Vampire Khan

by Dan Davis

Stephen was trailing close behind me, listening keenly as he often was. “This concept is known as taqiyya, is it not?”

  Hassan turned to glance over his shoulder. “Where did you hear that word?”

  Stephen nodded over to Abdullah, who was walking beside Khutulun, babbling away at her. “Abdullah told me about it. He said taqiyya means you can lie if there is a good reason for it, and by the law of the Mohammedans, it is no crime.” Stephen smiled, as smug as always. He never discovered that the possession of knowledge was in itself worth very little.

  “No,” Hassan said, scowling. “It is much more complicated than that.”

  Thomas muttered in my ear. “These people have no honour.”

  Firuzkuh Castle and surrounding settlement supported a little over two hundred fighting men, and a little over five hundred people in total, including children. It was not on the highest peak, nor was it a massive fortification. But it was a remarkable place, with four towers. Two of them squat and square, and two taller and round. Like the other Ismaili castles I had seen, Firuzkuh was built expertly into the landscape. A steep and rather narrow approach from the front would confine an attacking force between a steep cliff and a jutting rock wall. To the rear, a bleak plateau that was only accessible via long and difficult paths across the jagged mountains.

  Even though he had been away so long, and others had been in command of the place for years, the transition of power back to Hassan was seamless. More than that, it seemed to be a happy homecoming for the people and Hassan both. They loved him.

  We were tolerated and welcomed with cold courtesy. Given fresh clothes, good food. They even had people move out of their rooms within the castle so that Eva and I could have private quarters within the walls. The others of our party shared rooms near ours.

  “We are prisoners as much as guests,” Thomas pointed out on our first night.

  Stephen was simply amazed by the wonders that he saw. “What a place this is to be prisoners, though, is it not? Did you see the stores they have in place already to resist a siege? Rooms and rooms. That tank with the honey, it was big enough to swim in, I swear it was.”

  Eva rubbed her eyes. “Sometimes I wonder how you can know so much about the world and yet still be such a fool. But then I remember that you are very young.”

  Stephen did not like that. “In what way am I being foolish?”

  “You do not seem to understand the danger that we are in,” Eva said.

  “Hassan loves Richard. He would not let anything happen to us.”

  Thomas scoffed. “He wishes to use Richard for his own purposes.”

  “Still then,” Stephen said. “It is a fair trade. Sanctuary and support in exchange for… the Gift. Richard’s Gift bestowed on thirty of the men here.”

  “And the Mongols,” Eva said, smiling at him. “You are not concerned about the fact that a hundred thousand crazed barbarians are bearing down on us?”

  “This castle is safe. Who could assault such a fortress?”

  Thomas and I glanced at each other. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “This is a strong site. Sheer cliffs on two sides, steep approach from the front and a Godless wilderness to the rear. Good walls and sturdy towers. They have catapults. But do you think two hundred men could resist ten thousand, Stephen? We could kill five hundred, a thousand, five thousand. If they were determined, they could take us here.”

  Stephen shook his head. “They are marching into a trap, you heard what Hassan said. If they arrive soon, the winter snows will trap them in the mountains. If they arrive late, we will have months more to prepare. To make more men into Richard’s immortals, if need be. More like you, Thomas. Make enough, perhaps, to defeat the Mongols?”

  Thomas cleared his throat. It sounded as though he growled. “And that is what we wish to do, is it? These people are Saracens. Mohammedans. Do you wish for them to be made stronger? They are our enemy. Christ’s enemy. We should do nothing to help them.”

  “But these Assassins are the enemy of all other Saracens. The kingdoms of Egypt, and of Syria especially. Mortal enemies. If we help to make the Assassins powerful, they could even help us defeat the Saracens in the Holy Land. With them attacking from the rear, with thousands of immortals, who knows, we could even take back Jerusalem.”

  We groaned and shouted him down.

  “Your flights of fancy are of no help to us here,” Thomas said to him.

  We soon retired but I could not help but dwell on Stephen’s words. It was the sheer ambition of it that struck me so powerfully. My brother seemed always to be putting into motion such grand plans, as evil as they were. He created for himself a religious sect in Palestine, preying on travellers and caravans to build his strength until he could do more, such as take over a town, then a city. Even the Holy Land itself.

  And then he worked to crush the King of England, creating immortals from men like the Archbishop, and the sons of great lords. He poisoned King John and might have won control of the Crown, or at least a great part of the country for himself.

  Now, he had made more immortals in the heart of the most barbaric and evil force the world had ever known. What is more, he had in some way turned them toward the Holy Land, and then meant to drive them on to conquer Christendom. If his plans succeeded, then William could end up as the King of France, or the Holy Roman Emperor, and he could rule and rule for centuries until the Second Coming of Christ.

  The sheer audacity of it all. It was a sign of his madness, certainly, and his hubris.

  And what was I doing? Wandering around from place to place, living the life of a mercenary, a freelancer, trying to shelter Eva from men who would do her harm. I was ever afraid of being separated from her so that she would be forced to drink the blood of another and risk being caught and killed. A restless life. It was not a vain one, I had a purpose. But William always felt so far away.

  The rage I had felt for him in my youth had faded. My pursuit of him had long ago turned to duty over emotion. No doubt someone like Thomas would say that was only proper but it had come to feel like an empty existence. Or, if not empty, then a small one.

  What Stephen had suggested, in his naive way, was to use my gift to do something grand. To use the Assassins to bring down the Saracen armies of Syria and Egypt.

  But Thomas was right. Say I did make a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand blood drinking immortals and they conquered the enemies of Christendom. What then? How could I ever hope to control them? To bind them to me?

  William intended to set the Mongols loose on Christendom and even he would not be able to control them. And so he must simply not care about the consequences. He wanted to sow chaos, he wanted wanton and random destruction, for then he could take more power for himself from the rubble and dust of the kingdoms that had fallen.

  Was that ultimately what separated me from my brother? Not a lack of imagination or ambition but a fear of chaos? A preference for law over anarchy?

  Or was that simply another way of saying that I lacked imagination and ambition?

  Was William committing the sins of greed and pride while I was consumed with envy, and mired in slothfulness?

  Either way, I had sworn to Hassan that I would turn thirty of his men, and I was committed to that path for the time being.

  We would begin in the morning.

  ***

  And so it was that I began to turn a group of Hassan’s fedayin into blood-drinking immortals, like Eva and Thomas. And like Hulegu and his men.

  In the open interior courtyard, Hassan stood on the wall, looking down and explained it to all of them. I stood back and to one side, watching the sea of faces turned up to their lord.

  That they would no longer be able to father children. That they would need to drink human blood, at least twice every week, to avoid turning raving mad. That bright sunlight would hurt their eyes and burn their skin more than it ever had before. But in return they would become faster, stronger, and, by drinking blood after battle, would be able to he
al wounds rapidly.

  The fedayin were men already committed to dying for their people and so Hassan had more volunteers than we needed.

  “I am tempted to take more,” Hassan said when the full count was made. “We will need men to father the children of the next generation so I cannot turn them all. And Rukn al-Din commanded that we make thirty but perhaps I shall make fifty, and report that we have made thirty.”

  “Is that taqiyya again?” I said. He did not like me using that word. “You and I agreed to thirty also. I swore to turn thirty, and that is what I shall do. Afterwards, perhaps I will make more. We shall see.”

  Now that Hassan was in his home again, he became ever more like the great lord he truly was. Already, he was unused to any resistance to his orders and while he looked calmly at me, his nostrils flared and I was sure he would argue.

  But he nodded and we had our thirty men.

  “Each man will need to be drained of blood, down to the point of unconsciousness,” I explained. “But he shall need enough strength to swallow a pint of my blood.”

  “A pint?”

  “An eighth of a gallon,” I explained, though it did not make sense to him. “About this much,” I said, making a shape with my hands to indicate the volume. “Roughly speaking, that seems to be what it takes.”

  “And it must happen at night?”

  “I have only ever seen it done at night. I do not know if it will work during the day. Perhaps one of your men would like to take the risk, and then we may discover the truth of it?”

  “We will do it at night. How many can you make in one night?”

  “Losing blood weakens me. I would prefer to do no more than one, but I suppose I could do two. If you supply me with blood to drink in between.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  For he had also requested volunteers from the women and non-combatants of his lands. These folk would supply our company of immortals with blood from their veins. There were over a hundred of them all told, each one bleeding into a bowl every few days.

  Eva and Thomas too would no longer be reliant on small volumes from my veins. And though Thomas liked to pretend moral outrage and claimed that it turned his stomach to think he was drinking the unholy blood from the veins of a Saracen woman, he guzzled the stuff down keenly enough. Between drinking from me or from them, he knew it was the lesser of two evils.

  That night, I pierced a vein in my wrist and filled a jug with it while an Ismaili fedayin lay on a table nearby, drained of much of his own. Lamplight filled the room, along with the smell of blood. Unground seed corn filled the spaces between the floor slabs. We were down in the depths of the castle by the storerooms, away from where people lived and worked, which felt appropriate to what we were doing. To what I was creating.

  The man was named Jalal. He was in his forties and a leader and warrior of some standing who would be in command of the thirty men. He had insisted on being the first.

  Jalal was as pale as chalk when I lifted his head and commanded him to drink. He barely had strength enough to swallow.

  Hassan hovered at my shoulder. “Is this correct?” he asked. “To be so weak? This is how it is done?”

  I ignored him, and tipped the cup up, emptying the last of it into the man’s mouth. Jalal coughed with his throat full of blood and it seemed for a few moments that he would drown in it until I turned him on his side and some of the blood was coughed out onto the floor. He breathed easy again and I pushed him onto his back.

  “Will that lost blood cause the ritual to fail?” Hassan asked.

  “The ritual?” I asked. “I do not know. I am sure that all will be well.”

  “What is the next step?” he asked.

  “Now we wait,” I said.

  We looked down at Jalal, who—pale and cold as he was—seemed to be dead but for the occasional flickering of his eyes beneath the lids.

  He lived. Before morning, he opened his eyes and said he was thirsty.

  We gave him blood to drink.

  For a month, I turned one fedayin every night, and on some nights, I turned two of them. Out of the first thirty, we lost eight men. The first of the eight stopped breathing before I could get enough of my blood into them, and so we bled others less. And yet those ones who were not taken to the very edge of death were more likely to die from violent convulsions. They would thrash about in spasms, their skin hot to the touch until they moved no more. One man opened his eyes in the morning but remained otherwise insensible for days, and neither blood nor fresh air nor anything else could elicit a response. And so, Hassan cut his throat.

  Despite all this, finding replacements for the eight failures was no problem. The fedayin did not hesitate.

  Thomas urged me to leave the eight dead men, and argued that it was within the letter of my agreement with the Assassins, and yet it allowed us to limit the number of immortals. But that seemed petty to me and would create bad blood between me and Hassan, which I strived to avoid.

  I did not like being so beholden to him, or to the Assassins in general. For the first time in many years, I thought back to Ashbury Manor, and my time as lord there. It was no grand place, certainly nothing like a castle, but it was mine and I had servants, and I had knights and squires, all looking to me to command them. And I thought how that place was nothing compared to what I could have, should I so choose. What if I could find men who would serve me, as Hassan had his fedayin? With a fortified home, with immortal followers, I could become a great lord and I would be secure, finally. All I needed was an overlord who would protect me, who would help me to fend off rumours of my agelessness, and of the blood drinking that would no doubt leak out.

  But what Christian lord would do such a thing? Unless he was an unchristian man. Perhaps I could offer the gift of my blood to a king from distant yet civilised lands. Somewhere like Armenia, or Georgia, I thought. Or even the semi-barbaric lands of the Rus.

  And yet, an immortal king would have more power than I would have. And such a man could have me killed whenever he wished, so what kind of freedom was that?

  I could make myself into a king.

  The thought popped into my head, clear as a bell. The obvious end of such a line of reasoning.

  “If you did that,” Eva whispered to me, on the night that I spoke my thoughts to her, “then how would you be different to William?”

  “No, no,” I said. We sat on stools beside a table in the corner of our quarters. “I would do it, not from hubris or love of power over others, but only for our safety, Eva.” I lowered my voice and took one of her hands in both of mine. “Imagine us, sitting on thrones, in the hall of some castle. In a Christian land, perhaps one in the East. Or in the Thracian kingdoms. We could make a kingdom in those hills and dark forests. The Hungarian mountains, surrounded by wolves and bears. No one could touch us.”

  “I think all your bloodletting has drained the wits from your head,” she said, patting my hands with her free one. “Even if we could take power somewhere, a king rules with the consent of his people, whether he knows it or not. Do you think they would still support you after fifty years on that throne? A hundred? How long before they rose up to dethrone you, in your own castle? And those lands you just mentioned, you think they are defensible? They have all been crushed by the Mongols. Is that who you would like as your overlords?”

  I sighed. “Are you not tired of all this? Running from place to place? With no home?”

  She looked at me and spoke softly. “For a long time.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked her.

  Taking a deep breath, she hesitated. “I do not know if you have ever asked me that before.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “I understand that you do not wish to be beholden to any man who is not worthy of your loyalty. You are an English knight. You want to serve a good king, and a king of England, too. But we are where we are. And we must do what we have set out to do,” she said.

  “I think,” I said, the
n stopped myself. I did not speak for a long time but Eva simply sat and waited. How well she knew me. “I think, that my hatred for William has faded. It used to burn inside me. Oft times, I feared the sin of wrath would consume me, as I wanted nothing other than to kill him. And that wrath has driven me, driven me to murder and sin. But now…”

  “William has done incalculable evil. Murdered your first wife, your brother’s family. Who knows how many other woman and children. He murdered my father. He murdered King John. He must be killed. And who can do it other than you? You have said the Archbishop of Jerusalem told you that God made you this way so that you can put an end to William’s evil. You do not need to feel wrath to do this. All passion fades. Richard, you are a sinful man, that is true. But since the time I first met you, to this moment now, I could always see that your heart is ruled by justice. You do not need passion, or wrath, to fulfil your oath and deliver justice to William. You will do it because it is your duty.”

  “What about my duty to Christendom?” I asked. “I have made thirty immortals for our enemies. Surely, I should turn only men such as Thomas. Knights, dedicated to preserving our lands, our people, against the Saracens and all other enemies. This is wrong, is it not?”

  “Thomas has filled your heart with dread because he is a fearful old man who wants the world to stay the same as it ever was. And Stephen has filled your head with grand ambitions because he is young and wishes to remake the world with himself as some great part of it. They are both lesser men than you, and they will do as you say. They are followers of yours, Richard. Ignore their fretting and stay the course. We will use the Assassins to kill Hulegu and the other immortals. They cannot be allowed to live. Once that is done, and William is dead, we can find a place in this world.”

  “What would I do without you, Eva?” I asked.

  I did not know it then but one day soon, I would find out.

  ***

  The night air was cold but there was little wind. The waxing moon was half full and I could see across the rocks of the mountainside down to the faint shape of Firuzkuh Castle. Summer was all but over and winter was well on the way.