Here, In This Place: An Origin Tale: Chapter 46

PART TWO

Arriving two nights before the service, and always more or less in Kruinh’s immediate sphere were Alexandra and Leo. Alexandra was brown, the color of nuts, with wide dark ancient eyes in a long face and rich dark hair. She wore flowing white always whether in robes, kaftans or dresses, and Leo was easy to identify because he looked like a paler version of Laurie with his large dark eyes ringed by darker circles. With them came a young couple, pale Joseph, who looked like a more serious version of Dan, or at least a more suburban one in his polo shirts and chinos and hair part, and his wife, the golden haired Irene.

“These are my oldest friends,” Kruinh said. “These are the clan of Byzantium, and Alexandra and Leo are their heads.”

“Byzantium?” David and Sunny began.

“You must be Sunny!” Irene’s voice rang out in a midwestern accent. Her wide blue eyes, her hair and her disposition, were just as Sunny as Sunny’s own. She threw her arms around him.

“Hug them, Joseph! They’re family.”

Joseph, or Joe, looked embarrassed. He was shy, but it was easy to tell how much he was in love with Irene, and David, thinking he was by far the most ordinary of the vampires, gravitated toward him.

“I love kids,” Joe said, watching Irene laughing around a table as she lifted a dark haired boy and kissed him. They must live in America, for he too had chosen a Midwestern accent as Kruinh and Tanitha nearly, but not quite, also had.

“Irene is a great mother. We’re good on our own, and of course children are always children, in a way, but we like the being parents to kids thing, and we keep on starting families. This is our seventh one,” he said, reflectively.

“Joe, can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Exactly… how old are you and Irene?”

Joe gave a hooked grin that reminded David of Dominic back home.

“I can’t say off the top of my head anymore, but we were all teenagers—not that we called it that—when me and Irene met Kruinh. It must have been… around the time when those Frank bastards destroyed Constantinople.”

Joe took out his cigarettes, offered one to Sunny. He lit Sunny’s then his and shook his head, narrowing his eyes.

“It was a fuck of a time. A fuck of a time. You know, humans always blame the monsters. They make the movies where the werewolf or the vampire or whatever comes to kill them. But Dave, in my whole life I’ve never killed as many humans as the ones who killed each other the day those Catholic bastards took our city. When the Muslims finally came, not even they did near as much damage.”

“This Catholic bastard apologizes on their behalf.”

Joseph barked a laugh.

“You know how your wedding ceremony is supposed to go?” Joe asked.

“‘May He, Who by His presence in Cana of Galilee declared marriage to be honorable, Christ our true God, through the intercessions of His all‑pure Mother, of the holy, glorious, and all‑praiseworthy Apostles, of the holy, God‑crowned and Equal‑to‑the‑Apostles Constantine and Helen, of the Holy, great Martyr Procopios, and of all the holy Saints, have mercy on us and save us, as our good and loving Lord.’

“But when Kruinh was to marry Elisaveda, and she saw those words, she said she didn’t give a damn about Procopios and Constantine, and Helen meant nothing to her. She was a Catholic, a Venetian you see, and the Venetians were the very ones who had led the Catholics in destroying my city. But… That was in the past, and Veda was a great woman. David, you and me are going to be great friends, no doubt. I am over eight hundred years old. The only things I’ve ever really learned are friendship is king, loyalty is essential, and everything changes, so you can’t hold on.”

At the dawn of days, Osiris the God came to Egypt to rule as King. He brought the Egyptian people new laws and taught them how to farm well and live peacefully in their villages. Osiris was a wise and powerful king, loved and respected by his people. But Set, God of Shadows and of the outer places, planned to kill Osiris and take his throne. Late one night, Set measured Osiris’s body from top to bottom and from side to side. The next morning, Set took the measurements to a carpenter who made a beautiful wooden chest decorated with bright paint and sheets of gold. That night, Set threw a great feast, and invited Osiris as the guest of honor. The night was spent feasting, singing, dancing, and playing games. For the final game, Set brought out the huge wooden chest. He announced that the first person to fit perfectly into the chest would be allowed to keep it. One by one, each of Set’s friends climbed into the chest. Unsurprisingly, no one was able to fit into the chest, which was made for Osiris. Set convinced his brother to try and Osiris stepped into the chest and lay down. The chest fit him perfectly, and just as Osiris lay down, Set slammed the lid and sealed it shut. Set chopped the coffin and the body into fourteen pieces and tossed them half into the Nile and the other half all over Egypt.

Now Isis, Goddess of all Magics and sister to Set and Osiris as well as Osiris’s Queen, rose the next morning and learned of what Set has done. Though the Goddess of Night, Nephthys, her sister was the bride of Set, she loved Osiris, and so she and her sister transformed into huge birds and flew high over Egypt. Using their sharp vision, they found the scattered bits of Osiris and joined them together again. Aided by Nepthys, Thoth, and Anubis, Isis performed a great act of magic so when the body was whole once again, they wrapped it head to toe in strips of linen, creating a mummy. Then, in her grief, the Goddess mounted her husband, riding him one last time …

When he had awakened, to this new life, when he had resolved to find his killers, and bring justice to the house of Kertesz, Kruinh nodded to David, then turned and left. He barred the doors of the great hall. David, beholding Tanitha, was filled with a powerful desire he’d never known. He kissed her hard, drawing the vampiress to him, and her gown of mourning opened so that his teeth sank into her breast. It seemed no strange thing to drink from her, to have blood for the first time, to fill a new strength rising in his body. Later, when she took him to hunt, she understood he was a man of law, and for him there had been little room for the grey. She took him to the city. She showed him killers. This had been a totalitatian state for years. There were many people who had done many things and felt no guilt. They would die quickly in David’s jaws and, surprisingly, he would have no remorse.

But right then in the hall, moments after his rising, he was high on his new life, and desperate for her. She lifted up her gowns. And he had her on the floor beside the bier. It was not quick, it lasted a long time, and she was not shy about her screams. They would all know he was alive now. She drew him down and sank her teeth into his shoulder. He pressed deep inside her, and bit her throat. When he came it was with a roar, his whole body arching, when the fire had passed through them, the two of them lay together, wrapped in the black of Tanitha’s gown, David’s long white body tangled with her umber flesh. Their hands clasped, and on the white hand and the brown one gold serpent rings flashed, their sapphire eyes winking.

“Enough of this,” Tanitha had said the morning before their wedding.

“A new life, you’re starting a new life.”

She had taken sheers and cut of the wings of his black hair, and then she’d taken Laurie’s trimmers and given David’s sides a clean buzz.

“You were looking like 1998, and there’s nothing worse than a Drinker who cannot leave his time of origin.”

David ran his hand over the back of his head and grinned sheepishly.

“I actually like it,” he said.

“Of course you do.”

“I dunno,” David was saying to Kruinh. “This was not my plan.”

“I would be very surprised if it was.”

They were in Kruinh’s large apartments, and Kruinh was drinking tea from the red and gold tea set while a cheroot burned beside him.

“If I may ask, David, what were your plans?”

“I certainly wasn’t getting any closer to them when you all met me,” David said.

“I had thought that eventually I would marry, which I have. And I thought we’d go to church on Sunday, be part of the neighborhood parish, have some kids, watch out for everyone. Protect them.”

“It seems to me you can protect people now better than you ever could before.”

David Lawry raised his eyebrows and then settled them into a dubious frown.

“Do you think God only lives in the nice neighborhoods and pretty Midwest churches?” Kruinh said. “Or have you not discovered the red tooth of heaven? The God of the butterflies and lambs is the God of tigers and wolves. Prey, predator, dark, light and all in between. You dreamed of a good you, a sweet you, an innocent you who went to church on Sunday. Why not know a better you, a darker you, and go to church everyday, when you learn the whole earth is the house of God?

“Long ago,” Kruinh said, “when the world was more savage than it is now, or at least more open about it, our family was high in the confidences of the High Basileis, .the Emperors of New Rome, Constantinople. When things grew troubled in the northern parts of their realm, they gifted us land and asked us to protect it in God’s name from all enemies, and this was how we came to hold Visastruta. In other words we married, had some kids, went to church on Sunday, watched out for everyone, protected them. That was the tasks of the lords and ladies of Visastruta, of the House of Kertesz. And the House of Kertesz is now your own.”

David sighed.

“We’ve been away from Lassador too long,” he said.

“Let’s go home.”

Well, this chapter is done, and we've got one chapter left. After that I will begin posting THE BOOK OF THE BURNING, the final part of The Longbook of Locrys which started with The Book of the Blue House. Last time we left our friends in the city of Nava, and Myrne and Osric at war with Edith and the Baldwins. I will posting synopses to get us all caught up. There's so much which had probably been forgotten. See you there soon!