‘Where, in a world of many vampires, would vampires find the blood to feed themselves?’ asked Quintus, softly. It was the old riddle, asked even by children, offered as a proof that vampires must always be sparing with their gift, that there must always be common men to serve the drinkers of blood.
‘If what makes a common man a vampire is a kind of creature,’ said Noell, reflectively, ‘and if what there is in human blood which vampires need is also a kind of creature, then we might hope to find a way of liberating the one creature from the semen of vampires, and the other from the blood of men. If we could do that, then vampires would not need common men to nourish them, and common men would not need vampires to convert them. Then there might be a world of immortal men.’
‘A world without children,’ Quintus reminded him, softly.
‘Women might have their children first,’ Noell pointed out, ‘and be converted later. A world of immortals would not need so very many children.’
‘What kind of a world might that be?’ asked Quintus. ‘A world like Adamawara, without the servants. A world of people who became older and older, ancient whatever their appearance, settling more securely into their habits, not only careless of divine mercy but uninterested in change, unable to find anything new. A paradise, do you think?’
Noell thought of Berenike, cold through and through, all but lost to the world of thought and feeling. But that was not the path of thought which he was trying to explore.
‘What of a world of men who really did become wiser and wiser, without limit or end?’ he asked. ‘What of a world of men intent on discovery, from whom nothing could ultimately be hid? Not uninterested in change, or unable to find anything new. Perhaps it is only fear which confines the undying within ironclad tradition, committed to changelessness. The immortals who live now cling to what they have, but perhaps it is not necessarily so. When all danger is gone, when all fear is finished, then exploration of the new might be all joy, all pleasure. Might it not?’
Quintus bowed his head, wearily. ‘I cannot tell,’ he said. ‘I think no one can. I think that I would rather trust in the life which God has made for me.’
The monk was too tired to continue the discussion, so Noell bade him farewell, and promised to come again. He went to the door, and asked a passing servant to summon Kantibh, and when the Persian came he asked where he could find Leilah.
She was further away, in another corridor down a precipitate stair. She was well enough to be up and about, though he thought it must be the first time she had dressed herself, ready to return to the world at large. When she saw him, she leapt to her feet with obvious delight.
‘I tried to come to thee,’ she told him, ‘but I could not find thee, and could not make myself understood. They have been kind to me, most especially this man Kantibh, who has taught me some words of his language, and managed to tell me that thou wert well.’
Noell turned to Kantibh, and thanked him for that kindness. The Persian bowed, and withdrew again to leave them to talk.
‘Have you been very ill?’ asked Noell.
‘I thought that I would die,’ she told him. ‘I was lost in awful nightmares, and more than once I thought that my soul was consigned to your Christian Hell.’
‘Be thankful they could not speak to you,’ he told her, ‘else they would have questioned you even in thy dreams. But it must have been hard, with no one to speak to. I saw Langoisse, who was much disturbed, but I think that he is getting well now, and Kantibh does not think that he will die.’
‘And Quintus?’
‘I have come from his bedside. He is well. I saw Ngadze too, but not Ntikima.’
‘I have looked out at this kingdom from my window. It seems to me a poor place, made all of stone, with no golden treasures to astound us after all. What shall we carry home, to make us rich?’
‘We must see what we can find,’ he told her, ‘when we are well enough to travel across the valley. Perhaps the lake is shored with diamonds, and the hills are hewn from philosopher’s stone, which will turn base lead to gold. But if it is only soil and stone, as it seems to be, at least we have come where few men have come before us, and none in nearly a thousand years.’
‘And will I be a vampire now, to be thy noble courtesan?’ She laughed, as she had always laughed, with the same forthrightness she had always had. He remembered her laughing like that when she and he had been little more than children.
‘Your own people would stone you and burn your body,’ he told her, without matching her laugh.
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘I am an unbeliever, like thee, and do not care what those who once owned me would believe. I would that these were my people, they seem so nice and good. We will not go to Araby, my love, but to the grand courts of Gaul, where we will be vampires both, and have the best which all the world can offer.’
‘But then we could not be lovers,’ he reminded her.
She frowned at him, and said: ‘But we are not lovers as we are, so where would be the loss? I think thou might love me better, though, if I were a vampire lady. Hast thou seen the one called Berenike?’
‘I have,’ said Noell.
‘And has she come to thee, to drink thy blood?’
She laughed as she said it, but she was standing before him, looking up into his eyes, and before he could move to interrupt her she had reached up playfully, to pull the folds of his shirt apart, to look at his chest, where the marks of a vampire’s knife would be.
It was only a game, a silly tease born of the high spirits which the sight of him had brought her to. But the shirt came away from his breast, and there were the punctures made by the vampire’s awl, still livid near his nipple, and she saw what she had been morally certain that she would not see.
The colour drained away from her face, and her eyes grew hard as marble. When she raised her gaze again, to look him in the face, the high spirits were gone.
‘You are not a monk,’ she said, ‘after all.’
He tried to remember whether there had ever been a moment when she had forgotten herself, and called him ‘you’ instead of‘ thou’. If there had been such occasions, he had not noticed them.
‘Leilah … ’ he said.
She turned away. ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘I am the pirate’s mistress, and your sisterly friend. It matters not to me whether you are a monk, or a common man. I am your friend, and that is all. Thy friend. Choose thy lovers where thou wilt.’
‘Yes,’ he said, softly. ‘Thou art my friend, and the best I have.’
She went to her window, and he followed her. They looked out at the great valley, which seemed very peaceful, and very orderly. The fields were bright beneath the golden light of the morning sun, and it was not too hard to think of this as a kind of Eden: a little garden-world cut off by high walls from a cruel and ugly vastness without.
There was a haze of dust in the air, though there was no wind blowing, which drew a veil across the lower slopes of the mountains. There was a single snow-capped peak in the great distance, which rose above the haze, like a crocodile’s tooth pointing into the blue sky.
‘Was it worth the hardship we had in coming here?’ she asked, soberly.
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘It is for Quintus and Langoisse to say, for it was they who brought us.’
‘Will they make Langoisse the gift of eternal life?’
‘It has been made clear to me that they do not think us altogether worthy. But if Langoisse can prove himself to the satisfaction of the elemi, who can tell?’
She smiled at that, but only briefly and sarcastically. ‘You think my love can conduct himself like the noble Ghendwa, more monk than your friend the monk? I think his dream is to be a vampire like Cesare Borgia or the legendary Roland, not a withered sage like one of these. He dreams of becoming strong again, so that he might challenge Richard Lionheart to fight with him, as once he did before, and in his dreams he slays the wicked prince, time and time again. I suppose he cannot hope that they will give hi
m what he wants. And what might I do to prove my own self worthy? What is it that I might become, to earn the station of yon Berenike? Perhaps I am too old, with crow’s feet about my eyes and mouth, and ragged hair, and bruises in my flesh. When I was younger, though, I still had not the beauty of a vampire lady. What must I become, to live forever? Thou wilt tell me, I know, that I must give up the hope, that I must be content to wither away, and let the flesh decay upon my bones. We will grow old together, will we not, and grow apart?’
He took her in his arms, as he had on many an occasion before, to comfort her when she was sad or sick, or to bid her farewell when Langoisse was taking her away. ‘Do not be afraid,’ he told her. ‘I do not think that anyone here means us any greater harm than to let us die in God’s good time. If we do not offend them, they will not hurt us.’
This speech did nothing to soothe her ire, ignoring as it did the real cause of her distress.
‘And that is our treasure?’ she said, sharply. ‘That is the victory which we have won in crossing half the world and coming near to death? If we are good, and take care not to offend, they will let us live! I beg you tell that to my friend Langoisse, and see what he will reckon to the privilege of dying here!’
He wilted under her scolding, demoralised. There was no answer he could give. It would do no good to declare that they had set out from Burutu a tiny army, but arrived in Adamawara in a very different condition, in no shape to attempt a conquest. It was not that helplessness, in any case, which had disturbed her
When he said goodbye, she would not let him kiss her on the lips, though she put her cheek upon his wounded breast, as if to listen to the beating of his wayward heart.
SEVEN
The place of the unfinished was a good deal larger than Noell had thought at first, but much of it was empty and derelict. If one looked at the windows, ledges and balconies which overlooked the valley there seemed to be only a few dozen dwellings, but let into the rock were dozens of winding corridors and tunnels, which gave access to many more chambers.
Noell discovered that the small and underpopulated realm of the aitigu did not easily offer access either to the plain far below or to the forest without. Clearly, there must be a way up from the Mkumkwe’s fields, by which food was daily brought, but Noell realised that it must be as much within the mountain as without, and though he asked Kantibh where it was he could not get an exact answer. He was assured that when the time came, he would be taken to the valley floor, and across the plain to Iletigu, the place of the finished, which, he concluded, must be set in the opposite wall of the remarkable circlet of stony ramparts.
He found himself free to come and go as he pleased between Berenike’s house and Kantibh’s, where all his companions save Ntikima were lodged. He was let alone to explore the corridors and ledges as he pleased. Despite its title, there were many elemi in the place of the aitigu, which seemed in essence to be a place of instruction and learning. There were many more instructors than pupils, and many of the elemi seemed to be engaged in some esoteric business of self-instruction. He soon became used to seeing crabbed and decrepit black men, squatting alone, murmuring to themselves in sing-song fashion as though entranced.
At first he thought that these meditators were communing with their gods, or sending themselves forth upon odysseys in the dreamlands of their private selves, but he soon realised that this was only a part of the story. In Adamawara there was neither paper nor parchment nor papyrus. Though the elemi knew the skills of inscription they used them in the most sparing fashion, cutting words in softer stones with tools which were mostly stone themselves. They had no books to store what they knew, but they had a great supply of memories which could extend over centuries, and so could keep that information which they deemed necessary in the heads of men which were carefully trained to bear it.
Noell had previously thought of the elemi as men trained in mock-practical arts – in medicine and magic, in the properties of plants and the dispositions of deities and demons. Perhaps that was so, among the tribesmen, but here in Adamawara the accumulation of wisdom which was counted most significant was the careful stocking of the memory with layer upon layer of information. As each long-lived generation passed away, these carefully-ordered edifices of words were handed on from one elemi to another, fixed by endless rhythmic repetition; every time that new things were added to the store, new elemi were appointed to make it part of the commonwealth of wisdom which was Adamawara.
When he first realised this, Noell’s imagination was seized by the awesome weight of this tradition extending over thousands of years. He marvelled at the vastness of the stores which must be spun into the souls of these ancient arokin. But then he began to doubt. The real implications of it became clearer to him when the elemi began in earnest the business of taking from him that which he had to add to their store. He was by no means unenthusiastic to instruct them, and thought that he might have many things of value to impart. He was, after all, his father’s son; a mechanician whose like the heart of Africa had never known. He was zealous to reveal to his hosts the secrets of pumps and turning-machines, of clockwork and gears, of drills and furnaces, bold in his intention to be a prophet of iron and of glass, and of all the means of manufacture which had created the world into which he was born.
Alas, that was not what Nyanya – the elemi appointed to be his master pupil – desired to know. What Nyanya wanted, first and foremost, was to learn the English language, and then the beliefs which the men who spoke that language had about the natural and supernatural worlds. What Nyanya wanted was the names of things, as if there were a special magic in naming whereby it was enough to know what a thing was called, rather than what it could be made to do. Nyanya wanted to know what, but never to know how. He wanted words in vast strings, to be spun around some invisible mental spool, creating a tight-wound thread which he might unravel at will. Nyanya’s memory was, in its way, prodigious, but as Noell saw his own wealth of knowledge transformed as it passed from his own tongue to Nyanya’s ear, he began to reappraise the wisdom of the elemi, and came to a different view of what they were.
Noell saw that the elemi were not so much masters of their knowledge as prisoners of it. He realised for the first time that a good memory, in the Gaulish way of thinking, was one which was not merely expert in remembering, but adept in forgetting too. The work of the mind which he was used to doing had often seemed to be cursed by doubt, generating questions far more prolifically than answers, but now he saw that this was no curse at all. The elemi did not deal in doubt, and permitted a traffic in questions so narrowly delimited that their mental universe was very different from his own.
Nyanya borrowed all the words that Noell could find for him, with an appetite insatiable, but Noell quickly grew tired of instructing him, not because he sought jealously to keep secrets from those who had made him captive, but because the sieve through which his given knowledge was strained upon receipt became a barrier which cut him off, and made the words he spoke into little more than empty noise.
Another barrier, no less confining to Noell’s spirit, grew by degrees between himself and his vampire lover. He continued to live in her house, but it seemed to him that the moment he became properly conscious of her visits to his bed the weight of feeling invested in such occasions began a long decline.
Berenike had been the perfect lover when she was far more a creature of his dreams than a real being. Her beauty was no longer enough to satisfy him, now that he had become aware of her own dreaminess – her simplicity of mind, the emptiness of her life. He quickly found out that he was to Berenike no more than an instrument of self-stimulation, attractive by virtue of his colour and form, which seemed pretty to her, but not as a living and thinking being. He was conscious of the fact that as he became more familiar to her, she grew bored with him, and that she would eventually be finished with him, ready to put him away and commit him to some cobwebbed corner of her dreaming mind.
He might have tr
ansferred his awakened affection to Leilah, mortal as she was and lacking all the crystal beauty of a vampire, but Leilah’s eagerness to be near him had gone now – evanished, it seemed, with the knowledge that he was vampire’s prey. She avoided his company, and spoke to him coolly when they met. If he cornered her, she protested that she was his friend, and yet she had become unapproachable.
It was the other way round with Langoisse, who now deemed Noell a better friend than he ever had before, though he never spoke of that night when he had crawled into Noell’s room, desperate with an anguish more hellish than the one which had given him his name. But Langoisse had not fully recovered from the silver death, or perhaps from the fevers which had preceded it – he remained very weak in body, and tired in spirit. He spent most of his days in his bed, and Leilah had often to be his nurse, for he did not like the Mkumkwe servants who attended him. No elemi took instruction from Langoisse, and it was clear to everyone that the pirate could not, in his present condition, contemplate a journey away from the haven of rest to which fate had brought him.
The only one who dissented from this opinion was Langoisse himself, and that as loudly as one who protests too much his innocence. Of them all, Langoisse spoke most often of the return, of the sea, of things which yet remained for him to do. How could he linger here, he asked his friends, when he still had accounts to settle in his own country? How quickly must the destined day be approaching when he would meet Richard the Norman, as once he had tried to do, on the field of honour? These rhapsodies of the imagination seemed to Noell to be a kind of delirium, and it was plain that the bed-ridden pirate had not completely returned from the dream-state into which the silver death had taken him.
Empire of Fear Page 32
