A Dowry of Blood

by Gibson, S. T.

  A tide had turned. You had come to some sort of conclusion.

  “Who in the village knows that you’re here?” you asked, not glancing up from the paper.

  “No one, sire,” the doctor said, and my stomach muscles clenched. An honest boy, then. A fool. “I came alone, of my own accord.”

  “Good,” you said, setting down the paper and smiling at him. “Good.”

  You were on him before he had time to scream, ensnaring a handful of his hair and wrenching his head back to expose his throat. Teeth tore through flesh like a needle through silk, and you held him fast while you drank deep of him, ignoring his wheezing and gurgling. A torn trachea, then, fast-filling with fluid. His mask dropped to the floor, spilling flowers at your feet. Blood trickled down his neck onto the blooms, and my mouth watered at the tangy scent of iron.

  I was well-acquainted with violence by then, but my stomach lurched all the same. I thought you would let him live. Or maybe I hoped for it.

  You shoved his jerking body away onto the desk, cleaning your mouth with a lace-trimmed handkerchief while he gasped like a fish wriggling on the hook.

  “Drink, Constanta. You’ll need your strength.”

  I stood with my fingers white-knuckled into the skirt of my dress, watching the boy bleed out slowly. His suffering was an enticement, but as much as I wanted to lap at the pool of blood growing on the desk, there was a question burning inside me that took precedent.

  “He’s their only doctor,” I managed, stomach growling. “Without him, the people will succumb to the plague. Why must we kill him?”

  “Because he’s too clever to live, and too troublesome. The moment the villagers hear that he went to plead their case to the heartless aristocrat, the moment they all start to die and no help comes from the hills, they will turn on us. They’ll raid this manor even plague-addled and half-dead, if they think draining my coffers will save them. I’ve seen it before.”

  The doctor clapped a shaking hand over the hole torn in his neck, blood trickling through his fingers. He cast pleading eyes to me, his mouth forming soundless words.

  “There’s life in him yet,” I said. “He may still live.”

  “Not after what he’s seen here. Finish him, if you want to eat tonight. There’ll be no time to stop to feed on the road.”

  “On the road?” I echoed, almost a yelp. The room started to spin, faster and faster. I was so hungry, all of a sudden.

  “We’re leaving,” you announced, already out the door and striding up the stairs. “Tonight.”

  I choked back the tears and hunger rising in my throat. Then, my resolve broke. I made a small, miserable sound and hurled myself onto the still-breathing body of the doctor. I latched my mouth around his reddened wound and held fast as he convulsed and thrashed beneath me. Hot blood flooded my mouth in smaller and smaller spurts until finally, he lay dead across the table.

  I scrubbed at my mouth with the hem of my sleeve, tears stinging my eyes, and then left the room so quickly it was almost a run. Bloodstained flowers crunched to dust under my feet.

  Upstairs, you threw our belongings into a few large chests. My shoes, my dresses, my sewing needles and hair pins. All packaged up tidily like they were being taken to market to be sold.

  “Go untie the horses,” you ordered. “Bring them around to the carriage.”

  You always kept a pair of strong black mares, and would replace them throughout our lives with animals that looked exactly the same. As much as you thrived on innovation, you preferred your own domestic life to stay unchanged.

  “Why are we running?” I asked, still a little bleary from my fresh meal. A full stomach of blood always made me want to curl up and take a long nap. “We don’t catch illness, or die. You told me. We’re safe.”

  You stopped what you were doing and took a deep breath. Then you looked at me, your eyes so dark and haunted I nearly recoiled.

  “I’ve seen this before. Plagues come and go and they come again, Constanta. They are one of life’s great constants. We will not succumb to the sickness, but trust me when I tell you we do not want to be here when it overtakes the city. You do not want to see what happens to civilization when half its population is dying in the streets.”

  I brought my hand up to my mouth instinctively, as though to ward off the miasma.

  “Surely, not half —”

  You slammed the lid to the trunk, snapping it closed with brisk efficiency.

  “I was only a boy when it happened, in Athens. But I know my own mind, and I couldn’t forget what I saw after another hundred years of life, a thousand. We’re leaving. Finish packing.”

  We fled by night, in a creaking carriage stuffed full of our most valuable possessions.

  Those years are a dark smear across my memory; everything feels blurry and hollow. Plague drains not only victims but whole cities of life. It freezes trade, decays parishes, forbids lovemaking, turns childrearing into a dance with death. Most of all, it steals time. Days spent boarded up in houses, sick or clean, pass in a swirl of flat grey. Plague time is different, it stretches and looms, and I confess I can recall little of the decades we spent rushing from town to town, taking uneasy sanctuary until sickness came battering inevitably at the city gates.

  But eventually, the plague burned itself out. We were able to stay in cities for longer periods of time, and I stopped tasting the sickly tang of disease in the blood of all my victims. Eventually, it was time to choose a new home, to put down roots and build our little empire of blood and gold once again.

  Your discerning eye fell upon Vienna, and so to Vienna we went.

  Vienna was a whirl of color and sound to my provincial mind, and she was kinder to us, all in all, than Romania had been. We rang in the shining newness of 1452 together, one of the few dates I remember clearly. The city was celebrating an Austrian emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, and reveling in her political and mercantile prowess as a major trade hub.

  You bought one of the fine townhouses in the market square with the gold I could never quite trace or keep track of, and filled it with all the modern comforts money could buy. I was suddenly awash in the city, with dressmakers and maids and jewelers and butchers at the tips of my fingers whenever I wanted them. They were called to the house to measure me for gowns or deliver finely crafted furniture and they left as quickly as they came, though my heart never stopped fluttering when there was a knock at the door.

  I had become so accustomed to your company that I had forgotten how much it thrilled me to walk among humans, but Vienna brought me back to life. I could see it in my mirror, a new shine in my eyes, the ghost of a bloom in my dead cheeks. It was like falling in love all over again, only instead of falling for the lord of death, now I was in love with the seething, shouting mass of life outside my home. I took to waking up early so I could perch in bed, safely out of the stinging light lingering through the windows, and watch the people of the city hurry home for their evening meals.

  You were not impressed by the children shrieking through the streets, or the washerwomen calling to each other in the town square at all hours. You only had eyes for the university, and spent long hours haunting the lecture halls with your notebook in ink-stained fingers. I’m still not sure what you studied: maps or abacuses or corpses drained of blood so you could appreciate them with a clear head. But you slipped out at dusk to catch as many evening classes as you could, and you came back with a deep line of thought furrowed between your brows.

  We hunted together in those days, your tall figure following me as closely as a shadow through the tight alleyways. The whole city was our hunting ground, and there were meals aplenty in the darkest corners of Vienna. You preferred pretty women with stars in their eyes, or young men you had dazzled with your intelligence in one of the students’ drinking circles. But I had never outgrown my thirst for vengeance, and I preyed on only the most wicked members of society. Men, all of them, who I caught spitting at beggar children or grabbing a working girl’
s arm so hard it bruised. I reserved a special sadism for serial violators and batterers. In my mind, I was God’s lovely angel of judgement, come to unsheathe the sword of divine wrath against those who truly deserved it.

  You mocked my lofty aspirations, cynical as ever.

  “We are not arbiters of justice, Constanta,” you said after I left an abuser’s body slumped over and drained in a cesspool. A magistrate, well known about town for skimming off the top of his ledgers and dragging his wife through the house by the hair when she displeased him. “When will you give up this ridiculous crusade?”

  “It isn’t ridiculous to the woman who no longer has to cower in fear of him, I’m sure,” I said, taking your offered handkerchief and wiping my mouth. “And it isn’t ridiculous to the poor who will no longer be threatened with destitution now that he’s dead.”

  “You will have the poor with you always, is that not what your Christ says?” you said with a sneer.

  I recoiled. An unexpected harsh word from you was as jarring as a slap from any other man, and your temper had been spiking more and more recently. Vienna made you irritable as much as it made me blossom. I wouldn’t realize until later that you were irritable precisely because I was in bloom, because there were suddenly so many sources of joy in my life apart from your presence.

  “Why shouldn’t I take my meals where I please? You certainly do. So many young minds cut down in the promise of youth—”

  “Are you criticizing me?” you asked, deathly quiet. You were suddenly very close, looming over me in a way that usually made me feel protected, but was now having an entirely different effect.

  I staggered back a step, my calf banging into a low crate stuffed with rotting cabbage.

  “No. No, of course not,” I said, my throat tight. It was a scared girl’s voice, not a woman’s.

  “Good.” You reached for me, and suddenly your eyes were gentle again, your voice slippery and sweet. “Don’t look so grim, darling. Let’s seek some fresh diversions. There’s a travelling show in town, would you like to go see it?”

  A smile broke across my face, uneasy but delighted all the same. I had been taken by a voracious passion for theatre since our move to Vienna, and was always straining to see bits of morality plays through whatever crowd we found ourselves in. But you had no patience for “common” entertainment, and always complained that humans had lost their flare for the dramatic arts after the fall of Athens. A colorful travelling show lit by firelight was exactly my idea of a night well spent, but I doubt it even ranked for you.

  “Yes, I’d like that very much.”

  You smiled magnanimously and put your arm around me, leading me away from my victim and towards a night of fire eating and fortune telling. I was enthralled by the grace and talent of the performers, but I couldn’t help but cast a nervous glance to you ever so often. In the shifting firelight, there were moments when you didn’t even look like yourself. There was a darkness in your eyes and a tightness to your mouth I hadn’t noticed before—or perhaps hadn’t wanted to.

  There are other shadows across the bright spot in my memory that is Vienna. I didn’t realize, then, how deep your contempt for human companionship ran. There was an embroiderer who came by the townhouse to stitch intricate designs into the hems of my sleeves and the bodices of my dresses, a bright-eyed young woman near the age I was when you had claimed me. Hanne had an airy laugh, dark skin, and tight curls of hair she always wore swirled up into a coil. She was clever and lovely, and could create entire landscapes from tiny stitches of thread.

  We enjoyed each other’s company during our time together, and I started inviting her to the house more and more frequently, always coming up with some pillow or chemise I wanted her to decorate at the last minute. We shared stories and secrets and plenty of laughter while she worked. I would go out of my way to fix her plates of cheese and apples even though I had started to lose my taste for mortal food by then. I think I could have loved her, if given a chance.

  “Who was that?” you asked crisply one day after she had left. I was watching her go from the parlor window, admiring the way her green cloak swirled around her feet.

  “Hanne?” I asked, startled from my reverie. Surely you knew her name, and her trade. You had been in the house every time she had visited, locked away in your basement laboratory or upstairs reading in our room.

  “And what is Hanne to you?” you said, spitting out her name as though it were a curse.

  I recoiled, pressing my back into the fine needlepoint of my chair.

  “She is my...embroiderer? My friend, she—”

  “You have fallen into a shameful infatuation with a weak human girl,” you snapped, sweeping across the room. You snatched up a pillow she had covered with daisies and a songbird, sneering at it. “A peddler of fripperies.”

  You tossed the pillow down on the divan next to me, slightly harder than was strictly necessary.

  “Where is this coming from?” I asked. My heart was beating a jig in my throat, my breaths coming fast and shallow. I felt like I had missed a crucial turn in our dance.

  “You wish to run off and live a rustic life with her in her hovel, is that it?”

  “What? No! My lord, I would never, I love you! You and only you have my heart.”

  “Save your breath,” you said, swinging from enraged to exhausted. Your shoulders slumped, your knit brows going soft and pitiful. You looked very sad all of a sudden, as though reminded of some half-forgotten tragedy.

  I pushed tentatively up from my chair, crossing the room to you.

  “I would never leave you, my love. Not for the entirety of my second life.” Your eyes were wounded, filled with suspicion, but you let me reach out and press a gentle hand against your chest. “I swear it.”

  You nodded, swallowing back more words that threatened to bubble up and betray you. But betray what? Was there some secret heartbreak in your past that you carried in tormented solitude?

  “Did something happen?” I asked quietly. I felt suddenly very useless, as though there were depths of pain within you that even my gentle love couldn’t plunge. Scars that you would not allow me to see, much less heal.

  You heaved a sigh and smoothed a hand over my cheek, taking me in with those appraising eyes. Then, as though making up your mind, you leaned in and kissed my forehead.

  “It’s nothing, Constanta. Forgive my temper.”

  With that, you slipped away, leaving me confused and alone.

  You left for two days after that. I still don’t know to where. You gave no warning, no explanation, simply took up your hat and slipped out of the house one evening while I was still waking up. I dimly remember seeing your dark silhouette stalking away across the city square, shoulders hunched. You gave no indication of when you would be back, and once it became plain that you hadn’t simply stepped out for air or an errand, the panic began to set in. I hadn’t been without you for a single day since you found me, and I realized with shattering terror that I had no idea who I was if you were not at my side.

  Were you dead, decapitated in the dirt somewhere? I didn’t know exactly what could kill things like us, but you had theorized decapitation could do it.

  Had I done something wrong? Had I earned your total abandonment with my dalliance with Hanne, with my wandering eye for the city and her charms? I ruminated over my every indiscretion, chewing my nails bloody and wandering aimlessly from room to room. The city called to me, and I was desperate not to be alone, but what if you came back and found me gone? Would I have failed another one of your mysterious tests, proving my fallibility? I sent away the artisans when they came knocking at the door, even my precious Hanne, who I never spoke to again. To do so, I felt, would be a betrayal of you.

  For two days, I burned. I broke into a cold sweat like I was flushing opium out of my system. I writhed in our marital bed, sheets sticking to my sallow skin, as misery crawled along my skin with scorching fingers. I prayed to God to crack open the sky and douse me in
enough rain to stop me smoldering, but I was left alone in my sickly fever.

  Then, late in the evening on the second day, you arrived at our door. You stood in the doorway, the shoulders of your coat speckled with crystal rain, your cruel mouth reddened from the cold, looking more perfect than ever before.

  I sank down at your feet and cried until I was empty, my long hair covering your shoes like a mourning veil. You didn’t pick me up until I was shaking, then you drew me into your embrace and wrapped me in your cloak. You smoothed my hair and shushed me, rocking me like a babe.

  “It’s alright, my jewel, my Constanta. I’m here.”

  I held you tight as life, and let you scoop me up like a doll and carry me gently into our bedroom.

  You seemed to me a fire burning in the woods. I was drawn in by your enticing, smoky darkness, a darkness that still stirs memories of safety, of autumn, of home. I touched you the way I would touch any other man, trying to make my eager presence known and inscribe some sense of intimacy between us. But it was like grasping at a flame. I never penetrated to the burning heart of you, only came away with empty, scorched fingers.

  Whenever we were apart, you left your essence caught in my hair, in my clothes. I scented the taste of it on the wind, I shivered and ached for it. I could think of nothing but you the entire time you were gone, until you returned to me.

  I was happy to spend countless lifetimes chasing the warmth coming off you, even though the haze was clouding my vision.

  I still wake to the smell of smoke, sometimes.

  We made Vienna our home until war, my old enemy, came to the city in the early 1500s. Suleiman the Magnificent sent his gleaming ranks of Ottoman soldiers to seize the city. Their brightly colored tents encircled the city for months, unbothered by the cold rains of fall. Vienna was torn between the Hungarians and the Austrians, an attractive jewel to any expansion-minded ruler and a more valuable bargaining chip by far. Seemingly overnight, there were hundreds of thousands of troops outside our city, and emissaries were sent to negotiate a surrender.