==========
“Winter Flowers” was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and appeared in the June 1993 issue of Asimov’s, with an illustration by Alan M. Clark. Tanith Lee appears less frequently in Asimov’s than we might wish, but each appearance has been memorable. Lee has also written more frequently and with more originality about vampires than perhaps any other fantasy writer of her generation (with the exception of Anne Rice), and the darkly lyrical story that follows is no exception to either the rule of memorability or the rule of vivid originality, as she introduces us to some questing knights on their way to an enigmatic castle, and also on their way to a meeting with a deadly and mysterious destiny…
Tanith Lee is one of the best-known and most prolific of modern fantasists, with Numerous books to her credit, including the novels The Birthgrave,
Drinking Sapphire Wine, Don’t Bite the Sun, Night’s Master, The Storm Lord, Sung in Shadow, Volkhavaar, Anackire, The Blood of Roses, and the collections Night’s Sorceries, Tamastara, The Gorgon, Dreams of Dark and Light, and Forests of the Night Her short story “Elle Est Trois (La Mort)” won a World Fantasy Award in 1984 and her brilliant collection of retold folk tales, Red as Blood, was also a finalist that year, in the Best Collection category. Her most recent book is a new collection, Nightshades.
This story is for Louise Cooper, who played me the music, and told me who they were.
==========
Pierre was burned at Bethelmai; I helped them light the fire.
Parts of the town were already burning, and under cover of that, and the general sack, we had gone about our own business. There had been no real pay for months and Bethelmai was full of trinkets, particularly in the houses around the church, and there were the cellars of wine and the kitchens that still had chickens and loaves despite five weeks of siege. And there were the plump, cream-fed women. Duke Waif’s boys were well occupied. There should have been room enough for anything.
I had found an old narrow house in a by-way that the onslaught had either missed or else run over and left behind. Probably not the latter, for though there were signs of upset, broken pots, a few coins scattered from a chest, the hurried household may have made a mess in getting out. Upstairs someone was moving, or maybe only breathing. I climbed the stair and pushed open the door. Into the gloom of the chamber from a slit of window a light ray fell from the smoking town, and lit a pair of brown-amber eyes wide with fright.
“Don’t rape me,” she said, and then a fragment of bad Latin, the kind you hear all over a camp before the assault, prayer in pieces. She was obviously a servant, abandoned, only about fourteen years old.
“No. I won’t do that.”
I went right over and sat beside her on the wooden bed of her deserting master and mistress. I took her hand. Of course I reeked of the fight, metal and blood and smoke, but not of lust. I was only thirsty.
There was a tiny silver ring on her wrist.
“Don’t take it,” she said. “It’s all I’ve got.”
“No, I won’t take it.”
I raised her hand to my mouth, and moved the ring up a little, away from the vein. I put my mouth there, and sucked at the flesh, letting my saliva numb her, the way it does. And I crooned in my throat. She became still and soft, and when I bit into the vein she never flinched, only sighed once.
It was some while since I had had blood. That is the way of it. The campaigns are often long and it will be difficult to get anything. The battles make up for this, affording as they usually do so many opportunities.
The nourishment went into me and I could feel it doing me good, better than wine and meat. But I did not take too much, and when I finished I tore her sleeve and bound up the wound. They rarely remember.
She was drowsy, and I kissed her forehead and put some of the coins from the chest downstairs into her hand.
“Stay up here till nightfall. Then go carefully, and you might sneak away.” There was nowhere much for her to fly to, in fact, for the country side had been shaved bald by Waif’s hungry vicious troops. Still, she must take her chance. It is all any of us can do.
Downstairs I worked a touch more damage on the hall, and gathered up the last coins from the chest, the lock of which I smashed with my dagger-hilt for good measure. It now looked for sure as though the soldiers had already been through and there would be nothing remaining to filch.
Outside I went looking for a drink of wine. I felt strong, alert, and clean now, the way we do after living blood. With bright clear eyes I viewed the smoldered roofs, and on the ground the occasional corpse, and many looted objects cast aside. Waif’s happy men were throwing down treasures from upper windows and over walls. The mailed soldier swaggered, drunk, round the streets, toasting the Duke, and now and then some of the captains rode by on their steaming horses, trailing Waif’s colors proudly, as if something wonderful had been done. Dim intermittent thuds and crashes, shouts, and the continual high cries of women, thickened and smirched the air.
Bethelmai was hot from the fires, although outside winter had set in on the plains and hills. Bollo had said it would be snow before the week was out and he was seldom wrong. God help them then, all the towns and villages Duke Waif had cracked. Where next? There had been talk of Pax Pontis to the north. That was greater than Bethelmai and might require some months of siege. From somewhere Walf would have to get more cash and further provisions, or his toasting proud army would desert him. So I was thinking, idling along with a wine-skin I had pulled off an addled soldier, not realizing that none of this would presently con-cern me.
It was when I came out into the square before the church. that I beheld a secondary commotion was going on, and Pierre was in the midst of it. Waif’s men had him by both arms, and all across the distance I could see the scarlet marker, like the kiss of a rose, on his mouth.
Up on the church steps, before the broken gaping door, some of Waif’s officers were standing, looking on. But all around the pillaging soldiers scurried, not noticing what happened with Pierre, supposing it possibly some breach of petty discipline peculiarly upheld, as often happens, in the middle of a riot.
Then big-bellied Captain Rotlam came at me, pushing his beaked, scarred and scowling face forward like an angry, oddly-neckless goose.
“You, Maurs. That’s your man there. You see, the one my fellows have got.”
“I see, Captain. Yes, he’s one of mine.”
“Stinking mercenaries,” said Rotlam. He spat at my boot. No matter. It had had worse on it today, and several times. “You God-cursed filthy thieves,” he enlarged.
“Taking the Duke’s pay,” I wondered what pay he meant, “skulking—have you even killed anything this morning, aside from your own fleas? Any enemy?”
I said, “Shall I bring you their severed hands?”
“Eh? Shut your mouth. That bastard there. Your scum. Do you know what we caught him at?”
I knew. Already and quite well I knew, and my heart, which had been high, was growing cold. It had happened before, and when it did, there was not much that could be done. We all understood that. Even Arpad the hothead, and Yens the grumbler, and melancholy, colicky Festus. You must take your chance. All luck runs dry at last, like every river, now or tomorrow or at World’s End.
But I said, scowling back, “What’s Pierre done?”
“Pierre is it? Don’t you know he’s a stinking blasphemous witch?”
I crossed myself. I make my mistakes but am not a fool.
“Yes, God guard us—” Rotlam gestured at his men to bring my one forward, and they dragged Pierre, pulling him off his feet, so by the time they reached us he was kneeling.
His dark eyes moved up to mine above the red mouth. Poor lost Pierre. Dead brother to be. But I had my other brothers to consider, and my own damnable skin.
“Well,” I said roughly, “What’s this? What have you been doing in God’s name?”
“Nothing, Maurs,” said Pierre. He added expertly, and hopelessly, “ ‘There was this boy, he had a gold chain hidden, and when I tried to get it off him, he went for me like a mad dog. I fought him off but I couldn’t get my knife— so I bit him. In the neck. It stopped him. Then the Captain’s soldiers found us, and for some reason—”
“He was drinking the boy’s blood,” broke in the man who had Pierre by the left arm. He shook the arm as if to get it free of the socket and Pierre yelped. “Accursed demon shit!” the soldier shouted. He was terrified, all the drink gone to venom.
“He wanted to kill this bastard on the spot,” said the other man, “but I said, bring him to the Captain.”
“Oh, by God,” I said, sounding amused, amazed, my heart like the snow Bollo had told me was coming. “By God, can’t my fellow defend himself without—”
“He drank the boy’s blood,” said the calm soldier stolidly, staring at me. “If you’d seen, you’d believe. Or have you seen, sometime, and not minded?”‘
At that Rotlam punched me in the chest.
“Eh? Answer that, Maurs, you bit of muck.”
I straightened up and shrugged. “These two are drunk out of their wits. What do they know?”
There was some shouting then, and the calmer of the soldiers drew his sword on me and I knocked him flat. Then Rotlam hit me and I had to take it, since he was one of the marvelous Duke’s astounding captains. Pierre by this time had lowered his head. When the noise lessened, I heard him murmur, “Let me go, Maurs. My fault. Who cares. I’ve had enough.”
“What’s the devil say?” roared goose-face Rotlam, hissing and bubbling.
“God hears, not I,” I said. “I don’t know this man well. You’d better get a priest. See what he says.”
So, like Peter before Cockcrow, I gave my friend over to oblivion. And like Peter I sweated chill and was full of darkness.
They made quite a show of it, calling all the troops they could prize from the sack, setting up a sort of court. Examining Pierre. There were three greasy priests, rats who had been busy enough themselves on Bethelmai’s carcass until called off. The Duke’s bastard looked in upon the “trial,” but did not bother to stay. Bollo and I were asked questions, and Johan, who had been Pierre’s companion on various forays, and Festus and Lutgeri, who had been with Pierre getting in over the fallen gates of the town. We all said we did not know Pierre that well, for he had not been with us very long. He had come out of the night to our fire that summer, just before we offered our swords to the Duke. And as we said this rubbish, I watched Pierre slightly nodding to himself. Once, long, long ago, at a similar scene, I had wept, and nearly implicated myself. But the tears dry like the luck and the fucking rivers.
In the end, Pierre was pronounced demon-possessed, a witch. He admitted it, because otherwise they would have broken his fingers, lashed him, done other choice things. They made up a makeshift but efficient pyre, with a pole in the center that had been a cross-beam of some house. They pushed Pierre up and bound him. He looked at me, and his eyes said Curse me now. So we cursed him, and asked the priests for help and penances, and what prayers to say, since we had been all summer and fall in Pierre’s deadly company. The priests were sweet. They took our spoils of gold from Bethelmai and instructed us to abstain from wine and women, and meat. To beg from God morning and evening. And such clever methods.
When they set fire to the wood, I ran and flung a torch into the sticks, howling. My men cheered and spat upon Pierre. He looked down at us from beyond the smoke. He was a beautiful boy, seeming not more than twenty, with a face to charm the girls, and, come to that, the Dukes of this earth. He knew every foul name we called him was a prayer, and every gob of spit a cry for his forgiveness.
In the end he screamed in agony, and forgot us all.
They say the fire is cold. I heard it once—So cold! So cold!
It would be easy to abstain from meat after all.
When he was gone and the flames sank and gave way, and they had raked about and made sure that nothing had lived in them, they sprinkled the place with holy water.
Soon after, Rotlam the goose told us to get going. We were to have no pay—what pay?—and to take nothing from the town—the priests had had most of it. I argued, since not to do so would seem strange and perhaps suspicious. “We fought hard and well for Duke Waif.” But Rotlam laughed, and that in a ring of swords.
From the hills above the plain we glanced back, but Bethelmai was still burning, although Pierre had finished.
“May they eat their own flesh and vomit their own guts,” said Arpad.
“They will,” said Lutgeri. “They all do in the end.”
I thought of the girl with a fawn’s amber eyes, and if she would escape the town. To think of Pierre was a more terrible thing I must come to softly. For he was all the others who had died, and he was also all of us. No one spoke to me as we tramped across the hills, with the smut of Bethelmai upon our hides and the blood of Bethelmai in our bellies, and Pierre’s death our banner.
==========
Bollo had been right about the snow. It came like a great grey bird from the heart of the sky. The whiteness fell like petals. So cold. So cold.
“There’ll be wolves,” said Gilles.
“So, wolves are nothing,” said Johan stoically.
There are always two schools of thought with wolves. One says they are fiends who will tear you up as you sleep and chew your genitals till you wake shrieking. The other school, which from experience is mine, will tell that wolves seldom attack a moving man, or a sleeping man for that matter. Once Johan was relieving himself in a winter field and a wolf appeared and stared at him. The eyes of wolves are human, and Johan was costive for three days. But when he shouted at the wolf it fled.
In any case, we did not hear their song, up on the lean white hills. We heard nothing. The world had died. Good riddance.
Once, from a height, we saw a town far off, walls and towers, and when the dark began, that buzz of half-seen light, all the candles, torches, hearths, all the dreams and desires of the hive. Yens said that he thought the town was Musen, but we did not know, and hated it only dimly, like the distance.
After about two days, we began to talk of Pierre. We recalled things he had said and done, how he had been a friend, how he had enraged us. Those of us who recollected the first meeting between us spoke of that. It was true he had come to the campfire in the night, but that was a century ago. He found us by stealth and the magic of our kind. Our brotherhood of blood is old and uncanny, but we are like the wolves. Timid, lonely. Our pack cleaves to itself. We prey only where we can. And we too have human eyes.
In the dark white of the snow, Johan said to me, “You talked about bringing Rotlam the severed hands of those you killed. Was that unwise? Does it give away something? The Egyptians by the Nilus did that. Suppose you chatter to a scholar.”
“Then I’m done for, Johan. One day.”
Yes, no fool, but I make mistakes, and who does not?
Pierre…
It was not that he had been my lover, or like some son I had never seen. He was myself. And to each of us, he was that.
Lutgeri may be the oldest of us. Sometimes he dreams of painted icons in a hut of logs, and smoke, and a hymn that brought the light.
As we age, we lose the nearer past a little, as any old man does.
For the rest, it is lies. The sun does not smite us, nor the moon by night. Garlic is a fine flavor. Thorns rip but that is all. Iron and silver—we have had both, and lost both. And for the cross of the Christ? Well, He was one of us, or so Pierre once said. Did they not drink blood?
But kill us, we die. Burn us, we are ashes.
Ah, Pierre——-
==========
And so, through the death of Pierre, we wandered, a band of mercenaries without a lord, scavengers on the winter land, wolves, crows. And so, we saw the castle.
Maybe we would have turned to it our shoulders, but the hour was sunset, and in the sunset we saw this place, on a sky as red as blood and threaded with gold like the robe of a priest.
The castle looked black. Not a light, not a glim to be glimpsed.
“Perhaps there is some count or duke there,” said Ar-pad, “who wants men to serve him. Wants to take some city in the spring. The rotten old bastard. He’ll feed us.”
“And women,” said Festus.
“Gorgeous women, white as the snow, with sweets for tits and cores of roses.” This, Gilles.
We scanned the landscape for a village or town, some settlement to support the castle, and there was none. Under the snow, and the blood of crimson dying sun, nothing moved.
“A ruin,” said Yens. “Taken, despoiled. Empty.”
“We’ll go and see.” Arpad.
“Winter in a ruin. Not for the first.” Johan. . But we sat on the hill, slept by the fire. In the dawn we looked down again, and now the castle was not black but warm, the sun’s rays on it over the cloth of the snow.
If we had had his body, we would have buried him here, at this castle, our brother Pierre. But we did not have a mote of black dust.
Lutgeri said, “Pierre would have liked that place. He’d have waxed lyrical. Remember how well he sang. A troubadour.”
We thought of Pierre under the long thin windows of the castle, singing to some princess of story.
As we descended we found the snow was deep. We were pulled in and hacked our way out. It was another battle. Under the snow, Hades, a Hell of ice.
When we began to get level with the castle, we looked it over again. It was not so large. Some big towers with crenellations, and an inner block, high-roofed and capped by snow, with one slender squinnying tower all its own. Up there, a stab of light went through a window, rose-red, deathly green as a dying thorn.
“By the Christ,” said Johan.
We stopped.
“What’s that, by the Mass?”
“Flowers,” said Gilles.
“No.”
There could be no flower in the snowlands.
“Remember—” said Arpad, “remember what Pierre called it—the battlefield—”
Memory again. We had once come to a place, the plain of a war, in the snow, years back. And on the plain, left to God and the carrion birds, were the dying men, and the blood leaking from their bodies, red on the white. A feast.
A horrible and cursed feast we were then too desperate to ignore.
And Pierre had named the sight.
“The blood in the sunlight on the snow,” he said. “Red roses. Winter flowers.”
“Flowers in winter,” said Arpad now, so low only we could have heard him, and we did.
There was something blooming along the walls of the castle, and it looked like flowers. Winter flowers. Roses.
“There’s nothing like that,” said Johan. “We—we are the legend.”
We laughed.
We forced our way on towards the castle.
==========
There is a tradition of Maryam, the Virgin Mother of the Christ: That she has a garden enclosed by high walls. And in the garden it is always summer and the flowers grow.
Had we come to the Garden of Maryam?
As the castle’s barriers loomed up over us, we searched walks and towers with our gaze. But there was no sentry. No one called a challenge. We came up to the doors—and they stood ajar. This was curious and foreboding in itself, but we had seen such things; the bizarre is not always dangerous, just as sometimes, the ordinary is.
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 towards 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 standing 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 there 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. “Wo.”
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 colored vitreous, or the delicate pattern of grisaille. Tapestries and carpets on the walls, gleaming with luster 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 armory 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 jewelries 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 at 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 scrutinized 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, clamoring, 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 cicatrix 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 any more.
“ ‘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. Its teeth went into 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 armory. 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 armory, 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 armory 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 which 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 paralyzed.
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 vapor.
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 phosphorus 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 realize 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 messages 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 kneeling 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 color 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 somber as a shadow, with the blade in my hand.
God knows, He had 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 color 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.”