Vigil

by Saunders, Craig

  Part Three

  The Fast

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Eastern Europe and the Western World

  1599-1672

  How do you cover over seventy years of history in anything less than seventy years? Do you condense it? Boil out all the feeling to leave nothing but hard cold fact? What is there left of those years when they have been laid bare?

  Nothing. Even the most powerful words leave events stripped bare, devoid of the passions that pushed events forward. Who can know how Gallileo, or Isaac Newton on the completion of Principia Mathematica, felt?

  Feeling drives invention. Passion drives war. Indifference, strangely, is often the greatest engine of all.

  What is left when historians have poured over vast tracts of dried up old text? A crumbling old skeleton, devoid of marrow. A honeycombed and brittle version of what was, to the people who lived it, immense, overwhelming, all consuming. It was their life. History can never weigh the worth of a life, not even in years lived or achievements gained.

  In those seventy years of long and lusty feeding I tasted history. I tasted the people that lived way back then, at the dawn of a new age. I was born again, born anew, with each new discovery, each language absorbed. When you live through an epoch in history you do not look back and say, I remember when the Mayflower landed, I remember the beginning of the Thirty Year War, or its end, because you are too close. History for those that live it is not measured in lengths but moments, seen in close up while sometimes the panorama escapes us.

  Did I live through the 17th Century? No, I bathed in it. I revelled in it. It was my altar, my boyhood, my first love, my teenage years, my education…I rolled in it in a way no mortal could.

  Who could see both ends of a century in those days? People did not have the luxury of long life and free travel. It was a world ravaged by plague and war, when the horsemen rode free among the races of man.

  I saw much of the century, but did I boil it down and dissected it for consideration or discussion in the lofty halls of academia? Never. Nor will I do it here. It would lessen their pain. Their pain was something delicious and untameable, something that will always be repeated time after time, but the exact flavour can never be recreated. Pain is the one flavour a gourmet can never duplicate.

  Believe me, in those years I tasted pain, I saw it from afar and I saw it in the swiftly contracting pupil of a terrified eye. I lapped it up in blood and held it quivering and dying in my arms.

  Pain is ever changing. That, I believe, is why man fears it. It lives within. It can never be controlled, not with drugs or thought or peace.

  So what did the world boil down to? Tensions erupting between Protestants and Catholics, the start of centuries of strife. The Long War did end. I had played my part. I spent the rest of my life avoiding battle.

  But not bloodshed.

  1618-1648. Dates I remember well. The Thirty Year War. You would think it would have affected me…it didn’t. Not really. I wandered the length and breadth of Europe throughout those years and the only problem I had was avoiding the battles. I could smell them moving from miles away. The quickening thud of a thousand frightened hearts. The smell of the blood drove me insane sometimes, although I might have been miles from the battle. But I was no longer a slave to the blood. I didn’t need to feed to stave off the hunger as I could control it better than it could control me.

  I fed because I wanted to.

  Years of famine, a constant reminder for humans, came and went. The famine did not affect me. I had plenty to eat. Even when the humans were gaunt their blood tasted fresh.

  Bubonic plague ravaged much of Europe. I had to leave Italy for nearly ten years because of an outbreak. The infected did not taste good. Other than that, I didn’t care. I was immune to plague, to any disease or ailment in fact.

  Europe suffered and burned and I was flush with good health and cheer.

  Wars were fought and lost. Human barbarity outweighed my own. Dumb luck laid just as many low.

  Gallileo, Newton, the King James Bible…the list goes on an on. Now people call it the Age of Science. Was it? Gallileo was tried before the Inquisition at the start of the century. The Salem Witch Trials took place at the end.

  No, the world was still ruled by violence and superstition.

  I mention this because by and large it still is. Can science give us answers that God cannot?

  No. Neither can.

  Some things are ineffable. Some things defy quantification as they defy faith.

  Seventy years. A good span of time for a human.

  I met an old man once, many years later. He told me not to blink. His life, he said, went by in the blink of an eye. Before he knew it he was old. An old lonely man in the cold winter of his years.

  Wisdom takes many years and it all boils down to one thing. Time, whether its span be long or short, through mortal eyes or through immortal, it all passes the same way.

  In the blink of an eye.

  *

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  1672

  Scherzingen, Lake Constance

  1692 was the year of the Salem Witch Trials. They took place in Massachusetts. Give or take a few thousand miles, they had the right idea.

  I wandered for too many years. My feet were weary. I wanted to rest, to take time to assimilate the things I had learned over the years.

  There had been a change in me. It was gradual. Not the earth shattering impact of an asteroid, or a tidal wave, but of erosion and tectonic shift. I change during the course of decades and centuries. I have that luxury.

  I learned much about myself. I relished learning new languages from the people I happened across along my way, lonely years of travelling the lands of Europe, roaming freely and needing nothing. I had no need of finery, or property, or even food. People were numerous and easy picking for a creature of my talents. My first lesson had come soon after my birth and I had learned it well. No longer a ravening lunatic with a lust for flesh, I could wait and bide a while before I fed. Few people were fool enough to travel the roads alone, but there were plenty of meals to be had in wayward cottages and solitary farms.

  I never went hungry, but nor was I a glutton.

  Throughout those years I fed, but I also met people I did not kill. At first it was a strange experiment. I met a couple on their way north from Italy. I had difficulty with their language, but I insisted they abide with me awhile on the road. I picked up a phrase or two here and there, and I had a grounding in Latin. The road was more interesting in a way for the company and the lesson.

  Perhaps you imagine that I fed on that couple and that they never made their destination, but you would be wrong. I waved them goodbye after two weeks, full of knowledge, not blood.

  The woman gave me a kiss in passing, and remarked upon my cold cheek. I told her I had a slow heart. She seemed sad for me. Perhaps she thought it a bad thing. In a human, perhaps. But I imagine my heart beats slower so that I might live longer, if a lifetime can be measured in heart beats.

  I roamed countries and borders that no longer exist, and ones that would be made afresh by the end of the second millennium. I have seen so much of the world change around me. I may be eternal, but that change has shaped me, also.

  But in the way of slow things. In the way of erosion. I am a landscapes shaped by wind and rain. Only if you have lived a life as long and full as mine could you stand back and see those changes. To tell of them, in some ways, lessens the beauty of the changing landscape.

  I met many more people that I did not kill. Toward the end of the century it was becoming the norm for me to leave the bit players in my life with their life, and to pass on into the night.

  Of course, daylight was a problem, and people are understandably careful in the night. After all, that is when the dangerous beasts roam unhindered, under the moon and stars.

  So I roamed, for years, alone and a bit player in too many human’s lives to mention.

  I made small wav
es those days and nights. I don’t expect many of the people I happened upon remembered me for long. Perhaps they remarked upon the strange man they met, who could not stand the sunlight, and the affliction he suffered, that which made his skin pale and wane. Perhaps a few told of my sleepless nights. To them it must have been strange, the man who walked all day and left them when they camped for the night. I met many travellers along the way, and not a few farmers and villagers.

  I met mercenaries and soldiers, too. But I tried to steer clear of that ilk. I didn’t want to become a warrior again. I could sense the darkness in those soldiers I met returning home after a battle or a war was done. I met deserters and dark men whose souls were stained with the blood of men and women they had killed. I could smell the blood on their hands. It was a repulsive smell. Stale and tangy, cloying in the back of my throat. They did not know what they had done. To spill blood for nothing? That, I can at least say of myself, I have never done. Never have I killed on a whim. Nor will I. I am no murderer.

  I am a vampire. I kill to feed. I do not relish their pain. I am the hunter with the sure bow, the hunter that knows the pain of the deer. I do not miss. I do not maim. I am sure and swift and that, I think, is all the mercy there is in the world.

  So I roamed and listened to the breeze and the words that people spoke. They spoke of a place of beauty and peace, a haven between the warring states of man. It was there, spurred on by rumours of its beauty, that I headed. Eventually, I came to the shores of Lake Constance and a small village of surpassing loveliness in the throes of a terrible plague.

  It was there that I met the white monk.

  *

  Chapter Forty

  Scherzingen

  I followed him, largely out of curiosity. He was dressed in a white robe which covered him from head to foot. The garment was shapeless, but I saw that underneath it he was a well-built man. I placed him at about forty years of age.

  His head was completely shaven.

  It was the height of winter, too, and cold. Snow had been threatening to fall for some days now, and he must have been freezing.

  I myself wore a thick shirt, woollen trousers and heavy boots. I had a thick dark blue cape around my shoulders that kept out the worst of the cold. My hands were unprotected from the elements. I was feeling the cold. His head was turning blue.

  I sat on a stone wall outside a tavern and watched him on his rounds.

  He would enter a building, an indescribable expression on his face. I came later to recognise it as fervour. Fanatics and believers in a cause have that same expression on their faces. That their way is the one true way. It is often followed by condescension or derision. But I was mistaken in my initial assessment of the white monk. He was just pure of heart. Not many people I’ve met could claim the same.

  It was fervour, but there was also hope.

  People had been dying in the village for weeks. I had wandered at night, and in the painful light of day I had watched many of the shuttered houses open up to release the dead. Each day, it seemed, a new death greeted the dawn. Their deaths had nothing to do with me. It was a different plague. It was just as virulent as the disease that I carry, but ended only in a slow wasting away, not new power and immortality. But then, if everyone was like me, what fun would the world be?

  The white monk left the last house in the village and began walking slowly down to a house on the shores of the lake. The lake had long been frozen. Deep thick ice covered it in a silver sheen that glowed sullenly at sunset. Part of me longed to walk out on the ice and risk tumbling in, fascinated to see how long I could remain conscious in those freezing depths. But I have always hated the cold. Looking back on my time, I would have been better served to head to warmer climes, but then what use the warmth when I could not bathe in the sun?

  The journey took around half an hour. The white monk’s shoulders were still squared against the cold and what must have been disappointment. His visits did not help the afflicted at all, but still he tried. He traipsed from house to house, and each day that week his journey became shorter as more of those he visited died.

  I wondered what could drive someone on in the face of such overwhelming impossibility. He had no medicine. He had no modern science. He was armed with faith alone.

  Was he wasting his time?

  He was. But then, is it a waste to believe in something? Many times, throughout the years, I have longed for a belief to carry me through the unforgiving days. It has never come, and still I am a heathen in all the countries of the world. The world of religion never opened up to me.

  As I watched him walk firmly down to the shore of the lake and the house that waited there, I resolved to find out as much as I could about what drove the man. I followed him all the way, and when he knocked on the door and was not answered, I followed him into the house.

  The house, as all but the most wealthy of human’s houses were, was sparsely furnished. There was a table in the kitchen, two chairs. Upstairs was a simple affair, too. There was a bed, nothing more.

  The monk knelt by the side of the bed. He was reciting a prayer in Latin over the corpse under the covers.

  I sat with my legs crossed in the corner and listened. He did not look up while he prayed. He prayed for a very long time. I listened to the words and most I understood. I had learned my languages well over the course of the last seventy years.

  I imagined what it would be like for him to pray over me. Part of me thrilled at the idea.

  He finished and looked at me with sad eyes.

  ‘You show disrespect for the dead, coming here.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘I wish only to know what drives you so.’

  ‘My Lord,’ he said, simply.

  ‘And is your Lord open to all, or just the dead?’

  ‘My Lord is the Lord of all things, living and dead.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. I resisted telling him that I was both. People don’t tend to react well to that kind of thing. Certainly not in the 17th Century. Not so much now, come to think of it. For some people God is a private matter. I’d soon learned that my peculiar status between the life and death is a private matter, too.

  ‘I would like you to teach me about your God.’

  ‘You would know God?’

  ‘I’m a fast learner,’ I said.

  ‘God is best taken at a slow pace. He is, after all, infinite.’

  ‘I’m probably the least impatient student you’ll ever have.’

  He seemed to ponder my request seriously. I could see that he was intrigued. I have a way of speaking that perturbs some people. Sometimes it seems that I am being condescending. I give the impression that I know more than most people. That’s fine, though. I do.

  ‘I am returning to Salem,’ he said. ‘If you would learn, there is no finer place. We have the finest library in all of Europe. You can read?’

  ‘No. But I know the theory behind it. How hard can it be?’

  Not that hard at all, as I was to find out.

  ‘Then we leave at noon. My work is done here. I can do nothing more. The disease has run its course. Be packed and meet me before the tavern. We have many days walk ahead of us.’

  ‘I will be there,’ I told him. I left him to finish preparing the corpse.

  *

  Chapter Forty-One

  Shores of Lake Constance

  We walked for days without event. The white monk was sturdy and untiring. It was always me who broke the silence.

  ‘Do you have a name,’ I asked him, ‘or should I keep calling you the white monk?’

  ‘It is as good a name as any,’ he told me, ‘but my name is Jonas. Brother Jonas. And you?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I suppose I must have, but if I ever had a name I don’t remember it now.’

  People have asked me my name before. Sometimes I made one up. Mostly I killed the people anyway, so there didn’t seem any point in lengthy introductions. But I wanted to try and learn from this man, and his orde
r, so I was determined not to kill him. That left the introductions route, always difficult for me.

  ‘No matter. Names are not so important. I have always thought a name should be earned.’

  I mused on this for a while as we walked. He seemed lost in his thoughts again. I suppose he had a lot to think on. He was no doubt thinking of all the ways he could please his God. His God was not my God. I had no intentions of living a life of piety. We were at different ends of the spectrum. I didn’t think I would ever understand what drove a man like Brother Jonas, but in a life of darkness I wanted a little of his light to shine on me.

  We were in the shade and the sky was a steely grey but the light still pained me. He said nothing on this for the first few days. He slept and I pretended to sleep. I lay on the littered dirt under the trees and smelled his blood and sweat. I listened to his heart each night. It was a small torture. I was denying my nature. By then the hunger had grown into a monster with teeth, gnawing at my insides, desperate to be unleashed.

  I turned my attention from his soft beating heart and listened instead to the night. All but the night owls slept. An occasional huwhoo of a hunting owl broke the night. It wasn’t a perfect night for hunting. I thought of hunting, while my travelling companion slept. Animal blood could sate the hunger sometimes, but it always came back stronger. The only thing that ever made my hunger still was to feed on human blood. I could sense no other nearby humans, though.

  I lay very quietly instead of feeding and concentrated on the dull sky. To a human the night would have been pitch, but to me it was full of a riot of colour. I only need the barest of light to see by, and when it seems darkest to humans I am most at home. I come alive in the dark. It is when I hunt.

  It was a small torture to lay still in that glorious night glow and listen to his beating heart. No matter how hard I tried to ignore it I could almost feel its beat through the earth, feel its tremors through my skin.