A Matter Of Taste by Fred Saberhagen (best reads .TXT) 📗

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, 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 re-excavated 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. Before embracing my passionate little witch I had scarcely begun to understand that fact; but before our first coupling was concluded, both of us were very firmly convinced.

      Ah, Constantia, the first love of my second life! Surely your maidenhood, in the breathing, mundane sense, had been lost long before that night; but on that night you were still as virginal as I was myself in the delights of vampirism. Constantia, where are you now?

      In that infancy, dawn-time, childhood of my second life, other women, of course, soon began to appear. Folk who consider that keeping score in such matters is of great importance might say that there were a great many such women, of diverse social classes. My new sensuality having been awakened, I began actively, on subsequent evenings, to seek them out. Yet during the months following my introduction to the little gypsy, with maddening effect upon all my plans both serious and erotic, the great bulk of my time was consumed, wasted, in those lengthy periods when I could only lie stuporous in the earth.

      Slowly, very slowly, as those first months of my reborn and transformed sexuality stretched imperceptibly into years, I accustomed myself to the joys and difficulties, peculiar powers and strange limitations of my new existence. With regular feeding, upon both animal and human blood, the wounds that had sent me to my grave healed entirely, even the visible scars disappearing in good time. Mine could have been a heartily enjoyable existence, all in all. But I was prevented from making any philosophical evaluation of my condition, as much by my obsessive craving for revenge as by the lethargy that tended to set in whenever the blood-craving had been temporarily sated.

      My two surviving enemies, Basarab and Bogdan, for whom my hatred was as fresh and deep as ever, were seldom absent from my thoughts. But they were not to be found anywhere in the nearby countryside—someone had told me they were gone to Bucharest. It was obvious that if I was ever to come within reach of them, I must find a way of breaking free of my dusk-to-dawn existence, that constrained me to remain always within a few hours’ travel of my grave. I seemed to remember, from talk I had overheard on the night of my burial, that there had been a plan to move me to another grave, in a hidden spot under one of my castles. But for whatever reason, no one ever appeared to try to put such a scheme into effect.

      Constantia and I continued for a time to see each other frequently. Slowly, gradually, as I say, I grew accustomed to my new mode of existence. Up until this time—despite all the talk of moroi in the countryside—I had had no contact at all with other vampires, knew no master of this mode of life to guide me through my apprenticeship, no local community of my race to bid me welcome. Still, as my first affair with the young would-be witch had demonstrated, the state of being which I had now entered was not entirely unknown to the local populace. And I began to understand more fully, from one after another of the young women who became my lovers, how my condition was regarded by their people and the various names by which they thought it should be called. Then, I thought, there must have been others like me, in the past. Where were they now?

      The superstitious awe in which I was held was sometimes amusing, sometimes useful, sometimes maddening. I do believe that every single one of my lovers, during that distant epoch, were certain that I must be somehow in alliance with the Evil One; and more than one of them earnestly sought my help in establishing such a connection for herself, as if no greater boon could be