“Oh, Jeff, let’s not shoot .them! They’re such cute little fellows, and now there’s nobody to scare them!”
“I could sure go for some rabbit stew,” the man said doubtfully, then chuckled. “But have it your way, Kathy. Why should the last humans make themselves obnoxious to the new dominant species?”
“You—really don’t mind?” She looked at him with the look he had seen so often these last days, half imploring, half concealed.
He shook his head. “Not a bit. Maybe we’ll’ find a pig-some of them must have gotten loose and run wild. Anyway, we’re sure to find something—”
“Jeff!” The woman froze. “What was that noise?”
“A shot,” the man said huskily, “A shot—a rifle! Kathy, there’s someone else here!”
“Were they—shooting at us?” the woman faltered.
“I doubt it. Rabbits, probably, but—”
“I’ll fire a signal!”
Jeff was already heading the boat to shore. He said quietly “No. Kathy, it’s rotten to sound suspicious, but there could be trouble. Men, running wild—well, you’re a woman.”
And all men aren’t like me . . . instinct tamed so long ago it doesn’t matter. ...
She frowned at him “Oh, surely—there wouldn’t be
trouble? After all this time? Remember how—bow glad we were just to find out we weren’t alone in the world—”
”Just the same, keep the gun out of sight,” Jeff urged gently. “They’ll probably take to us better if we’re not armed. Put it away until we’re sure we’re safe with friends—or until we know we’ll have to fight.”
Obediently, the woman put the pistol back into the pocket of her windbreaker. Jeff stood up and shouted in his ringing basso, “Hello! Hello! Anybody there?”
Silence. After a long time, a thin echo rang back, “Hello!”
“That was no echo,” Jeff muttered, “took too long. Hello! Hey there! Can you hear us?”
Three rifle shots in rapid succession answered them; after a little, a man topped the brow of the hill, stood looking down for a minute, then yelled and broke into a run toward them.
“Hello!” he gasped breathlessly when we got to them. “Well, I’ll be damned, a few others made it too! You fellers been here long? I been—well, hell! It’s a girl!” His eyes rested on Kathy. “Seeing you so far off, in them slacks— and with you—” his eyes, now strangely altered, rested on Jeff. The newcomer was a thickset man, bearded, his clothes in tatters, and Jeff held himself by force from distaste. A man alone in the wilds would not feel the same obligation as a man living with a fellow human being—to maintain some semblance of normalcy.
He said quietly, “I’m Jeff Brown, and this is Kathy Morgan.”
“I’m Hank Nichols,” the man said. “Glad to see ya’ll, Miss Morgan. Jeff.”
Jeff held out his hand, but the man ignored it and after a moment Jeff let it fall to his side. Social gestures were a little incongruous now, anyway. Nichols’ eyes were still fixed on Kathy, but Jeff, remembering how, after his own long isolation, he bad wept for joy, just to see another human thought tolerantly; half mad with loneliness. Poor devil!
Nichols asked, “Any more of you in the city? I hoped—”
It was Jeff who answered, though he had spoken to Kathy; “No. I travelled all over the Midwest, looking, and finally gave it up. Katherine travelled all over New England. There was an old man—he died just before she found me.”
“Katherine, eh? I ain’t seen ary soul either. Guess we’re all that’s left.” His gaze at Katherine was open now and his side glances at Jeff more frequent. “I just caught me a mess of rabbits. Ya’ll might as well come eat with me, they’s plenty more.”
Kathy was looking at the man with dismay; bearded, slouching, not exactly filthy but certainly not clean. His eyes, which followed her, made her feel strange. She caught Jeff’s arm and murmured.
He smiled and said reassuringly, “Steady, girl. He may not be a very prepossessing specimen, but he’s one of God’s creatures, after all. We’re not in a position to be—” he smiled at her, winningly, “segregationists.”
She nodded, hesitantly, but clung to Jeff’s arm. Nichols, turning, saw the gesture, and his eyes narrowed, an odd light behind them.
In a small clearing not far away, he had pitched a tent, and the embers of a cookfire smoldered, smoke hanging over the untidy campsite. He squatted on his heels, skinning the rabbits deftly.
“Sure is nice here. I never got to see the country before I worked in a garage down in Kentucky. Only thing, I miss the movies. Some day I’m going to find me a movie projector someplace, must be one around. Sure lonesome, too.”
“It is,” Jeff agreed. “But there may be others somewhere—in Europe, Africa—we just don’t know. We’ve no way of knowing.”
Nichols tossed away a rabbit skin. Kathy took up the skinned animal. “Can’t I help you?”
“Sure, baby.” He handed her his knife, holding her small hand for a moment in his great paw. “Sure been missing someone to cut up my rabbits.” He laughed and leered, picked up a second rabbit from the pile and began expertly trimming off the paws and stripping away the pelt. “Jeff, why don’t you hunt up some more brushwood?”
The tone, casual and commanding, made Jeff seethe; but he stood up, said mildly, “Right you are,” and walked away. His thoughts were confused. Oh Lord, thy practical jokes are beyond human understanding. A man and a woman, and even a priest to marry them. Kathy had been afraid of the man—yet she was laughing with him, offering to help him. Instinct. Each after his own .kind, male and female . . . rough and dirty and unsavory as Nichols looked, he was a man; and he could, and would recognize the instincts in himself, and in Kathy.
The thought made sickness rise in Jeff’s throat; he swallowed, trying not to gag. Kathy—and that creature!
Be sensible. He’ll give her what she wants and you can’t—or won’t. Damned fool . . . clinging to a remnant of superstition, a vow made for a world that’s ended . . .
You protected Kathy from a dozen dangers. A pack of starving dogs. Falling walls. Rats. Savage, homeless cats, turned predatory-wild. . . .
But are you going to turn her over to a man who’s worse than any of these?
He clenched his fists and his teeth, shaking, sick, fighting the need to run back to the clearing, to fight Nichols, if need be, savagely, hand to hand, for his woman. But she’s not yours . . . oh God, oh my dear God . . . blessed Mother of Mercy, Mary have pity on me . . .
Kathy screamed. And screamed again, horribly. “No! No!
Jeff—help! Help! Jeff! Oh, no-o-o—!” and the cry was choked off as if a rough hand had stifled the screamer’s throat.
Jeff cast thought, prayer and compunction aside; the last remnant of civilization dropped from him and he ran. “Kathy! Kathy!” he shouted. “Easy, darling, I’m coming—”
Nichols bullet struck him broadside in the lung and he toppled headlong into the little gully.
Kathy, her hands to her mouth, stared in crazy horror at the bearded man. “You—shot him! You—shot him!”
“Yeah, I shot the dam—,” he said, but Kathy understood nothing of the rest of the sentence except that it was unbelievably foul. “Anyway, that’s all over. Figured you’d be damn glad to get rid of him. What’d he do—catch you when you were alone? Anyhow, now we got rid of him. Come on, babe, c’mere—hey! What you doing?”
Kathy fumbled in her windbreaker pocket. She had become expert at shooting the swift-moving, starving rats. Just another rat, she told herself, and her hand was steady on the trigger; the slug tore away his smile, wiped the sickening memory of his leer from her mind forever. Not until she found herself kicking his limp body again and again did she realize that she was crying. She ran to Jeff, kneeling at his side, babbling.
His eyes opened painfully. “Kathy—”
“I shot him,” she wept, “I killed him, I—”
“You shouldn’t have,” he whispere
d. His mind strayed. “Say—an act of contrition—”
She stared down in horror and sudden wild surmise as the man clawed slowly at the deep agony in his chest. Then he muttered, his eyes and his brain quite clear, “I was—right all along. As long as we—feel this way—we might as well end it here. Good thing he came along, or I would have given in . . .” he choked on bloody spit.
“Don’t talk! Oh, Jeff, darling, darling—don’t talk—” Sobbing, she cradled his head on her knees. His eyes, already unseeing, sought vainly to find her in the closing darkness. He muttered incoherently in Latin for a moment, then suddenly, softly, “Kathy—darling—bend down and tell me— did you lose that key on purpose?”
Sobbing, the woman bent to whisper her answer, but he was already beyond hearing. Father Thomas Jefferson Brown said clearly, loudly, “Sorry, Lord, you’ll have to start from a fresh batch of clay,” and died. After a minute, Kathy straightened, letting his limp body fall.
“He was right all along,” she said to nobody, put the pistol in her pocket, picked up the two skinned rabbits with a grim smile, and went back to the boat alone.
Treason of the Blood
Every night, as darkness folded over the Castello di Speranza, the little Contessa, Teresa, descended to gloat over her prisoner. There were formalities to this visit, each stylized as the motions of some pagan priest celebrating some high and ancient ritual before the altar. First she dismissed all of her servants, even the deaf—mute Rondo who obeyed her as a trained dog. Then, each night bruising her frail hands anew on the steel, she drew the bolts of her chamber and fastened the locks of earn casement. If some mythical observer could have hidden behind the arras he would have seen a strange thing; into each metal bolt, roughly and painfully scratched by hands unused to such labor, the sign of the cross had been inscribed.
Then she knelt for a moment before the oaken prie-dieu, clasping her fingers about her beads; mere habit now, for she had long ceased to pray. The mirror at the far end of the chamber gave back her reflection dimly, a shadow pattern in black and white; the black coils of her hair netted with thin lace, the close black of a mourning gown crossed by the clasped fingers of white hands on ivory beads, her face—drawn to the whiteness of bone, of alabaster-brushed with black silken brows.
A face made for softness and for love, but hard now and cruel, the eyes level with hate, the soft mouth drawn to a thin white line. A saint, transformed by the double lashes of grief and sworn revenge into a fiend from the pit.
Rising and laying aside her beads, the Contessa lifted the lid of a carven chest, and took a three—thonged whip of braided leather. At the end of each thong, bits of razor—steel had been fixed; the leather was blackened and the bits of steel dulled with a dull brownish - red stain. She touched her fingertips to the steel and drew them back quickly; the sharp steel had drawn her blood.
She shrugged, disregarding the pain. In the leather grip of the quirt, crudely cut by an inexpert knife, was again the sign of the cross.
There was no answering creak as she drew back the bolt of the secret panel. This door was kept oiled and in perfect repair. A taper held high in one hand, she descended the stairs as noiselessly as her own shadow, her trailing skirts sweeping aside fresh cobwebs and sending small spiders scurrying into the cracks of the stone.
The brackish smell of stagnant underground pools came up to meet her. There had been a time when her delicate nostrils had shuddered at this smell, but that time was long past. She herself hardly realized how much she had changed from the young girl, afraid of every shadow, her frail fingers bleeding from the struggle with the then—rusted bolt, who had first come down these steps in despair and terror.
She paused and sighed. “Why do I come?” she asked almost aloud, and tike an echo cast back from the dank depths there was a whisper and a sigh, “Come.”
Two turns of the winding stair and she came into an arched corridor, lighted with dim moonlight filtering down long shafts built centuries ago. The passageway was lined with remnants of a grimmer day; the rusted bars of a pulley still suggesting the strappado, a crisscross of bars like a hard couch, the grim green—bronze stare of an Iron Maiden. The Contessa barely gazed at these things which once had made her shudder; now they seemed familiar friends. She toyed, indeed, with a moment’s thought they could be put in order before she turned the final twist in the passage, where a steel grating reared from stone floor to arched ceiling. Taking the great key from the chatelaine at her belt, the Contessa unlocked the grating and passed through.
“Good evening, Contessa,” said the man chained to the wall.
The Contessa bowed her head. “And to you a good evening, messire, she said in her melodious voice, whose modulation was so deep a habit that even the transformation of maiden to fiend could not alter it.
She surveyed the man before her; his arms encased in cuffs of iron secured to the wall by long chains that passed through a ringbolt there. His legs too were locked in anklets of steel joined by a chain. A tattered white shirt and dark—stained leather riding breeches were all his clothing, yet, as he bowed, his fair hair caught the gleam of the taper and the dancing shadow, on the stone wall seemed to reflect wide wings.
The woman, standing carefully beyond the furthest reach of the chain, let her eyes linger on the features, thin, sharp and subtly sensual. As he raised his head again, his eyes, blazing with some strange spark, crossed hers. He shuddered as if with some terrible pain. The long look was almost like a lover’s glance. Again the Contessa was shaken by the curious beauty of the chained man. Beauty? A strange word, yet beauty it was, the beauty of some restless caged eagle, beating its wings with the fierce despair and agony of its inhuman hunger. But his glance fell first, though when he spoke his voice held a lilting mockery.
“You are beautiful this evening, madonna,” he said, “I regret that I may not kiss your hand.”
A spasm of indefinable emotion seemed to convulse her face. “So,” she said abruptly, “kiss if you will,” and extended her slender fingers, bruised and bleeding, to him. It was a mocking gesture, but he seized her hand in his and bent low over it, touching his lips to the hand. Then, abruptly, he struggled as if sudden madness possessed him, his chained hands crushing over her wrist, bringing them up avidly to his lips.
With a single swift gesture she brought up the whip and, wrenching her other hand free, lashed out with a single brutal blow. He flinched momentarily and in that instant she was beyond his reach again, her eyes flaming.
“I had forgotten,” she taunted, “it is full moon and you—hunger!”
He stood slumped in his chains, not deigning to answer her mockery. At last he said, quietly, “Aye, full moon again. Are not your dreams evil, madonna?”
She shuddered as if to ward off the memory, but said, “I count myself lucky if you can do no more harm than this—to send me evil dreams!” A spasm of disgust twisted her mouth. Suddenly she stepped back and caught up the whip again.
“Angelo, Count Fioresi,” she cried in a ringing voice, “You have fed on your last victim - vampire!” She laughed aloud.
“Three months have I kept you in chains and watched your strength diminish and your evil hunger grow!”
Suddenly he strained wildly against the chains, but the spasm was feeble and soon he fell back exhausted, leaning against the wall and sagging.
“Once you could have burst those chains,” she said, smiling in cruel triumph, “had I not carved the cross into each bracelet! Now even ordinary chains would hold you, I think!” He propped himself up on his hands.
“Madonna,” he said in a low voice, “my life is at your mercy; you might end it at your pleasure. None could blame you, if you sought my death. But why do you find pleasure in tormenting me?”
“Need you ask?” she cried in a high anguished voice—the last remnant of the young girl she had been three scant months ago. “You, who came to this castle as my suitor, beguiling my father by posing as the grandson of his oldest frie
nd? How often he spoke of you, saying he felt, when he was in your company, that the friend of his youth had returned from the dead? He did not know how true he spoke!”
The Count shook his head.
“No,” he said wearily. “If you must tell again that old sad tale, tell it truly. That is but old wives telling, that such as I return from death. We do not die, but live many times the span of mortal men, unless accident cuts off our life—or, or, we are barred too long from our other source of life.”
Her convulsed face seemed to waver in the dim light.
“Be it so then. Your old friend, my father, sickened and died, then Rico my brother, of a wasting sickness. Last of all Cassilda, the sister who had mothered me when I was left motherless, was laid in unhallowed Earth—still you sought to wed me.”
“Madonna, you call me a fiend—”
“Can you deny it?” she cried. “Can you claim to be man, you who have touched neither food nor drink in these months since I brought you here?”
“I have admitted I am not a man of your sort,” he said, his head bowed. “My race is far older than yours, Madonna, perhaps made before your own God gave dominion to your kind. Like some beasts, we live—when we have passed youth—only by the blood of living things. Till my thirtieth year, I thought myself as other men. Yet I did not kill your kin, Contessa. And if I had; if I had? Your eldest brother Stefano was slain in a duel with the lord of Monteno, yet Monteno’s kin are honored guests here in Castello di Speranzo. I did not know.” He seemed suddenly to writhe in pain—“I did not know, death was already in your kinfolk when I came here.”
“You lie!” she cried out, and the lash whistled in the air as it caught the man across face and chest. He cried out hoarsely and the fiend smile crossed the girl’s face.
“It gives me joy to know that you can suffer!” she cried. “Suffer as I suffered!”
Marion Zimmer Bradley Super Pack Page 28
