Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  ‘How?’

  ‘In the moat at Csejthe, beneath the crypt of the church . . .’ Hilary could feel the shrug. ‘Wherever I could. I became quite skilled.’ Surely a note of pride there.

  ‘Christian burial?’ asked the judges, and Dorko said eagerly that in the beginning certainly it had been Christian burial. The Lady had wished for it.

  ‘But later?’

  ‘It became harder. The snooping pastor started to ask questions. In the end we said what prayers we thought appropriate.’

  ‘“We”?’

  ‘Illona and me. When she helped.’ The contempt was plain.

  ‘What other things were done to the prisoners?’

  ‘The Lady sometimes tore flesh from their breasts. And sometimes Illona helped her to bum them between their legs.’ Illona did that, not I, said the words, self-righteously.

  Turoczi had probably edited that part. Dorko would have been a lot more explicit and a whole lot earthier.

  Again the question was put: ‘How many girls were killed?’

  The answer was as before.

  ‘We did not count. But at least three hundred.’

  The judges had not taken very long to deliberate on the evidence. Turoczi, precise as ever, had set the events down chronologically, and it appeared that the sentence against the two women servants had been pronounced almost immediately:

  ‘Whereas the confessions and testimonies have demonstrated the guilt of Elizabeth Bathory, it is known she has committed frightful crimes against female blood . . . Whereas her accomplices were the women known as Illona and Dorko and we have decided that their fingers shall be ripped off by the executioner’s pincers, because they have by means of these fingers committed crimes against the female sex; they shall further be thrown alive into the fire.’

  ‘This sentence shall be carried out immediately, in the courtyard outside this palace.’

  Hilary, reading the words of the sentence, occasionally having recourse to the dictionary and the grammar book, felt her skin crawl. It was unclear whether the words were Turoczi’s own, or whether he was reporting the judges’ words verbatim, but either way it made chill reading.

  Their fingers torn off and then burned alive . . . It was necessary to remember that they had knowingly and willingly aided in all that butchery and in all that torture. It was certainly no worse than either of them deserved.

  But what had been the sentence on Elizabeth?

  Gyorgy Thurzo had deliberated long into the night with his fellow judges, and a chill dawn was breaking as they filed back into the courtroom. Below the window were the sounds of hammering as the haiduks erected the scaffold for the execution of the two serving women. The sentence would be carried out at noon: Dorko and Illona, along with a handful of others who had been discovered to have assisted Elizabeth in her butchery, would die in the flames.

  A bad death. But a deserved punishment.

  And what of Elizabeth?

  Thurzo’s mind was concentrated on Elizabeth all through the terrible hour when Dorko and Illona were taken out to the courtyard to die. They were stupid women and they deserved every ounce of the agony ahead of them, but even so Thurzo felt his bowels slither ominously as he stood with his fellow judges to watch the execution.

  The executioner was robed in scarlet and wearing a cowl, and his assistants had already stacked up the faggots, ready for firing. The tearing off of the women’s fingers was to be done by white-hot pincers – an ironic touch when you remembered some of the tortures these creatures had helped to carry out.

  As the Judge Royal read out the act of accusation and condemnation, there was a dull murmuring from beyond the palace gates, and Thurzo saw that hundreds of people were gathering outside to watch. Ordinary people, peasants, who must have travelled miles to witness the end of a reign of terror.

  Only she still lives, said his mind. Elizabeth still lives.

  With the thought, he heard the crowd chanting: ‘The Beast, kill the Beast . . .’

  So she would go down in history as the Beast of Csejthe, thought Thurzo. The Beast of Csejthe who murdered between three and six hundred virgins for their blood . . .

  Long before the reading of the condemnation was over, the two women were swooning, so that the guards had to drag them to the centre. Their hands were held firmly in place, chained to a small wooden block, and the executioner lifted the glowing tongs.

  Thurzo thought the worst part was the sound and the smell: the sizzle of scorched flesh and then the stench of charred skin and fat. He was near enough to hear the other sounds, as well: the tearing of joints, the crunching of bones. One by one, the fingers were torn from their roots, leaving bloodied stumps that poured blood on to the ground. He should have ordered sawdust to be spread. You never got rid of bloodstains. Several of the judges were pressing linen kerchiefs to their lips and others were swaying, but the crowd at the gates were shouting in triumph. The two women were screaming, terrible trapped-hare screams, and the crowd screamed in joyful ecstasy against them.

  ‘Kill the monsters . . . Burn them, burn them . . .’

  The executioner and his assistant left the thumbs until last. They’ll be the hardest to tear off, thought Thurzo, sickened and appalled, but unable to look away. As the pincers gripped what was left of Dorko’s hand again, Thurzo felt the agony at the base of his own thumbs.

  The executioner paused and seemed to consult with his two young assistants. After a few moments, he reached for a glinting knife and, as the crowd pressed eagerly forward, he raised it above his head and then brought it down sharply, half severing the victims’ thumbs. As he reached once more for the tongs, both women swooned from agony and terror.

  ‘Prop them up.’ Thurzo did not know who had given the order, but the women were set upright, guards on each side of them. The crowd was shrieking again, ‘Burn them, burn them, burn them . . .’

  Dorko and Illona were half carried, half dragged to the jutting stakes and tied to them with iron gyves at wrists and ankles. They are high up, thought Thurzo, staring. Then there will be none of the merciful strangling under cover of the smoke. They will bear the whole brunt.

  The executioner’s assistants stepped forward and held burning torches to the piles of faggots, and at once the flames leapt into the raw wintry afternoon: garish red and yellow. A thin pall of smoke drifted across the courtyard and Thurzo shuddered. What must it be like to smell your own funeral pyre?

  The fires were burning up now, and the whole square was filled with the hot pungent scents of an ordinary winter’s bonfire. As the wind drifted across they caught and roared upwards, engulfing the two struggling prisoners; there was a truly dreadful sound as the women’s hair caught light and blazed wildly. From his position, Thurzo could see that their skins had turned shiny and red, and then began to split with the heat. Rivulets of fat ran out and the smell of burning meat was so obscenely reminiscent of roasting pork that he actually felt hunger-juices flood his mouth.

  The wind scudded across the courtyard again, flurries of snowflakes in it now, whipping the smoke into a huge, greasy cloud. For several minutes it was no longer easy to see what was happening and Thurzo murmured a prayer of thanks, but then the smoke billowed upwards and Thurzo saw, with dreadful clarity, the blackened, shrivelled things on the stakes, the flesh charred and smoking, but still moving. Still struggling to escape.

  As the wind changed again, the smoke belched into the faces of the judges, the rank, meaty stench so strong that Thurzo’s innards betrayed him then, and he ran from the scene.

  The death of the two evil old women solved nothing. It certainly did not solve the problem of what they were to do with Elizabeth.

  It was useless to argue that her high rank absolved her from the law; Thurzo had been genuinely appalled at the bloody pageantry unfolded at the tribunal, and he was absolutely determined that the Lady should answer for her butchery. The evidence had been inconclusive insofar as actual numbers were concerned: the judges had murmured to
one another that probably the servants were near enough illiterate, and so the clerk to the court had tried to make a rough calculation. But the evidence, overwhelming as it was, had been so contradictory, that they had been unable to agree the point.

  At last, de Szulo said, ‘What do numbers matter? It’s clear that she killed at least three hundred of the poor miserable creatures by various appalling methods.’

  What in God’s name were they going to do with her? What sentence could they pronounce that would punish her and satisfy the murmuring crowds but would not bring down the ire of her family.

  As Hilary turned the last pages of Turoczi’s remarkable document, the only sound in the convent library was the steady ticking of the clock. All about her, the house slept, and the traffic in the city outside had died to the occasional purr of a solitary car or a lorry rumbling its way through the night. Pools of yellow light lay across the great leather-topped table, and the old library was scented with long-ago lavender and beeswax and the lilac that must once have bloomed in Elizabeth Bathory’s gardens outside.

  It is an autumn night and yet I can smell the lilac and feel the sharp tang of the lavender . . .

  And beneath it all I can smell the blood that she spilled.

  At any minute, thought Hilary, her senses racing, I shall know what happened to her. In another minute I shall turn a page and there it will be.

  There was a mounting sense of dread now; only a few pages left. In five pages I shall know what they did to her, thought Hilary and discovered that she was shaking with sheer nervous anticipation. It had all happened over four hundred years ago, but she was shaking as she waited to hear the verdict. Four pages, three . . .

  The judges’ indecision and their reluctance to pass any kind of death sentence – in particular Gyorgy Thurzo’s reluctance – came over very strongly. They had hated her and they feared her and her crimes had genuinely horrified them. But they had also feared the wrath of her powerful family.

  Turoczi had said, in a brief introductory note, that at the end of his work were listed the appeals made by Elizabeth’s family for mercy to be shown. These would be interesting, but they could be studied later. What mattered now was Elizabeth’s fate.

  And then, without warning, it was there. Hilary felt the breath catch in her throat.

  ‘Elizabeth Bathory, by the power vested in us from His Highness, Matthias of Hungary, I condemn you to perpetual imprisonment in your own Castle of Csejthe.

  ‘You will be immured inside Csejthe for ever; a room will be made for you and the door and the windows of that room will be bricked up. Food and water will be passed through a small hatch.

  ‘Four scaffolds will be erected at the four corners of the castle to show that inside lives a creature condemned to death.

  ‘That death will never be dealt by us, Madame.’

  Hilary laid down the book carefully.

  Walled up alive. Never to see a human face again, never to hear a human voice. Darkness and silence for the rest of your life. How long would you survive? How long could anyone survive like that?

  She looked down at the page again. Beneath the closing paragraphs, someone had written in a clear neat hand.

  ‘On 21 August 1614, four years after sentence was passed, Elizabeth Bathory died in her lonely windowless prison. She died towards nightfall, without crucifix, without light, abandoned by all.’

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Elizabeth had shown neither weakness nor regret. She had stormed about the locked bedchamber, her eyes burning like ebony flames in her little white face, bitter fury scalding her small, frail body.

  The sound of hammering reverberated through the castle. The workmen preparing the terrible dungeon, and building the four scaffolds which would indicate that within the castle walls was a creature condemned to death.

  Her mind seethed with speculation. There would almost surely be appeals for mercy from her children. Anna and Pál would speak out, certainly. They did not understand her, and their spouses feared her. But they would do what was expected.

  But escape would not come from that quarter. Thurzo and the King would listen to the pleas, but they would not give in. If she was to escape she would have to fight, not as her ancestors had fought, with clawbone-horns and curving scimitars and double-headed axes, but with her mind and her body. Could it be done?

  She paced the bedchamber, stifled by the warmth and the closed curtains, staring at the candle flame that burned at her bedside. Soon now, there would not even be a candle flame.

  In her mind, she reviewed the guards. In every fortress there was a vulnerable spot, in every armed sentinel there was a weak link. Where was the weak link here? How could it be used?

  There was one guard – not young, but physically powerful and well-built – who had looked at her not as a creature to be guarded, but as a woman. His eyes had flickered over her and then had determinedly reassumed their correct impassivity. He was dark-haired and slant-eyed, in the manner of those possessing a little of the old Magyar blood.

  The wolfsmile curved her lips.

  Guarding the Lady of Csejthe, the Blood Countess who was being called by her own villagers, the Beast, was not quite the sinecure the dark-haired, half-Magyar guard had expected. He had boasted a bit in the village, of course, as they had all boasted; everyone drinking deeply of the ale served by the innkeeper whose modest tavern was enjoying more prosperity since the Lady’s capture than he had ever imagined possible.

  The dark-haired guard had drunk his ale, listening and joining in with the talk, everyone vying to tell what they’d do if the Lady should try any of her tricks, their voices just a bit too loud to be quite believable, their laughter just a little forced.

  The guard duty was easy enough. You had to stand outside the Lady’s bedchamber door for quite a long stretch, but in the service of His Majesty you got used to that. They shared the hours out between them, careful to be fair, occasionally swapping shifts so that two or three of them could go off to the tavern together.

  The dark-haired guard had drawn the early evening stretch of duty tonight. It was a time when you felt curiously unsafe in Csejthe Castle, although it would not have done to say this. But it was the slightly eerie hour when you felt the day shiver and blur, and when purple shadows stole across the harsh mountains that girdled Csejthe, and the forests were filled with the wakings of nocturnal creatures. His Magyar forebears had told some very strange stories about creatures that woke when twilight stole over the mountains out here.

  The orders were that the Lady was to be answered if she tapped on her side of the door, but that the door was not to be opened unless at least two of them were present. She was well provided with everything. Food and drink were taken in at appointed hours, and there were washing facilities. There was absolutely no reason why she should want anything else.

  The tapping from within the chamber made him jump. The supper tray had been taken in earlier: a leg of chicken and a wedge of bread it had been, together with pitcher of fresh milk. Very plentiful, although they said she ate hardly enough to keep life in her body. The door would not be unlocked until the tray was fetched in the morning, and bread and bacon set down in its place.

  When she tapped, the guard felt a lurch of fear. The others were not far away, of course: the Palatine’s orders had been that at least three must always be within easy reach. They none of them knew what tricks their prisoner might try, he had said solemnly. They must always be ready for some kind of ploy.

  This did not sound like a ploy. It sounded like the scrabbling of a creature in pain. A poor, frail thing who had managed to crawl as far as the door and was trying to attract attention. A trick? The guard reminded himself that this was Elizabeth Bathory, this was the Beast of Csejthe who had been found guilty of slaughtering several hundred girls so that she could bathe in their blood. She was a murderess and probably she was a witch. He closed his ears resolutely and thought that probably he had misheard.

  It came aga
in, almost at once. The scratching of nails against wood. A whisper that might have been a piteous cry for help. Supposing she was ill? Supposing she had been poisoned? Given Elizabeth Bathory’s crimes, this was perfectly possible. The guard remembered how the Palatine, his jowly face serious, had said: ‘We dare not execute this Lady. She is too high and that is why she is being imprisoned in this way. We cannot let her die.’

  They dared not execute her, nor dared they let her die, and yet she might be dying as he stood there. Would it hurt to just unlock the door and push it open a sliver? He glanced along the corridor to where his colleagues were playing cards. Within shouting distance. He grasped his sword firmly in his left hand and, with his right, reached for the key that hung on a nail.

  The last desperate gamble . . . The weak link in the chain.

  He had been easily dazzled, the Magyar guard. He had already been half under her allure as he unlocked the bedchamber door. It was exhilarating to find that they still came to her beckoning.

  He had been a worthy lover as well. It was ironic and extraordinary that, at the very last, she should have taken a man who had given her that brief, explosive pleasure.

  There had been a surprised delight at his ardour, and there had been a moment of joy – unlooked-for, unsought – when his body had shuddered and he had clutched her tightly against him and she had felt the rippling of her own body answering him.

  It had been the deep midnight when finally he left her, exhausted and spent, going without a word, his face turned away as he donned his clothes, fumbling at the fastenings in his haste to be away from her.

  Elizabeth knew he would never speak of it. He would keep it as a memory – a strange dreamlike experience – and he would probably never forget it. But if he spoke of it, Gyorgy Thurzo would fling him into prison and leave him to rot.

  The procession through Csejthe took place at midnight. The torchlights carried by the attendants flickered wildly as they descended, and there was a thick, brooding silence everywhere.