Perhaps, he thought, this was the region reserved for the vainglorious; he had certainly been guilty of vaulting ambition, and now it seemed that the fall awaited him which the scriptures promised to those of haughty manner.
Now that the die was cast, and there was nothing more to do but await the unfolding of the drama, he was not very tired. He seemed to have passed beyond exhaustion, into a fatalistic inertia. All the events which lay in wait for him now were mapped out as neatly and as carefully as Durand’s observers had mapped out the lines of the besieging forces, and there was nothing in that map to give him pleasure or relief.
Durand’s charting of the enemy’s dispositions had been necessary in order that the defenders would know where they faced vampires and where they faced common men, because the bloody arrows which were the last of all their hopes ought not to be wasted in mere slaughter. The mapping had been carefully done, with great attention to detail. So, it seemed, had the mapping of his own future been done with precision and care by fate or by God, or whatever other force it was that impelled today into tomorrow, and brought the form of history out of the readiness of time. Were he to consult that map of his fate, Noell supposed, he would see little in the way of symbols and contours. A few scratchmarks signifying fear and pain, a rude cross to mark the moment of his death, a straight road to take his shade to hell or oblivion; that would be all.
He had wondered whether he might take poison, to avoid the stake and the fire which Dragulya presumably had ready for him. He did not want to die in agony, most certainly not in public agony, for he still remembered with a chill of terror that tale his father had told while they had supped with Carmilla Bourdillon, of how Everard Digby had met his horrid death. Thus, it seemed, all martyrs must perish – if one could believe what was written in the legends of the saints. There was nothing to stop him taking poison. He was apothecary enough to prepare a draught which would give him easeful release, and as an unbeliever he had little fear of the wages of self-murder. And yet, he could not or would not do it.
What a wreck of a man I am, he said to himself. And what a poor thing my life is, to show itself in such a meagre map.
He had watched Langoisse die, despite his weak vision, and had wept when the gunmen cut him down. Was that, he wondered, a true hero’s death? No doubt there would be many tellers of the tale who would have it so: the pirate had destroyed the prince, in honest combat, and had then been treacherously slain. But was not the whole history of Malta’s rebellion written in that little allegory? Had not Noell Cordery’s elixir put an end to Attila’s empire of superstition and dread, only for that empire to strike back with merciless force at its slayer?
‘Oh, Langoisse,’ murmured Noell, aloud. ‘Thou wert free to flee this tragic isle … to go to England, where the true future is. Thou wert a fool to let the past restrain thee, and haul thee back to settle such a silly score.’
His heart ached, with all sincerity, for the pirate. He had hated Langoisse once, for what had happened to poor Mary White, and to Cristelle d’Urfé, but that hate had long been denied further nourishment, and had perished in his soul. He had not forgotten Mary, nor Cristelle, and would have felt ashamed had he been able to reckon their two deaths irrelevant, even in the face of such extravagant killing as he had lately seen and was yet to see; but his old bitter rage had been overlaid and hid by warmer feelings. Perhaps he had learned – better than Langoisse, it seemed – the futility of nursing such subtle poisons as hatred.
Noell was anxious for the Spitfire, but the mere fact that Langoisse had returned was assurance that the ship had not been sunk, and he did not believe that the pirate would have imperilled his crew in order to follow his fatal ambition. Leilah should be safe, and ought now to be on her way to London, to the protection of Kenelm Digby and his parliament. That, at least, was a cheering thought which should have lightened the burden of his despair, but his spirits were too deeply sunk.
‘Come away from the window, my friend.’
The voice cut through his reverie, making him start. Quintus had entered the room without his being aware of it, and he asked himself sarcastically whether his hearing was going the way of his sight. So much evidence of mortality! he said, under his breath. Will anything remain of me for Dragulya to murder?
‘You are ill,’ said the monk, when Noell made no audible reply to his plea. ‘You must rest.’
Noell had already turned his tired eyes towards the monk, and was measuring with his enfeebled gaze the candle-lit features and dirtied white robe. Quintus, who had been old before he was made a vampire, was not now the model of a doughty warrior, but there was a strength in his wiry limbs and in his shining eyes which could not be mistaken.
‘You were once a kind of father to me,’ said Noell, meditatively, ‘and yet it is I who seem far the older now. Indeed, I am older than I look, thanks to all my fevers and agues and infirmities, while you have the polished, unconquerable health of your kind. Perhaps you should call me sir, as surely befits the station of my rotting flesh, when you try to usher me away from confrontation with my destiny.’
‘I have always thought of thee as a kind of son,’ said Quintus, softly, ‘the only kind which I might have. If I had feared to lose that consciousness in becoming immortal, then I was anxious in vain. Not all the undying lose their power of affection, though once I thought that perhaps they must.’
‘An undying Quintus could never lose affection,’ agreed Noell. ‘Nor Leilah, nor, in his own peculiar fashion, Langoisse. I have my doubts about the greater number of those others, whether they be on the far side of the wall or the near. You have not surrendered your pity – nor ever could, I think – but I think that is because you have also refused to surrender the prerogative of pain. You might ignore a wound in your own flesh, but never a wound in another’s, and the pain of the world will e’er be upon your shoulders. If all men were like thee, my friend, there’d be no need for all of this, but thou art a man alone – a better man than I, I do believe.’
While he made this speech, Noell allowed Quintus to take him by the arm, and lead him across the room to a chair which was set beside the fire. There he sat, and Quintus sat opposite, so that they faced one another across the hearth.
‘I do not know about that,’ answered the monk, belatedly. Then, after a pause, he went on: ‘It seems to me, still, that if this is the world there is, then God’s handiwork is in it. I do not pretend to understand what manner of creature man is, or why he is beset by so many traps and temptations, but I know there is a purpose in its somewhere. I can no more fathom that purpose than you have fathomed the mysteries which you have sought to understand, but faith I have that all men have the chance to see the light of good and reason, and that more than we might sometimes imagine have something in them worthy to be saved. We have done God’s work, you and I, and not alone. What we do today we do with loyal and hopeful heart, and there are many like us in the vast wide world.’
Is this a final bid for my salvation? asked Noell of himself. But he did not answer in such terms. ‘Aye,’ he said, instead, ‘if there’s a God, then it must follow that His will is somewhere in this awesome chaos, though ’twould take a wiser man than I to guess precisely where. Sometimes, my bitter head explains to my hopeful heart that all of this was but a tiny jest of our Creator, such as He played on faith-besotted Job. One day, perhaps, he spake to a favourite angel, and said: “I will make men immortal, to prove to them that the gift of eternal life would only serve to make them strive much harder to destroy one another!” He’s a merry wight, our loving God, who gave us a span of life that we might readily spoil in sin, and will make us pay for our pleasure in the infinite fires of damnation.’
He was not surprised when this reply did not please the priest, but the monk only frowned a little, surely more in sorrow than in anger.
‘Do not be misled by thought of the morrow’s battle,’ Quintus said, his voice still gentle, not querulous or uncertain in the least. ‘It will be t
he day on which many men die, and a terrible price will be paid for what you have given to the race of common men, but it will not be the end of this history which you and I have dared to turn upside-down. The secret which we have made known will give long life to millions of men, and Dragulya knows even now – as Attila and Charlemagne know – that the days in which a tiny handful of men could hoard in miserly greed the treasures of youth and long life are dead and gone. The empire of the few is already crumbled, and the empire of the many is at hand. You have given the common men of future generations a freedom which Attila’s empires would ever have withheld, and the revenge which Dragulya intends to take is but a testament to your triumph.’
‘A sad and blood-stained triumph,’ murmured Noell, ‘still to be further polluted by our Parthian shot.’
Quintus bowed his head a little, and now his reply had not such certainty of resolution. ‘Do not regret it, my friend. There is nothing you or I can do to halt it, for Sceberra and Inguanez would not now be asked to sacrifice their people timidly. These Maltese are unbending folk, with a great and special courage, which will ever lead them to strike back at an enemy who would destroy them, even in the moment of their destruction. Attila’s empire is foredoomed to crumble, but the bolts from Durand’s crossbows will bring it all the sooner into dust, and save the lives of many future men.’
‘I know that,’ answered Noell, with a sigh. ‘All my bile against the wicked empire has been poured into the making of this thing, and left me empty of spite, but I am not about to complain against its justice now. Yet you and I will likely die tomorrow, and there is something in that circumstance which urges me now to think of further things than the fall of Gaul and Walachia. What I have loosed will not be put away so easily, and the empires which come after Gaul and Walachia might find that I have placed upon their own affairs a curse which will not be easily lifted.’
Quintus hesitated. ‘My son … ’ he said, but was not allowed to proceed.
‘I am not, after all, your son,’ said Noell, clasping his hands tightly, ‘but another man’s. I know that I have done what my father would have wished of me, and for his sake I am not ashamed to own to it, but I still cannot be sure that what my father did was moved by concern for his fellow men, or by the anguish thrust upon him by his vampire lover, and while I cannot be sure of him, how can I be sure of myself?’
As he finished this speech he stood up again, turning first one way and then another as if he did not know what to do with his derelict body. Then he strode back to the window, while Quintus came quickly from his seat to follow him.
‘Thou hast had vampire lovers yourself,’ Quintus reminded him, ‘who have not led thee to anguish.’
‘They never broke my heart.’
‘I knew Edmund Cordery,’ said the monk. ‘He was not a man with a broken heart. He had the stoutest heart of any man in England, braver than any Lionheart, worth ten of any vile impaler of the weak. He loved your mother, too; you must remember that.’
Noell passed his hand across his tired brow, and shivered in the cold breeze which blew through the unglazed window. Quintus tried to take him by the arm again, to lead him back to the chair where he might rest, but this time Noell shook off the hand and gripped the sill of the window as if to bind himself to it while he stared impotently into the night.
‘It is another of our kind creator’s jests,’ said Noell, remotely, ‘that we common men are made of clay so stupid that no common woman can ever possess the attractions of a vampire lady. Beauty, alas, is in the eyes of beholders, and we are drawn to that beauty which only vampires can possess. For me, there has never been aught to put in its place, and I sometimes despise it in myself. I pray that my father was a different man, but what is my blood was once his, and I dread that my sins were once his also.’
‘My son,’ said Quintus, more urgently now but without raising his voice, ‘you must absolve yourself from this imagined sin. It is not evil to own desire. I wish I knew whether the beauty of vampire women were a gift of God, or Satan’s trap, or a mere accident of happenstance, but I cannot tell. Your father loved the Lady Carmilla, perhaps as well as you love Leilah, but the fact that you could not love Leilah until she became immortal is to be excused as a mystery of your heart. It is not a matter for damnation, and it surely is not a proof that your father could not have loved your mother, or that his wrath against the empire of Gaul was not honestly found.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Noell, ‘I wish that I could know myself with sufficient certainty to absolve myself of evil. I wish I could say that I knew, without the shadow of a doubt, that what I have done was done for good and noble reasons, and not from some foolish motive so twisted and cunning that I cannot trace its tanglements within my soul.’
Noell paused, listening for a moment to the faint noises which drifted from the streets below – sounds which had earlier been masked by the roaring of the guns. Then he went on. ‘My friend,’ he said, awkwardly, ‘you know what it is that I have done, and perhaps you alone have the power of foresight to know what it will mean, not just to the war we must fight tomorrow, but to the world which our heirs must make out of the dereliction which we leave to them. I beg you to tell me whether there is any absolution from this sin. I ask you not for God’s forgiveness, nor even for your own – I ask you whether children yet unborn, when they grow to understand what I have done, will call me saint or devil?’
‘They will call thee martyr,’ said Quintus, with all the assurance of which he was capable, ‘and they will weep for you with all the pity that is in the world.’
‘All the pity that is in the world,’ echoed Noell. ‘But how much pity can there be, in a world which has conquered pain?’
‘The world will always have such pity as it needs,’ Quintus promised him. ‘Always and forever. And whatever the race of man becomes, with your gift of remaking itself, it will not lose love, for that is too precious a thing to be abandoned.’
Noell listened to these words, and repeated them to himself while he stood rigidly, clinging to the stone sill. Then, after a while, he slowly relaxed himself, and Quintus reached out again to help him bear his weight. The monk did not try to guide him away from the window this time, but put his arms around him to make him warm.
‘Dear God, Quintus,’ said Noell, with half a sob in his voice, ‘I am so afraid to die. I do not think I can do it well at all.’
‘Thou couldst not be a better man,’ whispered his friend, ‘if thou shouldst live a thousand years. Do not care about the manner of thy dying, for it is the way that thou hast lived which determines what thou art.’
‘But dost thou see,’ said Noell, softly, ‘that this is what I do not know? I ask of myself, how have I lived? I ask of myself, have I done what is right? And I cannot tell. Quintus, I cannot telll’
The monk only clasped him harder in his arms, until Noell came in his own good time to the understanding that within this stern embrace was all the answer that he needed. He did not need to believe in God, but he needed to believe in himself. In the end, it was simply a matter of faith.
NINE
Dragulya watched the long assault on Mdina from the hilltop, where his tent was pitched alongside the one where Richard the Norman’s body lay. Beside him was the man who now had command of the Norman troops, and might by Charlemagne be reckoned prince of Grand Normandy: Richard’s brother John.
John was by no means as imposing as his brother, being much slighter of build and carrying himself rather less arrogantly, but Dragulya liked him a little better, for he seemed calmer of mind and quicker of wit. Where Richard had all-too-obviously disliked the voivode, John gave the impression that he liked him. Dragulya did not care whether the appearance was true or not; in either case, it signified that John was the more cunning statesman. Then again, there seemed nothing squeamish about John, who seemed utterly indifferent to any contemplation of human suffering. He was the kind of man who would appreciate the humour of Dragulya’s jests.
> Michael Beheim was still by his master’s side, too, watching with him while the walls of Mdina crumpled under the trumpeting of the bombards. Blondel de Nesle was not to be seen, though. It seemed that John did not like his brother’s dear friend as well as he might, and Blondel had been sent to stay by his dead hero, to mourn and perhaps to count the cost of chivalry.
In the afternoon, the watchers on the hill saw the Walachian cavalry charge three times at a huge breach in the wall which Durand’s musketeers and artillerists fought desperately to defend. Less than a quarter of the troop were vampires, but their bravery was not lessened at all by the fact that so many stood to die. John exclaimed in ironic admiration of the recklessness of men possessed by the ambition to be vampires, but Dragulya never mocked his own men, even in secret. Indeed, he felt for them as he watched them surge forward on each assault, his heartbeat accelerating as he willed them on. When men and horses fell, bloodied and screaming, he gritted his teeth with anger, for these were his men, and every blow struck at them was aimed at the heart of his empire, and his power.
John was right, no doubt, to argue that ambition to be made immortal drove them on, transforming the fear of death into a burning fury, but that was good and right. That was a foundation of loyalty far more secure and trustworthy than any love or admiration. Dragulya’s common followers feared him, but they knew from the experience of eight generations of their antecedents that he was scrupulously fair in dispensing rewards. If they served him well, then they would win their place in the secret ceremonies of their masters, and join them in the ranks of vampirekind. So Dragulya watched his common soldiers, measuring their mettle, determined that many here today would become allies to share the centuries with him.
Though their horses were climbing the hill, against heavy fire, the riders drove them on with the passionate fierceness of those who had accepted the ultimate gamble: their mortal lives against the prize of immortality. In doing so, they earned the respect of the watching warlord, who knew the worth of any man who would willingly seize such odds. In his eyes, these were the best of humankind, the ones whose values accorded with the realities of existence. What else was mortal life for, but to use as a stake in the great lottery?
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