'If you would have me read for you, lord, then take me aside from here. Here my concentration suffers, for there is much sadness — aye, and various comings and goings, and likewise much fuss and to-do — oh, and many small matters to interfere with my scrying. A private place would be to some advantage.'
Oh? Indeed it would! 'Come with me,' I said.
'Lord!' her father stopped us. 'She is innocent!' The last word was spoken on a rising note — of pleading, perhaps? My nature was not unknown among the Szgany.
But… didn't he know his own daughter? It was in my mind to say to him: 'Lying Gypsy dog! What, this one, innocent? Man, she has licked my entire body clean as if bathed! I have fired my fluids into her throat every night for a month from the coaxing of her tongue and tiny, three-fingered hands! Innocent? If she is innocent then so am I!' Ah, but how could I say these things? For the fact of it was that I had only ever dreamed my love affair with Marilena.
Again she rescued me:
'Father!' she rebuked him before I could more than pierce him with my eyes. 'I have seen what will be. For me the future is, father, and I have read no harm in it. Not at the hands of the Ferenczy.'
He had seen my look, however, and knew how far he strained my hospitality. 'Forgive me, lord,' he said, lowering his head. 'Instead of speaking as a man sorely in your debt, I spoke only as a father. My daughter is only seventeen and we are fallen among strangers. The Zirras have lost enough this day. Ah! Ah! I meant nothing by that! But do you see? I trip over my own tongue even now! It is the grief. My mind is stricken. I meant nothing. It is the grief!' And sobbing he collapsed.
I stooped a little and put my hand on his head. 'Be at your ease. He who harms you or yours in the house of the Ferenczy answers to me.' And then I led her to my quarters…
Once there, alone, where none dared disturb, I lifted off her coat of furs until she stood in a peasant dress. Now she looked even more like the princess I knew, but not enough. My eyes burned on her, burned for the sight of her. And she knew it.
'How can this be?' she said, full of wonder. 'I truly know you! Never were my dreams more potent!'
'You are right,' I said. 'We are not… strangers. We have shared the same dreams.'
'You have great scars,' she said, 'here on your arm, and here in your side.' And even I, the Ferenczy, trembled where she touched me.
'And you,' I told her, 'have a tiny red mole, like a single tear of blood, in the centre of your back…'
Beside my fire, which roared into a great chimney, there stood a stone trough for bathing. Over the fire, a mighty cauldron of water added steam to the smoke. She went to the tripod and turned the gear, pouring water into the trough. She knew how to do it from her dreams. 'I am unclean from the journey,' she explained, 'and rough from the snows.'
She stripped and I bathed her, and then she bathed me. 'And how is this for a private reading?' I chuckled. But as I opened her and went to slip inside:
'Ah!' she gasped. 'But our mutual dreams took no account of my inexperience. My father told the truth, lord. The future is closing fast, be sure, but I am still a virgin!'
Ah!' I answered her, moan for moan, the while gentling my way inside. 'But weren't we all, once upon a time?'
How my vampire raged within me then, but I held him back and loved her only as a man. Else the first time were surely her last…
Now let me make it plain. What had happened was this:
As much out of idle curiosity as for any other reason, in my oneiromantic dreams I had sought Marilena out, become enamoured of her and seduced her. Or we had seduced each other.
But (you will ask), how could she, a child, inexperienced, seduce me? And I will answer: because dreams are safe! Whatever happens in one's dreams, nothing is changed upon awakening. She could indulge all her sexual fantasies without reaping the reward of such indulgence. And (you will also ask), how could I, Faethor Ferenczy, even asleep and dreaming, be anything less than Wamphyri? Ah, but I was a dreamer long before I became a vampire! Indeed, I was once a mere man! The things which had troubled me in my youth still occasionally troubled me in my sleep: the old fears, the old emotions and passions.
I am sure my meaning is not lost: all of us know that long after an experience has waned to insignificance in the waking world, we may still review it afresh in our dreams, with as much apprehension — or excitement — as we did when it was new. In my dreams, for example, I was still wont to remember the time of my own conversion, when I had received my father's egg and so been made a vampire. Aye, and such dreams as those still horrified me! But in the cold light of day that horror was quickly forgotten, lost in the grey mist of time where it belonged, and I was no stripling lad but the Ferenczy again.
The meeting of Marilena's dreams with mine had been more than mere chance, however: I had sought her out, and found her. And once insinuated into her dreams, I had dreamed (as any man might) of knowing her carnally. And again I say, these were not simple dreams! I had Wamphyri powers and she was a prognosticator. These were talents akin to telepathy. We had in fact shared each other's dreams, and through them known each other's bodies.
All of our fumbling and fondling, and later our more energetic, far more diverse lovemaking, had been done in another world — of the mind — where there had been no obligation to spare anything; so that when we came together at last it was very much as lovers of long standing. Except that in reality Marilena was innocent and her flesh untried by any man… for a while, anyway. Now, I understood these things but she did not. She thought that her talent alone had shown her the future, her future, without outside interference. She did not know that I had guided her in those dreams with a vampire's magnetism and beguilement and… oh, with all those arts so long instinct in me. She thought we were natural lovers! Who can say, perhaps we would have been anyway. But I was not so foolish as to tell her and take a chance on her disillusionment.
Now, it might also cross your mind to wonder how she, a gorgeous young girl, round and firm as an apple, fresh-minded and — bodied, could find any sort of waking satisfaction in a scarred and ancient undead thing like me, savage and cruel and filled with horror? I would be surprised if it did not! But then you would doubtless recollect what you know of a vampire's powers of hypnotism, and perhaps believe that you had fathomed the mystery. You would say: 'She was his plaything, not of her own free will.' Well, I'll make no bones of it, before Marilena this had always been the way of it. But it was not the way of it with her.
To begin with, I was not so grotesque as you might imagine. Wamphyri, my many hundreds of years didn't show, except perhaps occasionally in my eyes, or when I wanted it to show. Indeed with a small effort I could appear as old or as young as it pleased me to appear, which in Marilena's case was always young, no more than forty. Even without my vampire I would be tall and strong, and I had all those centuries of charm, wit and wisdom — and folly — in me, to draw on at will. Scarred? Oh, I was, and badly! But I had retained these gouges out of vanity (it pleased me to wear the dents of old battles) and to remind me of the one who had put most of them there. I could have let the vampire in me repair such disfigurements entirely, but so long as Thibor lived I would not do so. No, I wore those scars like spurs against my own flanks, to goad me if ever I should find my hatred flagging.