A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9)

by Fred Saberhagen

  Other people were methodically smashing plates and glasses. A very young but ugly woman had bared her breasts, and was dancing wildly on a table to music that she alone could hear. A man with a pot of honey and a spoon in hand stood in front of her, trying to attract her attention.

  I pushed on, having forgotten for the time being my recent new acquaintance outside. Now and then someone bumped into me, took a look into my face, and moved on. I patiently proceeded.

  Here was the doorway to what I realized must have been the Queen’s private suite of rooms. The way was partially blocked by a row of dead bodies wrapped in sheets and blankets. Such a neat enshrouding must have taken place earlier in the day, when some tidy-minded members of the household staff had still had time to worry about the dead.

  Inside the Queen’s rooms, more women of all ages were ransacking the wardrobe of Marie Antoinette, trying on hats and bonnets. Nearby stood a piano, violently bereft of ivory keys, steel strings pulled out and broken. A bust of the young Dauphin, which must have been on the piano, now lay on the floor, chipped and soiled.

  Poor Marie Antoinette! Not that I ever met her, but I doubt she meant anyone any harm, no more than her husband did. There is no shred of evidence, you know, that she ever really said it: I mean of course the famous quote about letting the poor eat cake if they could find no bread.

  Ah! ca ira,caira,ca ira,

  Les aristocrates a la lanterne…

  So it goes, so it goes, so it goes. To the nearest lamppost with those damned aristocrats, and hang them high. The ragged chorus dissolved in incoherent noise. Other musical instruments had been smashed also.

  (Radu, where are you? Surely you, as inevitably as the million flies, will be drawn to this scene.)

  “Hey! You, there!”

  The roar of triumph had come from behind me. I thought that the voice of Satan was in that noise. Turning, I beheld the speaker. He was advancing on me, a massive, archetypal figure in a red cap, clad in the rags and wooden shoes of a homeless Parisian, wearing the apron of his trade and waving a butcher’s cleaver. Having established eye contact, I raised my eyebrows and slightly shook my head, trying to convey the idea that it would do him no good to pursue me further.

  Normally when I attempt to communicate an idea of this kind I am successful. But not this time. Try to be kind, as folk in the twentieth century are wont to say, and see where it gets you. The man with the cleaver was all enfevered by the carnage surrounding him; he had me cornered, and plainly he was determined not to be cheated of his fun. No doubt in my hat and cloak I did look like some simpleton’s idea of an aristocrat attempting to disguise his appearance.

  My righteous butcher, armed with unshakable faith in his own strength and aflame with revolutionary zeal, was at least correct about one thing: He had me cornered, as it was still daylight. Denied the choice of disappearing into nothingness, or of turning into some four-legged or winged beast, I had no really convenient option other than to stand my ground.

  As the cleaver slashed toward my head, I plucked it from his grip and threw it away. A moment later I had seized one-handed the neck of that great cockroach and, with bone-cracking force, smashed his surprised face into the elegant wall paneling.

  On that afternoon in that particular palace no one paid much attention to a little more blood here and there. In fact, I had thought that no one in the rooms nearby was paying any attention at all, or I would have chosen a less dramatic method of pest eradication. My meatcutter’s body slid easily down the wall and blended into the similar litter on the floor. Briefly I considered claiming his red cap as the spoils of war, to serve me as protective coloration. But alas, it was already too late for that.

  Unhappily my disposal of this vermin, which might well have gone unnoticed amid the general uproar and carnage, had instead attracted the attention of several additional aristocrat-hunters, no less eager than the first. They were now shouting at me from an adjoining room. These folk I hoped to be able to avoid by retreating into the upper levels of the palace, where I expected to find mostly servants’ rooms.

  * * *

  Kind fortune discovered to me a narrow stair, formerly a path for unobtrusive servants, which went up inconspicuously within the thickness of a wall. I took this path, and no one immediately followed me. For a minute or two I was able to hope that my pursuers would be distracted, but so determined were they that at last I judged it wise to climb out of one window and up a more or less sheer wall into another one, following a route that few if any breathing opponents could have managed, and none at all if they were carrying weapons.

  Things were going on much the same upon the floor above, except that there were fewer people. On impulse, throwing open the doors in a large cupboard in hopes of discovering one of Radu’s breathing helpers, I found instead first one terrified servant of the royal household and then another, a pair who had been hiding from the mob. When I appeared they were convinced that their last hour had come, and began entreating me in the most disgusting terms for mercy.

  Bah. I shut their whimpering, howling faces and stinking bodies—they had already soiled themselves in fear—back up inside their closet. Whether they ultimately survived or not I have to this day no idea, but I suppose their chances were rather good, as the hunters were more interested in me.

  * * *

  Once or twice in my prolonged and convoluted passage through the ruined palace, I had observed signs which it would have been possible to interpret as evidence of Radu’s passage, things to indicate that he had proceeded me along this route, stopping to take his debased pleasures where and when he chose. For example, here and there a body showed evidence of more than ordinarily fiendish torture. But with atrocity on every hand, it would have been difficult even for him to distinguish himself in this company.

  * * *

  I had just begun to feel that my stubborn pursuers had given up, when one of them again caught sight of me in the distance, down a long vista of corridor, and raised a cry. I cursed and dodged out of sight, but here they came after me again, pounding on door after door and pausing at a couple of locked ones to break them down. These artistic palatial doors were not stout enough to require a great deal of effort. Five years ago, only madmen had dreamed of a mob that would one day be treading these exquisitely parqueted and tiled floors, seeking the blood of the oppressors of the poor.

  Fortunately for my patience, and for their own lives, none of those now looking for me ever quite managed to catch up. But neither was I successful in picking up the trail of my own quarry.

  * * *

  Thus it was that I, Vlad Dracula, spent the waning hours of that memorable afternoon barricaded in one of the highest rooms of the palace. From that sanctuary, up near the roof, I contemplated the beauties of the sky and waited for nightfall. Meanwhile I listened to distant music and laughter, screams and curses.

  Ah! ca ira, ca ira,ca ira,

  Leg aristocrates a la lanterne…

  Before the last verse of the day’s last performance of the carmagnole had faded into silence—a silence very like that of the grave—I had time to contemplate at some length the strange behavior of the human race.

  At last the sun went down, and my nature underwent its usual diurnal change, which allowed me to make my escape by flying out a window. It was pure joy to put aside for a time the outward form of humanity, and to abandon my small, winged body to the enveloping peace of the upper air.

  Chapter Ten

  After my futile attempt in August of 1792 to come to grips with my brother at the palace of the Tuileries, I departed from Paris, called away by matters which have little to do with the subjects of this chronicle. Suffice to say that for a year or more I was traveling, mostly out of France. Of course during this period my closest blood relative was never far from my thoughts, and now and then news reached me, indirectly, of some of his activities. Apparently he had chosen to remain in France, drawn like a moth to the Revolutionary flame. There was a report that Radu
had taken to frequenting lunatic asylums, recruiting disciples among some of the inmates.

  Not that the folk outside those walls seemed a great deal saner. Six months after the Tuileries, in February of ’93, all of Europe learned that Louis Capet, formerly king of France, had been guillotined like a common criminal.

  In July of that year, the Revolutionary propagandist Marat was assassinated, made a martyr in the eyes of his fellow enthusiasts; he was stabbed in his bath by Charlotte Corday, whose pretty head was separated from her body by Sanson a few days later. On 16 October, Marie Antoinette followed her once-royal husband to the scaffold.

  By the time of my return to Paris in the spring of 1794, when I was once more free to concentrate upon my problems with Radu, the French Revolution was entering its most acute phase. The infection known as the Terror was building to its most feverish height, before it reached its sudden climax in the Revolutionary month of Thermidor.

  * * *

  One of the events which drew me back to France at just that time was the news which had reached me concerning a gathering of vampires, which was soon to be held there.

  Simultaneously with word of this gathering there came to my ears an indirect communication from Radu. His emissary proposed, in his name, that we two brothers should take advantage of the conclave to discuss a truce.

  Treachery on Radu’s part was of course the first idea that sprang to mind when I received this news. Yet at the same time—perhaps I was tired—I allowed myself to toy with the idea that it might after all be possible to come to some agreement with Radu, to reach an armistice if not conclude a peace. Foolishly I allowed myself to be tempted by the notion that my brother and I might be able to coexist, however uneasily, in the world.

  Constantia too had evidently been invited to the gathering, or at least had learned about it, and for old time’s sake she found a way to let me know.

  * * *

  A hundred years earlier, the protracted feud between the brothers Dracula had been the subject of much gossip in the small community of European nosferatu now the subject was waxing popular once again. In general our colleagues found it vastly entertaining, if now and then a little worrisome.

  One or two of the newer members of the club, though they had recently met Radu, had never heard of me at all. Or they had heard vague tales of Prince Dracula (the peak of whose international fame, literary and otherwise, still lay far in the future) but took it for granted that Radu was the only member of the family to bear that title, the only Dracula still alive (or “undead,” if you prefer), and had always been the only one of any importance.

  * * *

  Radu had been giving intense consideration to the problem of recruiting people, preferably people of proven capabilities, to help him defeat his brother. In the end, as far as I could piece the facts together, he thought it best to try to intrigue them with the idea of a kind of hunt. He seems to have described the upcoming effort as a kind of sporting event—it would be fun, and not very dangerous, to track down the cowardly Vlad (whose, reputation, he assured them, was based on falsehood!) and torment him or kill him. How well Radu succeeded in this effort we shall see.

  I may digress for a moment to remark that now at the time of writing, as the twentieth century jitters unpredictably toward its close, the study of vampire populations still offers a fertile field of investigation, though (I admit we ourselves are partly to blame) facts are often hard to come by. An investigator of a scientific turn of mind might endeavor to calculate our probable longevity in terms of half-lives; in using that word I am not speaking of some supposed twilight existence of the undead, but adopting a scientific concept which is most commonly applied to the heavy nuclei of radioactive atoms. A population of such atoms is said to have a half-life of one thousand years, if its numbers are diminished by fifty percent after the passage of that measure of time. And in the Europe of two centuries ago, I now compute that the half-life of the nosferatu as a group was more than two centuries.

  Certainly the scholarly movement, which came to be known as the Enlightenment, sweeping across Europe in the last half of the eighteenth century, had brought some decline of belief in our existence, at least among the self-considered intellectual elite—though not nearly as great a falling-off in supernatural terror as was produced a century later by the widespread adoption of the electric light.

  * * * * * *

  While still perhaps two hundred yards away from the small group which was already gathered for the meeting, I could recognize the voice of Radu. No mistaking it, though he was speaking quietly and his mellow tones had not graced my ears for many decades. My flesh crept—no, I am not a total stranger to that sensation—with a premonition of evil. I listened, paying close attention, as I drew nearer. My brother was engaged in telling a small assembly of our colleagues his version of our family history—a lively chronicle in very truth, though perhaps not as extravagant as his tales would have made it—in an effort to enlist their support against his brother.

  The answers given by the group were skeptical and not particularly enthusiastic. Only one of the other voices was that of a vampire I had met before.

  Nodding to myself, I paused before joining the small assembly, to take thought, weighing the several possible ways in which its members might react to my presence, which to some of them would be totally unexpected. Much would depend on how much progress Radu had already made in winning them to his cause. And then, having made some preliminary decisions, I moved forward again.

  * * *

  Certain students of our miniature society have wondered why I appeared at this secret gathering of vampires in the traditional clothing of a French priest—wearing a black soutane, which is a cassock, along with the traditional buckled shoes and a black broad-brimmed hat. My reasons for this choice of dress were personal; I did not explain them to anyone at the time, nor do I consider it my duty to account for them now. It was not the first time I had worn such an outfit, and several explanations have been suggested, among which the reader may take her/his choice. The simplest may be that a clerical identity made certain things easier when one moved in society—or at least that was how things had worked in France before the Terror got under way in earnest.

  Others have speculated that Vlad Dracula was wearing a cassock and a black priest’s hat on that night as a gesture of defiance, simply because the Revolutionary government had forbidden such apparel, at the same time as it required all priests to take an oath of loyalty to the new government.

  There is even one quite romantic, chivalric interpretation, to the effect that I had disguised myself as a priest in the hope of giving a certain real priest, whom I knew to be a worthy man, a better chance of getting away from his sans-sculotte pursuers, who were determined to deprive him of either his sworn loyalty to God, or of his life. I can imagine those unfortunate fellows discovering, too late to help them, that they were chasing down Vlad Dracula instead; and like a varied assortment of rascals before and since, they were not to profit by the exercise … but the reader may take his choice.

  * * *

  I did not really expect to be challenged when I arrived at the meeting, but I was.

  Even as I neared the door, I was formally commanded to present some ancient password to a young vampire-sentry.

  “Who told you of our gathering?”

  The question was asked in tones of a childish suspicion, and from one of my age and accomplishments it deserved no answer. I tilted back my head and raised two open hands toward the sky, like one calling upon the heavens to witness some phenomenon beyond mere human comprehension.

  Though my vampirism ought to have been obvious enough to any of my colleagues, I did not necessarily consider myself slighted by the fact of being challenged—it was part of an old and honored ritual. I had an ample supply of passwords, in many languages.

  For several minutes I had already been aware of my brother’s presence in the small group ahead. From where I now stood, I could hear six beat
ing hearts but only one set of breathing lungs.

  Shortly before I entered the room—a chapel long-profaned, though only recently abandoned by its breathing owners, located a level or two above the ground floor of the ruined castle—with all my senses tuned to full alertness, I became aware that the breathing lungs were small organs working shallowly and rapidly. Their owner was at the far end of the chamber, behind some angle of stonework and as yet invisible to me.

  I gave the password almost absentmindedly, without making an issue of the challenge. My attention and my thoughts were now focused almost exclusively on my brother.

  Each of us solemnly assured the other that he was looking well.

  As I made my entrance, the group of five or six vampires, men and women, young and old, was deep in discussion; this came to an abrupt halt, and I suspected its subject would be likely to affect me directly. I did not need to hear much to know that Radu was actively attempting to enlist their aid in his war against his brother.

  A silence fell.

  Quietly I entered the darkened room, and Constantia, rather proudly as I thought, introduced me to the small handful of those who had known me only as a name. I was glad to see my old companion—in her breathing days my lover—present at this gathering, though I knew better than to depend on her for any support in a crisis. The former gypsy girl was in fact one of the senior members of this group, though she looked as young and beautiful as ever.

  Constantia had come to the meeting dressed up in a long gown of rich fabric that had certainly never belonged to peasant girl or sans-culotte. She wore it with a natural grace.