Necroscope 9: The Lost Years (40 page)

Men savaged by such an animal would usually die, to rise up again as vampire thralls - but without a master! Then they in turn must flee from their families and friends to wander as outcasts until their former brothers tracked them down, or the furnace sun found them wanting. Or they could cross the mountains into the dubious safety of Starside.

But they were different again from the victims of human vampires; not only did they fear the sunlight but revelled in the moonlight! For there was something of the grey brothers in them, whose mistress is the full and tumbling moon.

Also, they were generally insane - lunatics -or at the very least, they lacked total command of their senses. As such and despite that they were dangerous, they fell easy prey to men, the sun, the human vampires of Starside. Thus, in the language and psychology of the world beyond the Starside Gate, it was such pitiful creatures as these who would have been the true lycanthropes: madmen who
thought
that they were wolves!

Except… there was another sort.

Paradoxically - and for all that it sickened such lifeforms as suffered its infection - vampirism was the source of an incredible longevity. For the sickness was spiritual and of the soul, while life was physical and of the blood. Which meant that rarely, mercifully rarely, a wolf infected with a vampire spore would live long beyond the years of a true wolf, and its leech … would mature! Then the real danger, when a wolf such as this should savage a man!

For the vampire is tenacious, and the bite of
this
wolf would carry a deal more than venomous spittle! Indeed it might even carry the egg of its leech, by means of which a true vampire extends something of itself down all the ages.

And whether or no the victim died, he would rise up again undead and Wamphyri! Such men were. They
were
men -but the vampire egg of a wolf was in them, with whatever it had contracted or inherited of its former host’s makeup.

And unlike the poor
lycanthropes
of a different civilization and world (whose blood might be infected however slightly with some faint trace

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descended from Starside?) the werewolves of that paralel world did indeed have the power of transformation: metamorphosis into their ancestral form. Al it took was the moon flying ful over the boulder plains, to transform man into beast-man, to turn certain Lords of the Wamphyri into men with the faces, forms, and ferocious
appetites
of wild

dogs!

Homo sapiens,
Canis
sapiens, loup-garou … werewolf.

Radu Lykan - banished through the Hel-lands Gate by Lord Shaitan, as we have seen - was one such. But before he was a dog-Lord, Radu was a man. And this is his story:

Radu had been a loner, a mountain man … until he and his companion wolf had ventured east of the barrier mountains into the swampy badlands. He had been a man who rarely bothered with his own kind, favouring the company of a dog of the wild whose broken leg he had healed when he discovered the animal half-buried in sliding scree; since when they had been inseparable.

But where other Szgany loners were usualy dul, slothful felows -disinclined to the companionship of the camp, or to working alongside their gipsy brothers on Sunside; or defective of mind or spirit, which might tend to make them brutish, turning them into thieves, vagabonds, and finaly outcasts from the camps of the Szgany by virtue of the fact that none would have truck with them - Radu was very different.

He had been born into the band of Giorga Zirescu, a buly of a tribal chieftain whose twin sons were no beter than their father, made worse by virtue of Giorga’s influence and protection. Ion and Lexandru Zirescu had grown up with Radu, or rather
he
had grown up suffering their constant brutalities - but no more or less than the rest of the tribe suffered under Giorga and his sons. For while the Szgany Zirescu were strong in numbers, they were weak in resolve and easily cowed by their chief. And despite that Giorga was loathed, he and his sons were huge men, as hard-headed as they were hard-fisted.

Radu’s mother had died giving life to his sister, Magda; that had been when he was seven years old, folowing which his own childhood had been lost to caring for the smal girl-child, while his father Freji hunted, gathered, or beat the bounds on the perimeter of Giorga’s territory, in the lee of the barrier mountains where they commenced their gradual slump towards the western swamps and badlands. And in Freji’s frequent absence, Radu fel prey to the Zirescu brothers.

The twins were two years Radu’s senior, and their various torments ranged from trifling insults to major beatings. They would even have hurt little Magda, if Radu had not been there to redirect and absorb their spite, so protecting her. But he always was - which served to earn him yet more insults, when Ion and Lexandru were wont to catcal and name him ‘Radu the wetnurse,’ and so forth.

Radu was tall; indeed, and for all that his father was a slight man, Radu’s height was extraordinary. Aged nine he was tall as a fifteen-year-old, yet lithe and willowy as a lath - or as ‘a lass,’ as Ion and Lexandru would have it! Perhaps it was his nature to be thin; more likely it was the lack of good food (and the fact that hard work was plentiful) that kept him that way. But he was not without physical strength, and likewise his character was strong, however repressed. His face was usually expressionless, with dark, deep-sunken and humourless eyes, long cheekbones and jaw, and strong straight teeth in a thin mouth closed as if clamped shut. For he had learned even as a child that it was best to say very little, especially in the company or presence of the Zirescu brothers.

As a child, Radu’s hair had been black - black as night, black as jet! -but even in his early teens it had started to turn grey, and ashen streaks were prominent at his veined, sensitive temples. His nose was long but not severe … until Ion Zirescu broke it in a one-sided scuffle, and it healed squat at the base and hooked in the middle, lending Radu a hawkish mien tempered by self-imposed strictures of iron will, with which he held himself in rein. It was necessary that he exercise a firm control over himself, if only to appease his ailing father, who was a pacifist at best, a coward at worst, and no match for the Zirescus at any time. Which might explain why Radu usually lost his battles: (why, in his circumstances it might even be considered prudent to lose!) For while the Zirescu twins were trouble enough in themselves, their cronies among the tribe’s young men were numerous and the times several when these had held Radu down while the brothers kicked and pummeled him. So the young Radu had learned to control himself, while events shaped which would be quite uncontrollable.

Into Radu’s mid-teens, the bullying of the Zirescus went on unabated; the youth suffered many a bloodying, many a sore bone and broken face, but never once complained to his father, whose health had for long and long been failing. But if Freji Lykan was feeling the weight of his years and the weariness of many deprivations under his swine of a chief, then Giorga was likewise declining … except in his case it was the good plum brandy and surfeit of meat that were taking their tol. And of course his brutish sons looked on like the vultures they were, wondering where and when he would fal down for the last time, and who would bully the Szgany Zirescu when Giorga was no more. Perhaps both of them, if only out of mutual fear and suspicion. Oh, for they knew well enough how much they were hated among a majority of their people.

Al of which brings us to a time approximate with the era of Shaitan, when he came out of the west on Starside and built his aerie on the boulder plains, and the swamps in the badlands seethed with vampire spores. But as yet the incidence of their evil manifestations on Sunside

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were few and far between. As in al mankind, however, other evils were ever present. And in the Szgany Zirescu, the evil was in the name of their most prominent family: the Zirescus themselves.

The morning came when Freji could no longer work. His eyesight was failing, and in any case he had never been much of a hunter. Now his back gave him such pain that he could scarcely walk, and it was his turn to go into the forest to gather nuts and fruit.

In the Szgany Zirescu, a man worked till he dropped, then lay there while the tribe moved on, or until he found the strength to get up again. There were few drones among the Zirescus (with the exception of Giorga, of course, his sons and a handful of their cronies), and precious few old ones. And despite that Freji was half-crippled, his chief sent him stumbling off into the forest with a basket - from which task he failed to return. The Sunside days were worth four of those in a parallel world that lay all unknown beyond the Starside Gate, yet night fell and stil Freji was not back.

Radu had had his own duties that day; likewise his sister Magda, now grown to a beautiful girl, even as beautiful as her mother had been.

And when finaly Radu left the camp and went off into the woods to search for his father, he went without knowing or suspecting that it would be Magda - or her beauty, or her loss - that would finaly forge the iron in his blood into cold, hard steel.

Magda - and the Zirescu twins, of course …

But when he’d found his father’s body, and seen the truth of his dying - that it had been no accident, and certainly not the natural end of Freji’s life - then the rest of it had gone blazing across Radu’s mind like some mad meteorite through Sunside’s night skies!

For more than a year now the Zirescu twins had been paying court (of sorts) to Magda, not yet fifteen …

Giorga had said that eventually she must choose one or the other … Magda had scorned both of them; she knew that already they were a
scourge among the Szgany Zirescus girls and young, unmarried women -
and
among some of the married ones,
too …

Her father, Freji, who had a parenfs say in such matters, had been stalling the twins and their father, telling them that Magda was too
young. But it was not uncommon among Szgany girls to take husbands at the age of thirteen, and Freji had known he couldn’t delay matters
indefinitely. Giorga had fumed, cursed, threatened! He wanted grandsons from his sons
(real
grandsons, and not bastards), to
carry his name on. Freji Lykan had fumbled and fawned, but still he’d stood his ground …

The twins had poured scorn on Magda, and declared that she would end up an old maid, or a tart for any man. And deep down inside,
Radu had bubbled and boiled …

And now this:

Freji stiff and dead - murdered and left to the flies in an area of the

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forest rarely visited. His body had been tumbled into dense undergrowth; Radu discovered it when a vixen started away from the corpse. Then, after lighting a smal fire, he had seen the cause of his father’s death: the long blade of an ironwood knife broken off and still buried … in Freji’s thin back! A cowardly atack -typical of the backstabbing Zirescu twins. But Freji’s wicker basket was missing, and never a sign of the fruit and nuts which he had surely gathered that morning

…

Back at the Szgany Zirescu encampment, Radu went direct to the keeper of the foraging, caled Provisioner Borisciu, and asked him if anyone had brought in food from the forest that day. But despite that Radu held himself under tight rein, perhaps Borisciu saw something in his face. Answering Radu’s question carefuly, he told him that it had been an extremely good day; but surely he must already know that, since he had been one of the hunters, hadn’t he?

‘From the forest,’ Radu repeated himself, clutching the other’s wrist, however coldly. ‘I’m talking about greenstuffs, not meat, Provisioner.’ And now Borisciu was sure that there was something hard and cold and different in Radu’s eyes.

‘Fruits, aye,’ he answered. ‘But isn’t the forest always good to us?’ And quickly, as if to change the subject: ‘But the catch in fishes was exceptional! A good day at the river, Radu! Keep it to yourself, and I’ll perhaps find you a fat trout for your sister to cook for you and your father’s supper …’ With which he’d paused, remembering that someone had told him Freji Lykan was late coming in.

‘Fruits,’ Radu’s grip tightened more yet, while his voice became a growl. Tel me about the fruit, and nuts. Did anyone bring in plums, apples, almonds? A wicker basket of fruit, out of the woods? Tel me quickly!’

‘Radu, I—’

‘—Who was out gathering today? Do you know what I’m saying? Or were you in on this too, Provisioner Borisciu?’

‘What?’ Borisciu’s mouth fel open. ‘In on something, me? Why, the Govasci family were gathering today, likewise Andreas Tuvi, and …’ But here he paused again.

‘… And?’

‘And your father, I remember now.’ But the Provisioner’s eyes had suddenly gone very wide; he was frightened for his own skin. Something that had struck him strange earlier in the day, when the Zirescu twins had come in very quietly and secretively with a great basket of fruit, struck him even stranger now. Or perhaps not. And: ‘What is it that you are thinking, Radu?’ He trembled in the other’s grip. ‘What is it with your father?’

‘Dead!’ Radu hissed in answer, releasing him with a shove, so that

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Provisioner Borisciu staggered back behind his counter, against the side of his caravan. ‘Dead! Murdered in the forest, and his basket taken.’

‘By some enemy of the Szgany Zirescu, no doubt!’ Borisciu gasped. ‘Would-be settlers, claim-jumpers, land-thieves - on Giorga’s territory!’ But Radu cocked his head on one side and said, ‘Enemies of the Szgany Zirescu? Aye, it’s true - the twins themselves!’ At which Borisciu knew he’d been right, even though he’d scarcely dared admit it even to himself. And Radu saw it in the Provisioner’s eyes.