A Summoner's Tale - The Vampire's Confessor (Black Swan 3)

by Danann, Victoria

  If he went to the coffee bar, he always asked if she wanted something. She always replied with a too-crisp, "Thank you. No.", and made a point of refusing him the courtesy of looking at him.

  If he assigned her something new to work on, he would always add, "Is it too much?" She would respond by stretching her neck with exaggerated haughtiness then look down her nose, and say, "Certainly not."

  She recalled that they had spent their days working in silence, the only sound being his occasional sighs. She knew he watched her surreptitiously and, in a fit of vindictiveness that should be beneath her, she hoped he wanted her so that she could be all the more cruel. What was wrong with her?

  During the fraction of a second that she had glanced at him when he asked why she hated him so much, there was no doubt that he had looked hurt. Had she missed that or was she just so angry about some perceived injustice or transgression that she simply didn't care? That wasn't like her. At least she hoped it wasn't. She thought of herself as being a good person, but when it came to Istvan Baka, she had been comporting herself like a shrew.

  Something inside drove her to behave badly around him. She had thought she was in perfect control, but all along it had been just the opposite. She was reacting to a compulsion that didn't make any sense. Her will was not her own.

  With vision cleared, acting on impulse, she turned off the monitor and headed for the Chronicles section of Headquarters library thinking there could be some clue to be found in the records. He wasn't just away on personal time. She knew it right down to the bottom of her ESP.

  CHAPTER_6

  Istvan Baka was born in the eastern Carpathian Mountains of Romania in 1453 and lived there throughout his life as a human. The year that he was fifteen, the same year he began working for the monks of Cozio, an organization known as The Order of the Black Swan was forming in southern Germany one thousand miles due west. Immediately they had begun secretly recruiting young men to the highest and noblest calling; that of guarding humanity in silence and anonymity from creatures such as Baka was fated to become.

  At the time he was infected with the vampire virus he was working for the monks of Cozio, painting murals of the history of the monastery and various other religious themes.

  An image flashed in Heaven's imagination of what one of those paintings might have looked like. She saw the composition, the richness of the colors, and the feeling the artist conveyed. It was a strange reaction for someone who was hardly a student, or even a fan, of art.

  He was proud of the fact that some of his paintings on canvas survived, now owned by the Romanian Cultural Heritage Foundation and considered national treasures. He'd been to the museums to see them himself and had enjoyed standing off to the side, but close enough to hear viewers' comments.

  Baka sat on the dirt floor of his prison in utter darkness living his worst nightmare. Since the day he had remembered who he was, the only thing he had asked from life was enough distraction to keep him from reliving his life as a vampire. But there in the black with his hands manacled, with no creature or thing to divert his journey to hell, it all replayed in vivid detail.

  On a Spring day in 1468, at age fifteen, Baka's father was hired to repair the roof of the monastery and brought Baka to assist. He saw one of the monks writing through a window and was captivated. The monk noticed the boy's fascination and was, in turn, fascinated himself. Baka was invited to come inside for a closer look.

  The monk asked Baka for his thoughts on philosophical questions and was impressed with the fact that the boy had given thought to theological questions of good and evil. Most unusual for the progeny of peasant class. While he was helping his father repair roofs or mend fences, there was, apparently, a lot going on in the boy's head. His mind was just as busy as his hands.

  Brother Cufaylin asked if Baka would like to have a job working for the monks doing what needed to be done in exchange for meals and an education. For a peasant like Baka, the prospect of an education was tantamount to a lottery win. He couldn't believe his good fortune. He said goodbye to his parents and moved into the monastery.

  He was given a pallet that was rolled up and stowed under a cabinet during the day. At night he unrolled it and slept by the kitchen fire. The boy gladly performed any service required of him promptly and without complaint whether it was cooking, carrying, chopping, hauling, or digging. Gradually all the monks came to regard him with fondness. Collectively they were amazed at the depth of the questions he posed, some of which might have challenged Thomas Aquinas himself.

  Baka proved a quick study, with a natural proclivity for writing, mathematics, and, surprising enough, illuminating. The manuscripts he illuminated were so beautiful they were left open in the library as inspiration and evidence of the god's love expressed through the art of a penniless peasant boy. Secretly, there were times when Brother Cufaylin wondered if the care, education, and guidance of this special boy wasn't his true god-given purpose, or even that of the monastery itself.

  In the year 1470, an artist came from Italy to paint a mural on the chapel wall. Baka observed the man's technique for a few days and then proceeded to prove that he was as talented at painting large scale scenes as illuminating manuscripts. Brother Faescu, who served in the capacity of accountant for the monastery, was persuaded to approve a small expenditure for the purchase of paints and supplies so that Baka might practice and improve upon his talent. He worked hard at creating art, but he would never have named it work as it was a labor of love in the purest sense.

  Whenever he stopped to think about the hardships of living in those times, he thought he must be the luckiest person alive to spend his days making beauty out of a handful of raw materials. In time, that beauty astounded all who came to see.

  Shortly after Baka turned eighteen, he learned that one of the local girls, who was fifteen, had been left alone as the rest of her family succumbed to a fever and died. He went to Brother Cufaylin, explained that he would like to rescue the girl through an offer of marriage. The monk asked if Baka loved her. Baka admitted that he did not love her, but went on to say that he loved the idea of doing a good thing.

  The monk could not have been more pleased. He took some of the manuscripts Baka had illuminated and sold them for enough money to buy a stone cottage in the mountainside forest, fifteen minutes' walk from the monastery, and gave it to Baka for a wedding present. He also informed Baka that he would thereafter receive compensation sufficient to sustain a small family comfortably.

  Gheorghita knew she should be thinking of nothing but mourning the family she had survived, but it was hard to concentrate on that when she had won such a prize as she had never hoped for. Istvan Baka was the name on the tongue of every girl in the province. He was beautiful as a boy could be and seemed to have the light of spirit shining all around him. He was also completely oblivious to the feminine attention he drew to himself and had never shown the slightest interest in anyone. Certainly the fact that he had risen in status above the station of peasant to artisan made her all the more fortunate.

  They were married by Brother Cufaylin and set about creating an idyllic domicile in a stone cottage on the forested mountainside. Baka was easy going and good company, even if on the quiet side. He liked Gheorghita well enough and liked sex more than he had expected to. His observation of animals in the fields had been that they appeared to be suffering through a rather unpleasant task.

  His appetite for carnal knowledge far exceeded his wife's so he took what was tolerated and was glad for it.

  Every day Baka thanked his god for his good fortune and his many blessings. His basic needs were met which enabled him to wrestle with the harder, more abstract, and intellectual questions such as what might his purpose be?

  Those questions were answered with the birth of his first child, a girl he named Stavna. From the moment he first held her in his hands, Baka's core philosophy centered on a certainty that the meaning of life is children.

  Gheorghita delighted him
with a son the next year, but in the third year both she and a second boy died in childbirth. He grieved as much for his children's loss as anything. He had two children under the age of three and no caretaker. So he bundled them up and took them with him to the village to inquire about someone to watch them in his absence. The old herb woman suggested that he try the Widow Mironescu, saying that it might be a practical match. The widow had recently been left with two little children and no husband. Baka had recently been left with two little children and no wife.

  To Baka it seemed like sound reasoning. So he went to see the Widow Mironescu and made a proposal to give her the safety of marriage and the basic necessities for herself and her children in exchange for being a loving mother to his little ones. She was a plain woman but not ill-formed. She was older, in her mid twenties, but, as Baka thought, no one is perfect.

  The widow rejoiced and wept with gratitude. In terms of what might be expected to befall a Middle Ages widow, she was fortunate indeed to contract such a practical marriage, equally beneficial to both parties.

  Baka loaded the few things she could call her own onto the cart and started back up the mountain with a family quickly grown to four children and a new wife named Marilena.

  Baka was pleased enough with the new situation. Marilena fulfilled her obligation to keep the house, cook, and take care of Baka's children as well as her own. When it came to sex, she preferred to remain clothed, as was the custom of the time, wanting to bare only what was necessary for as little time as was necessary. She was not interested in foreplay nor was she interested in expressions of affection afterward. She encouraged Baka to accelerate the speed at which he reached orgasm to make short work of her wifely duty and, because he was an affable spirit, he did his best to comply.

  Over the next seven years they had three children together. The year that he was twenty-eight, a fever sickness spread through the valley and eventually reached his home on the mountain. Marilena, her two children, and two of the three they had together died leaving Baka with his first daughter, Stavna, who was then nine-years-old, and a little boy who was four.

  Suffering so many deaths caused Baka to struggle with issues of faith. If children were the meaning of life, then how could his god be so cruel as to take them and leave him behind? Baka was thirty-one, but the losses had left him feeling old. He was a widower a second time, but he thanked his god for sparing Stavna, who was not only the apple of his eye, but also of an age to take over the responsibilities of some household chores and and watching her little brother.

  A year passed without Baka feeling motivated to take another wife. Then another. The year that he was thirty-one, several of the monks were to journey to Bucharest to arrange matters of trade, and Brother Cufaylin wanted Baka to accompany them. They made arrangements for Stavna and her little brother to stay in the village with the herb woman while they were away.

  Baka had never been away from the valley community where he'd been born. Though he tried to appear outwardly sophisticated, on the inside he was excited as a child. It took four days to reach Bucharest. Baka had not thought there were that many people on Earth. Certainly he never could have imagined anything as grand as the palace that was Prince Vlad Dracula III's summer residence.

  The monks made arrangements to stay on the second floor of a stone building that housed a tavern at street level. They were served the evening meal by the innkeeper's young daughter, Helena. When she stopped next to Baka with a pitcher, ready to fill his mug with ale, she looked down into his face and caught her breath. He had lost the youthful beauty that had made the village girls stare and titter. His hair was no longer sun-streaked from working outside with his father. His eyes weren't bright with the promise of an unknown future. His skin wasn't flawless and it didn't flush when he realized he'd attracted feminine attention.

  What the innkeeper's daughter saw in that face transcended the bloom of youth. She saw the character of a man who was so good that he didn't struggle to do the right thing. It was just natural for him. She saw a man so steady that everyone who knew him knew that they could count on him. And, though she was sexually innocent, her body responded to him in ways that awoke her curiosity.

  Baka was every bit as taken with Helena as she was with him. He thought she was a walking work of art and was amazed that she was interested in a man over thirty and worn by the world. He wanted to take her home, but was concerned that a young woman accustomed to crowds and excitement might be unhappy with a quiet, secluded mountainside cottage and ordinary chores. When he voiced this concern, it was confirmation that her intuition was right about him because it was hardly typical to think about the happiness of a wife, much less to be concerned about it. She assured him that she simply wanted to be where he was and that would be happiness enough for her.

  On the last day of his sojourn to the Wallachia capital, he approached the innkeeper with a proposal. The man expressed considerable displeasure at the prospect of losing a valuable asset in the form of a daughter who worked for free.

  Brother Cufaylin assisted with negotiations and reached an agreement with the man that included payment of a dowry. Just two days before, the monastery had enjoyed a generous influx of cash from the sale of some of Baka's paintings which they had brought to a Bucharest art dealer. If Baka had understood that Helena's dowry was being funded with money he had made, it wouldn't have changed a thing. He would not have felt cheated. He would have said he had everything he needed and wanted.

  With his first objection out of the way, the innkeeper then insisted that Helena not leave his household without first being married. That was not a hindrance because Baka had brought with him several persons empowered to perform wedding rites.

  All the way home to Cozio, Baka marveled at the way her chestnut hair looked when the sun was shining on her. It seemed to him that a visible halo of gold shone all around her. Whenever she looked at him, her amber eyes sparkled and he experienced a wealth of feelings he had never had before. His young bride had no experience with sex. He had no experience with love and would give up his humanity without ever admitting to it.

  He would not have said that he was in love, but he would not have traded places with any other man. Helena loved Baka as much as a woman can love a man and would have done anything for him. She embraced his children and nurtured them as if they were her own. She went out of her way to make him comfortable and loved nothing more than making him smile. He could not wait until the cottage was quiet, the night fire built, so that he could get under the covers with his beautiful, young bride and quietly make sweet love to her.

  Baka had been familiar with the clinical basics of intercourse for nearly two decades, but in many ways he was as new to sexual pleasure as the woman whose body greeted him with hunger when he lay with her. She was eager to please him to the point of being a little wicked. The fact that she delighted in the intimacies they shared made him putty in her hands. She was willing to remove all her clothes under the covers and, even more astonishing, urged him to do the same.

  She made Baka feel young again. Even more surprising, he became aroused whenever he thought about her, at any time of day no matter what he was doing. Certainly that should not be happening to a man of his age.

  At night when the children went to bed on the far side of the one room cottage, Baka and Helena would engage in a conspiracy of silence, to keep from waking them. The newlyweds explored each other's bodies slowly and thoroughly. She moaned softly into his ear when he touched her thus and so and he quickly learned the difference between what appealed to her and what excited her. Sometimes he knew she struggled to muffle cries of passion as his fingers learned to deftly stroke between folds hot and slick with desire for him. Even that wetness was something new and surprising. The feel of a naked woman pressing against him, skin on skin, her body begging for his, was an ecstasy he never could have imagined.

  Once their instincts were freed from internal judgments of scandal regarding husband and wife findi
ng joys and delight in sexual acts, nature's course led him to explore her body with lips as well as hands, going lower and lower while she writhed until he nuzzled the triangle of honey-colored curls.

  When Helena realized what he was doing, she protested for the first time and tried to stop him. He hesitated just long enough to smile into those curls before going lower. Her silent protests were interrupted by a gasp as she felt his breath on her core for the first time. She stuffed a fistful of sheet into her mouth to muffle the subsequent sounds of ecstasy and wished that just once she could scream his name with abandon until her voice went hoarse.

  As the winter nights passed, they cuddled and snuggled and played and reveled in the feel of each other's bodies and the naughty ways they pleasured each other. Occasionally Baka made a sound that he was sorely afraid might be described as a giggle.

  He could not have been more pleased with his pretty, young wife and her sensual ways. In addition to being salacious in the most delicious way, she was kind and generous of spirit with his children. She was a good cook and seemed to want nothing more from life than their quiet existence. In other words, Helena was everything a man like Baka could hope for.

  On spring and summer evenings he would stop on his way home to gather wildflowers growing close to the path. The first time he brought them home Helena's face lit up with surprise and happiness. Her eyes shown with love as she asked him what each was called. He didn't know. So he made a point of pressing Brother Paisius into service, accompanying him along the path to teach Baka the names of each and every bloom. Romanian bellflower, Alpine primrose, yellow foxglove, pink dobrogean, Balkan peony and many more. If his bride wanted to know the names of petals, he would procure this information and take it to her as a gift, as proof that he liked her very much and wanted to please her as much as she had pleased him.