And then, as an afterthought, he added: Shigidi. Perhaps its name is Shigidi.
He had never taken Guazzo’s account of the vampire sabbat seriously. His father had laughed at it, and Quintus too. It was a nightmare, conjured up from fear and dread, and dressed with any repulsive detail which the writer could discover. Of course the devil’s semen would be black, just as his prick must be as cold as ice and as big as a horse’s member. It was for a similar reason the sabbat must also involve the sacrifice of babies and the eating of their flesh. Nothing could be spared if it would make the image of the occasion more frightful.
But was not Edmund Cordery’s account of the making of vampires a nightmare too? Was it not the case that it still wore the same dress of repulsiveness and horror? And as for Ogo-Ejodun … why, the name itself promised an abundance of nightmare elements. Babies really were sacrificed, it seemed, in that season of blood which belonged to Olori-merin; could there be any doubt that pricks were cut off in Ogo-Ejodun – a violation which many would consider more nightmarish than buggery?
It was all nightmares. Shigidi had a hand in all of it.
Noell sat back in his chair and stared out of the open window at the sky, looking into infinity. The source of vampirism was here in Adamawara. The silver death was here too, and nowhere else. Was that yet another idol of confusion, part of the smokescreen of falsehoods in which the truth was concealed?
In Africa, vampire women were not commonly seen. Berenike might be, for all he knew, the sole exception. But the elemi, unlike the aitigu, could not penetrate a woman – or a man either, for that matter – because of the mutilation that was done to them. Could they still make and discharge semen? Perhaps. But still, the elemi lay with no one. When they made vampires, it was not by means of any sexual intercourse. How had the forgotten medicine been administered which saved those likely to die from the silver death? Was it fed to the sufferers in their food, or like most African medicines smeared upon the body? Did it carry the seed of vampirism to fight the seed of the silver death? Was the seed of vampirism a similar thing to the silver death? Vampires were not stained silver, but their skin was certainly changed, in colour and in texture, and their hair was almost always altered too. Was vampirism no more than a benign mould, which preserved instead of spoiling, and was the silver death merely its malign counterpart, a breath of Satanic hell instead of Heavenly immortality?
Noell put his head in his hands, wishing that he could see a way through the cloud of questions. Oh father! he said, silently. Would that I had thy counsel to help me now.
The Lady Carmilla, he remembered, had asked Edmund Cordery if he had looked through his marvellous device at human blood. Did that mean that she thought the secret was to be found in blood? Or had she simply been too cautious to mention semen? Had she been encouraging her mechanician-lover to go in the wrong direction, or had the vampires’ fascination with blood become the focus of their own superstitions? And if Edmund Cordery were right, and Gaulish vampires at least were made by some kind of transfigured semen, then where did the blood fit in? What kind of nourishment did the blood provide?
Noell had looked at blood beneath the microscope, and had seen that its redness, like the blackness of this disease, was carried in rounded corpuscles, and that there were other shadowy forms abroad in the straw-coloured fluid which coursed in the veins. Might the vampires need some shadowy thing which was only found in common blood?
There were too many questions, and too many possible answers. He could not find a way through the wilderness of ifs. But he felt a paradoxical sense of confidence, because he felt that he was nearer to the answer than he had ever been before. He had returned from Shigidi’s realm of nightmares and was as clear-sighted now as a man could be. He felt that his eyes and his mind were ready to break idols, to see through smokescreens.
The vampires of Adamawara, he thought, have no need of iron, no need of machines. They can do what they need to do, and think that they need not look beyond. But I think they do not know what they are. Though their elders may have lived here three thousand years, their eyes are blinded by countless idols. Ogo-Ejodun is a nightmare, but somewhere within it is a very different dream, which I intend to see if I can.
He dismantled the microscope, then, and put his slides away. He did not destroy the slides which he had made from his own flesh, but he knew that when they dried out they would begin to decay.
He lay upon his bed, but he did not sleep. His mind was racing, and it was almost as if the mental efforts he had made were bringing back his delirium. When servants brought food to him, as the sun was setting, he still had not slept, but he was rested. The food was most welcome, his appetite having returned in full measure, and when he had eaten his fill his thoughts became calmer again. The heaviness of the meal in his belly had a soporific effect, and though he lit a candle by his bed he went quickly into a deep sleep.
He was awakened by a gentle pressure on his shoulder, which eased him back from somewhere very remote, where there were no dreams to trouble him.
It was Berenike who had woken him. She was sitting on the mattress beside him, her white robe falling away from her shoulders, though the night was cold, almost exposing the nipples of her breasts. Her bare arms reached out to him, so that her hands cupped his face.
Her fingers seemed very cold.
He remembered that stories of nocturnal visits by vampires to suck the blood of unsuspecting victims always said that the touch of a vampire was cold, and now, of all times, he realised how obvious it was that it should be so. Common men hugged their clothes and blankets about them, to shield them from the cold, but vampires did not need to do that. All a vampire had to do was forget the hurt of the cold. And so, by night, vampires became cold, unless they took care not to.
He knew, by the way she touched him, that she had not come to him now to offer him comfort, and console him in his distress. She had come to answer her own need. And yet she seemed so distant, so apart from things, as though she walked perpetually between waking and dreaming.
Is she mad? he wondered. Have the centuries through which she has lived taken toll of her senses and her mind?
He did not feel the same powerful attraction toward Berenike that he had felt towards Cristelle. It was not that her beauty was the less, but rather that beauty had somehow changed the meaning which it had for him. In earlier days, he had felt helpless in the grip of desires which seized him as though from without, and he had struggled against them. Now, his desires seemed much more a part of himself, and he did not feel that he was held captive by the beauty of her appearance. He knew that he had the choice, to offer his blood to her, to accept her caresses.
He took her in his arms, and kissed her. And then, because she was careless of the coldness of her body, he drew her under his blankets, to warm her, so that he could more easily bear her touch.
She had brought her own sharp-pointed instrument, with which to open his vein, and though it hurt far more when she used it than the knife which he had earlier used to cut himself, he found that the pain was not entirely unpleasant, and that what he received in compensation was worth more than he had imagined.
This day, he told himself, without shame or accusation, I am become my father’s son.
Afterwards, she clung to him without affection, as though completely lost in thought. He had anticipated coolness, but found this exaggeration of her remoteness annoying. She was not aware of him as a person, as Noell Cordery, but merely as an item of flesh, to serve her hungers. He knew that she must have taken blood almost every day of her life, but he did not know how often she had combined her blood-letting with love-making. For all that he knew, he might be the first man she had lain with for centuries.
As he brushed her face with his hand, he felt a cold tear at the corner of her eye. Strangely, that affected him more than anything else which had happened between them.
He touched her eye again, wonderingly, and though he spoke no question, she began to
talk, as she must have talked when she came to him in his season of dreams. Shigidi was with her, and perhaps was always with her, releasing the secret thoughts which were poisons in her soul. He had come back from Shigidi’s realm, and now was cleansed. She never had.
‘All lovers die,’ she said, in Latin. ‘They change and die, or they change and never die, but when they change so that they never die, they can be lovers no more. Sometimes, I wish that I might die, but never enough to contrive it. Love is not so important as life, and that is why I weep. I often weep – once or twice in every hundred years.’
The words, spoken in a tongue which was neither her first language nor his, sounded quite devoid of emotion. There seemed to Noell to be a barrier raised between them, which prevented them from sharing any real unity, even in their physical intimacy.
But it might have been different with Cristelle, he thought.
Then he changed his mind. It would not, he told himself. It would not.
‘I can love,’ she assured him, though he could not believe her. ‘I have lived so long in this unchanging place that I can only love things which come from without, but I can love. I love you all the more, because you are so near in looks to my own kind, and because you suffered so with the sickness. It seemed at one time as though you might die, and I weep for that thought. I weep often.’
Perhaps, if she had been speaking English, she would have addressed him as ‘thou’. In his mind he could have translated the Latin words in order to produce that sense of intimacy, but he did not. Latin was the language of scholars and of the Church, and it had no intimacy in it. It was entirely right that they should be speaking in that tongue.
‘I am glad,’ he told her, ‘that you chose me above Langoisse.’ But Langoisse, he remembered, was old now, and not the handsome figure he had seemed when first Noell knew him.
‘And now,’ she said, continuing with the thread of her own thought without attending to his interpolation, ‘they will let you die, because they have begun to think that all the world, outside Adamawara, is unworthy of their gift of law. They will let you die, and ask that all the world dies with you, save only Adamawara.’
Does she know whereof she speaks? Noell wondered. Or is it merely the wandering of her mind?
‘Do you never long to leave here?’ he asked her. ‘To return to the world from which you came?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘This is the only world where I have been happy. The world from which I came used me cruelly, and I shall never return.’
‘You would not lack for lovers there,’ he told her.
‘When death is always near,’ she said, ‘it matters more what kind of life you live. When death is far away, life is precious in itself, and the years are their own reward. I can love, but first of all is life. I will live forever, if I can.’
‘You will not come with me, then, when I go away?’ The question was as much to tease as to test her, for he already had her answer, and he sought only to draw out of her some exclamation of regret at the thought of his departure. But that was not what happened, for she picked her head up from where it lay upon his shoulder, and looked him in the eye for the first time since they had made love together.
‘When you go,’ she said, her voice seeming more strange than it had been before, ‘it will be to your grave. I cannot follow you there. But I will shed a tear. I will shed a tear, for the love I lost.’
This reassurance did not cheer him Indeed, he felt as if the blood were running cold within his veins, for she had spoken to him across the centuries, whose passing – if she could be believed – he was not destined to share.
SIX
The next day, when Kantibh came to him Noell asked to see Quintus and his other companions. Kantibh agreed immediately, and for the first time Noell left the room where he had been confined during his illness. The route by which he was taken led him through cloisters and passages such as one might find in the monasteries or prisons of the outer world. The doors through which they passed were made of wood, and all seemed very old. In one room which they passed he saw Ngadze, apparently well, but he did not linger there, being impatient to see Quintus. The monk was lodged in a room very like his own, no more than forty yards away.
Quintus was still in his bed, too feeble to rise from it even though there was no trace of blackness beneath his skin. Kantibh had told Noell that Langoisse was in a like condition, and would find it very difficult to talk coherently, but Quintus was conscious and quite clear-headed. He was delighted to see Noell enter the room, and pleased to see him strong enough to move about, albeit limpingly.
At first, Kantibh seemed inclined to linger, but as soon as Noell asked that he might be left alone with his friend the Persian withdrew. Noell squatted down upon the mat beside the bed, feeling quite comfortable; he had grown used to places where there were no chairs during his long exile.
‘How are the others?’ Quintus asked him.
‘I have spoken only to Langoisse,’ answered Noell, ‘and he is in a very distressed state. He is still sick. I have seen Ngadze, though, and I am told that Leilah and Ntikima are recovering well. I will try to see them both. Kantibh seems anxious still to bother me with questions, though I suspect that between the two of us, we have told them a great deal of what they sought to discover.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the monk. ‘I am not certain that they know exactly what it is that they seek to know. What have they said to you?’
The two exchanged details of their interrogations.
‘What do you suppose they will do with us?’ asked Noell, when the monk had finished his account.
‘They will keep us, and be kind to us, while we are docile. I do not think that they will harm us if we do not offend them, and Aiyeda has said that the elemi will be glad to learn all that I care to teach them of the wisdom of the world. They treat me as though I were a babalawo of some distant tribe, as the Edau and the Uruba came to reckon me.’
‘Will you tell them all that they want to know?’
‘Certainly,’ said the monk. ‘God made me a teacher of truths, and I will teach them to any who care to know. Adamawara is not the enemy of other nations. We came herè out of curiosity, and its people have the right to be curious about us.’
‘And if we should desire to leave when the rains end, to carry what we have learned back to the world from which we came. Will they help us to do that?’
Quintus shook his head. ‘I do not know. We have not yet been fully examined, and I do not think they will decide so soon what they want to do with us. Without a vampire guide to intercede with the tribesmen and help us with his medicines, without pack animals, without guns, we would have little chance of returning to Burutu. I do not think they intend to give us these things. It is no part of their plan that we should carry news of Adamawara back to Europe; it is possible that they would kill us rather than let us try. On the other hand, they might give us leave to go, and bid us a sorrowful farewell, secure in the conviction that we would die in the attempt.’
‘And what if we stay?’
‘It is too early to judge, but they seem determined that we should not become aitigu, and despite that they call me a babalawo and are ever ready to speak of the great brotherhood of tribes, I do not think that they intend to make me one of them.’
‘I am sure,’ said Noell, drily, ‘that they have no intention of welcoming me to their ranks. In any case, I do not think I would like to play the sacrifice at Ogo-Ejodun. I wonder if they have really forgotten the secret of making aitigu, but I suppose they would never reveal it to us if they had it still. I have the feeling that what we have told them of our world has troubled them, and I may have taken too little care to spare their anxieties. I fear that they will not readily let usgo;’
‘They have little to fear,’ said Quintus. ‘They are walled about by stone cliffs, evil forests and deadly disease. No army could hope to conquer this citadel while the silver death remains its moat. They seem sincerely to believe that the
empires of the aitigu will come to naught, and have taken our enmity against the vampires of Gaul as evidence supporting that conclusion. But you are right, I think; they are troubled by what we have told them, and what Ntikima has told them, and what they have found in the possessions which we brought. I suppose they have taken Langoisse’s guns?’
‘I do not know,’ admitted Noell, ‘But I would not be surprised. Is it their aim, do you think, to extend the rule of Ogbone throughout what they are pleased to call the brotherhood of tribes, even to the cold Siberian wastes, the Indies and far Cathay? Might Adamawara be a vision of the world as it must one day become?’
‘How can I tell?’ replied the monk. ‘Perhaps the common men of Europe and Asia will be reconciled to vampire rule one day, and be willing to play the part of cattle, as the Mkumkwe here seem content to do. Perhaps this is the only kind of paradise which the earth has to offer, and perhaps it is only a paradise of fools, who have convinced themselves that they are all-wise because they have lived so long with a foolish faith.’
‘I am not sure that these vampires are united among themselves,’ said Noell. ‘Kantibh and Berenike are not like Aiyeda and the other elemi they brought to see me. I do not find it difficult to imagine how those other young ones, who went as ambassadors to the world to serve the cause of Adamawara, came to betray that cause. The elemi who live with the further tribes have lives of their own, and within a secret society like Ogbone, there may flourish societies more secret still. I am not convinced that the rule of the elders can be eternal.’
‘Perhaps not,’ said the monk.
‘I see that there is a balance here, which there is not in Europe,’ said Noell. ‘In Africa, the elemi have made their condition less enviable, and they exploit the natural deference these tribesmen have for magicians, for the old, and for their ancestors. I suspect that they die almost as quickly as they are created, so that the order of things changes very slowly. In Gaul, what was once a handful of vampires has gradually become a legion, and that increase offers both a temptation and a threat to common men. If we seek to see the shape of the future, it is easier to imagine the triumph of the aitigu, who will multiply themselves until they are enough to secure any goal. Even if common men can bring about the fall of Attila’s empires, I doubt that vampirism would disappear from the world, as the Mohammedans would wish; once its secret is set free in our world, then every man and woman born will want to be a vampire.’
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