Even as I said those words, I felt torn, with the heavy heart of one who has made the decision to die in some terrible way and now had turned back from it. The boy himself had saved me as I had once saved him from a brute of a master. On our journey, he had taught me—by his silence alone—that there were reasons to live. Reasons to return to the good fight, to the duty, to the call of mankind itself. A child like this was reason enough, and I saw in him all the things that had been neglected in my own childhood. He recalled for me, just in his manner and devotion, the preciousness of life itself, despite the hail and lightning of the road upon which all life must travel.
He took my hand, just two fingers, and said, “I am your servant, sir.”
“You are not,” I said. “I free you here and now.”
“You are my father, then, for I have none,” he said.
“I am no one’s father. No one’s son. No one’s brother,” I said.
He raised his small fists in the air as if to beat me, though he made no move toward me. “You are my father!” He bleated like a lamb.
The welling of his emotion moved me, and when he rushed toward me, I expected him to hit me in anger. Instead, he wrapped his arms about my waist and pressed his face against me. “Be my father. Please. Be my father.”
In his voice, I was reminded of my own as a child, remembering my grandfather, and how I had wished he would never leave me and my family. Wished that if I held him tight or stayed with him, that he would not fall to the earth in the last quiver of life.
“I do not want you to die.” His eyes shone with tears as he spoke, looking up at me.
“I suppose,” I said, finally, letting out into the evening air what I had held for days, “neither do I.”
* * *
I had come to die. I had not anticipated a boy of my own country teaching me about the last drop of goodness in the cup of life. That all that was terrible in the world could be made sweet again simply by one good soul. Yet I was at war within my private thoughts, for another part of me felt as if Thibaud Dustifot was a phantom sent by the Devil to tease me into remaining alive to watch other terrors unfold in the world of men.
10
Thibaud and I made camp just within the gates. I decided that my duty to the boy was stronger than my duty to my own destruction, which would come, regardless. I determined that I would turn around on the road and find our camp again on an arduous journey back. I would give myself up as a deserter, throwing myself on whatever mercy the commanders might have—which was death, also, but of a slower variety—and I would claim that I kidnapped the boy at knifepoint, forcing him to accompany me in my desertion.
Whether that plan would work or not, I was never to know, for the next morning, I awoke, and Thibaud was gone. In the dirt, his small footprints ended not far from the cloak of mine that he’d used as a blanket.
It was as if some bird of prey had lifted him into the sky.
Chapter 10
________________
THE TOWER
1
At first, I had no fear for him. I believed he played a prank on me, or had awoken early and wandered about. But soon enough, I became certain that he had been taken by something dreadful. The legends of Ghul and of demon played havoc with my emotions, and the intense heat of the oncoming day added to my feverish thoughts. I began to go out of my mind imagining all that might have happened to the boy.
I searched the dead city, calling for him, crouching at each corner to look up the wall, or down into a crevice where a boy might hide, or glancing into the distance, hoping that he stood near a doorway, only to find a tall, broken urn rather than a boy when I approached.
I passed through what had once been the chambers of the living, but found not a trace of him.
I discovered a storehouse for great treasure—armor as well as weapons—swords made of silver and some cast from gold itself. I became full of an unimagined fear at seeing this treasury, for I wondered what leprous king might live there, murdering soldiers and knights and bringing the spoils of such conquest into this great chamber. I was too fearful even to touch it. Truly this was a place of poison, for otherwise, why had not someone stolen these riches? What man could resist, let alone an army? I had heard rumors that the Templars were wealthier than all the other orders of knights, and this fortress that had once been taken by them seemed to be an example of it.
Other wonders met me, including a great long courtyard with a reflecting pool. Thirsty, I knelt to drink from it. As I did, I remembered the stories of the poisoned wells, and wondered if I would die of this drinking. Had Thibaud not vanished, I would have no fear of death, but as the day continued, I became afraid, for his sake, that I might not live to find him. But the water seemed fine, and I felt refreshed from it.
Gently scalloped entryways led to rooms full of mosaics that played out both the religious dramas of the infidel as well as those of the Templars and the Teutonic Knights. Along soft walls of yellow stone madmen had scratched, in various languages, words and phrases that were indecipherable by me, yet I saw the Cross, again and again, as well as scratchings of swords and of a demon with wings, reminding me of that foul creature that I helped raise as a boy from the well in the Great Forest.
As I went through the halls and temples and houses within, I found a curious area that was nearly unreachable. It was a catacombs beneath what was, by all accounts, the keep of this fortress. As I wandered its byways, I found an entrance to a series of chambers. These seemed to be graves or mounds of some kind, too deep to peer into from where I stood. I could not venture into this snakelike chamber without risk of never leaving again, for it was hundreds of feet down, and I looked upon it from the edge of a corridor that simply ended as if it were a cliff.
I did not see any sign of the boy there. The smell of death was unmistakable, and I was glad to leave the area.
2
Half-starved, I all but crumpled to the ground, longing for death or sleep. My conscience pounded at me, for I had, in my selfish loneliness, allowed a boy to come with me to that deadly place. Who could say what vultures or jackals lurked along the parapets or within the unseen chambers? What Ghul lived there? What enemy? What demons flew across the skies looking for the lost and unguarded?
I called for him, my voice echoing along the walls and the distant chambers, but did not hear his voice in return. As twilight drew close, with a dusty wind howling through the empty doorways and along the abandoned chambers, I became more desperate, afraid that I had brought the only goodness left in the world to a horrible fate.
With the seeping darkness of night, I heard him calling from one of the many towers. As I glanced tower to tower, I saw a slight flicker of light at some distance. Calling to him, I followed the faint cry of his voice to one of the great towers at the south end of the city, overlooking the sea beyond the cliff.
When I reached the tower, I pressed open its rotting door.
3
At the base of the tower, on a low wooden table, there was a wide, shallow bowl. Within it, a greenish fire burned along the surface of scented oil. An unlit torch lay in a stack, as if I had been expected.
I heard Thibaud’s scream, a loud, piercing shriek, followed by silence.
I quickly lit the torch from the bowl and took the winding, narrow steps up the tower two at a time. It seemed an hour before I reached the room at the top of the steps, and when I did, I felt faint from the terrible stench there.
I have seen Death in people—in the diseased, in those who are leaving the world for their reward, in the men in battle who, with limbs torn asunder, lay fighting for their final breaths. But this stench was stronger than even that. It was meaty, this stench, like a slaughterhouse.
There, bound in heavy chains, lying in straw and filth, was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.
4
Her hair was the color of wheat and sandstone and cut like a youth’s rather than a maiden’s, combed to the side in the Syrian way. She w
as the most beautiful infidel I had ever seen—for I knew on sight that she was not of my countrymen or even of Christendom. Her eyes were dark; her lips were thick and drawn slightly across teeth as white as burning sand. She wore a rent and tattered garment that barely covered her body.
She twisted in her bonds, away from the light of the torch, so that I might not see her brazen flesh. As she turned, I noticed that she had been branded across her left shoulder: it was a mark that one of my fellow countrymen might use for cattle, a cross with a Latin word beneath it.
“Who has done this?” I asked. I removed my cloak and draped it across her shoulders so that she could again turn to look upon me without shame of her nakedness.
Her breath was sweet against my face. “Help me, please,” she said. “He will be back tonight, I am sure of it, he is a devil.”
“Does he have the boy? A boy?” I asked.
She glanced furtively to the left, then the right, among the piles of straw as if someone might be hiding there. “Boy?” she asked.
“A child.”
She nodded. “Yes. A boy.”
The cloak slipped from her shoulders. I saw the pale flesh around her breasts. I looked back to her eyes. She wept without tears. “Please. Hungry. Thirsty.” She motioned toward a corner of the room. I glanced in that direction and saw a wash bucket. “Please, he will kill me when he returns.”
“Who is this scoundrel?”
“A demon.”
She held out her arms, with the chains attached at the wrists.
I took my short sword from my side and tried to saw, then hack at the chains.
“That will not do,” she said. “He may return. You must cut at the flesh of my wrists. Please. He comes at night.”
She bit her lip and made but little noise as I cut the edge of her wrist with my dagger, and snipped at the flesh of her left hand until she could slip it beneath the manacle.
“The blood,” I said, tearing off a strip from my cloak and wrapping it around her bleeding wrist.
She watched me as I took care of her cut.
She locked eyes with me, for I tell you she was beautiful even in her pain, and my heart beat rapidly. I no longer saw this foreign maiden, but remembered Alienora herself, in her glory, in her purity. I felt blood rush to the surface of my skin, an enveloping warmth, as I beheld her. She reached up to touch my cheek, cupping her hand there, a finger touching the edge of my lips. She smelled of roses and lavender, with something else, something musky and sensual, like myrtle beneath the sweetness. I wanted to stroke her face and wrap my body around her. Alienora, is it you? Alienora?
Perhaps if I had not thought of Alienora, I would not have looked away from this maiden, feeling a kind of shame and revulsion at my own feelings. My fury over life and how it had dealt with me rose up for a moment. I saw something in a pile of straw, just behind and to the right of the maiden I had rescued. Just a clump of straw, nothing more. Perhaps another bucket, turned over, that had been covered.
Then I saw the small hand.
5
My mind could not understand why a small child’s hand would be in the straw. Or why I had forgotten the reason I had climbed the tower in the first place.
I pushed her aside and went to dig in the straw.
From it, I drew up the body of Thibaud Dustifot.
My boy.
In my heart, he had become my child.
I held him in my arms and wept. I pressed his small broken body to mine and let out a moan so loud that I felt as if the world were breaking around me, like glass, like the fragile thing it was.
He had been torn at the throat as if a wolf had taken him in its jaws and shaken him until he was dead.
6
The damsel fell upon me from behind. Her lips touched the back of my neck. Her teeth dug into my flesh, clamping like a she-wolf on its prey. I dropped Thibaud’s body, anger welling up in me at once.
Against my will, I felt, beneath the initial shock as the teeth punctured my flesh, a burning in my blood. Feeling as though a lion had leapt upon me, I struggled against my attacker, reaching to my side for my sword, but weakness had entered my body. I had no strength in me. I had no vitality. I thrashed about, but her teeth dug more deeply into my flesh until I felt her connect to bone.
Finally, like a deer in the hunt, I fell, and she continued her attack. I looked at Thibaud’s face, empty of life. Gone. I had come to meet Death, and Thibaud had gone before me, his small hand in Death’s great claw.
I closed my eyes as the demon continued to hold me fast.
My body would not obey my mind, but gave in to a writhing ecstasy of the demon’s piercing bite. I felt as if she were stroking me intimately.
I experienced a dreadful arousal throughout my body as my excitement grew, as the blood pulsed from the wound into her sucking mouth, the noise of which was disgusting and pig-like. I fought against her, but all my muscles had gone slack. I had become unable to direct my own body against the creature from Hell.
When many hours had passed, she was gone, taking the boy’s body with her.
Weakened, an empty vessel drained of most of my blood, I closed my eyes and prayed for death.
But it did not come during the day or night.
But she returned, with food and water to keep me alive. With caresses and bites and a terrible ravenous look on her face as of a starving woman who has just found a larder full of meat.
7
Her bondage had been a game to entice me to rescue her so that she might enjoy attacking me. This creature loved her games, and when she drank from me, she smiled and laughed and taunted me with how easily I had been fooled.
I did not know how many nights passed.
All the sins of my life seemed to have been washed in her ministrations to my body. All the memories I had, save one, seemed to have been burned away from me. I no longer thought of war or the small body in the straw or a distant beloved maiden I had left behind, nor did I remember others. This creature swallowed those sketchy details of my life. She took my sense of self with her, my understanding of my station, of my world, even of my temptations.
All that was left was pleasure.
Any heaven I knew became the heaven of my wound and of her lips and of the tearing of her sharp teeth into my flesh, which sang with pain. Heaven existed in her drinking of my blood. When her lips parted, my heart beat faster, and I felt my loins lift as if meeting a mate. If I had had the energy to beg for her, I surely would have.
She drank heavily, staying at my neck for several hours. She drained me of blood, which seemed to flow like a river from my body into her mouth. My leech, my lamprey, my parasite taking, taking, taking. As she took, my mind went to a safe place where it could not be touched by her, or by grief, or by the memory of Thibaud’s body, so empty of blood that when I had lifted him, he had felt like a rabbit in my arms.
I watched myself as if from above, looking down on the woman whose constant sucking against me became numbing by dawn, when she abandoned me to the straw.
Too weak to rise, I slept through the day until sundown, when she returned to me.
When the demon-woman came to me again, she brought bits of raw meat and a pitcher of water. I ate and drank greedily, like a wild animal. Yet this brought me no strength, for she took as good as she gave with her small, sharp teeth, which were like twin daggers of jabbing white bone.
She pressed her sweet and bitter lips against my flesh. I felt as if the pleasure flowed from my being for hours at a time, though only minutes passed between us. She drank slowly, deliberately, sipping and lapping at my wound until I felt wave after wave of heightened joy. My body went into seizures of both pleasure and sorrow, and yet my memory of it is of the best feeling that life ever offers one.
I longed for her and I despised her. I loathed this creature, yet I had become addicted to her bites along my throat. There was no pain from them anymore. I felt numb there, but a numbness growing from heat that kindled my flesh. I
was not in love with this monster, but in her thrall, bewitched. She enslaved me through this bewitchment.
I knelt before her and kissed her feet when she entered my prison nightly. She took my chin in her hand, lifting it up to her face. I saw both death and life in her gaze, but more, I saw the drug I had begun to crave, the sweet liquor of her breath as she brought her mouth to my wrist to drink, or to my throat, or even to my chest, where she drank from my nipple as if I were her mother, giving her the milk of my body, my blood. I had no great fear of death, as those who have ever been beneath the power of some great intoxicant, stimulant, life-enhancer, can understand.
Perhaps my eyes were encircled with dark smudges, perhaps my lungs wheezed with the effort of breathing, perhaps I had lost weight in the days and nights of my captivity. The delicious feeling of our union, of her mouth to my flesh, of her taking me into that mouth, pouring from my throat to hers—it was all I required of life. I had no life and no light in me—I survived merely to give her what she desired of me. I would be her table, her mount, her servant, her food, her drink, her thing, an “it,” lower than vermin, to be consumed at her bidding. I would flay myself for her pleasure. I would wound myself with a thousand little knives if it brought her lips to my thighs, to my ankles, to my back, under my arm, at the nape of my neck. She encompassed me, and I willingly allowed her to swallow all I had. And yet my body created more blood for her. She was as insatiable in her thirst as I, in my offering.
We played games between us in seeking a new patch of flesh for bleeding. I played my role well—I found a place at my inner thigh from which she had not yet drunk. I showed her the slight pulse of artery that lurked beneath the skin. I seduced her with my veins, and she played the innocent who would submit to my desire to give her more blood. Another night, we lay together, her face in the cradle beneath my arm, against the faint tufts of light hair there, her incisors pressing into the tenderness of flesh. She drank all of me, or so it felt, and still I lived.
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