Blood 20 Read online

  ‘Who knows?’

  ‘I miss my bloody dog,’ had said Laurus then.

  Corbo said, ‘You can always go back.’

  ‘Can I?’

  ‘Certainly. Only – if any of us do, we must tread carefully.’

  ‘They won’t believe what we did,’ said Laurus. ‘Sir.’

  ‘Don’t call me sir now. That’s past. My name is Marcus. They’ll come to believe it. Better than that, we shall go on and do more. As we know, the Vecordia are everywhere.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the only answer, isn’t it, s – Marcus.’

  That then was their plan. Slightly discussed, a moment here, or there, after sunset and before the uprush of dawn. Despite the blood, they felt the light a little, sometimes. A sort of soreness, a kind of unease. Like the bite of an insect that could never entirely heal, though it would never utterly harm.

  Marcus considered, as Laurus lay down to catch some sleep, his head pillowed on part of the old rolled-up blanket his dog had been want to lie on – Laurus had left the other half for the dog. Marcus Corbo thought of Arida, and regretfully of Yeila.

  But then, would he ever have trusted himself with her again? The urge to drink her blood would have mounted in him, he suspected, intrinsic component of sex. One night, however abstemious he had tried to be, he would go too far, and then – like Slinger – she would become one of their kind, and attached to him. With Slinger he was comfortable; the company of men and brothers. But women were different fare. Gorgeous. Sometimes too much. No. He did not want to risk that, with Yeila. Left alone she would forget him mostly. Or, when she learned what a hero he had become, she would never leave off vaunting their intimacy.

  What they would do, he and the Battalion, was continue their march. Over and across the entire map of the Exterra. They would go to find the other outposts of the enemy. It would not matter, their own low numbers or their apparently slight strength.

  No one man of Corbo’s band had been lost. Probably they would seldom be depleted. Or … be added to?

  They would live – as long as life.

  It did not bear thinking of. Corbo did not, beyond the occasional second, think of it.

  Next morning, as they were preparing to move away again southward, relentless on the trail of their predestined prey, a peculiar disturbance became visible over a clutch of high dunes to the north.

  They paused to watch, not alarmed, only perplexed.

  ‘It’s sheep –’

  ‘No – a child –’

  Laurus gave a shout. And then he ran away from them, toward the distance, laughing and calling.

  ‘It’s his damned dog!’

  So it was.

  Across the sands, frothed in a dusty sunlit haze, the dog of Laurus bounded. No spot on Earth was worth the patch of ground beside his master. The dog did not care that Laurus was a vampire, had no soul, sucked the blood of his enemies, and maybe his friends. The dog did not care that Laurus had left him behind – anyone could make a mistake.

  Watching them rolling together in the sand, laughing and barking and chirruping, and coughing at the grains, Corbo smiled. So huge the arena of the world, and the deeds that must be done there, and so silly, and now and then so kind, the tiny moments mosaic-laid all around them. A misplaced ring and a sorcerous mirror found, a blow of Fate colossal as the sky, a lost kiss, a question with no answer. Laurus was weeping, without shame, as he carried the huge and sandy, wriggling dog back into their camp. The camp raised a cheer. He said nothing, only looked to Corbo. Corbo patted the dog, who licked his face. ‘Better feed him. He’ll be missing the butcher.’

  He mounted up. How many days lay ahead? How many centuries?

  Corbo glanced back once. You could not, now, really tell one horizon from the other. As you could not really tell the past from the future. For the past altered its shape, as most men knew too well, and the future sometimes showed itself with awful accuracy. Corbo thought of a final nightfall, his bones, and with them the mirror, whole, or by then in fragments, lying under the sands, the grasses, the roots of trees as yet unborn. But then instead, Corbo thought of Yeila’s eyes, her breasts, her thighs, her hands. He too could always return. He could live. The sun rose higher as they rode. The desert shone like glass.

  BITE-ME-NOT

  (Or, Fleur de Fur)

  I

  In the tradition of young girls and windows, the young girl looks out of this one. It is difficult to see anything. The panes of the window are heavily leaded, and secured by a lattice of iron. The stained glass of lizard-green and storm-purple is several inches thick. There is no red glass in the window. The colour red is forbidden in the castle. Even the sun, behind the glass, is a storm sun, a green-lizard sun.

  The young girl wishes she had a gown of palest pastel rose – the nearest affinity to red that is ever allowed. Already she has long dark beautiful eyes, a long white neck. Her long dark hair is however hidden in a dusty scarf and she wears rags.

  She is a scullery maid. As she scours dishes and mops stone floors, she imagines she is a princess floating through the upper corridors, gliding to the dais in the Duke’s hall. The Cursed Duke. She is sorry for him. If he had been her father, she would have symp­athised with and consoled him. His own daughter is dead, as his wife is dead, but these things, being to do with the Cursing, are never spoken of. Except, sometimes, obliquely.

  ‘Rohise!’ dim voices cry now, full of dim scolding soon to be actualised.

  The scullery maid turns from the window and runs to have her ears boxed and a broom thrust into her hands.

  Meanwhile, the Cursed Duke is prowling his chamber, high in the East Turret carved with swans and gargoyles. The room is lined with books, swords, lutes, scrolls, and has two eerie port­raits, the larger of which represents his wife, and the smaller his daughter. Both ladies look much the same with their pale, egg-shaped faces, polished eyes, clasped hands. They do not really look like his wife or daughter, nor really remind him of them.

  There are no windows at all in the Turret; they were long ago bricked up and covered with hangings. Candles burn steadily. It is always night in the Turret. Save, of course, that by night there are particular sounds all about it, to which the Duke is accustomed, but which he does not care for. By night, like most of his court, the Cursed Duke closes his ears with softened tallow. However, if he sleeps, he dreams, and hears in the dream the beating of wings … Often, the court holds loud revel all night long.

  The Duke does not know that Rohise the scullery maid has been thinking of him. Perhaps he does not even know that a scullery maid is capable of thinking at all.

  Soon the Duke descends from the Turret and goes down, by various stairs and curving passages, into a large, walled-garden, on the east side of the castle.

  It is a very pretty garden, mannered and manicured, which the gardeners keep in perfect order. Over the tops of the high, high walls, where delicate blooms bell the vines, it is just possible to glimpse the tips of sun-baked mountains. But by day the mount­ains are blue and spiritual to look at, and seem scarcely real. They might only be inked on the sky.

  A portion of the Duke’s court is wandering about in the garden, playing games or musical instruments, or admiring painted sculptures, or the flora, none of which is red. But the Cursed Duke’s court seems vitiated this noon. Nights of revel take their toll.

  As the Duke passes down the garden, his courtiers acknowl­edge him deferentially. He sees them, old and young alike, all doomed as he is, and the weight of his burden increases.

  At the furthest, most eastern end of the garden, there is another garden, sunken and rather curious, beyond a wall with an iron door. Only the Duke possesses the key to this door. Now he unlocks it and goes through. His courtiers laugh and play and pretend not to see. He shuts the door behind him.

  The sunken garden, which no gardener ever tends, is maint­ained by other, spontaneous, means. It is small and square, lacking the hedges and the paths of the other, the sundials and
statues and little pools. All the sunken garden contains is a broad paved border, and at its centre a small plot of humid earth. Growing in the earth is a slender bush with slender velvet leaves.

  The Duke stands and looks at the bush only a short while.

  He visits it every day. He has visited it every day for years. He is waiting for the bush to flower. Everyone is waiting for this. Even Rohise, the scullery maid, is waiting, though, being only 16, born in the castle and uneducated, she does not properly understand why.

  The light in the little garden is dull and strange, for the whole of it is roofed over by a dome of thick smoky glass.

  It makes the atmosphere somewhat depressing, although the bush itself gives off a pleasant smell, rather resembling vanilla.

  Something is cut into the stone rim of the earth-plot where the bush grows. The Duke reads it for perhaps the thousandth time. O, fleur de feu –

  When the Duke returns from the little garden into the large garden, locking the door behind him, no-one seems truly to notice. But their obeisances now are circumspect.

  One day, he will perhaps emerge from the sunken garden leaving the door wide, crying out in a great voice. But not yet. Not today.

  The ladies bend to the bright fish in the pools, the knights pluck for them blossoms, challenge each other to combat at chess, or wrestling, discuss the menagerie lions; the minstrels sing of unrequited love. The pleasure garden is full of one long and weary sigh.

  ‘Oh flurda fur,

  ‘Pourma souffranee –’

  sings Rohise as she scrubs the flags of the pantry floor.

  ‘Ned ormey par,

  ‘May say day mwar –’

  ‘What are you singing, you slut?’ someone shouts, and kicks over her bucket.

  Rohise does not weep. She tidies her bucket and soaks up the spilled water with her cloths. She does not know what the song means because of which she seems, apparently, to have been chastised. She does not understand the words that somehow, somewhere – perhaps from her own dead mother – she had learned by rote.

  In the hour before sunset, the Duke’s hall is lit by flambeaux. In the high windows, the casements of oil-blue and lavender glass and glass like storms and lizards, are fastened tight. The huge window by the dais was long ago obliterated, shut up, and a tapestry hung of gold and silver tissue with all the rubies pulled out and emeralds substituted. It describes the subjugation of a fearsome unicorn by a maiden, and huntsmen.

  The court drifts in with its clothes of rainbow from which only the colour red is missing.

  Music for dancing plays. The lean pale dogs pace about, alert for titbits as dish on dish comes in. Roast birds in all their plumage glitter and die a second time under the eager knives. Pastry castles fall. Pink and amber fruits, and green fruits and black, glow beside the goblets of fine yellow wine.

  The Cursed Duke eats with care and attention, not with enjoyment. Only the very young of the castle still eat in that way, and there are not so many of those.

  The murky sun slides through the stained glass. The musicians strike up more wildly. The dances become boisterous. Once the day goes out, the hall will ring to chanson, to drum and viol and pipe. The dogs will bark, no language will be uttered except in a bellow. The lions will roar from the menagerie. On some nights the cannon are set off from the battlements, which are now all of them roofed in, fired out through narrow mouths just wide enough to accommodate them, the charge crashing away in thunder down the darkness.

  By the time the moon comes up and the castle rocks to its own cacophony, exhausted Rohise has fallen fast asleep in her cupboard bed in the attic. For years, from sunset to rise, nothing has woken her. Once, as a child, when she had been especially badly beaten, the pain woke her and she heard a strange silken scratching, somewhere over her head. But she thought it a rat, or a bird. Yes, a bird, for later it seemed to her there were also wings … But she forgot all this half a decade ago. Now she sleeps deeply and dreams of being a princess, forgetting, too, how the Duke’s daughter died. Such a terrible death, it is better to forget.

  ‘The sun shall not smite thee by day, neither the moon by night,’ intones the priest, eyes rolling, his voice like a bell behind the Duke’s shoulder.

  ‘Ne moi mords pas,’ whispers Rohise in her deep sleep. ‘Ne mwar mor par, ne par mor mwar …’

  And under its impenetrable dome, the slender bush has closed its fur leaves also to sleep. O flower of fire, oh fleur de fur. Its blooms, though it has not bloomed yet, bear the ancient name Nona Mordica. In light parlance they call it Bite-Me-Not. There is a reason for that.

  II

  He is the Prince of a proud and savage people. The pride they acknowledge, perhaps they do not consider themselves to be savages, or at least believe that savagery is the proper order of things.

  Feroluce, that is his name. It is one of the customary names his kind give their lords. It had connotations with diabolic royalty and, too, with a royal flower of long petals curved like scimitars. Also the name might be the partial anagram of another name. The bearer of that name was also winged.

  For Feroluce and his people are winged beings. They are more like a nest of dark eagles than anything, mounted high among the rocky pilasters and spinacles of the mountain. Cruel and magn­ificent, like eagles, the sombre sentries motionless as statuary on the ledge-edges, their sable wings folded about them. They are very alike in appearance (less a race or tribe, more a flock, an unkindness of ravens). Feroluce also, black-winged, black-haired, aquiline of feature, standing on the brink of star-dashed space, his eyes burning through the night like all the eyes along the rocks, depthless red as claret.

  They have their own traditions of art and science. They do not make or read books, fashion garments, discuss God or meta­physics or men. Their cries are mostly wordless and always myster­ious, flung out like ribbons over the air as they wheel and swoop and hang in wicked cruciform, between the peaks. But they sing, long hours, for whole nights at a time, music that has a language only they know. All their wisdom and theosophy, and all their grasp of beauty, truth or love, is in the singing.

  They look unloving enough, and so they are. Pitiless fallen angels. A travelling people, they roam after sustenance. Their sustenance is blood. Finding a castle, they accepted it, every bastion and wall, as their prey. They have preyed on it and tried to prey on it for years. In the beginning, their calls, their songs, could lure victims to the feast. In this way, the tribe or unkindness of Feroluce took the Duke’s wife, somnambulist, from a midnight balcony. But the Duke’s daughter, the first victim they found 17 years ago, benighted on the mountainside. Her escort and herself they left to the sunrise, marble figures, the life drunk away.

  Now the castle is shut, bolted and barred. They are even more attracted by its recalcitrance (a woman who says No). They do not intend to go away until the castle falls to them.

  By night, they fly like huge black moths round and round the carved turrets, the dull-lit leaded windows, their wings invok­ing a cloudy tindery wind, pushing thunder against thundery glass.

  They sense they are attributed to some sin, reckoned a punishing curse, a penance, and this amuses them at the level whereon they understand it.

  They also sense something of the flower, the Nona Mordica. Vampires have their own legends.

  But tonight Feroluce launches himself into the air, speeds down the sky on the black sails of his wings, calling, a call like laughter or derision. This morning, in the tween-time before the light began and the sun-to-be drove him away to his shadowed eyrie in the mountain-guts, he saw a chink in the armour of the beloved refusing-woman-prey. A window, high in an old neglected tower, a window with a small eyelet that was cracked.

  Feroluce soon reaches the eyelet and breathes on it, as if he would melt it. (His breath is sweet. Vampires do not eat raw flesh, only blood, which is a perfect food and digests perfectly, while their teeth are sound of necessity.) The way the glass mists at breath intrigues Feroluce. But present
ly he taps at the cranky pane, taps, then claws. A piece breaks away, and now he sees how it should be done.

  Over the rims and up thrusts of the castle, which is only really another mountain with caves to Feroluce, the rumble of the Duke’s revel drones on.

  Feroluce pays no heed. He does not need to reason, he merely knows, that noise masks this – as he smashes in the window. Its panes were all faulted and the lattice rusty. It is, of course, more than that. The magic of Purpose has protected the castle, and, as in all balances, there must be, or come to be, some balanc­ing contradiction, some flaw …

  The people of Feroluce do not notice what he is at. In a way, the dance with their prey has debased to a ritual. They have lived almost two decades on the blood of local mountain beasts, and bird-creatures like themselves brought down on the wing. Patience is not, with them, a virtue. It is a sort of foreplay, and can go on, in pleasure, a long, long while.

  Feroluce intrudes himself through the slender window. Muscularly slender himself, and agile, it is no feat. But the wings catch, are a trouble. They follow him because they must, like two separate entities. They have been cut a little on the glass, and bleed.

  He stands in a stony small room, shaking bloody feathers from him, snarling, but without sound.

  Then he finds the stairway and goes down.

  There are dusty landings and neglected chambers. They have no smell of life. But then there comes to be a smell. It is the scent of a nest, a colony of things, wild creatures, in constant proximity. He recognises it. The light of his crimson eyes precedes him, deciphering blackness. And then other eyes, amber, green and gold, spring out like stars all across his path.

  Somewhere an old torch is burning out. To the human eye, only mounds and glows would be visible, but to Feroluce, the Prince of the vampires, all is suddenly revealed. There is a great stone area, barred with bronze and iron, and things stride and growl behind the bars, or chatter and flee, or only stare. And there, without bars, though bound by ropes of brass to rings of brass, three brazen beasts.