Mozart’s Blood Page 33

  Octavia had checked no luggage. She fidgeted impatiently as the passport control officer flipped through her much-used passport, and as soon as he let her through, she hurried into the terminal. She found an exchange and fidgeted more while the agent exchanged her euros for Czech crowns with their sepia portraits of emperors and saints. She stuffed the bills into her bag and followed the signs to the taxi stand. From her prodigious memory, she dredged up the name of the road where the elders’ mansion was. She knew no number. There had been none in 1907.

  She was fortunate to encounter an enterprising cab driver, who laughed over her predicament and listened to her explanations of how the place looked the last time she saw it, of the ivy-hung walls and the little stone gatehouse. The man’s English was paltry, but his German was quite good, at least as good as Octavia’s. His cab was passably new and had been outfitted by the state with a GPS device. After a drive of thirty minutes, with a mechanical feminine voice reciting instructions, they came to Mohács Road and began cruising down it.

  The scenery had changed, of course. Wars and their subsequent political upheavals, a burgeoning population, and membership in the EU had brought a flourish of new construction. Other estates flanked the road, filling spaces Octavia remembered as orchards and fields. The cab’s headlights picked out elaborate scrolled-iron gates and elegant landscaping. But the same gentle mountain still sloped up above the road, and the inviting sparkle of blue lakes showed here and there between the rooftops and the landscaped gardens. In the distance, the red roofs of Prague glowed through the gathering darkness.

  The cab driver kept his speed down, chattering away to Octavia in German sprinkled with oddly anachronistic English phrases, perhaps picked up from someone who had learned English in another time. Octavia answered absently. They had been on the road for perhaps ten minutes when she cried, “È qui!”

  She didn’t realize until he looked at her oddly that she had spoken in Italian. He grinned as he pulled the cab to the side of the road. “Signorina, parla italiano? Ho pensato che fosse americana.”

  “Yes, I am American,” she said. “But I’ve been working in Milan.”

  He nodded as if this were perfectly normal and went around to open her door for her. She climbed out with her purse and her little night case. She paid him in crowns, and he stood with the money in his hand, looking dubiously at the dark, overgrown grounds of the mansion, the shuttered windows of the gatehouse. He turned to her, his brow furrowed. “Si sente al sicuro, signorina?”

  She gave him a rueful smile. “I know it looks awful,” she said. “But I’m all right. I promise. Molto gentile, signore.”

  With evident reluctance, he climbed back in his cab. As he drove away, she saw him looking at her in his rearview mirror as if expecting her to change her mind.

  She waited until he was out of sight before she walked up the moss-covered cobblestone path to the gatehouse and knocked firmly, and loudly, on the door.

  Hélène had soon found that baths at the elders’ compound were taken in a small building behind the main house. Kirska led her through the maze of corridors and stairs, out a back door, and on to the bathhouse. A huge, battered tin tub steamed on a floor of flagstone. The workers who had just filled it slipped away the moment Hélène appeared. A fire burned in a small grate, and an oil lamp shed yellow light over wooden benches and a low table holding soap and towels.

  As Hélène began to undo the fastenings of her short suit jacket, Kirska stepped forward as if to help her. Hélène said, “No,” shrinking away from her touch.

  Kirska gave a short nod, her mouth twisting. She pulled a painted screen forward and unfolded it so the tub was hidden from the door. Before she left, she raised her eyebrows as if to ask if there was anything else. Hélène shook her head.

  The water was clean and hot. Hélène put a fresh cake of soap on the edge of the tub before she draped her suit and shirtwaist over the screen and folded her lingerie into a tidy pile. She unpinned her hair and stepped into the warm water. She sank beneath the surface with a sigh, letting the water lap at her chin. Her hair trailed in wet strands over her shoulders as she laid her head back against the edge of the tub. She closed her eyes, giving herself up to the warmth.

  She thought she might have drowsed for a time. When a wave of cool air touched her wet shoulders, she opened her eyes. She hadn’t heard the door, but she thought Kirska must have come back. She called out, “Kirska? I’m not done yet. I want to wash my…”

  She stopped speaking. The smell that permeated the bathhouse was unmistakable. She sat up, catching her wet hair back with one hand. She snapped, “What are you doing here?”

  There was no answer, but the smell intensified, and there was a rustle of fabric against the flagstones. Hélène thought of jumping out of the bath, but she would be wet and shivering. “What do you want?”

  The creature, ancient and wavering, put a spotted hand on the edge of the screen, then shuffled forward to stand beside it. Her hood had fallen back, showing a thatch of thin white hair, raggedly chopped. Hélène stared up at her face, fully revealed now in the light of the oil lamp. She expected to feel the same horror she had experienced earlier in the day, but this time, what she felt was sorrow. And sympathy.

  Anastasia struggled to speak past her teeth, emitting only an unintelligible sibilance.

  Hélène said, “What? I can’t understand you.”

  The ancient tried again, leaning forward a little, as if propinquity might help. Her skin was an indeterminate color, as if whatever melanin had been there once had leached away over the years. She peered from beneath her sagging eyelids and croaked, “Vesssssel.”

  At least, that was what Hélène thought she was trying to say. Her lower lip could not quite reach her upper teeth to form the initial consonant. Hélène let her hair drop back into the water, and she folded her arms around herself. Her exposed shoulders prickled with chill. “Vessel? Is that what you said?”

  The ancient bobbed her head, once. “Sssssing.”

  Hélène stared at her, oddly touched. “Yes. I will sing. But tomorrow, not tonight.”

  The ancient nodded again and started the laborious movement of turning. Hélène said, “Wait. Anastasia.” The creature’s head swiveled painfully toward her. “Why do you call me that? Vessel?”

  Anastasia’s mouth flexed horribly as she said, “Lasssst.”

  Then she was gone, leaving Hélène in her cooling bath, staring in confusion at the flames flickering in the grate.

  There was a pianoforte at the opposite end of the parlor where Hélène had met the ancients for the first time. When the moment came, Hélène found that a generous fire had been laid in a yawning fireplace, and the end of the room that had been entirely in shadow now glowed with light. An assortment of furniture had been arranged in a semicircle around the pianoforte. Eusebio, Henri, and Anastasia were already there, each with their layers of clothing folded and draped around them.

  Hélène expected the pianoforte to be dusty and out of tune, as neglected as the rest of the parlor. She opened the lid of the instrument and touched the keys. She struck a C chord, and then G, the dominant. Eyebrows lifted, she rolled the subdominant, F, with both hands now, and then again C.

  Ugo, taking a chair nearby, chuckled. “I told you,” he said in an undertone. “Music is their only remaining passion.”

  Hélène pulled out the stool and sat down. She had no score, but of course she needed none. She glanced up at Zdenka Milosch, who sat on an eighteenth-century French love seat, turned so that her half of it faced the pianoforte.

  “I never really learned to play,” Hélène warned her. “I know only the music that Mozart knew. And knowing it and being able to play it properly are sometimes not the same thing.”

  The Countess’s voice vibrated with anticipation. “An accompanist is not possible.”

  “Of course.” Hélène looked around the little circle of her audience, at the firelit parlor with its semblance of socia
l nicety, of a salon concert about to begin. Candles had been lit in the wall sconces, and the bent little manservant had laid trays of glasses and decanters on scattered low tables. The ancients leaned forward, their faces shadowed by hood and hat and drifting gray hair, their bizarre teeth glimmering when a twig occasionally blazed up in the fireplace. The grotesquerie of the scene was intensified by its pretense of normality.

  Hélène looked to Ugo. She saw in his parted lips, in the gleam of his dark eyes, that he, too, awaited her music with eagerness, though not so overt as that of the ancients. She knew he cared about music, about her singing, but this avaricious look startled her. Her eyes passed over the ancients once again. She half expected to see saliva dripping from their tusks, like dogs awaiting a tidbit dropped from the table.

  She drew a deep breath, trying to banish the gorge that threatened to rise in her throat. She would give them what they craved. Then, perhaps, she could leave, she and Ugo.

  Because she could play it, because she could remember the piano reductions, she gave them Mozart. She sang “Laudate Dominum” and “Abendempfindung.” She sang “Exsultate, Jubilate,” and she sang a fragment from the Great Mass in C minor. She sang the Countess’s arias, and Pamina’s.

  They did not applaud, her bestial audience, but they breathed. It was evident, each time she played the final cadence, that their combined breaths came faster, whistling through fragile and failing larynxes, rattling in decrepit lungs. Zdenka Milosch patted her knee with a sound like that of bat wings in the trees. Ugo sat back in his chair, his chin on his fist, his eyes closed.

  Hélène was done. She was tired. With a decisive movement, she closed the lid of the pianoforte and pushed her stool away from the keyboard.

  One of the ancients, Henri, she thought, lifted his trembling head to fix her with a rheumy gaze. “Mozaa-aaa-rt,” he stammered. “Blood.”

  Hélène’s mouth dried as she stared at him, and her skin prickled.

  Eusebio gave a shaking nod and repeated Henri’s words, less intelligibly. “Blood…Mozaa-aaa-rt.”

  Anastasia made a terrible sound that Hélène feared was meant to be a laugh. Hélène looked to Ugo, then to the Countess, for explanation.

  The Countess stood up and inclined her head as if she were bowing to one whose title exceeded her own in importance. “Yes,” she said. “Yes. They know about you, Hélène. It was important for them to hear you. They know you shared the bite with Mozart.”

  “So did you,” Hélène said.

  Zdenka waved a negligent hand. “I have no musical ability. No voice, and no skill.”

  “But there must be others. Others I…that I…”

  Zdenka’s lip curled at Hélène’s inability to speak the word. “That you, shall we say, infected?” Something flickered in her eyes, and her lips parted as if she would say something more, but she closed them again and shook her head. She said only, “No.”

  Something kept Hélène from asking again, some dread she couldn’t face.

  33

  Lascia, lascia alla mia pena questo picciolo ristoro.

  Allow my suffering at least this small relief.

  —Donna Anna, Act Two, Scene Two, Don Giovanni

  Ugo opened his eyes gingerly, squinting against the light. He flexed his toes and his fingers and painfully moved his ankles and his legs. He had no scars, no wounds he could sense, but his body was stiff with cold. He drew a ragged breath and rolled to his side before he struggled to sit up. He bent his knees and wrapped his arms around his legs, trying to warm himself while he looked around to discover where the wolf had carried him this time.

  Until the current fiasco with Domenico, it had been a very long time since the wolf had emerged. Zdenka Milosch’s bargain had been a good one.

  She had taught him, those first months he spent behind the ivy-hung walls of her compound, just how wide the elders’ network was. He learned for himself, when he went out to do her work, how eager the recruits were to do whatever was asked of them. They were convinced, each one of them, that the translation of their mortal state into that of the near immortals was a mere matter of obedience and dedication. They found each other, these hopefuls, and banded together in New York and Rome, London and Paris, Berlin and Riyadh. They gathered in taverns, in underground catacombs, in secret upper rooms where they attempted rituals they had heard of, chanted offices they found in arcane manuscripts, cut themselves, branded each other, anything they could think of to attract what they craved.

  Their credulity caused Ughetto to feel pity at first. He resisted lining them up for La Società like calves for the butcher’s knife. But decades of suffering the gullibility of fools eroded his sensitivity until the last of his empathy scarred over and disappeared.

  The Countess took him out into the compound one day, leading him between clumps of yew and browning spruce yearning upward in search of sunlight. It was a huge garden, crowded with trees and shrubs. Ughetto recognized the heart-shaped leaves of linden trees, and the palm-shaped ones of oak. One of these had grown into the stone wall, pushing the stones aside to make room for its trunk. Its branches hung low on both sides, inviting squirrels to run in and out at will.

  The Countess gave no sign that she cared about the state of the garden, except for a small space of earth that had been cleared of low branches and vines so that it was filled with sunshine. It looked out of place, a neatly tilled and weeded spot in the midst of a riot of unchecked vegetation. A double row of perennials thrust up into the sunshine, vigorous stems that came almost to Ughetto’s waist and bore dark violet flowers. The Countess stopped and turned to be certain Ughetto was paying attention.

  She put one slippered foot into the carefully raked soil and lifted one of the violet flowers with a fingertip. “This is aconitum lycoctonum still growing. I thought you should see it before it has been dried. Some call it northern wolfsbane.” She stepped back, dusting her hands together. Ughetto bent to sniff at the blossom. “I’ve had it planted here specially for you, Ughetto.”

  He gazed into her expressionless face. “I have to come here for it?”

  Her lips curled in her sparse smile. “No. I mean to help you, as you will help me.” She turned away from the cultivated plot, back toward the house. “Aconitum vulparia has a different flower. Yellow, quite pretty. Less reliable in suppressing the wolf.”

  He walked on behind her, pondering the possibility that he might never have to transform again. They passed through the high-ceilinged kitchen with its pitted stone sinks and enormous pantry. The Countess pushed open the door of the pantry and pointed to bundles of herbs hanging from drying racks. Ughetto recognized basil and chives, thyme and oregano. On a separate dowel, away from the edible herbs, he saw sprigs of aconitum lycoctonum. The violet flowers had gone gray, and the leaves were curled and dry.

  “Take some,” she said. She went into the pantry, reached up and broke off a stem. “You will be able to test it at the next full moon.” She turned to him and held out the herb on her palm.

  Ughetto didn’t take it. “How do you know this works?”

  She blinked once, slowly. “You’re hardly my first lupo mannaro, Ughetto.”

  “There are others?”

  “There were.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Dead. Killed.”

  He took a half step back, reaching the support of the wall. “How?”

  “The transformation is dangerous. Men hate wolves, and with good reason. Any self-respecting householder will kill one that gets close to his property.”

  Ughetto stared at her in wonderment. “So, if I’m not killed that way, then…how long will I live?”

  Her gaze drifted away as if the conversation had become tedious. She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Who knows? None of the others lasted for long. But it may be you could live as long as we do, if you can keep yourself safe. All the more reason to learn to use the herb.”

  Ughetto learned little else from her. He tried asking her in di
fferent ways. He thought of catching her in a better mood, but such an event never came to pass in his presence. He tried tricking her into telling him more, asking oblique questions, even attempting to get Kirska to talk to him, but his efforts bore no fruit.

  He had to discover on his own, through trial and error, how much of the wolfsbane to take, and how long it would last. Sometimes it made him sick, and he threw up what he had taken before it could work. Sometimes he didn’t take enough, and the unimpeded light of the full moon proved it.

  The catalog of places the wolf left him continued to expand. Once he ran out of his herb in the wilds of America’s West and came back to himself on a high plateau where nothing moved but mountain sheep and a sharp, incessant wind. Another time the wolf left him, naked and confused, in Fort Tryon Park in New York. He woke beneath the stone wall surrounding the fort with soldiers marching guard above his head. When traveling by ship, he awoke one night deep in the hold, where cattle were chained in noisome rows. One was dead at his feet, its heart and half a rear haunch consumed by the wolf.

  And now, abandoned once again in a winter forest, Ugo shivered in the cold. Across a shallow valley, snowy peaks speared a clear blue sky. Beneath his feet, the ground fell away in a gentle incline. The wolf had slept beneath a boulder, in a little nest of dirt and moss and alpine bracken. A bit of filthy cloth lay among the litter. Ugo shook it out and laughed when he saw what it was. He could use it, at least what remained of it. One leg of the borrowed trousers was missing, and the other was shredded to the knee, but he could at least cover his privates.

  Shrugging, resigned, he pulled what was left of the garment up to his waist and started down the hill to see what might be at the bottom.

  Early darkness was already falling, making it hard to see his way. Footsore, miserable with cold, he watched the lights of an unknown city spring to life through the evening gloom. The glitter of civilization promised warmth and shelter and food. All he had to do was find something, or steal something, to cover himself decently. Perhaps he could steal a little money while he was at it.