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

      It was with great difficulty that I convinced these girls and women that they misjudged me, and perhaps the Evil One as well. No doubt one or more of them managed somehow to achieve her wicked aim, without my help. As for my own alleged dealings with the devil, I had long ago taken solemn oaths of fealty to his great Opponent; and for a Drakulya such pledges are not to be set aside.

      Despite, or perhaps because of, the stubborn convictions of my breathing acquaintances regarding my spiritual condition, I became ever more firmly convinced that what had happened to me had no connection with the supernatural. Thanks to my own supremely stubborn will—and to the permissive will, at least, of God—the death by sword cuts that I had undergone was no true death. My abode was neither heaven nor hell nor purgatory. Rather it was the grave I slept in daily, my body capable of passing up out of it and back again like so much smoke during the hours of darkness. And this, my earthen sanctuary, was dug out of nothing more or less than the soil of my homeland, in which I had been born.

      My lovers were not the only ones who observed me during this period. Certain other peasants of the region accidentally caught glimpses of my mysterious form, near dawn or dusk, and mostly at a distance. These were beginning to whisper that I still lived, or at any rate still walked. So began my local reputation as a revenant, which was to grow gradually over the centuries.

      But what the bulk of the population might know about me, or what superstitious nonsense they might imagine, concerned me little, particularly in the first year or two after my conversion. Very little had meaning for me beyond my own affairs. The women who were my lovers, and one or two other peasants who became my loyal if somewhat demented servants—who but a madman would have served a vampire then?—were always bringing me more news than I cared to hear concerning current events.

      I listened, more than once, to the story of how my half-brother Radu, called the Handsome, had been confirmed as Prince of Wallachia in my stead. And I heard what I thought was reliable confirmation of what had happened to other members of my family. I was perfectly certain that the only ones I cared about were dead.

      What might be the current state of the realm that I had ruled, and exactly what had befallen the few human beings that I loved—these questions seemed hardly relevant to me then. The monolithic concentration of willpower necessary to achieve what I had achieved in the way of exceptional survival, and the rage for revenge that was its corollary, had left me almost unable to think of anything else. My attempt to revenge myself upon Ronay had been essentially a failure, despite the fact that he was dead. He might very well have died anyway, of his infected wound. Perhaps all I had accomplished on my invasion of the monastery was to hasten his end and lessen his suffering.

      During this period I was myself quite mad by ordinary standards—of course observers were not lacking who would have pronounced me thoroughly insane long before the day on which I fell with fatal sword wounds. But now, in the midst of a slow mental and physical recovery, the fever of combat was still on me, the heat of that brief savage struggle in which my flesh had died and been reborn. My sense of time, along with much else, was still awry.

      The only news reports to which I paid the least attention were those concerning the two surviving scoundrels of the three who had struck me down. Well before I was able to exercise sufficient control over my new powers and limitations to have a chance of going after them, I heard to my dismay that they had both departed for Italy, there to hire out as mercenaries.

      Perhaps, I thought, the traitors had experienced some difficulty in collecting their blood-price from the Sultan and had failed to establish themselves in positions of power at home. Whatever their reasons, a sojourn in Italy was a common enough interlude in the careers of European soldiers of the time. Indeed, I had once visited that chronically troubled land myself, on a secret mission for the King of Hungary.

      The news of my enemies’ departure hit me hard, and of course there was no question in my mind that I must contrive some way to follow them. But if their townhouses in Bucharest had been too far away for me to reach, in my present state of dependence on my grave, how in the name of Heaven was I ever going to lay my hands on them beyond the Alps?

      I need not dwell on my first abortive attempts to extend my effective radius of travel. I soon found that I could rest without reentering my actual grave at every dawn. Any dark, secluded spot, where I could lie in contact with the earth, would do. But having passed the border of my homeland, it became necessary for me to turn back each night as dawn approached. I was unable to obtain my necessary daytime rest in any soil but that of my native country.

      Forcing my unabated frenzy for revenge to yield to cold calculation, I took thought on the matter. At first the restriction, like several others to which I now was subject, seemed absurd. If by my iron will I had been able to fight off death itself, then why should I not, by a lesser effort, overcome this seeming triviality of dependence on my home earth? Absurd or not, that was how the matter stood, and so it would remain. How very human, I think now, what excellent proof of the vampire’s persistent humanity: Our race can accomplish prodigies, but stumbles nonetheless on many matters that seem small.

      There was no way around the obstacle,