A Taste of Blood Wine

by Freda Warrington

  "What about?"

  Maddy did not answer at once. Then she said, "I like Edward so much. Did you see how he was with me? He quietened down, he was almost himself again. You heard the nurse say no one else has ever got through to him like that since he's been there, not even David."

  "He was always sweet on you, Maddy."

  A long, pensive silence. "D'you remember how we used to help the nurses during the War? I was rather good at it. This may be an awful shock, Charli, but I want to do something worthwhile. I don't quite know what, but don't laugh; I'm deadly serious. And I'm going to stick by Edward."

  As they drove back into Cambridge, the beauty of the town struck Charlotte as if she had never appreciated it before. A privileged life, cupped in the shimmering gold and green grandeur, the dour buildings in which the secrets of the universe were being pried from their minute Pandora's boxes. It came to her that life might be bearable after all.

  ***

  Karl felt that he had been aware for a very long time—years condensed into a single moment, or a moment stretched out for years—but dreaming, unable to reason. Like being suspended just under the surface of rippling red water… only seeing, not thinking or feeling.

  At some point memory began to return. First the vague fleeting sense that there was something he should know, some profound revelation just beyond the grasp of his intellect. His whole body ached, every bone of his spine seemed alight with pain, while through him and all around him a velvety ribbon of melody flowed from a cello. A seamless flow of notes, turning endlessly around itself like a Bach fugue. The ache in his spine and the music were the same thing… yet the music made the discomfort tolerable.

  He was cold. The air itself cracked and froze around him, shattered into powder and fell away into an abyss under a blazing ice-cold sun.

  And he was hot, turning slowly in an inferno while his flesh dripped from him like sweat. But the gliding notes of the cello carried him through the fever into self-awareness.

  He began to remember who he was. No specific memories, only an untroubled consciousness of self.

  Yes, the music… surely he must be drawing out the melody with his own hands… A glimpse of a dark-haired woman, playing with a baby, laughing. Therese… why can't I move, have I been ill?

  Still no anxiety, only a persistent feeling that there was something he should know. Everything fell away except a dragging emptiness which, it began to occur to him, was hunger…

  And then, out of nowhere, a hideous, blazing image came rushing towards him; from a single point of light it came, expanding until it seared through the centre of his forehead in a flower of white-hot iron. A blade slicing into his palms as he tried and failed to seize it, hacking into his neck as he fell. His head was being cut from his body and he was aware of it happening. Searing panic. Consciousness dragged on after his head was severed but the emotion was suddenly gone as if cut off with his body. He only saw. Garish shades of red in carpets and curtains all tilted at the wrong angle, someone sobbing, and the thoughts circling round and round his mind, I still live, I cannot die. Nothing can free me from consciousness. The horror brought him awake.

  One second ago it had happened… but how could that one second be so deep and full of detail, an interminable nightmare that a vampire had murdered his wife and made him like itself and pursued him down the years until he had taken the only escape possible; death. Only to find even that escape route closed. Am I sick or in hell? Therese, such a dream… No dream. He opened his eyes and knew that it had all been real. He was not human but a fiend, a luminous supernatural being that could not afford pity.

  He recognised the walls that enclosed him. A stone chamber lit by candles and the fluid dancing of fire. Kristian's castle. He was lying on a straw mattress, naked, his skin prickling with cold and heat. His body felt strange. He stared at his limbs; he was physically unchanged, unhurt. When he stretched, his body obeyed and feeling returned, an almost drowsy sensation that warmed him back to normality.

  But a shadow oppressed the room. Karl turned his head and saw Kristian standing a few feet away, looking down at him, arms folded. An intense expression of satisfaction on his strong pallid face, his shadow on the wall behind him like the flowing black cloak of his soul.

  "Karl," he said. "Can you speak? I have waited so long for you to look at me. Did you dream? Do you know what has happened to you?"

  Karl sat up slowly, swinging his feet over the edge of the mattress. His hunger made everything shimmer with painful clarity. Apart from that he felt, physically at least, as if nothing had happened. Strong, perfect, as vampires were.

  "You ask a lot of questions," Karl said. He felt completely calm; not angry, not afraid that Kristian had captured him at last. Not even resigned; simply calm. "You will have to help me answer them, Kristian. It may have been a dream… but I could have sworn that my head was severed."

  Kristian's eyes widened and the firelight gleamed in them; eerie, horrible they looked. He leaned forward, his voice an eager whisper. "Yes, it was. Tell me about it, Karl. How did it feel?"

  Karl sat back, felt the wall cold against his spine. He gazed candidly at Kristian, astonished yet amused in a bizarre way. "Extremely painful," he replied.

  "But when it happened—after it happened—were you still aware?"

  "For a time, yes."

  "I want to know about it!"

  Karl paused, gazing coolly at him. He took a breath; the air felt raw, and thirst went through him like streams of sand. "Then I shall tell you—in exchange for you explaining how in God's name you managed to put me back together. I understood beheading to be fatal."

  Kristian paced slowly around the chamber. "So it is, if no attempt is made to heal the immortal. But in God's name it was done. I brought you back here and tended you. I bathed the injury, I bathed the whole body with fresh blood every day, filled you with the power of the Crystal Ring; that is, the breath of God. And by His grace your immortal flesh was regenerated."

  Karl tried not to dwell on the words, fresh blood. He put a hand to his throat, felt smooth skin.

  "Would you like a looking-glass?" Kristian took a small mirror from a table and handed it to him. "I allowed this symbol of man's vanity into the castle just for this. Look."

  Karl looked. His reflection in the silver was pale with starvation, his hair tousled, his amber eyes shadowed; otherwise, the same. No scar on his throat. "How long did it take?"

  Kristian sat beside him and ran his broad hand down Karl's arm. Karl resisted the instinct to pull away. "Eight, nearly nine months."

  Karl gave nothing away, but he was shocked. And the image that came into his head was Charlotte. God, what did she feel when it happened? She was there, she saw. I heard her weeping. All this time, all this time, what has become of her? "Months… "

  "No time at all, to us," said Kristian. "Karl, I've brought you back to life. Does it mean nothing to you? Are you not grateful?"

  "It is difficult to take in what happened. I don't know."

  A black passion moved behind Kristian's eyes. He wants something from me, Karl thought despairingly. He's looking for signs that I've changed, relented.

  "How can you not be grateful that I've delivered you from death—not once now, but twice? I have given you this gift!"

  "And both times, I did not ask for it," Karl said without feeling.

  "You cannot mean that you wish I'd left you for dead. You can't tell me you would prefer death!"

  "You are the one who believes in God, Kristian. Perhaps I would have been in heaven now… or more likely in hell. It felt like hell. You have only saved me because you have unfinished business with me, isn't that so? I am not allowed to die before you bring me to heel. Afterwards, perhaps."

  Kristian stood up, a swathe of black that seemed to swallow light and energy from the room. "In heaven's name, Karl. Do you feel nothing? You died, you rose again! I did this—"

  "All we are missing is the Holy Ghost."

 
"—yet still you blaspheme! Do you feel no awe, no repentance?"

  "What I feel," Karl said slowly, "is mine, not yours to plunder because you have no genuine feelings of your own. I am not sure it is a pleasant thing to discover that I can't die, even if I want to. I could go up to the Wesskalt, starve myself and go to sleep there, but you'd rescue me, wouldn't you? I cannot escape from you, whatever I do."

  For the first time in his life, he saw an actual flash of panic in the older vampire's eyes. "Always you speak of escape, as if I am your gaoler! I gave you life, and the instinct of immortals is to live!"

  "But your condition is too hard," Karl replied. "You want me to live for you and I cannot."

  "I am the centre of your life! I choose who lives and who dies. I am the heart, I am God's right hand. You cannot turn away from me, you cannot!"

  "You expected me to come to you out of love, when you'd destroyed everything I loved. You wanted me to come of a free will which you would not let me exercise. And then by threats to Ilona, by scything down anyone who came near me; and now, gratitude."

  Sheer desperation in Kristian's eyes now. "But it was all for your sake, Karl. I must have you back."

  "So imprison me, starve me."

  "It's your spirit I want!"

  "You will have to break it first, and what use will it be to you, broken?"

  For a moment he thought Kristian was going to attack him. But the carved-stone face cleared, and his dark aura seemed to shrink a little. His huge fists unclenched. "I am unfair to you, Karl. You have barely recovered. You need time to think and reflect."

  Karl relaxed a little. Have I forgotten I meant to come back and talk to him? Hostility will never help us to understand. "Yes, you are right."

  Kristian smiled, as if he took this as capitulation. "You must be in need of nourishment. Why don't you go and dress—" he indicated a door to another chamber—"while I attend to it?"

  In the side room, Karl selected and put on clothes from a cupboard; not the drab robes that Kristian favoured, but an everyday suit in charcoal grey, and a dark overcoat and hat. When he returned to the main chamber—the coat over his arm a statement of intention—the door to the corridor stood open and skeins of human heat were drifting in.

  The thirst throbbed through him so fiercely that he almost cried out. A female vampire came in, dressed in a black robe like a monk, a hood over her straight gold hair. An intense solemn expression; in life Maria had been a nun, but now Kristian was her Lord. She brought with her a squarely-built grey-haired man from whom the aura of luscious vermeil life exuded. Although he looked strong enough to break her like a piece of straw, her thin hands and vampire glamour held him.

  Chains of fire and dust pulled Karl towards the prey. It was all he could do not to fall on him, yet somehow he held himself back and said coldly, "Thank you, Kristian, but I prefer to hunt for myself."

  He walked to the door. "Where are you going?" said Kristian.

  "To think, as you suggested. Am I a prisoner?"

  "No. You are free to go… and to return." Kristian made no move to stop him, but gave him a very strange look as he ducked under the lintel and walked away, fighting to control the fever of thirst.

  As he was on his way through the warren of corridors, Karl met Ilona and Pierre. They stopped and stared at him; two cynical faces, for one second slack with unguarded wonder. Karl thought Pierre would have embraced him, had Ilona not been there. Hostility gathered swiftly in her eyes, where just for a moment there had been the astonished pleasure with which she had used to greet him as a child, when it would take her a few seconds to realise that this virtual stranger was her father. Once it would have torn his heart open, but now, for the first time, he felt almost nothing. No love, no anguish; only a weariness that was too stale to be anger.

  "I heard," she said, "but I couldn't quite believe it."

  "Well, we are immortal, it seems," Karl said off-handedly. He was going to walk straight past them, but she put out her arm and stopped him.

  "Is that all you have to say? I suppose you don't want to hear how I have suffered. Kristian tortured me! He sucked my blood so I hadn't the strength to go into the Crystal Ring and then he locked me up and left me to starve. That I could almost bear. But he wouldn't leave me alone. Every day for hours, asking me over and over again the same questions." She imitated Kristian's tone viciously. '"But what was it like when you killed the woman, when you felt her life going into you?' Hours and hours of it… I gave a different answer every time, to save myself from going mad. 'Cold,' I said, 'like a crystal waterfall to a man who has crawled out of the desert.'"

  "Don't, Ilona," said Pierre.

  "And I said, 'Warm. Like swallowing someone who loved me whole, so that their love was inside me and could never betray me again… "'

  "Stop it!" Pierre said savagely. "There's nothing he's done to you that he hasn't done to the rest of us!"

  "What do you want me to say?" Karl said without feeling. "Am I meant to be outraged? I could forgive you almost anything, but not for murdering Fleur."

  Ilona seemed genuinely shocked by the lead-coldness in his eyes and voice. She drew back into herself. "Do you know how false her name sounds on your lips? She was just a human. How many have you killed?"

  "You did it to hurt me," Karl said, "but it was not me you hurt. That is what I can never forgive. Don't tell me how cruelly Kristian uses you. He put you in the Weisskalt, when I saved you, you came straight back to him. He starves and humiliates you, and you crawl back every time. You too, Pierre! You must have rejoiced when I died; isn't this his ultimate crime, restoring me?"

  How dreadful, the twisted loathing on her heart-shaped face. "I said I'd leave if you stay here, and I meant it. You will never see me again, and you couldn't bear that, could you, Father?''

  "I don't care what you do," Karl said, and meant it.

  Tears made pin-pricks of light in his daughter's eyes. "But this is your doing, don't you see? You ask why I come back. Without Kristian to love, without you to hate, I'd have nothing at all!"

  There was real anguish in her voice, yet Karl remained detached, floating in ice. Emotionlessly he said, "I wish I had left you in the Weisskalt; or better still, to live and die as a mortal. The Ilona I knew in life would not have let her existence become so hollow that her only reason for living was hatred. You are not my daughter."

  He walked on past her, ignoring Pierre. "Karl!" she said furiously. Then when he did not stop, "Father. Father!" Her voice followed him, more and more plaintive, decades of pain echoing along the bare stone corridors. He did not look back.

  ***

  After Karl had gone, Kristian went into his inner sanctum. There was the beautiful figure, dressed in a loose black robe, standing by the far wall and regarding Kristian with a serene golden gaze; Karl, to the life.

  Kristian walked to the figure, touched his shoulders, ran his hands over the high cheekbones, the mass of hair that was like burgundy touched with fire.

  "You are gone, yet you are still here. My blood is yours; you shall drink only my blood." Kristian bit his wrist and put it to Karl's mouth. He did not respond at once; then he seemed to realise what was required. Eyes widening he began to suck by reflex, like a baby, unconscious of everything except pleasure. Then he bit down more savagely, and Kristian had to wrench himself free.

  "Come here," said Kristian. He took Karl by the hand, led him to the chair and sat him down. He did what he was shown, stayed where he was placed; no memory, no real mind to guide him, only some vestigial instinct. Kristian went into the outer chamber, opened a tall cupboard and took a cello and bow from a case.

  "Karl used to play the cello for me," he said as he returned and closed the sanctum door. He pushed the creature's knees apart, clamped them on either side of the cello. He folded one of the pliable hands round the neck, placed the bow in the other. Karl did not move. Patiently, Kristian pressed his fingers onto the strings and guided his arm back and forth to show him how the bo
w was drawn over the strings. Toneless sawing notes vibrated from the body of the instrument.

  "You will play for me again, Karl. You must remember how. You will be everything he was not. You will never leave me, never look at me with cold eyes and deny God, never throw back the gift of life. Play for me, Karl."

  He stepped away and watched from the other side of the room. The vampire went on sawing at the strings just as Kristian had shown him—like a clockwork doll set in motion.

  "You must remember how to play!" Kristian shouted suddenly. "You must be able to learn!" Frustration and anguish flamed through him. "You must. You will!" Kristian rushed forward, hand out to strike the vampire. The creature was apparently unable to comprehend why this anger was directed at him, but like a dog he seemed to know he had done wrong and he drew back.

  Kristian's hand passed through thin air and he fell, sprawling over the cello and the chair. He leapt up, cursing, but the chamber was empty. His exquisite replica of Karl had vanished into the Crystal Ring.

  "Damn you!" he shouted. "I won't pursue you, you will not make a fool of me like that! You are the one who needs me. You will return, and you will be what I want!"

  And Kristian was not even sure which one he was addressing, the double or the true Karl.

  ***

  Elizabeth was sitting on the sofa in the main drawing room, reading a letter from her husband Lord Reynolds that outlined, in pedantic detail, the reasons for some journey he must make from India to Singapore. She put it aside without finishing it. I can never seem to settle to anything these days, she thought. She had done her best to forget the events of last autumn, and the busy social round of her life went on, yet she would often have these bouts of pensiveness when she could concentrate on nothing and sat for hours at a time gazing out of the window.

  It was night, but the curtains were open. She preferred to be able to see outside, just to be absolutely sure there was no one on the terrace. The state of my nerves, she thought irritably. No good to spend time on one's own, imagining things; that if as the root of Charlotte's trouble. It's so nice to have David and Anne in the house. I'll go up and see Anne in a little while, yes.