Fantasy

by Christine Feehan

  “What would you like to talk about?”

  “Would you tell me how you came to be a monk?”

  His smile was as gentle as his touch. “You could say it was karma. I was conceived here, as you may have guessed.”

  She nodded. “Your father was the English trader who was stranded in the pass. I do not suppose you knew him well.”

  Martin’s only sign of emotion was a subtle tightening of his lips. “He did not remain here long enough to meet his son, though he knew he was going to have one.”

  “When I spoke with him in London,” she said carefully, not certain he wished to hear, “he seemed the sort of man no one can hold. A restless soul. A foreign fever had spoilt his health and his sight was not what it had been. I think he resented getting older because he could only talk about his adventures. I cannot be sure—his was not an easy mind to read—but I think, underneath, he regretted the human ties he left behind.”

  “I assume he did not regret them enough to mention me and my mother.”

  “No,” she admitted, “though when he spoke of Tibet, his eyes were warm.” Martin pulled a face and she left the sensitive topic behind. “Tell me about your mother. She must have been special.”

  At once his expression softened. Luisa did not need her powers to know he loved her.

  “She was a woman of Kham,” he said, “a member of a traveling performance troupe. The Khampa have a reputation for being beautiful and fierce, and my mother was no exception. She once broke a man’s nose because he kicked a dog. One punch and he was down. But her voice was like birds warbling in the spring. With her brothers and cousins she would sing and dance and do acrobatic feats on horseback. I remember going from place to place, riding in front of her in the saddle and feeling luckier than any prince. My mother was completely fearless. She always kept me safe.”

  Which suggested there had been something to keep him safe from. “It cannot have been easy growing up between two cultures,” she said, thinking of children she had known, of how cruel they could be to anyone who was different.

  The curve of her thoughts caught a piece of memory: Martin as a boy backed into an alley by half a dozen ill-fed youths. Clods of dirt bounced off his lifted arms while tears of fury rolled down his cheeks. How dare they say such things about his mother! She loved him better than all their mothers put together, was better than them all.

  The violence of his anger shamed the boy he was. He would have hurt those children if he could, even knowing he was much luckier than they.

  She broke the link, not wanting to betray what she had seen.

  “I was loved,” he said, “and I always knew that someday I would live here. From my first glimpse of Shisharovar on the peak, it was my beacon, the place where I knew I would find a home. When my mother died in a fall a year ago, I returned.”

  The memory seemed to leave no mark on his face but Luisa saw beneath the calm recital. He claimed his mother kept him safe and yet it was he who felt compelled to remain with her, delaying his dream until she could not need him anymore. How great an outcast had she been because of her choice of lovers? She had given Martin an English name. That suggested there had been more between her and his father than an affair. When John Moore went back to England, he must have cut a painful wound.

  “You are very loyal,” she said.

  His robe rustled softly with his shrug. “It is not hard to be loyal to those you love, nor to return to a cherished home.”

  Luisa’s breath escaped in a snort. “I have known people who could barely be loyal to themselves.”

  “That is their loss,” he said as if what he’d done were a common thing. He seemed not to know how rare his integrity was.

  Feeling oddly off balance, she covered his stroking hand. “Do you really believe you lived before?”

  “I have dreamed of events from other incarnations and later had them confirmed. I have recognized possessions I used to own and people whose paths crossed mine. Of course”—his gaze met hers with banked amusement—“I do not expect you to take this on my word. As you said: faith is a matter of faith. There can be no proof for those who wish to doubt. But tell me of you. I am curious to hear of the man who made you, the upyr elder.”

  “You mean Auriclus.” Luisa laughed quietly in remembrance. “My master was tall and dark. Sinfully handsome. The perfect lure for a fisherman’s work-worn wife. He had a face like a tragedian, as weary and sad as if he had taken the weight of the world upon his shoulders, as if compassion for every suffering creature suffused his breast. Our kind are good at illusion. Even now I don’t know if his face spoke true.”

  “Did he seek you out?”

  “In a way. But I noticed him before he noticed me. It was just past sunset in Florence. The sky was the color of lemons, the clouds like shreds of cotton dipped in blood. He was leaning on the quay, wrapped in his somber cloak, watching the scattered traffic on the Arno. I remember wondering what a fine man like him must think of those rivermen, with their talk and their swagger and their garish clothes. Looking back, he was probably judging which one would make the better meal. That day, though, I felt lower than I ever had. I was less than the boatmen, less than their whores, less than the pink-eyed goat who gave us milk.

  “Auriclus must have heard my thoughts because he turned to me, not smiling, just staring as if I were a puzzle he wanted to work out. His attention shamed me so badly I scurried away as quickly as I could, but I saw him the next day at the well, and again the following evening as I left the mercato. I had a pomegranate in my basket, a treat I would have to hide when I got home. He blocked my way, then took the fruit to draw it to his nose. His expression when he inhaled was like a man in the throes of climax. When he spoke his voice was as husky as if he’d had one. It made me shiver to hear it, as much as did his words. He told me I smelled better than the fruit, as sweet and clean as summer grass. It was the first compliment anyone had ever paid me. He had me for the price of it, so cheaply was I willing to sell my soul.

  “Only later did I learn he was not supposed to choose me. He had a rival, a student to whom he had ceded the world’s great cities to avert a war. I was an experiment to him, an attempt to create a child who would be a bridge between their broods.”

  “Did it work?”

  “I do not know. Oddly enough, I have never met another child he made. I suspect he would say he failed. I may have begun as a peasant but in the end I succumbed to civilization’s lure.”

  “Did he change you that first day?”

  She rolled her head in negation against the cushion. “No. But I dreamed of him after our meeting, erotic dreams that made me long for sleep. I was scrubbing the wash and imagining his kiss when I tore my husband’s best shirt, the only one that had no mend. I hardly minded when Giulio came into the courtyard to beat me. I had a secret, you see, a hopeless fantasy that made me strong.

  “And then it was not hopeless because Auriclus appeared, my dark avenging angel. One sweep of his arm tossed my husband against the wall. He plucked me up and away before I could think to resist. He said he wanted to fan the spark in my eyes to life. Said I deserved to be showered with jewels and draped in silk. I knew he must be a madman but I let him do as he wished because his words were food to me and because, by that point, I did not care what it might cost. My children were grown. I had nothing left to lose.”

  “Your husband had beaten you before.”

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “To his mind, I was no different from a dog who had misbehaved.”

  To her surprise, this—rather than her confession of adultery—roused Martin’s ire. “He should not have done that. That is not the proper way between man and wife.”

  Luisa spread her hands. “My husband suffered for his abuse, though he knew it not. I could have been more to him than I was. But that was long ago. Another life, as you would say.” Her mouth curved in a grin. “Now I do not even wish him to roast in hell.”

  “You are wise to let your resent
ment go,” Martin said. “Strong emotion can bind people together for many incarnations. Perhaps you will not have to meet him on earth again.”

  Luisa began to laugh, the idea striking her as funny. What would her husband say if he saw her now? Probably fall to his knees and pray. Get thee behind me, spawn of Satan…but please seduce me before you go!

  The room rocked sideways with her laughter. Her head was so light she thought it might float away.

  Martin smiled at her hilarity. “Yes,” he said, “the herbs have begun their work. Just remember, you must focus your mind on what you fear.”

  But her mind was beyond her control, cut loose from its moorings like an oarless boat swept down a river. A landscape of images rolled by on the bank. The day her father sold her to her husband to clear a debt. The dirty clay of the hovel floor. One of her sons a wriggling bundle at her breast. So sweet they’d been, a tiny ray of love in her loveless life…until they’d grown into smaller versions of their father.

  She’d tried to prevent it—how she’d tried!—but their world, or perhaps their natures, stopped their ears to the pleadings of a woman. Kindness was weakness to them; respect the reward for brutish force. She watched her youngest steal a toy from a neighbor’s child. When she paddled his bottom, her husband beat her. Let him learn, he had roared, how to live in a heartless world. Her cheek stung from the blow, a tooth spit bloody into her hand. Suddenly, with the muddled logic of a dream, Auriclus held her close with his face in her golden hair, her only beauty that remained.

  Come to me, he’d crooned. Let me bring you to life again.

  His bite had all the tenderness of death, lancing the stored-up bitterness from her soul. She was nothing then, only pleasure, clinging to his shoulders until the rising, throbbing silence swept her under, into oblivion and forgetting. When she woke she was alive as she never had been before. Strong, healthy, beautiful. So beautiful. Without merit or justice, the power of attraction was simply hers.

  For that alone she would have adored him, but her master had not let her. Little Luisa, he’d teased, adore what you can be, not what you think I am. Sometimes she thought he was sorry he’d made her. He would watch her at her books or her correspondence as if he could not fathom who she was. Clever little monkey, he’d call her then, though he might as well have said clever monster.

  Fourteen years later he was gone, driven out of Florence—so he claimed—by the rise of one infamous book-burning monk. Savonarola had seduced the masses, taught them to hate their bodies and their minds. I will kill him, her sire explained. If I do not leave, I will spray his maddened blood across the square.

  Auriclus did not care that his abandonment broke her heart, that she had a growing business she could not leave. But at least he taught her not to kill. Charm the humans, he always said. Charm them and set them free.

  But it was not the humans who tested her adherence to his rule. That honor went to the upyr she met on a trip to London. Until she surprised them hunting for sailors by the docks, she had not known her kind were there. She guessed at once that Auriclus had not made them. They had a sleeker look than he, a darker, more urbane smell.

  Mindful of his warnings about Nim Wei’s brood, she had approached them with all the diplomacy she possessed. Staying away had not been an option. She longed too fiercely for the company of her kind. Perhaps they could teach her what she sensed her master had neglected. Sadly, far from teaching her, the English circle met her overtures with hostility, calling her spy and forcing her into situations where, had she been less strong and quick, she easily might have died.

  Only when they discovered her skill at commerce did they begin to warm. Money they respected, money and ambition.

  Ironically, finding them made her lonelier than ever: feeling so separate from those she should have been most like. Auriclus cared for humans. These upyr saw them only as animals to exploit.

  In defiance, she gathered a mortal harem, three youths flush with manhood who vied for the privilege of fulfilling her every need. That was the beginning of her love affair with humans. She chose them for what they could teach her, about life or business or the mysteries of the spirit. Minstrels succumbed to her, adventurers and dukes. To her delight, her business grew by leaps and bounds. She never thralled the humans with whom she dealt; that did not seem fair play. Even so, her conquests at the court of Suleiman were productive, winning her trading rights few could boast. If cleverness failed, she did not scruple to use her immortal body as her coin. Sometimes it bought her influence, other times merely pleasure.

  She remembered the pleasure now: hands, kisses, the passion-tensed curves of sweat-streaked skin. Men driven to madness by desire. Gasping. Trembling. Nearly bursting with their lust. Take me, they’d plead as she slid her tongue along their veins. Take anything you want.

  Someone gripped her jaw and turned her face to his. Martin. Beautiful, noble Martin.

  “Luisa,” he said, his voice commanding, “this is not the way to face your fears.”

  His eyes burned like the center of a flame. She reached for him, her hand falling limply against his chest. “I want you more,” she whispered, the truth freed by the drug. “More than any man I have known.”

  His gaze went black. She saw him swallow, his Adam’s apple moving strongly in his throat. Never mind his oath. Part of him wanted to bed her now.

  “Luisa,” he said, “remember why you are here.”

  She sighed like the melancholy finish of a tale. Then she did as he advised.

  The drug was meant to let him into her mind, but what he found there shocked him. The things she had done with those men, those many men, were beyond what he imagined. He knew, naturally, what the procreative act entailed. Growing up as he had, in communal tents and inns, the basic facts had been his from an early age. The more esoteric were part of his education since coming to Shisharovar. After all, the union of male and female essences had spiritual meaning, too.

  What he hadn’t known was the sheer physical joy one could take in sensual exploration. He had been there with her, had felt her body vibrate with longing and her teeth itch teasingly in their sheaths. He’d wanted to be those men, touching her, tasting her, forging thickly into her sex. One pair of hands was not enough. He wanted to be them all.

  And the places she had traveled! Stormy seas. Opulent palaces. Even England, so wet and dreary compared to the sunny sparkle of Tibet, possessed an appeal he could not deny. What, he wondered, were those curious platelike collars women wore around their necks? For what reason did they hang those fancy curtains on their beds? Velvets he’d seen, and lustrous embroidered silks, the exotic, nested backdrop to her play.

  She was almost childlike in her love of her possessions, though he could not deny a discriminating mind lay behind her greed. Here in Tibet, a painting was an act of worship; no artist would sign his name. In her homeland, Luisa had gleefully added luster to the name of scores. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ghirlandaio, and Titian: her patronage had helped them all.

  In truth, her life was a foreign jewel. The more he turned it, the more the facets shone. He reminded himself these were temporal pleasures that would soon pass away. The key to Luisa’s freedom lay far from such glittering bits of stone.

  When she told him she wanted him, though, more than she had wanted any man, the admission struck a resounding triumph in his soul, momentarily drowning out truths he knew.

  She lured him because of what she was, not in spite of it.

  He needed all his strength to pull them back to the path. “Luisa,” he said, “remember why you are here.”

  His words took swift effect. A flash cut across his vision like the blade of a Mongol butcher’s knife. He saw her dream self. She held a baby to her breast—her son—warm and plump. Dread closed around him. Her lips brushed the infant’s milky neck. Sweet neck. Soft neck. She tipped the wobbling head back in her palm. Her gaze locked to the tiny pulse. Her baby. Her sweet, warm, sleepy baby. Her hunger rose like a mournful wail,
like a sin she could not name.

  This was her fear, the monster lurking in her shadows.

  “No,” she whispered in his mind and in the room.

  She set the child on the floor where it gurgled at her wide-eyed, waving its dimpled arms. She had not touched it. She would not touch it, not even in a dream.

  “Luisa,” he said, knowing this darkness had to be faced.

  She shook her head and backed away. No, she said, no sound to it. Then she turned on her heel and ran.

  He called after her, warning her she’d get lost. She was not familiar with the geography of dreams: how fantasy and fear could parade as truth. To his dismay, she did not heed him. She ran up a narrow and odorous city street, carts in her way, horses, men in tight-fitting hose. She shoved past them, shouting, “Make way! Make way!” They bowed down to her beauty with sweeps of feathered hats. Ignoring them, she flung open a wooden door.

  Her harem waited inside the richly appointed room, the same three youths he had seen before. They were old now, walking skeletons with skin, their hands reaching ghoulishly from lace and velvet sleeves. “Don’t let us die,” they beseeched. “Make us what you are.”

  She covered her eyes and moaned. She did not know how to change them. She was powerless to help.

  The emptiness inside her yawned like a pit.

  And then she grabbed them, one by one, drinking them dry. When their bodies fell to the Turkish carpet they were young again, not so young as when they’d graced her bed but strong men still. She had made a terrible mistake. She had killed them in their prime. She had been too hungry, too rash, too loathe to see them age and die. She stumbled to her knees.

  This had to be a nightmare. It made no sense for her to have done this. She thought she heard Martin say Yes, these are only phantoms but there was blood on her hands. Sins enough to make an angel weep. Her hands were red. Her mouth.

  She gripped the gate that rose before her and pulled herself to her feet. The bars were strong. Immovable even to her. They glowed with opalescence as if they’d been carved of pearl. Martin felt her relax, her head dropping back in tired surrender.