Justinian?
“I didn’t want to do it,” he whispered. “God forgive me, I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
Where are you?
He closed his eyes again and put a fist to his forehead, pressing hard, as if he might push what was about to happen away with the strength of his immortal hand.
Justinian!
But he couldn’t keep from looking at her. When he opened his eyes again she stood before him, young and beautiful as she’d been in life. He huddled back into the chair. Her ghostly hand passed over his forearm and he shivered. So did she.
Justinian?
“Dear God, NO!” He fought the image, fought to control it, but the room around him had already begun to fade. His modern white stucco walls darkened into gray blocks of stone decorated with priceless tapestries, still glowing in their newness. Chicago’s nighttime haze of light pollution streaming through his picture windows muted, became the golden glow of a single candle.
“NO! I will not go through this again…”
Justinian…what have you done…?
five
Centuries twisted and intermingled. The cusp of the twenty-first century melted away like so much candle wax in a fire, just as the walls seemed to waver and fade when heroin coursed hard inside his veins. The emptiness of Justin’s present vanished, filled like a chalice with voices from his past. The empty room in Chicago was gone from his senses, scattered like dust to the winds, replaced by a low-ceilinged bed chamber in the ancestral castle of the earls of Sterling, looking exactly as it had looked long ago and far away in the fourteenth-century English countryside.
But though his surroundings changed, Gwendolyne remained in front of him, as always an anchor to the man he’d once been and a reminder of what he’d become.
“My lord, what have you done?”
Justin stumbled forward into the room, into the arms of his wife. He clutched her soft curves to him, cherished the warmth of her flesh.
“Do not ask me,” he said.
“The village is afire,” she said. Her hands gently wiped the soot from his cheek. “They say you started it.”
Still holding her, Justin collapsed onto the bed. He pulled her close to him, burying his face in her hair.
“The Black Death,” he said. “It has arrived. Half a dozen of my tenants are already dead. I burned their houses with the bodies inside. I pray the fire will drive the disease away. I left only when it was clear that the fires would die down without spreading.”
“You burned the village?”
“Yes, I burned it,” he said. “It was all I could do. These are my people, their homes my property. Do you think I wanted to see their dwellings crumble to ash and scorched rock? But I had no choice. Do you want all the villagers to die? Their children, too, and our own children? Even after the fire, I can’t be certain that I’ve destroyed the contagion. The Death may still be out there, walking among them.”
His young wife pulled away from him, recoiling from the horror of his words. Justin sat up for a moment, then got up from the bed to pace the room like a caged wolf.
Gwendolyne watched him, her deep brown eyes glistening with concern.
“They simply do not understand,” he said. “They see only their own concerns, their own little lives, going up in the smoke from the pyre. They don’t know how terrible this can be, what is at stake here. Do they think I like ordering something like this? I would have sacrificed myself on their behalf if I could have stopped it. But the plague is here. Perhaps it is the devil’s will, perhaps God’s own. It was certainly not my will that brought it into our midst, but mine is the task of stopping it, if such a thing is humanly possible. It may already be too late.” He ran his hands over his face, as if by doing so he could wash the stain of this morning’s actions from his memory.
Gwendolyne got up, put her arms around him.
“Tell me what happened, my lord. Why is there blood on your hands?”
Justin looked down, saw the scarlet stains mixed with the soot from the fires, saw the drying blood where he had smeared it upon her gown. He tried to speak, but the words were thick in his throat. He coughed, then began to speak.
“I killed a man. We came to burn his house and he went mad. He was in there weeping over the dead body of his wife. The plague had taken her. Neck swollen, the black spots. She was with child, near to term. We tried to take him out before we put the torch to the place, and he went mad. He struck Goodman Miller and picked up a scythe.”
Justin looked away. He couldn’t look his wife in the face. She wrapped her arms around the small of his back, held him tight.
“The miller managed to grab the scythe and I struck the man. He would not stop fighting, and I was forced to continue striking him until he went down.” Justin let out a slow, anguished breath. “We dragged him to the village square. He kept saying that he’d built this house for her…they were going to live there…he’d built it for her. He crouched there in the dirt crying like a babe. Blood ran down into his face from where I’d struck him. When the house caught fire, he broke free from our hold and ran inside. I couldn’t stop him. He never came out.”
Gwendolyne led her husband to the bed and sat him down. She dampened a cloth in the wash basin next to the bed and began to wash the blood and soot from his hands. If only the stain in his mind could be cleaned so…
“Milord, you did what you could. When this passes, those who survive, they will see that.”
Justin sighed. “I stood there watching that man cry today, and all I could think of was you. What if you were the one in that house? What if it was me crying in the dirt over your body? I would have grabbed that scythe and threatened anyone who tried to keep us apart. I, too, would have chosen the fire.” Justin looked into his wife’s eyes. “But he was not me. I bear the responsibility for all of the people on this estate. I am not free to act merely on my own behalf. I am lord here. It is my duty to stop such madness. But how could I have saved him?”
“My lord, you did your best,” she said.
“It wasn’t enough. I told them today in the village that I would rebuild all their homes if I had to sell my own to do it, but nothing could bring back that man’s wife, and he knew it. I told them that their homes and their dead had to go up in flames, or the Black Plague would take them as well. But they did not care.”
Gwendolyne placed the cool cloth upon his face, washing away the soot and tears. “Shhh, love, there was naught else that you could do.”
“I…I don’t even know if fire will save us. But I had to do something. I can’t just let my people die, and I have seen that the plague moves from one stricken victim to the next. Perhaps by sacrificing the one village, I can save the rest. Perhaps…I had to do something! I am their lord!”
Gwendolyne pulled her husband down beside her on the bed.
Justin looked down into her face. She smiled up at him. Her serenity eased his troubled heart.
“From the first moment I saw you,” Justin whispered, “I hoped that you would someday look at me with that gaze in your eyes.” He smiled. “Your love gives me the strength to go on.”
She took his hand in her own and pressed it against her heart. Soot from his clothes rubbed off on her white dress.
“My love,” she said, “my heart pains me some days, so full it is with all that I feel for you.”
“And you will stay here, won’t you? You won’t go into the village? You’ll keep yourself safe for me?”
“I will be by your side, my lord, no matter what should befall us.”
Justin looked into her deep brown eyes. He slipped one hand into her silky hair and smoothed it. “I am afraid for us all, you know. I don’t want to die, my beloved Gwendolyne. I don’t want any of the people I love, or any of the people who depend on me and whose work provides the wealth of this estate to die, either. Surely there must be something more I can do…”
“Some things, my lord, are in the hands of God, not man. And you hav
e done enough for today.” Gwendolyne pushed him back against the pillows. Her lips pressed onto his. Her hair, the scent of her warm body, surrounded and caressed him. No matter what hell he had tromped through each day, no matter what unspeakable miasma clung to his skin after his travels and adventures, she always welcomed him into her arms. She smelled like flowers on a spring day. He clung to the familiar comfort of her embrace, let it take him far away from the smoke, the flames, the dead and dying he’d purged from his lands with fire.
But as he closed his eyes and pulled her even closer, finally at peace, the moment was snatched from his grasp, even as one nightmare was ripped away from him and a new, though ancient, horror seared into his thoughts.
He knew what was coming next; this vision from his past was far too familiar, and the hell that followed a frequent, if unwelcome, visitor to his mental gallery of guilt. He felt time sliding by, running through his ineffectual grip like a catapult’s rope through ungloved hands, burning him unbearably.
He screamed, begged the fates to release him, but when he opened his eyes again it was too late. His wife was still before him, but horribly changed. Her face was drawn, her brown eyes cloudy. Even the soft scent of flowers that had surrounded her ever since he’d met her was gone, replaced by the acrid scent of disease and despair.
He was dying.
I am afraid it is necessary that you die…
“No!” Justin refused to believe it. He looked down at the fine linen sheet that covered him, hiding underneath its snowy expanse the strange and alien thing his body had become. He threw the bedclothes aside. As he’d suspected, the black spots were spreading. They dotted his shins, his thighs, his chest, and his arms like rot on a decayed fruit. Lumps the size of his fist, the swollen glands called buboes that gave bubonic plague its name, pushed up against the tight, bruised skin of his groin. His breath came in short, painful gasps—each lungful of air a burden dragged with great effort past the enlarged glands in his neck. His arms lay stiffly on the mattress, far away from his sides, pushed out from their accustomed positions by massive lumps in his armpits.
And he hurt, he hurt everywhere. The pain was unbearable, and it made him crazy. When the spots had first appeared, Justin had refused to believe he could be in the grip of the illness. The plague was for peasants. Surely his exalted position in society would protect him. He’d been blessed by God through the whole of his life, been given talent, beauty of form and face, the means to provide himself and his family with everything they could ever want. How could God desert him now?
But the Black Plague spared no one, king or commoner. It seemed to be God’s own curse, and, as such, did not respect the order that He Himself had established.
When the black spots gave no sign of receding, but instead spread at an increasing pace, Justin hid his illness from his wife for the little time he could. Even then, with the evidence growing right before his horrified eyes, he refused to believe he would succumb. It was all too terrible to contemplate.
He had not known then the meaning of terror. He had not known what pain was. He had not known what it meant to be damned.
He knew now.
The pain intensified. He seemed to leave his body sometimes, though he could never escape the pain. It came with him, an unwelcome passenger on his mad voyages through delirium. He would strike out at his wife while he watched his own erratic actions in confusion from some impossible mental distance. He would say nonsensical things, and then not remember them a breath later.
Gwendolyne, his beloved Gwendolyne, had nursed him in his misery. She would come to him and put cool cloths upon his burning forehead. Even when he struck out at her in his madness, she’d wince, retrieve the dropped cloths, and resume bathing him to reduce his fevers. She ignored the bleeding scratches he made on her ivory cheek, the bruises on her body.
Then there were the times his sanity returned to him. Times like this. He lay on his bed, staring at his grotesque body. The pain was a low murmuring thing crouched at the foot of his bed. He knew that if he moved, it would leap upon him.
I am afraid it is necessary that you die…
The local leech stood over him, one of the parish priests. Justin screamed at the priest, tried to tell him that he wasn’t wanted here. But his words weren’t in any tongue known to man. They were the insensible cries of a wounded animal.
The priest stood there, holding a cloth-wrapped bundle of sweet herbs over his nose. The trailing ends of the perfumed rag hovered an inch from Justin’s cheek. He tried to turn his head away from them, but the growths in his throat made it impossible. He moaned and lay still.
Gwendolyne stood behind the leech, waited in taut anticipation for his words. She was pale with worry, yet still so beautiful to Justin, even more so than usual now, despite her fatigue. He wondered if she ever rested at all. She had dressed up for him, in the elaborate gown and coiffure of a formal court appearance, going about her care for him as if nothing was seriously wrong, as if he weren’t rotting away before her eyes. Her safflower gown was made of embroidered silk as bright as the sun, even through the faded palette of his pain-tinged vision. Her waves of soft hair were confined in some complicated way with ribbons and braids and the odd tumbling ringlet. He loved to run his hands through her silky hair. But that was impossible now. Even if he could muster the energy, he would not defile something so beautiful with his wasted hands.
Finally, the leech-priest turned his head toward Justin. He knew what the priest was going to say, and he cried out against it, but once again his voice sounded more like the howl of an injured wolf than anything a man would say. The priest spoke directly to him, though it was clear he was unsure if Justin was still capable of understanding him in his current state.
“I am afraid it is necessary that you die. It is God’s will. You will be with him soon. One of my brethren will come to hear your confession and administer last rites.”
Justinian heard Gwendolyne’s stifled cry of anguish. He tried to find her, but he could not see her through the haze of pain surrounding him.
The door closed upon the priest.
After some time passed, Gwendolyne stood before him once again. He could see her now. Her gown was tossed in the corner, her corsets unlaced. Even as he watched, she removed them, loosened the ribbons on her chemise and let it fall off her white shoulders across her breasts, then past her waist to the floor. She was as naked as she’d been the day God made her. Slowly, carefully, she climbed into bed with him.
“No,” he said. “No, please, my love.” His words were barely comprehensible, beseeching pleas forced through his cracked, bleeding lips. “You must leave me.”
She did not heed him. She pulled the cover over both of them and laid her soft, smooth body next to his diseased flesh.
“I cannot see my face,” Justinian whispered frantically, “Gwendolyne…beloved Gwendolyne…how bad is my face?”
“Silence, love,” she whispered, and in her voice he could hear the tears that she’d never yet let fall in front of him, “Every movement causes you pain. Sleep, my love. Silent be…”
“Please!” He wanted to push her away, but in his weakened condition, his movements were a mockery, less forceful than the flailing of an infant.
“Rest, my lord, please.” She began to weep openly. Justinian could feel her tears trail across his fevered flesh.
It hurt him to see her pain, but there was one last boon he would ask of her before he sent her away. He wished to see for himself what the cursed hand of fate had wrought upon his flesh.
“A mirror, Gwendolyne. Bring me a mirror!”
“No, my lord, I beg you. Rest.”
“The mirror!” he commanded.
Gwendolyne pulled a silver hand mirror from the chest at the end of the bed.
“It is here, my lord.”
“Hold it up where I can see it.”
“My lord, it will only pain you to see what you’ve—”
“By God, woman! Do it!”
She held it up to his face. The mirror wavered with the trembling of her hands and her silent sobs.
His reflection was distorted by the motion and his own dementia, but what he saw was plain enough.
It was the monster he’d become.
The vision at last ran its course as he looked in the mirror upon himself as he was today.
Blood in his long black hair, on his chest, and on his hands. Iridescent scales clinging to the ichor that coated his body. A needle full of a moment’s forgetfulness hanging limply from his arm below the rubber tourniquet.
Finally freed from the past’s lethal grasp, Justinian reached over and pushed the plunger. Heroin rushed into his veins and the castle around him melted away. The pain melted away. And with it, the vision of Gwendolyne…
Heroin was a recent addition to Justin’s life, and not one he was proud of. Justin had known several Elder disciples of the Dragon over the centuries. For reasons he never understood, they did not suffer from the ghosts that plagued him. They carried out their missions for the master, many of them as bloody as his own, and never gave them a second’s thought. Apparently the ghostly gallery that haunted him was unique among the disciples. The other Elders could not know the desire that burned within him to flee from those pale images.
In the beginning, he had turned to alcohol, but it wasn’t strong enough. He metabolized the slow poison so fast that even in a swaying stupor, the ghosts could still follow him. He couldn’t drink enough to banish them by passing out. And in some ways, his ordeal became worse during his drunken frenzies. He lost what little conscious control he had on what he saw, and all of his practiced mental defenses against the pain.
Still searching for surcease, he started dabbling in opium in the fashionably unfashionable salons of Paris just before the French Revolution. Like alcohol, the opium did not send the ghosts away completely, but rather softened his emotional response to them. The pain was still there, but it somehow didn’t seem to matter as much.
Dark Heart Page 7