‘It was a yao-kuei, wasn’t it?’ Lydia whispered the name by which she’d first seen the revenants, three years previously in Peking. She pulled her tent-mate Nurse Danvers’s greatcoat more tightly around her nightdress and dressing gown. Despite the small oil-stove beside which she sat, the tent was freezing. ‘Jamie says draugar is the Icelandic word for creatures like that.’
‘James would know such matters.’ Don Simon brought her another cup of cocoa, as he had last night. There were times that Lydia felt the whole clearing station lived on cocoa.
Nurse Danvers had been coming off her rounds when Lydia returned, had helped her wash off all trace of her attacker’s blood and had reaffirmed that Lydia had no cuts or scratches through which that blood could possibly have entered her system. The moment she’d finished this chore she had inexplicably (to her, at least) sunk down, fully dressed, on her own cot and dropped into Sleeping-Beauty-like slumber. Lydia had just been tucking a blanket over her when Don Simon had appeared, silently, at her side.
‘I find it distressing,’ the vampire went on, ‘that the Scandinavians would require a word for, as you say, “creatures like that”. Yet neither Antonio nor Basilio – nor indeed, any of the Undead to whom I have spoken, on either side of No Man’s Land – have mentioned seeing these Others.’
Lydia set the cup on the tent’s wooden floor beside her cot, frowning. ‘You’re right.’ A moment before, her revulsion at the thing that had attacked her, had consumed her – the deeper terror that she might somehow have been infected by the revenant’s blood, that her own body might distort into a misshapen horror while her mind disappeared into the collective semi-consciousness of the brutes . Now that revulsion vanished before the puzzle of where this particular revenant had come from.
‘I haven’t heard the men in the wards speak of them, either,’ she added. ‘And they do speak of the vampires.’
She frowned, remembering poor Brodie (He goes to hospital in Calais tomorrow, I’ll have to bid him good luck before he leaves …). She glanced across at Don Simon, warming his thin hands before the stove. She assumed he’d also examined his own flesh for any possibility of transfer of blood, in the three-quarters of an hour since he’d set her down outside the dim lights of the camp. Did he make poor Captain Palfrey check his back? How did he explain matters to that well-meaning young man?
She wondered if Palfrey could see, as she did, the glassy claws that the vampire state caused to grow in place of the fingernails. If Simon had used the psychic skill of the Undead to block from the young man’s mind the huge scars that crossed the left side of his face and neck, where the talons of the Master vampire of Constantinople had raked him in a struggle, five years before, to save Lydia’s life.
She herself couldn’t always see them.
She went on, ‘My assistant, Mr Dermott, tells me some of the men say they’ve seen a ghost ambulance-wagon, or ghost stretcher-bearers …’
‘That’s Antonio and Basilio.’ Don Simon’s slight gesture was a dismissal. ‘They often hunt in an ambulance-wagon.’
Lydia turned her face away, for a moment too shaken to speak. Tears flooded her eyes in spite of the fact that she knew, as he had said, that they preyed only on those dying already …
I should hate them all. I should hate HIM.
Don Simon watched her face without expression, a pale shape in the dark of the tent.
How can he be both things to me? Both friend and monster?
She was well aware how meticulously careful he was, never to let her or Jamie see him kill. And it works, she thought despairingly. If we don’t SEE it, part of our minds can pretend it isn’t happening.
Good heavens, maybe we DID see something of the kind and he made us forget it. Can he DO that?
She wouldn’t put it past him.
She tasted over on her tongue the words, trying them out. I don’t want your protection. I don’t want you watching over me. I want you to go away.
She guessed that he wouldn’t. I’ll just never see him at it again … or maybe now and then, a glimpse from the corner of my eye … ‘We need to go back there.’ She looked back at him once again in the dim glow of the stove. ‘Now, before first light destroys its flesh. Jamie says sunlight doesn’t burn them as quickly as it does vampires, but it will crumble their flesh and their bones to dust. Is that true?’
‘It is, Mistress.’
‘Then I need one to study. The blood on my frock is too mixed up with mud to examine clearly, even with Major Overstreet’s microscope. And I should talk to men in that part of the trenches.’ She opened her locker at the foot of her bunk and brought out her spare uniform (I’ll need to talk to Storeman Pratt tomorrow about another one – I am NOT putting the bloodied one on again no matter HOW many times it’s boiled!). ‘Someone else must have seen it. We can at least get some idea of what direction it was coming from. Or, if it was German … Even if there were others with it, they’ll have moved on by this time …’
‘It shall be as you command.’
He vanished – or seemed to vanish, momentarily blocking her perception of his movement. Shuddering in the cold, Lydia dressed herself again quickly (And God bless the woman who invented the brassiere!) and gathered up the bloodied, mud-slathered garments in an old pillowcase. Handling them gingerly, she took a few minutes to cut swatches from the least-contaminated bloodstains, which she stowed in a candy tin at the bottom of her locker. By the time she checked her watch and buttoned on Danvers’s borrowed greatcoat, and slipped from the tent with the incinerator-bound pillowcase clutched at arms-length in one hand, it was quarter past two.
Lydia recognized – vaguely – the place where the staff-car lurched to a stop. The damp night, though windless, was very cold, the far-off crashing of the guns to the north like metallic thunder. The effects of the cocoa were wearing off and Lydia felt tired to death and chilled to the marrow of her bones. She leaned forward to the front seat to glimpse Captain Palfrey’s wristwatch – her own was the old-fashioned kind, pinned to her breast under a layer of greatcoat – and saw that it was past three.
‘Will you be all right?’ she whispered to Don Simon. First light would be in two hours. She estimated it was nearly two muddy, slogging miles from where they halted – in a welter of shell-holes and barbed wire – to the communication trench where they had been attacked.
‘John has orders to return you safely to the clearing station, should circumstances separate me from you.’ He took her hand in his own gloved one and led her toward the remains of the reserve trench, the glow of the shuttered lantern he carried swinging again across the glisten of mud, shattered steel and the red spark of rat eyes in the dark. As they descended the ladder once again she hoped Simon’s sense of smell was more discerning than her own in the quagmire of stench: rotting flesh, old blood, cordite, feces, smoke … A whole pack of revenants could be just around the bend of the trench and I’d never smell them.
The communications trenches were dug in a series of angles to protect against blast, resulting in the sense of being trapped in a wet, filthy labyrinth. On the walls of the trench boards had been roughly fastened, arrows drawn in chalk or paint with directions written above: 1st Scots, 2nd Lancs, or, simply and more prosaically, Rear. Bogs … Without them, Lydia couldn’t imagine how anyone could traverse this maze of head-high walls, zigzagged defiles and caved-in dugouts.
She found herself clinging to Don Simon’s hand.
‘Did you see his uniform?’ she asked. ‘Whether he was British or German? If these things are multiplying in the German trenches …’
‘I would have heard,’ returned the vampire. ‘Many of us haunt both sides of the lines. In any event, what use would such creatures be? Unless their minds could be directed and controlled the danger would be too great. No general in his senses would take such risk.’
‘But that may be why this woman – this dark-haired nurse – is seeking a vampire, don’t you see?’ Lydia glanced quickly across into her companion’s face. ‘You’ve said – many times – that a vampire can govern the actions of a living mind. Can summon at will those whose eyes he has looked into, can … can even sometimes put himself literally into another’s mind, if his victim is drugged, or insane. They’re seeking a vampire …’
‘Then they are fools,’ returned Don Simon calmly. ‘An old vampire, whose strength has waxed with time and who has been taught to manipulate the minds of the living, perhaps. A master vampire, or someone like Antonio, whose master instructed him in these ancient skills … Not all masters trust their fledglings to that extent. And so old a vampire will have doubtless learned not to put faith in the living – leaving aside the fact that no vampire, of any age, cares the purchase of a button about the wars of the living. We do not care, Mistress. As Antonio told you earlier tonight: we do not care. Not about our homelands, not about our families, not about those whom we loved in life. Nothing exists for us but the hunt. We know any other ties to be dangerous, and ties to the living, most dangerous of all.’
He paused for an instant where the communications trench in which they now picked their way branched, then turned right (Welches, said the sign), his strength helping Lydia find her feet where the duckboards were broken and the icy, filthy water soaked through her shoes.
‘The Master of Prague, where these things have long bred, and the Master of Peking, have both affirmed to me, that even the strongest master vampire has no dominion over the minds of these things. If this nurse you have seen— Carajo!’ He flinched at the sudden, earth-shaking thunder of an explosion that sounded nearly on top of them. Orange glare filled the sky. Another roar followed, and the splattering of torn-up earth, followed by the shouting and cursing of men.
‘We’re almost there!’ Lydia seized Don Simon’s hand again, her heart in her throat but her mind still calculating: That shell was at least a hundred yards away …
Around the corner ahead …
She snatched the lantern from his hand and slammed back the slide – no further need of precaution against snipers, not with what sounded like a full-on barrage starting – and ran, digging in her pocket for the rolled-up empty sandbags she’d brought to carry her prize. The ground jerked and the duckboards underfoot suddenly erupted with fleeing rats, swarming from their holes and pouring in a gray river up the side of the trench, as if the Pied Piper had blown his horn somewhere in the hellish cacophony of the darkness. If there’s a push on I’ll lose this thing, or it’ll be buried in a barrage …
She heard Don Simon swear in Spanish behind her, and a shell went overhead with a noise like an oncoming train.
Am I being intrepid or stupid?
Her heart in her throat, not giving herself time to think, Lydia whipped around the angle of the trench and her lantern-light fell on the huddled black mass of the revenant, and a smaller form leant over it. A woman.
Lydia stumbled to a halt. A shuttered lantern stood near the revenant’s severed head, and by its dim light Lydia saw the woman bend over the hacked and bloody body, doing something she couldn’t see. As the figure raised its face, she had a momentary vision of a heart-shaped countenance framed in pulled-back dark hair, a rich mouth twisted in resolution and shock. The gleam of a silver cross, dangling around her neck.
Something else by the lantern, a satchel …
Another explosion shook the ground, closer this time, and the woman grabbed for something in her pocket. Don Simon’s hand closed on Lydia’s elbow and Lydia was dragged back around the protective angle of the trench. She saw the woman rise from beside the corpse – it was still aimlessly clawing around it with one hand – and flee down the trench, turning to throw something …
Don Simon yanked Lydia along the trench, and she realized what the other woman had flung instants before they ducked around the next angle and the massive shock wave of noise, oily heat and flying debris almost knocked her off her feet. Grenade …
Men surged, shouting, out of another communications trench, as the barrage intensified over their heads. Yells of ‘Get out of it, boys!’ mingled with the screaming whistles of officers and bellowed commands to re-form ranks. Don Simon’s arm circled Lydia’s waist and he dragged her along, slithering expertly through the struggling bodies. He froze as a shell howled overhead and pulled her back, judging the sound of it, Lydia thought … And sure enough, some dozen yards ahead of them the crash of its explosion made her head reverberate, and dirt and mud splattered her as the trenches caved in under the blow.
The noise hurt her bones, and the mud splattered on her glasses made it nearly impossible to see. Men formed up around them again into ranks, which flowed through the communications trenches, Don Simon swimming against the tide. They came into a clear space of trench, the walls broken into craters by shells and the duckboards shattered underfoot. Men clattered past them, bearers carrying rolled-up blankets or the new-style litters, feet sinking – as Lydia’s sank – into bottomless mud. Twice she stumbled, and glancing down saw she’d tripped over corpses. But every new explosion filled the air above the trenches with flying shrapnel and splattering bits of red-hot metal – I hope Captain Palfrey has taken cover somewhere …
He evidently had. His hands reached down from the trench-ladder as Lydia was helped up out of the darkness, and it was he who half-guided, half-carried her toward the road down which men were already rushing toward the trenches, to re-enforce the existing troops against the German ‘push’ that everybody knew was going to come the moment it was light.
I have to get back to the clearing station. The wounded are going to be pouring in any minute …
‘I’m afraid the car was commandeered, M’am,’ gasped Captain Palfrey, as they stumbled over the broken ground. ‘I got their names, and units. The colonel’s going to have words to say to their commanding officers—’
‘The colonel?’ Lydia stumbled, and sought in her pockets for some piece of cloth sufficiently un-soaked to make headway against the muck that smeared her glasses. The shell-fire was somewhat behind them now, except for the occasional strays, and men still raced past them, packs clattering, rifles in hand. Minds focused on what lay ahead.
Four miles back to camp …
‘Colonel Simon.’
The first threads of daylight had not yet begun to dilute the darkness. Don Simon presumably knew how long it would take him to get to a secure shelter – God knows where! Reaction was setting in, and Lydia had to cling to Palfrey’s arm to keep from falling as they plowed through the wilderness of mud and old shell-holes, her wet skirts slapping and tangling her feet. Rats still swarmed. Once the fighting stopped, the creatures would stream back, to feed on the dead.
Lydia thought she glimpsed, away in the darkness, the pale shape of an ambulance-wagon jolting, and wondered if it was really an ambulance-wagon or just Antonio and Basilio.
Passionately, cold and exasperation and despair overwhelming her, Lydia cried, ‘Don’t you know what he really is?’
Captain Palfrey took both her hands in his – warm and strong, like Jamie’s, the capable hands of a man who understands horses and guns and tools – and his blue eyes held a gentle understanding. From his pocket he produced a clean – clean! – handkerchief, and stood while she took off her glasses and wiped the lenses.
Then with a little smile he tapped the side of his nose and said, ‘Well, M’am, it’s all a deep dark secret, of course … And he’s warned me that all kinds of the most ridiculous stories are circulated about him. Nursery-tale stuff you’d hardly credit, like a combination of Count Dracula and Bluebeard. But I’ve guessed the truth.’ His eyes shone in the first whisper of the coming dawn. ‘He – and his Department – are probably England’s best hope of winning the war.’