The Priest of Blood (23 page)

I opened my eyes to darkness. The whispering in my head stopped. I began to see clearly through the dark. Far above me, another passageway. I had looked down upon these graves when I had wandered Hedammu looking for Thibaud. I had felt as if I were on the edge of a precipice then. Now I was in the pit below. In some home of the dead.

I sensed someone nearby, although I could not then say how I felt the presence of another. No sound met my ears. I saw nothing as I looked upward.

I tried to rise, but my legs were too weak, and I collapsed.

Then the rush of wind, nearly howling above me, as if a door had been opened to a sandstorm outside.

Whispering above me.

Then the sound of a muffled scream.

A large bundle flew down to me from above.

I scooted backward.

The bundle: a maiden, completely bound head to foot with rope.

She stared at me in terror. Her face was white as milk, and she had open wounds along her shoulder and throat, as if a wolf had attacked her. Had Pythia already drunk from her? My heart beat fast, thinking of Pythia and of her ministrations to my own throat.

I wanted to lift the maiden up, but not for protection. I didn’t see a woman’s face so much as I began to see what ran beneath it: a dark, delicious elixir that was like fine wine and clear, pure water—the blood itself.

No longer man, I tell you, I had become a monster through Pythia’s breath.

I crawled toward the maiden. As I came closer, she opened her mouth to scream.

I turned her on her side. My fingers gently grazed her throat. The warmth I felt from her skin was comforting. I found the pulse of a vein near the whiteness of her collar. Had you told me that I lifted her to me like a barrel of ale and felt as if I might drink her down, I would have been amazed by your lie. I cared for this maiden and wished to cause her no harm.

I spoke to her kindly, my voice as weak as my hunger was strong. I simply asked for something of hers that she would be willing to part with—a memento of her existence. I promised her that I would release her after. I would release her from the ropes, I said. She could run home when I had that souvenir of her, that red flower of her throat.

A monstrous feeling in me arose. I fought it with all my might.

“Please,” she whispered. She had said it in her foreign tongue, but something within me translated her words without knowing how I had done so. This was not the language of my home, nor even nearby languages I had heard in my life. Yet I had the newfound ability to understand other tongues. “Please,” she begged, and began praying.

My compassion for this maiden overcame my thirst.

I nodded, and tore at the ropes and bindings that she might be free. The grave I lay within was too deep for her to scramble up the sides. My thirst for her blood increased—for I could smell the blood now, beneath her skin, soaking her organs and meats in its fragrant wine. Blood called to me. It called for my teeth to uncork it and to drink it down in one great draught.

Perhaps it was because I was a new convert to this alien tribe of the undead, but I pushed myself back against the dirt wall of my grave and allowed her freedom there.

“I will not harm you,” I growled. I am certain that my visage was terrifying to the maiden as I went to her, scooping her up in my arms.

A woman, dark of skin with her head partially wrapped in a saffron-yellow turban, her body cloaked in a fine cloth that wrapped about her to great advantage of her athletic figure, slipped down into my grave. She stood close, sniffing me. Her nostrils flared then turned to slits, and I felt a strange heat as she came close to me. The heat turned almost into the feeling of tiny, light feathers grazing my face and throat.

She was not beautiful in the tradition of women of Christendom, for she was tall and thick of shoulder and thin of hip, and she had painted her face in a way that seemed too exotic for even the harlots of the armies. She was beautiful and too strong for a woman—she looked like a warrior, and though I had heard tales of warrior-women, I had not believed them until that moment.

When she began speaking, it sounded as if it were some strange tongue I had never before heard. Yet the heat at my face and the feeling of being touched without being touched increased as she spoke. I felt vibrations in my ears, and I could understand each word she said. “Take her. Drink your fill.” Her voice was like a commander giving orders to a soldier.

“No. I cannot,” I said.

“You must drink,” she said. “You will die without it.”

“So be it,” I said.

“You think she is like you. But you are not mortal. You are vampyre now, one of the fallen ones of Medhya. As am I. You are of the tribe. And she is not. She is a vessel of blood. You must drink.”

As she spoke, the full force of her words hammered at me. No longer mortal. Vampyre. “I will die.”

“Your instinct is to survive,” she snarled, contempt in her voice. “You are weak. You are just being resurrected. You will be weak for several nights, even with blood. If I bound you to her, you would drink from her and she would die from it. If you drink from her now, she may live.”

“Even so,” I said, “I will not.”

“So be it,” she said.

Two other of the nightcomers slithered into the grave as if on their bellies, like serpents. It gave me a chill to watch them, and to think that I was of their kind now. One, an older man of forty or so, thick of muscle and a chest like a cask, with a tangle of beard at his chin and hair nearly to his back. He was unclothed except for rags bound about his loins. The other, a young man who looked as if he were a Turk, with the high cheekbones and piercing eyes of those barbarian people, but with the white-blond hair of the Norsemen. He was dressed in a simple tunic, and when he rose I saw his mouth open, it was filled with rows of fangs that seemed as if they were impossible to fit in his mouth.

These monsters moved closer to the maiden, who clutched at me, praying to her gods. The two males took up the ropes and bound her to my body so that my mouth and her throat were close.

“You must feed,” the female vampyre said. “If you will not, I will cut her throat and force her life into your mouth. We do not let one of our kind suffer long. The prey also suffers when the predator lingers.”

Then, more swiftly than I could comprehend with my mind, she and the others scrambled up from the grave.

“Do not leave me,” I begged, my voice a dry rasp.

The female leaned over the edge, her gaze like ice. “Drink of her. Her suffering will be short. Yours, without blood, will be unbearable. We feel the pain of our tribe. Your newborn ache is with all of us.”

Then, finally, she departed.

I was alone with the maiden.

Perhaps hours passed as I lay there, bound to the young woman.

Alone with her, who had given up all struggle, my lips so close to her throat, I could not resist.

“Forgive me,” I said.

Without even being aware that I’d made the judgment, I brought my mouth to her throat. My teeth—which had, to my horror, grown into small points—sank into her flesh. I felt a pop of skin, then the blood burst into the back of my throat. I drew my teeth out as soon as I recovered from this uncontrollable instinct.

I had just taken a few drops, just a bit, but the maiden had passed out from either pain or shock.

3

My first few nights were blurs of thought and memory mingled with the tastes of blood. I do not know what happened to the maiden who was my vessel, but one night I awoke and she was gone, the ropes that had bound me scattered on the ground beside me. I had still not left the womb of my grave, and though I felt strength in my body, I had not yet recovered from the first death.

The female vampyre brought me three men from a battle not far from us, each wounded and perhaps already dying, bearing wounds of others of our tribe—bites and tears along arms and legs and near the throat. I felt as if I were in a dream of dizziness and unquenchable thirst. My lips parched, I felt as if I were a hundred years old. Unable to move far, with a stiffness in my joints, I could barely crawl to the first man, whose body and spirit had already been broken by others. I did not pause to consider my monstrosity—my sense of humanity had begun to erode as my hunger and senses increased in their intensity.

I would even argue that all humans have this creature within them—this predator upon their fellowmen and -women, the monster inside that, if tapped, might reach a fever pitch and find sustenance with the blood of a friend or a lover. We fought in war and tore at our enemy. I had seen injustice disguised as justice and murder in the guise of religion. I had seen my own mother burn for the pleasure and sense of justice of others.

The monster lurked within humankind and all around us, like a shadow that did not reveal itself until twilight, until the delight of the blood thirst became overwhelming.

It is nature, after all, that requires the falcon to tear at the soft rabbit’s throat and the hounds to run down the stag and attack it in a thicket. Was man any different? Were we not once human, those of us who had been resurrected into this new life, after death? Perhaps this was all there was of heaven—perhaps this was the realm of the gods themselves, for what in all of Nature and supernature fed from man’s blood but the gods? What did we taste in Mass? Was it not the blood of our Lord? What did the surgeons leech from us, but our blood, to heal us by ridding us of the body’s fluids? And what pleasure we took in offering our legs or arms to the leech that it might take from us that which was the only sustaining juice of the fruit of our bodies?

All, monsters. All mankind. We of this tribe of night, savages and barbarians, living among the dead, drink from the weak and dying, the jackals within human form. Did we not simply ignore the social convention of kindness and goodness and the falsity of differentiating between the meat and blood of the deer and that of man?

I followed the instinct that grew like fire from my soul outward, a fire that could only be contained by sprinkling the blood of sacrifice upon it.

Each night for nearly a week, I drank from the soldiers’ necks like a newborn calf sucking greedily from the cow. My nights as a monster had just begun, but even then I felt something more than murder and bloodshed. I felt a deeper connection within my soul, even as I sent a victim to his death.

When you have returned from the dead, you understand the doorway that death opens. Your mind grows from this knowledge, and the brief suffering of life is a gift to those who will travel to the Threshold, and beyond, to the journey of the soul.

While you, the creature who drank of the body, remain in the grave, conscious, aware of all you have lost and yet with a knowledge of your own destruction within you—of the price of immortality, which is the living death that does not end.

4

The soldiers struggled against me. These were men who had spent their young lives in war, as had I, yet they were as full of terror as children in a nightmare.

My instinct rose and loved their fight as I drained them like great jugs, a glutton for the red elixir that filled me with strength and hope and a renewed love of the world. As I held one of them to me, tearing at his throat, I felt a communion with the soldier, who, as he lay there after, dead, drained so deeply from my thirst, had given up his secret to me, the wonder and pride of his treasure, buried as it was in vein and flesh.

I lay back, full, and felt as if I had never been so alive as I was at that moment.

During that first week of beautiful night and long sleep, I learned of the tribe I had entered when I had died, the first time. The other vampyres—I counted six or seven who gathered around as I drank—did not approach me during that time, except to look down on me from above my grave, as if I were some great curiosity.

It was dusk when I stirred from a sleep that seemed more like death itself, for it was simply an emptiness—as if I had lain down in my grave only moments before. The smells that greeted me were of earth and some malodorous ether, as if an animal had died nearby. Perhaps that animal had been me. Before I opened my eyes, I felt as if someone were staring at me. Yet, as soon as I looked, there was nothing but the grave of my rebirth around me. I had strength again—the blood had brought it. I felt a rich vitality in my flesh, and I longed to leave my resting place. I scrambled up over the ridge of the grave and saw a new world.

Great yellow stone columns spanned the spacious chamber and reached the ceiling a hundred feet or more overhead. Slits of windows let in the pink-purple light of the last of the sun, which lingered like a sword dangling above the darkness of my grave.

My eyes adjusted as the dark grew: all became light again in my vision. I saw as a cat now, better the less bright the light. The earth itself had a luminosity to it, and was wondrous to behold: it was as if feeble mankind could not see the light that teemed in life itself. The movement of worms, of lice, of the smallest ant, the tiniest fungus—all of it created thin rays of yellow light such that I felt as if torches had been lit in the earth. I felt my eyes dilate, and soon I saw more—the stones of the wall nearly four hundred feet from me, the other graves around me. I sensed that others were in them, also beginning to awaken to the night.

The thought panicked me only slightly: I, a monster among monsters.

I had not yet dressed, and was surprised to find that I had no self-consciousness about my nakedness as I had as a mortal man. In life, I had felt shameful without a tunic of some sort, but for the first time, I felt as if the flesh itself were clothing enough. I looked down at my body—it had whitened, and seemed to me like alabaster. I held my arms out in front of me and felt for life at the wrist, but there was none. Yet, I had the feeling of life in me. I felt a heart beat beneath my breast—blood still pumped. Life existed, impossibly, in this body that was neither dead nor alive. I felt the stirrings of nature itself, as I often did upon waking, and I wondered at this new existence, this damnation: why would it exist if it were truly evil? Why would I feel young, still, and even happy, after death had taken me?