Sacrament

by Susan Squires

  They had saved her. For themselves? Then why not rob her and take whatever else they wanted while they might blame her body on the other man? She couldn't think. She hardly even cared anymore who was an enemy and who a friend. Her journey continued. She had survived to take the next step. She did not know whether she had killed the thief, or if it was Mihai's knife. And really it didn't matter. She could have killed him, would have killed him. Therefore it was just the same as if she did. She wondered if that had always been there in her, that possibility. She thought a lot that afternoon about Sienna and Corina.

  Julien stood at the one uncovered window of the round tower room looking out at the stars, a goblet filled with wine in his hand. The window overlooked the valley a thousand feet below. Heavy velvet hangings at the other windows were drawn shut against the cold. The room was furnished with a great bed whose posts were carved with twining grape leaves and cherubim, a large chest and wardrobe in rough, dark wood, and a table with two chairs in the corner. A fire burned in the grate. Besides the one candle sitting on the table, it was the only light. He listened to footsteps trudge up the worn, winding stairs into the tower. They were carrying weight. It must be the Eldest One. Father Rubius didn't wait for an answer to his knock before he opened it.

  "Not meditating on your Vow, boy?" Rubius asked to announce his presence.

  Julien did not even turn his head. "The Vow will come soon enough, Father," he grunted and tossed back the rest of his wine.

  "Magda has calmed somewhat. Brother Flavio thinks introspection will profit her."

  Julien's laugh was ugly. "She pays for my sin as well as I."

  "Your deed was a sin. But it is a lesson to us on the evils of giving the Companion. And she may yet come through it. May I sit down?"

  Julien came to the table, poured a glass of wine, and gestured magnanimously to one of the chairs. "But don't lecture me upon my drinking. Soon I begin the ascetic life." He sauntered over to the chest to put the empty bottle with its many fellows. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." His voice was harsh. "Well, not exactly."

  Father Rubius pursed his lips and tapped his finger upon the table. He seemed to be thinking. "You… do not seem to be quiet in your mind, boy."

  "Is it not enough that I am willing?" Quiet might never be his again.

  "I have seen many come to take the Vow. I am the Eldest. Never forget that."

  Julien glanced at the countenance some would call jolly, the round belly, and saw the iron below the surface. He sat at the table. "Forgive me, Father," he muttered.

  Father Rubius smiled and shook his head. "Aspirants have already renounced the world by the time they reach us. They are ready to accept our discipline."

  "I accept the discipline, Father." Julien forced his voice to calm.

  Father Rubius stared at him with old, keen eyes. "You are not a shining example of acceptance. You want to burn out the passion in your soul, and we are a conveniently hot poker."

  "Perhaps, like Magda, I may yet come through." He swirled the wine in his glass.

  "I have been struggling with myself since you returned. I am not certain you are ready."

  Julien glanced up. "Do not deny me, Father," he whispered. "It is all I have left."

  "I am not so sure." Father Rubius pushed his bulk up out of the chair. He paced the stone floor. For perhaps a minute, maybe more, his footsteps made the only sound in the room. At last, he stopped and turned to face the younger man. "Tell me the true reason you seek us out, Davinoff. You are one of the youngest. I did not think to see you for a thousand years."

  "I have never been good at confessions," Julien demurred. "You have heard the sordid details from many others, in any case." He tossed off most of the wine he had just poured.

  Father Rubius did not disagree with him. Nor did he change his requirement. He wanted a confession. Julien lifted his eyes to the Old One's. He could feel the ancient blue eyes start, slowly, lightly, to demand. This was to be a demonstration of the humility required of an aspirant, no doubt. Julien had always responded poorly to demands. Hie eyes sparked and snapped with resistance before he could prevent them. Father Rubius demanded again, in a crescendo of seesawing wills. Julien jerked away. What purpose did it serve to challenge the Elder?

  "Now, what has brought you here?" Rubius asked calmly. But his breath was coming fast.

  Confession was now set as the price of entrance into their society. There was a long period of silence, as Julien leaned against the window embrasure to look out across the valley. Father Rubius waited. Why not? He had all the time in the world. "There was a woman," Julien said finally. "God, but that sounds trite."

  "It wasn't?" Father Rubius prompted, sighing. He had apparently heard it all before.

  "I wonder how many women I have known?" Davinoff asked of no one in particular. "A thousand, five? But none like her."

  "A beauty?" Father Rubius asked. He seemed bored.

  "No, not a beauty in the usual sense."

  "It was her intellect took your fancy, then."

  Julien chuckled. "She would hate to be thought a bluestocking." After a moment he continued, "I don't know precisely why there are none like her."

  When nothing else seemed to be forthcoming, Father Rubius said, "Not good enough, Davinoff. This does not convince me you are ready. She found you out? She was horrified?"

  It was Julien's turn to stride about the room. "It is an old story," he blurted finally. "Long after all had grown dull, I wandered the world, expecting nothing but the worst. In my time I have been angry at my fate and I quenched my anger in the blood of war. I played the artist until I found art meaningless. I became a bored collector of things that could not satisfy me. Then I reveled in the fact that there was no value. I thought complete freedom might be a substitute. I sank to bestial enjoyments. I tried everything, and nothing sufficed. When I thought I needed someone who could understand my trials, I made a woman in my own image, twice in fact, in all the years. The first committed suicide, the second was Magda. After that, there was nothing left."

  "Now you sound like an Aspirant. Why else did I found the monastery except to help poor creatures who were brought to such a pass? Was this girl the first you made?"

  Julien stopped pacing. He went back to the window and gazed out at the moon, small and distant in the night sky. "No. She found me weak and helpless, and helped me. She was tender, giving, even to a creature such as I. She accepted me, knowing everything, though I must surely be a monster in her eyes. She became a friend. She even grew to love me. But more than that"—he searched for words—"she gave me new eyes with which to see the world." He put his hands over his face. Drawing a ragged breath, he said, "I caught a glimpse of a life I had never known. It only occurred to me later it could never be mine."

  Father Rubius was appalled. "You are still attached to the world! You must resolve this, Davinoff. You must go back to wherever it was you left her and resolve your feelings about living before you take the Vow. You have unfinished business."

  Julien turned on him. "You don't understand, Father. I offered to share the Companion with her. I was weak. Thank the gods she refused it and by the time I saw her in Vienna, I had come to my senses. I know it is wrong, and wrong for her. Look at the results of my last disobedience! I will not repeat my indiscretion. But I cannot trust myself to 'finish' this business." He turned back to the window. "The Vow is all that is left to me."

  Father Rubius sat in stunned silence. Finally he said, "I did not know you had committed the Crime twice, and nearly a third time. We forgave your sin with Magda because you brought her here and you were contrite. Any new lapse would bring down our wrath." Father Rubius let his voice fill with command. "You would be a double outcast, reviled by the world who doesn't understand you and exiled from the solace of the only ones who share your nature. It is the most terrible of fates, one known by only a few of us, in all my years."

  "I understand," Julien said softly. "I will be fine, once I hav
e taken the Vow."

  Father Rubius rose. "The sooner the better," he said shortly. "We will find a way to cleanse you of the desire for this girl." He strode from the room.

  Julien poured another glass of wine, and turned once again to the window.

  The way to Tirgu Korva wound always upward. It was reached by roads still barely passable in April and so narrow they could hardly accommodate a cart. A dozen times Sarah almost slipped over some precipice into oblivion. She had left the brothers in Horazu. They were so fearful of Tirgu Korva, she couldn't ask them to take her there. Stefan helped her buy a horse, even as he tried to talk her out of going on. She only won acceptance when she told them she needed someone trustworthy to look after her trunks. She took only the chalice, bound into her coat, and abandoned the rest with instructions that the brothers could have them if she didn't return in four days. They stuffed her pockets with garlic and put a fragrant herb Mihai bought from an old hag in her cap. It was wolfsbane. That was daunting.

  But she would not lose courage now. She gave Stefan a hug, and kissed Mihai's scarred cheek. With only her horse and the wolfsbane for company, she toiled up the pass to Tirgu Korva.

  For the first time in the course of her journey, she met no one, either coming or going, though some carts had surely been through there, for there were ruts to guide her own progress. Now there was only the silence of the snow, and the wind soughing through the trees. She scanned the road and the woods, for what she could not tell.

  Sarah began to be affected by the palpable dread in the air. The anger that had sustained her through all of her journey slowly drained away. All the dark hints Julien had dropped about the nature of his homeland, of his kind, all the information she had gleaned from Khalenberg, rolled around in her mind until it seemed she might be riding into hell itself. And for what? Even if he was not yet initiated into the monastery, what chance did she have with Julien? He was the stuff of myths, and she had never felt smaller.

  It was coming on to darkness as she rounded a final bend. Wet and cold, dispirited, she still could not help but gasp. Across a little valley at the base of a breathtaking mountain of sheer stone, lights winked in the little village that must be Tirgu Korva. And looming above it was a wondrously carved and turreted structure, growing out of the stone of the mountain. Its complicated spires reached sinuously for the sky, its massive base rooted in the mountain. Mirso Monastery. Sarah was mesmerized. She had never seen anything remotely like it.

  The horse, forgotten, edged nervously to a stop. Sarah suppressed a shudder. She was sorely tempted to turn right around and go back. But that would have made her fearful journey all for naught. If she went forward she might face death, or something worse. At the least there might be rejection, final this time and irrevocable. But could she do less than everything there was to do in search of her future? If she had done everything, perhaps even if her reward was not to be a life with Julien, she would have left some shred of herself. It would be a shred she had not had before she met him, before she opened the door on Sienna, before she took him from Corina, before she walked down into the darkness of the cellar at the Dower House.

  She gave the horse his office to start and, after some sidling reluctance, he trotted down into the hollow in which the village lay, snorting nervously. Sarah grew calmer. Her thoughts returned again to Corina. Did Corina, in the silence of her convent in Lyon, have the courage to journey inside and find the balance she needed? Sarah was amazed to think she had once been in awe of Corina. No longer. But, for better or for worse, she saw clearly now what she shared with her friend. She too would do anything to get what she wanted. She thought she could drink blood. She knew she could kill a man. Poor Corina. She sent a silent thought out over the still air toward Lyon. I understand you, finally. And I wish for you that you will make yourself whole.

  Sharp air filled Sarah's lungs with cutting life as she came to the first rude buildings. She found a public house. Sore to the bone, she climbed down from the horse. The noise of people drinking wafted out into the cold. Behind the building the mountain and the monastery towered into the night. The moon had risen. In its light the fortresslike structure looked almost soft. The very stone seemed translucent in the moon's glow. As she watched, the effect was intensified by a light that flickered on in some cell, and then in another. The stone around the windows glowed. The two lights, in fair proximity, took on the aspect of eyes, shining into the dark to search out her soul. They were joined by another light, and still another, in differing parts of the fortress. The monastery seemed sentient as no building she had ever seen. The hair on the back of her neck prickled against her jacket.

  Sarah jumped as the valley filled with an echoing howl, then clutched herself, wide-eyed, as one became three and then a dozen or a hundred. Wolves, she thought, wolves on the hunt.

  She turned her eyes with effort to the coarse inn in front of her. The prospect of finding out just who lived in Tirgu Korva was not alluring. But the prospect of setting out for Mirso Monastery alone on foot in the dark and the freezing cold was less so. It was the villagers or the wolves. She took the great iron handle of the door and heaved it open,

  Chapter Twenty-one

  « ^ »

  Inside the inn perhaps a half dozen men sat around a roaring fire, talking and laughing loudly. Their peasant garb still bore the grime of work. The atmosphere was thick with the smell of old sweat and paprika. A buxom woman carried spirits reeking of malt and barley to the fireside on a tray held at shoulder level, above the danger of wildly gesticulating arms. Upon Sarah's entry into the room, talk ceased as everyone turned startled faces toward her. Sarah stood just inside the door, out of place and feeling incredibly vulnerable. Her disguise as a boy seemed transparent; her carefully loaded gun, farcical. The men were of a piece, she saw, as she stared around the room. Black eyes, black hair, long straight noses, and rather thin lips. She wondered, with a queasy feeling, just how long the village had been isolated by its terrible reputation. The eyes turned hostile. Several men got up and started forward.

  "I want to go to Mirso Monastery," she said in broken Romanian. She pointed up to where the translucent monolith must hover, unseen, behind the public house.

  The landlord paused and turned back toward what must be his spouse as if he expected her to handle this strange intrusion.

  The woman shook her head. "You don't want to go to Mirso Monastery," Sarah managed to make out of their colloquial Romanian.

  She nodded. "Tonight," she managed to remember from her phrase book. She pulled a handful of coins from her pocket. The landlord and his wife threw dubious looks back to the crowd of men. The matter was discussed ardently, with the room apparently evenly divided between those who wanted to rob her and cut her throat, and those who were curious about why someone wanted to go to Mirso.

  Only a man with a graying beard and swollen knuckles, quietly nursing his brew in the corner, seemed to be paying any attention to Sarah at all. Finally he stood up, and without a word, took a heavy coat down from an irregularly hewn peg in the wall. He walked forward, grunted to Sarah and motioned her to follow him. The room's cacophony subsided.

  Sarah stood for a moment, irresolute. The man shrugged on his coat. As he grabbed the handle of the door, he looked back and barked an inquiry. She saw fierce black eyes and an ageless face. He might have been forty or seventy. His lip curled disdainfully as he waited for her decision. She roused herself from uncertainty. He was her way to the monastery. There were far worse choices in the room. She nodded briskly and stepped out into the cold behind him.

  As he harnessed a shaggy horse to a cart with two giant wooden wheels, she examined her rough companion. His cap was pulled down low to protect him from the cold, his scarf was drawn across his mouth. But she could see his eyes. He seemed stoic about a journey to the monastery, almost unconcerned. In fact, none of the villagers had seemed afraid. There had been no gestures designed to ward off evil when she spoke its name.

 
What kind of men were they, who lived to serve the needs of such a monastery? What did they do? Grow food perhaps, raise livestock, and act as the workmen for the monks. She wondered why they didn't leave. But then where would they go? They were from Tirgu Korva and in the eyes of the world they were tainted, outcast. They were not vampires themselves. There was no aura of power about this man. He looked like a peasant—one who had seen much, but just a peasant all the same. And he did not guide her out of kindness. How did he serve his masters at Mirso Monastery by taking this intruder to their fortress?

  As they wound up the mountain behind the nodding draft horse, she lost sight of the heavy stone structure made magic by the moon. But she could feel it there, hanging above them. Julien was there. Perhaps he had already taken his vow. Her heart shrank within her. Perhaps she would be turned away at the gates. Perhaps if she saw him, her words would shrivel within her. Whatever words she had once wished to say. She could not think what they were. Go back, she almost shouted to herself. You are not ready. But it was too late for that. They made the final hairpin turn and drew up to a small flat area before the monastery gates. The huge structure stretched above her into the dark, blotting out the stars. At close range, she could see the stone was of a kind of quartz or onyx. The light of the moon seemed to penetrate its surface and illuminate the floating flecks within. In the sunshine, it would positively sparkle. Massive doors, plaid with iron straps and dotted with huge studs, broke the stone. They looked as though they meant to lock out the world forever, or to lock something in.

  Her impassive escort jumped down and made his way to the right of the huge doors. He seemed undaunted by the place. She scrambled down and trailed after him. In a niche, he found a bell pull and hoisted resolutely upon it. Into the silence a deep and resonant tolling rang out, a frightening breach of the sanctity of the night. At least no one could ignore their presence. The bell was no doubt heard even in the village, just visible far below.