Vigil (24 page)

Chapter Fifty-Four

Romani Camp

I pulled her to one side, smiling at the gathered people. I almost dragged her into the woods, out of the sun and into the shade where I was more comfortable.

              ‘What?’ she asked, seemingly surprised at my sudden aggressiveness.

             
‘What do you mean, we’re engaged? You don’t even know my name!’

             
‘What do you mean?’

             
‘We are to be married?’

             
‘Of course. I don’t understand. We danced.’

             
I didn’t want to go back, but she just did not get it. How could I be married to a woman, a human woman? How could I explain to her that as much as I wanted to, I could not.

             
‘I cannot marry you.’

             
Her face set stubbornly. I came to love that look, as I came to love all the other expressions that took on such a beautiful hue in the light of her face.

             
‘You accepted my proposal. We are to be married. You cannot deny me now. To do so would dishonour me. We danced all night. We are betrothed.’

             
I sighed and shook my head. I paced around her. She tapped her foot against the dirt and crossed her arms.

             
‘I am not like you. I am…I have…my kind…I mean my people…’

             
She was frowning now. There was anger on her face. I did not want to be the focus of her anger. I wanted her to smile again. God, how I wanted to see her smile.

             
‘I am different. I have what you would call a disease.’

             
‘You don’t look ill,’ she said. ‘You don’t dance like a sick man. You don’t smell sick.’

             
‘It’s a strange disease. It does not make me sick.’

             
‘Then it’s not a disease. Stop trying to make excuses. We are going to be married and that is that.’

             
‘You don’t understand. I’m not making excuses. This disease, it is catching. You can catch it from my blood. From a kiss from me. It would make you terribly sick. It affects the mind, and the body. It changes you so that you become something else. You would not be yourself. I would not risk your life because I love you.’

             
She smiled triumphantly. ‘There. Then we will be married.’

             
I growled in frustration. Was she even listening to me?

             
‘We can never be as man and wife!’

             
‘There is more to being married than kissing. Stop being such a baby. Unless this disease,’ she invested the word with venom at what she thought right until the end was just a lie, ‘means you are going to die tomorrow you will not dishonour me. This is settled. We will have the ceremony tomorrow.’

             
I shouted in frustration then. Perhaps those of you that have had stubborn wives will understand how easily such a woman can unman you with just a few words.

             
We would never lie together as man or wife, but I believe I know why men and women get married and want to spend their lives together. It is because the world is a lonely place. It is a wide world, full of empty places and cold realities. A wife or a husband can be like a fire on a cold night.

             
Like a fire, sometimes we long to get so close to it that it can burn out the chill. It is fascinating, it has a rhythm and a song. We are all drawn to the fire, in the end.

             
We were married the following morning.

*

Chapter Fifty-Five

Romania

A marriage is made of moments. Seen from the outside it is a construction of successes and failures. To an observer it can be quantified in years, children, milestones reached.

             
On the inside a marriage can last for forty years and be a barren wasteland devoid of life and utterly featureless. Or it can be filled by the most beautiful vistas, surrounded by rugged coastline and crashing breakers, storm-filled skies broken by shafts of sunlight like arrows loosed from the heavens. Our marriage was like that. It was a storm, full of sullen beauty and thunderous passions. We fought. We shouted.

             
We also made love. We did not make love with our bodies, but with our apologies, with a glance or a chaste touch.

             
Our marriage was short, blissful, painful, enraging, confusing, calming…all these things and more. It was never barren. It could not be measured in children, or years passed, but in moments shared. It was full of love, more than the rest of my life despite the years I have existed on this earth. No passion has ever come close, not even blood. When I think of her now my heart soars and sobs in equal measure.

             
All men should know such love. Men need a woman to own their soul. A man cannot be trusted to be the shepherd of his own heart.

             
I was a creature before I met her. I was in love with destruction. I had never built anything. Never created anything but bastard children, abominations like me that would rape the world. Every time we fought, we made up, and although we could not create pure children, we made something. We made a husband and wife, more powerful than the sum of our parts.

             
Does all this turn your stomach? Make you queasy because it seems somehow sickly sweet or just plain sick, that a harvester of souls could fall so swiftly and so completely for a woman?

             
Women are sometimes drawn to bad men. Sometimes they can fix them, make them better men more caring and careful as they pass through the world.

             
She could not fix what was wrong with me. I was not bad. I was not misguided or uncaring. I am a reaper.

             
But no longer without thought. If nothing else, she taught me to show respect for my flock. It was a lesson Radu had taught me long ago. Sometimes the simplest lessons are the hardest.

             
We made love in words and with our eyes and by the lightest of touches. We could not kiss. I could not lay with her as a man. It did not matter.

             
But as always, I was a fool. I entertained no hope that we could live out our lives as man and woman, but I wanted to experience the thing that drew men and women together through the ages. I wanted to share and become something more than just myself. I think I succeeded.

             
But in a way, I failed because of what I am.

             
A vampire cannot love. Not because a vampire is incapable of love, but because of man’s fear of the unknown. Love, by its nature, needs sunlight to flourish, and I am a creature of the dark.

*

Chapter Fifty-Six

Romania

We travelled with the others of her clan for nearly six months. There would be no repeat of my sojourn with the white monks, however. These people were wise to my kind in a way that the monks had not been.

             
For the first six months, through spring and summer and into the first auburn flush of autumn, we travelled long and wide across the vast expanses of the Romanian heartlands. We shunned large conurbations, stuck to the back roads, rolling along dirt tracks and the occasional paved road, the iron shod wheels of our homes grating on the hard roads. We lived among our own people, trading for what little could no be grubbed from the land. I learned to make traps for rabbits and hares, learned to fish the streams and rivers that ran cold from the mountains and crisscrossed the flat lands.

             
My life among the people was one of contentment. I wanted for nothing much…save blood. I hungered all the time, but I was healed and I did not need to feed. It was just the addiction. I could survive very well on raw meat and entrails. Unfortunately the dogs that accompanied our little caravan most often got the entrails, but I made sure I took the meat and fish from the fire before the lingering stink of wood smoke could get into the meat.

             
Was that what gave me away? I do not think it was so simple. But the difference between the people and myself was stark and obvious for anyone with eyes to see. Hell, even a blind man could have told the difference. My wife knew I was different. The people, I think, gave me longer because she was one of them and that had weight. We were married, and even though I was not one of them and never could be, they took me as their own because we had taken our vows.

             
But she could not protect me forever.

             
They did not burn me, though. They were much more civilised than the men of God who had tied me down and watched me burn.

             
One day, having been out in the dusk picking armfuls of deadfall for the evening fire, I returned to find the camp assembled. My shoulders bunched, my legs tensed. I was ready to fight, or flee, as the situation demanded. They were waiting for me, although they were not armed.

             
She sat on a fallen log that some of the men had dragged from the side of the road. Our camp was simple and modest. My wife and I had set up maybe fifty meters back from the road. I saw that we had a clear run to the road but the horses were not tethered. I would not be able to ride clear of trouble. She was watching me as I approached. I caught her eye and she shook her head.

             
I read the meaning in her simple glance. Do not fight.

             
She knew my strength. She also knew that this was not a fight in the making. I need not fear what was to come.

             
But she looked so sad.

             
Of course, there had been talk among the people. Talk about me and my wife. Mainly me.

             
Silas, who often spoke for the others when we met other clans of travellers, the only one who could be considered a leader, took me by the shoulder and led me to a spot beside my wife.

             
‘Michas,’ he said, for that was the name I had taken, ‘you cannot stay with us.’

             
‘But why?’ I said, reduced to childishness by my longing. I could have torn his throat out, but my wife would have had stern words with me and I did not want to upset her.

             
‘Because you are not like us. Do not seek to deny it. We are not fools. We know what you are, although you are different from your kind.’

             
‘I am not what you think I am.’

             
‘Do not seek to lie to us. We have shown you respect, and trusted you in our midst, but we can risk having you with us no longer. Out of respect for your wife we ask you to leave, and we beg you not to…hurt us.’

             
‘Have I ever given you reason to believe that I would?’

             
‘A bear sleeps most of the winter. It fasts. But in the spring it must feed again. It is its nature.’

             
‘I am not a bear, Silas.’

             
‘This I know. But our natures cannot be changed.’

             
I was silent for a time. I stared at the ground and tried to think. I could not deny his words. My hunger was constant. Could I trust myself? Could I ask these people to trust me?

             
He said they knew my nature, but they did not. I was a reaper. I could take their souls. I understood then. They could not bear me to live among them any longer. Who could live with the devil in their midst? It would be all too much like living with a tame bear. At any time it could turn, because no matter how long a beast lived among men, it could still return to its nature. If its nature was to rend and tear and feast, then nothing could stop it.

             
You could not make a beast a man.

             
Perhaps that was my folly. No, that is not true. It has always been my folly, and my undoing. Trying to be a man when I was not.

             
Eventually, even though I did not wish to, I nodded my assent.

             
‘I will leave. My wife?’

             
‘She can never live among our kind. You must understand. People would no longer accept her. We have tried. Do not think badly of us. She is your responsibility. She cannot return to us.’

             
I looked over to where she was sitting. I saw then, what I had failed to see all the months that we had travelled. The people kept their distance from her, as they always had with me.

             
I had not noticed because she had been my sun, and I had been spinning in her gravity.

             
‘She will take it hard. You are her people.’

             
‘No longer,’ said Silas. 'She is your people and you are hers. I think you both are something different. I do not think badly of you. I have been proud to know you. But I cannot take you into my heart, because you are not people, are you?’

             
What use was there in lying to him?

             
‘No, I am not.’ I said. ‘We will leave tonight. There is no sense in saying more. But I thank you for treating me with civility.’

             
‘You have shown restraint,’ he said, ‘and so deserved our hospitality. But you understand…’

             
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.

             
I rose and went to my wife. I took her hand and pulled her to her feet.

             
‘Come, wife.’

             
It was all I needed to say. She understood as well as I did, although I do not think she thought me a vampire, then. In many ways she was blind to my faults.

             
Love can do that to you. It blinds you, not with darkness, but with its white light.

             
We left that night and never saw the people again. I think if I had, even had I been hungry, I would have left them unharmed. The people had been the first humans who had understood my nature and yet still shown me kindness.

             
They deserved my respect, and my amnesty.

             
Besides, they gave me my wife, and for that I will always be thankful.

*