The Priest of Blood (21 page)

When I reached the tower, I pressed open its rotting door.

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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.

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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 was 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

We barely spoke a word between us, but it did not matter. I could have lain with her, pressed my flesh to her greedy mouth for an eternity. The silence without was broken by the richness I experienced within my soul. I saw great cities of vast kingdoms that I had never before seen. I had visions of creatures that swam beneath the sea, monstrous but beautiful beasts, and of a woman who wore a shroud of darkness and a gold mask on her face. I saw this woman who held me as she sucked at my blood, but many centuries earlier, sitting within a temple on a cliff’s edge, with cracks in the earth below her stone seat, and the mist of gases coming up.

With these visions, I learned her name—she was called Pythia, and I saw her differently in my mind while she drank from me. I saw her surrounded with serpents at her feet, wearing a long tunic that barely covered her, her breasts exposed, gold around her neck and arms, shaped also as snakes. Behind her, a statue of a man who wore a diadem that was like the sun itself. It was a pagan temple, and she was a priestess of some kind. In the vision, she began to move as if in a dance, but a dance as I had never before seen. It was erotic, then, by turns, vulgar, and I wondered if, in this vision, she was a temple harlot or a great leader. I could not tell. But the feeling I had while watching her was of ecstasy.

And then, when my mistress had drunk her fill of me for the night, and I felt the swoon of dawn arrive, the visions and the wonderful pleasure eroded. We lay together, entangled, I with my straps and ropes to keep me safe or trapped, and she with her cold flesh pressed against me, my lover, my murderer. There, I held her as the day wore on beyond the walls of my tower.

I forgot my past, I forgot my mother’s fire and the Great Forest of my childhood, forgot the Barony and even my Alienora. Forgot my brother, and dear Thibaud, and my companion Ewen, who had been with me through so much of my youth. All of them became a dream that I had been told.

For all I knew I had been a slave to this woman named Pythia my whole life, from birth. She was all that mattered. I was nothing. I was less than nothing. I was beneath the contempt of the lowest creature. My only offering was the blood that flowed through me. If it sustained her, and brought her joy, that is why I lived. If she took pleasure from me, it was more than I could have expected. Sleep came or did not come for me. Sometimes, I lay there, a long endless day without light, and yet knowing that the sun rose high beyond this tower prison.

Night came slowly, with pain in my joints as I began to desire her mouth to my throat, or the warmth of her spit along my forearm, and that pressure from her sharp teeth just before my skin gave way to the razor edge. If I could not feel her feeding against me, I would choose death. During the day I might feel self-revulsion, but come the evening, I would want only her and serve only her and be what she wanted me to be for her. She was my all. She was my reason for continuing to live.