Noell’s spectacles had slipped down a little from the bridge of his nose, and despite the fact that the distance was not great, he could not quite bring Vlad Tepes into proper focus. He had the impression that here was a huge and handsome man, with long hair and a flowing beard to show off very obviously that glossy sleekness which marked him a vampire. He could see, too, that the Walachian seemed to be holding his right arm crookedly against his chest, as though it was hurt and the hand could not be properly used. He wondered whether Dragulya was surprised to find him as he was, weak and imperfect, marked by age and illness and all the deficiencies of common flesh. But Dragulya must have known that he was an unlucky man, immune to immortality.
‘I am glad to meet you, Master Cordery,’ said the voivode. His English was lightly accented.
‘I had hoped to avoid the occasion,’ answered Noell. ‘I do not expect that it will have a happy outcome.’
‘You need not fear the stake,’ said the warlord. ‘I am asked to take you back to Rome, in order to deliver you there to the officers of Alexander’s inquisition, who will obtain your confession to crimes of sorcery, intercourse with the devil, and other maleficia. They will try to treat you more gently than some, I believe, for they will be a little anxious that you do not die under question. They would prefer it were you to walk alive to the place where they will burn you as a heretic, and will try to make you sufficiently penitent to condemn yourself before you burn.’
Two of the others who were present were bold enough to come to the warlord’s side to inspect his prisoner curiously. They were smaller, slimmer men, whose clothes had not been stained by the toil of battle. Because they had the sleek black hair and dark eyes characteristic of vampires they seemed almost indistinguishable to Noell’s blurred vision. One of them, seeing his condition, turned away and fetched him a chair, holding it for him so that he might sit down. Noell did not thank him.
‘This is my friend, Michael Beheim,’ said Dragulya, referring to the man who had not moved. ‘The one who has your comforts more fully in mind is Blondel de Nesle, but perhaps you know Blondel?’
Noell looked at the man who had fetched him the chair, and said: ‘I saw you several times, when I was very young. No doubt you have not changed, but my sight is feeble.’
If Blondel smiled, Noell could not see it.
‘Do you know what has become of my friend, a monk called Quintus?’ asked Noell of Dragulya. He had little interest in discussing the more awful aspects of his own intended fate, but he was anxious for news of the monk.
‘If he is not dead, then he will go with you to Rome,’ said the voivode. ‘Vampires may burn with common men, if they are proven heretics. I have not seen him yet, but you will understand that he cannot escape. You had your chance to sail away, and perhaps you were foolhardy not to take it.’
‘Perhaps,’ said Noell, ‘you will understand why I thought that you could not harm me. My life has already brought me to the edge of death.?
‘I could hurt you still, if I wished,’ Dragulya told him. ‘I have no doubt that the pope’s kind officers will do what they can to make your remaining time on earth unpleasant. It was a pretty jest of fate that such a physician as you have become could not cure himself of the curse of pain. I think the Romans will take ample time to laugh at it.’
‘Still,’ said Noell, keeping his voice quite level, ‘they cannot hurt Quintus. They might kill him, but they cannot hurt him. And 1 think I have placed many other men beyond the reach of the agonies which you intend to inflict. Did you find room aboard your galleys for a cargo of pointed stakes, or will your carpenters strip the island of its every tree? I fear that it has not very many.’
‘I have what is needed for my work,’ replied Dragulya, sounding almost as though he were mimicking the calmness of his prisoner’s tone. ‘It falls to me to deal with the Maltese, and the rebel hospitallers, to punish them for their part in what you have done. You know, of course, that Langoisse was killed?’
‘I saw it done. Has his ship been captured or sunk?’
‘I do not know. I have heard no such report, but the sea is still calm, and if the vessel sailed away from the western shore, there is no reason why it should not reach another port.?
Dragulya seemed honest enough in making these answers, and there was no sign of personal animosity in his cultured voice. If anything, there was a note of courteous curiosity, as if the impaler wondered what manner of being it might be which could appear before him in such meek and feeble guise, yet had caused him so much trouble.
‘What of Sceberra, Inguanez and Durand?’ asked Noell.
‘The Baron of Castel Cicciano is beyond our immediate reach: not yet dead, but in a sleep from which I will not trouble him to awaken. You must count me lenient in that, though it is not for mercy’s sake that I give him an easy death. He is not sufficiently important. My men are sharpening stakes for the other baron and for the Seigneur de Villegaignon.’
Noell shook his head in sorrow. ‘What point is there in impaling vampires?’ he asked, with more contempt than bitterness. ‘They can cancel out the pain, and will merely go to sleep with the stakes inside them. Their death will be as easy, in its fashion, as Sceberra’s. Your methods, prince, are out of date.?
Dragulya came closer to him then, and reached out to move his spectacles, apparently having become aware that Noell could not see him clearly. He adjusted them, gently and neatly, in spite of the fact that he was using his left hand. When they were better-balanced, he looked his adversary straight in the eye.
Noell had to look upwards in order to meet the vampire’s gaze. He offered no thanks, and was determined to meet Dragulya’s dark stare as stoutly as he could. But he looked away, eventually, glancing at Michael Beheim and Blondel de Nesle, whose faces were clearer now. They seemed fascinated by him, and by his conversation with Vlad Tepes.
‘You have never seen a man impaled, I think?’ said Dragulya, with calculated delicacy.
‘No,’ answered Noell. ‘But I have seen a vampire tortured, and I know how little the pain means, once the effort is made to contain it. I know that it serves no purpose.?
‘A common man impaled need not die quickly,’ said Dragulya, softly. ‘The stake is driven into his arse, so that the point lodges in his entrails. When it is carefully set upright, the man’s weight drags him very slowly down around the pole, so that the point inches upwards inside him, tearing the liver and the stomach, until it reaches the cavity where the lungs are. I have known men survive until that cavity is pricked, but they usually die before that, of loss of blood and the ravages of pain. If they writhe, the agony is worse but death comes quickly. I have seen men who knew that, and who understood it, throw themselves about most violently, though the pain must have been so terrible as to tear their souls to shreds. I have seen men bite their tongues clean through in such state, but I thought them brave men, after their fashion.
‘For a vampire, though, it is different. A vampire can control the pain, as you say. It is an effort, of course, but it can be done and a vampire on the stake does not writhe about. Instead, he must stay as still as he can; it is part of his exertion of control. He does not bleed as much inside as a common man does, and cannot die from that loss of blood. He may, if he is fortunate, fall into the deep sleep because of the pricking of his lights, but I have seen that it rarely happens that way. The very skill which a vampire’s flesh has in self-repair begins to heal the organs around the shaft which penetrates them. A vampire impaled, therefore, might live for weeks instead of hours, quite conscious of what is happening, while the point of the stake works up through the torso to the neck. He can be kept from the sleep of escape if he is fed with blood and water from a sponge on the end of a stick.
‘I have seen impaled vampires, in the fullness of time, tilt back their heads so that the point of the stake might emerge again through their mouths, with their internal organs adapting all the while to the spit which runs right through them. They control the pa
in, but they cannot unlearn the knowledge of what is being done to them. It is a subtler form of torture than you might understand, but we are made of subtle flesh, and those who seek to torment vampires must be very clever.
‘I have sometimes wondered, watching vampire flesh make such accommodations, what ingenious shapes human flesh might be induced to assume, if we only had the patience and the art to shape it. What deformities one might force upon a man! I have men who are skilled in the art of impalement, through practice and interest, but it has always been in my mind to attempt more elegant experiments. In the past, I have always been frustrated by a lack of vampires on which to exercise my arts, for we have ever been most careful of our own kind, but you have changed the world to help me in my work, and the beneficiaries of your elixir will surely supply me with such raw material as I need.’
Throughout this speech Dragulya looked very steadily into Noell’s eyes, waiting patiently for him to turn away again, but he would not. When the voivode finished, Noell continued to look at him, voicing no response at all.
‘You see,’ said Dragulya quietly, ‘what your endeavours have wrought. You have set vampire against vampire, and you have forced us to learn how direly we might treat one another, to secure our empire. You have added greatly to the sum of human misery, have you not?’
‘The harm which you do is on your conscience, not on mine, ’ Noell told him.
‘Is it, Master Cordery?’
Noell realised that Dragulya was very serious in this debate, and was not simply seeking to horrify his prisoner. Dragulya was genuinely angry with him, and was earnest in wanting to make his argument clear.
The voivode went on: ‘Is your conscience, Master Cordery, untroubled by anything which you have done, or any consequence of the rebellion which you have fostered? Do you reckon yourself a saintly man, Master Cordery, condemned by your frail flesh to die like the martyrs of old on their crosses and pyres, all for the love of Jesus? But the world goes on, Master Alchemist, and what you have begun will extend over centuries, touching the lives of generations of men. You have upset the world, and it will never be the same. Had you not come to Malta, many men who now lie dead in the streets would still be alive. Had you not done your work, many men who will this night be perched on wooden needles would instead be drowning such petty sorrows as they had in pleasant wine. Do you not believe, Master Physician, that they will die cursing you with all the harrowed breaths they take? Believe it, I command you, for I know that ’twill be so.’
Noell looked at him steadily, saying nothing, and waiting.
‘Have you no defence?’ asked the voivode.
‘It is not I who needs a defence,’ Noell told him. ‘You are the tyrant, the oppressor, the torturer. Malta has never harmed you; its citizens sought only freedom from the Imperium of Gaul. We are not the killers or the crucifiers. You are a poor fool if you think to make me guilty of the sins which you will gladly commit. You believe that this forest of death which you intend to plant will show the world how foolish men are to seek out the freedom and longevity which your kind have denied them, but in fact it will show them how vicious and how godless you really are. It will show them how desperately the world cries out for the smashing of your empire. I have done what I could to secure that end, and would have done more. I weep for every drop of blood that is shed in this cause, but to do other than I have done would have been a betrayal of the unborn: a treason against humankind as great as the one which Attila himself committed, and which your kind has brutally carried forward down the years. I am not to be made ashamed, Vlad Tepes, by such as you. I have done all that I could to destroy you, and I still have hope that I have done more than you imagine.’
As he spoke the last few words, Noell lowered his gaze at last, to look at the voivode’s injured arm. Dragulya looked down also, then reached across with his left hand to feel the upper part of his right arm, as if searching for some mysterious sign.
‘I had hoped that you would tell me,’ Dragulya aid, coolly. ‘But I would not have you think me devoid of imagination. I was wounded, as you must have guessed, by a bolt fired from a crossbow – a bolt which was bloody before it struck me. I had not quite understood the disposition of the defenders’ arms while the battle was in progress, for it seemed to me that you aimed cannon at common men and arrows at vampires, in defiance of the logic of the situation. I wondered, for a while, whether Durand had made some inexplicable error. Then, I saw your bloody bolts scattered on the ground, and the pots in which your marksmen anointed them, and I began to suspect that there was reason in what had been done.
‘I remembered what Richard had told me of the manner in which your father died, and I asked myself then whether a man who could devise an elixir of life might not also conjure up an elixir of death. I realise now that we, who have always made vampires with our magic, have taken too readily for granted the alchemy which you have used to copy us. At first, we did not believe that your elixir was anything but a mask, and assumed that you were only buggers like ourselves, mysteriously prolific. We have suffered, I think, for our complacency. Will you tell me, Master Alchemist, what damage your arrows will do?’
‘In all honesty,’ said Noell, smoothly, ‘I do not know. We have had no chance to test what I have made, except on rats which I first made immortal, and then destroyed. I cannot pretend to understand all that I discovered in Adamawara, and most of the secrets of my alchemy are secrets still. Human semen is not the only seed which can combine with that other seed to become that which makes men vampires, and I think there is more than one way in which human semen can be remade. What I have tried to do is to combine the seed of vampirism with seeds of disease taken from the bodies of suffering men, in the hope that those seeds of disease may gain the power to destroy vampires, as certain plagues in Africa are known to do. I am myself so vulnerable to contagion that I have been forced to be circumspect in this work, but I could not let Quintus and my Maltese apprentices do everything alone, and I have been the planner and director of this work. I have tried to murder you, Vlad Tepes, though with a slighter shaft than the one which I expected you to prepare for me.’
‘Your father failed,’ said Dragulya, coldly.
‘He killed Carmilla Bourdillon.’
‘And the plague which he loosed claimed thousands of common lives in London. If the Gaulish knights carry sickness back to eyery part of Charlemagne’s empire, and my Walachians to Attila’s, a million common men might die, and no more than a handful of vampires. Which is the greater monster, Master Cordery: a prince who impales a thousand guilty men to keep the peace, or an alchemist who might slay a million with fever, making no discrimination between friend and foe? How do you plead to the charge, Master Cordery? If Vlad Dragulya is to be reckoned a demon in disguise, how may the world reckon you when you have set abroad a greater plague than any the Europe has known before? Will you still imagine yourself the martyr? Are you even now a saint unjustly condemned to bum?’
‘I am no saint,’ Noell told him, quietly, ‘and others must judge the cause in which I am become a martyr. It is a poor martyr, I know, who sheds the blood of others in addition to his own, but we have been a race of martyrs, we common men, who have given too much of our blood in these last thousand years, to feed a race of tyrants and torturers. I say again that I do not know what I have done, but it is the vampire knights of Europe who are the first and principal targets of the arrows which I poisoned. If you would save the vampires and commoners of Gaul and Walachia from the danger of plague, you have only to stay in Malta, and bear that burden entirely by yourselves. I beg you to do it, for without the men of your wondrous army, assembled to humble this tiny island with a vast display of strength, neither Gaul nor Walachia can defeat the enemies which wait within.
‘Attila, they say, is mad, and Charlemagne not the man he was. Their day is done, and the shadow of eternity falls darkly now upon a future no man can know. I have tried to be one of its makers, and have done everything that I
could to contrive a true lottery, so that every man alive might strive to take a noble part. If I have set free such forces of destruction as will spoil the world entirely, then I will offer my soul to suffer in Purgatory for every innocent soul struck down by what I have unleashed. My prayer, though, is that I have destroyed Vlad Tepes, and hundreds of his vampire knights, and in bursting the iron bonds of the vampire empire might save a hundred lives for every one that will be lost. ’
Dragulya took a step back, away from him, and Noell felt as if a burden had been lifted from him. Dragulya’s accusations had hurt him more than he had expected, and had honestly tested his faith that what he had done could be justified. He felt illimitably tired now, and could not believe that he would have sufficient endurance to survive a journey in chains to Rome and the subsequent attentions of Alexander’s inquisitors. He felt too delicate to withstand any pain or pressure, and was almost ready to laugh at any threat.
‘If you had only stayed in London,’ whispered Vlad Tepes, whose eyes were burning now, as if with the onset of a fever. ‘Richard would never have had you killed. He was a prince, you see, who so liked to be loved, and could always be tempted by a handsome youth. Perhaps his way of making you a vampire might have succeeded where your own elixir failed, but in either case you’d be a noble of the English court today, a creature of silks and powders, devoted to masques and courtly dances. You might have had the world at your feet, with fine and lovely vampire ladies to make up for your mortality. ’
‘I have had a better life than that,’ said Noell, simply.
‘You will not think so, when they light the fire.’
Noell laughed, not bravely nor with contempt, but only because he saw a kind of jest in it: an absurd example of the wit, whether God’s or the devil’s, that was in and of the world.
Empire of Fear Page 49
