‘My father is not so very different,’ observed Michael Southerne. ‘He suggested to me a little while ago that there must be a great deal more than meets the eye in the coincidence which made the alien DNA compatible with the human genome. I think that he and the younger Darwin are trying to move the theory of evolution on to a much bigger stage: one which extends beyond the Earth to take in the entire universe, with a single system of life extending throughout its infinite reaches.’
Leilah remembered looking up with Noell Cordery and Quintus into the infinite sky, when she had told Ntikima that the stars were very far away; and Quintus had said that they were distant suns, and had rejoiced that God had made man incarnate on every world of every star, to fill his infinite Creation with body and spirit, in a scheme whose grandeur was beyond imagination – beyond even the imagination that a vampire had, despite that she had lived for thousands of years.
And then she thought again: Poor Berenike! To have the breath of life without the nourishment of vision. She spoke silently of Berenike to distract herself from the fact that she had first thought of her own inadequacies.
Aloud, she said: ‘I am glad to hear it. The universe of stars is a drear and dreadful place, if we have no sense of belonging there. I do not need the kind of God which Quintus had, but it soothes me to think that the story in which I play my part is not confined within a tiny particle of stone, lost in a limitless desert of midnight dark.’
To herself, she said: I remember him better than I thought, to speak thus for myself, for those were words that might have been his, long before I learned to speak in such a way.
‘You sound very like my father,’ said the boy, rather harshly. ‘I suppose emortals always think that way. I wonder whether it’s true, though, or just a convenient illusion?’
She looked at him carefully, measuring his frailty in the blueness of his eyes, which spoke so frankly of mortality.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘No one does. Someday soon, we may have better evidence, when we go to the stars, and discover whether life is really everywhere, and what it is like in other places, but the farther reaches of infinity will always be outside the things we know.’
‘Someday soon,’ he repeated, ‘when we go to the stars. It will be soon for you, no doubt, but not for me. This world is all that I have, and its pain too. My part in things is unfortunately limited, like the part which Noell Cordery had to play. He and I were marked alike by our treasonous DNA – condemned to early death.’
If he was trying to make her uncomfortable, he succeeded. She could hardly bear to think of the cruel trick which fate had played on Noell. Condemned to death he most certainly had been, and to such horrid pain that a boy like this, with morphine in his pocket and a whole world to help him in his distress, could not begin to comprehend. And yet, in her own treasonous heart, she had never been able to be truly sorry that he remained mortal, for if he had not, she would not have had him for a lover.
‘It was not his DNA which killed him,’ she said, not without a harshness of her own. ‘He was martyred by vengeful men.’
‘I know. But he did offer himself for capture and for trial, didn’t he? Would he not have fled Malta if he had not been doomed to death regardless? What comfort was there in life for him, once he was certain of his own mortality?’
She had to look away then, and she stood up to go to the window, to peer out at the cloudy night. The rain was beginning again, and she judged that it would be heavy.
‘What comfort?’ she echoed. She had always said to herself that she had been his comfort. But she had never been sure what that tiny comfort could be worth, weighed in the balance against death itself, and pain.
To Michael Southerne, she said something very different. ‘I suppose there was no comfort at all,’ she said. ‘He was not, after all, a comfortable man, never easy in his thoughts. He could be bitter, and sad, and at times he might have worn the nickname which my pirate lover took more readily than the pirate did. I cannot tell you that he was reconciled to his fate, or that he was entirely saved from misery by some discovered faith. He never found Quintus’s God, so that he might soothe himself with dreams of Heaven, nor was he ever truly convinced that he had made a proper mark on history. He did not know, when he spent his last months in producing a poison to destroy vampires, whether posterity would bless or curse him for his efforts – whether men like you would reckon him a hero or a felon. But still, he was a man who thought the life which he had worth living, and the things which he did worth doing – and he did not think that the infinity of things made any one of his achievements, or the least of his discoveries, too infinitesimal to be reckoned in the sum of existence.’ She turned around, to see what his reaction would be.
Michael was silent, and gave nothing away. It was as though he deliberately wanted to give no sign, even that he had heard. That in itself, she thought, was sign enough.
‘To tell the truth,’ he said, after a while, ‘I wouldn’t know whether to count him a hero or not. I think my father would call him a great man, for his discoveries, and for the role he played in breaking an old order to make way for a new, but I don’t know. I think I’ve become sceptical of my father’s opinions, almost as a matter of habit. Do you think, then, that I should take Cordery as my model, having found myself victim to his disease? Should I shoulder my own burden nobly, and set an example to the pitiless world by demonstrating that a common man can still make his mark?’
‘It sounds like good advice,’ she said, refusing to acknowledge that he was being sarcastic.
‘Easy enough to offer. Very easy, I suppose, for one like my father, who set out to be a man of science, who made discoveries while he still belonged to the world of pain and sickness, and who carried into his emortality a zeal for work which should sustain him for a hundred years. I’m not sure, though, that I’m as much like him as either he or I would want me to be. Tell me, how have you used your centuries of life?’
She did not mind the impoliteness, with all its veiled accusations. ‘I was bom a slave,’ she said, ‘and then I became a pirate. I have been an explorer in this great wilderness, and have tried to help a little in the making of New Atlantis. I was a spy for a while – an agent of the European emortals among the Mohammedans, carrying recipes for Noell’s elixir into the nations whose rulers fought hardest of all to keep it out. That was how I earned the gratitude of popes, though it was not for Christ’s sake that I did my work. I suppose that was the bravest thing I have done, but I was in London during the poison gas attacks in the last war, and I worked with those who tried to bring survivors from the rubble – emortals in coma, commoners brought close to death. Perhaps that was the nearest I have come to making myself useful to others. But what I have been all along, more constantly than any of those other things, is a mistress to common men – because that, for the most part, has been what the world I have lived in has asked me to be.’
‘I wonder what advice you would give to a girl who was like me?’ he said. ‘A poor, plain girl who not only could not become emortal, but who could not obtain the beauty which comes with it.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Nor do I really know what advice to give to you. I can’t tell you that you should be happy with what you have, nor how to make yourself happy. I can only say that it’s a mistake to believe that happiness can only come with long life and freedom from pain. I have seen men and women for whom long life became a kind of curse, who knew no better how to use it than they knew how to use the kind of life you have. I have seen common men and women who had great joy in their brief span, and felt no loss in what they never gained. Men have many shapes and sizes, and are as unalike in their tempers as they are in their noses. No path is there already, laid out for you to follow; you must find your own way. One thing I can say is that if you lose yourself in despising what you have, because others have more, then the path which you make for yourself will be all the worse for it, but I think you know that already, or you wo
uld not have fled the sea, and might indeed have been a corpse when I found you on the rocks.’
He was looking into the firelight again, still very careful in his unresponsiveness. That tendency to look away, to retreat into a private realm of thought, was something she knew well enough. Noell Cordery had had it too – and of her many lovers, it was still Noell that she remembered best of all. She always would, though fading memory had dimmed so much of her early life that she could not remember frailty or pain at all. Noell’s legacy she could not lose, because he was far too much a part of what she had ultimately become, and if she lived to be as old as Berenike, she would never forget the sensation of his touch or the image of his face, which was engraved upon her soul.
Poor mortal Noell!
The sound of the rain upon the roof was greater now. It was a steady drumming which promised no relentment or release.
Shango is busy, she thought. Once known, the Uruba personifications of nature were not easily forgotten.
‘You’d better try to telephone your parents,’ she said. ‘And tell them not to worry. There is no need for them to come for you on such a night as this. You will be all the stronger tomorrow if you stay.’
He looked at her sharply, and said: ‘I don’t know if they’ll permit that.’
She shrugged her shoulders, and said: ‘Why should they not? Can you reach the telephone without your stick, or shall I get it? Or should I help you to walk?’
He stood up, unsteadily. He could not stand quite straight, because of his injured leg, and in that small untidiness was all the weight of foul misfortune, all the pathos of mortality and pain: unkind, uncompromising, uncompensated.
‘I can do it,’ he assured her.
And when he tried, it turned out that he could.
FIVE
He woke before her, his mouth dry and his leg aching. The ache was worse than usual, and he knew at once that this would be one of those days when he needed help to fight it.
He sometimes wondered, when he woke on days like this, how he had been able to sleep at all. In the early days following the accident he had been quite unable to release his grip on agonised consciousness, save for the mercies of heavy sedation. Then he had gone through a period when his sleep, if sleep it could be called, was more like a waking delirium, when he felt trapped by repetitious absurdities and obsessive compulsions. Nowadays, the pain was usually much less, more sullen than fierce. Most nights, he could sleep deeply and naturally – it was almost as if his brain had found a means of self-anaesthesia, to protect whatever work it did in dreaming – but still he woke, on occasion, to find himself racked by pain.
He pulled himself up to a half-sitting position and reached for the bottle of pills which he had placed on the bedside table. He shook the capsules out into his hand and looked at them. He had a dozen left, having begun with twenty-four. He was not allowed to have more on any one prescription, though he had reason to believe that twenty-four would be quite enough to kill him, should he decide to take an overdose, so the precaution seemed merely silly.
The possibility of overdosing was one which he considered, abstractedly, every time he obtained a new supply, but he had never come close to an actual attempt to swallow a lethal dose. The knowledge that he could do it, if he chose, and that the opportunity would return with clockwork regularity, was enough to assuage the temptation. He knew that he was not simply evading decision by means of procrastination; he had found a determination to stay alive, and his contemplations of suicide were really ritual reaffirmations of that determination.
He swallowed two capsules, then took a few frugal sips from the glass of water which he had placed there in careful anticipation. It seemed suddenly bizarre that he had made room in his thoughts and actions for that small item of planning, at a time when one might expect that he would be lost in submission to a tide of emotion. It seemed, somehow, the kind of thing that an emortal would do, but not a common man.
He looked down at the small cuts which the golden-skinned vampire had made upon his breast, with a scalpel so razor-sharp that he had not felt it biting his flesh, until it was gone and the blood was oozing out in little beadlets.
When she had asked him whether she might cut him he had been filled with confusion, but now he felt that he understood. No modern vampire lady need drink blood, when she could draw the same sustenance from capsules very similar in appearance to those which he had just taken; but Leilah had lived by far the greater part of her life in a world where she must take her donations in a cruder manner, day by day.
For her, he realised, the act of love must always have involved the act of donation, for it was to her lovers first and foremost that she would have looked for such nourishment.
Though he had never before given the matter serious thought, he felt that he understood now why male and female emortals had always sought lovers among common people. He had always tacitly assumed that it was a strange kind of perversity, or perhaps evidence of what common men frequently said of vampires – that they became so cold in becoming insensitive to pain that they could not love at all, but only be loved – but now he knew the link which there was between love and common blood.
He touched his wounds gently, and did not wince at the tiny pain which his fingers caused. He was used to a regime of excruciation which made such twinges insignificant. He wondered what his father’s skin might have looked like, criss-crossed by many whited scars, before the breath of life had made him living marble and erased the record of his early loves. He had never thought to look, or dared to ask.
She woke up then, and saw him inspecting the marks. ‘Did I hurt thee with the knife?’ she asked. ‘I did not mean to cause distress.’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It was nothing at all. No, not nothing – but it had more joy in it than hurt. You must know that.’
‘I am never sure,’ she whispered. ‘Never sure. Real blood has a taste in it that the coloured tablets never have, though I sometimes feel that it might be shameful to prefer it. ’
‘No need,’ he said. ‘No injury done.’ After a pause, he went on, awkwardly: ‘A man might be offended, after all, if his lover preferred another donor … mightn’t he?’ He did not say it inquisitively, but there was a hint of curiosity in his voice.
‘I have always tried not to offend,’ she said, ironically.
He lay back, after moving the pillow to support his head. ‘It would be pointless, I suppose, to sip the blood of a vampire lover,’ he said, reflectively.
‘It is not the only advantage which common men have,’ she told him.
He blushed then, and she saw it.
‘You of all men must remember that,’ she said, softly. ‘When men become emortal, it is not only pain which they discard, but virility. Some say that they sacrifice something of their virility of mind and spirit, too, for though emortal men grow exceeding wise with the depth of their experience, there is a kind of creative fervour which only commoners have for their own. The greatest artists have always been common men, and even men of science have often shown greater insight while still beset by mortality.’
‘I don’t doubt it,’ he said, the answer ready to hand because he had heard the argument many times before. He said no more aloud, now, but he did continue the thread of thought in private. Pain is a spur as well as a curse; a useful thing to some. Perhaps my life will testify to that. He was uncertain; it was something which he had learned to say to himself, but had not yet forced himself to believe.
She reached out to touch the wounds on his breast, as he had done himself, and he watched her golden hand as the fingers stroked him. Then she kissed him on the same place, her tongue darting between her lips as if to search for some tiny residue of blood. He shivered under the caress, and hid his embarrassment beneath a smile, while he waited until she looked up at him, from her night-dark eyes.
‘Did you do it,’ he asked, haltingly, ‘because you pitied me?’
She did not seem annoyed, though it occurred
to him after he had said it that she had every right to be. She reached up to move a lock of jet-black hair which had fallen across her face.
‘No,’ she answered – what other answer could she give? – ‘’twas not from pity. Hast thou not heard that we who feel no pain can feel no pity?’
‘I don’t believe that,’ he told her.
‘It isn’t true,’ she confirmed. ‘I have known pitiless men, both common and vampire, but I could not see that pain had aught to do with it. Some vampires lose pity, as some lose all emotion, and memory, and reason … but there are vampires, too, whose hearts ache in the knowledge of the suffering of the children they once were, and that is a soreness less easily wiped out than other kinds. It is a silly saying, anyhow, for vampires can feel pain, if they let it hurt them. It is only by an effort that we blot it out. ’
‘Yes,’ he said, quietly. ‘Common men forget that, I know.’
‘Men who live a long time may grow cold,’ she told him, ‘but only if they will not warm themselves. I do not say that any anxiously seek the cold, but many let it steal over them, unawares. They need only resist, if they would have it otherwise. Vampires can love, and the manner of their loving does not diminish the measure of their love. Our lovers grow and change, while we do not; we lose them to the march of time and replace them over and over again, but we never like the losing and always delight in the finding, and it becomes, in the end, part of the rhythm of life, like the great slow beating of the heart of God.’
‘Yet you cannot do what God commanded, and love one another.’
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