Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale
F O U R T E E N
CASTLE
IN THE
HILLS
“Fucking is a human thing.”
-Kruinh Kertesz
Chaperon was only a resting place, and late the next morning they took the leisurely drive back to the landing strip, long cars with tinted windows looking over lush countryside and rich forests. When Dan growsed about how early it was from behind his shades, Kruinh said, “We want to see home in daylight. That is why. If you’re so troubled, Mr. Rock and Roll, sleep in the limo and sleep on the plane.”
Which is what Dan did, looking the closest thing to surly Sunny had ever seen him,
After the long flight across the ocean and across a third of the United States, David was surprised by the shortness of this trip and amazed to arrive in the majesty of the enchanted city of Bucharest. He’d only seen a few big American cities and the biggest city he was in contact with was Lassador. David marveled over wide boulevards and the great grey or white stone buildings crafted with scrollwork, red tiled and filled by jewel boxy windows and he was amazed while they passed through magnificent plazas and fountains.
“It looks like Disneyland,” Dan murmured. “If Disneyland wasn’t bullshit.”
Laurie frowned and Kruinh shook his head and grinned ruefully.
“He’s not wrong, you know,” Chris noted as they took the great bridge cross the deep blue Dneiper. Their cars took them through busy streets, past trolley buses and crowded sidewalks with fashionable women and handsome men.
As they drove, forest and hills took over what was city, and now David felt they were traveling into the past as the limousines rolled under trees skyscraper high, and now they passed through smaller towns, but always, in the sunlit distance, looking down from hills, were strange castles, magnificent but unlike anything he’d ever seen, with their fat, round towers and peaked red roves, and as they passed a steel blue lake cut like a speartip, David said, “We are in Transylvania. Aren’t we?”
“We are,” Tanitha said.
The road widened, and they were in a flat valley of intense green despite the winter, and they passed one village after another, and over it all, on top of a high hill or a small mountain was the deceptively simple box of a castle with all of its towers rising from from the courtyards around it. The sun glinted down on it and shone off the windows and onto the green land just barely covered in snow. As they came nearer, Kruinh touched Sunny and leaned back to tell David, “This is our home. This is Visastruta.”
“Soon it will be time for the evening meal,” Kruinh declared.
The crenellated wall that skirted the central part of he castle, looked down on the other great baileys and towers, and then beyond that the tree lined valleys fell into darkness going darker as the day came to an end. As far as David or Dan or Sunny could see, the land stretched evergreen under the early winter, and was studded by shining lakes reflecting from the depths back to the sky.
“It never gets old,” Dan said.
Kruinh, in a corded sweater, a scarf about his throat came out onto the parapet and stood beside Sunny
“No,” he agreed. “It never does.”
He looked to David.
“Penny for your thoughts?”
David Lawry shook his head.
“I’m not sure my thoughts are worth a penny.”
“Few are, and yet people express them anyway.”
David grinned at Kruinh.
“If you had told me Transylvanian castle, then I would have thought…. “
“Bela Lugosi?”
“Did you ever… You couldn’t have,” David began. “There was this cartoon when I was growng up called Count Duckula.”
Sunny snorted, but Dan said, “I totally remember this.”
“He was—”
“A vampire duck?” Kruinh guessed.
“Yes,” David said. “You don’t get points for that one. But he lived on this skinny odd castle on the top of a skinny mountain, and it was gloomy and weird and lightning always flashed around it, and to me that’s a Transylvanian castle.”
Still smiling at David, Kruinh said, “I am sorry to disappoint.”
Sunny shook his head.
“I thought the same fucking thing,” he told his lover, grinning.
“Who knows?” Kruinh said, his fingers rested on Sunny’s shoulders and then came under his shirt. “Maybe that’s just what it is, and everything else is an elaborate ploy to get you into my creaky castle so I can…” he bit down, nuzzling Sunny’s throat and shocking him into an arousal he was surprised and embarrassed Kruinh didn’t mind the others seeing, “Vite your neck!”
KRUINH
“Nothing is promised,” Tanitha says. “There is only love.”
I said the first half to her once, the day her mother died, and the one who stood beside me for so long was no more. There is no true preparation for a death. Whatever we are now, I am told we started out as mortal. A year to us is a year, ten years is ten years. It is the decades, the centuries that become the tricky part. It is thinking of some event, some place, and returning to it, seeing it long gone and thinking, surely it was not that long ago I was last here, surely not. And being told, no, this memory you have is of centuries ago. The years do not pass with ease or without comment for us anymore than they do for anyone else. Nor do they stop. When 1500 came, I was the age Christopher is now, and still time continued. And when Laurie was made—no short time ago—when he was just a boy, he was more frightened and put off by the Change than either Alexander or Daniel. But then time continued. The world we found Chris and then Laurie in crumbled and moved on, and so it goes on still.
This is the reason one should be careful about making a Drinker. The long passage of time, the constant shock of what was there no longer being there can be far too much. The years stretching before you can be almost dizzying. There have been some I’ve seen transfixed by it. They call this the Madness. It is one reason that, while there have been many blood drinkers made, there are so few of us who remain. If things were another way, how large would our clans be, but like any other human clan, there are grandfathers, but no grandmothers, one great grandparent, but not four, a father missing, a mother gone, a sister long in the past, and this is part of the reason why. We resist death a very long time. I have never known a one of us to resist it forever.
When I was not young by human standards but young for me, young for what we are, my grandfather was the head of the clan. Old he was, and once he told me he was weary of life. I did not understand. So old was he his skin seemed paper thin and he had lost all taste for the blood. He performed the old sleeping Rite, the Rite of Living Death, and I could not comprehend it. All of us can will ourselves into a deep sleep, a more than mortal sleep. It can be done for preservation, but easily come out of. Then there is that sleep which requires… more. I will not speak of it here, that which is called the Living Death. There is a row of tombs in Visastruta filled with the coffins of those who have entered it.
The Living Death begins like any sleep and after a matter of days one is still as a corpse. One may as well be a corpse. It is not entirely true that we live on blood, but rather that blood sustains our own blood, the ichor, to be a blood substance. Clearly we eat, we breath and drink, but is not quite the same. Food is not vital in that same way as it would be to an ordinary man. However, after a while, locked away from air, from water, from blood, from any sustenance, the body feeds on itself until, at last, there is no difference between the one who has entered the living death and any other dead body. The difference, unseen, is that such a corpse can be revived, renewed, restored.
When my grandfather climbed into his own coffin all those years ago, and made me a king rather than a prince, I wondered how he could do such a thing, but it has been many turns of the earth since he did that, and since then, in my long life, I have come to understand. There were years that I was largely catatonic, only half alive, surviving on drops of blood at a time, and there were times when I longed for death and knew exactly why that old man did as he did.
Tan has kept me alive, and there were many times when she did not want to live herself. When your child loses the love of her life, loses her mother, loses them both to the death that is irrevocable, you must remain. But the pleasure in remaining is when you feel young again, when there is something new to do. When Daniel showed up at our door, a boy of fifteen or sixteen, I longed in a selfish way to keep him and knew we had better send him on his way. When he returned, I was never able to believe it was merely an accident. And when Dan returned I began to sense that something new had begun, that I was not something old, hanging on, but that a family, fallen on hard times, grown old and fractured, was rebuilding itself new, and in a new world.
Love, passion, was another matter, a thing far removed from me. It was buried with Elizaveda, and though I had known love in the shape of a man before, I did not expect it. I did not expect anything.
And then, on a very ordinary night for me, I went to a rooftop restaurant, and there was a golden haired server who I knew was no mortal, who seemed far old than his years and stronger than his wiry frame.
He was, I am no fool, simply doing his job, but he turned to me with the sun in his hair and the bright sky in his eyes, like some magnificent prince out of legend and said the most unlegendary words:
“I’m Alex, I’ll be your server. You probably need time to decide? Let me start you out on water.”
“The water is so clear here,” David said as they walked by the river. For courtesy and for fashion’s sake, Sunny had put on a great furlined coat, but Dan walked in a leather jacket as if it were early fall and the black rushing river did not cut through snowy ground.
“Kruinh said the Christmas feasts here used to be amazing,” Dan told them. “He said they still are, but that a long time ago they were really something else.”
“A vampire’s Christmas,” David imagined, “must be something.”
“He said it was not the matter of vampires that made it strange, but that in olden times they were Orthodox, and the Orthodox did not celebrate Christmas. But in Transylvania, over time, there were all sorts of people, many Germans, many Catholics, and so Christmas became a thing, great parades, huge trees touching the ceiling and hung with candles, balls that lasted into the night, children singing all through the hills.”
David took in the hills, his eyes following the worn paths beneath the tree boughs. Downbelow, through the trees were the distant villages that still filled a land densely populated by wildlife as well as people.
“It must have been a time. What if we were to stay here for Christmas this year?”
“What?” Dan said. “Don’t you want to be with your family?”
David looked at Dan.
“My family is gone. My mother’s dead. My father’s dead. Who knows where my sister is? Before I found you all I didn’t have much. I would gladly stay here.”
Sunny had said nothing. All this he knew, but he did not know this bend in the river, a triple fall over ledges of ancient rock, nor had he seen these snow dusted banks rising in terraces from the water. Deer who had been grazing, lifted their heads, but did not run. They were in their own country and knew that these folk, who were not entirely human, were not interested in their flesh.
“Well, we are your family now,” Dan said.
“I’d had something foolish in my mind,” David said.
Dan raised an eyebrow.
“Do you think that Tan would want to be married again?”
“You’re going to propose?” Dan beamed.
“It had crossed my mind. I mean, I don’t know that someone like her would want to be Mrs. Lawry, a cop’s wife.”
“Well, then you be Mr. Tzepesh,” Sunny said. “A vampire’s husband. But, whatever you all are, I think you should do it.”
“I am…. Ordinary. She is not. In time I will grow old and she will wonder why the hell she married me. In the future—”
“Dave,” Dan cut him off, looking serious for once.
“None of us knows the future. All we know is now. Here, in this place, is all we have.”
Dan squeezed his friend’s shoulder.
“Propose to her.”