“You know you have only to call the house, and anything else can be sent on to you? Of course,” she added offhandedly, “you’ll want for nothing, there.”
I did not reply. What was there to say? I’ve “wanted” for so much here and never gotten it — at least, my mother, from you.
“I wish you very well,” she coldly said, “in your new home. I hope everything will be pleasant. The marriage is important, as you’re aware, and they’ll treat you fairly.”
“Yes.”
“We’ll say good-bye then. At least for a while.”
“Yes.”
“Good-bye, Daisha.” She drew out the ay sound; and foolishly through my mind skipped words that rhymed — fray, say. prey.
I said, “So long, Juno. Good luck making it up with Tyfa. Have a nice life.”
Then I turned my back, crossed the terrace and the drive, and got into the car. I’d signed off with all the others before. They had loaded me with good wishes and sobbed, or tried to cheer me by mentioning images we had seen of my intended husband, and saying how handsome and talented he was, and I must write to them soon, email or call — not lose touch — come back next year — sooner — Probably they’d forget me in a couple of days or nights.
To me, they already seemed miles off.
The cream limousine of the full moon had parked over the estate as we drove away. In its blank blanched rays I could watch, during the hour it took to cross the whole place and reach the outer gates, all the nocturnal industry, in fields and orchards, in vegetable gardens, pens, and horse yards, garages and workshops — a black horse cantering, lamps, and red sparks flying — and people coming out to see us go by, humans saluting the family car, appraising in curiosity, envy, pity, or scorn, the girl driven off to become a Wife of Alliance.
In the distance the low mountains shone blue from the moon. The lake across the busy grasslands was like a gigantic vinyl disk dropped from the sky, an old record the moon had played, and played tonight on the spinning turntable of the Earth. This was the last I saw of my home.
The journey took just on four days.
Sometimes we passed through whitewashed towns, or cities whose tall concrete-and-glass fingers reached to scratch the clouds. Sometimes we were on motorways, wide and streaming with traffic in spate. Or there was open countryside, mountains coming or going, glowing under hard icing-sugar tops. In the afternoons we’d stop, for Casperon to rest, at hotels. About six or seven in the evening we drove on. I slept in the car by night. Or sat staring from the windows.
I was, inevitably, uneasy. I was resentful and bitter and full of a dull and hopeless rage.
I shall get free of it all — I had told myself this endlessly since midsummer, when first I had been informed that, to cement ties of friendship with the Duvalles, I was to marry their new heir. Naturally it was not only friendship that this match entailed. I had sun-born genes. And the Duvalle heir, it seemed, hadn’t. My superior light endurance would be necessary to breed a stronger line. A bad joke, to our kind — they needed my blood. I was bloodstock. I was Daisha Severin, a young female life only seventeen years, and able to live daylong in sunlight. I was incredibly valuable. I would be, everyone had said, so welcome. And I was lovely, they said, with my brunette hair and dark eyes, my cinnamon skin. The heir — Zeev Duvalle — was very taken with the photos he had seen of me. And didn’t I think he was fine — cool, Musette had said, “He’s so cool — I wish it could have been me. You’re so lucky, Daisha.”
Zeev was blond, almost snow-blizzard white, though his eyebrows and lashes were dark. His eyes were like some pale, shining metal. His skin was pale, too, if not so colorless as with some of us, or so I’d thought when I watched him in the house movie I’d been sent. My pale-skinned mother had some light tolerance, though far less than my dead father. I had inherited all his strength that way, and more. But Zeev Duvalle had none, or so it seemed. To me he looked like what he was, a man who lived only by night. In appearance he seemed nineteen or twenty, but he wasn’t so much older in actual years. Like me, a new young life. So much in common. So very little.
And by now “I shall get free of it all,” which I’d repeated so often, had become my mantra, and also meaningless. How could I ever get free? Among my own kind I would be an outcast and criminal if I ran away from this marriage, now or ever, without a “valid” reason. While able to pass as human, I could hardly live safely among them. I can eat and drink a little in their way, but I need blood. Without blood I would die.
So, escape the families and their alliance, I would become not only traitor and thief — but a murderer. A human-slaughtering monster humanity doesn’t believe in, or does believe in — something, either way, that, if discovered among them, they will kill.
That other house, my former home on the Severin estate, was long and quite low, two storied, but with high ceilings mostly on the ground floor. Its first architecture, gardens, and farm had been made in the early nineteenth century.
Their mansion — castle — whatever one has to call it — was colossal. Duvalle had built high.
It rose, this pile, like a cliff, with outcrops of slate-capped towers. Courtyards and enclosed gardens encircled it. Beyond and around lay deep pine woods with infiltrations of other trees, some maples, already flaming in the last of summer and the sunset. I spotted none of the usual workplaces, houses, or barns.
We had taken almost three hours to wend through their land, along the tree-rooted and stone-littered upward-tending track. Once Casperon had to pull up, get out, and examine a tire. But it was all right. On we went.
At one point, just before we reached the house, I saw a waterfall cascading from a tall, rocky hill, plunging into a ravine below. In the ghostly dusk it looked beautiful and melodramatic. Setting the tone?
When the car at last drew up, a few windows were burning amber in the house cliff. Over the wide door itself glowed a single electric light inside a round pane like a worn-out planet.
No one had come to greet us.
We got out and stood at a loss. The car’s headlamps fired the brickwork, but still nobody emerged. At the lit windows, no silhouette appeared gazing down.
Casperon marched to the door and rang some sort of bell that hung there.
All across the grounds crickets chirruped, hesitated, and went on.
The night was warm, and so empty; nothing seemed to be really alive anywhere, despite the crickets, the windows. Nothing, I mean, of my kind, our people. For a strange moment I wondered if something ominous had happened here, if everyone had died, and if so, would that release me? But then one leaf of the door was opened. A man looked out. Casperon spoke to him, and the man nodded. A few minutes later I had to go up the steps and into the house.
There was a sort of vestibule, vaguely lighted by old ornate lanterns. Beyond that was a big paved court, with pruned trees and raised flower beds, and then more steps. Casperon had gone for my luggage. I followed the wretched sallow man who had let me in.
“What’s your name?” I asked him as we reached the next portion of the house, a blank wall lined only with blank black windows.
“Anton.”
“Where is the family?” I asked him.
“Above” was all he said.
I said, halting, “Why was there no one to welcome me?”