She would not allow him his victory. She was Erzsébet Báthory, even here, even desperate. She ceded the field to nobody, not even the Dragon.
Those five strong men, they were in attendance in spirit if not in body. Ilona had drugged their food and Fickó had cut their throats and then strong Katarína had hauled the jars of their blood up here. It was not maiden-blood, which Erzsébet had relied on all these years for her power, but blood was blood. It would be made to serve her as it served him.
And beside the bath, into which Ilona was even now pouring that blood, was the casket. What had the peasants thought, to see her shrinking entourage move from castle to castle with a little coffin in tow? What would they think, discovering she always chose the high mountain passes and travelled in winter, or if they had touched the casket’s gilded sides and found it icy cold and slick with meltwater?
As if I should care what peasants think.
They had crossed themselves, those ignorant serfs, but she took their superstitious fear as her due, just as she took their daughters.
She had wrung Rudolph’s library for what scraps of truth it contained, sifted the work of Dee, Flamel and Michael Scotus for hints and whispers of what she intended. It all came back to him and his ilk, those who stepped aside and let time rush past them, those who used the blood of others to cheat death forever. For the blood is the life. And just in time, for that mundane-minded Matthias was King of Hungary now, soon to be Emperor, most likely, and poor Rudolph practically a prisoner, his precious books scattered who knew where.
She could hear Dorottya’s weak voice rising from the stairwell. Of course the old witch would come to cry doom over everything Erzsébet was trying to achieve, but it was too late for that. Tonight she would finally conquer the great work. Tonight she would defy the laws of nature and time. And not selfishly, not for vanity; she would wield her mother’s love like a knife.
“Place him within,” she whispered, and Katarína cracked open the casket. Within, half afloat in the ice-melt, was András. She wanted to think, He looks so peaceful, but that would be a lie. He was purplish in parts, greenish-yellow in others, whilst the backs of his limbs were puckered, fishbelly-pale. His gut had bloated out and his eyes were dreadful sunken hollows.
And yet is this a six-year dead corpse? It is not. All her art and lore, and all the ice in the Kingdom of Hungary, had gone to frustrating the claws of time. András looked as though he had been dead mere weeks, perhaps. It is not too late. I have worked so hard.
Katarína shrank back from the dead flesh at first, she who feasted on the slain after they had been drained for Erzsébet’s pleasure. In the end Erzsébet had to beat her, whipping her with a switch until the huge lump of a woman took the little body in her hands and decanted it into the bath. It’s the only language she understands.
The blood of her thugs would not be enough, of course. They had been coarse creatures, men, they would add little power; and yet even that little was worth ending their lives for. Now she needed sweeter stuff, and Fickó was already scuttling forwards with his ever-ready knife. The first of the girls was hauled up and bent over the bath, her screams setting the rest of them off. Katarina had to slap and cuff them until they stopped. I will not have them ruin my triumph.
She took the knife and opened the first throat herself. Drink deep, András. Come back to me. Live. For a moment she thought something more than the wind battered at the shutters. She thought another voice was raised high above the death-shout of the peasant girl. Is he here? He’s come to stop me this last time? But she had drawn red wards at the windows and the doors, and though he might tear through them in time, it would be time enough.
“Countess,” wheezed Dorottya from the doorway, “you must not. It is too much. You cannot open these gates. You don’t know what will come through.”
“András will come through,” Erzsébet snapped. “Hold your tongue, old woman, if you want to keep it. Bring the next.” And another weeping serf was dragged over to give her all for her Countess. They were peasants, it was what they were for. It wasn’t as though they had finer feelings.
She heard the castle echo to shouting and imagined him beating at the wards, fighting to thwart her will. But this time I will hold you off. I will undo your work, you monster. And she reached for the next girl as Ilona manhandled her over. But Ilona was slowing, staring down into the bloody corpse within the vat.
“Mistress,” she breathed, half-horror and half-wonder.
Erzsébet looked down at what she had wrought and saw András’s shrivelled eyelids, so long closed, twitch and shiver.
In her mind she pictured Time and Death, two cadaverous pale figures just like him. She pictured them howling in outrage at what she had done. She pictured them in her cells, impotent against her. She would not bow to mortal authority, nor to the might of the Dragon. Why should she bow to the limits of the universe? She would break Time on the wheel and have Death torn apart by horses. She would live forever, be young forever, and all it would take was all the blood in the world.
Then András smiled and opened his eyes, and she met his dead gaze and screamed. Because she knew it. She knew what sat behind her son’s face like a toad. She had shed the blood and spoken the incantations, but it was he who leered at her from behind her son’s discoloured, half-decayed face.
She shrieked with rage and drove the blade down, hacking and hacking at flesh so soft and sagging that it came apart like overcooked meat, until the blood of the bath was swimming with pieces and corruption and nothing like a human form remained.
It was then that they thundered into the room, knocking Dorottya aside. She turned on them, spitting curses, ready to look him in the eye and strike him down, but it was not the Dragon. It was mere soldiers, uncouth peasants with swords and fists knocking down her servants, beating Katarína with clubs, striking Fickó so hard blood came from his ears. And behind them, a lean man with a thin face and a sharp dagger of a beard, some face she thought she knew from long ago. She commanded him to leave her castle. What did he think he was doing?
His expression—all that disgust and pity and loathing—made her drop the knife and put her hands to her face, for surely she was hideous, all of a sudden. Surely only truly ugly things could gather such a look as that.
Letter from György Thurzó, Bytča, to King Matthias of Hungary, Pozsony, 1610
Your Royal Majesty, I commend myself to your continuing wisdom.
I have brought the Countess Báthory here to Bytča, away from her holdings and people; less for fear of some attempt to free her from captivity and more that no vengeful relative should seek personal justice before proceedings are complete.
Whilst evidence to convict all the prisoners has hardly been lacking, I have been concerned that justice may be seen to be done for all those injured by the Countess’s reign of terror, and she herself has proved uncommunicative. For some time it seemed as though I would always be leaving loose threads behind me, even once the sentence had been handed down, but I finally found the lever that allowed me to separate one of her followers from the rest and obtain her cooperation. She is an ogrish creature, simple-minded and of appalling appetites, but I judged her low intellect as less culpable than the rest. She has been imprisoned amongst nuns of a severe regime, away from the others, and her hunger for human flesh has been transferred to a hunger more numinous, in particular the taking of the host, which she perceives as devouring something more precious and powerful than simple meat, which I suppose it is.
This servant, one Katarína Benická, has provided me with the locations of the Countess’s ‘day books’ in Csejte, and just today my swiftest messenger has returned from there with the texts in his possession. They make nightmarish reading, but I have been diligent, as I know your faith in me. I have read through the Countess’s deranged writings and can at least make a tally of her victims since she began this foul trade. I believe that her bloodlust has consumed at the very least 650 souls. I will freely confe
ss that I have lived a life of strife and war, and yet nothing has so unsettled me as reading the Countess’s matter-of-fact accounts of torments and murders. The books I enclose for your perusal should you wish, though I recommend you burn them unread.
Of the matter of punishment, I know you have recommended death, and for the uncooperative servants, naturally, no other course can be followed. However, the execution of one of her blood and high family may stir untoward passions in a land so recently riven by war and civil division. It would not do for the lowly to believe that they can pass judgment upon the mighty, and perhaps it would be better for the Countess to fade from memory rather than to become too striking an example.
I submit myself to your judgment and will, on this the 14th day of June 1610
G
From the Judgment of György Thurzó, 1611
…for their part in such crimes, the witches known as Dorottya Semtész and Ilona Jó to have their fingers, which committed such wicked deeds, plucked from their hands with heated tongs, and thereafter to be hanged by the neck until dead. The villain János Újváry, also known as Fickó, likewise to be hanged until dead. For that servant woman Katarína Benická, whom the court has found to have been dominated and led by those other wicked examples, she is to be imprisoned for the rest of her life in the hope that she may atone and assuage the stain upon her soul.
For the “Tigress of Csejte,” the Countess Erzsébet Báthory, so that she may long consider the bitter wrongs she has performed, she is to be immured alive within that castle she has most been associated with, seeing no visitors save for those instructed to watch over her, and there she shall remain until death comes for her.
X.
Csejte, 1611
THE WORLD WAS a room and the room had no doors and no windows. It was like a dream she’d once had, but in the end the dream had bent to her will and she had knocked down the walls with a thought and walked free. Here, in the heart of what had been her domain, nothing would obey her command. She had a bare slit left where the door had once been, and that sufficed for all transactions with the outside world.
Her contact with others was limited to one set of footsteps and the gruff voice of her jailer, twice every day. Had anyone asked her a few years before what value she placed on human company, she would have laughed them to scorn.
Today was different. Today there was a second set of footsteps. A jolt of excitement shot through her—They will let me out!—and just as swiftly it was replaced with one of fear. What if it’s him? He couldn’t have forgotten about her, she knew. The whole world must still buzz with the fear of her. And she would make them fear, if she ever got outside these walls. Of course he must still think of his rival, his equal.
But then the footsteps paused, by the slot they used to feed her. She heard the jailer’s muted voice receding; one must yet remain.
She summoned her courage and dared herself to look out into those deep-set burning eyes.
It was not him. She saw a blandly handsome man in fine clothes, his hair cut very short and his beard and moustaches trimmed to points. Not Thurzó the inquisitor, not one of Ferenc’s fighting comrades. His eyes were narrow and suspicious, and she knew him at last from those. Erzsébet Báthory stared through the gap in her world at Matthias II, King of Hungary.
“I am to have no visitors,” she said flatly. Human contact suddenly seemed overrated.
Matthias smiled blandly. “When the Emperor wishes to see such a spectacle, who shall tell him no?”
“Rudolph is gone, then?” She remembered the miserable mumbler in his library and felt nothing.
“Almost. He pushes to resume the war with the Turk, and the Empire will not stand for it. So costly! I’ve a stack of letters begging me to take my brother off the throne for good.”
She scowled at him. “I know someone who will not like your peace with the Turk.”
He regarded her for a long time, and then shrugged. “My brother has evil counsellors. They are none of mine.”
Then he stepped back as she was abruptly at the slot, hands crooked about its edge, staring out at him. “Then let me out, Your Majesty. I can teach you how to fight him. I can make you strong. I can make you live forever!”
His contemptuous laughter hurt her as keenly as András’s death. “I see captivity hasn’t cured you. Do you know, you even had poor György believing there was something behind your killings, beyond mere madness? But I told him, this is an age of reason. I am still rooting out the last of Rudolph’s pet mystics, all those who took gold and turned it to dross in defiance of their claims. I am not here to let you out, Erzsébet. I am just here to see a prodigy and rejoice that my reign has started with the righting of a great wrong.”
Erzsébet tried to lunge at him through the slot, but her arm would not go past the elbow, and he had already put a prudent distance between them. “And have you never beat a servant?” she demanded. “Or perhaps you take joy from watching others wield the lash. But you are like me; had you known what I knew, you would do what I have done!” And she waited for the inevitable denials, the sanctimony.
But Matthias was, after all, a man of reason. He only smiled slightly and shrugged. “Bohemia is crawling with Protestants decrying the excesses of church and state, and philosophers preaching the equality of the common man. And probably there’s truth in it. What do any of us do, we kings and lords? We all live off the blood of those below us, do we not? But there’s metaphor, and there’s literal truth. You took your little games too far, and we have to show the peasants that there’s order in the world.” He shrugged again, already turning to walk away. “And in the end, Erzsébet, I just owed you far too much money, and the Crown is not obliged to repay a murderess, and can do what it likes with her lands. So after all poor Rudolph’s striving, perhaps I am the better alchemist, for I have made gold from blood.”
Csejte, 1614
IF SHE STOOD at just the right angle, she could see through the corner of the slot, down the corridor and to a place where the light of the sunset fell. The sun itself was denied her, but each evening she would stand just so and watch the last red rays of the world face to an unrelieved grey.
When the jailer had come to take her plate and pail, this evening, she had told him she was cold, that her hands were numb with it, and he had told her to sleep. Sleep was no balm, to her. Only nightmares could creep in through that slot. Nor did they absent themselves when she woke. The vacant halls of Csejte echoed with voices conjured from her memories. She heard Ferenc’s bellow, Dorottya’s whispered imprecations. She heard András crying, far off.
When he came, at last, she was not sure if he was real or just a figment of her torment. The sun was long down, by then, but she woke to a darkness more profound than she had ever known, buried deep in midnight with not even an echo of the moon reaching her. And yet his paleness seemed to shine from it, the pallor that told of what he was and the road he had taken, the man who stood unharmed on the far side of death and time.
“Countess Báthory,” she heard him say softly. “What is this cage, that you allow to hold you?”
She stood, drawing to herself the little dignity they had left her. “Has the Dragon come to gloat?”
She heard his cold laugh. “Are you not free, yet, O Countess? Shall I show you the way?”
And despite herself, something broke in her. She remembered him in the orchard so many years before. She remembered when he had come to her after her wedding, his lips on the flawless white of her neck. She had fought him so long, but she had been fighting to be him, not to destroy him.
She asked, in a child’s voice, “Are you here to take me, at last?”
His laughter hurt her as much as Matthias’ had, years before: the laughter of a man who had done with her and can walk away. “You might have been mine, Countess, for a moment, or for a lifetime. But I will not take you as you are now. If you will follow me, you must do it yourself.”
Anger brought her back to herself. “You too
k from me the means to follow you. My servants, my books…”
“It was not servants or books that delivered me from Time, Countess,” he told her. “Nor, alone, the gift of blood my own master bestowed on me. It was will. What, beyond my will, keeps me in the world? What staves off time and gives me command of the things of night? It is nothing but will, the refusal to be bound by the fetters that might cage a lesser creature.” And he was close in the darkness. She wondered what he saw, staring at her haggard face. “Where is your will, Countess? Has it grown brittle in this place? Follow me, if you dare.”
And he was gone, or else he had never been there, and she lay back down and felt the unseasonal cold leach into her.
Excerpt from a Letter from Father Tamás Kovács, Hrachovište, to Péter Pázmány, Primate of Hungary, 1621
…As I know you have an interest in the curious, and as my heart has been obscurely troubled by a matter, I write to share a most unusual deathbed confession in case you may shed light upon it.
Whilst the identity of the deceased shall of course go undisclosed, it will not offend if I reveal that he was amongst the staff at Csejte Castle guarding a most particular prisoner, and indeed was on duty one night six years ago when that prisoner, whose name I am sure you can guess, went to her final rest to the relief of all Hungary.
He was plainly troubled by some thought of it, and strove mightily to give his confession, so much so that, in light of she whom he had warded, I was prepared for an act of great darkness. However, when the matter came it out, the act and the guilt could not readily be correlated. He told me that she had called out to him and pledged to tell him where certain treasures were buried if he swore to perform a service for her. There would come messengers after her death, she said, who would order him to inflict curiously specific mutilations upon her corpse, viz., beheading, impalement and the like. Her request was simply that he say he had performed these acts, but yet not defile the body and instead let it go into the ground unmarked.
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