Soulless, p.9
Soulless, page 9
It hurts the first time. Not that he cannot bear pain, of course, but qi is always sweeter when the prey is content. The blood tastes better, too. I'll fit my cock in him yet, but only when the moment serves me best.
His healing of Nicholas's sprained knee fell under the same reasoning. Why further dilute the quality of the man's qi, so unusually difficult to absorb, by permitting a fresh injury to fester? Ban wasn't sure why attuning to Nicholas's life breath was such a challenge. The connection didn't rely on carnal attraction; he'd joined with Martha effortlessly, siphoning off some of that precious energy despite the fact she'd been born without sexual desires. Besides, he was certain he did arouse Nicholas, in whatever intellectual manner a eunuch experienced arousal. So the wall between their personal energies, giving Ban no more than lightning-flashes of Nicholas's emotions, was unprecedented.
Almost as if he's protected from me. Shielded, somehow, Ban thought.
There was one room in Grantley Ban hadn't searched, simply because if Sebastian ever heard he'd done such a thing, Ban would be hard-pressed to defend himself. And when it came to disobedience, Ban was in deep enough already. He was charged never to reveal his true nature, not unless the prey's demise was assured, but Nicholas and Parthenia Jane Robinson had guessed what he was. That, indisputably, was not Ban's fault. The rest—stalking Martha, a favored servant, and making a ridiculous bargain for her safety with Nicholas, then feeding from the master of Grantley in his own bed—were offenses for which Sebastian, if he ever learned of them, would make Ban pay.
"Why did your foolish friend Maud die at the stake?" It was a question Sebastian had often hurled at Ban. "Because she revealed herself to those she'd loved while alive! Because she thought the power of one vampire, sleeping by day, was equal to the power of a hundred humans hunting her from dawn to dusk. If the humans hadn't staked her, I would have destroyed her myself, lest her stupidity someday trigger my own demise."
Well aware of how far he'd already strayed, the idea of entering Mrs. Robinson's sickroom, trespassing as she slept, no doubt attended by a dozing maidservant, had struck Ban as needlessly dangerous. He wasn't even sure why the notion of personally discovering the Vessel fascinated him.
Because it would prove, at long last, that I am no imbecile. Oblige Sebastian to see me as I am, not as I was. Make him acknowledge—Ban cut himself off in mid-thought, exasperated by the attempt at self-deception. With the Vessel in my possession, I could demand anything I wished, at least while the weather stays so warm. I could even hide it until the spring thaw, if need be. Then, when Sebastian is weakest, offer it to him in exchange for my freedom. If the Vessel is a Holy Grail of sorts, I wouldn't be killing him, or condemning him to endless misery.
But did Ban care if Sebastian lived or died? Truly care?
Better not to ask such a question. And if he meant to trespass in Mrs. Robinson's sickroom, this was not the time, as bonfire revelers straggled back into Grantley, eager to gain a few hours' rest before Sunday dawned, calling them all to church. The next time he visited Nicholas, he would force his human plaything to escort him into Mrs. Robinson's boudoir. The idea of Nicholas's objections, anger, and inevitable capitulation made Ban smile. And still smiling, he exited Grantley, satisfied below the waist, but again on the hunt for blood.
***
In the year of Our Lord 1440, Ban had been born in an English village called Cowslip, after the common yellow flower. Little more than a collection of huts surrounded by rocky fields, Cowslip had also boasted a tanner, smithy, and tavern. Ban's father, an indifferent farmer and enthusiastic drunkard, died after scratching his finger on a rusty nail. Three months later, Ban's mother gathered her belongings in her shawl, running away to join a Welsh tinker's caravan. Ban, fifteen years old, never saw her again. Of course, in those days, he was called Hob, a name he despised. "Bancroft" had been the name of his lord, once upon a time; the village of Cowslip, just another of Lord Bancroft's fiefs.
"Vampires are not vassals. Nor do they admit to being lifted from the muck, even when everything about them proclaims their low birth," Sebastian told Ban on the first night of his new life. Or, as his maker called it, Ban's soulless, undying death. "Hob, the apprentice blacksmith, is gone. Choose a grander name, as befits your new status."
Status was something Ban never expected. He'd been born with certain gifts, all of them physical—a handsome face, a strong back, a pleasing voice in address and song. His mother had meant him for the church, intending her subsequent sons to handle the farm. But Ban's younger brothers had died, two of fever before their christening, another at age five after falling down a well. After Ban's father died and his mother fled, the farm had been ceded to another vassal. Ban was left to humble himself to the village smithy and beg, literally on his knees, for an apprenticeship.
Cowslip's blacksmith had no desire to take on Ban. But the monks of St. Mark's, unwilling to see an able-bodied male starve or turn to thievery, insisted Walter the Smithy apprentice the boy he despised. Ban, grateful for the reprieve, gained a roof to sleep under, bread to eat, and a new avocation he soon grew to hate. His apprenticeship, stretching on for thirteen years, was the unhappiest time of his life. Twice he nearly ran away, hoping to find a monastery where he wouldn't be expected to do more than mumble prayers and grow turnips. But before he could flee, he met Simon.
Until age fourteen, Ban, like his mother, considered himself destined for the Church. The prospect was intoxicating: clean clothes, music every day, and lavish meals on feast days. The acquisition of secret knowledge also appealed to him. In the Church, he would learn his letters, read the Holy Books, and function as an emissary between Man and God. Such an existence, breaking bread with men, singing and laughing and spending his life always among men, had sounded pleasant. After all, God was a man, or at least male. So it made sense a destined son of the Church would feel at home among all things masculine. But one night Ban dreamt about Geoff, the tavern keeper's son, and his self-perception changed forever.
In waking life, Ban and Geoff were enemies, scrapping over territory, allies, and anything else, including whether the sky was blue or green. During the course of routine village warfare, Geoff had sprained Ban's arm, and Ban had flattened Geoff's nose. But the fine-featured blond boy healed all the prettier, with a cheeky grin and lips as red as any rose. In waking life, Ban despised Geoff for his resilience. In the dream, Ban's feelings transformed. Hot with a strange urgency, he wrestled Geoff to the ground. But instead of hitting Geoff in his perfect mouth, Ban had torn off the other boy's clothes. And instead of breaking Geoff's nose again, Ban had pressed against him, rubbing his groin against Geoff's inner thigh. The other boy had moaned, unresisting, just the way Ban's mother had moaned when his father mounted her in the communal farmhouse's only bed.
Ban awoke in the throes of climax, hot seed spilling over his fist. At first it made no sense. Yet eventually, after many more dreams, both sleeping and waking, he accepted the deeper meaning. Already there were signs he'd fallen out of step with his friends, most of whom had followed friendly girls into barns or behind haystacks. All had sniffed quim, touched it, or managed to stab their pricks inside that warm fold. Ban, never moved by such needs, had assumed a destined man of the church did not seek female company. Now he knew the real reason why. He was bent, unnatural and destined to become an outcast, should the good folk of Cowslip learn the truth.
Thus burdened, Ban went about his new apprentice duties in a daze, sometimes praying for forgiveness, sometimes begging for strength. Daydreams about Geoff were the norm, a guilty pleasure he indulged in two or three times a day. But he craved more. One night while drunk on ale, seventeen-year-old Ban considered cornering Geoff and doing something unforgivable, something that would turn the village against him, possibly even get him killed. But he lacked the heart to do such violence to one he both loved and hated. And then Simon arrived, making Ban forget Geoff altogether.
Simon joined the smithy at age thirteen. Small for his age, he'd been sold, in essence, by parents desperate for a plow and eager to cast off another hungry mouth. Simon showed no particular aptitude for the work. In fact, he seemed better suited to almost any task but hammering red-hot metal. Walter, never subtle, tipped his hand right away. He'd taken on Simon as an additional apprentice merely to make Ban despair and, with any luck, run away. How could Ban, now seventeen and a grown man by any measure, stomach his master's preference for a pale, scrawny weakling?
What Walter did not comprehend, what he was incapable of comprehending, was the gentle feelings Simon aroused in Ban. The child, missing his mother, needed warmth and tenderness. Each night as Simon curled in a dark corner and wept, Ban offered comfort. Sometimes he talked to the boy, repeating gossip and silly riddles. Other times, he gave Simon extra bits of food, a morsel of bread or a stolen apple. What Ban did not do—what he forbid himself from doing, no matter how often Simon asked—was lie down and take the child into his arms. He knew if he did that, if he held the boy close, the inevitable conclusion would do worse than consign Ban's immortal soul to perdition. It would injure Simon, who couldn't possibly understand.
By the time Ban was nineteen, he'd learned the tricks devised by other bent men to satisfy their needs without being driven off or stoned. Most of Cowslip's villagers assumed Ban was simply slow to choose a wife, shy, or backward. But eventually his friends, including the still-beautiful but now married Geoff, forced Ban into a whorehouse, locking him inside a bedroom with an obliging girl until his supposed virginity was gone. Ban hadn't panicked. Flattering the girl with his sweet voice and good looks, he'd coaxed her into turning over, letting him enter the back way, the better to imagine his most recent male conquest. Thus Ban had "proven" his interest in females while honoring his secret self.
Beyond that, Ban had hunted for lovers with the utmost care. There were certain words, clandestine looks and signs that allowed one bent man to recognize another. The exchanges that followed were loveless, purely physical, but they allowed him an outlet. Bent men didn't wed, nor did they love one another, not since the days of the Greeks. For every tale of a knight who cherished only his devoted, rosy-cheeked squire, there were fifty more in which the warrior eventually wed a lady, releasing his young man forever.
"God's teeth! Are you yet a virgin?" Simon, having recently celebrated his sixteenth birthday, teased Ban one night after supper. Walter, who viewed both apprentices as dead weight, allowed them scandalously meager portions, but Ban stole enough to round out each meal. When he and Simon retired to the smithy, to the straw-covered dirt floor where they slept near the banked hearth, Ban brought out his ill-gotten food, splitting the apples, hunks of cheese, and morsels of cooked meat between them.
"Virgin?" Ban repeated. "Worried about my cock, are you?" Well aware Simon had tumbled at least three village girls, Ban no longer censored his lewd remarks around his fellow apprentice. In fact, the curly-haired, brown-eyed boy was so popular, Ban suspected skirts were hiked up wherever Simon went.
"Of course I worry." Simon bit into a piece of hard yellow cheese. "Elias says if you don't spurt once a fortnight, your stones turn black and drop off."
"Yes, well, tell Elias I spurt often enough. Berta never says no." It was his usual lie about a sweetheart in a neighboring village.
"Oh, yes. Your mysterious milkmaid. What does she look like?"
Ban shrugged.
"Shall I guess?"
"If you like."
Simon considered. "Smallish. Pale and passing fair, as the bards say. Sweet-voiced. Curls to here," Simon grinned, touching his own hair. "And a fat pink cock to suck on."
"What—what do you mean?" Ban knew he sounded ridiculous, but he had to prevail. Of the pair of them, he was the man grown. The representative of godly and moral behavior to a fellow orphan, tossed on Walter the Smithy's tender mercies. Ban couldn't reveal the temptations he suffered, couldn't corrupt a younger soul.
Simon threw the cheese rind on the floor. There was no reason to fear Walter's censure on the morrow; rats would carry it off long before daybreak. Smiling, the junior apprentice unlaced his breeches, pushing them down to reveal his manhood, fat and pink and fully erect. "If you're still hungry, sup on this."
"Simon," Ban hissed. Now he, too, was hard, aching for something he dared not do.
"I've dreamt of you for ages." Lifting his cock, Simon stroked it with slow teasing motions. "Kiss me, Ban. Kiss me where I'll never forget."
From that night, Ban and Simon were lovers, sweethearts like every whispered Greek tale, or every story of a knight who preferred his squire to virtuous ladies. And nothing but adoration of Simon could have kept Ban, who hated the smithy more than ever, from running away. Infamous for letting his mind wander, humming and singing to himself and forgetting what he was about, Ban turned out so many ill-balanced, unattractive weapons, he was finally relegated to shoeing horses and repairing farm implements. Simon, weaker but far more focused, applied himself to the art of crafting daggers, both for table and hunting. Neither man expected to stay in Cowslip. Simon was squirreling away coins; Ban was contemplating theft far beyond his usual acquisitions of fruit, cheese, and bread. The plan was to buy passage far away, perhaps to the coast, or even France. But before such plans could be put into effect, Walter the Smithy died.
"Sudden" was the only word for it. One moment Walter was pounding a horseshoe, abusing Ban in half a breath and berating his eldest daughter in the other. Then next, he was slumped over, narrowly saved from branding his own cheek by Ban. An hour later, Walter the Smithy was cold in his bed, dead of a heart seizure.
"I'm ruined," Walter's wife Bess screamed in the streets, dashing from pillar to post like a madwoman. "I'm ruined! Robin's too young to take over. Jack's soft in the head. Lord God save me, I'm ruined!"
"You should wed Lizzy," Simon told Ban that night. Tucked in their usual corner of the smithy, situated near the banked fire and snug within a quilt and several handfuls of fresh straw, they began the evening by making love. In the face of sudden death, what could be more natural? But before Ban could drop off, Simon had shifted into questioning mode, poking and prodding until Ban was fully awake.
"Wed Lizzy? I can't abide her," Ban said at last. Walter's eldest daughter was his heiress, given thirteen-year-old Robin's youth and twenty-two-year-old Jack's mental infirmity. But none of that meant anything to Ban. "She feels the same about me."
"Odd. I think she fancies me," Simon said.
"As the entire village knows." Ban laughed. "Care to tell her you're bent, my love? Or shall I do it for you?"
Simon snuggled closer. "Lizzy wouldn't understand. And what does it matter? I've bedded girls before. Quim or arse, it's just a hole. Close your eyes and make of it what you will."
Ban didn't answer. Something about this discussion troubled him vaguely, but despite his boyhood interest in the church, he'd never been one for wrestling hypothetical questions.
"You'd do that, would you?" he asked at last. "Wed ugly, fat old Lizzy, nine-and-twenty if she's a day, just to run Walter's smithy?"
"Well." Simon cleared his throat. "The plain truth is, I'd rather you did it. And took me on as your heir, of course."
"I'll never marry Lizzy. Nor any woman," Ban had replied. Then he'd fallen asleep, unaware of how much that answer would transform the remainder of his human existence.
Life at the smithy after Simon and Lizzy's marriage was very different. By twenty-three, Ban was a confirmed failure at almost everything. It was much too late to change avocations, or find a new trade. No farm would take him as a laborer, given his reputation for making music when he should have been working, not to mention riding horses that weren't his. The tavern, now run by Geoff and his stunningly fecund wife, needed no extra hands; Geoff's sons and daughters staffed it beautifully. And so Cowslip's lone smithy was Ban's only recourse. Except Simon—Master Smith, as some called him—slept in the house, wore a fine suit of clothes to church on Sundays, and was the father of twin boys. Ban and the new apprentice, Coll, continued to sleep in the smithy, wrapped in old quilts and straw, while Simon presided over his adopted family.
Marrying Lizzy and ascending to such wealth and prominence didn't afflict Simon with amnesia. He still remembered his time in the rat-infested smithy, and his nights in Ban's arms. At least once a month Simon sent Coll away, slipping into the smithy by starlight to find Ban. And to his shame, Ban never said no. It took him some time to work out that Simon had been his first love.
"Your heart is canine," Sebastian told him decades later. "Designed to imprint on a master and serve unto death. That boy was your master in life. I am your master in death. You need understand no more."
Of course, Simon didn't think of their rare trysts as anything unworthy. After each lovemaking session, he assured Ban he'd married Lizzy for the smithy, and his heart still dwelled with Ban. Yet Ban, who desired so much to believe that fable, could not discount the evidence of his eyes. Simon treated Lizzy and his mother-in-law, Bess, with obvious affection. He doted on his nephews, even simple-minded Jack, and prized his twin sons above all else. He sought to run the smithy properly, to learn the skills he'd previously ignored and ensure the new apprentice, Coll, gained a firm foundation in the basics. After all, if disaster struck again, the smithy had to be left in someone's hands. And those hands, by any objective measure, would never be Ban's.
"I'm leaving," Ban had finally announced. By then he was twenty-eight, a ludicrous age for a villager to do anything except bless his eldest child's marriage or await the birth of his first grandchild. Adventure? At Ban's time of life, it was madness.
Simon, heavier and prematurely gray, tried seducing Ban into remaining. But the spark had fled long ago. Without meaning to, Simon had been subsumed into his family, taking on the role of a far older man. And the better Simon acquitted himself as a husband, father, and blacksmith, the less Ban wanted anything to do with him.
