"We were nearly a hundred fighting men, all well trained and riding on horseback. We fell upon those unprotected pagan villages like the wrath of our new God. Where we struck we killed all those who fought back, took anything worth having and had our way with any of the wenches we found fair. Any male prisoners of fighting age were killed painfully and messily before the eyes of what was left of their village as a hard lesson in what awaited anyone who thought to oppose us." He met Moon and Sonia's disapproving eyes with a sad but steady blue gaze. "Yes it was wicked, bloody work, my friends. But you must understand that this was the way we were taught to behave in that time and it remained the normal way of things up until nearly the present day. I did nothing that the members of my culture would consider evil and it has taken me centuries to learn to think otherwise."
"Sonia shook her head. But how could you be so callous? Didn't you feel guilty about what you had done?"
"About some things, yes, I did. One cannot harm and use others, especially women, the way that I did then without eventually feeling remorse. Not if one possesses any shred of humanity anyway. I quickly tired of that kind of sport, regardless of how lustily my comrades pursued it, and it was that pursuit that eventually brought about our downfall." Pinkish tears formed at the corners of Uri's eyes as he drained his glass. "This tale calls for more lubrication, my friends, may I get them in?"
As Uri headed for the bar to replenish their drinks Sonia turned her angry gaze to Moon. "The man's a monster. How can we dare trust him after hearing about the terrible things he's done?"
Moon thought it ironic that Sonia could accept Uri, knowing that he was a vampire, but that when he confessed to his ancient acts of human cruelty he suddenly became a 'real' monster. "He's in good company," he replied with wry a smile. "Most of the heroes of British history would probably be considered war criminals or worse if they did what they became famous for today. I've spent enough time studying the past to understand that Uri was just a man of his time." He put down his glass, touched Sonia's hand and looked deeply into her eyes, which were still filled with icy outrage. "Try to cool it a bit about what he's done in the past, love, and have a good look at how it affects him now. Even after nearly a thousand years it still torments him to think about it."
Sonia sighed and grimaced at Moon. "I suppose he might have changed. It just sounds so horrible, Jerry."
Uri returned with a tray of drinks including, Moon noticed, another large vodka for himself. Noticing their expressions, he said: "So, you are wondering whether you can trust this evil beast?" A deep shadow passed behind his eyes. "I can't say I blame you. Even I have trouble coming to terms with it sometimes, and I have had a long time to do so, but I assure you that I am no longer the person I was in my teens and twenties. Even then I was not truly the person I was trying to be; ruthlessness and cruelty were considered admirable traits in a warrior back then."
Sonia nodded. "I guess we'll just have to take you at your word for that… for now. So, you were telling us how your partiality for rape got you into trouble." Sonia didn’t bother to hide her disgust as she said the word 'rape'.
"Actually, I had no active involvement in that part of it," Uri replied defensively. "My crime was simply being a member of the drujina band that conquered a largish village just to the north of the Carpathian Mountains." Uri's eyes took on a far-away look as he focused his inner eye on the past. "We had decided it was time to build ourselves a base of operations. We had discovered an excellent site for a fortification on a craggy foothill above a small lake and we bullied the men folk from the village into felling trees, hauling rocks, digging and building. Shortly we had the beginnings of a decently fortified keep, which overlooked the lakeside village from an acceptable height. We felt smugly secure once we had a tall palisade surrounding us on three sides with a sheer cliff at the rear. It was a nearly perfect stronghold.
"One day. when the work was nearing completion, Rurik decided to ride out to supervise the building work on horseback. As he was riding along the makeshift dirt road to the keep, a peasant suddenly lost his footing in the mud and tipped a handcart full of rocks in the path of Rurik’s horse. It was a thoroughbred and nervous at the best of times, so the shock made it rear and stumble, breaking its right fetlock. Rurik was furious and demanded payment for his horse. Of course the peasant, who was a fisherman named Gern, was unable to provide recompense for such an expensive beast. Rurik then slyly asked Gern if he had any children. The old man replied that he had two daughters and a son. Rurik laughed and declared that he would take Gern's two daughters as 'mares' in payment for the stallion that he would have to put down that day. The poor man was deeply distraught about this and begged repeatedly for mercy but Rurik was determined to have his revenge. He had the two girls brought up to the keep where he commanded that they should be used by the entire drujina in any way they wished, which of course meant that those poor maidens were to be subjected to a continuous ordeal of rape and abuse until he saw fit to release them."
"Poor kids," said Sonia, who was obviously the ordeals of her own not too distant past.
"Yes, indeed, 'poor kids'," agreed Uri, nodding sadly. "One evening, about a week later, Horvar, a huge Turkish mercenary, who was feared even among our band for his inventiveness at cruelty, had taken both girls to his tent. None of us thought anything strange in this but a few of the men grumbled that the bastard was taking more than his fair share and that the girls would be no use for days after he had finished with them. A short time later, however, our night was suddenly disturbed by a man's outraged roars of pain accompanied by women's laughter, which quickly turned to chilling screams. We followed the sounds to Horvar's tent in the compound. We found him there, sitting crouched over on his blood soaked pallet and groaning in agony. The broken corpses of Gern's daughters lay pale and naked on the ground before him. While we were attempting to help Horvar, he told us what had come to pass. When he and the girls were alone he had made the older of the two, Neela, undress before her sister. He was intending to take her before the younger girl’s eyes to add the spice of fear to Ola, the younger’s, impending rape. But Neela had a knife hidden about her person, which she plunged deeply into his groin when he started to ravish her. In his anger at the unexpected attack he had slaughtered both of the girls with his bare hands. Horvar's own wound was deep and the knife had severed an artery so the Turk himself didn't last the rest of that night. Considering the consequences of his actions, he was probably the most fortunate of us." Uri paused and took a large sip of vodka, his unnaturally blue eyes clouded with dark memories.
"So what happened?" asked Sonia, fascinated by Uri's recollections of the ancient past.
"Vengeance happened, Sonia… dark and dreadful vengeance. The girls' bodies were returned to their parents. When they saw how cruelly they had been used and how brutally they had died, they showed their pitiful corpses to the other villagers. The entire village was outraged by what we had done and conspired to put an end to our plans of conquest once and for all. This was something we expected and thought we were prepared for. After all, what could a mangy bunch of villagers do to a drujina of Varangian heroes? Were soon to find out…
"One of their elders was a shaman - a tiny, wizened monkey of a man by the name of Korj. He seemed so insignificant that we had paid him little notice when we took over their village but, despite his humble appearance, he was a powerful sorcerer. This final outrage had stirred his anger against us enough for him to risk casting a dangerous and costly spell. I don't know the full details of course, but on the night after the girls' funeral the whole village gathered in the market place around a large bonfire. We thought they were performing some kind of death ritual but more sentries, including myself, were posted along the palisade just in case they were planning something. All that happened, however, was that the villagers started a low rising and falling chant as they circled the fire. I remember joking with one of my companions that there was no end to the strange things these heathens
would get up to. As we laughed together, their chant ended abruptly in a single great yell of: 'Upiri!' - the sound seemed to crash over our palisade like a great wave and the entire drujina was suddenly swept into a deep and dreamless sleep.
"How long we slept I do not know but it must have been at least three days as that is the time it takes to travel by cart from that village to the cave in the foothills of the Eastern Carpathians where we awoke. We didn't understand what had happened at first, I thought I must have passed out from too much drink, but a bleary-eyed examination of my surroundings was enough for me to realize that our situation was more serious than that. I was lying on the rocky floor of a large cave with one of my companions, Georgi, sprawled on top of me. We were at the edge of a pile of sleeping warriors who had been dumped unceremoniously on top of each other like corpses after a battle. As we began to wake up there was a barrage of growls and complaints accompanied by the sound of the occasional blow as those on the lower levels of the pile fought their way to the surface. When everyone was pretty much on their feet, a bright blue globe of light appeared at the centre of the cave with the sorcerer, Korj, standing at its centre. This vision seemed somehow taller and more authoritative than the little old man we had encountered in the village and around him I could sense an unmistakable aura of power. He laughed at us and told us mockingly what was to be our fate. Because we had acted like 'upiri lichy', which means 'cruel vampires', that is what we would be for the rest of our lives. He had cursed us to guard the entrance to their lands from other Russian invaders and to visit vengeance on our countrymen throughout eternity. Then he laughed and exited swiftly through the cave mouth. Many of us tried to follow but we quickly found that we couldn't bear the direct rays of the early morning sun so we had to shelter in the cave until nightfall. Each of us fell into a death-like sleep as the day progressed."
"So you were somehow bound to the area where the villagers had left you, am I right?" asked Sonia.
"That's correct," Uri nodded.
"Then how come you're here now?" she demanded, taking a sip of her Green Fairy.
"It's a long story. Korj had bound us to Rurik, but it was Rurik that he had bound to the land itself. I don't know why he did it that way but perhaps he drew upon our existing loyalties to work his magic. I've learned over the years that those who use magic tend to opt for methods that are the least expensive, in terms of power. A sorcerer's energy is drawn at least partly from himself so they attempt to minimize the drain that their spells place upon their own personal resources. We did not know that this was the way the spell worked, however, until Rurik died.
"You see, Rurik didn't change in the same way we did. We all grew fangs and developed the terrible hunger for blood and extreme sensitivity to sunlight but we remained essentially human in appearance, while compared even to us Rurik was a horror. Already a tall man, Korj's curse turned him into a giant nearly three metres tall, his features contorted into an obscene mating between those of a human and a vampire bat, with a squashed back, fringed snout, tiny black eyes and huge pointed ears." Uri opened his arms expansively. "He had wings, you know. Huge bat-like things, with a spread of over thirty metres, which sprouted from his back… and a leathery membrane grew down between his legs, which was divided by a long, muscular tail with a leaf-like vane at the tip. While most normal vampires possess the ability to levitate, Rurik could actually fly. He was also incredibly strong, much stronger than me and the rest of our brethren. Korj must have thought that, by making Rurik so much more powerful than us, it would make it easier for him to rule over us. The wizard obviously relied on the influence of Rurik's innate cruelty to transform us into the curse upon our own countrymen he intended us to be. And this worked… for a few centuries at least."
"I don't get this," interjected Moon shaking his head. "This Korj didn't like the way you treated his people so, what? He turned you loose to do worse to the peasants on the Russian border? It doesn't make sense."
"Not to modern thinking, perhaps, Moon." The corners of Uri's mouth pulled up into a humourless smile. "But people usually didn't think far beyond their own boundaries in those days. Korj was no altruist; the only people who mattered to him were the members of his own village. We Russians had a terrible reputation back then because of our nobility’s ruthless expansionism. The whole of Russia was the enemy as far as Korj was concerned. He couldn't care less what happened to the Russian peasants he had unleashed us upon, just as long as our presence prevented another drujina from invading his people's lands. And we turned out to be very effective at doing just that once we had established ourselves.
"Under Rurik's pitiless leadership we carved out a kingdom of terror in the foothills of the Carpathians. At the start we just sallied out from the cave at night and attacked a few of the outlying farms but as we grew bolder and more confident in our powers we overthrew the local prince and took his castle. Some time later we discovered that we could enchant humans into becoming our servants so we had someone to watch over us as we slept. We created a formidable army of these 'ghouls', with which we drove out or killed the nearby aristocracy. Eventually we ruled an area of countryside which spread over thirty kilometres." Uri gestured expressively with his arms, making Moon wonder if he wasn't getting a bit drunk. "We quickly found that we could make more of our kind so the land was crawling with vampires and half-vampiric ghouls who preyed on any unwary travellers through that area. Within two decades no-one sane would attempt to pass through our lands, be it for trade or conquest."
"Sounds horrible," commented Sonia, sipping her drink.
"Worse than horrible," replied Uri. "The very presence of Rurik seemed to blight the land itself, turning it into a place of treacherous swamps full of twisted growth and haunted mists. From the centre of this Rurik reigned like a great diseased spider in its web.
“I don't know whether Rurik’s transformation went more than skin deep or if the shaman’s spell simply unlocked a hidden store of darkness within him, but he seemed to develop an unlimited capacity for evil and depravity. He had used to be simply given to random cruelty when the opportunity occurred but now he went out of his way to indulge every wicked whim and dreadful imagining. Because Korj had made all of us the bastard’s slaves, he dragged us down into the darkness with him. It didn't help that we all believed that we must already be irredeemably evil because we had been turned into vampires but even that spurious belief did not prevent the impact it had on our minds. Several of us actually went mad because of the depravities he expected us to witness or partake in. At the time I believed that madness would also be my fate if I could not find a way to stop him."
The horror of those times turned Uri's eyes into bleak pits. He didn't describe what Rurik had forced him to do but their silent eloquence was enough to summon the darkest visions into Moon and Sonia's minds. Forgetting her earlier distrust, Sonia reached across and touched Uri's hand. "It's okay, Uri," she reassured him, "it's not as if you had the choice."
Uri looked up at her, shaking his head. "That's the problem, Sonia. I don't know. I just don't know if part of me was willing; if I gave in too easily to doing those dreadful things..."
"The very fact that you have those doubts and they trouble you so much is enough to convince me that you would never have given in willingly," comforted Moon. "Everything I've seen of you since we first met suggests that you are someone who has struggled to rise above the moral limitations of the society he was born into. I don't care about what you've done in the past, whether it was because of the time you grew up in or from living under the dominion of a mad vampire lord, you've tried to do your best with the hand you were dealt as far as I can see."
Uri looked hesitantly over at Moon. "Thank you, my friend. But do you see now why Rurik must be stopped at all costs? I am certain that he wants to turn Bristol, maybe the whole of Britain, into the same kind of nightmare kingdom that we built in Russia."
Moon nodded. "It looks like it. How did you manage to kill him back then? I
t might provide us with a clue that tells us how to fight him now."
"I don't think it will help much but I'll tell you… I wasn't particularly high up in our pecking order, possibly because he sensed my disgust at what we had become and the revulsion I felt for his filthy 'amusements'. However, I was at least a member of his inner circle because I was of noble blood and a member of the original drujina, so I was allowed access to his inner sanctum. Even so it was nearly three hundred years before the opportunity arose to kill him. I was forced to work alone, you see, because I didn't know which, if any, of my comrades felt like I did or who amongst them actually rejoiced in our transformation as some seemed to. There was no possibility of trust between us. One day, whatever dark fates look after vampires must have smiled on me, because I finally found myself armed and alone with Rurik in his chamber.
"You see by then we had begun to cultivate our peasants rather like a farmer husbands cattle. Blood was a limited resource so, rather than kill them outright at every feeding; we kept a number of humans at each of our main strongholds and we would drink from them on a rotational basis, thus allowing them to regain their strength and replenish their blood in between feeds. It had become a necessity, you see, after the flow of travellers through our countryside had dried up. But Rurik was the exception to this. He claimed that his larger frame required a kill for each feed so we established a tithing system. This meant that each village within our thrall would surrender a number of their daughters on a staggered three-yearly basis. Rurik insisted it should be girls because that way he could satisfy his lust with them before draining them of blood."
Under a Ghostly Moon (Jerry Moon Supernatural Thrillers Book 1) Page 17
