by Tanith Lee
They preyed on all the villages and towns scattered, flea-like, through the tree-furred landscape, and up the flanks of the mountain crags.
Sometimes they took Dracul with them. He rode the winds with one, or two or three of them. Arpaz took the child most often, as if on a hunting trip, and showed him first a narrow house against the wall of a church. The church was beautiless, vegetable in aspect, yet it fascinated Arpaz, as such buildings sometimes did the vampires.
‘Do you smell the incense, Dracul?’
‘No.’
‘That sweet smoky smell – sickening – yet irresistible …?’
‘No, Arpaz.’
‘One day you will smell it. Nothing is finer than to take, right beside one of these shells of their God, who does so little to protect them.’ But, passing by the church on the way to the narrow house, Arpaz, gliding like a shadow through shadows, ducked his head aside as if at a blow, where the old crucifix of ancient wood angled from a tree. Arpaz would not look at the God, though he spoke of him with scorn. Nor would he pass any closer to the church than the house.
In the house, a woman was. She was young and fair-haired, and she slept.
Arpaz drifted to the window, the boy somehow borne with him.
The girl on the bed stirred, uneasy, flinging one arm, brown from summer daylight sun, across her face.
Arpaz purred to her then like a great cat, sat there in the window embrasure, purred and hissed and slipped over like velvet into the room, and covered the girl up against the night like her blanket. There was no real movement, not like the struggling plunging scenes of human sexual activity Dracul must sometimes have glimpsed, in horrified disbelief. The girl sighed, and her long plait of hair slid over and along the floor, and then a little vermilion thread dripped down into it. That was all. They went five nights in a row. Once Stina joined them, once Cesaire. The last night there were two big rough men waiting in the room, but Arpaz stood below purring in the dark, having sensed them, and going up, the men too were tranced to a coma-like sleep. Then Arpaz choked. He sneezed and hawked and spat on the floor, backing away. ‘Dracul, darling,’ he moaned, leaning at the wall as if he might faint, frightening the boy, ‘do you see there, those stinking bulbs and flowers – gar-gar-garlic. Move them away, throw them out on the street for me – ’ Dracul rushed to help Arpaz. Once the allergy-causing flowers were gone, Arpaz recovered himself. He stared, his eyes burning like red-green coals, at the unconscious maiden. ‘You shall pay for that,’ he said, and going to her casually, tore out her throat with his clean white teeth.
Schesparn also took Dracul ‘hunting.’ He had a penchant for caves, tunnels – doubtless why the child had first met him in a flood drain. Travelling this way, rather than having any real sense of forward momentum, Dracul seemed to see the stones instead melt off them in a maelstrom. In towns, emerging from under the earth, Schesparn bent over drunks in alleys, or sleeping guardsmen even, in their barracks, three together, while the boy stood watching in admiring astonishment. Schesparn required the blood of men for his sustenance. Mostly, however, the vampires had a preference for victims of the gender opposite to their own.
Dracul was privy to the suborning, by handsome Cesaire, of a female goat herder on the hills. Cesaire enjoyed the seduction, it appeared, as much as the conquest, and drew the procedure out, meeting the girl twice under the stars before finally overwhelming her. As she sank into his arms, the arch of her white neck offered to him like a slice of moonlight, Cesaire remarked, lingeringly, ‘How I adore the reek of goat on her. How earthly she is. How utterly human.’
Chenek and Faliborv were more violent. They would often work together, waylaying young women straying home too late from some mortal tryst or other fleshly business. They felled these prey animals with harsh blows, or leapt down on their backs from trees like panthers, pinning the women to the ground, stifling the screams only fitfully, allowing legs to kick: a form of rape.
Béla hunted always alone. Mihaly was the same. But these were the two who hunted beasts also, sometimes for themselves, and always for the child. In the end, as he grew older, they taught Dracul the ways of ordinary hunting for survival. Though they could, like all their kind, call and draw wild beasts to them, they took a keen interest in the ordinary hunter’s skills they had, presumably, possessed in their prevampiric existence.
Nevertheless, lessoned to hunt, Dracul was still envious of that knack of drawing deer, wild pig, and birds of any kind, by the inexplicable charismatic spells of vampire magic. It was Tadeusz himself who drew the wolves to the mansion on certain nights of the full moon. Huge packs would stand, a grey-black tide of pelt, crystalled with eyes, singing their eerie, breaking hymns at the sky. Then Tadeusz, the old leader, would walk among them, stroking their heads, so they whined with pleasure and bowed to him like favoured human courtiers.
The pursuit of human blood, in the case of Tadeusz, the boy, even as years passed, never saw.
Dracul was nine before Stina permitted him to accompany her. Of course physically virtually unaging, she was beautiful, a girl still, and hand in hand they walked on a dusk riverbank, until a dark young man came striding from the fields over the hill.
‘Oh come to me, my dear,’ called Stina, ‘come to me. Here I am. Come and kiss me, beloved.’
The young man turned, and his eyes clouded and brightened, both at once. As he went into Stina’s embrace, Dracul felt within himself a new and distinctive urge. It was sexual, but he did not realise that. He thought, with pride and some relief, he too was now coming to desire the drinking of blood. But he was patient and modest. He kept the awakening to himself because he had yet to become a god.
Long before that, in the first year he was with them, Tadeusz had decreed certain matters must occur in Dracul’s life.
He called Schesparn and Dracul, and the three of them went to a library high in a square stone tower.
‘Since you are, in some manner, his guardian, Schesparn, you may teach him the rules of our life, our needs and codes.’ A look passed between them. It was the compact of something, but Dracul did not know what. As he grew older, he came to see, he thought, that Schesparn would be the one to change him, alter him into the being of a vampire. The process stayed always mysterious to Dracul. For although it involved some of the acts of blood he saw the others perform on humans, there was more to it, naturally. Many of those the vampires fully drained did change, rising from graves and deathbeds, becoming a sort of vampire – thing – but it was a moron, a kind of automaton, mindlessly lusting for blood, filthy and stinking, with matted hair and the claws of a lion. The soul seemed gone, so much was plain, and the ghastly machine easily trapped. Usually the native village, or other community, settled these zombies swiftly.
In the making of a true vampire, where soul and flesh fused to create an immortal of barely imaginable powers, other rites must additionally be carried out. It was done only for those they loved and wished to keep by them, and seldom done lightly.
Why had the vampires decided to rear the child for this signal honour? Some sentimental thing perhaps, both in Schesparn, and most of the tribe … Stina missing her lost son, Mihaly wanting a boy to teach hunting – human foibles somehow remaining in the luminous material of vampiric life.
Yet Tadeusz, the leader? More gentle, more implacable than any other of the band, he had not accepted Dracul, nor allowed him to keep such a name, out of special fondness.
As it seemed to Dracul – a parade of years later, and no longer Dracul – Tadeusz had noted something in the randomly rescued and worthless child, some quality of steel, of self-will. But at the start of it all, the boy had not known even that he had a self, let alone any will at all.
In the library, nevertheless, it was Tadeusz who began to forge the child from clay to iron and bronze.
‘I will teach you books, Dracul. If you can read, you may learn anything. See, here – ’ His white hand swept across the dark air of the room, describing the cranky ebony shel
ves, piled high with masked, secret blocks: books, to one who could not yet read. Dust was thick there, and the webs of spiders. Beetles had eaten a way in at certain tomes. Despite that, there was enough. More than enough.
Tadeusz taught the child to read. He did it hurtlessly, and by a method of hypnotism, Dracul presently thought. For one moment he stared at a page covered by an unknown alchemy of symbols – next moment he had begun to decipher them. Words – sentences – mental landscapes having no borders.
Nor was it only a single language that Tadeusz lavished on the child. Latin and the purest Greek he gave him, High German, Russian and French. English too, an outlandish teeming tongue, made apparently from an amalgam of all others. ‘Be advised,’ said Tadeusz to the child, ‘sometimes, when you speak to a man in a language that is his, and not your own, it is wise to make a few little slips. If that time is also fraught or dangerous, you may wish to speak gauchely and clownishly, too. For that way he will in turn say and reveal things to you he might not otherwise attempt. And you will likely, if you must, catch him out. Or, if you may rely on him, that you will learn also. The wise are often best served by appearing imperfect, nor too clever. The higher you ascend in one region, the better to frolic and seem ignorant elsewhere.’
Dracul relished these lessons. But he loved all the lessons, including the killing of animals for his food, Cesaire’s and Stina’s seductions, Medestha’s childish wiles upon other children scarcely older than Dracul had been himself.
Dracul had been a land burning up with drought. And now the drinkable rain fell on and on. Cascading water for thirst. One day – blood.
He did not confide in Tadeusz, not dreams, nor questions, beyond those of the student. Dracul loved and respected Tadeusz, half feared him, in the way it is possible to fear someone also loved and respected and trusted – fearlessly.
But he loved them all. They were his kin. And he, was theirs.
Twenty years on from then, or was it thirty – forty – a hundred – he had driven her mad, literally mad, the human woman he had taken to himself. With his nightmares, his regrets, his rages, anguish – his erudition. His strength. With all that remained of love, respect, and fearless fear.
From his seventh year, Dracul slept by day, as they did, in a grave.
He had been shown the scrolled stone boxes, filled with earth, containing always elements of their indigenous soil. At sunrise, the lids were lowered, either that or the bed of stone lay in some vault, far down, where daylight never penetrated.
The sun was wasps and scorpions to the vampire kind. It could burn them, tear them. If very vital they might endure it, but never for long. Some would perish in less than a minute should the light fall on them. It was like acid.
One day-night, then, when he was seven, he lay down with Sraga in her box. This had been done to accustom him to such a resting place, before he should have to do it alone. She smiled, and put her arms about him, and slept instantly, as if her life had ended. Sleepless an hour, Dracul stayed looking at her.
Without doubt, they slept – like the dead. You could not rouse them. They were helpless at such couchings. Initially, Dracul did not like to believe this, and surely they never said as much. But it was obvious enough.
When he was 12, Dracul had it proved to him, anyway. The event was, at that time, the worst incident of his life.
The vampires spread their activities over a wide area. Travelling in air or mist, running as wolves or flying as bats, they maintained so colossal a territory, they usually eluded too much specific attention.
But Cesaire had fixed on a particular family, and these lived in the nearest village of all. First he had the daughters, all four of them. Then the mother, who was still young and good-looking. All five pushed up from the graveyard with earth in their nails and blood between their fangs, and were put down by the village priest, an irate old man, part crazed, and full of energy.
Following that, the brother of the sisters set out after Cesaire. No-one else would go with him. They were too afraid, even the yowling, hammering priest. But the younger man, a sturdy woodcutter, got through the forest and the birches, and climbed up from the river, the mountains above like silver in the morning light.
The crumbling mansion and wild estate were known of a little. The woodcutter found his way. He got into the house by climbing the face of the carven stones – rather as a vampire might have done it – and stepped through one of the casementless windows, to spring down in the hall.
All was deathly silent, the 12 occupants asleep. The priest had tutored the woodcutter well, and besides, this man had witnessed the curtailment of the zombie second lives of his mother and his four siblings. He had stakes with him of sharpened ash wood, his axe, haft good as any hammer, and a cavalry sword that had lain in the church for a century, rusty but serviceable. Round his neck hung an aromatic garland of garlic, and his mother’s silver cross, which she had thrown off for the vampire.
It seemed he knew not only Cesaire was in the mansion. He thought he might get one or two more, if they were present – he had brought five stakes, the same number as his familial dead. He knew that a vampire slept by day. What he did not know was that one of the vampire tribe was not yet vampiric, and slept by day only from choice and habit.
Dracul woke from his human slumber, hearing a noise in the house that normally, from dawn till sunset, was silent. He believed some big animal had got in, and decided, for once, to get up and hunt it, since it had been foolish enough to attract his notice. But the light was so shrill in his streaming eyes, for some while he could barely see. In that condition he almost came to reckon it would be better to leave the animal alone. After all, what harm could it do? Dracul’s kin were safe under stone lids or behind vault doors. For the furnishings of the mansion, a handful of antique chairs, cabinets, beds, they were very few, and anyway eaten by moths and damp.
Then though, he heard a sound deep down, down where the vaults were, under the house. And it was the note of something metallic striking, and next of a door opening. Only one animal could undo such a door.
Dracul ran down the stairways of the house toward the vault, and coming into the blessed dimness, could see again. He had been very quiet, having peerless teachers in that as in so much else. The thickset man bending over Cesaire’s grave box had not heard anything beyond his own racing heart.
For Dracul, he himself was transfixed. Yes, he had beheld other people – mortals – frequently, when he was in company with his kindred. But never any human thing in a position of power over a vampire.
Dracul stood leaden, unmoving. As if helpless in a stupor, he watched the woodcutter heft one of the ash stakes. There was no lid to this box. They were in the vault. Only the light the villager had made, three small wavering candles, illumined Cesaire, lying there handsomely cataleptic in undead sleep. Dracul could have made him out by now, in any event, with no light but that of his own night vision.
But the woodcutter lifted the ash stake high. Although Dracul had heard the modus operandi described, en passant, by the vampires, who effected no dread, he had never witnessed it. This time his mind was slower than his eyes, his body slower yet.
The plunge of the stake, even that, though it horrified Dracul, did not quite bring all his faculties together. Cesaire’s scream of fury and agony did so. Dracul bounded forward. Then everything was there at once. He saw Cesaire’s wide-open knowing eyes, locked like rigid jewels in his immobilised face. Saw Cesaire’s body already spasming, the hands ripping at empty air. Heard the smash of the axe haft coming down as the pointed shaft was hammered home, right through the heart.
A spout of blood burst from Cesaire’s chiselled mouth. His eyes grew cloudy – just like the eyes of certain victims of the vampires, when the love-spell-trance enveloped them. Then his eyes went blank. He was – no longer there.
The woodcutter still had not noticed another running up to him. He swung the cavalry sword and lopped off Cesaire’s fine head. It lay there on th
e pillow of earth, marble pale, absurd in its charm and loathsomeness. Then one of the remaining four ash stakes thumped into the woodcutter, back to chest. He half turned, gaping, and saw, judging by his look, a sort of imp – a monster – before the world fell over into darkness. No vampire, the stake had not even needed to pierce his heart, only his intestines. He was humanly dead in minutes.
Dracul did not look at that. He was lying in the grave-bed by then, with Cesaire, holding the dead vampire in his arms, weeping, howling.
He knew it was no use to try to wake the others. By day, once they slept, it was almost impossible to do so. Only Tadeusz, he had gathered from their talk, had sometimes been awake by day. But Dracul had never learned where the leader lay down to sleep. In that insane hour, Dracul vowed he must find out. For of them all, surely Tadeusz might yet have saved Cesaire. Yet Dracul knew also from the talk, the lessons, that these two reductive strokes, the heart-stake, the decapitation, as with sunlight and burning in fire, were the only deaths a vampire must avoid. They were final.
When the others appeared at sundown, looking for Cesaire and for the boy, they found Dracul, there in the vault. Cesaire lay smooth, his head replaced against his body, face wiped clean of blood, eyes closed.
The woodcutter, Dracul had hacked in pieces, employing the man’s own axe. As a last statement, Dracul had stuffed his mouth with garlic, and stabbed the silver cross into one of his eyes.
The event of Cesaire’s execution was in fact another lesson. When it happened, Dracul did not understand this. Or if he thought it valid instruction, then of another meaning completely. Grieving for Cesaire he found, to his vague surprise, a novel estrangement from the others. For they, after the first shouts of calamity and distress, did not seem to suffer much. Nor Sraga, either, whom Cesaire had made his own and personally altered to the vampire condition, only two or three decades earlier. Tears had run down her face. They were tinged with blood, like palest rubies. But it lasted only moments.