The Seeker

by Martyn Taylor

  She gazed up into his eyes and the bliss he saw inside her seemed as though it was about to rip his heart from its moorings. Was she so eager to cease to exist that death mattered more to her than anything else in her long, amazing life?

  Deep inside he screamed out that he should mean more to her than dying, at least, but as soon as he thought it he hoped he had kept it secret, ashamed that he should imagine a creature as ancient and magnificent as Roxane should care for something as insignificant as him.

  She smiled. “Thank you, Robert Call, thank you for everything you have done for me, everything you know and everything you don’t know. In another time..?” S

  he stood up on her tiptoes and kissed his lips with such sweet forgivingness he feared he might fall apart. He opened his mouth to speak, but could find no words. She turned away and returned to stand between Herne and the Minotaur.

  Why should he even begin to think of laying a burden like his feelings on the shoulders of someone who had finally managed to reach the end of their long and winding road? She knew there was nowhere left to go, nothing more she wished to experience. He knew it too, and that nobody cared whether or not he could accept that, not even Roxane.

  Paul the Roman marched into the glade, dressed in full centurion armour that was polished blindingly silver in the moonlight, his scarlet cloak draped from his shoulders and billowing around his calves like a woollen sail.

  If there was a feeling of raw power about Herne and the Minotaur, it also surrounded Paul, only several times multiplied. The ground seemed to tremble beneath his footfall, as though the entire lost Legio Hispania was returning to camp rather than the single survivor. He carried his silver helmet beneath his left arm, scarlet plumes dancing with the rhythm of his progress. He was the very image of a two thousand year old cavalry officer, but Call doubted even a Percheron could carry him into battle now. It would require something with the strength of an elephant.

  He came to a parade halt between Call and Roxane, crashing to a bone-juddering attention, turned about on his right heel and came to attention. A Brigade of Guards Regimental Sergeant Major would have fainted away on the spot watching him. He unsheathed his gladius and lifted it to his lips, saluting Roxane, then Herne, then the Minotaur and finally Call, who would have returned the salute, had he remembered whether his hand was supposed to be face out to his forehead or sideways.

  Paul replaced his sword in its scabbard and took gentle hold of Roxane’s right hand in both of his, drawing her from the grasp of her attendants. Herne and the Minotaur took three long backward steps and seemed to Call to fade a little into the background, the circle of forest inhabitants. Holding her hands in his, Paul looked down into her eyes.

  “My child, I gave you into eternal life, did I not?” His voice sounded to Call to be intimately conversational, but he had no doubt everyone and everything gathered there heard the vampire’s words as though he breathed them into their ears.

  “You made me a blood drinker, yes,” Roxane replied. Call saw she was staring into Paul’s eyes, giving as good as she got in the competition he only just realised was taking place.

  “Yet now you wish me to take this blessing away from you?” Anyone could have been forgiven for believing Paul did not understand her desire.

  “I wish you to lift what has become a curse to me, a sentence of solitude without end.”

  Call surmised this was not the reply he had been given when he rehearsed this ceremony with her. He smiled a little, inwardly. Roxane was going to be the contrary creature she had become right to the end.

  “Then I have your forgiveness for what I am about to do?”

  The question dumbfounded Call. He had not imagined that a thing such as Paul had required forgiveness in centuries. Roxane reached up with both hands and drew Paul’s head towards her, kissing him on the eyes and then the lips before releasing him. “You are forgiven,” she said.

  To Call the words sounded as empty and clanging as a cracked brass bell. Then he realised that she could never truly forgive Paul, not for killing her – that was her dream, her obsession – but for having created her a vampire in the first place.

  She tugged open her robe, exposing her throat and the upper swell of her breasts, inclining her head back and to the side to give Paul unimpeded access to her carotid arteries. That gesture made Call feel intense discomfort, the conviction that he was nothing more than a voyeur. He should not be there. Nobody should be there. Such a moment of intimacy was not to be shared.

  He began to gather himself to run away so that he could not bear witness, but just then her gaze caught his for a moment and he could no more move from where he stood than could a statue.

  Paul bent forward and Call saw his extended fangs touch her throat, although they did not penetrate the flesh as they would that of an ordinary human being. The vampire bit down harder, yet still made no progress until Roxane’s hand reached up behind his head, took a fistful of hair and pulled down hard on it. She gasped aloud as the fangs penetrated her artery, her hand falling away as he began to slowly feed on her.

  At first anyone might have thought it was just a ceremony, with Paul playing his scripted part as Roxane lay back in his grasp like some heroine of a pre-Raphaelite painting and he sipped on her life blood as though it was nothing more than fine wine. Except it was not wine. It was blood, a vampire’s blood, an ancient vampire’s blood, more potent than anything even Paul had ever tasted before.

  Before long he began to tremble, and his feeding became more energetic, more and more and more, the noises he made inhuman and liquidly obscene, until Roxane fell from his arms onto the ground and he dropped to his knees, chewing on her throat, tearing it to pieces, as delicate as a hyena afraid of the lion’s imminent return and as aware only of his meat as that hyena would be.

  There was nothing of the ceremonial about this, just tearing and drinking and blood. Call was at once more outraged by this than he had ever been in his life, that anyone she be so treated, and at the same time cowed into silent awe at the spectacle of the creature that stood atop the food chain, unchallenged, as it went about its natural business. Had he brought a weapon with him he would have used it on the vampire’s neck, regardless of his knowledge that it would have no effect on the thing before him. There was nothing he could do to harm a vampire as ancient as the Roman. Dying to prove it would be futile.

  Roxane would not have approved.

  The Roman eventually groaned and fell away from what little remained of Roxane, rolling over onto his belly and digging into the earth with his fingernails, as though trying to dig his own grave. A noise came from him that could have been sobbing. Shining particles began to rise into the air from where Roxane’s abandoned robe lay on the ground, rising like embers and sparks from a camp fire, rotating in rising air the way insects rode a thermal in summer, intelligent birds too.

  Call stepped forward and took up the robe, only for Paul to lunge forward and grab hold of his wrist, making Call feel as though his bones were crumbling inside his arm. “Leave it alone, Hunter. It is not for you.” The Roman took the robe from Call’s hand and buried his face in it where her blood had stained it, releasing Call.

  “Hunter?” wondered Herne. “You are a hunter? Like me?” Call shivered. He was not in the least like Herne the Hunter. That much he did know, if not much else. “What do you hunt, little man?”

  Call looked up at his face, this personification of an English mythic archetype who seemed as real and human as he did, although there was no humanity to be seen behind the fire in those eyes. “I hunt them,” he whispered, waving his right hand idly at the vampire. “Things like them. Things not as powerful as it.” He shook his head and spat on the ground between the vampire and himself. “There is no point my hunting it. There is nothing I can do to kill anything as ancient as him.” He was uncertain who he despised the more, Paul for being as powerful as he was, or himself for being as weak as he was.

  “It was her choice, Hunter,�
� said Herne, looking to the Minotaur for support. Who could interpret the expression on that face? “You were a witness. The vampire is not responsible. He was just the instrument she chose to bring death to her.”

  Call felt rage at this begin to rise inside him, only to subside just as quickly. Herne spoke the truth. Feeling the strength drain out of him, he sank down to squat on his haunches, pressing his back against the tree. Tears filled his eyes and rolled down his face, unregarded until he wiped them away with the heel of his hand. He would not weep for her.

  He became aware of the forest dwellers moving away, back between the trees and into the depthless shadows as clouds moved before the moon and diminished its harsh brilliance, transforming shining silver into dull grey. Paul knelt in front of him, carefully folding her robe and slipping it beneath his cloak. When he was done there was no sign to be seen of her, no evidence Roxane had ever been there, had ever even existed. The Roman wrapped his arms around himself, cradling the robe to him, rocking back and forth, keening in a language Call did not recognise, so low his words could hardly be heard.

  When he fell silent, Herne and the Minotaur bowed towards the both of them with elaborate, careful courtesy, almost touching the ground with their hands, then turned away and walked into the shadows. As they disappeared a fine, almost invisible rain began to fall, quickly replaced by a thick mist that blew in from nowhere and filled the glade to the extent that Call could not see beyond the furthest reach of the great oak’s branches. That was just great. His head fell forward until his chin rested on his chest. He raised his knees until he could wrap his arms around them and began to feel really sorry for himself.

  Abruptly he raised his head and glared into the Roman’s eyes, finding not the least humanity in them.

  “Why don’t you just have done with it and kill me?”

  Paul fell silent and looked at him. “Kill you? Why should I kill you?”

  Call snorted. “You’re a vampire, I’m a vampire hunter. That means it is you or me.”

  The vampire chuckled and shook his head. “A vampire who does not want to kill, and a vampire hunter who cannot kill. Isn’t that pathetic?”

  Call said nothing. Now he looked at their circumstance that way, pathetic was exactly what it was.

  “Pretend I am the Sphynx,” the vampire said. “I will ask you a question. If you answer correctly I shall kill you, seeing as you want me to. Answer incorrectly and you shall live.”

  “Ask away.” Call did not hesitate.

  “Did you love her?”

  Whatever question he had been expecting – if he had been expecting anything at all – it was not that one. Did he love her? Their days together passed before him, flickering, jagged images, like a Victorian magic lantern show, what they had shared together, what they had kept from each other. Of course it was impossible that he could love a monster, impossible. What was love anyway?

  What was the momentary illumination he had found with Roxane compared to the unhappy every afterwards relationship he no longer had with Marion? And he was certain he had loved Marion, once upon a time, loved her enough to create a life together, have children together, putting a collective two fingers into the eyes of entropy, loved her enough to still have an aching, bleeding, Marion-shaped and sized void in his heart. What was whatever he believed he felt for Roxane compared to that? There had never been a tomorrow with Roxane, just an eternity of yesterdays she remembered and he did not. Love was inconceivable…

  “Yes, I loved her.” Sometimes the truth could escape when the mind was looking for excuses elsewhere.

  “Then you live,” sighed Paul. “I condemn you to the same sentence imposed upon me, a lifetime of loving Roxane in her absence.” He looked at Call and smiled. “While I was with them I always believed it was her brother who held my heart. Only now, when he is gone and a long, long time has passed do I realise I was mistaken even about that. It was always her. Life is many things, many, many things. It is bitter and sweet, joyous and daunting, long and short, empty and fulfilled, but what it always, always, always is… is cruel.”

  With that he turned his back on Call and hunched himself down within the shelter of his cloak. Call leaned back against the tree, wrapping his jacket around himself against the damp chill. He did not expect to sleep.

  When he awoke he was alone beneath the tree. It was light, but not yet daylight. Mist clung wetly to the grass and drew formed traceries among the branches like spider webs. He almost expected to see something gnostic and profound written on those webs, to help him live through the coming weeks and months.

  ‘Some Pig’ might be appropriate, but there was nothing to be seen. Even though he hurt and ached in places he had not known he could feel, Call got to his feet and looked around himself.

  The glade looked smaller than it had appeared before he fell asleep, the grass longer and more tussocky, the oak much less huge and imposing.

  It would be very easy for him to believe he had imagined everything, the assembly, the death, the consequences, but he knew that would be imagination. However improbable – never mind improbable, however impossible what he had witnessed might seem, the absence of Roxane at the back of his mind was testament that she was gone. If she was gone then what he had witnessed had to have occurred, because there was no other way she could be gone.

  There was no sign of Paul the Roman either, which alleviated the desolation her absence caused in him, just a little.

  Chapter Thirty

  When he arrived home Call was utterly drained, a dried out husk of the man he had been. A strong gust of wind would have lifted him into the air and carried him away. He desperately wanted to just go to his bed and die, but first of all, after he closed the door behind himself, he turned off the alarm box and rearmed it to take account of his being home again.

  He walked through into the back room that would have been a dining room, but which he used as his quiet space. There were no electronic devices of any description in there. He had even left his mobile phone on the sideboard in the hall, beside the junk mail he had dumped there, the only sort of mail he ever received nowadays.

  In the quiet room he sometimes sat and thought, but most times he just sat, allowing his brain to sift through his recent experiences, filing some away, discarding most without conscious input from himself, something like dreaming while awake. It might be instinctive, but Call trusted his instinct. Before sitting down in his single reclining chair he opened the curtains at the tall windows for the first time in as long as he could remember and watched the dust motes dancing on the sunbeams.

  For a moment he wondered about the health consequences of breathing air as thick with dust as that only to laugh at the absurdity of the question. If he was so concerned the answer was simple. He could search out his vacuum cleaner and try to remember how to use it.

  Turning back into the room he was startled to see two small parcels and an envelope on the table in the middle of the room. He could not breathe. His head felt so light he raised his hands towards it as though he needed to hold it on. He felt as though he was about to pass out. They had not been there when he left the house the day before, and hadn’t the table been placed in front of the hearth?

  He did not try to think who could have overcome his security to enter his home only to leave something behind them. It was a worryingly short list of candidates. He pulled over a hard backed wooden chair and sat down before the desk.

  The chair was uncomfortable, which was what he intended it to be. He sat with his hands cupped on his lap, concentrating on controlling his urgent desire to rip open the heavy white envelope and discover what it contained. His hands might not be itching but his brain was.

  He concentrated on his breathing, counting in for ten, and then holding for ten, breathing out for ten and then holding again for ten. He felt his heart rate returning to an acceptable level, his startlement dissipating. He very deliberately looked anywhere in the room but at the gifts the Roman had left for him. He w
as in no doubt it was Paul. With Roxane gone as well as Cyrano, there was no-one else it could be.

  Finally, when his curiosity threatened to burst into flames within his skull, he reached out and took up the envelope, which was not an actual envelope but a single sheet of plain white paper, of a heavy, luxurious quality, folded carefully to make an envelope, the way they were made before anyone invented a water activated gum to hold the pieces in place. He unfolded the paper. Within it was a single sheet of writing paper, A5 size or similar, of the same quality as the envelope. It had been folded very precisely in half. The ink was starkly, richly black against the dazzling white of the paper, the penmanship old fashioned and ornate. Call did not recognise it.

  ‘Seeker’ he read, ‘Roxane commanded me to give these items to you. One is for you, the other for your daughter. She said that you will know which is which. That was her command to me. All I have to say to you is this, do not seek me out. Until we meet again.’ He signed it ‘Paulinus Antonius Drusus’ - Paul the Roman.

  As far as Call was concerned, hell would freeze over before he ever sought out the Roman, unless he discovered a means by which he might destroy him. A tactical nuclear device might get the job done, but he wasn’t going to try to confirm that. He would happily die before encountering him again.

  Reaching over the desk, he retrieved a glass ashtray and a GI Issue cigarette lighter, which had been his father’s and which he did not use because he had never smoked, not even once to confirm it tasted as foul as he suspected. He crumpled the paper into a loose ball, lit it and dropped it into the ashtray, where he watched it turn first into black ash and then into fine grey and white powder.

  The first package was the size of a hen’s egg, but lighter, and it needed some examination before he loosened the paper fold and tongue that held it together. Roxane’s ring dropped onto the table with a solid thud. Even looking at it this closely he could not be certain what the stone was, opaque and a pale, milky, greeny-blue shot through with scarlet and emerald filaments.