Blood and Chrysanthemums

by Nancy Baker

  Then he bent and began coiling up the rope.

  “Now what?” Ardeth asked.

  “Now we sit and enjoy the night for a while, until it’s time to hike down. There’s a path just behind us that goes to the main trail down to town.”

  “What time does the sun come up?”

  “About seven.” He checked his watch. “Plenty of time.”

  “I have to be home before dawn,” she pointed out uneasily, scanning the eastern sky automatically.

  “Me too. I have to go to work at ten.”

  “What would we have done if the moon hadn’t come back out?” She hadn’t allowed herself to ask that while they hung trapped on the cliff face.

  “Waited for the dawn.” He caught her shudder with a curious glance. “We could have bailed and rappelled down in the dark if we’d had to. Are you that sensitive to sunlight?”

  “I can stand a little, especially if my skin is covered up. But like this, in full sunlight . . .” She gestured to her T-shirt. “We would have had to rappel down.” His gaze grew speculative again and Ardeth suddenly regretted her motion. He had said nothing about her light clothing before, but she could tell that he was cold, even in his jacket. She was making slips even an amateur would be ashamed of; she would have to be more careful.

  To distract him, and herself, she moved to settle her back against a boulder, metal clattering against the rock. She began to strip his cams and carabiners from her harness. Mark shifted to sit beside her, unhooked his canteen and tipped it to his mouth. When he offered it, she swallowed two careful gulps of the clear water.

  “So, what did you think of your first climb?”

  “It was,” Ardeth tried to find the words, “what I needed.”

  “Delay included?”

  “Temporary delay included,” she acknowledged, dodging the curiosity in his voice. “How about you?”

  “It was what I needed too. To keep from worrying about whether I’d sent you off to break your neck.”

  “Fall included?”

  “Fall included. Besides, that wasn’t exactly the worst one I’ve ever had.”

  “What was?”

  “I fell off Mount Forbes once and broke my leg. Of course, I was on the way down. Then I fell in the river on my way back to camp and ended up with pneumonia.”

  “Sounds like fun,” she said and he laughed at the dubious tone in her voice.

  “Yeah. Climbers are notorious for bitching about how miserable everything was—cold, wet, rotten rock, running out of food, getting stuck halfway up—and then going out to do it again the next day.”

  “Why do they do it then?”

  “Different reasons, I guess. This kind of climbing is good for a rush. It takes strength, balance . . . that kind of thing. It’s not really as dangerous as it looks. Seriously,” he insisted, at her doubting glance. “You’re a lot more likely to die in an avalanche while mountaineering than you are falling off a rock. That’s my favourite type of climbing, though I don’t get to do it much. You have to climb rock and ice and snow. You’ve got to be strong and smart on a real mountain to climb. Judgment counts more than muscle, in many cases. And you’re so much closer to the real world. Out on the mountain, you can really see the bones of the world . . . not just its surface. In a way, you see the bones of life too—the deep-down things that really matter.”

  “Just before you get hit by an avalanche.”

  “That’s part of it, I suppose. We all need danger of some sort. It reminds us that we’re alive.”

  Ardeth shivered suddenly, remembering her nights on the streets of Toronto. That’s what I told myself, she thought. That I was the danger they were all looking for. Too bad for them if it killed them. Faces flashed in her mind; the street kid who had died during her first, clumsy feeding, the millionaire’s son who had tumbled to his death in an abandoned house when he tried to escape the truth he glimpsed in her eyes. “Until it kills us.” Her voice was harsh.

  “Sometimes it does,” Mark acknowledged. “I’ve lost friends to the mountains. That’s why I’m careful, why I don’t take any stupid chances.”

  The irony of it seared through her, jarred her to her feet and around the boulder to the darkness of the trees. “Ardeth . . .” She heard him rising, following her. “Ardeth, what’s wrong?” She caught the trunk of a wind-twisted tree, fought unsuccessfully against the harsh laughter clawing up out of her throat. “What’s so funny?”

  “You are. I am. You are taking the biggest, stupidest chance of your life, Mark Frye, and you don’t even know it.”

  “What are you going to do, push me off the mountain?” The jest was gentle, uncertain, meant to pull her back from the cliff he couldn’t see. He was not afraid of her, she realized, he was afraid for her. The sympathy irritated her even as it drew her.

  She should go . . . before that draw grew too strong, before she surrendered to the temptation it offered. She had already succumbed to one lure when she let him climb with her. You knew all along, a voice in her head whispered, you knew what would happen when you got to the top.

  “Ardeth,” he began again, putting on hand out to touch her shoulder. She turned and saw concern, curiosity and desire pass across his face like clouds over the moon. She could feel the heat of his hand through the thin fabric of her shirt.

  She should go. . . .

  But it was too late. His mouth opened on her name and lost it as she kissed him. Ardeth felt herself dissolve into sensation; rough bark against her back, the scrape of his growing beard against her cheek, the rough-toughened calluses on his fingers on her skin. She gave herself up to it and to the waiting heat that pulsed wherever their bare flesh met. Emptiness opened at gut and groin.

  It was climbing gear that stopped her, dragging her back to awareness. The hooks and buckles, designed for safety, could not be undone without engaging at least part of her mind. Apart, the same sanity seemed to seize him and he drew away from her a little, as if afraid for the first time.

  Ardeth thought of Rozokov, staring alone at the stars. Shame surged through her, bitter and burning.

  “I’m sorry, I . . .” she began and saw dismay begin to replace the curiosity and desire in his eyes. As she pulled away from him, she knew there was nothing else she could say, no explanations that would make any sense . . . or any different. “I’m sorry.”

  She spun into the welcoming arms of the forest and ran down the narrow path, leaving gear and shoes and Mark’s anxious voice behind.

  Chapter 8

  The stars wheeled above him, unnoticed.

  Rozokov stooped over the telescope, watching the wind ruffle the moonlit pines at the top of the mountain. The cliff face was not visible from his vantage point, therefore there was no harm in his looking. The skewed logic of the thought amused him suddenly. How easy it was to rationalize his most irrational actions. He had sworn to himself that he would not interfere, would not hover like a protective parent as his fledgling tried her wings, or her claws, on the mountain’s stone. But oaths were easier to make than to keep. The echo of his own warning to her came back to him: “We have an eternity to break our promises . . . and chances are that we shall.”

  He shifted the telescope upwards again, to catch the rivers of Milky Way stars that flowed above the mountain peaks. After their argument, neither of them had mentioned leaving again. If Ardeth had noticed his refusal to answer her questions, she was willing to ignore it. They hunted together and sampled the town’s few nighttime pleasures and slept away the day in each other’s arms . . . but the damage had been done.

  It had never been like this with Jean-Pierre, the only other vampire he had known, more than a century ago in France. But Jean-Pierre had not been his blood-child and never his lover. They could sip their way through the beauties of Paris without the faintest shadow of jealousy to cloud their pleasure. What they shared was nothing that mortals could touch.

&
nbsp; There was another vampire, he reminded himself; the cold, beautiful woman who had somehow been drawn to his clumsy necromancy in the winter of 1459. But she had died the true death two days later, victim of the stake and sword wielded by a priest with Rozokov’s betraying words in his ears. It was his bitter revenge, either the last act of a despairing mortal or the first of an inhuman monster, he had never been able to decide which. But whichever it was, it had meant that he had never known what it was supposed to be like between creator and created, between male vampire and female.

  And with Ardeth everything was different. With her, there was such a tangle of obligation and desire, love and fear, that neither his reason nor his experience could unravel it. When rationality fails, he thought ruefully, I fall back on rationalizations, just like any common mortal man.

  Sighing, Rozokov lifted his head from the telescope. There was no point in looking any more tonight. His mind was resolutely tied to the things on earth and would not see the stars. Usually, the knowledge that the light that reached his eyes was millions of years old make him feel strangely young; tonight it only made him feel alone.

  He cranked the roof of the shed closed, shut the doors behind him, and walked away. It was well past midnight and he let the first stirrings of hunger lead him through the quiet streets towards the deserted pathways that wound beside the river. In the woods beyond the town, there would be elk blood to answer his body’s need and the dark stillness that could perhaps answer his mind’s.

  Then the wind brought him the scent of blood. It was so faint no mortal could have detected it, but it exploded through his senses.

  His feet left the path and drew him through the trees, toward the light shining through the screen of pines and brush. There was a chain-link fence among the trees but the padlock on the gate cracked open under his hand before he had time to wonder why he did it. Just a glance, he promised himself. Just to make sure that no one is bleeding to death . . .

  Through the branches, he saw two figures on the shadowy patio. The white coat cloaking one of them cued him to the neon “H” above the building. It was the town’s small hospital. That explained the blood scent, then. He started to turn away, then one of the figures spoke and the voice drew him back.

  “Don’t worry about it, Leigh. He’ll be fine.” White coat resolved into a man, middle-aged, balding. “This your first bear attack?”

  Rozokov thought of the bear he had encountered one night as he hunted. They had faced each other on the narrow path and he had sensed the heavy beat of its heart, the thick odour of wet fur, the faint snuffling of its breath. Small eyes glittered for a moment as its head lifted. Its front paws left the ground. No prey here, his mind whispered to it as the great bulk settled again. No competition either. He stepped politely off the path and after a moment the bear ambled past, watching him with wary contempt. He was not certain whether it was the will he aimed at it or its own disinterest that kept it moving but he did not cease his silent message of avoidance until he could no longer hear its tread on the trail. He would not have cared at all to meet it as a mortal.

  “Yeah. I know, it could have been worse. Once we got the bleeding stopped and I could do the stitch-up, things were fine. I’m just . . .” the woman stopped, shrugged. “I’m not used to night shift yet. My body thinks I should be asleep.”

  “You’ll settle in. Tonight was unusual. The worst things you get around here most times are broken legs from skiing in the winter and road rash from biking in the summer. It’ll be positively boring after your stint in the city.”

  “A little boredom I can handle, believe me.”

  The man laughed and checked his watch. “Well, I’ve got rounds. You coming in?”

  “No. I think I’ll sit out here for a few minutes. The air might clear my head.”

  After the man disappeared back into the building, Leigh shifted herself to sit on top of the picnic table along one edge of the patio, her feet propped up on the bench. After a moment, she glanced around with contrived casualness, then dug into her pocket. Rozokov saw a match flare in her hand then resolve into the dim glow of a cigarette tip, glowing like a distant star. Almost unwillingly, he found himself studying her.

  Her hair was brown, bound into an untidy knot at the back of her head. Her face was full of bony angles, giving her a look of sharp strength that was now edged with weariness. Her hunched posture hid a body that was like her face, thin and strong. She took a slow drag on the cigarette and blew smoke at the cloud-shrouded moon.

  The blood must be on her hospital clothing, Rozokov guessed. Or else the constant proximity to it had caused it to permeate her very skin, lending her a sweet perfume only detectable by those for whom it was life itself.

  You should go now, he told himself. The night is waiting. There are elk beyond the town lights. They are enough.

  He was lying, just as surely as Ardeth had. He remembered her angry accusations, the answers he did not have. He did not know which he hated more—her questions or his own indecisiveness. She seemed to have forgotten that she was the child of this century, not he. She relied on him for solutions as if she had no knowledge of her own, as if she had conveniently suspended the intellect and skills which she possessed.

  Perhaps he should act. Perhaps that would break the spell of inertia which seemed to have overcome him. He would make a decision, as Ardeth had urged him. If it was not the sort she had anticipated . . . well, that was hardly his fault.

  It did not take an eternity to break most oaths. Especially the one that had never been spoken.

  He backed away a step, rested his back against the tree trunk that was waiting there and reached out with his mind.

  Leigh lowered her head, cocked it slightly. Slowly, her body unfolded, slipping from the table and moving across the patio, the cigarette dropping forgotten from her fingers. Rozokov saw her mouth open then close over whatever words she had intended.

  The brush rustled around her. Twigs snapped beneath her feet. As she saw him, her eyes widened. He saw the fear there but his gaze quelled it, lulled it within a grey haze. She moved past him and stopped at the fence.

  Close to her, the scent of other blood that had drawn him was drowned out by the heat of her own. He put his hands on her shoulders and felt them tense and tremble.

  “Who are you?” she whispered, her voice vague and dreamy.

  “No one. A dream. A nightmare.”

  “I have to go. . . .”

  “Not yet.” One hand tangled in the knot of her hair to pull her head back and to the side. The other slid down her body, over her breasts, to wrap her waist and pull her tight against him. He thought that he could feel her heart, hammering within its cage of flesh and bone. “You have sworn to preserve life,” he said softly against her ear. “Preserve mine.”

  She made a soft sound when his teeth found her vein and she reached out to hold the fence, steadying herself. He pushed her harder against it, holding her still even as her hips moved against his. His hands closed over hers, wrapping hard around the wire.

  When he was done, he whispered the rituals of forgetfulness against her ear and let her go. He saw her sag against the fence for a moment, and the first tendrils of remorse worked their way through the sweet haze her blood had left. Rozokov took her hand. Her fingers were long and thin, scored now with the marks of the wire fencing. He led her to the edge of the trees then gently propelled her through the branches onto the patio. In a moment or two, she would awaken and, no doubt, attribute her temporary disorientation to her overtired and overstressed state.

  Then he was gone, moving quickly back to the path and down the riverside towards the apartment.

  Above him, the moon shed her veils and laid silver beneath his feet. He did not look up. He ignored both the wanton moon and the spread of stars. There was something about their ancient light that was too bitter for him to bear.

  Chapter 9

  Ardeth
leaned on the stair railing for a moment, staring up at the naked bulb that lit the door to the apartment.

  Go on, she thought, shifting her weight from one bare, aching foot to the other. Go on up and get it over with.

  She had fumbled through a dozen lies on the way home but discarded them. Why should she lie? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Not really. And it was part of her new life—if she didn’t tell him what had happened, how was she ever going to learn to deal with it?

  The conclusion had seemed reasonable three blocks away. Now, poised halfway up the stairs, she wished that she had found a suitable lie. As if you could lie to him, she thought, taking another step towards the door. As if he wouldn’t be able to look at you and know the truth.

  Would he be angry? She climbed another few steps. No, she decided, not angry. He would look at her in the way that tore her heart: sad, sympathetic, knowing. He would forgive her, which in its own way would hurt. When the explanations and guilt were over, nothing would have changed. She could not tell if that thought relieved or infuriated her.

  She reached the top of the stairs. She took a deep breath and tried the door of the apartment.

  The living room was dark, lit only by the faint glow of the moonlight through the window. Rozokov was sitting in his customary chair. She saw the grey glitter of his eyes as he turned his head to look at her.