Eventually, you permitted me to wander the halls of my new home. Leaving the house was strictly forbidden—I was still too weak, you said—and you fed me solely from your own veins in those early days. Occasionally you tempted home a boy from a neighboring village with the promise of work, but those feasts were few and far between. You did your best to only hunt for yourself when I was asleep, not wanting to leave me alone for long periods of time, but whenever I woke to an empty house I entertained myself with exploration.
I was so enamored with every painting, every carefully laid stone in the fireplace hearth. It was finery beyond my wild imaginings, and it was all mine to possess and command. Not that there was much to command, without any servants or guests or other living creatures in the house besides you and I. But I took great pleasure in rearranging furniture, dusting off family silver, and imagining what it may be like to throw a grand dinner party in the house someday.
No room was off-limits to me except the banquet hall, which I was to enter only with your express permission and accompaniment. One day, when you were feeling particularly magnanimous and I was giving you my sweetest pleading look, you granted me entry.
“This is a sanctum,” you said sternly at the door. “Being permitted entry is a privilege. Do not touch anything, Constanta.”
I nodded wordlessly, practically vibrating with excitement.
It must have been used for entertaining travelling gentry with lavish meals, once. But you had cleared away the high-backed chairs and most of the tables to make room for all your beloved devices.
I didn’t know what to call any of them then, but now I know I was looking at beakers and abacuses, mechanical compasses and astrolabes. All manner of medical and scientific tools both rudimentary and advanced, from Greece, Italy, Persia, and the vast reaches of the Caliphate’s empire beyond. They were laid out in gleaming heaps atop sheaves of parchment. Some of the devices were well-used and others appeared to not have been touched in a century.
“What is all this?” I breathed, my voice carrying easily in the cavernous space. Everything about that castle made my tiniest word seem huge, disruptive to the ecosystem you had built.
“The best this backwater has to offer,” you said, sweeping aside a chart of the constellations. “Such a coarse time we live in, Constanta. The greatest minds of Europe cannot riddle out the simplest diseases or equations. In Persia, they chart the course of blood through the body, operate on the livers of live men, perform feats of engineering that seem like alchemy to the untrained eye. The Greeks and Romans knew sciences that have been utterly lost to time.”
“But what is it all for?”
“To decypher the mysteries of the body, of course. To catalogue the human animal and uncover its intricacies.”
“I didn’t realize you had such an interest in humans,” I murmured, reminding myself that I could no longer count myself among their number. Human beings were a less evolved creature, you said, wretched short-lived beasts suitable for food and diversion and little else. Certainly not true companionship. I should not attempt to forge any friendships outside our home, you warned me. They would only end in heartbreak.
“I have an interest in my own condition and so I must have an interest in theirs,” you said, running your finger over a page covered in tight handwriting. I couldn’t read in those days, but I could recognize drawings of human feet and hands, a rudimentary sketch of what looked like a heart. “Don’t you wonder what power animates us after our first death? Grants us our long, unaging lives?”
I gave a little shiver in the drafty hall. I tried very hard not to think about that, most days.
“I couldn’t imagine, my lord. There is no creator other than God, so maybe He forged the first vampire from the clay of the Earth. Instead of mixing the clay with water, He mixed it with blood.”
I had always been a faithful person, sometimes bordering on superstitious. Entering my second life hadn’t changed that; it had simply broadened my existential horizons.
You smiled at me. Condescendingly. Almost pityingly.
“Your priest’s bedtime stories cannot account for us. Whether we are nature’s triumph or her great shame, there’s rhyme and reason to our hungers. To our bodies and their processes. It is my intention to unravel it, to comprehend and map our condition.”
“To what end?” I asked. I could not stop the questions from coming, even though I was learning that more than two in a row tended to irritate you. Sure enough, I saw a flash of annoyance in your eyes. But you sighed and answered me, as though I were a pestering child.
“Power, of course. To know oneself, one’s limits and abilities, is its own power. To know how one may best subdue another with similar abilities is another.”
My heart lurched in my chest. Your words were like splinters of light through the darkness of a tomb, the promise of life in the world outside.
“Another? There are others like us, my lord?”
You hadn’t mentioned others. You spoke of us as though we were the only two creatures like us in the known world, like we had been hand-picked by fate to meet.
“There are never only two of any species. Consider how I sired you, Constanta. You have experienced firsthand how we are born.”
“Does that mean I could sire another?” I said, pressing my hand to my abdomen in shock. An old habit, associating birth with a womb. But it wasn’t childbirth I had in mind.
You gave me one of your surveying glances.
“No, little Constanta. You are too young, your blood is too weak. It would take a thousand years for you to even be able to make an attempt. It’s a weighty power, siring. Best to leave it to those who can manage the responsibility.”
My head was swimming with so much new information, crowded with questions the way your study was crowded with the baubles you had picked up on your travels.
“That means someone sired you, then,” I said, racing to keep up. “If you’re looking for our originating principle, you were made just like I was. Where is your sire now?”
“Dead,” you said, dismissing my question with a wave. “He was not as kind as I am. I was his slave in life and he sired me to be his eternal servant. He did not live long after that, unfortunately.”
Your irritation was manifest now, warning me to mind my place. I was there to ornament your home and soothe your mind, not bludgeon you with questions. So I gathered my skirts in my hands and stood quietly while you narrated your instruments, your studies, your small discoveries to me. Feeding me tiny tidbits of what you believed I was ready to know, a crease of annoyance still written between your brows.
You always hated it when I overreached the carefully drawn limits of my knowledge.
Probably because you so enjoyed dangling the promise of revelation just out of my reach, the way sailors dangle kippers to make cats dance for their supper.
Questions. I had so many questions, and I should have asked them all. I should have worn you down like water dripping away at a rock until I learned everything you knew. But you must understand, I was only a girl. I was alone, and I was scared. I had no home left to speak of.
It’s easy to hate myself for my ignorance now, when I have the hindsight of centuries behind me, but in those first years I was only concerned with surviving. And the best way to survive, I believed, was to surrender myself to you with total abandon and adoration. And God, how I adored you. It went beyond love, beyond devotion.
I wanted to dash myself against your rocks like a wave, to obliterate my old self and see what rose shining and new from the sea foam. The only words I had to describe you in those early days were plunging cliffside or primordial sea, crystal-cold stars or black expanse of sky.
I dove down deep into your psyche, turning over every word you gave me like a jewel. Looking for meaning, seeking out the mysteries of you. I didn’t care if I lost myself in the process. I wanted to be brought by the hand into your world and disappear into your kiss until us two could no longer be told apar
t.
You turned a strong-minded girl into a pulsing wound of need.
I never knew the meaning of the word enthralled before you.
Our first visitor to the home was our last, and although it still feels like treachery, I can’t help but admit that I still think fondly on our young harbinger of doom. Maybe it was because I hadn’t spoken to another person in decades, possibly even a century by then. I had grown starved for the sound of a human voice that wasn’t just the gargled screams of the victims you brought home to teach me how to kill. By then, I was better acquainted with the jugular vein, the forearm’s tender ulnar river, and the beckoning femoral artery hidden in the soft cushion of a thigh than I was with pleasant conversation.
That’s why I was so startled by the knock on our door that came one heady summer evening. The sun had barely set and I was still sleep-grogged, but I pulled on my dressing gown over my chemise and hurried down the main stairs. You were nowhere to be found, so I stepped into my role as mistress of the house and opened the door.
He shuffled into the dim of our home, a figure wrapped in stiff oilcloth. The hem of his robes dragged along the floor, smearing dirt through the entryway. Most notably, he wore an eerie mask under his wide-brimmed black hat, long-beaked in the Italian style and battered as though it had been dragged through a warzone.
“Can I help you?” I asked, unsure of what else to say. He was neither pilgrim nor beggar, and certainly not anyone from the village below. He smelled of strange waters, drying herbs, and the slow rot of disease. The scent of sickness quickened my heartbeat, inflaming a deep-rooted self-preservation instinct. Vampires learned to fear the smell of infection early on in their second lives, to keep them away from meals that might putrefy the stomach. We don’t die of disease, but infected blood makes for foul meals.
The stranger inclined his head at me politely.
“I seek the lord of this house, my lady.”
“He is not available.”
The words were an easy, set script you set out for me early in our marriage. I was to turn all unexpected visitors away. No questions asked.
“I’m afraid my business is very urgent. Please.”
Your voice filled the empty space of the hall, commanding without needing to be raised.
“He’s permitted, Constanta.”
I turned to see you at the top of the stairs, tall and beautiful and terrible. I was always most impressed with you when I saw you through the eyes of others, beholding you as though it was the first time. You descended the stone steps with a painful, slow deliberateness, not speaking until you came to a stop right in front of the visitor.
“Speak,” you said.
The stranger bowed at the waist, polite but perfunctory. He was used to dealing with gentry, but also used to haste.
“My lord, I’ve come on a matter of great urgency. I am a physician of—”
“Take that off,” you said, gesturing to his mask. “If you’re going to address me, do it properly.”
The stranger faltered, hand raising partway to his face before dropping again.
“Sire, it is a protection against sickness, a tool of my trade. It keeps away the miasma.”
“There is no miasma in this house, nor any sickness. Do either of us look sick to you? We’re the only ones here. Take it off.”
The doctor hesitated, but he did as he was told, unfastening the leather straps that held the mask in place. It came away in his hands, showing that the beak was full of dried flowers. Little bits of mint, lavender, and carnation spilled around his boots.
He was younger than I had guessed, bright-eyed and ruddy with cheeks that still had the fullness of childhood on them. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, with curls of brown hair that wanted for a trim. Were it not for the determined look in his eyes and the bruised shadows beneath them, he would have looked perfectly cherubic.
The sharp sweetness of lavender wafted over to me, along with the enticing spice of his blood, heightened without the mask to protect him. You undoubtedly ordered him to speak to you barefaced to assert your power, but also because it would be easier to snap his neck this way, or dig your teeth into his tender throat.
“I am a physician of the body, trained in Rome and dispatched to Bucharest,” he said, voice a little quieter now that he was face to face with you. He had to look up to speak. “I have served in fine houses and in the hovels of the least fortunate, diagnosing illness and administering medicine.”
“Very impressive. But what business have you with me?”
The boy swallowed. There was real fear in his eyes. But not of you.
“I’ve come to deliver news of a sickness, spreading like wildfire throughout the region. The doctors of Bucharest can barely move fast enough to fight it, and we’ve done everything we can to prevent the spread. I am very sorry to say we have not been successful. The illness has reached the outlying cities. Your city, sire. I saw five cases today alone in the town just beyond these walls. I asked for a letter to be dispatched to you post-haste but no one in the town would...” He swallowed, unsure of how to proceed. “The people are, ah, superstitious, and...”
“They think me a baby-slaying Devil,” you supplied, with a cordial smile that made it sound more like an introduction. “I’m well aware. As I said, we do not receive many visitors. The situation must be truly dire for you to come yourself.”
The doctor clutched his hands around the staff he carried.
“It is… grave, I will say as much. I thought you, as the region’s sovereign, deserved to know. I’m not sure what relationship you have with the smaller towns, but the people speak of you as their lord. I have found, in times of plague, that if a ruler moves quickly, sometimes catastrophe can be averted.”
A thin smile touched your mouth. A cat pleased with the fight a mouse was putting up.
“And what would you have me do, as ruler?”
“Leverage your power to spread the word. Tell the people to avoid the open-air markets and the cesspools, the garbage heaps. They mustn’t breathe the foul air; it will infect the body. Those who succumb must be strictly sequestered in their beds.”
You gave a dismissive wave, already turning from him. I stepped forward, poised to show our guest out the door.
“Those people do not answer to me. Let them rally themselves.”
The doctor took a few strides towards you, and I almost thought he might catch your arm as though you were a common merchant. Bold, this one.
“You have such vast wealth, and resources, sire. The people would look upon you as a savior, a benefactor, if you came to their aid. Surely it would only cement their loyalty; it serves your ends as well. You said yourself that it is only you and the lady in this vast home. Perhaps a wing could be donated to the doctors and the nuns who tend the sick, or even a gatehouse.”
“Are you sure you aren’t a holy man come to lecture me on the sins of excess? It’s Constanta you must plead your charitable case to. She’s the only one in this house afflicted by piety.”
“I was educated by monks,” the doctor muttered. “They have their points to make. But I would not presume to ask you to sacrifice your own comfort, only to spare what little pleases his lordship—”
“We’re done here,” you said, flicking me a subtle gesture that meant I was to dismiss him. “Good day to you. Do not call again.”
I gathered my skirts and opened my mouth to see our guest out, but anger overtook his good sense and his tongue.
“You would not feel the same if you could see what was happening to your people,” the doctor snapped. “Boils that arise mysteriously and then fester and blacken within hours, children vomiting blood while elders lose their noses to gangrene, healthy young men struck dead in a day! Do not think your stone walls will protect you from this plague, sire. You must make preparations.”
You froze, shadowed by one of the stone arches of our home.
“Boils?” you echoed.
“In some cases, yes. O
r swellings, rather, on the neck, under the arms, in the groin—”
“Will you come into the study?” you asked suddenly, eyes lit with a strange, urgent fire. The doctor and I exchanged a shocked look at your sudden change of temperament, but you were insistent. “Please. I wish to hear more of this plague.”
“You heard my lord,” I said, ushering our guest into the darkness of the home. He walked without protest, but his mouth was tight. Suspicious. He was too smart for his own good.
We led him into the cramped room where a desk and parchment were stored, virtually abandoned. You knew how to write, more languages than I had ever heard spoken, but we did not have much occasion to communicate with anyone.
“You said you were educated in a monastery?” you asked, retrieving what little wet ink was left. “Write for me then, a list of the symptoms. Start from the outset all the way to death, do not spare me the details.”
The doctor took the quill hesitantly, casting a wary glance my way.
“So I may watch for the signs of disease in my subjects,” you added, smooth as the wax pooling around a guttering candle.
The young doctor nodded firmly, happy to have a task of merit before him. He scrawled out a meticulous list while you loomed at his side, one hand braced against the desk as you read over his shoulder. He seemed so small standing next to you. I was struck once again by the knowledge that he was little more than a boy with a little medical schooling under his belt and the world weighing him down.
“The symptoms don’t always progress in the same way, but they set in quickly. Sometimes the rubbing of a cut onion on the sores discourages festering, and I’ve seen success with a potion of Four Thieves Vinegar as well. But there is no perfect cure, sire, and many die before treatment can be administered.”
“Interesting,” you muttered, plucking up the paper. I could hear in your voice that you had no interest in the cure, only in the disease. The doctor watched, baffled as you took in every detail, running your fingernail down the page as you noted them. I drifted closer, sensing a subtle shift in your mood.
A Dowry of Blood Page 3