by Brian Lumley
“All things pass,” she said, bravely. “Now—can you sit up? I have soup for you, with chunks of soft meat. Your blood has grown thin as water through all the hours you’ve lain here. This will thicken it up.” She brought soup and bread. Harry was suddenly very tired, but he was hungry too. While he ate, Nana Kiklu looked on in silent approval. She approved of him wolfing the food she’d prepared, and she approved … of him.
Under his bedclothes lay the body of a hunter, a fighting man; hard-muscled as Hzak’s had been, yet pale and different. Well, of course he was different, for he came out of the hell-lands of legend! But … not that different. She’d washed him tip to toe and so knew he wasn’t that different. But handsome, aye! Tall, and lean in the hip. Strong too, before his sickbed, and would be again. Nana had no concept of the word “athlete”, but she could picture Harry chasing a wild pig and casting his spear: the ripple of his muscles, the narrowing of his strange honey-brown eyes. She could picture him doing … many things.
As for the waving grey streaks in the russet of his hair: it seemed unlikely that age could have put them there. Harry Dwellersire was—what, ageless? When she’d listened to him rambling in his fever, he had sounded like nothing so much as an innocent boy; for a fact his body seemed older than his mind! Nana couldn’t know it, but in that last thought she had struck upon the absolute truth.
So, why was he greying? Did it result from great learning, the wisdom that came from it, the weight of mighty knowledge? But knowledge of what strange things? In her reasoning, too, she came closer to the truth than she knew. But as things were she could only offer a small, unselfconscious shrug which went unnoticed. Why strive to understand anything? He was after all a hell-lander. It was probably as well that she neither knew nor understood.
Harry was asleep almost before the last spoonful of soup was down, and a half-hour later Nana Kiklu handed over her duties to another, much older woman. Good as her word, she said nothing about their charge’s partial recovery …
Harry woke up at the end of the six-hour shift, saw the old Gypsy woman nodding on her stool, closed his eyes and moaned until she started awake. Then he kicked his limbs, but feebly, convincing her that he was feverish still. When he calmed down she spooned soup into him, crooned to him until he slept again. Six hours later he employed the same subterfuge with a third Szgany woman, but this time there could be no hiding his rapid improvement. He was only saved by the prompt arrival of Nana Kiklu.
“He looks well,” his unknown Gypsy nurse told Nana as she came in from Starside’s long night, shrugging herself out of a heavy coat of fur. “His fever is in abeyance; all the clamminess has gone out of him; he took enough soup for two men! I think he’ll wake soon. We should tell The Dweller.”
And feigning sleep, Harry heard Nana’s answer:
“Let’s not be too hasty. The Dweller is resting. Sunup is five hours away and the dawn will be time enough. Don’t worry, I will see to it.”
“As you will,” the other answered, and left.
Harry had done most of his thinking in his sleep, which in the main had been restful; also in his dreams, which were less so. He was aware that his son would soon take him out of this world into his own and leave him there, and that he would be a free man again. But only a man, no more Necroscope, and no way round it. He wasn’t reconciled to it but had no choice. For the time being, however, his frustration seemed all burned out of him; except … he supposed it must return. Yes, as long as there were locked rooms in the mansion of his mind—while he remembered the Möbius Continuum, and the myriad dead friends who were lost to him now—it would always return.
But looking at Nana Kiklu where she came to stand over him, looking at her through three-quarters shuttered eyes, which yet feigned sleep, he found himself remembering other, more mundane things. Earthly, even earthy things; yet not of the earth, and certainly not of the grave. For Nana Kiklu was far from that. On the contrary, she was full of life. And he remembered how her breasts had felt against his face when she’d hugged him.
And then he knew why he continued to feign sleep: so that he could watch her watching him. He wanted to consider her expression, and see if he could sense that in her which he felt in himself. It had been a long, long time since he’d known a woman.
When Nana sat beside him he merged into her shadow, felt drawn to her. The top buttons of her soft leather blouse were open; leaning over him to straighten his pillow, the curves of her elastic breasts were partly exposed. Only lift his hands a little and he could test their weight. It was a struggle not to. And to control his breathing.
She cocked her head a little on one side, half-shuttered her own eyes, frowned at him. But her eyes, like her thoughts, were very deep. She had noticed the rise and fall of his chest: a trifle … irregular? Both Harry and the Gypsy, each wondered what were the other’s thoughts.
In the same moment that he felt he must touch her, finally she moved, got up, went to the door—and barred it. And Harry knew, in the way people do, what was going to happen; also that he wanted it to happen.
She came back, her Gypsy hips swaying hypnotically, and sat down again. But as she adjusted his blanket, so her hand crept beneath it on to his naked thigh. Harry stopped breathing, stiffened with the shock of her touch, and her suspicions were at once confirmed. Her laugh was low and husky. “I thought your fever had cooled a little. But look, here you are hot as ever! Hot—and hard …”
Already erect, his manhood grew more yet into her tightening, deliciously mobile fist, to hammer like a heart against her palm. Until he groaned, “No! Wait! Nana, don’t waste me!” His trembling hands found the buttons of her blouse and her breasts tumbled free. While he fondled and kissed their softness, teasing her brown nipples to life, she struggled to be rid of her clothes and into bed with him.
“Fill me, Harry Dwellersire,” she moaned, “for we’ve both been empty and aching for far too long. I’m not sure why you ache, but this may be part of the cure.”
He made no answer, found the sucking gate to her sex and drove into it. In the next moment, for a moment, he held himself back, then panted: “I can’t—daren’t—damn it, I’ll get you pregnant!”
“No,” she shook her head, rolled over on top and came down slow and heavy on him, trapping his flesh deep in her lava core and his face in the silky curtain of her hair. And slowly working her body, with her breasts lolling in his face, she gasped, “I’m … barren.” It was a lie; Hzak’s seed had been at fault, she knew. But as for Nana, she wanted a child—so why not Harry’s?
Harry felt himself swelling, shook his head wildly. “Nana, I can’t hold it!”
“Don’t try,” she told him, and instantly felt him jerking, geysering into her. His long bursts seemed unending, lubrication for the hot engine of her womanhood.
“Too quick,” he moaned, angry with himself. “Too damned quick!”
“Yes,” she murmured, smothering him in her breasts, her kisses. “Too quick. But that one was for you. This one will be for me, and it will be slower.”
It was. And so was the next…
In the grey twilight, just before sunup, Nana crept from Harry’s bed and dressed, went to The Dweller and told him that his father’s fever had broken. When she left her lover of a few brief hours, he was sleeping a dreamless, exhausted sleep, and somehow she knew it was the last she would see of him.
But, warm inside, she also knew that it was not the last of his works.
II
Four years later:
Lardis Lidesci’s house stood on a rise a little above Settlement, where the grassy, temperate but abrupt foothills of Sunside climbed towards rocky outcrops and steep, forested heights. He liked sitting in front of the house at sundown, to catch the last rays of the sun; likewise before sunup, to watch it rise. Unthinkable four short years ago (two hundred “days”, or sunup-sundown cycles), and even now nerve-tingling: to be up and about, safe and sound, and the parent star itself not yet risen. Strange, too, to li
ve in one place, in a house; though almost all of the Szgany did these days—certainly the majority of Lardis’s prosperous, ever-increasing band.
The Szgany Lidesci: Lardis’s people.
Oh, there were still a few families who preferred their hide-covered caravans along the valley trails, and those who dragged their scant belongings on travois from place to place, unwilling to rest, relax, rejoice in the fact that the scourge of the Wamphyri was a thing of the past. But in the main they were settled or settling now, while other tribes, clans, bands of Travellers were following suit, building their own places along the forest’s rim, east to west down the spine of the barrier range.
Lardis’s cabin was styled after The Dweller’s house on Starside. Providing shelter for Lardis, his young wife Lissa, and not least their small son Jason—who had been named by his father after someone he very much admired—it stood a mile east of Sanctuary Rock. Lardis had chosen the spot himself, built the house, finally taken a wife and settled here, all in that period of twenty-four solar rotations following immediately upon The Dweller (whom some saw fit to call “the changeling” now, and others Harry Wolfson) sending the Szgany out of his garden on Starside. And while Lardis had toiled to construct his home here in the lower foothills, so his people had followed his example, felled trees and built Settlement.
Since the place was the first community of its kind in more than two thousand years of wandering, Lardis found its simple name in keeping—if not the high, stout fence which the Gypsies had seen fit to throw up around it. With its catwalks, turret watchtowers and various defensive systems … perhaps “Fortress” would have been a more suitable name! But memories of hard times die hard, and Szgany dread of Wamphyri terror and domination was instinctive and immemorial.
The Wamphyri, aye!
Sitting here in the faint, false-dawn light of Sunside, looking down on Settlement—with its tiny gardens and allotments, blue smoke spiralling from its stone chimneys, the first antlike movements in its cramped streets—Lardis wondered if the Wamphyri would ever return. Well, possibly, for they were like a recurrent nightmare which fades but not entirely from inner memory, bloating anew when least expected, resurgent in the night. But not, he prayed, in his time. Let it not be in his or little Jason’s time.
It wouldn’t be, not if he could help it.
And yet … it was reported that the vampire swamps were acrawl again. Creatures and ignorant, lonely men went there to drink, and came away more than creatures and less than men. Or more than men, depending on one’s point of view: that of someone entirely human, or that of something other. Impossible and therefore pointless—and not least very, very dangerous—to attempt to quarantine, patrol or monitor those great boggy tracts sprawling west of the barrier range, those morasses of bubbling, festering evil. Their extent was unknown, unmapped; no one fully understood the nature of vampire contamination, infestation, mutation.
How then to keep the threat at bay? The Szgany Lidesci could only do their best. Lardis’s plan had been simple and so far had seemed to work:
West of the jagged barrier mountains, where the crags fell to earth, petered into stacks, knolls and jumbles, became foothills which eventually flattened into quaggy hollows, that was where the swamps began. Fed by streams out of the heights, the marshes brewed their horrors through the long, steamy sunups, released them into the gurgling, mist-wreathed nights. At least one tribe of Starside trogs, inhabitants of deep caverns far to the west of what was once The Dweller’s garden, knew the danger well enough: they kept a constant watch for any suspicious creature emerging from that region. And since all such were dubious, they destroyed them whenever they could. Wolf, goat, man—it made no difference—if he, it, whatever, came stumbling or stalking out of reeking, moisture-laden darkness into trog territory, then he was doomed.
Lardis had taken his cue from the trogs. One hundred and forty miles west of Settlement, where the mountains were less rugged and the green belt of Sunside narrowed down to something of a thinly forested bottleneck, that was where the Szgany had always drawn their line of demarcation. In all Lardis’s travelling days, he’d never taken the tribe across that line, neither him nor any other leader that he knew of. Apart from a handful of solitary types—lone wanderers who always kept themselves apart, perhaps for safety of body and soul—apart from these and the rare, nomadic family group, the territory beyond the line of demarcation was unknown to men, unexplored. But as for the line itself: now at least it was manned. And constantly.
There were two well established Gypsy communities west of Settlement: Mirlu Township only twenty miles away, and Tireni Scarp, three times as far again. Volunteers from all three of these “towns” took turns guarding the brooding vampire frontier. Even now two dozen men of the Szgany Lidesci were away from home, an entire sunup’s march to the west. There they’d stay for four long days—and four fraught, eerie sundowns—until relieved of their duties by the Szgany Mirlu. Eventually it would be the turn of a band from Tireni Scarp, and so forth. This way, just as Starside’s trogs kept a lookout for incursions into their territories, so the Szgany protected Sunside.
It was as much as could be done; Lardis had agreed all of the procedures with Anton Mirlu and Yanni Tireni; the Lidescis—because they were situated furthest from the boundary and so had further to trek in pursuance of their duties—would seem to have got the worst of the deal. At the same time, however, they were the furthest away … but never to the extent that Lardis was out of touch. No, for he must always maintain his intelligence, keep up to date where and whenever vampiric outbreaks or manifestations were concerned …
Hunched in his chair in his small garden over Settlement, Lardis chewed over all of these things, considering what had been and wondering what was still to be; until suddenly, feeling a chill, he turned up the collar of his jacket. Not that this would warm him, for his was a chill of the soul—maybe. He snorted and gave an agitated shrug. At times he cursed the seer’s blood in him; it told him things and gave warning, true, but never told enough and sometimes warned too late.
A thin mist was gradually (and quite naturally) rising out of the earth, up from the streams and rivers, advancing through the forests and gathering in the hollows. Already Settlement’s walls were fading into the grey of it. Lardis didn’t much care for mists; he’d seen too many which were other than natural; he remembered their clammy feel against his skin, what had issued them, what all too often issued out of them. But this one—
—He narrowed dark Szgany eyes and merely scowled at this one. Knowing its source he could afford to, for it was simply the dawn. In just a little while now the glorious, laborious sun would lift its rim up over the far furnace deserts, pour its light on fringes of scrub, crab-grass, savanna where they gradually merged into forest, until finally its golden rays would light upon Settlement and the barrier range itself.
Sunup, soon! The land knew it, stirred, breathed a moist breath of mist to wake birds and beasts alike, and cover the shimmer of trout in the brightening rivers.
Sunup, aye … And with the thought, all manner of morbid omens and imaginings slipped quietly from Lardis’s mind. For a little while, anyway …
“Halloo!” The cry broke into Lardis’s solitude, brought him to his feet.
Going to the front of the garden and looking down the zigzagging, rudimentary stairway of stones which he’d wedged into the steepest part of the descent, Lardis saw two disparate figures climbing towards him, their feet swathed in a milky weave of ground mist. One of them, whose familiar voice had hailed him, was Nana Kiklu. The other—male, gnarled, and somewhat bent—was the mentalist Jasef Karis; or the ‘thought-thief’, as most people knew him, except that was an unkind expression. Oh, the old Gypsy could get into your head right enough, and steal your thoughts if he wanted to! But that wasn’t his way. Usually he kept his talent to himself, or else used it to the tribe’s advantage as a whole.
As for Nana: her man had died following the battle for The Dweller’s g
arden, which itself had followed fast on the hell of the bloodbath at Sanctuary Rock. And Lardis remembered that only too well…
Then: the Wamphyri Lord Shaithis had come into Sunside looking for Zekintha Föener and the hell-lander Jazz Simmons. In fact Zek and Jazz were both hell-landers, but while Lardis had admired them individually, his memories of Zek were that much fonder. Though it would have been impossible to mistake her for a Gypsy (what, with her colouring, like a burst of sunlight?), still there had been something of the Gypsy about her. While she’d never once encouraged Lardis, nevertheless he’d entertained hopes. Perhaps if things had worked out differently … but they hadn’t. Zek was gone now, returned to her own world. Anyway, Lardis had Lissa and Jason, and loved both of them. He channelled his thoughts afresh:
After the slaughter at Sanctuary Rock and the period of sojourn in The Dweller’s garden, when the tribe had returned to Sunside to build Settlement, then Nana had been given the task of caring for old Jasef; for there were no drones among the Szgany. Indeed, if circumstances had been as of old, then Nana would have been obliged to find herself another husband. And as for the old man: surely the day had long since dawned when the mentalist would have been no more. His rapidly shrivelling brain, desiccated bones and knotted ligaments must certainly have done for him by now, when during some nightmare raid from Starside—with neither wit to hide himself away, nor agility to flee—Jasef would have ended his days as fodder in the belly of a hybrid Wamphyri warrior creature. Except … that had been then and this was now, and things were very different.
Lardis continued to follow the progress of the pair as they climbed towards him, and his thoughts in respect of the aged Szgany telepath were neither callous nor calculating, merely honest: