Marcilla Pt 02 The Beginning

ITALY (PRESENT DAY):

"We'll stop here for today," I said. "I remember this spot."

Enid looked around. "How can you tell? It looks all the same."

"See the bend of that stream over there?" I pointed to a stretch of water that made a hook-shaped glimmer through the trees. "And there's the village, just where I saw it last."

"Village? What village?"

I reminded myself once again that Enid was new to all this, and that she didn't even have a human experience of being outside her pretty little English town. "There," I said. "See the ruined buildings? They're overgrown, of course, but you can still make out the shape. They apparently never rebuilt it after the war." I got off my bicycle and propped it up on its stand. "Get the sleeping bags. We'll spend the day here."

"Which war?" Enid had finally begun to get used to cycling long distances, and hadn't fallen off in a couple of days. Still, she winced and rubbed her bottom. "When were you here last?"

"The Great War. Nineteen seventeen." I gestured. "There were a lot fewer trees around then, and the houses were just fresh ruins. Come on, let's find a spot to rest."

Enid took a moment to look up to the north, past the branches of the forest, where the jagged peaks of the Alps glittered in the morning sun. I tried to see it through her eyes, to feel the wonder that this beauty must still have for her, who'd not grown far too jaded with the passage of centuries to be able to be affected by mere natural beauty. She'd get that way soon enough; the thought made me hurt inside, as did everything else she was going through and would have to go through to learn to be what she would have to be for the rest of eternity.

"I'm glad we took this trip," she said. "It's all so lovely."

I found a place where the grass was thick and the branches overhead formed a lattice that would block out the worst of the sun. Nearby, the remnants of the old church were covered with vines and part of the bell tower still poked skywards like an accusing finger. The last time I'd seen it the walls were still smouldering and shattered chunks of masonry had been scattered everywhere.

"Are you sore?" I asked Enid. "Do you need a massage?" The wild boar we'd fed from the previous evening had put up a tremendous fight, flinging us both around as he tried to rip us with his tusks. We'd only got a few sips each and finally had to withdraw, calling it honours even. If easier prey had been available I'd never have tried to take on a wild boar. They are not animals to be trifled with.

"No, I'll be all right with a bit of rest." She pulled off her boots and socks and crawled into her sleeping bag. "Marcilla?"

"Hmm?" I looked up from undoing my bootlaces.

"Why were you here then, during the war?"

I sighed. "Do you really want to know?"

"Of course. I want to know everything about you."

I didn't say anything until I'd got into my sleeping bag. Enid stretched her arm out to me, touching the back of my hand. "Well?"

"You won't think well of me," I warned her. "You'll decide I'm a terrible person."

"No, I won't." She turned her head and looked into my eyes. "I promise."

"Right...so..."

I took a deep breath and began.

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ITALY (1917):

I learnt centuries ago that wars are a great potential feast for our kind. The death and destruction left behind by armies provides endless opportunities for feeding without danger of discovery. I'd followed Napoleon into Russia, and tore the throats out of the stragglers of the Grande Armée as they retreated from Moscow through the winter snows. In the 1850s, disguised as a missionary, I glutted myself on peasant soldiers as Hong Xiuquan's Taiping Rebellion raged across China like a forest fire. Just over a decade later, I was back in Europe, feeding from French and Prussian with equal abandon at the fringes of the battlefield at Sedan. I'd gone to the New World in between, too, but arrived just too late to be able to taste the harvest of the American Civil War.

Back then, conflicts were delicious to me, and I looked upon wars and the prospect of wars with anticipation and glee.

When Europe descended into yet another of its periodic paroxysms of madness, I was in London. By then I'd long since stopped considering myself an Austro-Hungarian or indeed of any nationality; England was no more, or less, my enemy than Austria-Hungary or France or Germany. I'd immediately tried to find a way to reach the fighting. But I'd soon realised that the Western Front, with its trenches, its millions of soldiers living cheek by jowl, its constant bombardments and its fighting that occurred almost exclusively at night, was impossible. A woman could never manage to get to the frontline without being immediately noticed; nor did I have any particular wish to be vaporised by a shell. You'll recall that then I was as powerless and vulnerable as a human during the day.

But Italy offered better prospects. The war was being fought on precipitous Alpine slopes, but I didn't need to go up there; the foothills were crowded with troops and civilians, and I was sure a woman like me could move unnoticed among the forests and little villages, taking what I considered to be rightfully mine.

So I took ship from Marseilles, disguised first as a society lady, and then, in Italy as a French prostitute, and afterwards as various other things, I made my way among the woods and valleys, feeding from sentries and peasants and moving on before my work was discovered. I didn't feed only a little, as I do now; I drained them, leaving only corpses in my wake. And then, one afternoon, I reached this spot.

I still remember it as clearly as it was yesterday, though so many other memories have blurred and merged and shifted in my mind. It was a sunny day, and I had been walking since the previous night. At first I'd walked aimlessly, just to put as much distance between myself and the previous night's victims as possible, but then I'd noticed smoke rising into the air, and one thing I had learnt was that smoke in wartime was an excellent indicator that I would find sustenance. So I changed direction and clambered over boulders and fallen trees until I reached the place the smoke was coming from.

It was this village. Even then, it was so small that it only had a single street and maybe twenty houses. But when I arrived it was already deserted and still burning. The Austro-Hungarian artillery in the mountains had shelled it to pieces. There were no corpses, not even civilian ones -- I looked -- so I don't know why they'd shelled it.

I'd sat down to rest a bit before moving on when I heard the engine noises. They came from aeroplanes, up above. Back then aeroplanes were still so new that even I'd only seen a handful, so I was curious enough to look up at the sky

There were two of them, an Austro-Hungarian and an Italian one. At first they were so high up that I had to squint even to see them. They were circling each other, each trying to get on the other's tail. And as they circled, they descended, lower and lower, until they were so close overhead that I could clearly see the insignia painted on their lower wings.

Long before the pilots themselves realised it, I knew that they were going to collide. Each of them was trying to turn in smaller circles than the other, until, inevitably, one's propeller clipped the other's wing, and then they both tumbled to the ground in a mass of wood, metal, and fabric.

Some of the wreckage must still be there, under the grass and moss and rotting logs, machine gun bullets and engine parts and such. But if you don't mind, I'm not going to look for any of it.

Before they'd even struck the earth, I was up and running as fast as I could. I knew that they could explode into a fireball, and I needed to reach the pilots before that happened. Back then, they didn't wear parachutes, so they would ride their planes right down to the ground.

I did make it to the mangled wreckage before anything exploded, but it was already too late for the Austro-Hungarian pilot. He'd been flung from the cockpit on impact and was dead, his head twisted on his neck at a grotesque angle. I wasted nothing on him but a glance, and rushed to the other plane.

The Italian pilot was still alive, and moving feebly in his harness, trying to free himself. I had a knife with me -- I never was without one in the days when one could still carry a personal weapon without arousing suspicion -- and used it to cut him free of his straps. Pulling him out of the cockpit, I dragged him sufficiently far away from the wreck that he'd be safe from any explosion, and then ran back to get his first aid kit.

He was looking up at me with an expression of incredulous joy when I got back to him, and began muttering something about seeing an angel. "Don't try to talk," I said in Italian, which was one of the languages I'd grown up speaking. "It'll be all right. You're safe. I'll take care of you." Though he was badly hurt, I was fairly certain I could keep him alive. But he still needed to be out of the elements, so I dragged him into the only nearby house I could see that was still relatively intact and no longer burning.

It was still late afternoon, though the shadows were lengthening. I cut off his flight jacket and the uniform tunic he had on underneath with my knife, carried water up from the river in a tureen I found in the kitchen, washed his wounds, and dressed them with the bandages I found in his first aid kit. By then he'd lost consciousness and I was terrified that he'd die, but eventually he opened his eyes again.

"My angel," he whispered again. "You're my angel."

"Shhhh," I said. "Try not to talk."

But he kept talking. "You saved my life, bella. I owe everything to you forever. Not only I, my old mother and my sister owe everything to you." He raised his head to try and kiss my hands. "As long as I live, I will remember every moment I have from now on is because of you."

He was really very handsome; dark eyed and olive skinned, with curly black hair that sprang out when I removed his leather flying helmet to mop his brow. A normal girl, something I of course no longer was, might have fallen in love with him on the spot. I closed my eyes tight for a few moments to dispel the thought.

"What's your name?" I asked. If he was going to insist on talking, at least I might try to make him say things that did not wound me to the heart. "Where are you from?"

"Enrico Cavalcanti," he whispered. "I'm from Firenze."

Florence. I'd visited the city many times over the years, watched the sunset from the Ponte Vecchio, made love to the nubile daughters of society ladies and then drained them of their life essence before vanishing into the night. I clenched my fists to banish the memories. "It's a lovely city," I replied.

"Will you come back with me?" His dark eyes were full of helpless adoration. "I want to take you home, to meet my family. They deserve to know who saved me."

"I'll try," I said, and I felt the tide of misery rising inside. "I'll do my best." In order to avoid looking at him, I got up and went to the door. The sun had already disappeared over the mountains and blue shadows were puddling on the land. "I'll try and visit your family."

I waited at the door, not wanting to look at him, until the last vestige of daylight had disappeared from the sky, and I felt my power flood back into my body.

Then I walked back and tore his throat out with my freshly regrown fangs, and drank the sweet liquid that flowed from his veins.

I kept my eyes tightly shut throughout, so I didn't have to see the shock and betrayal on his face.

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ITALY (PRESENT DAY):

"I wish I could say that was the last time I followed a war," I said. The memories were so intense that I felt my heart beating frantically. "I wish I could say that I could never do that again, after that. But it would be a lie. I spent the rest of that war following behind the armies, killing and feeding, but..." I paused, hoping Enid had fallen asleep. I couldn't bring myself to look at her.

She had not fallen asleep. "But?"

"But I didn't want to think about the mothers and sisters whom I was depriving of their sons and brothers." I paused for a few long breaths. "I was too cowardly to look at his identity papers to get his address. I didn't want to visit his mum and sister. I didn't trust myself to not harm them."

"Marcilla..."

"Yes," I said, "I know you hate me now."

"I don't hate you. How could I?" Her fingers tightened around mine. "You did what you had to do."

I laughed, without any humour. "Of course it wasn't what I had to do, only what I chose to do, because it was easy pickings. Just over a couple of decades later Europe began destroying itself over again in a maelstrom that made the Great War look like a picnic, and I did it all over once more. I followed Hitler's armies into Poland and France, and then into Russia and back again. And if after that war it had not become nearly impossible for a woman to travel unnoticed to a conflict zone, I might have been doing it still." I drew a long ragged breath, and realised, belatedly, that I'd been sobbing. "I was a monster, and I can't forgive myself for that."

"You aren't a monster," Enid said. "You could never be a monster." Her hand squeezed mine tightly. "I love you."

"I've been a monster a very long time." I looked up at the sky through the branches, so blue and pure. I wanted to fall up into that sky forever. "I had to become a monster, to survive after I was turned. I had no choice."

There was the faint sound of Enid unzipping her sleeping bag, and then I felt her warm breath on my cheek as she lay on the grass next to me. She threw her arm across my torso. "Marcilla."

"Yes? You'd better get back into your bag. The grass is still clammy from the dew."

"Marcilla. Please. Look at me."

I turned my head. Her eyes were warm and full of love. "Stop hurting yourself. Whatever you were, you aren't now, you daftie."

I gave her a surprised laugh. "Such words of wisdom from one so young! Not like what I was at your age."

"You were very young, weren't you? When you turned?" She sat up to look down at me. Her straggling brown hair fell across her face, and I reached up to push it behind her ear. "When are you going to tell me about it?"

"About how I turned? That was so long ago. Why do you want to know?"

"I told you, I want to know everything about you. Besides, you keep telling me that it was very hard for you in the early days, and that you were lucky to live through them until you learnt how to survive. Don't you think I should know that?"

"Are you sure you'd not rather sleep and hear this some other time?"

"Don't be a berk. If you don't tell me now, I'll have to wait months till I can get a chance to ask you again. And I'm not sleepy anyway, and neither are you."

"You've got me there. Well, if you're going to sit on the wet grass, I might as well do so too." I struggled out of the sleeping bag and sat with my back against the nearest tree trunk. Enid surprised me by lying down on the grass and put her head in my lap, looking up at me with a smile. I gave and involuntary grin back in response, and began.

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STYRIA (1698):

I told you that I don't remember my parents, and that is true enough, in that I don't recall their faces or the sound of their voices. I do remember, however, their plans and expectations of me.

When I was born, the von Karnsteins were already an ancient family, and already one that had seen much better days. Once the family lands had stretched through much of Styria, but by 1679 only the old Schloss Karnstein and the village in its shadow still remained. And while I was still a very young girl, my parents determined that my destiny would be to marry into a rich and powerful family to restore the Karnstein fortunes.

So, as I grew, I was moulded and trained for one thing, and one thing only: to be an attractive wife for someone with money and connections at the court in Vienna. I was taught to sing, which I hated, and to play the clavichord, which I found so impossible that even my parents finally abandoned their efforts to teach it to me.

And of course I was taught to dance. Dance was very important in social life then; social life revolved around dances. I didn't really enjoy dancing, but I got very good at the minuet, mostly to escape the displeasure of my mother.

Oh, and I was taught languages and court etiquette, and allowed to read enough books that I might be able to conduct a captivating conversation. But I was never taught, or encouraged, or even allowed, to think for myself, and of course I was never exposed to life outside the Schloss. Except for our yearly sojourns in Vienna, I doubt that I saw the world outside its walls more than a score of times in the first eighteen years of my life.

Then I turned eighteen, and my parents decided that I should begin attending balls in the grand residences of the aristocracy, both to meet prospective suitors and to prepare for me to be presented at the Imperial Court in the next year.

I still recall the first ball I attended, chaperoned by my governess, a stuffy French spinster of impeccable manners and no detectable imagination or intelligence, easily shocked and as easily duped. But though I could have slipped away from her easily enough, what could I do if I did, wander the halls by myself? So I allowed myself to be subject to interminable conversations with grand ladies whom I had met once or twice at Vienna and whose names I struggled to remember, and danced with their awkward sons, sweating in my formal attire, waiting until the ball could be over and I could go home again.

It was when I got away long enough to take a few sips of wine when I saw her. She was standing across the ballroom, to one side of the door, alone. She was in a gown of dazzling white, over which her blonde hair floated and shimmered like a waterfall. She was easily the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen.

And she was looking right at me.

I had, of course, no knowledge of sex; the very idea of telling me about the birds and the bees would have shocked my poor Mademoiselle de F____________ (I just realised that I don't remember her full name) insensible. So even less did I have any idea that one could be attracted to someone of one's own gender. And, following from that, I could and did have no understanding of why the blood rushed to my cheeks and my heart began to beat so quickly.

I don't know what might have happened then if Mademoiselle de F_________ hadn't come bustling up. "Grӓfin," she said reproachfully. She always referred to me by my title, though she'd known me since I was a toddler. "I have been looking for you all over. You must come back, the next dance is about to start."

"I'm coming," I said, putting down my little goblet of wine. "I was just about to speak to the lady over there."

"Which lady?" Mademoiselle de F____________ looked confused. "Whom are you talking about, Grӓfin?"

"Whom?" I asked. "Why, that lady over th..." I turned towards the door.

But there was nobody there. She was gone.

Later that night, after the carriage had taken me back to Schloss Karnstein and I had finally retired to my bed, I could not fall asleep for hours, because I kept thinking about that mysterious woman. And the more I thought of her the more I felt sensations in my body I didn't know how to interpret, a mysterious tingling in my breasts and between my thighs. I became more and more confused about all of it.

Eventually the wine I'd drunk and my own exhaustion got the better of me, and I fell into bed, expecting to be asleep in moments.