Bathory's Secret: When All The Time In The World Is Not Enough (Affliction Vampires Book 1)

by Romina Nicolaides

  It read:

  Dear Katalina,

  I am sorry I did not come to your room for a lesson last night, but Szuzanna must have seen me sneak out with my books some nights ago, so I couldn’t take the risk of being followed.

  If you are able to read this letter, which I know you are, you are doing much better than you think. Last night I was planning on continuing with the future tenses but because I won’t be able to I have left my grammar book for you to study. It is a rare edition so please care for it.

  Keep practicing your words, and if you can, have a look in the library for a thesaurus. The Countess has a big collection of Latin books so you won’t have to interrupt your studies while I’m gone. I will be back after the holiday and we can pick up where we left off, though I think as far as Latin is concerned you don’t need me for much more. You’ve shown an exceptional thirst for knowledge and more aptitude for the language than I ever expected of you and it has paid off.

  God be with you.

  Oriana.

  Overjoyed, Kati pushed the letter to her chest and grinned. Here was proof that in a few months she had learned to read in an ancient language. I can read, I can read! She told herself again and again as if the months of incessant practice had not convinced her in the slightest.

  Looking at the letter again, she folded it and put it inside the book which she placed at the bottom of the laundry basket, piling the dirty clothes on top, and headed for her room to immediately hide it.

  Unsure of who had access to her bedroom she thought that under the mattress would be an obvious hiding place for a book, especially if someone other than herself was to change the sheets. Looking around the small sparse room she was stumped. Lying back on her bed wondering what to do, her eyes fell on the exposed ceiling beams. Using the chair in the room she was still too short to reach, and looked around for anything that would help add height.

  Seeing the laundry basket, she stuffed it really well with clothes and placed it upside down on two chairs which she arranged to face each other. Tentatively stepping on the bottom of the basket she feared the delicate woven structure was going to give in at any second but to her relief it was stronger than it appeared and the clothes inside gave it support. Quickly she tucked the book between two joining beams and got down to check that it wasn't visible. Relieved that she had stashed it safely away she returned the chairs to their place and went to the yard to continue with her chores.

  The sheets all hung in a neat line drying. Mačka was enjoying playing with the frayed corner of one of them, flicking the water off himself every now and again when he got too saturated. When he got bored of getting wet, he sat on the rim of the well and proceeded to wash himself thoroughly, paying particular care to the area behind his ears with his little paws. The days had grown longer and warmer and he enjoyed sleeping in the sun.

  The barn having been emptied and cleaned, Kati sat on the entrance step and took a little break. It well past lunchtime, she thought, and judging by the last time the chapel bell had gone off it must have been around three in the afternoon. Returning to her room she found lunch waiting for her as usual and after finishing that she took a nap. The six o’clock bell ring woke her and she sat up feeling fuzzy and disoriented. The irregular hours she kept here at the castle were still playing havoc with her body.

  Oriana’s letter playing heavily on her mind, she looked up at the beams feeling relieved that the book was so well hidden. Getting up off the bed she went straight to the Library. The room was empty and cold in contrast to the vivacity the four girls brought to it. Approaching the bookshelf she felt her breathing quicken. The Library was vast and she had no idea where to begin, but she remembered how one of the girls always approached the far right section when they would be reading the “classics,” which, as Oriana had explained to her, were important Roman authors. After passing several books with titles she didn't recognize she came across one that said “Thesaurus”. With trembling hands she opened the cabinet and took it out. Opening it, she was delighted to see that every word she knew in Latin was explained by one or several others also in Latin. Her jaw dropped at this treasure and she flicked page after page refusing to believe her eyes.

  “What on earth do you think you are doing?” The voice was unmistakable and Katalina unwittingly held her breath as panic gripped her. She looked up to see the Countess standing at the door in one of her sumptuous charcoal grey velvet evening dresses with silver filigree embroidery, staring furiously at her. She wore a conservatively sized but impeccably starched silk ruff which accented her elaborately braided hair adorned with grey pearls. She looked magnificent save for the ugly talisman round her neck just under the ruff, but Kati had no time to admire her attire. A million thoughts passed through her head and the most prominent one was how she was doomed to punishment for simply being in there. The memory of the bruised cheek and broken nose was all too recent and she felt her eyes begin to tear up, just before a thought came to her.

  “I was cleaning up, mistress. Since the girls left this morning, I collected their linens and cleaned the barn, washed the bedclothes and came in here to check if they had left anything behind and to make sure everything was in order.”

  “The girls know to leave this room impeccable when they finish with their lessons.” She was looking very suspicious and cast her gaze at the book on the table. Katalina picked it up and put it back on the shelf.

  “They left a few books on the table mistress, perhaps in their excitement at going home for Easter, and I put them all back on the shelf. I also cleared the fireplace and wiped down the tabletop.”

  Entering the room, the Countess looked at the table with a disgusted expression.

  “You clearly didn’t do a good job. The surface is laden with finger marks.”

  “My apologies Your Grace, I will go over it again with lemon oil to make sure it gleams.”

  The Countess seemed preoccupied so didn’t press the matter further with Katalina.

  She turned to leave but hesitated and came back in.

  “Katalina, I’ll be going to Vienna for a while, I’m not certain yet, but I may be away for the entire holiday season. Make sure to continue with the binding while I'm gone.”

  “I’ll dedicate all my time to it now that I don’t need to care for the girls anymore.”

  “And remember to speak with no one and always lock the room. The keys I gave you must always be in your possession. Is that clear?”

  “Yes mistress, I always make sure they’re safe,” she assured the Countess by tapping her skirt pocket.

  “Good, I expect to have seen significant progress by the time I have returned, understood?”

  “Yes Your Grace, I will do my best.” She did a little curtsy.

  The Countess stood at the door vacantly staring at Kati for what seemed like a few moments longer than normal, but without saying anything else she turned and left. Kati felt her body relax by having got away with that. She rushed to the window but realized she couldn’t reach to see out. The windows were higher in this room compared to other parts of the castle due to the shelving. Carefully standing up on a chair she looked down on the courtyard and the familiar figure of the coachman brushing the mane of one of the four fresh horses he had secured to the carriage.

  The sudden appearance of the Countess in the yard gave the horses a fright and for a moment they fluttered about agitated. Unperturbed she entered the carriage unassisted and closed the door behind her. The coachman grabbed the four horses by the reigns and tried to calm them. Though she couldn’t hear him, Kati imagined his voice going "Whoa lassies” in her head and smiled. When they were finally relaxed, the coachman peered inside the carriage where he exchanged a few brief words with his mistress, before taking his seat and setting off towards the large gate and down the large paved ramp that led away from the castle. She stayed watching as the carriage was no longer in sight and then noticed a young man she had never seen before come out of the main building and close
the gate.

  Returning to the shelf she retrieved the thesaurus and taking off her apron, carefully wrapped the book with it.

  Seven

  The following morning Katalina got up at the crack of dawn. Aware that the Countess had gone for what could potentially be a really long time she knew this would be her chance to start reading the books she had been binding all this time and couldn’t contain her excitement and curiosity. Perhaps they all contained boring castle-related business which she wouldn’t understand but the mischievous child in her wanted to have a go at something she had been expressly forbidden to do. Grabbing an apple she had brought in from the yard she bit into it greedily and made her way to the binding room.

  When she entered the space it was as if she was looking at it for the first time. She’d spent countless hours in there but this time she felt as if she’d never set eyes on all those books before. During the time she'd been learning to read she never felt confident enough to look at the words on the sheets. Her role had always been manual but today it was going to be scholarly. Oriana had given Kati her blessing and now she felt ready to venture into these secret journals.

  Placing the thin apple core on the edge of the table, she grabbed the first tome from the shelf and opened it wide, also quite proud of the excellent binding work she had done. Looking down at the previously codified symbols, they now magically transformed into fully legible words right before her eyes. The first book began with some very simple words:

  My name is Theodora Laskari and I was born in Constantinople in 1195 during the reign of the Emperor Alexius III. My father was a Greek, middle class cloth merchant by trade and my mother was a Venetian financier’s daughter with a talent for weaving fine linen cloth. Together with my four brothers we all lived in a small but comfortable home in the city. My parents’ marriage was unusual for its mixed heritage but they were in love and had become pregnant outside of wedlock so were quickly married. Their families had tried repeatedly to separate them but with no success. Marriages between the Orthodox and the Latins were seriously frowned upon at the time so my parents eloped and chose to stay out of the family's way, only having contact with one or two members. My father began his business with very little money after they were forced to move to a part of the city where no one knew them and kept my mother’s past as secret as possible. For many years as I was growing up I remember tensions between the Greek inhabitants of the city and the Latins and this always scared my parents who as part of either community feared rejection by both. In fact some years before I was born there had been a massive massacre of Latins by the Greeks and the dead had numbered in the tens of thousands. The Latin Princess Maria had infuriated the people by her favoritism towards her own kind and that allowed Andronikos Komnenos to rouse mob support against the unpopular Latins and launch a massacre of an unprecedented scale. It was said that approximately 60.000 men, women and children were killed in only one month.

  It would be years after the massacre until relations returned to normal and trading slowly resumed with the few remaining and returning Latins. As one would expect, fear, tension and distrust clouded every aspect of people’s minds and seeped into their interactions. Talk was brief and a polite and tense distance was maintained between the two faiths. Disputes and misunderstandings were quick to erupt and sometimes men of the Latin faith would be found dead on the street. I often recalled my mother’s fear, reflected in the grip of her hand, when we would happen to walk the streets and some sort of tension brewed.

  In March 1204, when I was about nine years old, Crusader ships began to arrive and drop anchors outside of town. Unrest simmered throughout the city and the rate of incidents amongst the two communities increased once again. People speculated as to their reasons and whispers between the Latins told that they had come to exact revenge for the massacre of almost two decades earlier. The Greeks of course refused to believe that a force put together to protect the true faith would attack other Christians but that disbelief quickly crumbled when they set up camp in the town of Galata across the strait and prepared to attack. The whole city waited with bated breath to see if the reinforced fortifications would hold and when it began to look like it would be breached, we loaded a few mules with as much as we could carry and headed inland towards the west with no plan but only the hope of escaping the city with our lives.

  We would travel during the day and camp in the city’s outskirts during the night as we headed westwards. A day or two after we left we were caught up by some refugees who had also left the city and a few days after that more would follow. The ones that had been fortunate enough to escape with their lives described scenes of immeasurable horror. Looting, vandalism, and destruction were unleashed by the Crusaders on the city and the survivors spread out in the surrounding areas like fleeing rats scrambling to escape a flooded sewer. The more the days passed, the stories that reached us got worse and worse. Churches and convents were destroyed, stripped of their art and religious paraphernalia which were then loaded onto ships for Venice. Men, women and children were killed, nuns were raped, the weak taken into slavery. The Latins in the city finally got their blood back by joining into the Armageddon.

  Away from the city we tried to survive in the forests as best as we could. More families had arrived and a makeshift refugee camp had been formed. Rations were meager but people shared as much as they could. We survived on foraging, hunting and what little grains we had brought out of the city. The people from the surrounding villages viewed us with suspicion but could be parted from their crops at the right price. Though we had brought as much gold as we could carry when we left the city, it was all we had and it had to be wisely spent. By the time winter came, half the families in the camp had perished from hunger, disease or injury and our future looked bleak. The dark imperial forests were hostile and city folks like ourselves had few survival skills.

  Reaching the end of the first passage Kati could not believe her eyes. Who was this Theodora Laskari? What did the Countess have to do with something that had taken place over four hundred years ago, if her basic mathematics was correct? Some of the words were big and hard to comprehend but the Countess’s priceless journals essentially told the story of a refugee.

  Our existence in the forest continued and for almost six years we lived as nomads on the outskirts of the city with the fewer and fewer refugees who remained. Over time they found their way to the newly founded Byzantine Kingdoms and our invitations to join continued, but my father would politely postpone. Though he always suggested we should head towards Nicaea in the coming spring, he secretly hoped Constantinople would regain its former Greek majority and we would return to our lives like before. His heart had always been in the city and in truth he didn’t want to stray too far.

  One cold winter night about six years into our exile my family and I were away from camp. Normally we would avoid straying at night but after another raid we were forced to check our traps for damage. We could not afford a night to go by with damaged snares as we would have nothing to eat the following day. While I was inspecting one of the traps that I had built I noticed a deer some trees away and decided to go after it and shoot it with my bow. An opportunity like this was rare as this was a large animal and could feed us for days. The light of the moon guided my steps and I chased after it for quite some distance but eventually lost it. Realizing I had gone much further than where I would usually venture, I was overwhelmed by an unnatural sense of calm and quiet. There was frost on the ground and on the trees, and a few fallen leaves but everything was dreadfully still. It was too quiet for a forest at night and I became frightened. Before I could finish a thought about trying to find my way back, something landed behind me from the nearest tree, pinned me to the ground and sank its fangs into my neck just under my chin. It wore a thick woolen pelt which was matted and wet but this was no ordinary beast. I felt the searing pain of the bite where my pulse was strongest and sensed the upper and lower teeth sever the skin on both sides of my thr
oat swiftly releasing a large quantity of blood before I began to lose my senses.

  The creature would most certainly have killed me had it not been for my father finding us and shooting at it. My attacker was not hurt but had no choice than to leave me with what little blood it had not drunk and escape as quickly as it had appeared. My last memory was of my father pushing against the bleeding wound on my neck and holding me close to his chest. I woke up in camp three days later in one of our makeshift tents to my mother’s untold relief, where I was left to slowly recover from bouts of high fever. By dawn of the third night the fever had settled but the sunshine it brought with it now caused me a lot of pain and distress. In the days that followed I would avoid it with fervor and hide until night time when I felt at peace.

  My parents grew worried and afraid that I had become possessed by some demon or spirit and were extremely frightened of me. God fearing as they were they believed that only evil thrives at night and that no good can come of a person afraid of the daylight. They began to avoid me and became extremely protective of my brothers when I was around them. When one night I was caught drinking the blood directly out of a fox my father held a knife to my neck and told me to leave before he was forced to sever my head from my shoulders.