by Rice, Anne
“Where will they go, back to that evil town? Back to the monsters who gave them up in sacrifice?” I was in a fury suddenly. “Punished, that’s what they must be.”
“In time, Vittorio; there is time. Your poor sad victims are free now. This is our time, yours and mine, come.”
Her skirts went out in a great dark circle as down we flew, down and down, down past the windows, and down past the walls, until my feet were allowed to touch the soft ground.
“Oh, Lord God, it’s the meadow, look, the meadow,” I said. “I can see it as clearly under the rising moon as ever I saw it in my dreams.”
A sudden softness filled me completely. I twined her in my arms, my fingers digging deep into her rippling hair. All the world seemed to sway about me, and yet I was anchored in dance with her, and the soft airy movement of the trees sang to us as we were bound together.
“Nothing can ever part us, Vittorio,” she said. She tore loose. She ran ahead of me.
“No, wait, Ursula, wait!” I cried. I ran after her, but the grass and the irises were tall and thick. It wasn’t so like the dream, but then again it was, because these things were alive and full of the verdant smell of the wild, and the sylvan woods were gently heaving their limbs on the scented wind.
I fell down exhausted and let the flowers climb up on either side of me. I let the red irises peer down upon my upturned face.
She knelt above me. “He will forgive me, Vittorio,” she said. “He will forgive all in his infinite mercy.”
“Oh, yes, my love, my blessed, beautiful love, my savior, He will.”
The tiny crucifix dangled down against my neck.
“But you must do this for me, you who let me live below, you who spared me and fell asleep in my trust at the feet of my grave, you must do this …”
“What, blessed one?” I asked. “Tell me and I’ll do it.”
“Pray first for strength, and then into your human body, into your wholesome and baptized body, you must take all the demon blood out of me which you can, you must draw it from me, and thereby free my soul from its spell; it will be vomited forth out of you like the potions we gave you, which cannot hurt you. Will you do it for me? Will you take the poison out of me?”
I thought of the sickness, of the vomit that had streamed from my mouth in the monastery. I thought of it all, the terrible gibbering and madness.
“Do this for me,” she said.
She lay against me and I felt her heart trapped in her chest, and I felt my own, and it seemed I had never known such dreamy languor. I could feel my fingers curl. For an instant it seemed they rested on hard rocks in this meadow, as if the backs of my hands had found harsh pebbles, but once again I felt the broken stems, the bed of purple and red and white irises.
She raised her head.
“In the Name of God,” I said, “for your salvation, I will take whatever poison I must from you; I will draw off the blood as if from a cankerous wound, as if it were the corruption of a leper. Give it to me, give me the blood.”
Her face was motionless above mine, so small, so dainty, so white.
“Be brave, my love, be brave, for I must make room for it first.”
She nestled in against my neck, and into my flesh there came her teeth. “Be brave, only a little more to make room.”
“A little more?” I whispered. “A little more. Ah, Ursula, look up, look up at Heaven and Hell in the sky, for the stars are balls of fire suspended there by the angels.”
But the language was stretched and meaningless and became an echo in my ears. A darkness shrouded me, and when I lifted my hand it seemed a golden net covered it and I could see far, far away, my fingers shrouded in the net.
The meadow was suddenly flooded with sunlight. I wanted to break away, to sit up, to tell her, Look, the sun has come, and you’re not hurt, my precious girl. But on and on there came these waves of divine and luscious pleasure passing through me, pulled from me, pulled up from my loins, this coaxing and magnificent pleasure.
When her teeth slipped from my flesh, it was as if she had tightened the grip of her soul on my organs, on all parts of me that were man and babe once, and human now.
“Oh, my love, my darling, don’t stop.” The sun made a bewildering dance in the branches of the chestnut trees.
She opened her mouth, and from her came the stream of blood, the deep dark kiss of blood. “Take it from me, Vittorio.”
“All your sins into me, my divine child,” I said. “Oh, God help me. God have mercy on me. Mastema—.”
But the word was broken. My mouth was filled with the blood, and it was no rank potion mixed of parts, but that searing thrilling sweetness that she had first given me in her most secretive and perplexing kisses. Only this time it came in an overwhelming gush.
Her arms were tucked beneath me. They lifted me. The blood seemed to know no veins within but to fill my limbs themselves, to fill my shoulders and my chest, to drown and invigorate my very heart. I stared up at the twinkling playing sun, I felt her blinding and soft hair across my eyes but peered through its golden strands. My breath came in gasps.
The blood flowed down into my legs and filled them to my very toes. My body surged with strength. My organ pumped against her, and once more I felt her subtle feline weight, her sinuous limbs hugging me, holding me, binding me, her arms crossed beneath me, her lips sealed to mine.
My eyes struggled, grew wide. The sunlight filled them, and then contracted. It contracted, and my sighs seemed to grow immense, and the beating of my heart to echo, as though we were not in a wild meadow, and the sounds that came from my empowered body, my transformed body, my body so full of her blood, echoed off stone walls!
The meadow was gone or never was. The twilight was a rectangle high above. I lay in the crypt.
I rose up, throwing her off, back away from me as she screamed in pain. I sprang to my feet and stared at my white hands outstretched before me.
A horrid hunger reared up in me, a fierce strength, a howl!
I stared up at the dark-purple light above and screamed.
“You’ve done it to me! You’ve made me one of you!”
She sobbed. I turned on her. She backed up, bent over, her hand over her mouth, crying and fleeing from me. I ran after her. Like a rat she ran, round and round the crypt, screaming.
“Vittorio, no, Vittorio, no, Vittorio, no, don’t hurt me. Vittorio, I did this for us; Vittorio, we are free. Ah, God help me!”
And then upwards she flew, just missing my outstretched arms. She had fled to the chapel above.
“Witchlet, monster, larva, you tricked me with your illusions, with your visions, you made me one of you, you did it to me!” My roars echoed one upon the other as I scrambled about in the dark till I found my sword, and then dancing back to gain my momentum, I too made the leap and cleared the spears and found myself high up on the floor of the church, and she hovering with glittering tears before the altar.
She backed up into the bank of red flowers that barely showed in the starlight that passed through the darkened windows.
“No, Vittorio, don’t kill me, don’t do it. Don’t,” she sobbed and wailed. “I am a child, like you, please, don’t.”
I tore at her, and she scrambled to the end of the sanctuary. In a rage, I swung at the statue of Lucifer with my sword. It tottered and then crashed down, breaking on the marble floor of the cursed sanctuary.
She hovered at the far end. She dropped down on her knees and threw out her hands. She shook her head, her hair flying wildly from side to side.
“Don’t kill me, don’t kill me, don’t kill me. You send me to Hell if you do; don’t do it.”
“Wretch!” I moaned. “Wretch!” My tears fell as freely as hers. “I thirst, you wretch. I thirst, and I can smell them, the slaves in the coop. I can smell them, their blood, damn you!”
I too had gone down on my knees. I lay down on the marble, and kicked aside the broken fragments of the hideous statue. With my sword I snagg
ed the lace of the altar cloth and brought it down with all its many red flowers tumbling on me, so that I could roll over into them and crush my face into their softness.
A silence fell, a terrible silence full of my own wailing. I could feel my strength, feel it even in the timbre of my voice, and the arm that held the sword without exhaustion or restraint, and feel it in the painless calm with which I lay on what should have been cold and was not cold, or only goodly cold.
Oh, she had made me mighty.
A scent overcame me. I looked up. She stood just above me, tender, loving thing that she was, with her eyes so full of the starlight now, so glinting and quiet and unjudging. In her arms she held a young human, a feeble-minded one, who did not know his danger.
How pink and succulent he was, how like the roasted pig ready for my lips, how full of naturally cooking and bubbling mortal blood and ready for me. She set him down before me.
He was naked, thin buttocks on his heels, his trembling chest very pink and his hair black and long and soft around his guileless face. He appeared to be dreaming or searching the darkness, perhaps for angels?
“Drink, my darling, drink from him,” she said, “and then you’ll have the strength to take us both to the Good Father for Confession.”
I smiled. The desire for the feeble-minded boy before me was almost more than I could endure. But it was a whole new book now, was it not, what I might endure, and I took my time, rising up on my elbow as I looked at her.
“To the Good Father? You think that’s where we’ll go? Right away, just like that, the two of us?”
She began to cry again. “Not right away, no, not right away,” she cried. She shook her head. Beaten.
I took him. I broke his neck when I drained him dry. He made not a sound. There was no time for fear or pain or crying.
Do we ever forget the first kill? Do we ever?
Through the coop I went all that night, devouring, feasting, gorging on their throats, taking what I wanted from each, sending each to God or to Hell, how could I ever know, bound now to this earth with her, and she feasting with me in her dainty way, ever watching for my howls and wails, and ever catching hold of me to kiss me and ply me with her sobs when I shook with rage.
“Come out of here,” I said.
It was just before sunrise. I told her I would spend no day beneath these pointed towers, in this house of horrors, in this place of evil and filthy birth.
“I know of a cave,” she said. “Far down the mountains, past the farmlands.”
“Yes, somewhere on the edge of a true meadow?”
“There are meadows in this fair land without count, my love,” she said. “And under the moon their flowers shine as prettily for our magical eyes as ever they do for humans by the light of God’s sun. Remember His moon is ours.
“And tomorrow night … before you think of the priest … you must take your time to think of the priest—.”
“Don’t make me laugh again. Show me how to fly. Wrap your arm around my waist and show me how to drop from the high walls to safety in a descent that would shatter a man’s limbs. Don’t talk of priests anymore. Don’t mock me!”
“… before you think of the priest, of Confession,” she went on, undeterred in her dainty sweet small voice, her eyes brimming with tears of love, “we’ll go back to the town of Santa Maddalana while it’s fast asleep, and we’ll burn it all down around them.”
13
CHILD BRIDE
We didn’t put the torch to Santa Maddalana. It was too much of a pleasure to hunt the town.
By the third night, I had stopped weeping at sunrise, when we retired together, locked in each other’s arms inside our concealed and unreachable cave.
And by the third night, the townspeople knew what had befallen them—how their clever bargain with the Devil had rebounded upon them—and they were in a panic, and it was a great game to outsmart them, to hide in the multitude of shadows that made up their twisted streets, and to tear open their most extravagant and clever locks.
In the early hours, when no one dared to stir, and the good Franciscan priest knelt awake in his cell, saying his rosary, and begging God for understanding of what was happening—this priest, you remember, who had befriended me at the inn, who had dined with me and warned me, not in anger like his Dominican brother, but in kindness—while this priest prayed, I crept into the Franciscan church and I too prayed.
But each night I told myself what a man says to himself under his breath when he couches with his adulterous whore: “One more night, God, and then I’ll go to Confession. One more night of bliss, Lord, and then I’ll go home to my wife.”
The townspeople had no chance against us.
What skills I did not acquire naturally and through experimentation, my beloved Ursula taught to me with patience and grace. I could scan a mind, find a sin and eat it with a flick of my tongue as I sucked the blood from a lazy, lying merchant who had put out his own tender children once for the mysterious Lord Florian, who had kept the peace.
One night we found that the townsmen had been by day to the abandoned castle. There was evidence of hasty entry, with little stolen or disturbed. How it must have frightened them, the horrid saints still flanking the pedestal of the Fallen Lucifer in the church. They had not taken the golden candlesticks or the old tabernacle in which I discovered, with my groping hand, a shriveled human heart.
On our last visit to the Court of the Ruby Grail, I took the burned leathery heads of the vampires from the deep cellar and I hurled them like so many stones through the stained-glass windows. The last of the brilliant art of the castle was gone.
Together, Ursula and I roamed the bedchambers of the castle, which I had never glimpsed or even imagined, and she showed me those rooms in which the members of the Court had gathered for dice or chess or to listen to small ensembles of music. Here and there we saw evidence of something stolen—a coverlet ripped from a bed and a pillow fallen to the floor.
But obviously the townspeople were more afraid than greedy. They took little from the castle.
And as we continued to prey upon them, artfully defeating them, they began to desert Santa Maddalana. Shops lay open when we came into the empty streets at midnight; windows were unbolted, cradles empty. The Dominican church had been deconsecrated and abandoned, its altar stone removed. The cowardly priests, whom I had not granted the mercy of a quick death, had abandoned their flock.
The game became ever more invigorating to me. For now, those who remained were quarrelsome and avaricious and refusing to give up without a fight. It was simple to sort the innocent, who believed in the faith of the vigil light or the saints to protect them, from those who had played with the Devil and now kept an uneasy watch in the dark with sword in hand.
I liked to talk to them, spar with them verbally, as I killed them. “Did you think your game would go on forever? Did you think the thing you fed would never feed on you?”
As for my Ursula, she had no stomach for such sport. She could not endure the spectacle of suffering. The old Communion of Blood in the castle had for her been tolerable only because of the music, the incense and the supreme authority of Florian and Godric, who had led her in it with every step.
Night after night, as the town was slowly emptied, as the farms were deserted, as Santa Maddalana, my school town, became ever more ruined, Ursula took to playing with orphaned children. She sat sometimes on the church steps cradling a human infant and cooing to it, and telling it stories in French.
She sang old songs in Latin from the courts of her time, which had been two hundred years ago, she told me, and she talked of battles in France and in Germany whose names meant nothing to me.
“Don’t play with the children,” I said. “They’ll remember it. They’ll remember us.”
A fortnight went by before the community was irreparably destroyed. Only the orphans remained and a few of the very old, and the Franciscan father, and his father, the elfin little man who sat in his ligh
ted room at night, playing a game of cards with himself, as if he did not even now guess what was going on.
On the fifteenth night, it must have been, when we arrived in the town, we knew at once that only two persons were left. We could hear the little old man singing to himself in the empty Inn with the doors open. He was very drunk, and his wet pink head gleamed in the light of the candle. He slapped the cards down on the table in a circle, playing a game of solitaire called “clock.”
The Franciscan priest sat beside him. He looked up at us, fearlessly and calmly, as we came into the Inn.
I was overcome with hunger, ravening hunger, for the blood in them both.
“I never told you my name, did I?” he asked me.
“No, you never did, Father,” I said.
“Joshua,” he said. “That’s my name, Fra Joshua. All the rest of the community has gone back to Assisi, and they took with them the last of the children. It’s a long journey south.”
“I know, Father,” I said. “I’ve been to Assisi, I’ve prayed at the shrine of St. Francis. Tell me, Father, when you look at me, do you see angels around me?”
“Why would I see angels?” he asked quietly. He looked from me to Ursula. “I see beauty, I see youth fixed in polished ivory. But I don’t see angels. I never have.”
“I saw them once,” I said. “May I sit down?”
“Do as you like,” he said to me. He watched us, drawing himself up in his hard simple wooden chair, as I seated myself opposite him, much as I had been on that day in the village, only now we were not in the fragrant arbor under the sun but inside, in the Inn itself, where the candlelight gave more volume and more warmth.
Ursula looked at me in confusion. She didn’t know what was in my mind. I had never witnessed her speaking to any human being except for me myself and for the children with whom she’d played—in other words, only with those for whom her heart had quickened and whom she did not mean to destroy.
What she thought of the little man and his son, the Franciscan priest, I couldn’t guess.
