Sons of Devils

by Alex Beecroft

  It didn’t matter. The voices were still wrangling outside. Now was not the time to worry about himself. He staggered the short distance to the door. Everything in him flinched away from more anger, more fighting, more pain, and he stood, panting with his hand on the curtain that stood between him and it. I can’t, I can’t, I just want to be left alone . . .

  He pushed the fabric aside nevertheless and limped down the steps with as much pride as he could gather. If he was praying silently, Please God, please don’t let them hurt me, he hoped it didn’t show.

  There was time for a breath of relief when he saw that the men who stood among the circle of seated figures around the fire were as dark skinned and dark haired as the women. Not the overlord’s men, then. Not a deputation with lances and the right to kill.

  The argument cut off with his appearance, and all the faces turned to him.

  He took a second, more cautious, deep breath, and resolved not to be selfish. “If you’re arguing about me, be assured that I meant it when I said that I do not wish to cause you any difficulties. Tell me what I must do.”

  “We cannot keep you here.” The man who stepped into the firelight was ancient, his long hair and sweeping moustache pure white, his face lined with hard wear, but there was nothing infirm about him. “Not in the night. You are bleeding still. They will smell it and come for you. You will bring them to us, and we will be lost.”

  Wolves, Frank thought. Or bears perhaps. He saw the children asleep by the fire, and bit down on his internal scream of But what about me? “Of course. I’ll . . . Which way? Maybe I can make it to the nearest town.”

  Even Constanta smiled at this. He hoped with approval, but probably it was relief to have him gone, and at that thought his belly filled with a despair that seemed familiar.

  The elder came to him and turned him by the shoulders, pointing him towards a gap in the hedge at the other side of the field. “Go there. You will find a path which slopes upwards through the orchards and out onto the foothills where the goats graze. When you come to the shrine at the crossroads, take the path which leads upwards. At the top of the hill you will see below you the bridge and the lights of Bircii village. They have stone walls to defend them. It may be that you can make it in time. With the help of God, it may be.”

  The words had the weight of an epitaph. Frank swallowed, then braced himself, looking for the stick he had been leaning on when he arrived. He thought he saw the end of it poking out from the fire and tried to laugh. But evidently his willingness to go out and risk death for them had charmed the people’s hearts, because a cane was pressed into his hand instead. One of the women wound her head scarf around his waist as a sash, and a hank of rye bread was tucked into it, along with a whittled cross of ash wood.

  In some respects this kindness helped. In others it just made him want to scream all the louder. He felt like a fatted calf being decked out with flowers for its procession to the altar, but tried to smile nevertheless. Thanking them all, Constanta more warmly than the rest, he leaned heavily on the cane and shuffled back out into the dark.

  It was marginally easier to walk now, with his ribs bound up and his shoulder padded. The cane he’d been given was lighter than it appeared. There was a hole down the centre of it that made him think it was the outer part of a sword stick, orphaned from its blade. It was certainly an improvement on the heavy, twisted branch that had supported him as he’d limped into camp.

  For a while, he made good progress, following a level, grassy path through lanes of gnarled but flowering trees, their white and pink blossoms gathering a silvery sheen in the blue twilight. The landscape teased Frank with its familiarity as he walked. He kept thinking he remembered these fields, until he raised his head and saw the looming indigo bulks of the mountains beyond. Then he knew that although he had no idea where home was, this wasn’t it.

  The breeze picked up as he emerged from the shelter of the trees. Outside their shade, the sky was pale enough to show him a worn ribbon of bare earth that wound up past outlying boulders onto hillsides speckled with alpine flowers, springy with heather cropped short. The colours had begun to drain from the world—he saw all now in shades of white and blue—and behind him there came a yellowish bony light from a swollen moon at the level of his shoulders.

  The air that had been balmy with spring sunshine now nipped at his fingers, as if it had blown from the high mountain ice. The birds that had been strident in their dusk chorus quietened down to silence, letting him hear the sigh of the wind.

  No sign yet of a crossroads or a shrine, and his knees had begun to feel loose, the sinews of his legs badly attached to the bones, threatening to slide apart with every step.

  But as he thought this, he caught sight of something white up ahead, glimmering like a second moon, and, yes, it was a small house-like shape topped with a white cross. In an alcove in its centre, bunches of wilted flowers lay on a platform in front of a carved figure of which the halo was the only part he could properly parse. Between the faintness of the carving and the ancient fashion of its clothes, he couldn’t tell if it was man or woman, scholar or soldier. In the hand not raised in blessing it held something that looked unpleasantly organic. He peered closer, then recoiled—it was a human heart, still with faded flakes of red paint attached.

  Was this papism, he wondered, with a practiced flinch of disgust, or some other heathenish denomination, mired in the physical world, to which religion was as much a matter of flesh and blood and ordure as it was of the soul? He felt more a stranger at this evidence of the peasant superstition of the place. They had left tokens and flowers like sacrifices to ancient gods. So very unspiritual. Despite the brilliance of its white paint, the shrine seemed dirty, and he was glad to put it at his back, turning up into the hills as the old man had told him.

  By the time he reached the top of this minor foothill of the greater range, the sky was black. Not even his slowly adapting eyes could pretend night had not fallen. The path glimmered slightly, if he squinted for it, and a swathe of bright stars added a faint, tricky silver to the moonlight by which he could just about avoid a pothole if it was directly ahead of him, but his pace had fallen to that of a halt, blind old man. His chest was red-raw and bruised with every breath, and without the stick he would have fallen a dozen times.

  When the slope flattened he had to stop, fear of wolves or not, lower himself to his knees to breathe and pray and sob at the hardness of life. It was when he had finished his entreaties and fallen silent that he heard a voice ahead of him, a woman singing in a sweet whisper, the song as sad as his own thoughts.

  His mind clutched at the sound as if rescued, letting him know again how terrified he had been of his loneliness. It gave him strength to stagger to his feet and lurch on down the path towards it. Could he see . . .? Yes, he could see something now that wasn’t a tree, something standing upright in the centre of a hollow on the other side of the peak, brushed with starry pallor.

  His footsteps faltered just as the song faded. The tall thing’s head turned towards him—or at least, a shrouded shape atop what might have been shoulders swung around at his footfall. It bore some resemblance to the saint he had just passed—a long sweep of pale drapery and a blurred nothing for a face. It was crowned in flowers, and only the fact that it did not move towards him kept Frank from bolting, spooked by the eeriness of it.

  Then it spoke. “Help me,” it said. “If you are man and not devil, help me, please.”

  A woman’s voice, young and frightened. Frank swallowed his night fears and limped closer. The white pillar of her resolved into something that both made sense and disquieted him more. This was no animated statue, but a woman in a white shift with a bride’s long veil over her head. This covered her face, fell to her knees, and made her look like an upright corpse in a winding sheet. A circlet of flowers, black and white in the starlight, added a grotesquely festive touch to the fact that her hands were bound behind her, secured fast to a sturdy post embedded deep i
n the ground.

  “What on earth . . .?” Frank exclaimed in a language he didn’t recognise, and suffered for a moment a dizzying swing of vertigo while he scrabbled to place it. His body took the chance to step forwards and fold back the veil from the woman’s face, revealing a glitter of tear tracks, a tumble of loosed pale hair, and a gleam of impatiently bared teeth. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Mirela. Please, the rope. Free me. They’re coming. They’ll take you too if you’re out here. I can help you fight. Quickly!”

  The bonds were a bewildering mixture of cords. He managed to pull free the knot of heavy rope, though his bruised fingers shook and cramped. Beneath it, a second layer of white cords were so tight around her wrists that he could see, even in the darkness, her hands were swollen and dark. They felt cold to the touch. Her bonds were cutting off the flow of blood.

  These cords were made of something soft, slippery and fine, and the knot had pulled so close he couldn’t get a fingernail into it. He fumbled, tugged, and cursed while the woman hissed with pain, but the bonds held and at last he had to reel away, clutching his beaten fingers to his chest and curling protectively over them. “I can’t!”

  “Do you have no knife?”

  “No.” He scanned the hilltop wildly for tumbled rocks. There was a kind of rock that could be split to make a sharp edge. He remembered this. But the hillside was smooth under goat-cropped grass, and he could see no convenient stone.

  “Why have they done this?” Frank asked. “What have you done, to be left out for wolves?”

  “Wolves?” She laughed at him, sharp and high. “It is not wolves I fear. It is Văcărescu to whom I am sacrificed, and if you do not move fast, he will have you too.”

  The bride’s crown and veil made some sense to Frank now. Oh, he thought, repelled. It was some feudal droit du seigneur he interrupted? The lord of the region exercising his right to bed a new bride before she went to her husband? Disgusting, certainly, but surely a custom these girls were raised to expect—and therefore something that should not provoke such pleas. “I’m sure it won’t be that bad,” he said. “Not worth pulling your hands off for.”

  But if that was the case, why the stake? Why bring her out here into the wilderness? Why not at home, in a bed?

  “Idiot!” she hissed, struggling harder. “Your stick. Break it—it may be there will be a jagged edge.”

  Something moved in the darkness on the edge of the clearing, and Frank’s confusion spiked back into fear. A pale blur seemed to pass over his head with a whirring noise, like a single huge swan, as a blast of cold air struck directly down and chilled his spine. With it came a blind animal panic, as of a rabbit in a trap. Paralysis swept over him as he locked prey-still, and then his mind returned to him. He set his foot in the centre of the sword stick and bore down. It cracked through, and there were indeed three sharp points left where the lower part broke from the upper.

  He got the most promising of these under the white silk bonds and sawed with all the strength in his numbing hands.

  “Oh,” said a bodiless voice, out in the night’s shade. “Fair maiden, thou hast a swain.” It sounded like a man’s voice, deep and cold, strangely accented, but Frank’s instinct overruled his judgment—told him no, it was a monster. “And he also is fair. Perhaps your village will be spared for this generosity. I do like it when folk give me more than I require—”

  The cord caught on the sharp edge, frayed, and broke. The woman seized Frank’s wrist and bolted with him down the hill.

  The unseen man laughed. “Shall I tear his throat out before you and sup?”

  A deeper darkness lay at the bottom of the hill. Trees, Frank saw, as he stumbled at the end of his strength in the woman’s grip. The threat behind him was a million driven-in pins along his spine, but he couldn’t move any faster, couldn’t leap away doe-like as the young woman could. He could feel from her grip on his arm—the impatient hauling—that he was slowing her down. And even though the thing behind them terrified him, he could not bring himself to carry on putting a woman in danger.

  “Go!” he said. “I can’t make it. Go! I’ll distract him.”

  It would have been nice if she’d been more reluctant, but she dropped his wrist at once, picked up her skirts in one hand, and sprinted away, and the white-hot pain in his chest made him stop and gulp air. If he turned slightly, the man’s gaze raked along his face like the touch of metal left out in the snow.

  “How swift it makes your heart beat when you run from me,” said the voice. Panic punched Frank in the chest, for it was far closer to him than he had imagined. He strained his eyes, and saw a tall shape against the sky of stars—broad shouldered, its head rounded below, rising into a black cylinder. A walking shadow almost the shape of a man, with a glint of pale eyes, and very white teeth.

  At the sight of that feral smile, Frank’s body found a new strength—a fountain of numbness and energy bursting up from a spring of terror. He gave a strange, whimpering gasp and then turned and ran for the trees as if he was unharmed, all of his pains subsumed in the need to get away.

  His hunter laughed behind him, and as he raced over the final yards of rocky turf, plunged into the shadow under the trees, there came again that thin whistle and a twisting, ribbonlike mist flanked him, cold as a crypt. The night air filled with the reek of old, dried blood.

  Then Frank heard water ahead. Bouncing over tree roots, wrenching his ankles, rebounding into springy branches and tearing through briars—feeling none of it—he headed straight for the sound.

  To his left, the pale cold thing kept pace with him, reaching out a tendril every so often to stroke his face and chill his bones. Ahead, water cut through the deep valley. Not the mountain rill he had imagined, but a river, deep and black, edged with reeds and rushes. The bank plunged steeply down into it, lined with jagged rocks. To Frank’s right, a path led downhill beside the stream—the path the elder had told him to take to make it to safety in Bircii.

  In the distance, where moonlight struck the water, something white could be seen moving, drawing away fast. Then it blinked out like a star hidden behind clouds. Mirela. He hoped fiercely that he had done enough—that she had escaped.

  The thing following Frank stopped with him as he halted on the riverbank, his back to the water and a desperate plan in his mind. The creature poured itself back into the silhouette of a man—he still couldn’t see its face, though silver glinted on its chest in five parallel lines, and the shape of it flared out towards the bottom, as though it were wearing a long military coat. Its eyes were not on him—that strangely misshapen head had turned to follow Mirela’s escaping form.

  Some of the confident mockery had gone from its voice when it turned back. “You are a troublesome cur after all.” It lowered its voice to a whispery purr. “Enough playing now. Come, let us be at it.” It lashed out, long clawed fingers curving around Frank’s neck.

  Instinctively, with a faculty he hadn’t known he had, Frank grabbed for the glow of the distant stars. He pulled the light to him until it filled him up and welled out in a blue-green glow. The creature hissed in pain, jerked its hand away from his flesh. A magical talent! Who would have thought it? But there was no time to ponder the discovery. Frank grabbed the crucifix from his sash, threw it at the monster’s face, hurled himself backwards, and plummeted into the stream.

  A profound darkness closed around him, and cold such as he’d never felt before struck him to the bone. The glow of borrowed starlight washed away.

  Frank held his mouth shut by sheer effort, keeping in the bubble of warm air, though his body told him to gasp at the chill. A rock skewered him in the hip—he rebounded, and then the current took him, tugging him under, sweeping him on. A bright flare of joy at the speed of it, a feeling of liberty—he had escaped! But a moment’s thought contradicted that. The hunter, whatever he was, had not seemed like a fool. He would simply keep pace with the water, either flying above it or running down the path at the bank
, and when Frank came up for air, his monster would be there to snatch him up. The memory of those grinning teeth froze him worse than the mountain runoff.

  Frank fought the current. Gradually, he clawed his way out of the deep channel, toward the bank. Reeds whipped at his face, and stirred up silt made the water gritty, stinging in his wounds. When he grabbed for the rushes, they whipped out of his hands, leaving friction burns, so that his fingers were the only part of him that felt warm. But his speed slowed. Soon he could haul himself in amongst the tall plants, surround himself with stems. He burrowed further down and in, until his questing hand found a tree root that gave him grip enough to come to a complete halt.

  The need to breathe had become a torment; he could not hold it any longer and live. After exhaling as gently as he could, he put the smooth end of his hollow cane in his mouth, raised the jagged end to where he thought the surface was, and sucked. Silt and water came down at first, but gave way to a cool draught of air, and he breathed it in gladly despite the danger.

  In the mud and ooze of the reed bed, in the dark night, with the moon behind the distant mountains, he could see nothing at all, and that was good because it surely meant that no one could see him. The cold settled into his bones and numbed his many aches.

  His heartbeat had just begun to slow and his panic to abate when the tree root to which he clung shivered slightly. And again. There was a pattern to its shaking—one two, one two—footsteps, coming closer along the bank. It felt as though they would shake his world down. Trapped and helpless, he froze like the prey he was, breathed in deep and held it for an infinitely long, terrible time. And then the footsteps began again, going from a shake to a shiver, the vibration trailing off into nothing. They had gone. He had gone.

  Perhaps Frank wept; the water around his face seemed warmer for a while. Then he wondered what to do. If he got out of the river, the wind might blow his scent to the thing that had followed him. If he let go of the branch, the river might sweep him somewhere shallow where he would again be exposed. If he stayed, how long would it take before the creature gave up its hunt? How long before all the lingering warmth was sucked out of him and he died of mere cold?