“Yes,” said Grazide. She lisped, as though something in her mouth was restricting the movement of her tongue. “You’ll see,” she said, promising. “You will see more of that.”
“If I see he’s not harmed,” Chambord said.
Grazide lay back beside Ila and raised one leg. Chambord took her little shoe by its heel and removed it; he stroked her calf, his stroke gathering the end of the stocking so that it rolled to her ankle. He peeled her stocking off. He bared the other leg, too. Grazide turned to Ila, her face fair and clean in its frame of the woody tendrils of her dirty powder-clotted hair. She pressed against him, ducked her head under his chin, and bit him.
The marquis and Grazide were talking like angels. They spoke in Provençal, as Ila’s family and neighbors had. But Grazide used words Ila had never heard. Their conversation was musical, a measured dance, formal and courtly. They spoke about God, Grazide saying to Chambord that there was a good God and an evil God. That souls belonged to the good God and bodies to the evil. She said the world would not end till every soul had left it.
While she talked, she stroked Ila’s chest. Ila lay turned to them. He could see how Chambord still rested in the cradle of Grazide’s arms and thighs, his head on her shoulder. Grazide’s mouth and chin were dark with dry blood, and blood was smeared in a thin, sticky wash on Chambord’s cheeks. Ila knew that it was his blood, only it didn’t seem to matter. All he minded was his shyness—he didn’t dare to nestle closer to them, not just look and listen but touch.
After a time Chambord and Grazide uncoupled, with a whimper of wet skin parting. They rearranged themselves, came to lie on either side of him. The marquis tilted Ila’s chin and looked at the wounds on his neck, then put his mouth to the place and kissed it, as a man might kiss the ring of the Papal Legate, a seal of authority. Grazide pushed her fingers into Ila’s hair and ran her hand through it, pulling, moving his head so that the scabs on his neck split and oozed. She told Chambord that she’d buy out this journeyman’s remaining time. She’d pay his master more than he was worth. “I’ll keep him with me as he changes, and bring him back to you once his own weapons have formed, and are primed. Then you shall feel what I have felt—night’s venomous electricity. You will join me, and when I’m old, and have forgotten who I am, you can teach me my own grammar, and remind me who I love.”
Chambord’s hand was up under Grazide’s skirts and Ila could see tendons in the man’s sinewy arm roll across his arm bone as his fingers worked. Chambord said to her, “How much do you love pleasure?” His other hand found Ila’s fly, which was still buttoned, and pulled hard so that the buttons popped, one by one, from their frayed holes. Grazide got up and shrugged off her dress, stripped off her stays and underskirts, and mounted Ila, naked, shining above him, her flesh rosy with blood like black wine in a porcelain cup. Her skin was pale and dappled with white reptilian markings. She rocked and rose to the rhythm Ila helplessly, reflexively took. Chambord watched them, his eyes sleepy and his small mouth slightly open. Once he touched them, to move one of Ila’s hands from Grazide’s breast and jam its heel into her gasping mouth. She bit the hand, and again Ila experienced a rush, his body melting and spilling beyond its margins. He felt hot liquid dribble down his arm and drip from his elbow onto his flexing stomach.
When the birds had begun their chorus Ila was given chocolate. Beside the daybed was a table with a solid silver top, decorated with figures in high relief, too high for Ila to put his hot cup down. He burned his mouth trying to spare his hands.
Madame Grazide dressed. She put on the cloak she’d come in, a cloak with a deep, enveloping hood.
Ila shuffled off the bed and put his empty cup down on the marquis’s rug. He tried to put himself in order. His fingers were numb and clumsy with his buttons. He couldn’t fasten them, so left them, gathered the flaps of his fly together under the tail of his shirt, and wove his way to Grazide’s side.
But Grazide moved away from him, fled through the door like a shadow pursued by torchlight.
“Come,” said Chambord. He grasped Ila’s arm above the elbow and drew him out of the room. Ila took one stupid, covetous look as he left—at a mantelpiece they passed, at a brass clock with automata. The clock was chiming and angels had appeared from its workings to parade before an enthroned Madonna and child. It was Death who struck the bell. Ila stumbled through the door and onto a landing. He saw the hall and the staircase, a fleet black shape hurrying down its sweeping curve. Then Grazide was gone—and an instant after she vanished the sun appeared, in a gap between the horizon and a pall of mist.
Ila stopped. He said, “What was that? What’s that sound?”
The staircase banister was of iron, and when the sun came a corresponding filigree of shadow appeared on the wall, sharply black in clear gold light.
“What sound?” said the marquis.
Ila tripped on the sagging legs of his trousers. Chambord turned to him, tucked his shirt in, and buttoned his fly. Then Chambord’s hands were still, though he still held Ila by the buckle of the belt he had just finished fastening. For a moment they stood, their heads hanging, cheek to cheek, their mouths so close that their breath made one ghost in the sunlight on that cold landing.
Then the marquis shook his head and tugged at Ila’s arm.
They continued on down. The door was open, and Grazide’s carriage was standing at it, its curtains closed fast.
Chambord released Ila and went through another door, beside the main entranceway. He walked away from Ila into a chapel, where he cast himself facedown on the floor before the altar. The marquis lay prone, his forehead to the flagstones. He flung out his arms. Thick pillars of altar candles and the altar’s gold seemed piled up over him.
Ila went down to the carriage. The sun had risen into the mist, and more mist was coming up in stealthy wisps from oak and plane trees and the leads of the château’s roof. Ila got into the carriage. It was dark inside, and for a moment the space seemed to be inhabited only by shadows; then Grazide’s face turned back to him—she’d had it pressed against the far wall. “How thick is the mist?” she asked.
“It’s becoming thicker, I think.”
Grazide stopped the carriage on the Island. She made a tiny crack in the leather concertina curtains—their pleats as thick as the flanks of a forge bellows. She poked her gloved fingers through the gap and peered at the day. Then she opened the carriage door. Her groom, startled, was too slow off his box; his mistress had already jumped onto the road and was walking away from the carriage, her cloak dragging over the damp white grit. Ila followed her. The day was cold and bright, the world without borders and severely limited. The mist entered Ila’s body; with each intake of breath he felt himself grow heavier.
Grazide stopped beside a roadside shrine. It was a landmark Ila knew from his childhood but had scarcely spared a glance. The shrine held a figure of Saint Benezet the bridge builder. Grazide raised her gloved hands to draw her hood up more securely and turned her back to the pearly part of the white mass of vapor around them—the screen behind which the sun was hiding. She told Ila to look at the stain under the saint’s eyes. Floodwaters had once risen to the rims of Benezet’s eyes. He had looked out over flotsam and treetops. The big trees fell because the ground liquefied and couldn’t hold their roots. Mortar melted and coffins floated out of the crypts of the churches, then out of the ground itself, birthed like bubbles. Grazide had been asleep in a crypt, she said, and had floated out, riding on a coffin. “By daylight,” she said. “I was young, and could still endure it for a short time.” She said that she’d survived by cocooning herself in mud, by making a statue of herself until the river fell and she could cross to the city, which was sodden but solid.
Grazide put her arms around Ila and stood on her toes so that she took his face into her hood. She said that Chambord believed he couldn’t be pleased, but Ila would please him. “You can couple with him as I can’t. I can’t because I’m a breeder—not of babies, but of my ow
n kind.” She made a face. “I have made you into what I am. Your attentions to Chambord will be my attentions. Your mouth will be my mouth—but young and clean. You can give him a taste, and then you will dance for me, dance naked on your back, for me. We will show him what he can have, to give as well as take. Pleasure. His pleasure and mine.” Her eyes gleamed.
“I heard the sun,” Ila said.
Grazide raised her eyebrows.
Ila said that when he was on the landing the sun had come with a sound like a flare of gas on a marsh in the stillness of a hard frost, the flame that comes with a whisper and stands as straight as the candles at Mother Mary’s feet. “The air is alive, and a blue flame springs with a hiss from a muddy vent.”
Grazide sighed. “You mustn’t speak to the marquis like that. I chose you because you’re comely, and unafraid, and ignorant. You be that. Continue to be that. Be bloody. I’ll keep you full. Full and satisfied. You will ache with use. You can look all you like at what he owns, but Chambord is mine, my library, scholar, seer, magician, confessor. My lover. You will keep your mouth shut except to bite him—do you understand?” Then Grazide kissed Ila and took his tongue into her mouth and showed him what she had there.
Grazide kept Ila at her house while he changed. When she went out she locked him in. She brought him the few things he owned—she’d paid the enameler so handsomely he’d not be asking questions. Ila might like to visit the man again—once he had learned a little decorum—in order to allay any remaining fears the man had.
Ila sickened and altered—then grew well again, well and hungry. His eyes watered and his skin stung in sunlight, so he learned to avoid it. Grazide took him out in the city at night and let him loose on drunks and beggars. She never spoke to him but to issue instructions. And she never used his name. He was “boy”—“my strong bloody boy.”
A month passed; then Grazide took Ila back to the château. This time he was allowed into the marquis’s bedchamber. He watched the marquis and his mistress making love in the candlelight, on a bed of clean linen sprinkled with sprigs of lavender. And, as he was instructed, Ila joined the couple fully clothed, only to bite Chambord’s shoulder when the marquis was in the throes of pleasure.
“‘Of pleasure,’ Ila would emphasize when he told his story. This story I’ve put together from what he’s told Dawn, and me, and Martine,” Eve told Bad. “He said that he couldn’t know what he took from Chambord when he first bit him—other than blood. But he later came to see that he did take another, everyday, thing—pleasure the Church would say was unsanctified. Unsanctified, but natural—natural carnal pleasure. For once Ila had put his spines into Chambord, and the man’s body began its prolonged, ecstatic spasming, had its fit of joy, Ila felt that he had brought the man down, that he had sunk his teeth in the muscle of Chambord’s shoulder, and had felled him as a lion fells an antelope. That, while Chambord came back to consciousness, he had, in fact, died then.”
Afterward Chambord put up an arm and drew Ila down onto the bed, scooped Ila and Grazide together beneath him. Grazide, displeased, hissed at Ila.
But on later occasions they went further—Grazide and Chambord—inspired by the receding horizon of their ecstasy. Ila would join them in the bed and would bite Chambord as Grazide was biting him. And Ila, incited by her venom, would lose all restraint and would bite and bite, for the pleasure of sinking his barbs and pumping venom—his mouth itched and tingled with its bounty. Chambord would howl, then lie limp, moaning and stuporous, his chest like a pricked piecrust, its holes running with warm red juice.
That winter Chambord dismissed most of his servants and shut up much of the château. They nested through the cold months, the three of them. Ila had the freedom of Chambord’s house, and the marquis gave him a box of inks, thick paper, brushes, and pens. Illumination was a clear step up from enameling and, Chambord said, Ila’s talent was decorative, his eye untrained in perspective, in seeing what was really there.
The marquis and Grazide read and talked and lay for hours, face-to-face, looking at each other in the firelight or at something they shared, something invisible to Ila.
Ila went out at night, through the château’s parkland, and followed the trails of hearth smoke to villages. It snowed, and he forged through the snow with the energy of a wolf. The days were short, each only an island, standing dry but diminished in a flooding river.
It became apparent that Chambord was exhausted. He shivered if he left the warm rooms. The skin of his lips turned a soft mauve in shade and was puckered by dry patches. Grazide would bare his skin, kiss him, and beg him to let her. To let her finish him. Let her take him.
Chambord said no, wait.
The spring came; the snow melted; the fields were muddy, then suddenly green. Ila found that there weren’t enough hours in the night, after he’d ranged to feed and walked back along his wet, difficult pathways. He shut himself in the château’s longest gallery, closed the shutters against the dawn, lit candles, and made his pictures.
One morning at the end of May, when Ila was at work in the long gallery, he noticed that there were people in the house. Figures crossed the light from the landing, men moving to and fro, carrying trunks. Ila heard them laboring, burdened, down the stairs. He wasn’t able to go to the window and look through the curtains, couldn’t see if there was a carriage at the door. But he heard them arrive—carriages—heard the flinty strumming of iron wheels on gravel, a thud of hooves, the clink of harness, and a carriage’s springs graunch as it stood and took the weight of luggage.
The spring sun loomed like a wave above the château. It was nearly noon. Ila retired to the daybed and loosed the cord that held its curtains open. They swung together and he was in the dark. He lay back and shut his eyes.
Later there was a sound, a discreet creak of skin on paper, the flap and settle of sheets picked up, then put down again. In the silence between each little sound Ila heard attention. He knew that someone was taking a good look at his illuminations.
The curtains opened and the marquis sat on the edge of the bed. He had pushed back the shutters in the room, for the triangle of light in which he sat lapped like molten silver in a crucible.
Chambord inclined into Ila’s cave and put his hand on Ila’s shoulder. “You’re the one I knew,” he said. He withdrew his hand.
Ila couldn’t move; his eyes had closed. The sunlight came through them, though, a pink haze divided by the smear of Chambord’s shadow.
“I want you to tell her this,” Chambord said. “I still know the difference between a treasure and a curiosity.”
Ila heard the marquis speak but didn’t hear him go. He never did pass on the marquis’s message, because when he woke in the evening the room was cold, though there were flames in the fireplace. Flames with green and blue and violet tongues. Ila’s illuminations lay, in a collapsed stack, in the hearth, on the coals of that morning’s blaze. They had caught and were burning. Ila jumped out of bed and rushed to the fireplace. He pulled them out. Each sheet was brittle and edged black, their jeweled surfaces browned by heat. Ila took in this damage, then put them back and watched as the fire consumed them.
He heard a door close and went to the window. Grazide’s cloaked figure emerged onto the terrace in the soft impression of the firelit window. Ila saw her pause, notice his shadow against the weak light on the ground at her feet. She glanced back, then hurried on.
The next day people came and draped all the château’s furniture with dust sheets. They came early, and Ila was able to hide himself. It was the first time he’d slept crammed into a tight space—not a tenant or occupant but like vermin in a house. The servants nailed the shutters closed and left the château. Ila stayed with the phantoms of mirrors and tables, chairs and paintings and wardrobes. He waited for one of them to come back—Grazide or the marquis.
They didn’t come. Ila was lonely and hungry. He left the château to look for Grazide in Avignon and found her house deserted, so went back to the Island and h
is mother’s house. He was the ailing son come home to recover or to die. He lay on a bed by the stove in his mother’s house and shunned the daylight, covered his head against the long pool of sunlight that spilled across the floor from the door at evening. Those sisters and brothers who still lived at home seemed to catch Ila’s sickness, though not his sensitivity to light. Their neighbors watched as each sibling grew pale and vague, drawn, and blue about the mouth. It was remarked upon that their elder brother didn’t appear at their funerals. Then his mother was seen at the market, shawled and shivering in the hot summer weather. The rest of the family convened and made a decision. They went to the house and dragged Ila out of it. He slumped in the yard, his hands over his streaming eyes. They prodded him till he got up; then they drove him away, shoving him before them along the road. They stood behind him in a close cluster, puzzled and fearful, as he walked into a water-filled, cress-covered ditch at the roadside and scooped mud from its bank to lather on his neck and face and hands, further spoiling the yellowed linen of his once fine shirt. He looked at them—uncles, cousins, neighbors—out of his glistening gray face. The sun was hot and steam rose from the drying mud—his head and hands smoked. Then he turned and walked away from them into the forest.
“Despite everything he had heard Grazide say, despite her long assault of temptation and Chambord’s scrupulous refusal, despite all that going on around him, Ila had not taken in the salient fact. He followed his instincts, the instincts that came with his appetite, and tried to have his family join him. He tried to keep them. He tried to turn them into vampires. And all he was able to do was kill them slowly, stifle them with anemia.”
Eve inclined against the hot back of her wrought-iron chair. She felt its rigid lace through the cotton of her shirt.
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