I smiled. The desire for the feeble-minded boy before me was almost more than I could endure. But it was a whole new book now, was it not, what I might endure, and I took my time, rising up on my elbow as I looked at her.
"To the Good Father? You think that's where we'll go? Right away, just like that, the two of us?"
She began to cry again. "Not right away, no, not right away," she cried. She shook her head. Beaten.
I took him. I broke his neck when I drained him dry. He made not a sound. There was no time for fear or pain or crying.
Do we ever forget the first kill? Do we ever?
Through the coop I went all that night, devouring, feasting, gorging on their throats, taking what I wanted from each, sending each to God or to Hell, how could I ever know, bound now to this earth with her, and she feasting with me in her dainty way, ever watching for my howls and wails, and ever catching hold of me to kiss me and ply me with her sobs when I shook with rage.
"Come out of here," I said.
It was just before sunrise. I told her I would spend no day beneath these pointed towers, in this house of horrors, in this place of evil and filthy birth.
"I know of a cave/' she said. "Far down the mountains, past the farmlands/'
"Yes, somewhere on the edge of a true meadow?"
"There are meadows in this fair land without count, my love," she said. 'And under the moon their flowers shine as prettily for our magical eyes as ever they do for humans by the light of God's sun. Remember His moon is ours.
'And tomorrow night . . . before you think of the priest . . . you must take your time to think of the priest—."
"Don't make me laugh again. Show me how to fly. Wrap your arm around my waist and show me how to drop from the high walls to safety in a descent that would shatter a man's limbs. Don't talk of priests anymore. Don't mock me!"
". . . before you think of the priest, of Confession," she went on, undeterred in her dainty sweet small voice, her eyes brimming with tears of love, "we'll go back to the town of Santa Maddalana while it's fast asleep, and we'll burn it all down around them."
13
CHILD BRIDE
WE didn't put the torch to Santa Maddalana. It was too much of a pleasure I to hunt the town.
By the third night, I had stopped weeping at sunrise, when we retired together, locked in each other's arms inside our concealed and unreachable cave.
And by the third night, the townspeople knew what had befallen them—how their clever bargain with the Devil had rebounded upon them— and they were in a panic, and it was a great game to outsmart them, to hide in the multitude of shadows that made up their twisted streets, and to tear open their most extravagant and clever locks.
In the early hours, when no one dared to stir, and the good Franciscan priest knelt awake in his cell, saying his rosary, and begging God for understanding of what was happening—this priest, you remember, who had befriended me at the inn, who had dined with me and warned me, not in anger like his Dominican brother, but in kindness—while this priest prayed, I crept into the Franciscan church and I too prayed.
But each night I told myself what a man says to himself under his breath when he couches with his adulterous whore: "One more night, God, and then I'll go to Confession. One more night of bliss, Lord, and then I'll go home to my wife."
The townspeople had no chance against us.
What skills I did not acquire naturally and through experimentation, my beloved Ursula taught to me with patience and grace. I could scan a mind, find a sin and eat it with a flick of my tongue as I sucked the blood from a lazy, lying merchant who had put out his own tender children once for the mysterious Lord Florian, who had kept the peace.
One night we found that the townsmen had been by day to the abandoned castle. There was evidence of hasty entry, with little stolen or disturbed. How it must have frightened them, the horrid saints still flanking the pedestal of the Fallen Lucifer in the church. They had not taken the golden candlesticks or the old tabernacle in which I discovered, with my groping hand, a shriveled human heart.
On our last visit to the Court of the Ruby Grail, I took the burned leathery heads of the vampires from the deep cellar and I hurled them like so many stones through the stained-glass windows. The last of the brilliant art of the castle was gone.
Together, Ursula and I roamed the bedchambers of the castle, which I had never glimpsed or even imagined, and she showed me those rooms in which the members of the Court had gathered for dice or chess or to listen to small ensembles of music. Here and there we saw evidence of something stolen—a coverlet ripped from a bed and a pillow fallen to the floor.
But obviously the townspeople were more afraid than greedy. They took little from the castle.
And as we continued to prey upon them, artfully defeating them, they began to desert Santa Maddalana. Shops lay open when we came into the empty streets at midnight; windows were unbolted, cradles empty. The Dominican church had been deconsecrated and abandoned, its altar stone removed. The cowardly priests, whom I had not granted the mercy of a quick death, had abandoned their flock.
The game became ever more invigorating to me. For now, those who remained were quarrelsome and avaricious and refusing to give up without a fight. It was simple to sort the innocent, who believed in the faith of the vigil light or the saints to protect them, from those who had played with the Devil and now kept an uneasy watch in the dark with sword in hand.
I liked to talk to them, spar with them verbally, as I killed them. "Did you think your game would go on forever? Did you think the thing you fed would never feed on you?"
As for my Ursula, she had no stomach for such sport. She could not endure the spectacle of suffering. The old Communion of Blood in the castle had for her been tolerable only because of the music, the incense and the supreme authority of Florian and Godric, who had led her in it with every step.
Night after night, as the town was slowly emptied, as the farms were deserted, as Santa Maddalana, my school town, became ever more ruined, Ursula took to playing with orphaned children. She sat sometimes on the church steps cradling a human infant and cooing to 'it, and telling it stories in French.
She sang old songs in Latin from the courts of her time, which had been two hundred years ago, she told me, and she talked of battles in France and in Germany whose names meant nothing to me.
"Don't play with the children," I said. "They'll remember it. They'll remember us."
A fortnight went by before the community was irreparably destroyed. Only the orphans remained and a few of the very old, and the Franciscan father, and his father, the elfin little man who sat in his lighted room at night, playing a game of cards with himself, as if he did not even now guess what was going on.
On the fifteenth night, it must have been, when we arrived in the town, we knew at once that only two persons were left. We could hear the little old man singing to himself in the empty Inn with the doors open. He was very drunk, and his wet pink head gleamed in the light of the candle. He slapped the cards down on the table in a circle, playing a game of solitaire called "clock."
The Franciscan priest sat beside him. He looked up at us, fearlessly and calmly, as we came into the Inn.
I was overcome with hunger, ravening hunger, for the blood in them both.
"I never told you my name, did I?" he asked me.
"No, you never did, Father," I said.
"Joshua," he said. "That's my name, Fra Joshua. All the rest of the community has gone back to Assisi, and they took with them the last of the children. It*s a long journey south."
"I know, Father," I said. "I've been to Assisi, I've prayed at the shrine of St. Francis. Tell me, Father, when you look at me, do you see angels around me?"
"Why would I see angels?" he asked quietly. He looked from me to Ursula. "I see beauty, I see youth fixed in polished ivory. But I don't see angels. I never have."
"I saw them once," I said. "May I sit down?"
"Do as
you like," he said to me. He watched us, drawing himself up in his hard simple wooden chair, as I seated myself opposite him, much as I had been on that day in the village, only now we were not in the fragrant arbor under the sun but inside, in the Inn itself, where the candlelight gave more volume and more warmth.
Ursula looked at me in confusion. She didn't know what was in my mind. I had never witnessed her speaking to any human being except for me myself and for the children with whom she'd played—in other words, only with those for whom her heart had quickened and whom she did not mean to destroy.
What she thought of the little man and his son, the Franciscan priest, I couldn't guess.
The old man was winning the card game. "There, you see, I told you. Our luck!" he said. He gathered up his greasy loose cards to shuffle them and to play again.
The priest looked at him with glazed eyes, as though he could not gather his own wits even to fool or reassure his old father, and then he looked at me.
"I saw these angels in Florence," I said, "and I disappointed them, broke my vow to them, lost my soul."
He turned from his father to me sharply.
"Why do you prolong this?" he asked.
"I will not hurt you. Neither will my companion," I said. I sighed. It would have been that moment in a conversation when I would have reached for the cup or the tankard and taken a drink. My hunger hurt me. I wondered if the thirst hurt Ursula. I stared at the priest's wine, which was nothing to me now, nothing, and I looked at his face, sweating in the light of the candle, and I went on: "I want you to know that I saw them, that I talked to them, these angels. They tried to help me to destroy those monsters who held sway over this town, and over the souls of those here. I want you to know, Father."
"Why, son, why tell me?"
"Because they were beautiful, and they were as real as we are, and you have seen us. You have seen hellish things; you have seen sloth and treachery, cowardice and deceit. You see devils now, vampires. Well, I want you to know that with my own eyes I saw angels, true angels, magnificent angels, and that they were more glorious than I can ever tell you in words/'
He regarded me thoughtfully for a long time, and then he looked at Ursula, who sat troubled and looking up at me, rather afraid that I would unduly suffer, and then he said: "Why did you fail them? Why did they come with you in the first place, and if you had the aid of angels, why did you fail?"
I shrugged my shoulders. I smiled. "For love."
He didn't answer.
Ursula leaned her head against my arm. I felt her free hair brushing my back as she let me feel her weight.
"For love!" the priest repeated.
"Yes, and for honor as well."
"Honor."
"No one will ever understand it. God will not accept it, but it's true, and now, what is there, Father, that divides us, you and I, and the woman who sits with me? What is between us—the two parties—the honest priest and the two demons?"
The little man chuckled suddenly. He had slapped down a marvelous run of cards. "Look at that!" he said. He looked up at me with his clever little eyes. "Oh, your question, forgive me. I know the answer."
"You do?" asked the priest, turning to the little old man. "You know the answer?"
"Of course, I do," said his father. He dealt out another card. "What separates them now from a good Confession is weakness and the fear of Hell if they must give up their lives."
The priest stared at his father in amazement.
So did I.
Ursula said nothing. Then she kissed me on the cheek. "Let's leave them now," she whispered. "There is no more Santa Maddalana. Let's go."
I looked up, around the darkened room of the Inn. I looked at the old barrels. I looked in haunted perplexity and appalling sorrow at all things that humans used and touched. I looked at the heavy hands of the priest, folded on the table before me. I looked at the hair on his hands, and then up at his thick lips and his large watering and sorrowful eyes.
"Will you accept this from me?" I whispered. "This secret, of angels? That I saw them! I! And you, you see what I am, and you know therefore that I know whereof I speak. I saw their wings, I saw their halos, I saw their white faces, and I saw the sword of Mastema the powerful, and it was they who helped me sack the castle and lay waste to all the demons save for this one, this child bride, who is mine."
"Child bride," she whispered. It filled her with delight. She looked at me, musingly, and hummed a soft, old-fashioned air, one of those threads of songs from her times.
She spoke to me in an urgent persuasive whisper, squeezing my arm as she did: "Come, Vittorio, leave these men in peace, and come with me, and I'll tell you how indeed I was a child bride." She looked at the priest with renewed animation. "I was, you know. They came to my father's castle and purchased me as such, they said that I must be a virgin, and the midwives came and brought their basin of warm water, and they examined me and they said I was a virgin, and only then did Florian take me. I was his bride."
The priest stared fixedly at her, as if he could not move if he wanted to move, and the old man merely glanced up again and again, cheerfully, nodding as he listened to her, and went on playing with his cards.
"Can you imagine my horror?" she asked them. She looked at me, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. It was in its ripples again from the plaits in which she'd had it bound earlier. "Can you imagine when I climbed onto the couch and I saw who was my bridegroom, this white thing, this dead thing, such as we look to you?"
The priest made no answer. His eyes filled slowly with tears. Tears!
It seemed a lovely human spectacle, bloodless, crystalline, and such an adornment for his old soft face, with its jowls and fleshy mouth.
'And then to be taken to a ruined chapel," she said, "a ruined place, full of spiders and vermin, and there before a desecrated altar, to be stripped and laid down and taken by him and made his bride."
She let go of my arm, her arms forming a loose embracing gesture. "Oh, I had a veil, a great long beautiful veil, and a dress of such fine flowered silk, and all this he tore from me, and took me first with his lifeless, seedless stone-hard organ and then with his fang teeth, like these very teeth which I have now. Oh, such a wedding, and my father had given me over for this."
The tears coursed down the priest's cheeks.
I stared at her, transfixed with sorrow and rage, rage against a demon I had already slaughtered, a rage that I hoped could reach down through the smoldering coals of Hell and find him with fingers like hot tongs.
I said nothing.
She raised her eyebrow; she cocked her head.
"He tired of me/' she said. "But he never stopped loving me. He was new to the Court of the Ruby Grail, a young Lord and seeking at every turn to increase his might and his romance! And later, when I asked for Vittorio's life, he couldn't refuse me on account of our vows exchanged on that stone altar so long ago. After he let Vittorio leave us, after he had him cast down in Florence, certain of Vittorio's madness and ruin, Florian sang songs to me, songs for a bride. He sang the old poems as though our love could be revived."
I covered my brow with my right hand. I couldn't bear to weep the blood tears that flow from us. I couldn't bear to see before me, as if painted by Fra Filippo, the very romance she described.
It was the priest who spoke.
"You are children," he said. His lip trembled. "Mere children."
"Yes," she said in her exquisite voice, with certainty and a small accepting smile. She clasped my left hand in hers and rubbed it hard and tenderly. "Children forever. But he was only a young man, Florian, just a young man himself."
"I saw him once," said the priest, his voice thick with his crying but soft. "Only once."
'And you knew?" I asked.
"I knew I was powerless and my faith was desperate, and that around me were bonds that I could not loose or break."
"Let's go now, Vittorio, don't make him cry anymore," said Ursula. "Come on, Vittorio. Le
t's leave here. We need no blood tonight and cannot think of harming them, cannot even ..."
"No, beloved, never," I said to her. "But take my gift, Father, please, the only clean thing which I can give, my testimony that I saw the angels, and that they upheld me when I was weak."
"And won't you take absolution from me, Vittorio!" he said. His voice rose, and his chest seemed to increase in size. "Vittorio and Ursula, take my absolution."
"No, Father," I said. "We cannot take it. We don't want it."
"But why?"
"Because, Father," said Ursula kindly, "we plan to sin again as soon as we possibly can."
14