Vigil (17 page)

Chapter
Forty

Scherzingen

I followed him, largely out of curiosity. He was dressed in a white robe which covered him from head to foot. The garment was shapeless, but I saw that underneath it he was a well-built man. I placed him at about forty years of age.

             
His head was completely shaven.

             
It was the height of winter, too, and cold. Snow had been threatening to fall for some days now, and he must have been freezing.

             
I myself wore a thick shirt, woollen trousers and heavy boots. I had a thick dark blue cape around my shoulders that kept out the worst of the cold. My hands were unprotected from the elements. I was feeling the cold. His head was turning blue.

             
I sat on a stone wall outside a tavern and watched him on his rounds.

             
He would enter a building, an indescribable expression on his face. I came later to recognise it as fervour. Fanatics and believers in a cause have that same expression on their faces. That their way is the one true way. It is often followed by condescension or derision. But I was mistaken in my initial assessment of the white monk. He was just pure of heart. Not many people I’ve met could claim the same.

             
It was fervour, but there was also hope.

             
People had been dying in the village for weeks. I had wandered at night, and in the painful light of day I had watched many of the shuttered houses open up to release the dead. Each day, it seemed, a new death greeted the dawn. Their deaths had nothing to do with me. It was a different plague. It was just as virulent as the disease that I carry, but ended only in a slow wasting away, not new power and immortality. But then, if everyone was like me, what fun would the world be?

             
The white monk left the last house in the village and began walking slowly down to a house on the shores of the lake. The lake had long been frozen. Deep thick ice covered it in a silver sheen that glowed sullenly at sunset. Part of me longed to walk out on the ice and risk tumbling in, fascinated to see how long I could remain conscious in those freezing depths. But I have always hated the cold. Looking back on my time, I would have been better served to head to warmer climes, but then what use the warmth when I could not bathe in the sun?

             
The journey took around half an hour. The white monk’s shoulders were still squared against the cold and what must have been disappointment. His visits did not help the afflicted at all, but still he tried. He traipsed from house to house, and each day that week his journey became shorter as more of those he visited died.

             
I wondered what could drive someone on in the face of such overwhelming impossibility. He had no medicine. He had no modern science. He was armed with faith alone.

             
Was he wasting his time?

             
He was. But then, is it a waste to believe in something? Many times, throughout the years, I have longed for a belief to carry me through the unforgiving days. It has never come, and still I am a heathen in all the countries of the world. The world of religion never opened up to me.

             
As I watched him walk firmly down to the shore of the lake and the house that waited there, I resolved to find out as much as I could about what drove the man. I followed him all the way, and when he knocked on the door and was not answered, I followed him into the house.

             
The house, as all but the most wealthy of human’s houses were, was sparsely furnished. There was a table in the kitchen, two chairs. Upstairs was a simple affair, too. There was a bed, nothing more.

             
The monk knelt by the side of the bed. He was reciting a prayer in Latin over the corpse under the covers.

             
I sat with my legs crossed in the corner and listened. He did not look up while he prayed. He prayed for a very long time. I listened to the words and most I understood. I had learned my languages well over the course of the last seventy years.

             
I imagined what it would be like for him to pray over me. Part of me thrilled at the idea.

             
He finished and looked at me with sad eyes.

             
‘You show disrespect for the dead, coming here.’

             
‘On the contrary,’ I said. ‘I wish only to know what drives you so.’

             
‘My Lord,’ he said, simply.

             
‘And is your Lord open to all, or just the dead?’

             
‘My Lord is the Lord of all things, living and dead.’

             
‘That’s good,’ I said. I resisted telling him that I was both. People don’t tend to react well to that kind of thing. Certainly not in the 17
th
Century. Not so much now, come to think of it. For some people God is a private matter. I’d soon learned that my peculiar status between the life and death is a private matter, too.

             
‘I would like you to teach me about your God.’

             
‘You would know God?’

             
‘I’m a fast learner,’ I said.

             
‘God is best taken at a slow pace. He is, after all, infinite.’

             
‘I’m probably the least impatient student you’ll ever have.’

             
He seemed to ponder my request seriously. I could see that he was intrigued. I have a way of speaking that perturbs some people. Sometimes it seems that I am being condescending. I give the impression that I know more than most people. That’s fine, though. I do.

             
‘I am returning to Salem,’ he said. ‘If you would learn, there is no finer place. We have the finest library in all of Europe. You can read?’

             
‘No. But I know the theory behind it. How hard can it be?’

             
Not that hard at all, as I was to find out.

             
‘Then we leave at noon. My work is done here. I can do nothing more. The disease has run its course. Be packed and meet me before the tavern. We have many days walk ahead of us.’

             
‘I will be there,’ I told him. I left him to finish preparing the corpse.

*

Chapter
Forty-One

Shores of Lake Constance

We walked for days without event. The white monk was sturdy and untiring. It was always me who broke the silence.

             
‘Do you have a name,’ I asked him, ‘or should I keep calling you the white monk?’

             
‘It is as good a name as any,’ he told me, ‘but my name is Jonas. Brother Jonas. And you?’

             
‘I’m not sure. I suppose I must have, but if I ever had a name I don’t remember it now.’

             
People have asked me my name before. Sometimes I made one up. Mostly I killed the people anyway, so there didn’t seem any point in lengthy introductions. But I wanted to try and learn from this man, and his order, so I was determined not to kill him. That left the introductions route, always difficult for me.

             
‘No matter. Names are not so important. I have always thought a name should be earned.’

             
I mused on this for a while as we walked. He seemed lost in his thoughts again. I suppose he had a lot to think on. He was no doubt thinking of all the ways he could please his God. His God was not my God. I had no intentions of living a life of piety. We were at different ends of the spectrum. I didn’t think I would ever understand what drove a man like Brother Jonas, but in a life of darkness I wanted a little of his light to shine on me.

             
We were in the shade and the sky was a steely grey but the light still pained me. He said nothing on this for the first few days. He slept and I pretended to sleep. I lay on the littered dirt under the trees and smelled his blood and sweat. I listened to his heart each night. It was a small torture. I was denying my nature. By then the hunger had grown into a monster with teeth, gnawing at my insides, desperate to be unleashed.

             
I turned my attention from his soft beating heart and listened instead to the night. All but the night owls slept. An occasional huwhoo of a hunting owl broke the night. It wasn’t a perfect night for hunting. I thought of hunting, while my travelling companion slept. Animal blood could sate the hunger sometimes, but it always came back stronger. The only thing that ever made my hunger still was to feed on human blood. I could sense no other nearby humans, though.

             
I lay very quietly instead of feeding and concentrated on the dull sky. To a human the night would have been pitch, but to me it was full of a riot of colour. I only need the barest of light to see by, and when it seems darkest to humans I am most at home. I come alive in the dark. It is when I hunt.

             
It was a small torture to lay still in that glorious night glow and listen to his beating heart. No matter how hard I tried to ignore it I could almost feel its beat through the earth, feel its tremors through my skin.

             
I closed my eyes.

             
I lay that way until the time before dawn. In the twilight hour it began to snow. Large flakes fell through the trees to land on my face. I pulled my cloak tighter around my shoulders and shivered as each flake touched me. They did not melt as quickly on my face as they did on Brother Jonas’ sleeping form. He was warmer than me. I envied him his warmth. His warm blood, pumping through his body.              

             
The hunger gnawed at my insides again. I turned my face away from him and rose. I wandered down to the lake’s frozen shores and stared out at the sight as snowflakes drifted and settled. The surface was soon white. The sky was pregnant with snow. It would be a cold walk.

             
Behind me I heard Brother Jonas’ heart quicken and knew he was awake.

             
I returned to him and squatted opposite him as he broke his fast.

             
He offered me a hunk of bread, as he had each day.

             
‘Hungry?’ he said.

             
‘Always,’ I said. ‘But I am fasting.’

             
This seemed to please him. I learned later that the monks thought hunger was somehow holy. That it brought a man closer to God and focused the mind.

             
It didn’t bring me closer to God. But I suppose it was God’s work. In a way I was saving lives.

             
If that’s not holy work then I don’t know what is.

             
The day turned out to be miserable. Brother Jonas was silent in his thoughts, and I kept my council. There were many things I wished to know. I did not ask, though. I walked on by his side, content with the silence. The snow built up until walking became hard. By midday we were walking through drifts that were two, sometimes three, feet high. My feet were numb, even through my boots. I wished for a quick heart then. I have become inured to most hardships over my long years, but I have always hated to be cold. That has never changed.

             
I was feeling sorry for myself as we walked during the day. My discomfort did not abate when we stopped for the evening and made our sorry little camp. For some reason we were doomed to suffer through the winter. I have wintered many years outside, and I was no stranger to snow and cold. It didn’t mean that I had got used to it. Each summer the memory of the cold seeping into my slow limbs would fade, and then each winter as the snows began to fall the memory would come back and I would wonder why I hadn’t thought to kill a farmer in some out of the way place and winter there. But the hunger drove me even in the winter, and the fear of too many people kept me from staying in a village for too long. By necessity and my strange blood I was an outcast. I needed to roam.

             
I wondered for a time, over the following days, what I was thinking, joining this monk on his journey to his monastery. I wanted to learn, but could I really pass for human for long enough, among others of his kind?

             
Would they sense the darkness in me? I didn’t know. People couldn’t tell what I was from a quick meeting on the road, but I had not spent more than two weeks in human company since the girl that shared my cell in Romania. She had known what I was though, through the depths of her mental wall that allowed her to remain aloof while I fed.

             
It was strange. All these years I had largely shunned society, living on its fringes, but I could see the way the wind was blowing. Even through years of war and famine, people were spreading wider. Sure, in those days I could still walk for weeks through the forests and mountains and see no people or signs of civilisation, but then there would be a village and it would have grown since the last time I saw it. People loved to build and live together. Perhaps they felt safer from the dangers of the world when there were more of them.

             
It seemed a foolish assumption to me. Most of the things that killed humans were the result of other humans living nearby. Get people together and illness spreads and war grows from their discontent. Better to live alone in the forest and hunt the beasts in the shade of the trees, or sit on the banks of the lake and fish in solitude. That would be a far safer pastime than living in a city or a town.

             
War would come. It was inevitable. The whole continent was shaped by war. Famine and disease must have been a pleasant change for the people of that century.

             
We moved on through the days and through the snow. I was thoroughly frozen by the time we came before Brother Jonas’ home. Still, we were both alive when we arrived at the Abbey. Brother Jonas would never know what an achievement that was.

*