Time's Convert

by Deborah Harkness

  Hell, he discovered, was strangely cold now that his soul had flown. There was none of the fire and brimstone Reverend Hopkins had promised, and the heat of his fever was gone, too. Everything was icy and still. There was no screaming, or howls of pain, but only a slow, stammering drumbeat.

  Then that faded, too.

  Marcus swallowed.

  When he did, there a sudden cacophony of sound louder than Washington’s band. Crickets trilled, owls bugled. The limbs of the trees beat out a rat-a-tat-tat.

  “Christ, no,” de Clermont murmured.

  Marcus fell from a height and landed with a thud. His skin prickled with awareness, the night air and the rush of the wind sending every hair on his head aloft, every hair on his neck rising along with it.

  “What is it, Matthew? What did you see?” Russell asked.

  The sound of Russell’s voice prompted images to flash through Marcus’s mind as though they were printed on Gerty’s deck of cards and she was shuffling through them at lightning speed. He seemed to be looking out at the world through a different set of eyes, eyes that saw everything in crisp detail. At first, the images were of John Russell.

  John Russell in a dark tunic, his expression bitter and hard.

  A sword slicing into John Russell’s neck, through a chink in plates of armor—a death blow.

  John Russell sitting, hale and hearty, at a table in a dark tavern, a woman on his knee.

  John Russell taking blood from a woman’s arm—drinking it, devouring it. And the woman liked it. She cried out in ecstasy, her fingers working between her legs as Russell fed.

  “His family.” De Clermont’s voice sounded like broken glass, jagged in Marcus’s newly sensitive ears.

  At the word “family,” the flood of images twisted and turned direction.

  A golden-haired woman.

  A mountain of a man with critical eyes.

  A pale, slender creature with a baby in her arms.

  The dark glance of a woman in yellow, her eyes hectic and wandering.

  A gentle man who reclined in the eyes of another man—this one dark and handsome.

  An old woman with a round, creased face and a kind expression of welcome.

  Family.

  “His father.” Hands took Marcus by the arms and grasped them so hard that he feared his bones might snap.

  Father. This time the word shaped the images that followed into a story.

  Matthew de Clermont, his hands holding a chisel and hammer, his clothes stained with sweat and covered in gray dust, walking home on a summer night, met on the way by the same woman Marcus had seen before, the one with the child in her arms.

  Matthew de Clermont, leaning on a shovel’s handle, face damp with effort or tears, his expression bleak, staring into a hole that contained two bodies.

  Matthew de Clermont falling to a stone floor.

  Matthew de Clermont, covered in blood and gore, exhausted and kneeling.

  Matthew de Clermont fighting with a hard-faced young man not much older than Marcus, who gave off an air of bitter malevolence.

  “I know why MacNeil changed his name,” de Clermont said. “He killed his own father.”

  * * *

  —

  FROM THAT POINT on they were constantly moving, and always at night. Marcus’s delirium gave way to a desperate thirst that nothing would quench. His fever abated, but his mind was still addled and restless. Marcus’s life became a patchwork quilt of jagged impressions and conversations stitched together with bloodred thread. Russell left them to return to the armies at Yorktown. De Clermont’s Indian friends led Marcus and Matthew along paths no wider than a deer trail and impossible to follow unless you knew the subtle signs that marked the way.

  “What if we get lost?” Marcus asked. “How will we find our way in the dark?”

  “You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont said briskly. “You have nothing to fear from the night.”

  During the day, Marcus and de Clermont took refuge in houses along the road whose doors opened without question when the chevalier appeared, or in caves tucked into the hillsides. The Indian warriors who traveled with them kept their distance from the farmhouses, but always rejoined them after the sun set.

  Marcus’s body felt unwieldy, both oddly weak and strangely powerful, slow one moment and then quick the next. Sometimes he dropped things, and other times he crushed them with no more than a touch.

  While they rested, de Clermont gave him a strong drink that had a medicinal, metallic tang. It was thick and sweet and tasted heavenly. Marcus felt saner and calmer after he had it, but his appetite for solid food did not return.

  “You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont reminded him, as if this should mean something to him. “Remember what I told you at Yorktown? All you need to survive is blood—not meat or bread.”

  Marcus dimly recalled de Clermont telling him that, but he also remembered there was some mention of never getting ill again, and it being difficult for him to die. And de Clermont had told him that he had been alive for more than a thousand years—which was preposterous. The man had a thick head of raven-colored hair and a smooth complexion.

  “And you’re a wearh, too?” Marcus asked.

  “Yes, Marcus,” de Clermont replied, “how else did you become one? I sired you. Don’t you remember agreeing to it, when I gave you the choice of living or dying?”

  “And Cole—Russell—is a wearh as well, and that’s why he didn’t die at Bunker Hill?” Marcus kept at his efforts to assemble the events of the past week into something that made sense. No matter how hard he tried, the result was always something more fantastic than Robinson Crusoe.

  They had reached the border between Pennsylvania and New York when Marcus’s powerful thirst gave way to different urges. The first was curiosity. The world seemed a brighter, richer place than it had before Yorktown. His eyesight was sharper, and scents and sounds made the world crackle with texture and life.

  “What is this stuff?” Marcus asked, drinking deeply from the tankard that de Clermont offered to him. It was like nectar, fortifying and satisfying at once.

  “Blood. And a bit of honey,” de Clermont replied.

  Marcus spit it out in a violent stream of red. De Clermont cuffed him on the shoulder.

  “Don’t be rude,” the chevalier said, his voice purring in his throat like a cat. “I won’t have my son behaving like an ungrateful lout.”

  “You’re not my father.” Marcus swung at him, his arm whipping out. De Clermont blocked it easily, cradling Marcus’s hand in his own as if there was no force behind it.

  “I am now, and you’ll do as I say.” De Clermont’s face was calm, his voice even. “You’ll never have the strength to beat me, Marcus. Don’t even try.”

  But Marcus had grown up under another iron first and had no more intention of giving in to de Clermont than he had to Obadiah. In the following days, as they continued to travel farther north and deeper into the woods of New York, Marcus fought with de Clermont about everything, just because he could, just because it felt better to wrestle with him than to keep everything bottled up inside. Marcus now had three powerful desires: to drink, to know, and to fight.

  “You cannot kill me, much as you might like to,” de Clermont said after a wrestling match over a rabbit left them both temporarily bloodied, the rabbit torn to pieces and Marcus’s arms—both of them—broken. “I told you that on the night you were made a wearh.”

  Marcus didn’t have the courage to confess that he didn’t remember much about that night, and what he did remember made no sense.

  De Clermont reset Marcus’s right wrist with the practiced touch of a skilled physician and surgeon.

  “Your arm will heal in moments. My blood—your blood, now—won’t allow sickness or injury to take root in the body,” de Clermont explained. “Here. Give me you
r other arm.”

  “I can do it myself.” Now that his right wrist was working properly again, Marcus pushed his left forearm back together. He could feel the bones fusing, his blood crawling with power. That sense that something was invading his body and taking it over reminded him of being inoculated. Marcus was thinking about what it might be in de Clermont’s blood that would make him immune to sickness or harm—when the chevalier asked the question that had hung between them, unanswered, since that night in Yorktown.

  “Did you kill your father because he beat you?” de Clermont asked. “I saw what he did. It was in your blood, when I took it at Yorktown. He beat your mother, too. But not your sister.”

  But Marcus didn’t want to think of his mother and Patience. He didn’t want to think of Hadley, or Obadiah, or life before. He had killed his father but had always retained a small hope that he might return home again. Now that he drank blood, he knew that was out of the question. He was no better than a ravening wolf.

  “Go fuck yourself,” Marcus snarled.

  De Clermont rose to his feet without a word and stalked off into the darkness. He didn’t return until the sun rose. De Clermont brought him a small deer, and Marcus fed on it, better able to stomach the blood of a four-legged creature than another person.

  Finally, Marcus and de Clermont reached the hills and valleys of a part of New York that Marcus had never seen before—far north, almost into Canada. It was there that they took shelter with the Oneida. Marcus recalled the spring of 1778, at Valley Forge, when news had swept through camp that the Marquis de Lafayette and his French companions had brought a troop of Oneida allies to fight the British. As the Indians who had guided them here were welcomed home by friends and family, Marcus realized that the Oneida had been ensuring their safety.

  In New York, Marcus was at last allowed to hunt. He found relief running after deer and game, and pleasure in taking their blood. De Clermont also encouraged him to compete with the young warriors. Marcus might be fast and impervious to injury, but he was no match for the Oneida when it came to tracking animals in the forest. Next to them, Marcus felt clumsy and foolish.

  “He has much to learn,” de Clermont apologized to a battle-scarred elder who was watching Marcus’s hapless attempts to trap a duck with ill-concealed scorn.

  “He needs time,” the elder replied. “And as he is your son, Dagoweyent, he will have plenty of that.”

  * * *

  —

  THE PUNISHING REGIMENS MARCUS WENT through with the other young men of the tribe did take some of the fight out of him. Marcus wanted to sleep but couldn’t seem to shut his eyes and rest. He still didn’t fully understand what had happened to him. How had he survived the fever? And why was he now so strong and fast?

  De Clermont kept repeating the same information over and over again—that Marcus would heal from almost any wound, that he would be difficult to kill, that he would never be ill another day in his life, that his senses were now far beyond what most humans enjoyed, that he was a wearh—but there was something missing in the account, some larger perspective that would explain how all this could be true.

  It was the hunting—not the fighting or the questions or even the drinking of blood—that finally brought the fact that he was no longer human home to Marcus. Every day and every night, de Clermont took Marcus hunting. They tracked deer at first, then moved on to other prey. Ducks and wild birds were difficult to capture, and contained only a small amount of the precious blood that kept Marcus alive. Boars and bears were rare, and their size and drive to survive made them formidable opponents.

  De Clermont would not let Marcus hunt with a gun, or even a bow and arrow.

  “You’re a wearh now,” de Clermont said once more. “You need to run your prey down, catch it with your wits and your hands, best it, and feed. Guns and arrows are for warmbloods.”

  “Warmbloods?” Here was another new term.

  “Humans. Witches. Daemons,” de Clermont explained. “Lesser creatures. You will need human blood to survive, now that you are growing and developing. But it’s not time to take it—yet. As for the witches and daemons, their blood is forbidden. A witch’s blood will eat away at your veins, and the blood of daemons will sour your brain.”

  “Witches?” Marcus thought of Mary Webster. Had those old legends in Hadley been true after all? “How will I recognize them?”

  “They smell.” De Clermont’s nose flared in distaste. “Don’t worry. They fear us and stay away.”

  Once Marcus could bring down a deer quickly and feed from it without tearing the animal apart, they left the Oneida and traveled east. Along the route they met with fleeing soldiers, some wounded and others perfectly hearty. Some were British soldiers running away from the war. Others were Loyalists trying to escape into Canada and freedom now that they could see which way the fight would end. Many more were Continental soldiers who had grown weary of waiting for a formal declaration of peace and decided to go home to their farms and families.

  “Which one do you want?” de Clermont asked. They were crouched in the tall grasses that grew beside a meandering stream, watching a group of British soldiers on the opposite bank. There were four men, and one was wounded.

  “None.” Marcus was happy with deer.

  “You must choose, Marcus. But remember: You must live a long time with your decision,” de Clermont said.

  “That one.” Marcus pointed to the smallest of the lot, a wiry fellow who spoke in a broad, unfamiliar accent.

  “No.” De Clermont pointed to the man lying by the water, groaning. “Him. Take him.”

  “Take him?” Marcus frowned. “You mean feed from him.”

  “I’ve seen you feed from a deer. You won’t be able to stop drinking from a human once you start.” De Clermont sniffed the breeze. “He’s dying. The leg is gangrenous.”

  Marcus took in a gulp of air. Something sweet and rotten assaulted his nose. He practically gagged. “You want me to feed off that?”

  “The infection is localized at the moment. He would smell worse otherwise,” de Clermont said. “It won’t be the sweetest blood you’ll ever taste, but it won’t kill you.”

  De Clermont vanished. A shadow passed over the narrow, pebbled ford. The British soldiers looked up, startled. One of them—the largest, most muscular of the soldiers—gave a frightened shout when de Clermont seized him and bit into his neck. His two companions ran away, leaving their few possessions behind. The wounded soldier, the one with the dying leg, began to scream.

  The smell of blood sent Marcus after de Clermont. He arrived on the opposite bank more quickly than he would have dreamed possible—before.

  “We aren’t going to kill you.” Marcus knelt beside the man. “I just need to take some of your blood.”

  De Clermont’s prey was slowly sinking toward the ground as his blood was drained.

  “Christ. Please. Don’t kill me,” the wounded soldier begged. “I have a wife. A daughter. I only ran away because they said we would be put on a prison ship.”

  It was every soldier’s nightmare to be flung onto one of the foul vessels anchored offshore with no food, no fresh water, and no way of surviving the filthy, crowded conditions.

  “Shh.” Marcus patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. He could see the man’s pulse, skittering at his neck. And the leg—Lord, John Russell had been right at Yorktown. Warmbloods did give off a terrible stench as their flesh died. “If you would just allow me—”

  Strong white hands reached in and took the soldier by the collar. The man began to weep, his begging now constant as he faced what seemed like sure death.

  “Stop talking. Bite him here. Firmly. You’ll be less likely to kill him if you latch on to him, like a babe on his mother’s breast.” De Clermont held the soldier still. “Do it.”

  Marcus bit, but the man whimpered and moved, and that urge Marcus had
been feeling to fight and fight some more roared back to life. He snarled and sank his teeth into the soldier’s neck, shaking him slightly to quiet him. The man fainted, and Marcus felt a pang of disappointment. He wanted the man to challenge him. Somehow, Marcus knew the blood would taste better if he did.

  Even without the fight, human blood was intoxicating. Marcus could taste a sourness that he supposed was from the gangrene and whatever other illnesses were pulsing through the soldier’s veins, but even so Marcus felt fortified and stronger with every sip.

  When he was finished, he had taken every drop in the man’s body. The soldier was dead, his neck torn open with a gaping wound that looked as though an animal had attacked him.

  “His friends,” Marcus said, looking around. “Where are they?”

  “Over there.” De Clermont jerked his head toward a grove of trees in the distance. “They’ve been watching.”

  “Those cowards just stood there, and watched while we fed off people they knew?” He would never have let de Clermont feed on Vanderslice or Cuthbert or Dr. Otto.

  “You take the little one,” de Clermont said, dropping a few coins by his soldier’s face. “I’ll have the other.”

  * * *

  —

  BY THE TIME THEY REACHED the Connecticut River, Marcus had fed from old men and young men, sick men and hale men, criminals and runaways and even a rotund innkeeper who never woke up from his fireside slumbers while Marcus drank. There were a few tragic accidents when hunger got the better of him, and one rage-filled attack on a man who had been raping his way across New England and who even de Clermont agreed deserved to die.

  Marcus and Matthew boarded a ferry and crossed the water. When they landed on the other side, Marcus realized that he was close to Hadley. He looked at de Clermont, unsure of why his father had brought him here.

  “You should see it again,” de Clermont said, “through new eyes.”

  But it was Marcus’s nose that first registered the familiarity of the place. It was filled with the scents of fall in western Massachusetts—leaf mold and pumpkins, cider presses filled with apples, woodsmoke from chimneys—long before the MacNeil farm came into view.