He put his hand out to her. “I will leave, but not on your account.”
“Oh, yes,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “You and your wandering. It is safer to wander. You have told me before. You are content to be alone in your travels, you have said. You make few vampires in your wanderings, and you console yourself by deciding that those whose blood you drink love you.” Tugging the reins she pulled her bay mare back into the trees. “The monks will start chanting soon, and I will not listen to them. Come away.”
Germanno perceived more emotion in her than she was willing to accredit, but said nothing more than, “All right.”
“There is nothing more for me here,” she said. “Not for such as they were.”
“Ximene, they are dead. This was the True Death.” He hoped to see some indication of compassion in her eyes, but there was none.
“All the better. My son is dead, and his was the True Death: none of them were worth a nail on his hand.” She signaled her horse to walk on. “We have a distance to go tonight before we can feed.”
Germanno wanted to bring her to a realization of what had happened, but decided that she would not listen to him now. “And where are we—”
“Follow me and do not ask me ridiculous questions anymore,” she said, her back stiff and her voice edged. “There will be game to hunt tonight. Tomorrow night we will hunt men.”
“No,” said Germanno, quietly but with absolute conviction. “You may, if you must, but I will not.”
She turned in the saddle to stare at him; even in the dim light of the forest he could see her taken aback expression. “You refuse to do as I require?”
“I will not stop you from hunting, but I will not join you. I do not prey upon men,” he said, adding to himself that he had not done so in more than twenty-five hundred years.
“And if I order you?” She sounded dangerous now, angry enough to be reckless.
“I will refuse.” He pointed ahead. “There is a river nearby. How do we cross it?”
“We follow the banks to the cattle-ford, and ride over. The water is low; it will not be too painful.” She coughed, suggesting he was too fastidious to expose himself to running water.
“My soles are filled with my native earth,” he reminded her. “The water will not bother me.” That was not entirely true, he admitted to himself: he would still have a faint sense of vertigo and lassitude while crossing the river, but it was bearable.
“So you say,” she mocked. “If you must keep yourself untainted by what you are, I will not compel you join me.”
“Thank you,” he said sardonically.
They went along in silence but for the steady clop of their horses’ feet. When they reached the river, they turned westward along its banks, following a trail made by game; hoof-prints of deer and foxes marked the soft earth, and once there was the unmistakable impression of a bear’s clawed pad, and at another place, the whole of the trail was scored by the marks of boars’ hooves where a sounder had passed.
“The game has been moving away from our region. The fighting and the fires have made them afraid,” said Ximene, her voice distant, as if none of this touched her. “The shepherds have taken the flocks to the other side of the mountains, beyond Aragon, so they will not have to lose any more of their sheep to the soldiers.”
“That must interfere with your hunting,” Germanno remarked, recalling the many times in the past he had seen just such a pattern emerge from war.
“All kinds of hunting,” Ximene agreed. “The villagers have turned against us, and there is no game.”
“Yet you remain here,” Germanno said.
“Better to stay where you belong than become an exile, an exile from home, and from daylight.” She sounded bitter now, and resentful. “Do not tell me it is a wise way to live, for I know it is not.”
“You do not wish to consider what I have told you.” He knew it was fruitless to argue, that no matter what he said, she would regard it as wrong.
“You have said nothing worthy of consideration,” she responded, then held up her hand. “The ford is not far ahead. I think I hear cattle.” For a moment she thought about it, then said, “If there are cattle, there will be men.” A sly smile lifted the corners of her mouth as she swung around to look at him. “What do you say? Will you change your mind and hunt with me?”
“I will hold your horse,” he answered. “Hunt if you must.”
“I am
famished,
” she exclaimed, keeping her voice low. “If you are not, then you must be more monkish than the monks.”
“I hunger,” he said quietly. “But blood alone will not suffice.”
She waved him to silence again just before she swung her horse around to face him, slipped out of the saddle, tossed him her reins, and slunk off into the cover of the trees, moving more like a wolf than a woman.
Germanno heard the lowing of cattle just before a man screamed. There was a swift, intense brawl, mixed with the distress of the animals, then the sound of cattle scattering. He held his horse and the reins of Ximene’s more tightly, not wanting them to bolt with the cattle.
A short while later, Ximene returned, her clothes wet to the waist, a smear of blood on her lips. Her pace was unsteady, as if she were slightly drunk. She was panting a bit; she shot a resentful glare at Germanno. “Do not trouble yourself about this one. He will not rise into our life. I made sure he was truly dead.” She pulled herself into the saddle. “I will continue on in a short while. For now, I am sated and I need a little time to restore myself.”
It was useless to protest. Germanno handed her the reins she had given him. “If you have to rest, so be it.”
She glanced of him. “If Aulutis had been as knowing as you, he would still be alive and we would never have quarreled,” she said dreamily.
This seemed highly unlikely to Germanno, but he kept his thoughts to himself, choosing instead to listen to the night around him, and watch over Ximene’s rest. He would have to leave her soon, he knew, and return to the task Idelfonzuz had set for him. Would she rejoice or be saddened by his departure? he wondered, or would her fury blot out any other emotion?
Shortly before midnight she wakened, rousing gradually, stretching as much as the saddle would allow. “There,” she said slowly, deliciously.
“Now I am ready.”
“Where do you want to go?” he asked as he put his horse in motion.
“Well, first we will go pick up your mules where you left them. If Goroloz has managed to control his hunger, the mules should be ready to come with you. I know you do not like to leave them too long in our care.” She offered him a snide smile, as if his concern for animals was as foolish as his regard for living humans.
“Would you want to, were you in my position,” he countered, bothered that she had managed to drag him into a dispute with her.
“If I did not think I would ever find mules again, I might.” She threw back her head and gave a crack of laughter. “We will cross here,” she added in a different tone as they reached the ford.
The ford was shallow, coming no higher than their horses’ knees, but the water was fast-flowing, which made it more precarious to cross; Germanno held the high pommel of his saddle to compensate for the queasiness that filled him. As soon as they were on the far bank, relief washed over him with an intensity that almost made him dizzy.
“It is two leagues to where they are waiting. They have your mules safe, or they will answer to me.” If this assurance was intended to please Germanno, it failed.
“Why do you punish your own?” he asked. “I find it baffling that you do.”
“Because they are my own,” she said as if this was obvious. “It is for me to make them, and having made them, it is for me to keep them in order.”
He considered her answer, and was nonplussed by it; he had expected a blunt answer but not this one. He had to curb his desire to challenge her certainties, to contain his inclination to make another attempt to show her there was another way for vampires to live. “Yet you are disappointed,” he said at last.
“How could I not be? You would be, too, were you willing to command those you have made,” she countered, turning as much as the high saddle would allow. “You have seen for yourself how I must deal with those around me, how much care they require. What can I be, but disappointed?” There was a trace of emotion in her voice now that suggested she might allow herself to mourn her son, but when she spoke again, it was gone. “They all betray me, in the end.” They went the greater part of a league without speaking, each alone though they rode together. They passed a village with half its buildings burned, and only pigs left in the pens. “Moors did that,” Ximene said. “They do not eat pigs, so they let the peasants have them.”
“At least they did not slaughter the pigs, so the villages would lose most of the meat in any case.” Germanno said, having seen that done from China to Britain, from Poland to Tunis.
The track they followed went into the forest again; here the underbrush was thick and the trees half-grown. “There was fire here, twenty years ago. Some of the mountain washed away, but here, on this plateau, there will be real forest again in sixty years, if they do not burn it anew.” She gave the place a look of disgust. “There used to be many bear here, and deer. Now they are fewer in number and harder to catch. I have not seen a wild cat in this part of the mountains in forty years. It is said that they have all gone to Toulouza.”
“And have they?” Germanno asked, knowing the answer.
“No one has seen them there, either,” she said, and sighed. “I remember how it was when I was young, and the mountains were all forested. A few of my clan also recall those times, but most came to me after the Moors began to fight, and to cut trees, and to burn. The Christians learned from them, and now we watch the mountains fall away in the winter.”
“It saddens you, does it not, Ximene,” Germanno observed, feeling a touch of satisfaction that something—anything—could make her sad.
“When I see familiar places vanish, it does,” she admitted. “But then, I know that the living are asinine.”
“You lived, once,” he reminded her gently.
“And when I did, I was as witless as any of them.” She stared into the half-grown woods. “Something is wrong.” Reining in her horse, she stared intently into the night.
Germanno rose in the stirrups and looked ahead. “What is it?”
She swung her horse around. “The forest is on fire. Three leagues or more. It will burn this way.”
“But three leagues—” Germanno began.
“Yes. That is where most of my clan gathers each night,” she said grimly. “If Herchambaut and Goroloz have any sense, they will run for the far side of the mountains. Two of my clan have long since gone to the north, and will give them shelter. You have lost your mules, Germanno, it would seem.”
Germanno signaled his roan to crouch and half-rear, then turned him back the way he came. “Do we cross the river?” he called out to Ximene, who had put her mount into a steady trot.
“And follow the far side until there is another valley,” she said.
“You will tire your horse,” Germanno worried her. “Let them walk as long as they can.” He had kept his roan from trying to run, and held him back as Ximene urged her horse to go faster.
The first, distant trace of smoke fingered the night wind; two deer came crashing through the scrub, all but blundering into Germanno’s roan in their panic. As if goaded by the fleeing deer, Ximene pushed her horse into a canter, and was soon lost to sight on the narrow path.
Germanno kept his horse to a steady, rapid walk, not letting the increasing number of scared animals frighten him into bolting with them. “We will get there,” he assured his horse, patting his neck as he watched the woods around him. He was nearing the small village they had passed when he brought his horse to a halt; men were rushing out of their houses, many of them bearing torches, and shouting, “The Viexa Armoza! The Viexa Armoza!”
Ximene’s bay mare stood, flanks heaving, by the pigsty; from the way she stood, her off-side foreleg was broken. Ximene was just getting to her feet, one hand to her head.
“Burn her!
Burn her!
” the villagers shouted.
“You would not dare!” Ximene raised her voice in command. “You will not
touch
me!”
Three or four of the men surrounded her horse and clubbed its head until it fell over, kicking once or twice before it died.
“Burn her!” The words were becoming a chant, as hypnotic as any cycle of prayers.
“You killed my horse!” she shrieked. “You will answer for that!”
“Burn her!” The cries grew louder and more frenzied as the men crowded around Ximene. One of them thrust a torch at her.
With a scream of rage she rushed at the man, throwing herself on him and trying to bite him. Most of the men drew back, aghast, but three did not retreat, and one of them actually struck her across the shoulders with a crudely made whip. Ximene bellowed and pushed herself away from her victim, her hands raised like talons to rip at anyone who came close enough to be touched.
Germanno clapped his heels to his horse’s side, putting the roan to a gallop. He charged at the center of the men, keeping his whole attention on Ximene. As he reached her, he pulled his roan to a rearing halt, reached down and swung Ximene up into his saddle across his lap, then set his roan galloping away from the village toward the river. He held her in place with one hand and guided his horse with the other.
“The Devil!” one of the villagers shouted as they shrank back from Germanno’s blue roan. The others around her took up the cry, and a few of the men sank to their knees and began to pray.
At the river, the roan splashed across the shallows in a series of plunges and half-jumps until he made his way up the far bank, where Germanno stopped him, dropped Ximene out of the saddle onto her feet and let the horse shake himself. Only then did he look back. “They are not following us,” he said.
“Why should they?” she demanded. “To be carried away like a sack of flour—” She finished her thought with a gesture that showed aggravation and disgust.
“At least you were carried away,” Germanno said. “They were prepared to burn you.”