Lucien's Khamsin (7 page)

“I thought you were a prince,” she said.

Lucien shook his head. “A prince of the Revenants, aye, but I was not born royal if that is what you thought, wench.” He looked across the room. “I prefer to think of myself as a master craftsman rather than what I was made.”

Khamsin looked to where he was staring. “Did you make that?”

“Aye,” he said. “It was a wedding present for Magdalena.”

“Your wife?”

“My life,” he said and his eyes narrowed in what she recognized as grief. “When she was taken from me, my life ended in more ways than one.”

Understanding settled like a heavy weight on Khamsin’s shoulders. “She was raped,” she said quietly.

“As I watched,” he whispered. “Unable to help her.”

She felt a deep need to put her hand on his arm where it rested upon his bent knee, to comfort him, and it was all she could do to refrain from doing so. She could not be sure he was not mentally coercing her into the response.

“She died during the rape,” he said. “Our daughter was killed, too.”

“The men who hurt your wife and child tried to kill you?”

“That was their intent, aye,” he replied with a snort. “I was drawing my last breath when Sibylline found me.”

“Sibylline?”

“Let me tell you the whole of it and then you will know,” he said softly and began his tale.

“Every myth has a basis in fact—the creation myth, the Great Flood, the explanation of seasons. Even the beasts who walked the imagination of humankind bear some resemblance to real beings. Much of the time those creatures of myth were taken from something that actually existed and sometimes the real things twist themselves to fit the myth.

“We were a peaceful people who tended our fields and flocks, who lived our entire lives beneath the shadow of Mount Duáilce. There was no reason for our young to leave the village. Sons went to work for their fathers. Daughters married neighbor sons and were content to live in their mother-in-law’s home. Few of us ever ventured off, and those who did always came home. We were comfortable, and happy and unafraid.

“But evil lived just over the crest of Mount Duáilce. There—in the caves—was a tribe of cannibals. They had never invaded us until that night for we were well-guarded by our own soldiers and watch kept very closely over our lands. But there had been a disease that had run rampant through the animals, killing nearly every beast we owned. So the soldiers—led by Petros—had ventured far from our lands to hunt for wild animals to fill our bellies for the winter. In our complacency, we had forgotten the threat of the Manticore clan and their warrior kin, the Sagittary.

“They descended upon us in the dead of night and took every life save mine. They gorged themselves on every living thing within the village, leaving behind nothing but bone and hair. Because I had dared lift a weapon to them, I was left bleeding and broken upon the cobblestones, my sanity gone and no will within me to live.

“Myths had been written about the Manticore, turning them into cat-like beasts with triple rows of spiked teeth and the barbed tail of a scorpion. The only thing real about the myth was the grinning human face. Likewise, the Sagittary were morphed into the image of the drunken centaur with its torso of a man and the hindquarters of a horse.

“The cat-like image came from the pelts of mountain lions the Manticore clan wore draped over their heads and shoulders. The razor-sharp teeth were true enough for the clan had filed down their teeth to better rend the flesh of their victims. They had a weapon forged of metal with spikes on a heavy ball. It swung from their wrists on a chain.

“As for the Sagittary, they were great horsemen, handling their beasts as though they were a part of the animal. They could control their beasts with great skill. They were known also for their drunken revels and were hardly ever sober. So in harmony with their horses, they fashioned britches of horsehair and wore those always, giving the impression of having horse legs themselves. Rarely did they wear clothing on their upper bodies and never when they went to hunt, reveling in the feel of blood splattered on their bare flesh.”

“I remember a bit of the mythology the teachers on the ship taught us. Did your invaders pattern themselves after the myths of manticore and centaur or was the myth patterned after them?” she asked.

“A little of both, I think. The Manticore was an old family, driven from their village long before the time of Christ because they had developed a taste for human flesh. Even before Christian morals came into being, the notion of eating human flesh was taboo amongst most of the tribes. The Sagittary were shunned for their drunken rape of any woman who crossed their path and wound up fleeing for their lives. It was inevitable they should join forces with the Manticore—both outcasts, hated and feared.”

“When was this?” she asked. “When did all this happen to you?”

“The year was 1240 A.D.,” he answered.

“Over eight hundred years ago!” she exclaimed. “That is so unreal.”

“That night myth became real for me for there was one legend that truly existed beyond reality and I came face to face with it as I lay dying.”

Khamsin felt the hair stirring on her arms. “Sibylline was a Revenant,” she said.

Lucien rubbed at the pain over his right eye. “Not just a Revenant, wench, but the queen of them. She lived on the isle of Santorini, up in the mountains from which she could take flight and soar over the waters she could not physically cross. It was the violence that had attracted her and caused her to come investigate. It was the scent of my blood that drew her to the place where I lay and it was my face—as she has told me a thousand times—that made her sink her fangs into my neck and turn me into a Revenant.”

Khamsin studied Lucien’s profile and could see why the Revenant queen had been so taken by his face. He was more than handsome. He was beautifully male with a body that stirred the libido.

“And I obviously stirred hers,” he said, reading her thoughts and causing Khamsin to blush.

“Did she take you back to Santorini?” Khamsin asked, feeling the heat in her cheeks.

“No, she left me here because she had no way to carry me to Santorini. As I said, she cannot cross water by normal means and as a flying creature, she is but the size of a large raven. I’ve never known her to shift into anything larger.”

“What of the men who had gone hunting? When did they return?”

“Petros stumbled into the village four days later—wounded from a Sagittary arrow, barely alive. He was the only one of the hunting party to survive for they had run into the Manticore on the way back. He blames himself for not being there that night. If he and the other soldiers had been on guard, he doesn’t think the Manticore would have dared attack us.”

“The chances are they would have sooner or later. Don’t you think?”

“Aye,” Lucien agreed. “It was but a matter of time before they did. They had wiped out nearly every village save ours.”

Khamsin looked to the window that was open to the night air. “Are they still up in these mountains?”

Lucien did not answer and when Khamsin looked around, she flinched at the awful smile that stretched his full lips. His eyes were as cold as ice.

“You killed them?” she asked in a near whisper.

He nodded.

“All of them? Manticore and Sagittary?”

He nodded again. “I had regained my strength by the time Petros returned. Regained that strength and become endowed with a might far greater than any human alive. I knew what I was and I reveled in that knowing.”

“You said you had only turned one human,” she remembered. “That was Petros, wasn’t it?”

“He wasn’t happy that I gave him unlife,” Lucien explained. “He would have preferred to die, but I was greedy and did not want to live here all alone. Once he accepted what I had done to him, it was he who suggested we avenge our village.”

“You went up into the mountains.”

“With no weapon save our hatred. We fell upon the Sagittary like locusts and drained them until they were nothing more than empty husks. The Manticores were sleeping when we entered their cave. When we were finished, we piled them one atop the other and set fire to their shriveled bodies.”

“You drained them,” she said, staring at him. “With your teeth.”

“No, with a giant syringe,” he said then laughed at her confused look. “Aye, wench, with our teeth. He peeled back his lips. “These teeth.”

As Khamsin watched, his two lateral incisors slowly descended from either side of the larger central incisors. They curbed wickedly and had sharp, glistening points from which twin drops of a milky substance sprang.

“Venom,” he said, licking the drops from his fangs. “Harmless to me, life-giving to those into whom I inject it.”

“Not poisonous like a viper’s,” she said, her voice filled with awe, her eyes wide.

“Not poisonous,” he agreed. He retracted the teeth until they were no more than the shiny white teeth he had before the exhibition.

Khamsin shook her head as though ridding it of the image of those dangerous fangs.

“You drink blood,” she said, shuddering.

“Not from my fangs, I don’t,” he told her.

“Then why do you have them?”

He shrugged. “To bite with, wench, why else? I just don’t drink blood from them. The blood I need to consume—and about a pint a day will suffice me—comes from the phlebotomy set up for just that purpose. Did anyone sink their teeth into you?”

She cocked her head. “No, they used a needle.”

“They used a needle to draw your blood for two reasons,” he said. “One is that it is safer for you and us. Had you been carrying the plague, we certainly would not have wanted you around the other members of the herd to infect them. The second reason is that it is a lot easier on the donors. They aren’t as frightened as they’d be if a Revenant pounced on them and sunk his fangs into them.”

“Donors,” she said, trying out the word. “That’s a congenial way to describe us. Unwilling donors but donors nevertheless.”

“So to answer an unasked question brewing in your head, no, I do not drink blood from my victims’ necks. I take it from a glass and so do the others.”

“There were only the two of you left from your village.”

“There was one other,” he said. “Christina.”

“How was it she survived?”

Lucien shrugged. “Christina had been asked to leave our village a few weeks before the attack and had gone to a village near the seacoast. When she heard that her village had been attacked and there were no survivors, Christina rushed back, hoping the rumor was not true.”

“She’s gay,” Khamsin said. “A homosexual, I think it’s called.”

“And quite content to be that way,” Lucien said. “But you can imagine how the people of our village felt about her back then.”

“Also an outcast, hated and feared,” Khamsin observed.

“Petros and I saw her coming and warned her away but she ignored us. She later said that if the two of us had survived perhaps some of her family had. After she learned the how of us being alive, she asked to be turned. I refused.”

“Petros didn’t.”

“I love him like a brother, but sometimes the man can be an idiot. He’s made more than his share of fledglings, I’m afraid,” Lucien said with a sigh. “Although, I am glad he turned Christina, for she has been a good friend. Over the years, she has tended the herds for us.”

“Not very well, though,” Khamsin reminded.

Lucien frowned. “Apparently not. I am inclined to think her research has been more important than her doctoring.”

“Research?”

Lucien got up from the bed and walked to the window. He leaned his forearm against the casing and pressed his throbbing head to his wrist as he looked out over the mountain valley.

“There really is a plague, you know,” he said.

“Aye, I’ve seen it.”

He looked around. “Where?”

“Near the coast of Mexico but that was a few years ago,” she replied.

“How came you to be there?”

“I told you I had stowed away on one of the supply ships?” she asked and at his nod continued. “It was a schooner and they found me eventually. At first they were angry but then they set me to work.”

“Did they take you?” he asked.

Khamsin shook her head. “They thought I was a boy. I looked like one back then.”

“So the supply ship dropped anchor off the coast of Mexico and that is where you saw the plague victims?”

“Only one, but the memory of what I saw still haunts me.”

“I imagine that was not a pretty sight.”

Khamsin shuddered. “It was ghastly. The poor woman had boils all over her. She was howling from the pain and though it seemed cruel, I was glad when they shot her. There was nothing that could be done for her.”

“No, there is no cure, but that is something Christina is working on. She helped to find the serum that is now widely used in the herds. Many humans died from the plague before that preventative was found.”

“And the serum is as important to your kind as it is to us,” she said.

“Without it, the human race would die out and our supply of sustenance would be limited to animal blood,” he remarked with a frown. “That is not a palatable notion. We would survive but the quality of our unlife would be greatly diminished.”