peered at it. And one by one they set it down; and their faces, also oddly-lit, their eyes en-embered, turned strange, unearthly, and lawless.

  There was no likelihood the woman in the painting was not kindred of the Scorpion house. Evident in her, as in the young man at the table, was that same unequivocal hair falling about and upon that same succulent skin. The contour of the eyes, and all the features, was so similar to Valore’s own that it could have been modelled on him, save for some almost indefinable yet general difference, and a female delicacy absent from the masculine lines of the one who – in the flesh and to the life – sat before them, indisputably a man.

  ‘But,’ Stephano murmured eventually, ‘she might be your sister.’

  ‘My sisters, as you are aware, Stephano, do not so much resemble me. They are besides raven-haired. Therefore, the lady’s not my sister. Not, to forestall you, my cousin, my mother, any sister of my mother’s or my sire’s, or even, per Dio, any forward daughter of my own. Yet she is kin to me. Yet this key is the key to her chamber. Yet she will not turn away whoever of you may win it at the dice. If any win, save I. If not, it is mine, as now mine. I have done.’

  The fox-lit faces angled to each other.

  ‘An enigma.’

  ‘If you wish.’

  At that moment, one of Andrea Trarra’s servants came out into the garden like a ghost. Bending to the master of the feast, the man whispered. Andrea’s face underwent a subtle fortuitous alteration. He spoke in assent to the servant, who moved away. Then, turning to the company, he dazzled them with the words:

  ‘A fourth guest has just now arrived.’

  There followed a popular demand as to whom this guest might be, formerly unexpected, conceivably unwelcome. Valore did not join in the outcry. He sat, toying with the key, and only stilled his fingers when Andrea announced: ‘It is one you know of. Di Giudea.’