He saw Langoisse at the sabbat, carrying the severed head of the Lady Cristelle, whose lips were trying to speak. He saw Ntikima at the sabbat, masked as Egungun, carrying a feathered wand. He saw Edmund Cordery at the sabbat, wearing a different mask, which marked him as a member of the Invisible College of England.
Noell wanted to cry out to these three, to plead with them that they must not sell their souls, and to trust instead in providence, to heed the message of the saintly Quintus, but he dared not give himself away lest the vampires find him spying on their rites, and impale him on a sharpened stake to see him squirm.
There were other mysteries to explore, each as fascinating in its way as the sabbat.
His waking self had never been to Tyburn, to see the poor wretches brought to the three-legged mare, crowded in carts. He had never seen a man noosed and left to dangle, kicking and shitting his soul away. But his dream-self had been there. He had been there with Shigidi, and forgotten and forgotten and forgotten … but now he need not forget, and could engrave such sights upon the surface of his soul.
His waking self had never been to an African village on a day of sacrifice, to see a child’s throat cut for Olori-merin; to see its flesh dissected, its blood trapped and tasted. He had never seen the priests of Ogun take out the heart of an ennobled slave, to be pounded with medicines and eaten. But his dream-self had been there, more often than he ever could have guessed until he came to Adamawara, and came to know more of these secrets than he had ever sought to have revealed to him.
His waking self had never been to Hell, and knew nothing of its fiery pits and frozen wastes, its lakes of blood and iron spits … but his dream-self knew that realm, with an intimacy he would not have dared to suspect, and he had seen men there whose damnation he would rather not have known. His dream-self knew that Edmund Cordery burned in Hell, and that a place was set aside in company with him for his ingrate son … and his dream-self wished devoutly not to know it, but to no avail.
In a world such as this, with Shigidi gibbering inside of him, there could be no question of secrecy, no question of concealment. He looked into the underworld beneath the waking self which he had always thought to be the real Noell Cordery, and wondered what he was.
He was asked many questions, and gave account of himself, without mercy to himself or others. But the worst questions were those which he asked of himself, and he received such answers which made him doubt that there could be any forgiveness anywhere. He saw within and beneath his soul that which he could never forgive in himself, and that for which he could never ask forgiveness from anyone who loved him; he understood why the mercy of God must be infinite, else it could not begin to contend with the secret dreams of men.
Sometimes he caught glimpses of his questioners, but the voices came as often from a formless darkness which might have been a baleful God, or the shadow of some monster too terrible to behold.
Kantibh was one who asked questions of him; Quintus was another; Edmund Cordery was a third. One of them told him he would burn as a heretic, but he could not tell which. One of them promised him martyrdom, but which of them it was that could be so reckless, he did not know. One of them told him that he was still so far from his ultimate reckoning that that his dreams had an unimaginable wealth of wonders yet to reveal to him, but who might utter a promise so direly ambitious he could not guess.
Everything he told them of himself he relived, not as as his waking self had seen and felt it, but as his dream-self knew and understood it. He talked of childhood, of the Tower, of his father and mother. He talked about Grand Normandy, and the Imperium of Gaul. He spoke wildly of the arts of the mechanician, saying a great deal about the kinds of machines which were used in Europe now, and the myriad ways in which they changed and channelled the lives of men. He gave elaborate discourse upon the various doctrines of Christian belief, of the heresies of Gregory, the corruption of Rome, the parties of the clergy, the follies of faith.
When he told them about the world, he spoke with the authority of being the world, as though it were all encompassed – great round earth and endless history – by the bounds of his own small soul; as though it were constituted by his thoughts, his learning, his attitudes and his feelings. He spoke of Africa as though there were naught in Africa but that which spilled from his fecund imagination: comical beasts and monstrous godlings and sweating forests all alike in the great river of his thoughts, mere waves and eddies upon the surface of his being.
Long afterwards, when he came to the conclusion that some of his questioners had been really present at his bedside, and that a fraction of what his dream-self babbled out was really heard by them, he tried to remember what he might actually have said to his phantom interrogators. It was an impossible task.
Of what had he accused himself? What confessions had exposed his soul? He could not tell.
There was more.
His dream-self, while his dream-soul was confined to the dream-flesh, was injured in other ways than by the tortures and punishments of his interrogation. On numberless occasions he felt himself buggered, though his waking self had never suffered any such indignity. Having no real experience on which to base the illusion of penetration, there were conjured up for him all manner of absurd sensations.
At one time, the organ which forced him open felt cold and slimy, at another hot and sharp. At one time the unseen prick would be huge, its copious ejaculation filling him up and making him choke in his belly and his throat alike; at another it was comfortable and smooth, but its semen tore him like shot, shattering his bones. At one time, such a rape was committed by a figure resembling Quintus, at another it was Langoisse’s Turk, who stuffed him while he was pinned in a pillory which gripped his wrists with iron hands.
His dream-self was no more beyond the reach of shame than it was beyond the reach of misery, and he suffered these assaults, without the saving hope that one of them might plant within his flesh the seed of immortality. The Satan of the Gregorians was never one of those who hurt him thus, nor was Richard Lionheart or any of his kin.
But if all these chapters in the season of his dreams were only different circles of a Dantean Hell, he had also glimpses of Paradise.
His waking self had journeyed further across the face of the world than was ordinary, and yet had seen very little of the vast Creation engineered by the hand of God; that waking self had often looked raptly to the sky, failing to count the stars or compass the wanderings of the planets. But his dream-self, unfettered, had often dragged his sentient soul far away from the prison of flesh, to fly aloft with all Creation at its mercy, leaping free into the sky to bathe in the rays of the sun or blaze a comet-course among the stars, lonely in the great darkness yet proud in its power.
Alas, the taste of heaven within these dreams was a faint one, for in the abyssal reaches of the void he could feel a special remoteness which was as hellish, in its way, as the labyrinthine prisons of solidity to which nightmare sometimes confined him. He felt, when his soul strayed too far from the comfort of the sun, which became as tiny as any other star, that like Odysseus he had incurred the wrath of fate, and would be tortured by postponement of his homecoming. Such flights of the soul seemed never to reach any final climax or conclusion.
But there was another demi-paradise, which he shared with the women of the vampire race, who used him far more kindly than his interrogators, or those to whom he played the catamite. He thought when he later tried to appraise this season that perhaps he had been saved from the extremity of despair only by the vampire ladies.
Or, at least, one vampire lady.
His waking self had never lain with common woman or vampire. He had never made love, even to the gypsy who had liked him since she was a girl. Shy and shamed, made ever more cowardly by the long extension of restraint, his waking self had put erotic feelings aside, tight-binding them with personal taboos.
But his dream-self …!
Neither shyness nor shame had shadowed that phan
tom being which moved within him, and no bonds forged by consciousness could possibly contain the impulses which rose unbidden in the sleeping body to command the service of the dreamlocked soul.
In his dreams, he had never lacked for yielding flesh, lustrous and undying, for the bloody kisses of immortals. There Cristelle still lived, no severed head sent screaming into Hell but whole and free, couched and clad in any wise he might imagine, always open to him, always anxious to caress. Carmilla Bourdillon was also there, not bloated by the plague which had turned her blood to bile, but warm and white and everlasting, ever-gentle, ever-lovely, ever-thirsty.
In his dreams, there were a thousand vampires, often faceless, always perfect; often nameless, always soft. In his dreams, which knew no limit to fear and fury, monstrousness and malevolence, no bounds were set either on beauty and bewitchment, ecstasy and ease. But there were no common lovers even in his dreams, for his dream-self knew no necessity to favour frailer flesh, to prefer the flawed to the immaculate, the rotten to the sempiternal.
In his long season of dreams, his demon lovers did not desert him, but were instead expanded in their number, by one who came with subtle touches, one who served him languidly and well. This one was like no other, not because she transformed the nature of his lust, but because she whispered to him while she lay beside him; as though she too were lost in a season of dreams, condemned to pour out her heart to invisible inquisitors which teased her pain-free flesh with arrows of delirium.
The name this phantom vampire gave herself was Berenike, and his dream-self learned that she had been born in Alexandria, in the declining days of Alexander’s empire, while Rome was in its cradle. She was sold as a slave to adventurers, who crossed the desert in search of Solomon’s Ophir. The desert was less cruel in those long-gone days, and Alexander had sent several expeditions into the heart of Africa, some of which returned. Her masters, hearing of Adamawara, believed that it must be Ophir, and they had come to search for Elysium on earth.
The lifeless forest, unlike the desert, had been crueller then, and the survivors of the party which brought Berenike the slave into its shade fell direly sick with the silver death, and all had seemed sure to die. She lay in fevered terror for many days, lost in nightmare, consumed by anguish. That Berenike would have died, but the elemi found a medicine which saved her, and which made her almost like themselves, but aitigu: unfinished.
In the centuries which followed, other men came to Adamawara, from the arab lands and those empires which rose and fell in the Mediterranean cradle of civilization. For a while, the elemi used their medicines to drive away the silver death, and made of them undying aitigu, and Berenike was not alone. But the elemi had become angry, offended by things which the aitigu had done, and they used that medicine no more. One by one, the aitigu died, or went away, and Berenike had long ago become lonely. Her seasons of dreams, she said, took her away to the folds of paradise, where she need not be afraid of time, but she would sometimes return to less fortunate spaces, if there was a reason. He was the reason, it seemed, for her present descent from paradise.
Making love to her, in his season of dreams, was like being touched by an angel. His encounters with her were confused, and often he did not know whether it was Berenike who came to him or one of those myriad others, but there was always joy.
Sometimes, it was Cristelle who gave him ease. Sometimes, it was Carmilla. Sometimes, it was the nameless one, whose face he had yet to see. One of them told him that he was the handsomest man in England now that he had killed his father, but he did not know which it was. One of them said that the breath of a better life was in him, and that his children would renew the widowed world, but he could not tell which one. One of them told him that she would always remember him, through all the seasons of dreams which were yet to come, and would find him again and again and again in every face which she touched and every drop of blood she drank, but he could not recognise her voice, and knew her only by the name which was everpresent in his dreams, and attached itself to everything: Shigidi.
THREE
Wakefulness intruded into his season of dreams by slow degrees.
At first he forgot the events of wakefulness as soon as he returned to sleep, but as time went by his fugitive consciousness regained and tightened its grip upon the world without, and he dragged himself from that infernal pit into which the silver death and its Uruba demon had dragged him.
His memory of actual events was recovered in a fashion which was at first confused and fragmentary. Remembered sensations of cramming food into his mouth, and drinking from a cup, were mingled with a cacophony of broken conversations. He knew that Kantibh had often been with him, sometimes with an ancient black vampire, Aiyeda: an Oni-Shango who spoke to him in Uruba. He knew that he had spent much time in sore discomfort, and had sometimes been madly feverish. Sometimes, he thought, he had raved and babbled in response to interrogation, driven by some deep inner impulse to get certain thoughts and ideas out of his system. He had tried to expel them with his voice as though they were poisons in his being, stored there through all the long years when, as a non-believer, he had refused the confession and communion required by religious observance.
He knew, too, that he had sometimes looked at his naked body, with open and waking eyes, to see it almost completely covered in a black stain which gave his body the semblance of a huge bruise. Remembering this, when his thoughts became coherent once again, he wondered what kind of burning it was which had left him so ashen, as if Hell’s fires had reduced him to a mere calx. Was this, he asked himself, what the condition was to be throughout eternity of sinners and unbelievers? Had he seen a vision of the soul’s corruptions evidenced in the flesh? Was this why God allowed Shigidi and his kin their limited domain within the human soul?
His waking self became again the emperor of his senses and his memory, but it was a victory not easily won, and not without its setbacks. In ruthless fashion his newly-hatched consciousness set out to suppress and plough under all but a tiny fraction of that which his dreams had liberated, but he could not conceal from himself the truth that he was a changed man. Whether he was the better or the worse for it, he was not sure.
From all the flotsam and jetsam of his delirium there was one sequence of happenings that his soul did take care to salvage, and which his memory preserved as best it could, anchored by the image of a face: the face of the woman Berenike. He knew, when sanity returned to him, that the lovemaking of his dreams had made a bridge with reality. Berenike had actually come to him, as his interrogators had actually come, and she had lain with him.
How many times this had happened in fact, and how many in mere fancy, he could not tell, but he knew that in the matter of his lust and tenderness there was little partition between illusion and reality. Perhaps, he thought, it was always so. Perhaps passion was the true meeting of the inner and outer worlds, powerful enough to forge a weld between dream and reality, dark and light, Hell and Heaven, sterility and potency, vampire and common man.
He reflected that Berenike must have had lovers seventeen hundred years before he was born, and that her affections reached him now across the great expanse of human history. Thus she connected him more intimately to all the intricate pattern of human cause and consequence which lay within the shadow of eternity. He felt, the first time he made love to her in a wholly conscious way, that he was embracing the Heart Divine, and taking his allotted share of the breath of life, even though it was too poor a portion to rescue him from pain and death.
He supposed that she must have talked to him a good deal despite his delirium, telling him about her early life, and about the centuries which she had passed in Adamawara. Perhaps she had spoken out of a need to unburden herself which was not too different from his own. When he was whole again, and fully conscious of their meetings, she became shy and seemed reluctant to talk to him, and this made him shy also.
He knew that Berenike had drunk his blood while she made love to him in his d
elirium, and this disturbed him. Perversely, he had not been anxious for himself, that he should have become vampire’s prey, but anxious for her, because he thought harm might come to her if she drank the foul black blood from his diseased veins. More than once, he thought, he had cried out in wordless protest when she bent over him, and he thought that he remembered seeing her withdraw in confusion, not knowing what had alarmed him.
He did dream, at least once, that she slit his throat with a knife, and licked the blood which gushed out with lustful avidity, but when he was sane again he knew that it had been a dream. When Berenike took blood from him, she took it from his breast and not his neck, and he felt nothing but a languourous acceptance of what was being done to him.
There was no single moment when he knew himself to be returned from the morass of fragmentary memory to full and proper consciousness, but there was one moment which he was later to recall as the true resumption of problematic life. It happened at night, when he became conscious, with frightening clarity, of the fact that some sound had brought him back from sleep.
He was immediately conscious that he was lying down in his bed, on his left-hand side – which, he knew, faced the blank stone wall of his cell. He could feel the roughness of the blanket where it warmly lay upon his body, and the texture of the mattress on which he lay. The flesh of his neck caught a draught of cold air, which stirred the hairs on his nape. Behind him, in the room, something was moving.
He did not immediately turn, but lay there listening. The sounds continued, as though of a body being dragged across the floor while someone breathed, heavily and raggedly.
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