Empire of Fear

by Brian Stableford

  She gathered her cloak about her a little more tightly, and dropped her gaze. ‘The blood which I have drunk has been given willingly,’ she said, in a strangely distant tone. ‘Given, for the greater part, with love, or at least with false promises of love. Would you not give willingly of your blood, Master Cordery, for love? Your saviour was not ashamed to bleed for love of mankind, and you partake of that blood in holy communion, do you not?’

  ‘It is not the same,’ said Noell, insistently.

  She looked up at him again, and it seemed to him that she had only looked away in order to prepare that transfixing glance. She had banished the tiredness from her face, and the distress too, and she spoke now in a very different tone of voice.

  ‘If thou wert in love with me, Noell Cordery,’ she said, ‘wouldst thou not offer to thy lover the gift of thine own sweet blood? Wouldst thou not offer it with joy, as Edmund Cordery offered blood to Carmilla Bourdillon? And in refusing it now, art thou not seeking to torture me, in thine own fashion, as the unkind and furious pirate tried to do?’

  He was caught by her stare, as she had plainly intended, and felt himself trapped by the force of his own sight. How could he deny that she was more beautiful than any common girl? How could he help but feel the pressure of his own desire? It was nothing of his choosing; desire moved within him like a supernatural force, a wind from hell. He was, after all, no monk, and if he felt himself more aroused by the vampire than by the so-called gypsy princess or poor Mary White, was it not simply a mirror of the way the world was made? Was Langoisse right, and this beauty of hers a monstrous trap, and she a siren, a Satanic whore? And if not, or even if so, what was a man to think or feel or do?

  ‘I do not love thee,’ he replied, his voice much strained, and realised as soon as he had said it how silly his reply must seem, when he had echoed her ‘thee’ unthinkingly. He made the sign of the cross, not ostentatiously, but covertly and ashamedly, driven by necessity to seek what protection it might give him.

  ‘Carmilla Bourdillon might have loved thee,’ she said, ‘as she loved thy father before thee. Such comfort might have been found in her white arms as to make thee loathe the life which now must be thine. It was a comfort which Edmund Cordery did not deny himself, even when he thought to murder her in the midst of his loss.’

  He backed away from this curious assault, feeling himself more endangered by argument than by any threatening movement she might have made. He found himself backed up against the stone wall, as though pinned there by his consternation.

  But she did not laugh to see him so anxious. Instead, she softened her expression again, and looked at him with all the innocence of a child. ‘Please, Master Noell,’ she said to him, ‘for pity’s sake, spare me a little blood.’

  ‘No,’ he replied, hoarsely. ‘I cannot. I will not.’ He turned away from her, putting his face to the door, wishing that it might open. It did not.

  When he turned round again, at last, she was no longer disposed to pay him the slightest heed. She had gathered up her ankles beneath her thighs, and was curling up as if to sleep. It was as if she were settling herself to sleep for a hundred years, in that mysterious way which vampires had, not to wake again until blood was gently spilled upon her eager lips.

  As he watched her long black hair fall across her pale face, he saw that there was now no sign of the scar made by Langoisse’s dagger on the earlier occasion when he had tormented her. In time, the wounds on her back would fade away as if they had never been. Langoisse’s back, no doubt, still carried its scars and weals, and caused him pain whenever he must use the damaged muscles. Perhaps they had cut so deeply into the frame of his being that they would remain even if he were someday to win that prize which he sought, and become immortal. Some of Richard’s knights, converted in maturity, still bore the stigmata of earlier wounds, whose state had passed beyond repair. Langoisse was not concerned with appearances, and would be proud to keep the welts; it was the pain from which he sought his freedom.

  Could there ever be an end, Noell wondered, to the toll of blood which the vampires demanded of common men – not just the trickles which were freely and lovingly offered in unnatural passion, but the great floods which were drawn by the torturer’s lash and the warrior’s blade? All the legacy of vampire rule, it seemed just then, was measured in scars and spoliation; the scars of Langoisse’s ruined back; the scars of Edmund Cordery’s ill-used breast; the scars of sin on the souls of the undying, who need not hurry to meet their judge and maker.

  I want no scars, said Noell to himself, so vehemently that he nearly spoke the words aloud.

  Even as he made this declaration, he felt the sin of Adam roiling in his soul, an awful desire whose release could only be bought with blood.

  ‘Oh, Quintus,’ he murmured, as he sat himself down in that lonely corner, wedged between wall and door, ‘what am I, after all, but a thing of common clay? I dearly wish that I might pray, to ask that God might make me other than I am, though I know full well that He would not do it if He could.’

  EIGHT

  Noell was awakened from exhausted sleep by the sound of the bar which had imprisoned him, scraping along the stone as it was withdrawn. He came slowly to his feet, picking up the two daggers which he had thrown down. He turned to face the opening door.

  It was not Langoisse but Selim who had come to set him free. The Turk looked at him dully, his eyes seeming the only human part of his ruined face as he beckoned, ordering Noell to come out. Noell turned instead to look at the vampire, who was silent and still upon her cot. He picked up the cloak which she had gathered about her, and raised it gently. He was careful because he thought it might stick, caught by the drying blood which had flowed from her wounds, but it did not. He could hardly believe, looking down at her naked skin, that this was the same flesh which had been lacerated only hours before. There was hardly any blood, and where she had been cut by the lash the wounds were already closed. Only where the hot blade had burned her was there clear evidence of the damage which had been done – a great ugly weal, pink and gleaming.

  She did not wake up, and Noell guessed from her stillness that she would not wake at all, today or tomorrow. She had escaped into that deeper unconsciousness of which vampires were capable – a coma which might last a year, or a hundred years, from which she might wake briefly at irregular intervals to seek the blood which she still needed. Her wounds would heal, but there remained a hungry void within her, which only common blood could fill.

  Noell laid the cloak down again, gently, and then went out of the cell. The Turk pointed to the passage which led from the cells to the cloister, but Noell, having handed over the two knives, told him to wait. While Selim barred the lady’s cell, Noell took down the bar from Mary White’s door, and went in.

  Mary lay on her straw pallet, hands tied and mouth gagged. Her clothes were torn. She moved when she heard him come in, but she could not see who he was, and her movements were inspired by dread.

  He quickly went to her, soothing her by calling her name, several times. He took the gag from her mouth, and then began to untie her hands. She whimpered faintly, as though she could not speak, and he fetched her water from the jug. She sipped avidly, but she would not speak, and turned her face away in pain and shame. He realised that she had been raped, and that she was near-delirious with anxiety and lack of sleep. She writhed away from his touch, and he did not know what he ought to do.

  He opened his mouth to ask her who it was that had hurt her, but the question died on his lips as she shrank away from him. After all, he thought, I am only an outlaw among outlaws, who shares their station. Why should she not cower away from me? He ached with guilt.

  ‘I will send one of the monks,’ he told her. ‘He will bring a draught to help you sleep.’

  She tried to reply, but could not form words. She had looked to him for help, and he had given none. He felt that he had betrayed her. He felt betrayed himself, by his own impotence.

  He di
d not know where to go, but wanted to hide. He did not want to go to the refectory, or to his room, or to the quiet church where, for him, there was only an absence of God. So, when he had told Brother Innocent, as he had promised, about Mary White’s distress, he went to the library. He could not have explained precisely why he chose this place above all others, but it was the only place in which he had any sense at all of belonging. For a while he stayed in the upper room, but when the chimes told him that the monks would be at matins, he went down instead into the cellar, there to consult The Vampires of Europe on the subject of Lady Cristelle d’Urfé.

  Little was said of her in the book, whose many authors had been more interested in the activities and ambitions of the males of her species. The text revealed that she was a relatively young vampire, having been born in Less Normandy about the year 1456, the younger daughter of a cousin of the Marquis de Verney. In 1472 or 1473 she had become the lover of the vampire knight Jean de Castrys, who lived at the time in Rheims, and while in Rheims had become a vampire. It seemed that she had never been to Charlemagne’s court at Aachen, and that de Castrys had brought her to Grand Normandy in 1495 – apparently because of some quarrel with Prince Geoffrey. De Castrys, though, had returned to Rheims when he had patched up his quarrel, leaving Cristelle at Richard’s court.

  The list of Cristelle’s common lovers contained only one name which Noell thought notable: the adventurer Raleigh, who had later married the daughter of Henry Tudor and Nan Bullen before being executed for treason. The crimes listed against her were trivial, and Noell judged that as a stranger in Richard’s court, brought there by a foreign knight, she had never been entrusted with any of its labour of intrigue.

  When he had replaced the book, and returned to the sunlit room above, he could not bring himself to read. Instead he sat alone with his thoughts, watching the clouds drift in from the sea upon the westerly wind. I would that it were Elphin’s time, he thought, when vampires had not yet come to British soil, and the truth might still make a stand against the world, in the voices of honest men.

  Later, Quintus came to him, as he was accustomed to do, almost as if it were an ordinary day. ‘I am bitterly sorry,’ said the monk, ‘for all that happened last night. There is no sanction we can use against the pirate, who has us all in his power. I do not think that he is an evil man, but his blacker moods bring him close to madness. He is fearfully anxious of his situation, though he dare not let his fear show in any honest way. We must pray that naught disturbs him until the hour of his departure.’

  ‘What will happen to Mary White?’ asked Noell.

  ‘I will ask that he leave her here, so that we may find a place for her in a convent,’ replied the monk, carefully.

  ‘Despite that we do not wish her harm,’ said Noell, bitterly, ‘she is as much a danger to us as she is to Langoisse. If she were ever to tell what had happened to her here, she could have us all destroyed. And why should she hold her tongue, when the Lord’s house offered her no effective sanctuary? Perhaps, good Christians though we be, we should pray that Langoisse might remove her, and take her for a brigand’s whore; or that he might kill her, when she has been raped a few times more by the vilest of his crew. She is innocent of any crime, and yet she is a threat to your safety and mine. ’Tis a dire world, which sends us such vexations.’

  ‘I will ask Langoisse to leave her,’ Quintus said again, more definitely. ‘I will tell him that we shall send her to the nuns at Llanllyr. I pray that he will let her go, and that the nuns can persuade her not to betray to the Normans what happened to her here.’

  ‘And the vampire?’ asked Noell. ‘Would you send her to a nunnery too?’

  Quintus shook his head. ‘I do not know what might be done with the vampire, now that she sleeps, but I know that Langoisse will not surrender her.’

  ‘I know nothing,’ Noell said, in a voice bitter with pent-up anxiety. ‘For all my studies, I know nothing of what I need to know. I do not know the purposes of the Invisible College which took me when my father died. Nor do I know the purposes of these quiet monks, who keep what they call the True Faith, owing allegiance neither to Alexander nor to Gregory. I do not know what work there is for a common man to do in this world of lordly vampires and vengeful brigands. I thought that I did know these things. I thought it a courageous ideal to preserve an authentic Church of Christ from destruction by a false pope and his inquisitive friars. I thought I understood, too, why members of the court might belong to a secret society, plotting against the vampires even while pretending to support them. I even thought that I knew what heroic work a pirate might do, trying to claim the oceans for common men although the land belongs to the vampire Imperia. Now I see that I know nothing.’

  ‘It is an important discovery to make,’ said Quintus, evenly, ‘and one which frightens us all.’

  ‘I am too sick to stomach sophistries,’ said Noell, sharply. ‘It seems that the whole of justice, and mercy, and courage, and wisdom, are in hiding, while in the open part of what we do there is only slyness, and malice, and fear, and folly. Why is the world so twisted about itself? Why do not common men simply stand together in great armies, to face the vampires and cast down their empire, instead of pretending to submit while secretly weaving sad shadows of defiance?’

  ‘It has been done,’ Quintus replied. ‘Armies of common men have faced the vampires a hundred times. But the vampire-led armies have always won. They are such bold warriors themselves that they terrify those who would stand against them, and they are very clever in saving their most precious reward for those men who fight most bravely in their cause. That is the essence of their power. Another day will come when good men will go against them, and another and another, but they will need to bear weapons which hurt vampires more than mere arrows or musket-balls can. If ever common men are to inherit the world, they will need the way prepared by such secret societies as you have mentioned; they will need minds made by the wisdom of the Invisible College, and they will need souls shaped by the teaching of the True Faith. Without the first, the world cannot truly be won; without the second, it would not be worth the winning.’

  ‘But there are those within this very monastery,’ Noell told him, ‘who believe that the true True Faith requires not opposition but patient forbearance, and that it matters not at all that the material world has been given to the dominion of evil while we have the more precious immortality awaiting us in Heaven. Some of your own brethren would ask us to submit to the temporal power of the vampires while saving our souls. Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.’

  ‘Is that what you would rather do?’ asked the monk.

  ‘How can we know what it is right to do?’ asked Noell, his tone almost pleading. ‘How can we even be sure that it is common men and not the vampires who are the Lord’s chosen people? If we accept that they are not the devil’s handiwork at all, but were made by God as Adam was, how can we not accept that God placed them over us? How do we know what we must do, to make the world right?’

  ‘God sent his only son to us as a mortal man,’ Quintus told him, gently. ‘Christ died for us, to show us the pathway to salvation. Only death can redeem us from our sins. It is a hard road, but it is the only road which can lead us to the Kingdom of God. That other immortality is a temptation. I cannot honestly tell whether it is the most clever of all the devil’s tricks, or another gift of God which men must one day learn to use in wiser fashion, but I know that the vampires use it ill, and against the interests of man and God alike. It is lawful to oppose their empire, not merely by prayer and by refusal, but by action. As Our Lord cast out the usurers from his father’s house, so may we seek to cast out the vampire lords.’

  But Noell took up the Bible, which rested on the desk where he had left it two days before, and opened it to the gospel of St. John, quoting: ‘Then Jesus said unto them, verily, verily, I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have no l
ife in you. Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the Last Day. For my flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.’

  Noell paused after reading, to study his mentor’s face, but Quintus said nothing, waiting for Noell to go on. ‘May this not be God’s commandment to the vampires?’ asked Noell. ‘Is it not a commandment which they follow most faithfully, after their fashion? Might it then be Richard’s kind, and not our own which will enjoy the favour of Christ, when he comes again to judge our world? They do not need our blood as meat, for the ordinary nourishment of their bodies – so what can common blood be to them but the food of the spirit? May not the pathway of salvation be theirs to follow, not ours at all?’

  Quintus, recognising the pain of his doubt and distress, did not charge him with blasphemy. Instead, he said: ‘The devil is the ape of God, and his task is to twist and pervert the true doctrine by forging a false one. Vampirism is but a mockery of the message of the saviour, whose true meaning is enshrined in the holy communion. Jesus brought his message to human beings, Noell. There were no vampires in Galilee at that time, nor in the whole empire of the Romans which St. Paul set out to convert. I do not hold with Gregory that the vampires are demons in human guise, but I do believe that Satan sent Attila against the Holy Empire when that empire had grown too strong a force for good.’

  Noell still could only shake his head in care-worn fashion.