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her to make the attempt. As she held up my arm, tugging hard against a certain
inherent stiffness
more appropriate to a day-old than a year-old corpse I suddenly returned her
handclasp. My own grasp was gentle, but still sufficiently firm to insure that
the digit she was attempting to isolate should not be left undefended.
The young woman's first reaction was disappointingly restrained; she only
gasped, and would have pulled away, but my grip was vastly too strong to allow
that. Courageous as she was, I think that in the next moment she might have
fainted. But now I had shifted the direction of my gaze, and with my eyes
locked on hers I willed her to retain consciousness.
Her next move was a wise one, to throw down the knife she had been holding in
her free hand. Then she began to mutter, and presently declaimed aloud, first
prayers and then more abominations of witchcraft.
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I spoke to her for the first time. "I command you, girl, cease this shameful,
wicked way of speaking. If you are going to pray, pray properly!"
Her response surprised me: "And who are you, moroi
, to call me wicked? Or to give me instructions in prayer?" And she tossed her
head in a gesture of defiance.
She had again used the term for undead, and for some reason that gave me
pause.
Despite all my recent experience I had never yet thought of myself in such a
way. "Well," I said at last. "I am undead indeed. But when you come right down
to it, what does that mean, except that I am, thanks to the good God, still
alive?"
My captive uttered a little yelp of shock and astonishment, an almost
endearing sound. "You dare to speak the good Lord's name? Hell strike you
down!"
Again it was my turn to be surprised. "Indeed? And why should He do that?"
She was shivering, though the night was not that cold, and seemed unable to
answer. "I am Vlad Drakulya," I told her after a pause. "Once Prince of
Wallachia. But I suppose you knew that, woman. If not, whose grave did you
think you were violating? And what is your name?"
"I am called Constantia." She was shivering more and more with fear by this
time, though somehow managing to keep her voice almost under control.
Courage has always fascinated and impressed me.
I squeezed her hand still almost gently. "And on what task, good Constantia,
were you about to employ your dagger? Did you think my fingernails might be in
need of trimming, after so long in the grave? Is that what brought you here
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tonight?"
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She stared at me, and then produced a tremulous little smile. If my grip was
causing her pain she gave no sign. Her spoken answers remained evasive. But of
course I under-stood perfectly well that what must have brought her to my
grave was the practice of witchcraft doubtless she had meant to excise more
than one portion of my anatomy to aid her in her spells. Dead men's eyes,
fingers, testicles
the witch's shopping list is long were and are considered of great value.
Most in demand are the parts of executed criminals, followed by those of men
of spiritual power. Looking back, I can believe that I was considered as
belonging to both categories.
How, by what means of bribery or divination, this little apprentice witch had
learned the location of my grave I was never to discover. She must have
assumed that the body of Prince Drakulya would possess some special efficacy
to aid her in her work. But as the situation actually worked out, she was, I
believe, content to leave my bones intact, forgetting her original purpose in
the dazzling light of her discovery that I was not dead after all. Yes, I know
she had expected to find an undead, or thought she had; but to actually
observe the fact was something else. Gypsy witches of the time, and Constantia
in particular, were not known for the fine precision of their logic.
"Why do you call me moroi
?" I asked her more than once on that first night as I
helped her to fill in my grave above the empty coffin. Of course I knew what
the name meant, but to me it was no more than a superstitious word applied by
foolish peasants to some of their more unsettling nightmares.
Sometimes, when I asked her this, she must have thought that I was angry, for
in answer she would only shake her head and maintain silence. On other
occasions,
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a few minutes earlier or later, she must have considered me to be in a good
mood, for she tried to argue that I did indeed fit that category. Not that she
had ever known anyone else who was moroi.
Our acquaintance prospered from the start, though for some weeks after our
first encounter I refrained from sleeping in my proper grave, half expecting
that
Constantia might come back when I was deep in one of my stupors and renew her
efforts to carve me up.
But now to return to those first minutes of her first visit to my grave.
Letting go her hand at last, and then clasping her with both arms around the
waist, I stepped up out of my newly reexcavated pit, lifting her with me. Her
strength was, of course, no match for mine. But no sooner had we demonstrated
this than our struggle, that had begun as a tentative combat, began to assume
quite other aspects.
Sex, for a vampire, is almost inextricably confused with taking nourishment,
and both of course involve almost exclusively the drinking of the blood.
Whatever expectations of sensual delight might have been aroused in either
Constantia or myself on our first night together were more than fully
realized, though not in the way that I, at least, until the moment of our
embrace, had expected.
In my transformed mode of existence, the blood is indeed the life. It is
everything, the single physical craving and the single physical requirement.
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