AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Real?” He laughed quietly. “Is anything from that life real? I’m Ansel now. In a few decades I will be someone else.”
“Sorry, keep going.”
“I’m not boring you?”
Now Saber laughed.
“No, not at all.”
Ansel nodded.
“I stepped into the light of his chamber candle, and I can only imagine what I looked like then. My hair had always been worn long, but now it was a greasy tangle, I was naked in spite of the cold, filthy from sleeping in the woods. My nails had grown longer and were caked with dirt. I’m sure I was frightening, and the duke looked terrified. He stumbled back, turning over his chamberpot, and tried to scream, but I stopped him. I killed him brutally, letting him suffer. I had never tried to intentionally cause harm before, had only been trying to survive, but I wanted to make sure he knew it was me and why I had returned.
“In the morning, when servants came, they were shocked to find his body. The servants were peasants and knew that an evil creature haunted the township but had not expected it toprey upon the residents of the castle. I stole some of the duke’s clothes and, the very next night, I returned. I must have looked ridiculous and terrifying, but I was the man of the castle, and the servants let me in. So I was back, reinstated in my former home.
“I told the peasants a short, wild story about having lived in the woods, and requested a bath, and for a bed to be made for me. Their true master, I told them, had returned. That’s the story of me becoming a vampire.”
“Wow,” said Saber, sitting back. “What happened next?”
“You really want to hear it?” He smiled, and gazed at her.
“I really do.”
Ansel nodded.
“For many years I lived at the castle. The peasants knew that I was strange, but if they knew I was a vampire, they never said anything, but I noticed that my vassalage shrank, that the townspeople who had any bravery or imagination packed up their things and left with haste.
“Some stayed. Rumors traveled, as they had to back then. People whispered about my peculiar ways, only waking at night, not eating or drinking anything that the servants were aware of, that sort of thing. I had a coffin built and brought to the castle, and that upset the servants greatly. I should have been more discreet. I didn’t know. I had it placed in the catacombs, where my mother and sister were interred and said it was for when I joined them one day. That was where I slept during the day.
“And I hunted. I learned to be more discreet, learned to eat without mutilating the bodies, learned to choose people who might not be missed, learned that deer could be nearly as satiating as a person if I was trying to resist my urges, which I did all the time. The town was so small, and every person gone missing, or dead in an unusual manner, was noticed and frightened the peasants.
“After a while I learned to dress myself again, and ordered more clothes, made in Austria, and invited other nobles to my home to visit. Other young men in my social class would sometimes bring courtesans. With those women I satisfied my other carnal needs and learned to feed on a person without killing them. I learned how to make deaths look like accidents, but there were still rumors. Word about my proclivities spread. I got fewer visitors, and the ones I did get were unsavory types who were excited by the idea of a man with some kind of violent sexual perversity, which was freeing for a moment, before I realized it would garner more attention than I wanted to attract.
“I had been a vampire for almost ten years by then, and my township was dying. The visitors to my castle were few and far between, and I could not imagine a future. I realized I needed to attract more people or leave.
“I sent a man into the city, now known as Zagreb, in Croatia, which was far away at the time. Now it would be about a long day’s drive. I asked for him to bring me back a builder, someone smart, not that either of us knew, then, what intelligence really was.
“The person he brought back was a small, dark-eyed man named Elias, the first Jewish person I would ever meet. Elias was intelligent, keenly so, and had a mind for architecture. I had him make the plans for a beer hall and a small church and gave him a very generous budget to work with. I asked him if Jews would become ill if they designed a church and he laughed at me. I told him to hire as many workers as he needed and told him to tell them that if they came and liked the village, there would be plenty of work for them as long as they lived.
“Elias did as I asked, coming night after night to show me plans he’d sketched, and asking me questions, not just about the buildings, but about the village, what it was I wanted to do and how. I was fascinated by the way he spun ideas seeminglyout of thin air. I had grown up as a member of royalty and had never been expected to work. The feudal system was all I had ever known, and I never questioned it until I met Elias. He had gone to a school, had trained under an apprentice in Vienna, and had learned a skill. He could imagine something, something very complex, make a plan, and then build it. At the time, that was astonishing to me.
“We planned. Word spread that there was work in the village, and land for those working, so men came with their families. The beer hall was finished first, a fine, modern building of wood and stone, a place where villagers could gather and drink and make music or have meetings, whatever they wanted, I didn’t care. Elias found me a vigneron who built me a vineyard. Within three years, we had our first grape harvest and the church, a rather large one, was being built.”
Ansel took a deep breath.
“I think of that time as the beginning of my life as it is now, when I first cared about something. The church was finished, one of the most beautiful in the country, and the vineyard matured and made wines that I would never get to taste but were said to be the best in the region. It still exists today, or a version of it does, at least. Meanwhile, almost without my noticing, Elias became old. It had been twenty-five years.
“One night he came to me and said, ‘My Lord Ulrich, you may have noticed that I have aged, while I have noticed that you have not.’ It was a strange moment, but I only nodded and made up a strange lie about how people in the Bible lived for hundreds of years, and I was maybe one of those types of people. He looked at me for a long time. He knew what I was. Every culture has its vampire myth.
“I was hiding out more and more, afraid that my agelessness threatened the work I’d done, the beautiful village I’d built. By then we had many skilled tradesmen, and even a respectablepriest, who I refused to meet with. I knew I could not sustain my strange customs any longer. The tiny village was now becoming a place of trade and commerce, and if a villager went missing every now and then, not much was made of it, but my immortality could not be kept hidden.”
Saber noticed then that Ansel’s accent and cadence now sounded old-fashioned and European. She’d barely heard him slip into it. He probably hadn’t even noticed himself.
“I knew I had to leave. Elias, now an old man, helped me plan. He hired a man to care for the estate and collect the taxes, which he would take four times per year to a bank in Vienna. I packed many of my family’s things and my coffin into a wagon, and we left. He helped me to procure a townhouse in Vienna, he went back to the estate, and I began my new life as a gentleman of leisure. I went to concerts, dances, anything and everything. I patronized artists and musicians all over the city and my house was known for being a part of the nightlife where the elegant and beautiful gathered. I enjoyed myself, and I was far less conspicuous. When I became bored, I left.
“From there I went to Venice, but I didn’t want to start my life as a playboy over again. I wanted to make something the way I had with Elias. I needed money, the Hungarian army had taken my land, and my estate had changed hands, but I had built a significant amount of wealth that I converted to gold and put into a bank in Venice, where I bought a Piazza on the Grand Canal. Am I boring you yet, Saber?”
“Not at all.”
