Blood 20 Read online

  ‘What are you brooding on, Ismi?’ asks Yane from along the table. The girl from the village has fallen asleep against him, soothed by his glamorous kindness and the Eastern incense he has rubbed into his hair.

  ‘The past,’ says Ismira.

  ‘Oh, that. Don’t think of that. Let me tell you what I saw on my way here – something better than the Eastern mark­ets, for all their glitter and show. Better even than the moon-and-star night over the City of Rome.’

  ‘What?’ inquires Ismira. She knows what he will say.

  ‘I saw the sun.’

  ‘Which will make you ill. It always does.’

  ‘Yes, it always does, but this was three days ago. And you see, I’m cool and well. Perhaps I’m growing used to the sun, or it to me.’

  ‘The wineskin full of blood,’ says Ismira. She becomes angry with him, because in his fevers she must nurse him, and she hates the chore, and also is infuriated to see him suffer so stupidly by his own lack of control. He is addicted to the sun, she sometimes thinks, worse than blood.

  But Yane boasts, ‘I crept out of my deep hiding cave, and I beheld a sunrise in the mountains. The sky was redder than any blood. I’m cool and hale, Ismi. Can’t you see? Perhaps, in a day or so, I can try again.’

  ‘The sun isn’t for you.’

  ‘But you can see it every day! Don’t you know how jealous I am of you, Ismi?’

  She too frowns. She considers how Yane rides about the world, journeying to lands she has never, will never, see. How she remains at home, tending the castle, alone, save for the winter months when Yane comes back, often flaming with sun-fever, crazy and devilish, and girls must be collected from the village, one every thirty days, for Yane’s pleasure.

  I’m his skivvy, Ismira thinks. And he is jealous?

  In her childhood, once only, she saw one of the Scaratha kin brought to the castle after the sun had caught him, not for a few minutes at sunrise or set, but at the height of noon. He had burned alive and screaming for many hours before he died.

  This is why they value those of their kind who are not vampiric. They take them in and load them with codes of honour and high dreams of loyalty, and make them into useful servants of the house.

  Ismira can hear Yane talking endlessly, in raptures about the sun. She pretends – she is quite clever at pretence – that she attends to him. She loves him, admires him, but resents him. They may have two hundred years more like this, for, left to themselves, the Scaratha are all long-lived. The rest of the castle inhabitants perished in a war with other Scaratha ten years ago. But other castles and fortresses exist still well-stocked with their kind. Sometimes Yane promises to take her visiting. He never does, and doubtless never will.

  She considers leaving him and going off on her own. Wherever she went – on foot, alone, unsafe ways for a woman, even – especially – a Scaratha woman to travel – she would in the end fetch up with the Scaratha. She would have no other place to go. And then her life would be the same as it is here, save with more to do, more persons to love, admire and tend – the higher echelons of the practising vampires.

  Now Yane is speaking to Thental, the flower-like sacrif­ice.

  ‘Time for bed, sweetheart.’

  There was something too he had put in the wine. The girl stirs and smiles at him, sleepy and adoring, ready as a summer peach on the vine.

  He half carries this now-willing and pliable companion – perhaps she thinks this is her wedding-night? – away along the passage, and up the steps of a tower to the bedroom Yane has there. Ismira has put fresh embroidered sheets on the bed, sprinkled lavender and other herbs. Scented lamps burn, and the window is heavily shuttered against sunrise, and locked – Ismira keeps the key.

  Up there Yane the Sorian will make love to the girl, exquisitely, and also he will drink her blood, with passionate discretion. It will do her no harm whatsoever. He is whole­some, his teeth clean and flawless. Even the marks on her throat will fade when, after seven or so nights, he turns her out of bed, with enough money and jewels to make her rich beyond her most avaricious dreams. He will also escort her – by night – along the valley. That is Yane’s gallantry. He knows about women travelling on their own, particularly with wealth about them. He will make sure she reaches some sort of safety, for the Scaratha are careful with the goods they handle. After a certain point, however, once he has discharged his duty to her, or his payment for her services, Yane will leave the girl. If something happens to Thental then – or has happened in the past to any of the countless others – that will not be Yane’s fault.

  Ismira tidies the table. She hauls a pitcher of cold water and adds it to a wooden tub of hot, and rinses the platt­ers and knives. The precious cups of emerald crystal, rimmed and stemmed with gold, she replaces on the stone top of the hearth, among the candles, vases of dead flowers, iron keys, onions, and other things.

  Outside the wind is rising. It howls like the dog in the village they had struck to make it silent. Who will strike the wind?

  The villages naturally believe all who are brought here die, drained like bottles. Or else they are turned into undead devils, and subsequently roam the countryside, preying on the sheep, or small unguarded children, which in fact lammergeyers or starving wolves have picked off. One day perhaps the village may rebel against the castle. But probably they will not, for Scaratha power, though so isolate and scattered, is yet omnipresent and much dreaded.

  Ismira blows out the kitchen candles. She takes one with her, and goes about the castle again, replenishing the lights. Later, when her brother has had tonight’s fill of the girl, he will ramble through the passages, enter the great hall, take down old swords, and musical instruments to play. The castle is a rare treat for Yane – how not, when he is hardly ever here.

  As she retires to her room beyond the kitchen, Ismira hopes the sun will not have made him ill, and that he has enjoyed Thental. But when she falls asleep, Ismira dreams of herself riding his horse away and away, her own black hair and cloak rippling in the race of their speed. Dimly in the distance she thinks she sees the acres of a sea, the domes of the East, the moonlit columns of Rome. I am Ismira she sings in her sleep, nor was I born in Soriath –

  The Chess-Game

  It was how the Scaratha taught their young the rules of existence – that is, the vampiric, more-valued young, although the others, the lesser, but so-useful breed, they were allowed to stand by and watch. In this way Ismira had been part of the audience at the chess-games, played out on the huge board half­way down the mountain-hill.

  They commenced at dusk, often not concluding until midnight, all by torchlight – and in the village below, no doubt the people covered their heads in fear. This was before the war among the Scaratha had wiped away all but two of the castle’s indigenous population.

  Scaratha chess was not like humanly employed chess, of course. There were no pawns, for humanity was all made up of pawns, as far as the Scaratha were concerned. Here, the Scarathu hunted each other over the squares, which then were kept vivid with paint. A knight might take a queen, a queen a priest, as they pleased. Physical figures performed these actions. Delib­erately, always, the wrong moves were educated into the Scaratha young, so they should learn to break all the other rules of the world.

  Only at the very end would the victors fasten on their conquered own. This was not like a war. None died. They milked their victims, in mutual delight, of blood. Tokens, love tokens, which still meant someone had won. Blood to the Scaratha was not a food, but a covenant. From human things they took it as of right, from their own they took it as the sigil of conquest. And life was all a game, like chess.

  The spilled blood had dripped, during these playings, through the paint into the chessboard, then coloured red for blood and black for night. Because of the nourishment of those libations, when finally allowed by neglect, flowers came to break cracks in the squares. The flowers were very strong, tougher from being kept down, from fighting back. Only harsh fros
t could kill them now, and in the spring others would come, rising from death as gods and vampires allegedly did.

  How Fair the Day

  Waking early as always, Ismira gets up. She sets about the business of the morning, equably, quietly. She anticipates nothing of it, but it has a surprise for her after all.

  She is in the great hall, clearing up the mess of spent candles and replacing them with fresh, when Thental steals in like a slim white ray around the door.

  Sometimes these girls do venture down, while Yane lies sleeping in the dark. Then, by now besotted with the vampire from Soriath, they talk on and on of his virtues to Ismira.

  It is her task too, to give them food and drink, to keep them healthy, bathed and appealing, for her brother.

  When she turns to Thental, however, Ismira is briefly bemused. It seems to her the girl has impudently put on Yane’s dressing-robe of chessboard red and black, edged with gold.

  But no. The gold is Thental’s dishevelled hair, and the white her own skin, some of it. The red and black, which are thick on her naked body, are rich red blood and skeins of black hair that seems to have been torn out at the roots.

  Thental lifts her head and smiles at Ismira.

  ‘How fair the day! I’ve done what I came for. Just as I swore I would, I did it. I never forgot, never. I can cry always just thinking of her. I told them, this time, let it be me, I’ll go. And so they let me. See this? My little dagger, razor sharp. The hilt’s silver; that helps with killing a demon-thing. I bartered for it off a pedlar. He fucked me for it. Sensible trade, worth every jolt.’ Thental raises the dagger high. If it was ever silver, now it is not. It is blood-red, like most of the rest of her. ‘What a lot he had in him,’ Thental remarks of this blood, conversational, moving nearer. ‘Some of it after all was mine. What he drank from me last night. I stabbed him through as he slept. Then I hacked off his head – quite a job I had of that, but I managed. It’s how you must do it with that kind – your kind – I’ll do it for you –’ She runs headlong at Ismira. Ismira, Scaratha though not vampire, kills the girl instantly with one swift sidelong blow that breaks her neck.

  Then Ismira stands there, staring at the wreckage, thinking about the other wreckage that will be all that is left of Yane in the tower.

  Presently, Ismira sits down.

  She considers graves, digging them, which is easy. She has dug a couple, if some years ago. She thinks of her glorious brother, she thinks of the human heritage she has never had, the vampire Scaratha heritage she has also, being second rate, never had.

  Yane’s horse is in the stable. The snows have not yet begun. The sun, for Ismira, provides no difficulty – though later, she can always make believe it does …

  Ismira goes over to Thental, the fragile white flower that grew strong enough to crack the paving of the chessboard, but that the frost of Ismira’s hand then finished. Human flowers do not recover from that, nor vampire flowers, so Ismira has discovered.

  Ismira dips her finger in the still-wet blood Thental has thoughtfully brought with her, Yane’s blood. Ismira licks the finger. It means nothing to her, nothing at all. But, as with the sun of this fair day, she can always pretend.

  THE ISLE IS FULL OF NOISES

  ‘… and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.’

  Nietzsche

  I

  It is an island here, now.

  At the clearest moments of the day – usually late in the morning, occasionally after noon, and at night when the lights come on – a distant coastline is sometimes discernible. This coast is the higher area of the city, that part that still remains intact above water.

  The city was flooded a decade ago. The Sound possessed it. The facts had been predicted some while, and various things were done in readiness, mostly comprising a mass desert­ion.

  They say the lower levels of those buildings that now form the island will begin to give way in five years. But they were saying that too five years back.

  Also there are the sunsets. (Something stirred up in the atmosphere apparently, by the influx of water, some gener­ation of heat or cold or vapour.) They start, or appear to do so, the sunsets, about three o’clock in the afternoon, and continue until the sun actually goes under the horizon, which in summer can be as late as 7.45.

  For hours the roof terraces, towerettes and glass-lofts of the island catch a deepening blood-and-copper light, turning to new bronze, raw amber, cubes of hot pink ice.

  Yse lives on West Ridge, in a glass-loft. She has, like most of the island residents, only one level, but there’s plenty of space. (Below, if anyone remembers, lies a great warehouse, with fish, even sometimes barracuda, gliding between the girders.)

  Beyond her glass west wall, a freak tree has rooted in the terrace. Now nine years old, it towers up over the loft, and the surrounding towers and lofts, while its serpentine branches dip down into the water. Trees are unusual here. This tree, which Yse calls Snake (for the branches) seems un­fazed by the salt content of the water. It may be a sort of willow, a willow crossed with a snake.

  Sometimes Yse watches fish glimmering through the tree’s long hair, that floats just under the surface. This appeals to her, as the whole notion of the island does. Then one morning she comes out and finds, caught in the coils of her snake-will­ow, a piano.

  Best to describe Yse, at this point, which is not easy.

  She might well have said herself (being a writer by trade but also by desire) that she doesn’t want you to be disappointed, that you should hold onto the idea that what you get at first, here, may not be what is to be offered later.

  Then again, there is a disparity between what Yse seems to be, or is, and what Yse also seems to be, or is.

  Her name, however, as she has often had to explain, is pronounced to rhyme with please – more correctly, pleeze: eeze. Is it French? Or some sport from Latin-Spanish? God knows.

  Yse is in her middle years, not tall, rather heavy, dumpy. Her fair, greying hair is too fine, and so she cuts it very short. Yse is also slender, taller, and her long hair (still fair, still greying) hangs in thick silken hanks down her back. One constant, grey eyes.

  She keeps only a single mirror, in the bathroom above the wash basin. Looking in it is always a surprise for Yse: Who on earth is that? But she never lingers, soon she is away from it and back to herself. And in this way too, she deals with Per Laszd, the lover she has never had.

  Yse has brought the coffee-pot and some peaches onto the terrace. It is a fine morning, and she is considering walk­ing along the bridge way to the boat-stop, and going over to the cafés on East Heights. There are always things on at the cafés: psychic fairs, art shows, theatre. And she needs some more lamp oil.

  Having placed the coffee and fruit, Yse looks up and sees the piano.

  ‘Oh,’ says Yse, aloud.

  She is very, very startled, and there are good reasons for this, beyond the obvious oddity itself.

  She goes to the edge of the terrace and leans over, where the tree leans over, and looks at the snake arms that hold the piano fast, tilted only slightly, and fringed by rippling leaves.

  The piano is old, huge, a type of pianoforte, its two lids fast shut, concealing both the keys and its inner parts.

  Water swirls round it idly. It is intensely black, scarcely marked by its swim.

  And has it been swimming? Probably it was jettisoned from some apartment on the mainland (the upper city.) Then, stretching out its three strong legs, it set off savagely for the island, determined not to go down.

  Yse has reasons, too, for thinking in this way.

  She reaches out, but cannot quite touch the piano.

  There are tides about the island, variable, sometimes rough. If she leaves the piano where it is, the evening tide may be a rough one, and lift it away, and she will lose it.

  She knows it must have swum here.

  Yse goes to the table and sits, drinking coffee, look­ing at the piano. As she does this a bree
ze comes in off the Sound, and stirs her phantom long heavy soft hair, so it brushes her face and neck and the sides of her arms. And the piano makes a faint twanging, she thinks perhaps it does, up through its shut lids that are like closed eyes and lips tog­ether.

  ‘What makes a vampire seductive?’ Yse asks Lucius, at the Café Blonde. ‘I mean, irresistible?’

  ‘His beauty,’ says Lucius. He laughs, showing his teeth. ‘I knew a vampire, once. No, make that twice. I met him twice.’

  ‘Yes?’ asks Yse cautiously. Lucius has met them all, ghosts, demons, angels. She partly believes it to be so, yet knows he mixes lies with the truths; a kind of test, or trap, for the listener. ‘Well, what happened?’

  ‘We walk, talk, drink, make love. He bites me. Here, see?’ Lucius moves aside his long locks (luxurious, but grey­ing, as are her own). On his coal-dark neck, no longer young, but strong as a column, an old scar.