"She has a human soul in her," he said in a whisper. And then he drew back as if he did not want to touch her, couldn't bear to touch her, and he backed away from her, shoving me away, forcing me back as he did.
I broke into weeping. The sun shifted, and the shadows began to thicken in the crypt. I turned finally. The patch of light above was now pale. It was a rich radiant gold, but it was pale.
My angels stood there, all gathered, watching me and waiting.
"I'm staying with her here," I said. "She'll wake soon. And I'll put it to her, that she pray for God's grace."
I knew it only as I said it. I understood it only as I made it plain.
"I'll stay with her. If she renounces all her sins for the love of God, then she can remain with me, and death will come, and we will not lift a hand to hasten it, and God will accept us both."
"You think you have the strength to do that?" Mastema asked. 'And you think it of her?"
"I owe her this," I said. "I am bound. I never lied to you, not to any of you. I never lied to myself. She slew my brother and sister. I saw her. No doubt she killed many of them, my own. But she saved me. She saved me twice. And to kill is simple, but to save is not!"
"Ah," said Mastema as though I'd struck him. "That's true."
"So I'll stay. I expect nothing from you now. I know I cannot get out of here. Perhaps even she cannot."
"Of course she can," said Mastema.
"Don't leave him," said Setheus. "Take him against his will."
"None of us can do that, and you know it," said Mastema.
"Only out of the crypt," pleaded Ramiel, "as if from a canyon into which he's fallen."
"But it is not such a thing, and I cannot."
"Then let us stay with him," said Ramiel.
"Yes, let us stay," said my two guardians, more or less at the same time and in similar muted expressions.
"Let her see us."
"How do we know that she can?" asked Mastema. "How do we know that she will? How many times does it happen that a human being can see us?"
For the first time I saw anger in him. He looked at me.
"God has played such a game with you, Vitto-rio!" he said. "Given you such enemies and such allies!"
"Yes, I know this, and I will beg Him with all my strength and the weight of all my suffering for her soul."
I didn't mean to close my eyes.
I know that I did not.
But the entire scene was altered utterly. The pile of heads lay as before, and some at random, shriveling, drying up, the acrid smoke still rising from them, and the light above had darkened, yet it was still golden, golden beyond the broken stair, and the jagged broken spears, golden with the last burnt dregs of the late afternoon.
And my angels had gone.
12
DELIVER ME NOT INTO TEMPTATION
FOR all my youth, my body could take no more. Yet how could I remain in this crypt, waiting for her to awake, I without attempting some form of exit?
I gave no thought to the dismissal by my angels. I deserved it, but I was convinced of the rectitude of the chance I meant to give her, that she throw herself on the mercy of God, and that we leave this crypt and, if necessary, find the priest who could absolve her human soul of all her sins. For if she could not make a perfect confession for the love of God alone, well, then, the absolution would surely save her.
I poked around the crypt, stepping among the drying-up corpses. What light there was gleamed on dried founts of blood that ran down the sides of the stone biers.
At last I found what I had hoped to find, a great ladder that could be lifted and thrown up to the ceiling above. Only, how could I wield such a thing?
I dragged it towards the center of the crypt, kicking out of my path the heads which were now damaged beyond reprieve, and I laid down the ladder, and stepped at midpoint, between two of the rungs, and tried from there to lift it.
Impossible. I simply did not possess the leverage. It weighed too much, slight as it was, because it was so long. Three or four strong men might have hoisted it sufficiently to make its topmost rungs catch on the broken spears, but I alone could not do it.
Alas, there was another possibility. A chain, or a rope, that could be tossed to the spears above. In the gloam, I made a search for such but found none.
No chains anywhere here? No coil of rope?
Had even the young larvae been able to leap the gap between the floor and the broken stairway?
At last I moved along the walls, searching for any bump or hook or excrescence which might indicate a storeroom or, God forbid, another crypt of these fiends.
But I could find nothing.
Finally, I staggered towards the center of the room again. I gathered all the heads, even the loathsome bald head of Godric, which was now black like leather with its yellowed slits of eyes, and I piled these heads where the light could not fail to continue its work on them.
Then, stumbling over the ladder, I fell on my knees at the foot of Ursula's bier.
I sank down. I would sleep this little while. No, not sleep, rest.
Not willing it, indeed, fearing it and regretting it, I felt my limbs go limp and I lay on the stone floor, and my eyes closed in a blessed restorative sleep.
How curious it was.
I had thought her scream would awaken me, that like a frightened child she would have risen up in the darkness on the bier, finding herself alone with so many dead ones.
I had thought the sight of the heads in the pile would have terrified her.
But no such had happened.
Twilight filled the space above, violet-colored, like the flowers of the meadow, and she stood over me. She had put the rosary around her neck, which is not common, and she wore it as a beautiful ornament with the gold crucifix turning and twisting in the light, a glinting speck of gold that matched the specks of light in her eyes.
She was smiling.
"My brave one, my hero, come, let's escape this place of death. You've done it, you have avenged them."
"Did you move your lips?"
"Need I do that with you?"
I felt a thrill pass through me as she lifted me to my feet. She stood looking up into my face, her hands firmly on my shoulders.
"Blessed Vittorio," she said. Then clasping me about the waist, she rose upwards and we passed the broken spears, without so much as touching their splintered tips, and found ourselves in the chapel in the dusk, the windows darkened and the shadows playing gracefully but mercifully around the distant altar.
"Oh, my darling, my darling/' I said. "Do you know what the angels did? Do you know what they said?"
"Come, let's free the prisoners as you wish," she told me.
I felt so refreshed, so full of vigor. It was as if I'd suffered no exhausting labor at all, as if war hadn't worn down my limbs and broken me, as though battle and struggle hadn't been my portion for days.
I rushed with her through the castle. We threw open the doors, one pair after another, on the miserable occupants of the coop. It was she who scurried on her light, feline feet through the pathways beneath the orange trees and the bird aviaries, overturning the kettles of soup, crying out to the poor and the lame and the hopeless that they were free, that no one imprisoned them now.
In a twinkling we stood on a high balcony. I saw far below their miserable procession in the half-light, the long winding line of them progressing down the mountain under the purple sky and the rising evening star. The weak helped the strong; the old carried the young.
"Where will they go, back to that evil town? Back to the monsters who gave them up in sacrifice?" I was in a fury suddenly. "Punished, that's what they must be."
"In time, Vittorio; there is time. Your poor sad victims are free now. This is our time, yours and mine, come."
Her skirts went out in a great dark circle as down we flew, down and down, down past the windows, and down past the walls, until my feet were allowed to touch the soft ground.
&n
bsp; "Oh, Lord God, it's the meadow, look, the meadow," I said. "I can see it as clearly under the rising moon as ever I saw it in my dreams."
A sudden softness filled me completely. I twined her in my arms, my fingers digging deep into her rippling hair. All the world seemed to sway about me, and yet I was anchored in dance with her, and the soft airy movement of the trees sang to us as we were bound together.
"Nothing can ever part us, Vittorio," she said. She tore loose. She ran ahead of me.
"No, wait, Ursula, wait!" I cried. I ran after her, but the grass and the irises were tall and thick. It wasn't so like the dream, but then again it was, because these things were alive and full of the verdant smell of the wild, and the sylvan woods were gently heaving their limbs on the scented wind.
I fell down exhausted and let the flowers climb up on either side of me. I let the red irises peer down upon my upturned face.
She knelt above me. "He will forgive me, Vittorio," she said. "He will forgive all in his infinite mercy."
"Oh, yes, my love, my blessed, beautiful love, my savior, He will."
The tiny crucifix dangled down against my neck.
"But you must do this for me, you who let me live below, you who spared me and fell asleep in my trust at the feet of my grave, you must do this..."
"What, blessed one?" I asked. "Tell me and I'll do it."
"Pray first for strength, and then into your human body, into your wholesome and baptized body, you must take all the demon blood out of me which you can, you must draw it from me, and thereby free my soul from its spell; it will be vomited forth out of you like the potions we gave you, which cannot hurt you. Will you do it for me? Will you take the poison out of me?"
I thought of the sickness, of the vomit that had streamed from my mouth in the monastery. I thought of it all, the terrible gibbering and madness.
"Do this for me," she said.
She lay against me and I felt her heart trapped in her chest, and I felt my own, and it seemed I had never known such dreamy languor. I could feel my fingers curl. For an instant it seemed they rested on hard rocks in this meadow, as if the backs of my hands had found harsh pebbles, but once again I felt the broken stems, the bed of purple and red and white irises.
She raised her head.
"In the Name of God," I said, "for your salvation, I will take whatever poison I must from you; I will draw off the blood as if from a cankerous wound, as if it were the corruption of a leper. Give it to me, give me the blood."
Her face was motionless above mine, so small, so dainty, so white.
"Be brave, my love, be brave, for I must make room for it first."
She nestled in against my neck, and into my flesh there came her teeth. "Be brave, only a little more to make room."
'A little more?" I whispered. 'A little more. Ah, Ursula, look up, look up at Heaven and Hell in the sky, for the stars are balls of fire suspended there by the angels."
But the language was stretched and meaningless and became an echo in my ears. A darkness shrouded me, and when I lifted my hand it seemed a golden net covered it and I could see far, far away, my fingers shrouded in the net.
The meadow was suddenly flooded with sunlight. I wanted to break away, to sit up, to tell her, Look, the sun has come, and you're not hurt, my precious girl. But on and on there came these waves of divine and luscious pleasure passing through me, pulled from me, pulled up from my loins, this coaxing and magnificent pleasure.
When her teeth slipped from my flesh, it was as if she had tightened the grip of her soul on my organs, on all parts of me that were man and babe once, and human now.
"Oh, my love, my darling, don't stop." The sun made a bewildering dance in the branches of the chestnut trees.
She opened her mouth, and from her came the stream of blood, the deep dark kiss of blood. "Take it from me, Vittorio."
'All your sins into me, my divine child," I said. "Oh, God help me. God have mercy on me. Mastema—."
But the word was broken. My mouth was filled with the blood, and it was no rank potion mixed of parts, but that searing thrilling sweetness that she had first given me in her most secretive and perplexing kisses. Only this time it came in an overwhelming gush.
Her arms were tucked beneath me. They lifted me. The blood seemed to know no veins within but to fill my limbs themselves, to fill my shoulders and my chest, to drown and invigorate my very heart. I stared up at the twinkling playing sun, I felt her blinding and soft hair across my eyes but peered through its golden strands. My breath came in gasps.
The blood flowed down into my legs and filled them to my very toes. My body surged with strength. My organ pumped against her, and once more I felt her subtle feline weight, her sinuous limbs hugging me, holding me, binding me, her arms crossed beneath me, her lips sealed to mine.
My eyes struggled, grew wide. The sunlight filled them, and then contracted. It contracted, and my sighs seemed to grow immense, and the beating of my heart to echo, as though we were not in a wild meadow, and the sounds that came from my empowered body, my transformed body, my body so full of her blood, echoed off stone walls!
The meadow was gone or never was. The twilight was a rectangle high above. I lay in the crypt.
I rose up, throwing her off, back away from me as she screamed in pain. I sprang to my feet and stared at my white hands outstretched before me.
A horrid hunger reared up in me, a fierce strength, a howl!
I stared up at the dark-purple light above and screamed.
"You've done it to me! You've made me one of you!"
She sobbed. I turned on her. She backed up, bent over, her hand over her mouth, crying and fleeing from me. I ran after her. Like a rat she ran, round and round the crypt, screaming.
"Vittorio, no, Vittorio, no, Vittorio, no, don't hurt me. Vittorio, I did this for us; Vittorio, we are free. Ah, God help me!"
And then upwards she flew, just missing my outstretched arms. She had fled to the chapel above.
"Witchlet, monster, larva, you tricked me with your illusions, with your visions, you made me one of you, you did it to me!" My roars echoed one upon the other as I scrambled about in the dark till I found my sword, and then dancing back to gain my momentum, I too made the leap and cleared the spears and found myself high up on the floor of the church, and she hovering with glittering tears before the altar.
She backed up into the bank of red flowers that barely showed in the starlight that passed through the darkened windows.
"No, Vittorio, don't kill me, don't do it. Don't," she sobbed and wailed. "I am a child, like you, please, don't."
I tore at her, and she scrambled to the end of the sanctuary. In a rage, I swung at the statue of Lucifer with my sword. It tottered and then crashed down, breaking on the marble floor of the cursed sanctuary.
She hovered at the far end. She dropped down on her knees and threw out her hands. She shook her head, her hair flying wildly from side to side.
"Don't kill me, don't kill me, don't kill me. You send me to Hell if you do; don't do it."
"Wretch!" I moaned. "Wretch!" My tears fell as freely as hers. "I thirst, you wretch. I thirst, and I can smell them, the slaves in the coop. I can smell them, their blood, damn you!"
I too had gone down on my knees. I lay down on the marble, and kicked aside the broken fragments of the hideous statue. With my sword I snagged the lace of the altar cloth and brought it down with all its many red flowers tumbling on me, so that I could roll over into them and crush my face into their softness.
A silence fell, a terrible silence full of my own wailing. I could feel my strength, feel it even in the timbre of my voice, and the arm that held the sword without exhaustion or restraint, and feel it in the painless calm with which I lay on what should have been cold and was not cold, or only goodly cold.
Oh, she had made me mighty.
A scent overcame me. I looked up. She stood just above me, tender, loving thing that she was, with her eyes so full of the star
light now, so glinting and quiet and unjudging. In her arms she held a young human, a feeble-minded one, who did not know his danger.
How pink and succulent he was, how like the roasted pig ready for my lips, how full of naturally cooking and bubbling mortal blood and ready for me. She set him down before me.
He was naked, thin buttocks on his heels, his trembling chest very pink and his hair black and long and soft around his guileless face. He appeared to be dreaming or searching the darkness, perhaps for angels?
"Drink, my darling, drink from him," she said, "and then you'll have the strength to take us both to the Good Father for Confession."