by Rice, Anne
“Do you love me?” I asked.
“Where is it written that we should?” answered the one who had not yet spoken. His voice was as toneless and soft as a whisper, but more distinct. It might have been the same voice as the other angel.
“Do you love us?” asked the other.
“Why do you guard me?” I asked.
“Because we are sent to do it, and will be with you until you die.”
“Lovelessly?” I asked.
They shook their heads again in negation.
Gradually the light brightened in the room. I turned sharply to look up at the window. I thought it was the sun. The sun couldn’t hurt me, I thought.
But it wasn’t. It was Mastema, who had risen up behind me as if he were a cloud of gold, and on either side of him were my arguers, my advancers of the cause, my champions, Ramiel and Setheus.
The room shimmered and seemed to vibrate without a sound. My angels appeared to glisten, and to grow brilliantly white and deep blue in their robes.
All looked to the helmeted figure of Mastema.
An immense and musical rustling filled the air, a singing sound, as if a great flock of tiny golden-throated birds had awakened and rushed upwards from the branches of their sun-filled trees.
I must have closed my eyes. I lost my balance, and the air became cooler, and it seemed my vision was clouded with dust.
I shook my head. I looked around me.
We stood within the castle itself.
The place was damp and very dark. Light crept in around the seams of the immense drawbridge, which was of course pulled up and locked into place. On either side were rustic stone walls, hung here and there with great rusted hooks and chains that had not been used in many a year.
I turned and entered a dim courtyard, my breath suddenly taken from me by the height of the walls that surrounded me, climbing to the distinct cube of the bright blue sky.
Surely this was only one courtyard, the one at the entrance, for before us there loomed another immense pair of gates, quite large enough to admit the greatest haywagons imaginable or some new-fangled engine of war.
The ground was soiled. High above on all sides were windows, rows upon rows of the double-arched windows, and all were covered over with bars.
“I need you now, Mastema,” I said. I made the Sign of the Cross again. I took out the rosary and kissed the crucifix, looking down for a moment at the tiny twisted body of Our Tortured Christ.
The huge doors before me broke open. There was a loud creaking sound, then the crumpling of metal bolts, and the gates groaned back on their hinges, revealing a distant and sun-filled inner court of far greater size.
The walls through which we walked were some thirty to forty feet in depth. There were doors on either side of us, heavily arched in worked stone and showing the first signs of care that I had glimpsed since we entered.
“These creatures do not go and come as others do,” I said. I hurried my pace so as to reach the full sun of the courtyard. The mountain air was too cool and too damp in the foul thickness of the passage.
Here, as I stood up, I saw windows such as I remembered, hung with rich banners and strung with lanterns that would be lighted by night. Here I saw tapestries carelessly thrown over window ledges as if rain were nothing. And very high up I saw the jagged battlements and finer white marble copings.
But even this was not the great courtyard that lay beyond. These walls too were rustic. The stones were soiled and untrodden in many a year. Water was pooled here and there. Rank weeds sprang from crevices, but, ah, there were sweet wildflowers, and I looked at them tenderly and reached out to touch them, and marveled at them, existing here.
More gates awaited us, these two—huge, wooden, banded in iron and severely pointed at the top in their deep marble archway—gave way and sprang back to let us pass through yet another wall.
Oh, such a garden greeted us!
As we made our way through another forty feet of darkness, I saw the great groves of orange trees ahead of us, and heard the cry of the birds. I wondered if they were not caught down here, prisoners, or could they soar all the way up to the top and escape?
Yes, they could. It was a great enough space. And here was the fine white marble facing I remembered, all the way to the summit, so high above.
As I made my way into the garden, as I walked on the first marble path that traversed the beds of violets and roses, I saw the birds coming and going, circling broadly in this wide place, so that they could clear the towers that rose so distantly and majestically against the sky.
Everywhere the scent of flowers overcame me. Lilies and irises were mingled in patches, and the oranges were ripe and almost red as they hung from the trees. The lemons were hard still and touched with green.
Shrubbery and vines hugged the walls.
The angels gathered around me. I realized that all along it was I who had led the way, I who had initiated any movement, and it was I who held us all still now, within the garden, and that they waited as I bowed my head.
“I am listening for the prisoners,” I said. “But I can’t hear them.”
I looked up at more of the luxuriously decorated balconies and windows, the twin arches, and here and there a long loggia, but made of their style of filigree, not ours.
I saw flags fluttering, and all were in that dark blood-red color, stained with death. I looked down for the first time at my own brilliant crimson clothes.
“Like fresh blood?” I whispered.
“Tend to what you must do first,” Mastema said. “Twilight can cover you when you go to the prisoners, but you must take your quarry now.”
“Where are they? Will you tell me?”
“In deliberate sacrilege, and in old-fashioned rigor, they lie beneath the stones of the church.”
There was a loud, searing noise. He had pulled out his sword. He pointed with it, his head turned, his red helmet on fire with the glint of the sun reflected off the marble-faced walls.
“The door there, and the stairs beyond it. The church lies on the third floor, up to our left.”
I made for the door without further delay. I rushed up the steps, taking turn after turn, my boots clattering on the stone, not even looking to see if they followed me, not wondering how they did it, knowing only that they were with me, feeling their presence as if I could feel their breath on me when no breath came.
At last we entered the corridor, broad and open on our right to the courtyard below. There was an endless strip of rich carpet before us, full of Persian flowers deeply embedded within a field of midnight blue. Unfaded, untrammeled. On and on it went until it turned, ahead of us. And at the end of the corridor was the perfectly framed sky and the jagged speck of green mountain beyond.
“Why have you stopped?” Mastema asked.
They had materialized around me, in their settling garments and their never-still wings.
“This is the door to the church here, you know it.”
“Only looking at the sky, Mastema,” I said. “Only looking at the blue sky.”
“And thinking of what?” asked one of my guardians in his toneless, clear whisper. He clung to me suddenly, and I saw his parchment-colored fingers, weightless, settled on my shoulder. “Thinking of a meadow that never existed and a young woman who is dead?”
“Are you merciless?” I asked him. I pressed close to him, so my forehead touched him, and I marveled to feel it against me and see his opalescent eyes so distinct.
“No, not merciless. Only one who reminds, and reminds, and reminds.”
I turned to the doors of the chapel. I pulled on both giant hooks until I heard the clasp give, and then I opened wide one side and then the other, though why I made such a vast and broad escape for myself I do not know. Maybe it was a passage for my mighty band of helpers.
The great empty nave lay before me, which last night no doubt had been crowded with the gaudy blood-drenched Court, and above my head was their choir loft from which th
e most ethereal dirge had come.
Sun violently pierced the demonic windows.
I gasped in shock to see the webbed spirits emblazoned so immensely in the fractured and welded fragments of glittering glass. How thick was this glass, how heavily faceted, and how ominous the expressions of those webbed-winged monsters who leered at us as if they would come alive in the blazing light of day and stop our progress.
There was nothing to be done but to rip my eyes off them, to look down and away and along the great sprawling marble floor. I saw the hook, I saw it as it had been in the floor of my father’s chapel, lying flat in a circle cut in the stone, a hook of gold, polished and smoothed so it did not rise above the floor and would not catch a toe or a heel. It had no cover.
It merely marked decisively the position of the one long main entrance to the crypt. One narrow marble rectangle cut into the center of the church floor.
I strode forward, heels echoing throughout the whole empty church, and went to pull the hook.
What stopped me? I saw the altar. At that very instant the sun had struck the figure of Lucifer, the giant red angel above his masses and masses of red flowers, which were fresh as they had been the night when I had been brought to this place.
I saw him and saw his fierce burning yellow eyes, fine gems set into the red marble, and saw the white ivory fangs that hung from his snarling upper lip. I saw all the fanged demons who lined the walls to the right and the left of him, and all their jeweled eyes seemed greedy and glorying in the light.
“The crypt,” said Mastema.
I pulled with all my might. I couldn’t budge the marble slab. No human could have done it. It would have taken teams of horses to do it. I locked both hands more tightly around the hook, yanking it harder, and still I couldn’t budge it. It was like trying to move the walls themselves.
“Do it for him!” Ramiel pleaded. “Let us do it.”
“It’s nothing, Mastema; it’s only like opening the gates.”
Mastema reached out and pushed me gently aside, so that I was caught on my own feet for a moment and then righted myself. The long narrow trapdoor of marble was raised slowly.
I was astonished at its weight. It was more than two feet in thickness. Only its facing was marble, the rest being a heavier, darker, denser stone. No, no human could have lifted it.
And now, from the mouth below, there came a spear as if from a hidden spring.
I leapt back, though I had never been near enough to be in danger.
Mastema let the trapdoor fall on its back. The hinges were broken at once by its own weight. The light filled the space below. More spears awaited me, glinting in the sun, pointed at an angle, as if affixed in parallel to the angle of the stairs.
Mastema moved to the top of the stairs.
“Try to move them, Vittorio,” he said.
“He can’t. And if he trips and falls, he falls down into a pit of them,” said Ramiel. “Mastema, move them.”
“Let me move them,” said Setheus.
I drew my sword. I hacked at the first of the spears and knocked off its metal point, but the jagged wooden shaft remained.
I stepped down into the crypt, at once feeling a coldness rise and touch my legs. I hacked again at the wood, and broke off more of it. Then I stepped beside it, only to find with my left hand that I felt a pair of spears awaiting me in the uneven light. Again I lifted my sword, the weight of it making my arm ache.
But I broke these two with swift blows until their metal heads had gone clattering from their wooden stems as well.
I stepped down, holding tight with my right hand so as not to slip on the steps, and suddenly, with a loud cry, I swung out and off the edge of nothing, for the stairway broke there and was no more.
With my right hand I grabbed at the shaft of the broken spear, which I already held in my left. My sword went clattering down below me.
“Enough, Mastema,” said Setheus. “No human can do it.”
I was hanging, both hands locked around this splintery wood, staring up at them as they rimmed the mouth of the crypt. If I fell, I would no doubt die, for the fall was that far. If I did not die, I would never get out to live.
I waited, and I said nothing, though my arms ached excruciatingly.
Suddenly, they descended, as soundlessly as they did all things, in a rush of silk and wings, slipping into the crypt at once, all of them, and surrounding me, embracing me and carrying me down in a soft plummet to the floor of the chamber.
I was at once let go. And I scrambled around in the dimness until I found my sword. I had it now.
I stood up, panting, holding it firmly, and then I looked up at the sharp distinct rectangle of brightness above. I shut my eyes, and bowed my head, and opened my eyes slowly so as to become accustomed to this deep damp dusk.
Here the castle had no doubt let the mountain rise up under it, for the chamber, though vast, seemed made of only the earth. At least this is what I saw before me, in the rude wall, and then turning around I saw my quarry, as Mastema had called them.
The vampires, the larvae—they lay sleeping, coffinless, cryptless, open in long rows, each exquisitely dressed body covered in a thin shroud of spun gold. They ringed three walls of the crypt. At the far end hung the broken stairs over nothingness.
I blinked and narrowed my eyes, and the light seemed to filter more fully upon them. I drew near to the first figure until I could see the dark-burgundy slippers, and the deep-russet hose and all of this beneath the webbing as if each night fine silkworms wove this shroud for the being, so thick and perfect and fine was it. Alas, it was no such magic; it was only the finest of what God’s creatures can make. And it had been spun of the looms of men and women, and it had a fine-stitched hem.
I ripped off the veil.
I drew near the creature’s folded arms, and then saw to my sudden horror that his sleeping face was quickened. His eyes opened, and one arm moved violently towards me.
I was yanked back out of the clutch of his fingers only just in time. I turned to see Ramiel holding me, and then he closed his eyes and bowed his forehead into my shoulder.
“Now you know their tricks. Watch it. You see. It folds its arm back now. It thinks it’s safe. It closes its eyes.”
“What do I do! Ah, I’ll kill it!” I said.
Snatching up the veil in my left hand, I raised my sword in my right. I advanced on the sleeping monster, and this time, when the hand rose, I snared it with the veil, swirling the fabric around it, while, with my sword, I came down like the executioner on the block.
At once the head rolled off onto the floor. A wretched sound came, more from the neck perhaps than from the throat. The arm flopped. By light of day, it could not struggle as it might have in the dark of night in my early battle, when I had decapitated my first assailant. Ah, I had won.
I snatched up the head, watching the blood spill out of the mouth. The eyes, if they had ever opened, were now shut. I hurled the head into the middle of the floor beneath the light. At once the light began to burn the flesh.
“Look at it, the head’s burning!” I said. But I myself didn’t stop.
I went to the next, snatching the transparent silken shroud from a woman with great long braids, taken to this eerie death in the prime of her life, and snaring her rising arm, severed her head with the same fury and caught it up by one braid and hurled it to land by its mate.
The other head was shriveling and turning black in the light that poured down from the high opening above.
“Lucifer, you see that?” I called out. The echo came back to taunt me, “See that? See that? See that?”
I rushed to the next. “Florian!” I cried out, as I grabbed the veil.
Terrible error.
When he heard his name, his eyes snapped open even before I had drawn abreast of him, and like a puppet yanked on a chain he would have risen if I had not struck him hard with my sword and gashed open his chest. Expressionless, he fell back. I brought the sword dow
n on his tender gentlemanly neck. His blond hair was caked with blood, and his eyes went half-mast and empty and died before my sight.
I snatched him up by his long hair, this bodiless one, this leader of them all, this silver-tongued fiend, and I hurled his head into the smoking, stinking pile.
On and on I went, down the line to the left, why to the left I do not know, except it was my path, and each time I pulled back the veil, I leapt forward with ferocious speed, snaring the arm if it should rise, but sometimes gaining such momentum on it that it had no time to rise, and chopping off the head so fast that I became sloppy and my blows ugly, and I smashed the jawbones of my foes, and even their shoulder bones, but I killed them.
I killed them.
I ripped off their heads and fed them to the mountain, which had gained such smoke now that it seemed a simmering fire of autumn leaves. Ashes rose from it, tiny thin ashes, but in the main, the heads languished, greasy and blackening, and the mass thickened and the ashes were only a few.
Did they suffer? Did they know? Where had their souls fled on invisible feet in this harsh and terrible moment when their Court was dissolved, when I roared in my work and stomped my feet and threw back my head and cried and cried until I couldn’t see through my tears?
I had done with some twenty of them, twenty, and my sword was so thick with blood and gore that I had to wipe it clean. On their bodies, making my way back to go down the other side of the crypt, I wiped it, on one doublet after another, marveling at how their white hands had shriveled and dried up on their chests, at how the black blood flowed so sluggishly by day from their torn necks.
“Dead, you are all dead, and yet where did you go, where did the living soul in you go!”
The light was dimming. I stood breathing heavily. I looked up at Mastema.
“The sun is high overhead,” he said gently. He was untouched, though he stood so near to them, the charred and reeking heads.
It seemed the smoke issued more truly from their eyes than anywhere else, as if the jelly melted into smoke more surely.
“The church is dim now, but it is only midday. Be quick. You have twenty more this side, and you know it. Work.”