Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

‘Orders?’

  ‘You are to be taken to one of the cells until our master returns,’ said the man, and the guards surrounded him.

  Unlike Catherine, Franz-Josef did not fight. He submitted politely but rather absent-mindedly to their capture, almost as if his mind might be on something more important, and he allowed them to lead him through the house, along the narrow corridor with the harsh cold electric light and the rows of cells.

  ‘And be glad you aren’t going into the Men’s Ward,’ said the oily-faced guard, unlocking the end door and pushing him inside. ‘Be glad you’re who you are. One of the élite. The Family,’ he said, rather sneeringly, and Franz-Josef studied him thoughtfully.

  ‘You will assuredly be punished for this,’ he said, and the guard laughed derisively and went out, locking the door behind him.

  There had been a rather dreadful finality about the sound of the lock being turned, but Franz-Josef beat down the panic and surveyed the small cell grimly. Sparse and bare. A narrow bed. A hinged table. Basin and jug for washing. He glanced up to the small oblong of window through which the twilight was already showering its purple-tinged light, and the helplessness of his situation flooded his mind. Imprisoned. Decoyed here by Stefan’s tale about Pietro. Bitter fury rose in him, because of course Pietro was not mad, Pietro had never been within a mile of being mad. Was Pietro in fact here at all? The thought was black gall to him.

  He hardly noticed the plain but perfectly palatable meal brought to him later, or the awed glance of the guard who set it down on the small hinged table that folded down from one wall. He ate the food – thick vegetable soup – and then lay on the hard narrow bed, his hands linked behind his head.

  Rage rose in him at the way in which they had imprisoned him, but there was rage as well at himself for being so easily fooled by Stefan. Did Stefan intend to take his place as the Family’s head now? Yes, of course. It was the matrix of the whole sordid little intrigue. But Franz-Josef would be damned if he would let Stefan get Varanno, and he would be thrice damned if he would let Stefan’s wretched whelp take his place in Bianca’s bed. Ladislas and Bianca . . . Would Bianca try to rescue him? How infatuated was she with Ladislas?

  Franz-Josef’s eyes shone with a hard cold light at the thought of Ladislas in Bianca’s bed. He hated Stefan for usurping him, but he hated Ladislas more. He hated him just as much as Pál Bathory had hated Franz-Josef himself. The smile curved his mouth unexpectedly at the memory of Pál’s forced renunciation all those years ago.

  Pál and Anna had gone to immense lengths to preserve Elizabeth’s legacy, Franz-Josef knew that, as most of the Family knew it. They had been fiercely loyal, and they had been determined that their mother’s remarkable secret should survive. And although they had not Elizabeth’s strength, they had nurtured the trickle of power they had inherited and, after Elizabeth had died, they had sought out the ancient crones and the forest sorceresses that she had consulted. Some had been dead and some had been husked dry of any power they had ever possessed, so that they had been toothless and mumblingly impotent. Some had been too frightened to talk at all. But a few had been greedy and ready to talk, eagerly snatching the gifts of money that Pál and Anna had offered.

  There had been two other daughters, born after Elizabeth’s demands of those same forest sorceresses for fertility philtres, but they had both married young and Franz-Josef could not recall what had happened to them. Certainly they had never shared in the legacy, and probably they had wished to distance themselves from the scandalous crimes of their mother.

  It had been Anna and Pál, and later Franz-Josef who had nursed that fragile vein of power, and who had laid such careful and intricate plans for the secret dynasty that gradually evolved.

  The dynasty that I ruled for so long.

  At the thought of Stefan taking it all from him, the mercurial spirit of his ancestors rose strongly in him, and the old fervour and the passion for life was again in the ascendant.

  He would think as his ancestors had thought: not of defeat and death, but of fighting and victory. The Bathorys had been a wild, ungovernable clan; they had frequently died violent and bloody deaths and they had often led ill-starred revolutions and fought in cruel wars. In the earlier centuries they had hurled themselves into battle brandishing the dragon-head spears which had been their symbol, the eerie music of twin-pipes made from the clawbones of cranes echoing coldly across the scenes of carnage. And while many of them had been satyrs and sadists, as many again had been strong, powerful rulers: Stephen of Poland; Christopher and Sigismond of Transylvania; Andras the Cardinal of Varad; Laszlo the great biblical scholar. They had sometimes been mad – brain-diseased and tormented; they had often been guilty of incest and lechery and rape, and they had frequently been tragic, haunted creatures.

  But they had been fighters. They had fallen to appalling deaths on glaciers; they had been hacked to pieces by marauding Turks; they had been skewered and impaled and roasted on spits. But they had never ceased to fight. Seven centuries of that fighting spirit rose up in Franz-Josef now, and he clenched his fists and thought: Stefan shall not take Pietro’s inheritance and Ladislas shall not have Bianca, not if I have to traffick with Elizabeth’s own forest gods to prevent it!

  Because for all that had been done to her at the end, Elizabeth had never really been destroyed.

  Franz-Josef would not be destroyed either.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Elizabeth had understood about fighting when every hand was turning against you. She had fought not with her body, that sacred vessel which she had tended obsessively, but with her wits. And she had nearly – so very nearly – won.

  She had pitted her wits against the dignitaries of the day when they had begun to inquire too closely into her way of life; Franz-Josef, who knew the stories, thought she would have enjoyed doing so.

  It had begun, inevitably, with Csejthe’s pastor, Ponikenus. Ponikenus had never ceased to worry away at all those unexplained deaths at Csejthe; his mind continued to question the hasty interments, the midnight burials. All of them young girls. This was the thing that had stuck in Ponikenus’s tender conscience like a thorn. A mixed lot of deaths he might have accepted: people died from plagues, from agues and fevers and from a dozen different illnesses. But the burials at Csejthe had all been girls.

  Elizabeth had haughtily sent benefices for the Church, and they had been lavish benefices which any prudent churchman would have accepted with tactful gratitude and loyal discretion. But Ponikenus was a devout, straightforward soul, with the fervour of the early martyrs and the tenacity of a weasel. He had spent nights praying for guidance, days walking the stark mountainside, struggling with his conscience. To instigate an inquiry into the Lady’s ways? To lose at one sweep this generously endowed living and incur the wrath of the Lady’s powerful relations, all for fears which might prove groundless? Or to take the other course? To turn a blind eye; to compound the sin – committing one of his own in the process – and remain silent?

  In the end he had written to the Palatine, Gyorgy Thurzo, sending his most humble duty, but outlining his suspicions that Csejthe’s Lady might be trafficking with the devil. He could not bring himself to pen the word ‘murder’, but the Palatine, a man of learning and percipience, would understand.

  Gyorgy Thurzo understood very well indeed, and he read the pastor’s careful missive with interest, seeing at once what the good honest man could not bring himself to write. Trafficking with the devil meant any number of crimes, but inevitably and at last, those crimes led to human sacrifice. Elizabeth Bathory a murderess?

  It was not, of course, becoming to a man of Thurzo’s standing that he should harbour resentment – he did not rule out the possibility that this pastor was smarting under some kind of slight from the Lady either – but it did not behove anyone to ignore such a hint. Thurzo was a Protestant by birth and by inclination, but he took his responsibilities as Palatine very seriously, and like Ponikenus he was well aware that there
were sins of omission as well as commission.

  He pondered the matter at some length. Was it conceivable that Elizabeth had been dabbling in the dark arts? Soiling her white hands with the blood of human sacrifices? If they were to prove it, they would have to proceed with extreme caution; the lady was related to half the crowned heads in Europe, and Palatines were expendable. But it was very thought-provoking.

  Franz-Josef thought it was impossible that Thurzo, at that stage, could have guessed the extent of Elizabeth’s atrocities, but he had certainly got dangerously close to the truth. Perhaps he remembered the Lady’s disquieting beauty and her bizarre moods. Perhaps he had experienced at first hand the way the dark hunger could blaze without warning in her eyes. Anna and Pál, loyal to their souls, had always vowed that their mother had only ever taken one man, and that man her husband, into her bed, but Franz-Josef, with his cool, scholarly detachment, doubted this. Elizabeth had been a sensuous, catlike creature, and she would have explored many paths to find gratification.

  Witchcraft, necromancy, the offering of Christian souls in return for power had been a serious offence in Hungary in those days, as it had been in England. James I of England had set the standard; he had scoured the meadows and the hedgerows of his island for offenders, and he had dealt summarily with those he did find. Burning alive.

  Gyorgy Thurzo, studying the missive that had cost Ponikenus so much thought, remembered that he had always rather admired the English; certainly he would not disdain to take James Stuart as his model. Even if it involved sentencing the wilful, beautiful Countess? Even if it ended in burning that slender perfumed body and seeing it charred and blackened on a pyre? It had been a number of years since Elizabeth had rejected his advances, and Thurzo was not by nature vengeful. But his vanity had been wounded in its most vulnerable place – between his legs – and although he was not actually visualising the stake or the scaffold, it would please him to deal the imperious Countess a sharp and public rap across the knuckles. There was a saying that revenge was a dish as good taken cold as hot. He pondered the matter, because he did not want to make a fool of himself; there was another saying about the biter getting bitten. He would probe a little deeper before he took any action.

  Pál and Anna had been very young when Gyorgy Thurzo invited Elizabeth to the splendid and lavish banquet to celebrate his daughter’s wedding in his magnificent castle at Bicse. Pál had been barely ten, Anna a few years older, but they could remember the accounts of the pageantry; the tales of Bicse’s splendour, the dazzling furnishings and paintings, the gold plate and jewel-crusted faience jars and goblets that the Palatine set before his guests.

  Elizabeth had been an honoured guest, as befitted her rank, seated near to Thurzo at the wedding feast, allotted one of the best bedchambers. She had been jewelled and furred and robed in satin and silk for the ceremonies; she had been icily beautiful, arrogant and glittering, and Thurzo had eyed her speculatively. To believe the Csejthe pastor or not? Faced with the reality of the Countess, it seemed almost impossible.

  The festivities had gone on for several weeks, as was the custom, and through it all Elizabeth comported herself with icy dignity. She took part in the banquets and the entertainments and bear hunts, and she watched the jousting tournaments and the crossbow competitions that took place in the wintry afternoons when cold grey light slanted across the mountains, and throughout it all she was bored, bored, bored! Even the at-first piquant game of fooling Thurzo, of sending him melting looks of remembrance, had palled. She had seen instantly the speculative looks he had directed at her, and she had guessed that someone – who! – had been talking. There had been instant fury at the knowledge that her household harboured a jackal: she would seek out and punish the culprit when she returned to Csejthe.

  It had been easy to deal with Thurzo as it was easy to deal with all men; absurd, awkward creatures with their ugly lusts and their clutching bodies and simple minds. It was easy to play a part for the Palatine. She donned a plain white silk gown for the banquet that night, and arranged a black fur-trimmed cloak over it. Her great dark eyes were made larger and darker with the smoke of crushed burnt wild nuts, and her lips had been emphasised with one of Dorko’s geranium pastes. Her body in the white silk appeared so helpless and frail that the little bones might snap in a man’s hand, but her small white face was dominated by her eyes: black, smouldering pits. It was an astonishing contrast, and when she entered Bicse’s great hall, every head turned to look at her; for a few moments, naked lust showed in the eyes of the men. The women glared with angry jealousy: the plain, unadorned silk was a breathtaking contrast to the heavy, ornate jewels and the florid velvets and brocades of the other guests, and a wave of hatred wafted across the hall. Why did we not think of such a trick! Elizabeth, standing in the arched doorway, the glow from hundreds of glowing wax candles lighting her small figure, heard the whispers and saw the looks and smiled the cat smile.

  During the banquet she talked wistfully of the Count away fighting the Turks and the Mohacs, and several times laid her hand on Thurzo’s arm, as if seeking strength and protection. I am a helpless harmless soul who is often lonely. She was not so blatant as to say: and I should not disdain to accept a little comfort for a time: but it was implicit in her eyes and in her voice.

  But in the safety of her bedchamber, she threw off the sickly-sweet mien and reached for the shrivelled scrap of caul with its bloodied incantation etched in the oddly musical mixture of ancient Czech and Serbian. Thurzo had been partly lulled, but Elizabeth was taking no chances. She removed the caul from its leather pouch and stroked it, murmuring the incantation:

  ‘Isten, give me help: and ye also. O all powerful cloud . . . Protect Erzsebet, and grant me a long life. I am in peril. O cloud . . . Send me ninety cats . . . Tell them to assemble together, to come from the mountains, from the waters, from the rivers, from the rainwater and from the oceans . . . Tell them to bite the heart of Gyorgy Thurzo again and again . . . And guard Erzsebet from all evil.’

  It had never failed her and it did not fail her now. Thurzo was at her side for most of the remaining time, guiding her to the best seats at the entertainments, seeing to it that she had the best viewpoint of the jousting or the archery; inviting her to ride with him in the hunting and dance with him in the hall after supper. A number of times his hand lingered on her arm or her shoulder and his eyes were warm. He had never quite forgotten their brief closeness, he said. Elizabeth lowered her eyes demurely and whispered that she had not forgotten it either. Inwardly she was laughing scornfully at the ease with which she had achieved her goal. She was still silently laughing when Thurzo came to her bedchamber that night. He had the air of a man who had stolen furtively along the draughty corridors, clutching his robe about him to conceal his bedgown, constantly looking over his shoulder in case anyone should see. Once in her room, he was between the sheets in an instant, groping for her body with his hard, horny hands. It was a dreadful bore; he was clumsy and fumbling and his untrimmed nails snagged at the sheets and rasped her skin. His breath was tainted with wine and with the spicy foods served that evening, and Elizabeth had to grit her teeth as it gusted into her face. But it all had to be endured.

  The other guests were of no interest at all. They were sycophantic sheep, bleating their gratitude throughout the thirty-course banquets, mincing their self-satisfied way through the formal dances. They had flock-mentality, rushing off first to the bear-hunt and then the javelin throwing, gabbling their thanks for the Palatine’s condescension in inviting them. It was easy to escape them for a while, simple to order her coach and go off by herself with Illona and Dorko.

  Too risky, Dorko had said sourly when Elizabeth issued the order. Courting trouble, said Illona, frowning. What if she were seen? What if they could not trust the coachman any more? Someone had talked, said Dorko meaningly, who understood her mistress insofar as anyone ever did understand her, and who had guessed what lay behind the seduction of the Palatine. They had bette
r be very careful indeed, said Dorko dourly.

  But Dorko and Illona did not understand how it felt to burn up with the hunger until your body was a raging torment, until only one thing could slake the searing agony.

  Only one thing . . .

  As the coach jolted its way across the snowy tracks, behind them Bicse glittered with music and colour and lights. Bicse was safe and enclosed and innocent in its complacent world. But ahead was a small, white-covered village, no more than a sprinkling of cottages and a meagre farm with outbuildings, and within that village there would be people . . .

  Animal tracks were clear in the ground as the coach jolted towards the village, and there was a hard, glittering frost everywhere. The coachman shivered and blew on his hands in an attempt to keep warm, and the horses’ breath turned to vapour on the air. The leader skidded several times on the hard-packed ice.

  Inside the coach, Elizabeth was wrapped in thick fur cloaks, her hands were thrust into a huge black muff and a deep hood shadowed her face. Her expression within the hood was languorous, but her eyes were alert: they darted constantly from side to side, scanning the landscape. Nearly beyond Bicse’s boundaries. Nearly beyond Thurzo’s lands where his people might be patrolling. And at any minute prey would scurry across her path: she could feel it. At any minute some plump little serving girl, some blood-filled kitchen-wench or cotter’s daughter would appear. She knew that it would happen with that uncanny dark perception that came to her at such times. A pulse of excitement started to beat.

  ‘Isten help me . . . Send me a sacrifice . . .’

  It was beginning to snow in earnest, and the dark afternoon was stingingly cold when the girl appeared. Her head was covered with a shawl and she had a basket of provisions on her arm. Was she taking food to some bedridden villager or grandmother? It did not matter. The coach drew to a halt, and the door opened. A slender white arm snaked out, the pink-tipped fingers beckoning. As the girl moved curiously forward, Dorko and Illona moved as well.