Blood Ritual

by Sarah Rayne

  Gyorgy Thurzo walked at the head and, behind him, chanting prayers, the pastor Ponikenus. They were absurd and ridiculous with their empty prayers and their mumbling talk of repentance and forgiveness. Elizabeth walked between six guards, whose swords were unsheathed. She was robed in black and she looked neither to left nor right, her head high.

  She paid no attention to the direction they took her, other than to notice that they were somewhere close to the old castle keep. The only sounds were the padding footsteps of Ponikenus and the heavy booted tread of the guards. Was her Magyar here? No. It afforded her a grim amusement to think that he might have traded his spell of duty tonight so that he should not have to face her again.

  The grisly procession came to an abrupt halt, and there before her was her prison, an oblong box, a dank, dark tomb with a small opening left for her to enter. Two stonemasons stood in the shadows, their faces averted. Waiting to wall her up.

  The room was roughly half the size of her bedchamber, and it smelled of new mortar and the hastily-laid stones. It had been sparsely furnished with a pallet bed, and a wooden chair and table; a handful of straw had been spread in one corner. So I shall be forced to endure the stench of my own ordure.

  A small slit for light and air had been left high up in one corner where the wall met the ceiling. She could see the deep velvety night sky, and she could hear a faint susurration of the wind in the trees. Then on the other side of that wall was the forest.

  She sat straight-backed, her face impassive as the workmen began their appointed task. There was a massive set of iron bars which they dragged into place, scraping across the stone floor with a sound that set her teeth on edge. The iron grille filled up the space between the floor and the ceiling, an extra wall in itself, and for a moment she dared to hope that this was all there would be. For through the iron bars I can at least see into the tunnel beyond, and I can see the people who will come down here to bring food and water.

  And then the workmen began to haul the bricks and stones into place, and Elizabeth understood that the iron bars were for extra security. Newly built walls could be dislodged; mortar could be scraped out while it was still damp, and desperate prisoners could squeeze out through the smallest of apertures. The grille was reinforcement. It crossed her mind that they might have commissioned it from the blacksmith who had wrought for her the grinning cage so many years ago, and she fought down the urge to laugh wildly.

  As they began the final task of bricking up the wall, she could see the faces of Thurzo and Ponikenus, lit from below by the flickering candles, their expressions sombre. Were they exulting over her downfall? The stonemasons worked quickly, anxious to be finished, not looking at her. Ponikenus’s droning prayers faltered into silence, and the only sound was the rhythmic slapping of wet mortar and the scraping of the stones, one layer arranged atop the next. As the layers built up, the light dimmed. Then the last thing I shall see is the light of the burning torches and the faces of the two men who brought me to this.

  With that thought, the last row of stones was in place, touching the ceiling, shutting out the faces and the voices of everyone in the world.

  For ever.

  And now she was more alone than any creature in the entire world. She was bricked up, left to the huge, brooding darkness of the old castle. Above her were the rooms and the galleries and the chambers where once she had moved imperiously and haughtily, ordering her servants, deceiving her lord. Great empty, echoing rooms. Did the shades of her murdered girls walk there? Would they come to her here, wringing their bloodied hands, their bodies torn and mutilated? Could she bear it if they did?

  Food and water would be pushed through the tiny hatch at intervals by servants from the village. They would come up to the castle for the express purpose – she guessed they would come in threes and fours, determinedly brave – but it would probably not be more than once or twice a week. She would find herself measuring the days and the weeks by that small event. She, who had once dazzled the Imperial Court and given banquets to which the highest in the land came eagerly, was reduced to looking forward to four or five minutes once a week when coarse peasant food was shoved at her on the end of a hooked pole.

  The food was disgusting. Fat pork and coarse rye bread and salt bacon. Sour ale which made her retch.

  She counted the days since the guard’s love-making, and she watched, through the slit above her bed, the moon wane and vanish and then grow gibbous again . . . If the moon’s phases no longer ruled her blood, she would begin to hope.

  Two moons and nothing. Three . . . But I was surely too old! her mind cried. I was surely already beyond the watershed of a woman’s life . . . Yes, but he was strong and virile.

  The fourth moon brought a swelling of her body, and wild dreams began to tumble through her mind. Escape. Freedom out there in the achingly sweet afternoons, scented by lilac and hawthorn. She laid her plans and wove her schemes and somehow held on to the tattered shreds of sanity.

  But the light was dimmer these days, and the birdsong outside her prison wall was fainter than it had been. Perpetual darkness, perpetual silence. I am becoming blind and deaf.

  The birth was harder than her other four births. The pain tore through her, so that she howled into the night, barely able to hear her own voice now, peering into the darkness like the blind, underground creature she had become.

  But she could still feel and she could still smell, and she could feel her hair sweat-soaked from the agony and smell her own stale body juices. She was sick several times before it was over, feeling her way to the straw in the corner, doubling over to retch and choke in lonely agony.

  Agony . . . Hours and hours of unremitting pain . . . Grinding waves of torment so that you thought your womb would burst open. I am too old by far to give birth . . .

  But the birth was the way to her escape. If, when the villagers next came to bring her food and ale she could present to them a living crying child, they would have to break down the wall and remove the iron grille: they would have to get the child out. They would never leave a child in this place. And once they had broken down the wall, once the miserable cell was filled with stonemasons and women clucking over the child, she would have her chance. Out through the passages and the halls of Csejthe, out into the forest. Hold on to the thought. Hold on to the memory of the forest just beyond this wall.

  At the end, she crouched against the wall, her knees drawn up, squatting over the straw like an animal. And although she could barely see, she could feel the child when at last it lay between her thighs, small and shrivelled, but breathing. Alive. And a boy. She would not have expected a puling girl from her Magyar.

  She managed to wrap the child in a small square of blanket from the pallet bed and, working by feel again, wiped his eyes and his nostrils clear with a wisp of straw moistened in the metal tankard of water. She rocked him against her, feeling his mouth searching for food. Her failing hearing had just caught the feeble mewling cry at the beginning, but there had been nothing more. She bent over, her ear pressed against the narrow, birdlike chest. Dying? Then my plan will never work.

  Elizabeth sat where she had fallen after the birth, her thighs bloodied and smeared with birth fluid, weak and dizzy, but her mind clear. Presently it narrowed towards a single, concentrating point.

  For the plan to work, the child must survive. It must thrive. She began to concentrate ferociously on his survival.

  Pál and the three girls had been handed straight to a wet-nurse, of course, but even in those well-fed luxurious days there had been only the thinnest trickle of milk from her breasts. Now, kept in darkness for nine months, fed only on sparse peasant fare, her breasts were empty and barren.

  In her arms the child stirred, flailing feebly with one hand, its mouth opening and closing like a bird’s beak.

  Elizabeth reached into her mind: there was something you could do – something that animals did— An immense and immediate form of nourishment—? Race-memory stirred, and f
or a moment she was a child at Varanno, watching wolfcubs born . . .

  This child should survive. Anna and Pál and the others would call him the Bastard but it would not matter. One day he would be the Family’s Head; she knew it as strongly as she knew that she herself would not live to see it. He would be elegant and patrician, and he would possess that cool inbred authority that was impossible to feign and formidable to oppose. The sharp mind in the velvet scabbard. The sensualist and the scholar. He would be the most brilliant, the most shining of all the brilliant shining Bathorys and it was unthinkable that he should die here in the dark dungeon. Clutching the child to her with one hand, she reached down between her thighs, feeling in the bloodied straw beneath her. Almost at once, her hand closed about the still-warm afterbirth.

  The greatest irony was that the plan so nearly succeeded.

  Her captors had broken down the wall to get at the child, of course, exactly as she had known they would, but for Elizabeth it was already too late: the she-wolf had lost its spring and the creature who had once terrorized the mountain villages no longer existed. Her strength had been leached away by the terrible prison, and when they finally came, she was too weak to outwit them; her sight was too dim for her to even see the broken wall and her senses were dulled by the months of silence and isolation. She could only cower shivering and purblind in a corner as they took the child away, and then re-built her prison wall.

  She had failed. She had taken that last remarkable gamble and she had lost. The years stretched out before her: utterly without hope, and filled with cold and hunger and black bitter misery. There was nothing left to cling to. There was nothing left for her but darkness and silence and aching empty loneliness. Despair, the agony of the soul, closed about her mind.

  She could not know that many years later, a Jesuit Father would write a monograph on her life, and that later still, a young English nun would sit reading it, in the very room where once Elizabeth had held the grisly banquet at which sixty serving girls had been slaughtered.

  She could not know of the strange stark epitaph that she would be given:

  ‘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 . . .’

  The convention of the day – of any day – required that a further sentence be added: ‘And may God have mercy on her soul.’

  But whoever had written the epitaph had not done so.

  Hilary sat for a long time in the library, staring at the remarkable manuscript that recorded Elizabeth’s trial and that of her servants. Beyond the thick oak door, she could hear the ordinary life of the convent going on, but the sounds were muted and faraway.

  At last she picked up the monograph and went in search of Armand Wagner, who was still using the little room at the rear of the convent. He was studying a typed report with the young Bremner, but they both looked up at once when she tapped on the door and the sudden thin smile lit Wagner’s face.

  ‘Sister Hilary? You have some information for us? Something you have remembered?’ He stood up and set a chair for her, closing the door leading out to the passage.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Hilary, sitting down. ‘It might not be important at all. If it’s not, I’m sorry to be wasting your time. But it might have a bearing on what’s happening to Catherine and her brother and I thought you’d better see it.’ She put Turoczi’s book on the desk, opening it carefully at the final pages. ‘I’m afraid it’s dreadfully fragile. You’ll be careful of it, won’t you? I thought you’d need to see the book itself, rather than a transcript.’

  Wagner was handling the small book with extreme care, turning the pages warily. He said, ‘Erzsebet Bathory—’ and Hilary heard with a shock how he gave the name what was probably its correct pronunciation. Erzsebet . . . It had a harsh, rather gutteral ring.

  ‘Sister, what is this?’

  ‘The minutes of her trial,’ said Hilary. ‘The details don’t matter so very much – at least, not as far as your – your case is concerned. But it’s this that I thought you should see.’ She pointed to the last page. ‘There’s a kind of appendix of documents farther on – lists of the people in Elizabeth’s family who appealed for mercy on her behalf.’ Hilary had only glanced through this because you could only absorb so much harrowing detail at a time, and also her head had begun to ache with translating the Latin text. ‘But the epitaph underneath is hand written.’

  ‘And,’ said Wagner, studying it closely, ‘at a guess, added relatively recently.’ He indicated to Bremner. ‘It’s ink, not biro, which makes it easier to take a guess at the age.’ He looked back at Hilary. ‘Can you translate the Latin, Sister?’ he said and Hilary remembered that Latin was no longer a language that many people understood.

  She read out the paragraph about Elizabeth’s death, feeling the horror prickling her skin again. ‘“She died in her lonely windowless prison . . . Towards nightfall, abandoned by all”.’

  ‘Rather nastily evocative,’ murmured Wagner. ‘Go on.’

  Hilary said. ‘Directly beneath that – here where you can see – the same person wrote something else.’

  ‘Yes?’

  Hilary read it carefully. ‘“This punishment was adopted as the exemplum for those who transgressed the Family’s rule”.’ She laid down the book and looked at them.

  ‘“Exemplum”?’ said Wagner. ‘That is—?’

  ‘As far as I know, it’s exactly what it sounds. A punishment intended as an example to would-be offenders against the Bathorys,’ said Hilary.

  ‘Ah. I meant, has it any religious significance? Monastical, conventual?’

  ‘Not that I’ve ever come across,’ said Hilary, frowning.

  ‘Then it’s a punishment?’

  Hilary said, slowly, ‘According to this book, Elizabeth Bathory was walled up alive for her butchery. But the two servants who testified against her were burned alive.’ She eyed him.

  ‘Two punishments,’ said Wagner, thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes, exactly.’

  ‘And we don’t know which of the two punishments the writer of that regarded as the exemplum.’

  Hilary said, ‘If Turoczi’s information is accurate – and he got it from the actual minutes of the tribunal – I think it could be argued that Elizabeth’s servants betrayed her. Their testimony is given more or less verbatim and, as far as Elizabeth was concerned, it must have been absolutely damning. Perhaps without that testimony there would have been no case. Elizabeth might even have gone free.’

  ‘And so they were regarded afterwards as traitors,’ said Wagner, frowning. ‘By Elizabeth’s family.’

  ‘Yes.’ Hilary was finding this easier than she had expected; Wagner and the young Bremner seemed to be taking her seriously. She said, ‘Elizabeth’s descendants – Franz-Josef and his wife and Stefan and the others – seem to be viewing Catherine and her brother as traitors – her brother especially. Pietro’s looked on as a renegade because he left a few years ago. Those corpse-things in Csejthe referred to a ritual that Pietro rejected – I’m sorry, I told you that earlier,’ said Hilary, impatient with herself for repeating what they already knew.

  But Wagner made a brusque gesture. ‘It does not matter, I would rather be told something a dozen times than not be told it at all. And you are very articulate, Sister. Very clear-minded.’

  He lapsed into silence again and Bremner said, ‘If the servants were believed to have betrayed their mistress at the trial and punished by burning—’

  ‘The story may have been handed down,’ said Hilary. ‘The tradition that traitors to the Family should suffer the exemplum – whatever it is – may have been nurtured. I know it sounds far-fetched,’ she said, defensively.

  ‘Not so far-fetched as all that. The Sicilians have their vendetta. The Ku Klux Klan in America theirs. And blood feuds can last for many generations.’ Wagner was still staring down at the book, but when he loo
ked up his eyes were sharp and searching.

  ‘Sister Hilary, I don’t often make swift decisions, but I’m going to make one now.’ He studied her for a moment, and then said, ‘I’m going to ask you to come with us to Csejthe Castle tonight.’

  ‘Csejthe?’ said Hilary, startled. ‘But surely – CrnPrag is where Catherine is—’

  ‘Your Mr Devlin is taking on CrnPrag,’ said Wagner, and Hilary was annoyed to find herself blushing. ‘In fact he’s on his way there already – we know that because we rang the Red Angel. And we don’t want to upset any little plan he may have cooked up. Also,’ said Wagner, scrupulously truthful, ‘CrnPrag isn’t exactly the kind of place where we can just wave a warrant and go in.’

  ‘Assuming we could get a warrant by tonight,’ put in Bremner.

  ‘Well, yes. But Csejthe’s a different cup of tea. It’s a bit of a no-man’s land, and it seems to be the centre of a good part of all this,’ said Wagner. ‘If we can round up those corpse-creatures and a few of the guards, we’ll be a very good way to getting what we want.’

  Hilary saw the logic of this. ‘But why should you want me to come with you?’ she said.

  ‘Well, there are a number of reasons. You can be of help in identifying some of these people to us.’

  Hilary looked at him. ‘That’s not the real reason,’ she said. ‘The real reason is that you don’t think I should stay here.’

  ‘You could truly be of help to us,’ said Wagner. ‘But you’re quite right; the real reason is that I don’t want you to stay in this convent until we’ve got Ladislas Bathory locked up and stern questions asked of the rest of his strange clan.’

  Bremner said, ‘Chief Inspector you don’t really suspect—’

  ‘I don’t know what I suspect!’ said Wagner explosively. ‘What I do know is that there’re too many nasty strands weaving themselves into this business and too many bloody threads unravelling! I mean bloody in the literal sense, you understand,’ he said turning to Hilary suddenly and Hilary grinned.

  ‘Listen,’ said Wagner, ‘Ladislas Bathory tried to silence you last night. Supposing he tries to do so again tonight? Or sends someone else to do it for him?’