Kate considered hauling the foolish girl out and giving her posterior a sound spanking. It would be crueclass="underline" she might rot to nothing in the sun.
Father Pitaval was on his feet again, somewhat sheepish. The general was not getting value for his patronage.
'Mireau, have you no shame?' she asked.
Turning, she walked away from the lot of them. She heard shouting as the general abused his subordinates. A little spark of satisfaction warmed her heart. She had accomplished little, but at least Mireau was hurt enough to want to strike back. If she kept at it, she could have him.
Perhaps there were more worthwhile bones to worry. Especially the bone marked Château du Malinbois.
She got on her bicycle, and pushed off. On the road to the railway station, she whistled the 'Barcarolle' from Tales of Hoffmann, thinking of dancers and fliers.
8
Castle Keep
Inside the Château du Malinbois, night was eternal. By day, the mediaeval slit windows were shuttered, the stone hallways lit only by infrequent candles. Deep in the damp guts of the castle, even a vampire felt the cold. Tiny drips of water were as constant as the granite-muffled pounding of the guns. Only the scientists' work quarters made use of electricity. In the examination room, dark corners were banished. Light shone without mercy. Merely to lie on the table was to expose one's interior workings.
Leutnant Erich von Stalhein wondered if General Karnstein had chosen Malinbois to give the fliers a feeling of being buried alive, to increase their desire to get into the air. Aloft, with the freedom of the currents and the strength of the moon, they were loosed from the shackles of earth.
Stalhein lay prone as Professor Ten Brincken checked another series of measurements. A brooding bear with shocks of grey hair on his beetle brows, the director was more dockyard bruiser than scientist. Perhaps his craze for the physical improvement of mankind sprang from awareness of his own ursine appearance.
An arrangement of directed lamps was fixed above the table. Stalhein's bloodline throve on moonbeams but glowing wires in glass bulbs were no use to him. Cold, artificial light was unsatisfying.
Dr Caligari, Jagdgeschwader 1's alienist, was in the room. Stalhein heard his clumsy waddling, smelled his reeking clothes. He privately thought Caligari a quack. Like Ten Brincken, he was fascinated by the vampire condition. In interviews, he always tried to draw Stalhein out, asking question after question about feeding.
'The muscles of the neck and chest are more developed,' Ten Brincken told Caligari. 'It is pronounced enough to be calibrated. There would seem to be overall change. An evolution.'
The scientists discussed him as if he were a truly dead corpse, dissected for their edification. Stalhein was accustomed to this treatment. It was his duty to the Kaiser to endure such examinations. No flier of JG1 was exempt, not even the Baron.
Ten Brincken signalled the end of the examination by turning off the overhead lamps. With vampire quickness, Stalhein slid off the table and stood. Caligari, stared, cringed inside an ancient tailcoat. Stalhein dressed, pulling on breeches and boots, slipping into a good shirt. Ten Brincken, suddenly unctuous as a valet, held up his tunic. He backed into the sleeves, then fastened buttons from belly to collar.
'Fine, fine, Leutnant,' Ten Brincken cooed. 'Most excellent.'
Naked, Stalhein was an object for study. In uniform, he was close to a demon prince.
Ten Brincken's lair was a fusion of ancient and modern. The walls were fourteenth-century stone, obscured by scientific charts of various vintages. The director scrawled hieroglyphics in a brassbound tome which seemed a thing of the monasteries, but the eye was caught by an array of shining surgical implements in a steel and glass stand. Ten Brincken and Caligari and the others - Dr Krueger, Engineer Rotwang, Dr Orlof, Professor Hansen - called themselves scientists, but alchemy was mixed in with their prattle of evolution and genetic heritage.
To men of Stalhein's father's generation, the vampire was a mythical beast. Within a lifetime, ancient magic had become a tolerated field of modern science. Understandably, the two scrambled. General Karnstein, the Graf von Dracula's overseer, was an elder; he had lived through centuries of persecution, perhaps believing himself a creature of darkness, only to emerge in the twentieth century and be restored to high estate.
Stalhein saluted and left the laboratory. His night eyes were better suited to the gloom of the narrow passageway, which ended in the staircase that led to the Great Hall. Music drifted down. A Strauss waltz.
Vaguely troubled, he climbed up to the Hall. Ten Brincken's endless examinations were rarely painful but always perturbed Stalhein. A secret purpose was kept from him. He told himself his duty was to do, not to understand. The fliers were not uninformed, but focused. Each victory was a building brick of the greater victory to come. He should pity the short-lived warm kind; they could never know what it was to master the skies, to taste the blood of a foe, to drink the light of the moon.
He wanted to be flying, bearing down on his prey. To feel the kick of discharging guns, to hear the whining of the air over his wings, to watch an aeroplane spiral in flames: this convinced him he was alive. His score was a respectable nineteen victories. In an ordinary jasta, such a record would be outstanding; but in this Circus, he was one of the lesser hunters. If he lasted long enough, he hoped to change that. The high-tide mark was the Baron von Richthofen's score, which stood currently at seventy-one.
The faded portraits and mouldy animal heads that had been on display in the Great Hall were consigned to cellars. The circus had replaced them with twentieth-century trophies. Above a fireplace the size of a railway tunnel was crucified the top wing of an RE8, its forty-three-foot span of stiff linen dotted with bullet-holes. Hanging in the fireplace, anchored to the mantel by chains, was a rigged-up chandelier: the front of an engine, its cylinder heads stuck with lit candles. Spreading out from the centrepieces was an overlapping patchwork of serial numbers hacked from the fabric of Allied aeroplanes, many half-burned or badly holed. JG1 had collected specimens of Bristol Fighter, Dolphin, Spad, Vickers, Tabloid, Nieuport-Delage, Bantam, Kangaroo and Caproni. Also mounted in the display were scavenged guns, compasses and altimeters, human heads, leather helmets, single boots, broken cameras, bones, Constantinesco gears, propellers.
The magnificent horn of the new gramophone rang with an aria from Die Fledermaus. Hammer, smugly wearing the Pour le Merite awarded him on his fortieth kill, played cards with Kretschmar-Schuldorff, the intelligence officer, and Ernst Udet, a promising flier neck and neck with Stalhein in victories. Grouped around an oil lamp, they were dwarfed by the vaulted space. Hammer was buried in a huge bearskin coat that made him look like a troll. Theo puffed on a cigarette whose smoke cloud was still rising but had not yet reached the distant ceiling. Udet, having succumbed to the latest vampire fashion, sported a fresh rack of antlers. Hung with ragged velvet, they sprouted through steadily trickling wounds in his forehead.
Night was hours away. Stalhein was down for the twilight patrol. He conquered impatience.
There were other fliers in the darks of the Great Hall, as eager as Stalhein for sunset and the chase. The sounds of tender feeding came from a curtained recess. The insatiable Bruno Stachel was lapping up the juice of another of his French girls. Stalhein thought a nosferatu should not feed by day; it made him duller when the time for real hunting came. A rare JG1 flier without a 'von' to his name, Stachel did not quite fit; in a cadre of hunters, he was merely a murderer. His score stood at thirty-one.