Blood 20 Read online

  Feroluce, on the steps of the menagerie, looks into the gaze of the Duke’s lions. Feroluce smiles, and the lions roar. One is the king, its mane like war-plumes. Feroluce recognises the king and the king’s right to challenge, for this is the lions’ domain, their territory.

  Feroluce comes down the stair and meets the lion as it leaps the length of its chain. To Feroluce, the chain means nothing, and since he has come close enough, very little either to the lion.

  To the vampire Prince the fight is wonderful, exhilarating and meaningful, intellectual even, for it is coloured by nuance, yet powerful as sex.

  He holds fast with his talons, his strong limbs wrapping the beast, which is almost stronger than he, just as its limbs wrap him in turn. He sinks his teeth in the lion’s shoulder, and in fierce rage and bliss begins to draw out the nourishment. The lion kicks and claws at him in turn. Feroluce feels the gouges like fire along his shoulders, thighs, and hugs the lion more nearly as he throttles and drinks from it, loving it, jealous of it, killing it. Gradually the mighty feline body relaxes, still clinging to him, its cat teeth bedded in one beautiful swan-like wing, for­gotten by both.

  In a welter of feathers, stripped skin, spilled blood, stray semen, the lion and the angel lie in embrace on the menagerie floor. The lion lifts its head, kisses the assassin, shudders, lets go.

  Feroluce glides out from under the magnificent dead-weight of the cat. He stands. And pain assaults him. His lover has severely wounded him.

  Across the menagerie floor, the two lionesses are crouched. Beyond them, a man stands gaping in simple terror, behind the guttering torch. He had come to feed the beasts, and seen another feeding, and now is paralysed. He is deaf, the menagerie-keeper, previously an advantage saving him the horror of nocturnal vampire noises.

  Feroluce starts towards the human animal swifter than a serpent, and checks. Agony envelops Feroluce, and the stone room spins. Involuntarily, confused, he spreads his wings for flight, there in the confined chamber. But only one wing will open. The other, damaged and partly broken, hangs like a snapped fan. Feroluce cries out, a beautiful singing note of despair and anger. He drops fainting at the menagerie keeper’s feet.

  The man does not wait for more. He runs away through the castle, screaming invective and prayer, and reaches the Duke’s hall, and makes the whole hall listen.

  All this while, Feroluce lies in the ocean of almost-death that is sleep or swoon, while the smaller beasts in the cages discuss him, or seem to.

  And when he is raised, Feroluce does not wake. Only the great drooping bloody wings quiver and are still. Those who carry him are more than ever revolted and frightened, for they have seld­om seen blood. Even the food for the menagerie is cooked almost black. Two years ago, a gardener slashed his palm on a thorn. He was banished from the court for a week.

  But Feroluce, the centre of so much attention, does not rouse. Not until the dregs of the night are stealing out through the walls. Then some nervous instinct invests him. The sun is coming and this is an open place – he struggles through unconsciousness and hurt, through the deepest most bladed waters, to awareness.

  And finds himself in a huge bronze cage, the cage of some animal appropriated for the occasion. Bars, bars all about him, and not to be got rid of, for he reaches to tear them away and cannot.

  Beyond the bars, the Duke’s hall, which is only a pointless cold glitter to him in the maze of pain and dying lights. Not an open place, in fact, but too open for his kind. Through the window-spaces of thick glass, muddy sunglare must come in. To Feroluce it will be like swords, acids and burning fire –

  Far off he hears wings beat and voices soaring. His people search for him, call and wheel and find nothing.

  Feroluce cries cut, a gravel shriek now, the persons in the hall rush back from him, calling on God. But Feroluce does not see. He has tried to answer his own. Now he sinks down again under the coverlet of his broken wings, and the wine-red stars of his eyes go out.

  III

  ‘And the Angel of Death,’ the priest intones, ‘shall surely pass over, but yet like the Shadow, not substance –’

  The smashed window in the old turret above the menagerie tower has been sealed with mortar and brick. It is a terrible thing that it was for so long overlooked. A miracle that only one of the creatures found and entered by it. God, the Protector, guarded the Cursed Duke and his court. And the magic that surrounds the castle, that too held fast. For from the possibility of a disaster was born a bloom of great value: now one of the monsters is in their possession. A prize beyond price.

  Caged and helpless, the fiend is at their mercy. It is also weak from its battle with the noble lion, which gave its life for the castle’s safety (and will be buried with honour in an ornamented grave at the foot of the Ducal family tomb.) Just before the dawn came, the Duke’s advisers advised him, and the bronze cage was wheeled away into the darkest area of the hall, close by the dais where once the huge window was but is no more. A barricade of great screens was brought, and set around the cage, and the top of it covered. No sunlight now can drip into the prison to harm the specimen. Only the Duke’s ladies and gentlemen steal in around the screens and see, by the light of a candle branch, the demon still lying in its trance of pain and blood loss. The Duke’s alchemist sits on a stool nearby, dictating many notes to a nervous apprentice. The alchemist, and the apothecary for that matter, are convinced that the vampire, having drunk the lion almost dry, will recover from its wounds. Even the wings will mend. The Duke’s court painter also came. He was ashamed presently, and went away. The beauty of the demon affected him, making him wish to paint it, not as something wonderfully disgusting, but as a kind of superlative man, vital and innocent, or as Lucifer himself, stricken in the sorrow of his colossal Fall. And all that has caused the painter to pity the fallen one, mere artisan that the painter is, so he slunk away. He knows, since the alchemist and the apothecary told him, what is to be done.

  Of course much of the castle knows. Though scarcely anyone has slept or sought sleep, the whole place rings with excitement and vivacity. The Duke has decreed, too, that everyone who wishes shall be a witness. So he is having a progress through the castle, seeking every nook and cranny, while, let it be said, his architect takes the opportunity to check no other window-pane has cracked.

  From room to room the Duke and his entourage pass, through corridors, along stairs, through dusty attics and musty storerooms he has never seen, or if seen has forgotten. Here and there some retainer is come on. Some elderly women are discovered spinning like spiders up under the eaves, half-blind and complacent. They curtsy to the Duke from a vague recollection of old habit. The Duke tells them the good news; or rather, his messenger, walking before, announces it. The ancient women sigh and whisper, are left, probably forget. Then again, in a narrow courtyard, a simple boy, who looks after a dovecote, is magnificently told. He has a fit from alarm, grasping nothing, and the doves who love and understand him (by not trying to) fly down and cover him with their soft wings as the Duke goes away. The boy comes to under the doves as if in a heap of warm snow, comforted.

  It is on one of the dark staircases above the kitchen that the gleaming entourage sweeps round a bend and comes on Rohise the scullery maid, scrubbing. In these days, when there are so few children and young servants, labour is scarce, and the scullerers are not confined to the scullery.

  Rohise stands up, pale with shock, and for a wild instant thinks that, for some heinous crime she has committed in ignorance, the Duke has come in person to behead her.

  ‘Hear then, by the Duke’s will,’ cries the messenger. ‘One of Satan’s night-demons, which do torment us, has been captured and lies penned in the Duke’s hall. At sunrise tomorrow, this thing will be taken to that sacred spot where grows the bush of the Flower of the Fire, and there its foul blood shall be shed. Who then can doubt the bush will blossom, and save us all, by the Grace of God?’

  ‘And the Angel of Death,’ intones the priest,
on no account to be omitted, ‘shall surely –’

  ‘Wait,’ says the Duke. He is as white as Rohise. ‘Who is this?’ he asks. ‘Is it a ghost?’

  The court stare at Rohise, who nearly sinks in dread, her scrubbing rag in her hand.

  Gradually, despite the rag, the rags, the rough hands, the court too begins to see.

  ‘Why, it is a marvel.’

  The Duke moves forward. He looks down at Rohise and starts to cry. Rohise thinks he weeps in compassion at the awful sentence he is here to visit on her, and drops back on her knees.

  ‘No, no,’ says the Duke tenderly. ‘Get up. Rise. You are so like my child, my daughter –’

  Then Rohise, who knows few prayers, begins in panic to sing her little song as an orison:

  ‘O fleur de feu,

  ‘Pour ma souffrance –’

  ‘Ah!’ says the Duke. ‘Where did you learn that song?’

  ‘From my mother,’ says Rohise. And, all instinct now, she sings again:

  ‘O flurda fur,

  ‘Pourma souffrance,

  ‘Ned ormey par,

  ‘May say day mwar –’

  It is the song of the fire-flower bush, the Nona Mordica, called Bite-Me-Not. It begins, and continues: O flower of fire, For my misery’s sake. Do not sleep but aid me; wake! The Duke’s daughter sang it very often. In those days the shrub was not needed, being just a rarity of the castle. Invoked as an amulet, on a mountain road, the rhyme itself had besides proved useless.

  The Duke takes the dirty scarf from Rohise’s hair. She is very, very like his lost daughter, the same pale smooth oval face, the long white neck and long dark polished eyes, and the long dark hair. (Or is it that she is very, very like the painting?)

  The Duke gives instructions and Rohise is borne away.

  In a beautiful chamber, the door of which has for 17 years been locked, Rohise is bathed and her hair is washed. Oils and scents are rubbed into her skin. She is dressed in a gown of palest most pastel rose, with a girdle sewn with pearls. Her hair is combed, and on it is set a chaplet of stars and little golden leaves. ‘Oh, your poor hands,’ say the maids, as they trim her nails. Rohise has realised she is not to be executed. She has realised the Duke has seen her and wants to love her like his dead daughter. Slowly, an uneasy stir of something, not quite happiness, moves through Rohise. Now she will wear her pink gown, now she will sympathise with and console the Duke. Her daze lifts suddenly.

  The dream has come true. She dreamed it so often it seems quite normal. The scullery was the thing that never seemed real.

  She glides down through the castle and the ladies are astonished by her grace. The carriage of her head under the starry coronet is exquisite. Her voice is quiet and clear and musical, and the foreign tone of her mother, long unremembered, is quite gone from it. Only the roughened hands give her away, but smoothed by unguents, soon they will be soft and white.

  ‘Can it be she is truly the princess returned to flesh?’

  ‘Her life was taken so early – yes, as they believe in the Spice-Lands, by some holy dispensation, she might return.’

  ‘She would be about the age to have been conceived the very night the Duke’s daughter d – That is, the very night the bane began –’

  Theosophical discussion ensues. Songs are composed.

  Rohise sits for a while with her adoptive father in the East Turret, and he tells her about the books and swords and lutes and scrolls, but not about the two portraits. Then they walk out together, in the lovely garden in the sunlight. They sit under a peach tree, and discuss many things, or the Duke discusses them. That Rohise is ignorant and uneducated does not matter at this point. She can always be trained. She has the basic require­ments, docility, sweetness. There are many royal maidens in many places who know as little as she.

  The Duke falls asleep under the peach tree. Rohise listens to the love-songs her own (her very own) courtiers bring her.

  When the monster in the cage is mentioned, she nods as if she knows what they mean. She supposes it is something hideous, a scaring treat to be shown at dinner time, when the sun has gone down.

  When the sun moves toward the western line of mountains just visible over the high walls, the court streams into the castle and all the doors are bolted and barred. There is an eagerness tonight in the concourse.

  As the light dies out behind the coloured windows that have no red in them, covers and screens are dragged away from a bronze cage. It is wheeled out into the centre of the great hall.

  Cannon begin almost at once to blast and bang from the roof-holes. The cannoneers have had strict instructions to keep up the barrage all night without a second’s pause.

  Drums pound in the hall. The dogs start to bark.

  Rohise is not surprised by the noise, for she has often heard it from far up, in her attic, like a sea-wave breaking over and over through the lower house.

  She looks at the cage cautiously, wondering what she will see. But she sees only a heap of blackness like ravens, and then a tawny dazzle, torchlight on something like human skin.

  ‘You must not go down to look,’ says the Duke protectively, as his court pours about the cage. Someone pokes between the bars with a gemmed cane, trying to rouse the nightmare that lies quies­cent there. But Rohise must be spared this.

  So the Duke calls his actors, and a slight, pretty play is put on throughout dinner, before the dais, shutting off from the sight of Rohise the rest of the hall, where the barbaric gloating and goading of the court, unchecked, increases.

  IV

  The Prince Feroluce becomes aware between one second and the next. It is the sound – heard beyond all others – of the wings of his people beating at the stones of the castle. It is the wings that speak to him, more than their wild orchestral voices. Beside these sensations, the anguish of healing and the sadism of human­kind are not much.

  Feroluce opens his eyes. His human audience, pleased, but afraid and squeamish, back away, and ask each other for the two thousandth time if the cage is quite secure. In the torchlight, the eyes of Feroluce are more black than red. He stares about. He is, though captive, imperious. If he were a lion or a bull, they would admire this ‘nobility’. But the fact is, he is too much like a man, which serves to point his supernatural differences unbearably.

  Obviously, Feroluce understands the gist of his plight. Enemies have him penned. He is a show for now, but ultimately to be killed – for with the intuition of the raptor he divines every­thing. He had thought the sunlight would kill him, but that is a distant matter now. And beyond all, the voices and the voices of the wings of his kindred beat the air outside this room-caved mountain of stone.

  And so, Feroluce commences to sing, or at least, this is how it seems to the rabid court and all the people gathered in the hall. It seems he sings. It is the great communing call of his kind, the art and science and religion of the winged vampires, his means of telling them, or attempting to tell them, what they must be told before he dies. So the sire of Feroluce sang, and the grandsire, and each of his ancestors. Generally they died in flight, falling angels spun down the gulches and enormous stairs of distant peaks, singing. Feroluce, immured, believes that his cry is somehow audible.

  To the crowd in the Duke’s hall the song is merely that, a song, but how glorious. The dark silver voice, turning to bronze or gold, whitening in the higher registers There seem to be words, but in some other tongue. This is how the planets sing, surely, or mysterious creatures of the sea.

  Everyone is bemused. They listen, astonished.

  No-one now remonstrates with Rohise when she rises and steals down from the dais. There is an enchantment that prevents movement and coherent thought. Of all the roomful, only she is drawn forward. So she comes close, unhindered, and between the bars of the cage, she sees the vampire for the first time.

  She has no notion what he can be. She imagined it was a monster or a monstrous beast. But it is neither. Rohise, starved for so long of beauty and alway
s dreaming of it, recognises Feroluce inevitably as part of the dream-come-true. She loves him instantly. Because she loves him, she is not afraid of him.

  She attends while he goes on and on with his glorious song. He does not see her at all, or any of them. They are only things, like mist, or pain. They have no character or personality or worth; abstracts.

  Finally, Feroluce stops singing. Beyond the stone and the thick glass of the siege, the wing-beats, too, eddy into silence.,

  Finding itself mesmerised, silent by night, the court comes to with a terrible joint start, shrilling and shouting, bursting, exploding into a compensation of sound. Music flares again. And the cannon in the roof, which had also fallen quiet, resume with a tremendous roar.

  Feroluce shuts his eyes and seems to sleep. It is his preparation for death.

  Hands grasp Rohise. ‘Lady – step back, come away. So close! It may harm you –’

  The Duke clasps her in a father’s embrace. Rohise, unused to this sort of physical expression, is unmoved. She pats him absently.

  ‘My lord, what will be done?’

  ‘Hush, child. Best you do not know.’

  Rohise persists.

  The Duke persists in not saying.

  But she remembers the words of the herald on the stair, and knows they mean to butcher the winged man. She attends thereafter more carefully to snatches of the bizarre talk about the hall, and learns all she needs. At earliest sunrise, as soon as the enemy retreat from the walls, their captive will be taken to the lovely garden with the peach trees. And so to the sunken garden of the magic bush, the fire-flower. And there they will hang him up in the sun through the dome of smoky glass, which will be slow murder to him, but they will cut him, too, so his blood, the stolen blood of the vampire, runs down to water the roots of the fleur de feu. And who can doubt that, from such nourishment, the bush will bloom? The blooms are salvation. Wherever they grow it is a safe place. Whoever wears them is safe from the draining bite of demons. Bite-Me-Not, they call it; vampire-repellent.