Twelve (44 page)

'How do you mean?'

'There's not much of the Grande Armée left compared with what came. Thirty thousand out of half a million? It's about the emperor, not the army now.'

'And why not? Napoleon is a great man.'

'You think so?'

'He makes my life a lot easier.'

'So Dmitry was quite wrong. You were never on our side?' I asked, feeling more vindicated than shocked by the proposition.

'Not at all. If Napoleon had defeated Russia it would have meant French hegemony over the whole of Europe. And that would have meant peace – a peace you and I would have despised for different reasons, but nonetheless inimical to both of our lifestyles. True, there would still be war with Britain, but I've never been much use at sea.'

'So you just always support the underdog?'

'I like to help maintain the balance of power.'

'So now you switch sides to France when she is weak?'

'Exactly.'

'How long have you been doing this?' I asked with genuine curiosity. 'How many times have you switched sides? How many wars have you tried to perpetuate for your own ends?' I was prevaricating unnecessarily. 'What I mean is, Iuda, when did you become a vampire?'

'An interesting question,' he replied, but one which he was not going to answer.

I had not noticed it begin, but as our conversation paused, I heard that the few birds which for some reason chose to remain in the trees during the winter months had begun their daily song.

The pre-dawn dark blue of the sky was only just becoming visible, but already they had noticed it and reacted to it. I felt a little sorry. There was so much more that I wanted to ask of Iuda and discover from him, but I could not afford to be sentimental. I could so easily learn to regret any opportunity for survival that I might offer him.

'Might I be allowed to smoke?' he asked politely.

I could see no harm in it. I shouted to the guard, 'Have you got a pipe? Or a cigar?' He came over and handed me a cigar. It was a thin, withered offering – much like the man who offered it – made
à l'Espagnole
, with just paper to wrap it. It was possibly all he had. I gave a coin in exchange, paying – in my sympathy for his instinctive willingness to hand over even his personal possessions at a senior officer's behest – a similar price to that I would have received during my days as a tobacco vendor in occupied Moscow.

Again Iuda eyed the guard, looking for a chance to flee. I lit the cigar from the fire and offered it to Iuda. He gestured to me with his bound hands and gave an expression of humble entreaty. I placed the cigar between my lips and then cut his hands free with his own knife, before handing the cigar to him. His feet were still tied, and I had the guards with me. Besides, it would soon be dawn and Iuda would be no more threat to anyone. I felt safe.

'Thank you,' he said, inhaling deeply. I sat back down and threw the knife once again into the snow between my feet. Knowing that time was short, I searched my brain for any other questions I could put to him. One immediately occurred to me.

'How was it that you managed to get from Kurilovo back to Moscow so quickly?'

'By horse,' he answered simply. 'The same as you.'

'But it took me eight hours, and you got there ahead of me.'

'Well, I left before you did.'

'What I mean is,' I asked, annoyed that he was, quite sincerely, missing my point, 'how did you travel in daylight?'

'Ah, I see. One of the many curses that the vampire must put up with. I often wonder whether there are any advantages to it at all.'

'The immortality, surely,' I said. It was Domnikiia's voice that had put it in my head.

'Ideally, yes, but not in practical terms. Did Pyetr prove to be immortal? Or Matfei? And what about that boy – Pavel? His vampire existence spanned only a few weeks. Vampires are so easy to kill.'

'I've not found it so easy.'

'Oh, you have, Lyosha! Once you know what to do. And even if you don't, the daylight thing must be a misery. Thousands must die by accident just because someone happens to open the curtains.' He failed to conceal the smirk that broke on his face, pleased at his own ridicule.

'So why do people willingly choose that path?' I asked.

'As you say, some are fools who do it for the immortality. Others do it for the liberty.'

'Liberty?'

'Yes, liberty. I doubt vampires have any desire for equality and I know that they have no conception of fraternity, but isn't liberty what all men seek?'

It was as though he had been reading my mind as I had lain beside Domnikiia, waiting to join her in that world of immoral immortality. Still I was compelled to hear what Iuda had to say – to understand what the appeal was that could turn a man willingly into a monster. 'Liberty from what?' I asked.

'Most men want liberty from many different things, but all seek – and few achieve – liberty from themselves. That is what the man who drinks the warm, fresh blood of a vampire seeks. That is what I too have found – to be unconstrained by conscience or by God – to revel in the ultimate pleasure that lies in the pain of others, both as its witness and its instigator, without the clammy undertow of one's own . . . sentiment.' He spoke the final word as though it tasted of rotting fish, then he smiled. 'You of all people, Lyosha, know that.'

He glanced pointedly at the scars on my left hand as he spoke, but I knew that he could not be aware how much his words rang true.

'And that makes becoming a vampire worthwhile?' I asked, both fascinated and repelled by what he had said.

He paused and bent his head forward. Its shadow, long and distorted in the low sun behind him, reached as far as my feet.

'I don't know,' he said wearily. 'There are so many restrictions – so much that they must miss out on. The desire to kill is so much intermingled with the desire to eat – much like in humans. The first kill of the night delights both predilections, but as they become less hungry, they also lose (to an extent) the urge to kill. By surfeiting, the appetite sickens. How much better it is to separate the two; to eat for hunger and to kill for pleasure. Do you hunt, Lyosha?'

'Occasionally,' I said.

'Then perhaps you will understand what I mean. More than that, though, there are straightforward, mechanical problems that make the life of a vampire so unappealing. For instance, have you ever considered, Lyosha, that a vampire can never look into the eyes of his victim as life departs?
You
can, and I'm sure you have. You know the experience of seeing a man's face as, thanks to you, he breathes his last. Whether you count it as a pleasure or not, you know the experience. A vampire must bite at the neck, and so can never take that pleasure.

'Now, with my knife . . .' He leaned forward, casting his cigar aside, and reached forward for the knife. I was so enthralled by what he was saying and his movement was so appropriate to the conversation, that I almost let him. Only at the last moment did I kick his hand to one side. He sat back upright and raised his palms to me in apology. The guard I had spoken to glanced towards us at the movement, but did nothing.

'With my knife,' Iuda continued, 'I can inflict all the pain that a vampire can with his teeth and so much more, and yet I'm still free to gaze into the face of my companion and see every exquisite reaction to every excruciating action I perform. And by joining up with the others – the Oprichniki, I believe you called us as a group – I had eleven other so much more brutal weapons whom I could let get on with inflicting the pain, whilst I sat back and experienced the pleasure.'

As he spoke, I found myself confronted with the memory of the scene in the barn near Kurilovo. Each of the Oprichniki had bowed to Iuda's every suggestion of what they should do. He had scarcely touched the man or ever tasted his flesh, and yet he had been the one who had taken the most pleasure from the situation. The sun, now risen in the east behind Iuda's head, made to seem larger by its low declination, formed an ironic halo.

'What freedom, I wonder, do they really have – the vampires – that I have not also achieved?' asked Iuda.

'Achieved?'

'You are right, as ever, Lyosha. I cannot claim it as any achievement. It is something I have always had – something I was born with – something that most men can only gain by becoming a vampire. I have the best of both worlds. I can bask in the sun. I can eat a normal meal. I could even father a child if I wanted. Yet still I can indulge in the ultimate bliss that lies in the unutterable, absolute, unfettered suffering of another human being.'

'Did the other vampires never recognize you for what you are?' I asked.

'For what I am? I could ask the same question of you. You had no idea that the twelve of us were vampires at first. And then when you did, you had no idea that I was not. There's no magic to it. I act as they do. I feel as they do. I kill as they do. They're not going to notice that occasionally I like to go outside during the day – not without killing themselves in the process. Zmyeevich, of course, is a different matter. He's been a vampire for a long, long time. But whatever his suspicions about me may have been, he has his own reasons for not pursuing them.'

I sat in silence, facing him. Still today, I cannot determine exactly when during the conversation the truth had come to me. It was astonishing, but not revolutionary. Iuda was exactly what he claimed he was. He was not a vampire in much the same way that Maksim was not French. He aspired to be a vampire. He behaved like a vampire. But occasionally he was able to benefit from the fact that he was not a vampire. Maks himself had known that he deserved to be treated as though he were French. Similarly, though he might in some minor, legalistic way be human, Iuda deserved to be treated as though he were a vampire. The problem was that the light of the sun could no longer do the work for me. It was a problem and a pleasure. I would be happy to see him die in a more traditional manner.

I rose to my feet and faced him. 'I think we should be able to arrange a firing squad before we break camp. You are, after all, a French spy.' I began to raise my hand to summon the guard.

Iuda frowned and turned away from me with a look of impatient disappointment on his face. He shook his head and tutted to himself quietly. 'So, you see, there was never any prospect of her becoming a vampire,' he said. There was some point on to which our conversation had not turned, and he wanted it to.

'Margarita, you mean?'

'I wonder when it was she realized that she was unchanged – that she would remain mortal.'

'I think you demonstrated her mortality pretty quickly,' I snapped.

'What do you mean?'

'By killing her straight after.'

Iuda smiled a tight, knowing smile that barely resisted breaking into a laugh. 'Tell me, Lyosha,' he asked. 'What was it that first made
you
believe that it was not Dominique you had seen me with at the window?'

I thought about it for a moment, but there was no trick to it – the answer was obvious. 'The fact that she hadn't become a vampire.'

'Which means . . .'

'Which means?'

Iuda sighed. 'It's really no fun for me if you can't be bothered to work it out for yourself.' I looked at him blankly. 'You concluded that Dominique had not been with me because if she had been with a vampire she would have become a vampire,' he explained, like a schoolteacher.

I don't know whether I had been dull-witted or whether it was a conclusion that I wanted to avoid coming to, but now Iuda had brought it to a point where I could not ignore it. I sank back on to my seat. Could it have after all been Domnikiia that I had seen with Iuda at the window and not Margarita? Of course she had not become a vampire; Iuda had no ability to make her into one. She could have sucked every last drop of blood from the wound in his chest and it would have had no effect.

But she had believed that it would. Had she awoken that morning with exactly the same sense of surprise that I had later felt, as she discovered there had been no change in her? Had she found to her horror that she could stand comfortably in the bright morning sunlight and begun to cry as she realized that it meant she would still one day die a mortal death? She would have had to think quickly to then pretend that it was Margarita that I had seen. No, that was impossible. She must have decided to say it was Margarita beforehand. Either Iuda had told her to, or they had planned it together. There had been a great deal of careful choreography to ensure that, watching from across the square, I only ever saw Domnikiia from behind. Had Margarita known about the plan? Domnikiia had seemed genuinely shocked when we had found Margarita's body. Genuinely? How could I now regard anything about her as being genuine? A woman who would gladly become a vampire would hardly baulk at the death of her best friend being a part of the process.

It could not be true, and yet I could not see any fault in it. I myself had been sure it was Domnikiia that I had seen with Iuda right up until the point I had discovered she was not a vampire. Now I had a better explanation for that. Was I really fool enough to mistake Margarita for Domnikiia just because their hair was similar – I who knew every inch of Domnikiia's body? There must have been something more that I had seen, without consciously registering, that had told me it was Domnikiia, and now I knew it to be true. All her sorrow and anguish in the days that followed had been very convincing, but then, that was her speciality. I heard Domnikiia speaking to me, but she only repeated one whispered word over and over. How much she must have been laughing to herself when she had first said it to me. '
Prostak!
Prostak! Prostak!
'

Iuda placed a consolatory hand on my knee, saying, 'She did it for you, Lyosha. She thought she could be with you for ever.' He was standing now. At some point, unnoticed by me, he had retrieved his knife and had cut the ropes around his feet with it. I heard a shout from one of the soldiers guarding us to the other, but he was too late. The other had momentarily turned his back on us and Iuda was now behind him. A brief stroke from Iuda's toothed blades across his neck and he fell to the ground, the pure, white snow around him sullied by an ever-growing stain of red as blood haemorrhaged from his wounded neck, unhindered by the grasping of his dying hands.