I touched her throat just at that spot myself, but with my lips alone. And having done so, I sat back in the saddle, pondering the mysteries of my own heart, which I was far from understanding.
* * *
We rode on our way unchallenged, and within a quarter of an hour arrived at a country crossroads, the intersection of two rutted moonlit tracks beneath which I could dimly sense the ancient graves of two of my own kind. Long ago the true death had established its claim upon them.
Around us the panorama of farms and villages and woods was quiet, town folk and peasants alike slumbering and dreaming, some quite peacefully. It might have been some calm land in a fairy tale, dwelling in peace, yet to hear from its challenging monsters and rescuing prince. How fortunate those good people, if they could tell one from the other!
But now I judged it was time for me to wake my companion, a task I accomplished as gently as I could. When her bright eyes were open, I asked: “Do you know, little one, which way your village lies from here? Your house?”
After the child had inspected the three roads available, omitting of course the way that we had come, I was rewarded with a pointing finger.
When we had proceeded in the indicated direction for perhaps another quarter of a mile, I judged it safe to stop at least briefly.
At this point I dismounted and sent my horse away, relying upon a certain knack of communication with animals that I enjoy. I intended to regain the animal later, but meanwhile it would create a false trail to deceive the one (at least) who, I expected, would be impelled out of sheer vindictiveness to follow me.
But something far more important, namely my oath-taking, had now been brought into the situation. Vital to me, because I am what I am. And of great significance to Radu, because of what it meant to me.
The child had become a pawn in the deadly game we brothers played, but she was still a child. And I realized that in putting on the garments of a priest I had accepted a certain responsibility.
“What is your name, little one? Come, you are safe for the time being, you can tell me.” The question kept her from falling back to sleep. Gently I rocked her, as her mother might have done. Yes, I have told you that I have been a father; and you might consider the incontestable fact, strange as it may seem, that I was once a child myself. My manner and voice were as soothing as I knew how to make them, and the immediate cause of terror had been left behind. I thought that the speaking of her name might be of some assistance in my seeing her to safety, and causing her trail to vanish.
Around us the night was very quiet, the loudest sound a gentle susurration of insects. The path behind us was untrodden, at the moment, by anything more dangerous than a mouse; the air above the fields and forest flowed undisturbed by the flight of anything larger than a bird or natural bat.
With a little more coaxing, my small client produced a distinct word: “Marie.” It was so softly breathed into the night, I needed vampire’s ears to hear.
“A pretty name indeed. And where am I to discover your house, Marie? Your Mama and Papa?”
Another whispered name. Presently we moved on again, in the direction of that village.
When we had reached what I considered a safe distance from my deranged colleagues, I exerted some hypnotic power to ease the child’s mind of the most corrosive residue of fear, the memories of what had already happened to her, so that her agitated trembling almost—almost—ceased, and the nightmares that would otherwise have soon arrived to murder months of sleep were drained of most of their capacity to hurt.
A quarter of an hour later, I felt confident that she had regained her essential sanity, and was almost beginning to feel at ease within the circle of my arm, though of course terror had established a foothold that years of peace would be required to eradicate. By now we were within the boundaries of the village, just outside her house. A neighbor’s dogs were moved by my close presence to begin to bark, but from a distance I tranquilized the yapping pups, so that after a brief outburst only a querulous whine went trailing into silence.
To expunge from my small client’s inner mind and soul the whole burden of fear associated with the incident would not have been wise, even had it been possible.
And after taking thought, I removed from around my own neck a certain holy medal, marked with a cross (Ah, are you astonished yet again? Remember that in my breathing years I did endow five monasteries.) and other symbols, and having this hidden virtue: of making the wearer impossible to locate by any of the darker arts—remind me to tell you the story, sometime, of how, in a vastly different time and place, I had happened to come into possession of such a thing of virtue—and hung it on its silken cord around the child’s neck, athwart those silken veins and gently pulsing arteries. No doubt, I thought, her parents would soon take notice of the addition, she would tell them that the priest had given it to her, and they would suffer her to retain it.
But having come so far, Marie was reluctant to leave my guardianship—to cross, alone, the last few yards of darkness before the door of the small peasant house. That building’s windows were glowing with late lamplight, and its interior was wakeful with the murmur of anxious parental voices, disputing between themselves in prayerful agony as to whether there was anything to be done now to try to regain their missing child.
She still felt safer clinging close to me than running to the house. But this condition lasted only until we were close enough to her home for her to hear the voices. Then without another word, she suddenly let go my hand and darted forward, raising a wordless cry. Cries of relief, soon turning to anger, came out of the abruptly opened door and glowing windows. There followed the sound of a sharp slap, and a child’s outraged scream. Parental voices were bellowing their hoarse anger and relief.
By that time I was already in full, silent retreat, four-footed in wolf-form, and many yards away. My thoughts were already turning back to my problems with Radu.
But not entirely. For a long time afterward, I could still feel on my right hand, in a kind of tactile afterimage, the grip of five small fingers.
Chapter Twelve
I was soon to learn, the hard way, that my brother—who proved much better-organized than I had given him credit for—was rather skillfully arranging an intense vampire hunt, for which purpose he had recruited both nosferatu and breathing helpers. The former included some of those who had been in attendance at the meeting.
Very few people in the world had ever been able to do a better job than Radu of frightening and bullying people—and I am thinking now of the kind of people generally considered to be terrifying characters in their own right. But it is fortunate for me that he himself was hunting elsewhere when one of the party of his allies, under lesser leadership, had success.
Radu mercilessly drove his adherents, playing on their own fear and bloodlust, to track me down, then to take me by surprise, if possible, while sleeping in one of my French earths, and to kill me on the spot without allowing me to regain consciousness.
The second-best alternative, from the hunters’ point of view, would be to harry me out of the earth and then dispose of me aboveground.
Of course their task was facilitated by the fact that I had given away my talisman, possession of which would have greatly reduced their chances of locating me by magic. But their job was made more difficult by the fact that Radu himself was prudently staying home.
* * *
Later, Constantia told me that as soon as she became aware of this effort, she had tried to warn me but had been unable to locate me in time. Also, according to her account, she had undertaken to organize countermeasures among the vampire population who did not like Radu. But I am afraid that her attempt must have been rather tentative.
She frankly admitted also that she was terribly afraid of Radu, and to try to ingratiate herself with me harked back to those long-ago days of our first meeting, when I had been a most junior and uncertain vampire and she a breathing gypsy girl.
I smiled at the me
mory, and nodded. “As a girl you were delightful, but as a magician you were … shall I say, not among the most effective I have ever met.”
Ever proud of what she considered to be her magical powers, she responded with a gamine’s grimace. “I have learned something over the years.”
“No doubt you have. Tell me, Constantia, my little gypsy—what is the great attraction of the truly dead for the seekers of occult power? In cemetery after cemetery I have seen … but never mind.”
* * *
Unlike the breathing populace of France, unlike the rest of Europe for that matter, our little community—if that is not too strong a word—had among us no First, Second, and Third Estates. Nobility, clergy, and commoners were all represented in our ranks, and among these disparate components something like a rudimentary democracy had taken shape long before Paine or Jefferson or Franklin made their first political statements—centuries before Marat and Robespierre and their ilk worked fanatically at forging their nation’s bondage in the name of Freedom.
There is an analogy: Aristocrats are to the common people as vampires are to breathers. Both small, exotic groups might be said to live by sucking the blood of the mundane majority. And both offer the masses in return a certain entertainment value, if nothing else.
There are differences, of course; all analogies limp, as the Germans used to say. Vampires expand their membership by more or less active recruiting; it is much more difficult to pass from serfdom to aristocracy, where membership is jealously guarded.
* * *
After having seen the little girl safely inside her parents’ cottage, and having satisfied myself that for the time being the child was as safe as she could be, I moved on through the peaceful night—thirty miles or more, traveling for the remainder of the night—before coming to the hidden earth I had been hoping to find. This sanctuary lay, in the form of a body-sized cavity at a depth of some six feet, under a patch of open ground in a pasture. I had not visited this spot for many years, and alterations in the growth and the very existence of nearby trees made it necessary to rely upon sightings of certain landmark rocks to determine the approximate location.
I was pleased to find this lair undisturbed, and before dawn could seriously inconvenience me, I sank into the rich French soil to enjoy a thoroughly deserved rest.
* * *
When I lay down, I was no longer garbed as a priest, but in a costume which would probably have caused any chance observer to take me for a hunter or gamekeeper. With the exception of a practical and quite mundane hunting knife, I bore no weapons—I have to this day a chronic dislike of firearms, though as a breathing soldier of the fifteenth century I was no stranger to the operation of the antique matchlocks, which were then the best technology could do.
It was, and still is, part of my general policy to conceal supplies of clothing, money, and any other vitally important items, wrapped in oilskin, in or near most of my earths. Exactly how many of these hospitable nests I had then, or possess now at the time of writing, is not a subject we are going to discuss. Inspecting these arrangements at least once every few years, and renewing them when circumstances warrant, is part of the housekeeping of every prudent vampire.
In every year of my life there have been some days when I have behaved prudently—and there are many other days on which I at least like to think that I am doing so.
And then there are those days when the idea of prudence never enters my mind. I must admit that there are years in which these latter form a definite majority.
* * *
The hunting skills, magical and otherwise, of Radu’s people proved keener than I had anticipated. And I had given up my anti-location talisman to small Marie.
One of Radu’s search parties, consisting of three of his breathing associates and two nosferatu, one of the latter a woman, used magic and other means successfully to track me to my temporary lair, arriving there some six or seven hours after the ground had received my grateful body in mist-form. That they succeeded in taking their quarry by surprise was largely a matter of luck.
Only one of these people—the practically fearless, comparatively youthful vampire whose courage had already been rewarded with a serious injury—had been among the group I met at the deserted chapel in Radu’s presence. No member of that gathering, with the doubtful exception of Constantia, had actively come over to my side.
The leader of this particular search party—the very man I’d dosed with Borgia poison—still suffered from a sore shoulder and a half-useless arm, besides a few more general, systemic side effects. By the time he caught up with me, he had recovered sufficiently to enter the lists again, and was burning for revenge. Not only for the physical hurt, but for having made him look a fool.
* * * * * *
Either of my two vampire-enemies who were present could have assumed mist-form to enter my sanctuary without digging, but hunting a dangerous quarry by that method has its own frightful perils; and neither of the nosferatu who had come out against me had quite the stomach for any such tactic.
Having successfully located their quarry through magical or near-magical sensitivity, they took up tools and weapons with eager, trembling hands, ready to enjoy a triumph but fearing at every moment to provoke and alert the monster underground. By this means they dug and scraped away the first two or three feet of age-packed soil, using tools they had brought with them, or had stolen nearby. Then, unreasonably afraid that their noise and activity would rouse me prematurely from my trance, they tried to impale me with wooden spears, screaming as they thrust down at me through the last two or three feet of earth.
The remaining layer of soil was hardened by having lain undisturbed for many decades, but it failed to muffle the louder scream of mingled rage and agony, which now went up to them in answer.
I owe my life to their fear—and to the fact that my potentially strongest opponent still suffered a weakness in one arm. The assault failed by being launched prematurely, before they had dug deeply enough to be sure of my exact position, and too tentative.
Having thus brutally been made aware of the presence of mine enemies, I dragged myself awake as rapidly as possible. The process occupied only a few seconds, much less than it would have taken ordinarily, but under the circumstances it was still almost fatally slow. Long enough for my enemies, stabbing blindly into the ground in a frenzy of over-confidence, to inflict another wound or two.
I was struggling, trying to fight back, even before I was fully out of my resting trance. Fortunately no more than two of the ten or more spear thrusts into the dirt had actually struck me. Clawing my way up out of the earth, spurting blood and spitting mud between bared fangs, I cursed my own overconfidence, lack of prudence—call it what you will—that had caused me to underrate my brother’s ability to mobilize a force against me and to overrate my own power to terrify and subdue the opposition.
Wounded, with only one arm fully functional, I erupted savagely in man-form out of the temporary grave, raging and showering loose dirt in all directions.
Even still half-asleep, before I was completely up out of the earth, I used my hunting knife to good advantage, slashing a breather’s Achilles tendon and thus bringing one opponent down.
Shortly I sustained a belaboring with wooden weapons which deprived me of this handy knife. But moments later I was gripping in my right hand the fire-hardened point of one spear I had already caught and broken off. With this weapon I quickly disposed of one more of my attackers.
Exactly what reaction my foes had expected of me when they provoked me to come roaring up out of the earth, I do not know, but evidently not the berserk fury of this counterattack. No mere breathing human possessed a fraction of the speed and strength required to face one of the nosferatu in open combat. I make no idle boast when I assure the reader that, had they not taken me by surprise, no three or four of them would have been able to stand against me for a full minute.
My strategy was to concentrate my efforts upon one of them
—ideally the most dangerous, he of the poisoned arm—and quickly put him out of action or drive him away.
Knowing the best strategy and being able to achieve it while under multiple attack are not the same thing.
The small grove echoed with the savage impacts of wooden weapons. One after another, these went splintering away. Blood spattered violently upon the nearby trees, and winged little breathing things, and running things, went clamoring out of our way.
After making a good beginning to the fight, I was forced to endure a long moment or two in which I could do little more than sit, almost helpless. They might have finished me then with spear-thrusts, but they delayed a little. And that little was too long.
They stamped and wheeled around me. Fortunately for me not all of them were skilled in personal combat and they got in each other’s way, their wooden spears and clubs clattering against each other, saving me from further immediate damage.
A turning point came when I was able to seize my remaining breather attacker by the ankle, and by main force throw the man off balance.
I fought my way to a standing position, only to be seized and dragged to the ground again by the desperate effort of my opponents. Kicking viciously at every ankle I could reach, I shattered several bones. In a moment I had again regained my feet.
My enemies might have chosen to abandon the struggle at that point, but instead were incautious enough to stand their ground and try to finish me off. One factor in their calculations must have been that they still dreaded their master more than me.
* * *
A Sharpness On The Neck (Saberhagen's Dracula Book 9) Page 13