The young woman's first reaction was disappointingly restrained; she only gasped, and would have pulled away, but my grip was vastly too strong to allow that. Courageous as she was, I think that in the next moment she might have fainted. But now I had shifted the direction of my gaze, and with my eyes locked on hers I willed her to retain consciousness.
Her next move was a wise one, to throw down the knife she had been holding in her free hand. Then she began to mutter, and presently declaimed aloud, first prayers and then more abominations of witchcraft.
I spoke to her for the first time. "I command you, girl, cease this shameful, wicked way of speaking. If you are going to pray, pray properly!"
Her response surprised me: "And who are you, moroi, to call me wicked? Or to give me instructions in prayer?" And she tossed her head in a gesture of defiance.
She had again used the term for undead, and for some reason that gave me pause. Despite all my recent experience I had never yet thought of myself in such a way. "Well," I said at last. "I am undead indeed. But when you come right down to it, what does that mean, except that I am, thanks to the good God, still alive?"
My captive uttered a little yelp of shock and astonishment, an almost endearing sound. "You dare to speak the good Lord's name? Hell strike you down!"
Again it was my turn to be surprised. "Indeed? And why should He do that?"
She was shivering, though the night was not that cold, and seemed unable to answer. "I am Vlad Drakulya," I told her after a pause. "Once Prince of Wallachia. But I suppose you knew that, woman. If not, whose grave did you think you were violating? And what is your name?"
"I am called Constantia." She was shivering more and more with fear by this time, though somehow managing to keep her voice almost under control. Courage has always fascinated and impressed me.
I squeezed her hand—still almost gently. "And on what task, good Constantia, were you about to employ your dagger? Did you think my fingernails might be in need of trimming, after so long in the grave? Is that what brought you here tonight?"
She stared at me, and then produced a tremulous little smile. If my grip was causing her pain she gave no sign. Her spoken answers remained evasive. But of course I understood perfectly well that what must have brought her to my grave was the practice of witchcraft—doubtless she had meant to excise more than one portion of my anatomy to aid her in her spells. Dead men's eyes, fingers, testicles—the witch's shopping list is long—were and are considered of great value. Most in demand are the parts of executed criminals, followed by those of men of spiritual power. Looking back, I can believe that I was considered as belonging to both categories.
How, by what means of bribery or divination, this little apprentice witch had learned the location of my grave I was never to discover. She must have assumed that the body of Prince Drakulya would possess some special efficacy to aid her in her work. But as the situation actually worked out, she was, I believe, content to leave my bones intact, forgetting her original purpose in the dazzling light of her discovery that I was not dead after all. Yes, I know she had expected to find an undead, or thought she had; 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 ofmy newly reexcavated 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.