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Nothing had changed in the night.
Behind them the sparse traffic of early morning moved on the Avenida Atlantica. And the voices of the city rose and subsided beneath the hushed voice of the sea.
But Marius was changed. Changed forever.
"Tell me what happened," Marius pressed. The intimacy of that long-ago blood exchange in the oak shimmered in his mind. "Where did you go? How did you survive?"
Teskhamen nodded. He was still looking out to sea. "The woods were thick in those times. You remember them. Moderns have no conception of that old woodland, that savage wilderness of trees ancient and young spreading across Europe--against which each hamlet or village or town must fight for its life. Into that woodland I slithered like a lizard. I fed on the vermin of the forest. I fed on what could not escape me even as I could not walk without pain, even as the sun found me again and again in dank hollows and claimed even more of my skin because I could not dig deep to protect myself from it with these hands."
He looked at his fingers. "In time," he said with a sigh, "I found a woman in a lowly hut, a cunning woman, a healer, such a thing as men call a witch and a hag. Hesketh was her name. She was a prisoner of hideousness as was I.
"But I begged for her patience. She could not destroy me and I fascinated her, and my suffering touched her heart. Oh, this was so remarkable to me. You cannot imagine. What did I know of compassion, of mercy, of love? She had pity on me, and curiosity burned within her. She would not have me suffer. And some bond was forged before language could express it even in the simplest form.
"Even in my weakened state, I worked small miracles for her effortlessly, told her when strangers were approaching, raked their minds for the questions they were coming to ask her, for the curses they wanted her to bring down on their enemies. I warned of anyone who sought to do her harm. An evil lad bent on murdering her, I easily overpowered and from him drank my fill before her unquestioning eyes. I read her thoughts and I found the poetry inside of her, beneath the misfortune of warts and pockmarked skin, of hunched shoulders and deformed limbs. I loved her. Indeed she became, whole and entire, quite beautiful to me--. And she came to love me with her whole heart."
His eyes grew wide as if he were marveling at it all even now. "It was at her hearth I discovered my dormant powers, how with my mind I might kindle the fire when it had gone out, how I might make the water boil. I protected her. She protected me. We had the souls of each other. We loved in some realm where the natural and the preternatural meant nothing. And I brought her into the Blood."
He turned to look at Marius again.
"Now you know what a crime that was against the old religion, to share the Blood with one so malformed. The old religion died for me in that act of defiance and a new religion was born."
Marius nodded.
"I lived with Hesketh for over six hundred years after that, regaining my strength, healing in body and soul. We hunted the villages of the countryside. We fed on the thieves of the roads. But your beautiful Italy, your beautiful Roman world--which has so inspired me--was never to be mine except in the books I read, the manuscripts I stole from monasteries, the poetry I shared for myself with Hesketh by our humble hearth. Nevertheless we were happy, and we were clever. And as our boldness grew, we penetrated the crude castles and fortresses of country lords and even the streets of Paris in our lust to see and to learn. Those were not bad times.
"But you know how it is with the young in the Blood and how foolish they can be. And Hesketh was young and still misshapen, and all the blood in the world could not succor the pain she knew when mortals screamed at the very sight of her."
"What happened?"
"We quarreled. We fought. She struck out on her own. I waited. I felt certain she'd return. But she was caught by mortals, a mob that overwhelmed her, and they burned her alive as the Druids had sought to kill me. I found her remains afterwards. I destroyed the village, down to the last mortal man, woman, and child. But Hesketh was gone from me, or so it seemed."
"You revived her."
"No, that was not possible," he said. "Something infinitely more miraculous happened which was to give my life meaning from that time on. But let me continue: I buried her remains near a vast ruined monastery, deep in the untended forest, a collection of rude buildings made of crudely dressed stones and rough timbers where monks had once studied and worked and lived. There were no longer any fields or vineyards around it, for the woods had reclaimed all. But in the weed-infested cemetery, I found a place for her, thinking, Ah, it is consecrated ground. Maybe he
r soul will rest. Such superstition. Such nonsense. But the time of mourning is always the perfect time for nonsense. And I stayed nearby in the old scriptorium of the monastery, in a filthy corner, beneath a pile of old rotted furniture which no one, for one reason or another, had ever taken away. Each night on rising, I lit once more the small earthen oil lamp I'd placed on her unmarked grave.
"It was a dark and miserable night when she came to me. I had come to the point where death by any means seemed preferable to going on. All those splendid possibilities I'd seen in your blood, they had come to mean nothing--if Hesketh was not with me, if Hesketh was no more.
"And then Hesketh came, my Hesketh. Hesketh came into the old scriptorium. In the light of broken arched windows I saw Hesketh--solid as I am now. And gone was the warty and pockmarked skin that even the Blood had not been able to smooth, and the twisted and deformed limbs. This was the Hesketh I'd always loved, the pure and beautiful damsel inside the wreckage of malnourished and cruelly formed flesh. This was the Hesketh I'd loved with all my heart."
He paused and studied Marius.
"She was a phantom, this Hesketh, but she was alive! Her hair was flaxen and her body tall and straight. Her pale hands and face were shimmering and soft. And another phantom was with her, as physically visible as was she. This phantom went by the name of Gremt. And it was he who had aided her wandering shade and given it solace and taught her how to appear to eyes such as yours and mine. This was Gremt who had taught her how to hold together the airy physical shape in which she sought to appear. It was he who taught her how to make that shape solid and enduring so that I could reach out and touch her with my hands. I could even kiss her lips. I could even take her in my arms."
Marius said nothing, but he had seen ghosts this powerful himself. Not often, but he had seen them. He'd known of them but not known ever who they were.
He waited but Teskhamen had fallen quiet.
"What happened?" Marius whispered. "Why did this change the course of your life?"
"It changed everything because she remained with me," said Teskhamen, looking at Marius again. "It was no fleeting moment. And with each passing night she grew stronger, and more clever at retaining her physical shape, and Gremt, whose powerful solid shape would have fooled any mortal, shared my hearth in the old monastery as she did, and we spoke of things invisible and visible and of blood drinkers and of the spirit that had come into the ancient Queen."
He paused as if pondering and then went on.
"Of our species and history, Gremt knew all things, things that I did not know, for he'd been watching the course of the spirit Amel inside the Queen for centuries, and he knew of discoveries and battles and defeats of which I'd never heard a word.
"We forged an alliance, Gremt and Hesketh and me. I alone was a true physical being and provided some temporal rhythm for them that I have never fully come to understand. But in that place, that ruined monastery, we signed a pact, and our work together in this world began."
