Vampire in the Banyan Tree

The Vampire

The tocsin tolled, the dim vales and steeping slopes of the mountains took it and rolled it back in softening echoes. It was difficult to distinguish from the ethereal medium of the air in which it resonated, that indistinct itself from the swaying miasmas of tall grass, bogs and winter-bitten cliffs of black rock.

The bell was the voice of the red-walled monastery that stood sentinel on the dark country, invisible to the land below. It rang on each of the seven watches of the night, telling those who found their nervous feet on the ribbon road that they were not forsaken. The monks tolled the hour in defiance of the darkness and if the creatures of it recollected, by the sound, some fear of heaven's justice, so much the better.

The monastery was built on a promontory that created a narrow plateau. Here was a lofty strip of land falling away to cliffs on all sides, backed by impassable mountains on the east. On this high place, the monks astutely cultivated a garden, carving out intricate terraces, each inch of land carefully assigned to useful purpose. Inside the great hall, they recited the Dhuma, meditating under the icy waterfalls that fell from the cliffs, and practiced the art of Koroti until spear points blunted against their flesh and they could split timbers and rock apart with their bare fists. Little by little, they rarefied their minds until each thought became as singular as the great mountain and they could spend months in contemplation of a tiny leaf, or rock, seeing the entire universe in it, needing no more nutrition than a handful of unmilled whet and the droplets of mist and rain that beaded upon their bodies.

Although the copper-fronted doors were unbolted to any who beat on them for sanctuary, the monastery was not easily arrived at. A muddy track left the main path without signpost to distinguish it, pushing through underbrush so thick it was almost like a tunnel of scratching limbs. The path became wet and steep, soon deteriorating into rough stairs of rock. Pack animals and heavy goods had to be secured and left behind. The stairs, often slicked by streams and rivulets, became high and nerve-wracking. Soon they rose above the trees and ceased to be steps at all. Here the traveller found the first votary niche, containing a small statuary figure of the first Slaeah of the West, bedecked with flowers that were bought each day by a monk who made the spider-climb down from the monastery above, regardless of weather.

From this ledge, further progress upwards was by hand-holds cut into the cliff. There were three hundred and five of these, each carved with iconographs. The first seventeen represented the ascending levels of earthy form, encapsulating mankind's sensual conception of himself a creature of gross physicality, the forest of unself, growing from the garden of the pre-conscious. Then came the two hundred and forty five devotionary repetitions and the seventy six exculpatory invocations describing transcendental procession from the lower layers of consciousness to the first plateau of Letu, the gateless door, then the seven tiers comprising of the domains of light, thought and action, the persistence of the mind in defiance of nihilism, and the terror of the void. All of the first three hundred and forty five hand-holds were helpfully inscribed with characters to refresh the memory of those who felt the specifics of catechism escape them under the tension of scaling a sheer cliff, but the final three hand holds were left unmarked. They were Ta, presence in the eternal moment, Orr, continence of impermanence, and finally Ul, the radiance of pure consciousness, emanating from that great throne, immensely remote along the procession of planets, but wreathed in myth and glory, reminding the struggling one, as he gained the top of the cliff in the sweat of exhaustion and relief, of that final authority, as he saw the sun burst in glory, above the mountains.

Nit-pickers might have said some of the lesser devotionals were cut too close together, there being a little more enlightenment represented than the cliff could bear, but it was an nice effect.

Having gained the top, a traveller could now get a pretty good lay of the land. It was a maze of cruel hills and cliffs, heavily forested, cut deep by melt water. They were full of caves and inexplicable pits, carved for reasons unknown. Here the yellow road could be seen, appearing and disappearing intermittently, weaving through the pass like drunken cursive dragged from point to opportunistic point by a thick-fisted illiterate. The saints and guides of the virtuous dead helped those who held faith to the path. The road was life and woe betide those who stumbled from it, into the gloom of the trees and the watching mountains.

***

The girl stood in the shoulder of a small hollow. Rotten buttresses of wood stood about her, the shells of trees long gone to beetle and fungus. She was perhaps thirteen. Pretty, although 'good looking' would perhaps be a better description, a wholesome, clean-limbed child with glossy brown hair, coiled back and bob-pinned at either side of her head. She wore a red dress of heavy silk, embroidered with a white thread. It was clean and pressed, showing no signs of weary travel or muddy road, nor abrasion from the many sharps and thickets of the great wilderness that lay indifferently about her. Her boots, decorated it their tops by girlish silver medallions and bells, were similarly unmarked, as if she had descended tranquilly from the open sky.

Across her chest, descending from left, was the broad leather strap of a bag that sat on her right hip, firmly buckled and vaguely scholastic. It made her look a practical and studious child, a banker's daughter plucked from under the wing of her nanny on the way to school and inexplicably transported, with no evidence of passage, here, to the furthest edge of mankind's track.

She was holding two objects, one in each hand. In her left, a large sack, inelegant, of rough weave, but strong. In her right she held a long wand, of polished black willow. This she swished in menacing style, as if she had a mind to lop the head from a thistle or two.

Her gaze was firmly and determinedly upward. Before her towered a monster, a monarch in this tangled place of fecundity and rot, a great, spreading, sinuous-limbed fig tree. It was a Balyia fig. Those that, in the east, called a Banyan and refuse to saw or cut out of superstitious fear. The smooth flesh of its vast trunk crenelated towards the base, coiling and splitting into tentacle-like buttresses of roots, spread widely to accommodate a court of lesser vegetation, struggling for height. In this place of decay, it seemed greenly alive, full of brooding, drawing secrets up from the waters of its deep reach, exhaling them in the high airs of its distant crown. So heavy was its grip that those winds that ruffled the heights of the trees under the moon breathed but little here. Here, where the small girl in the red dress stood, snapping her slim wand, a stroke of bright red against a dim canvass, all was still, save for the occasional knocking and rattling of fruit falling from the heights.

In this tree, a pale figure hung upside down, framed like a votary god, by the spreading nexus of limbs. It hung by its hooked heels like a bat. It was albino leprous, blue-veined and pallid as a cave fish, naked, apparently sexless, emaciated and yet unnaturally vital, its skinny muscles standing out like whip cord. It seemed a near skeleton, rarefied by desolation, as if its flesh had dried into leather and shrunk tight across bone. The proportions were disturbingly inhuman, the head unnaturally large, the eyes closed and lost in deep cavities, the ears translucent and bat-like. Even as the girl in the red dress watched, those eyes opened a slit, like cracks of yellow agate in the gloom, perspicuous and full of predatory wisdom. It was a vampire.

The girl pursed her lips in disapproval, apparently merely of the thing's existence, absent of any action it had yet taken. She raised her black willow and swept it harshly down in a chopping motion, piercing the silence with a clear, childish voice. 'Lembas, Cghirikios, tsi-oggoth-HAI'

The air of the hollow thickened, and filled with potential. This was crude, what the philosopher scientists would call 'second order manipulation', however, the rough forces of nature are as simple in their levers as they are irresistible, often crushing the artistry of more elegant sorcery under primitive wheels. On the downward slash of the girl's wand, the potential became lightning and struck the cadaverous figure in its plexus with a flashing crack of thunder that rolled way into the hills like the monk's bell. The great tree shivered to its crown, the shock travelling into the earth to its farthest roots. The pale thing gave a shriek and balled up its limbs like an electrocuted spider. It came bouncing down the side of the trunk to roll in the thick buttresses of roots below, wreathing in trails of blue smoke behind it. With another command, the girl held up the black sack and it leaped from her hand, flapped across the short distance to engulf the pale form and stitch shut the draw string. In an instant it was done, the sack was a dark lump under the tree. Crude symbols, seemingly stitched into its weave, burned brightly for a moment, then faded.

The girl lowered the willow and walked forward, pressing aside the tall weeds. There was an unpleasant smell of burnt hair and ozone. The sack lay still. She poked it with the wand, finding its surface hard and unresponsive. She jabbed again, impatiently. Again nothing. 'Embatu' she said and drew the delicate pip of the willow across the thick laces, causing them to writhe and unravel somewhat. Inside was revealed, not the pale flesh of the unnatural creature, but grey stone. With a cry of rage she swept the sack open to reveal a mossy old votary idol, about three feet across, in the shape of a rotund man seated cross-legged in prayer (the wild regions were full of such worn relics and statuary). It's face had been weathered to imbecilic blankness and its indecently large - if crudely carved - phallus was at least partially made modest by a trouser of green moss.

The girl heard a laugh, crawling and insinuative as pale fingers creeping around a door jam in the dead of night, and her head jerked up to find the source. The vampire was in the tree, hanging imperturbably where she had first seen it, as if it had never moved, it's amber eyes still glowing in the forest gloom. She leapt back from the trunk, baring her teeth in a flash of childish temper.

         'Yhumerithit-yi oh gu!' she yelled, and immediately a great wind bent the lesser trees of the gloomy hollow, striking the creature at the great tree's nexus. The air filled with whirling leaves, branches and forest litter adding tearing claws to the vortex, but the target of her ire was unmoved.

She let the wind fall and swung her wand about the clearing. Instantly, with the sharp cracks and poppings of snapping wood, the pallid saplings sprang up, splitting and folding their bodies into shapes crudely man-like. Their leering faces were of twisted wood and knot-hole, crowned by green leaves, their long arms were tough sapling branches with grasping stick fingers. It may have been a trick of the light, or, more likely, the mnemonic contamination that such improvised autonima are susceptible to, but they had a cheerily hook-chinned and squinty-eyed air about them, as if recalling some childish toy of their youthful creator that had unsettled her with its wooden grin from the corner of a moon-lit room. In an instant these creations had swarmed like sailors up the trunk to lay hold of the creature, but the thing squirmed throughout the branches as swiftly as an eel, far more craftily than the simulacrums could manage with their splintery limbs and the girl, at length frustrated, gave an exasperated cry and let her puppets fall. A they tumbled from the boughs in splinters, the hollow laugh came again. The wretched creature hung there as if it had never moved, and quite probably it hadn't.

Few youngsters can stand being mocked, this one less than most. The girl in the red dress, now breathing heavily and gripping her wand in increasingly white-knuckled pique, found the idea that her opponent was thwarting her heavy blows with trivial misdirection infuriating, and quickly began to resort to methods better suited to murder than apprehension.

She called great flashing blades from some fold in the universes hidden fabric. They rained savage blows upon the thing, knocking stinging chips and wedges of wood from the boughs like cake. In an instant, the creature was cut into parts, it's arms severed from its torso, it's weird, bat-hooked legs leaping and twitching free to dance about the great bough, while its head chased them, gibbering and laughing. This spectacle was so unsettling that the girl inadvertently stepped back and, as her diamond-point concentrations lapsed, so did her spectral weapons. Again the vampire hung in the tree, unmarked. Again the black wand flashed, straining under the weight of the energy it was dragging in train. She tried to pull the heat out of her enemy's body in accordance with her intense, unspoken will freeze, you bastard! but, although the sap in the nearby boughs froze with popping retorts, the pull was defeated by the thing's slippery aura and it barely blinked at the frost on its lashless eyes.

She reached down into the decaying vegetation of the hollow, finding the chemical malice that resonated there in sympathy with her own, dragging atropine and scopolamine from the ragged stands of seedy Monk's Hood, strychnine from the Nightshade and amatoxins from the luminescent shelves of fungi in the rotten boughs, whirling them up in a lethal pirouette that burst around the hanging figure like a murderous halo. But even as the poison beaded on its uncanny flesh and the beetles and night insects fell dead from the branches, the thing's imperturbable gaze did not waver and she had to wave the toxic effusion away least she breath it herself.

These last manifestations were not second order manipulation but direct field effects and, if they were heating the precocious girl's temper with headache-inducing concentration necessary to direct them, they were harder still on her instrument. The handsome willow wand bent like a fishing rod under the magnetism of invisible force as she dragged the chemical potentials out of the plants, its grain splintered along its polished length in the torsioning effects of the field as she whirled them into twisting ropes and cracked them at the target of her ire. Without warning, lightning leapt from its tip to ground the unbalanced field and the polished wood popped and cracked. The pressure was too much, it burst into splinters, stinging her hand with droplets of molten copper from its core.


She threw it away with a shout of rage, and this time the blow directed at her imperturbable adversary was without finesse or temperance. She dragged everything she could reach from the ground and sky and hammered it down on the pallid figure like a fist. It struck, an-eye watering distortion that flashed out from the point of impact in a radial wave, forced by sudden compression upon the dense matter of the trunk to equalize itself and shed its potential as heat. Burn you bastard! The tree did, its glossy foliage momentarily replaced by leaves of glaring flame, a recoiling blast of heat nearly threw the monster's creator off her feet and she was forced to close her eyes against the stinging sparks. The fire burned unnaturally, voluptuously red, dyed the same vermilion hue of her dress, throwing white ridges of incandescence like the cranes printed upon it. The fury leapt up the giant and above the treetops. For a moment, the landscape under the dim moon was illuminated by a glare, the canopies of the dark trees picked out in red highlight, then the fiery wave outran its fuel and burst off the burning tips of the tree with a thunderclap, sucking air up through its hot core from the forest below. In the ringing aftermath of the roar could be heard the clattering cries of flying foxes and night birds, rising from the trees in panic.

The glare had faded. The far ends of the great fig tree's branches were glowing like cherry embers in the darkness, the glossy leaves burnt away. A tremendous penumbra of smoke was now expanding above the forest, filled with flying sparks and the cries of panicked night birds, but below, although its skin was blackened and split, the greenwood flesh of the giant was untouched, and, she saw, as the acrid haze parted, neither was the vampire.

This time she didn't curse, but merely stood upright, fists clenched. She was breathing heavily from her exertions and had to suppress impulse to cough on the harsh air. She didn't want to give the wretched thing the satisfaction. She set her teeth, placed her feet firmly and raised her hands and, as she did, the vampire finally spoke.
         'Enough!' it said, and if one were to hear the gnawing hunger of the eternal night in its voice, there was a also distinct note of exasperation. 'Even the gods must tire before the obstinacy of a child.'

         'Do you surrender then?' demanded the girl.
         'Let's say I do, if only to relieve the tedium. Perhaps I will jump in your sack, upon which you so prettily stitched the seven sigils of the Jaysthara, and there cry mercy, assuming your flames have not burned it.'

         'Do it then!'

         'No thank you.'

         'Wretched creature,' yelled the girl stamping her foot on the smouldering ashes, 'you'll answer me either way, if I have to pull the moon down on your head or boil you in that rotten sack. I will not bandy words with a disreputable spectre from a position of equality.'

         'May I ask,' replied the malevolent, 'what questions my interrogator has that require flying swords and burning down trees in the night with their occupants still in them?'

         'I want my name.'

         'Good for you. But you have one already, surely. I doubt those who raised you to have so little apparent respect for your elders addressed you as 'hey you'.'

         'They gave me a name.'

         'What was it? That I might know my conqueror.'

         'Oblinia.'

         'Oblinia - tree of paradise, who's fragrance fills the heavens', laughed the vampire, 'Boail would be better for you, the impertinent weed that forces its head through the ploughman's tracks where it is least wanted. But it has a prettier flower.'

         'I will not be called by either,' snapped the youngster.

         'Little tiger,' smiled the creature, 'walking in the ruined cities, calling specters to the cross-roads, rattling the dead hand in its house. I saw your flame from the mountains and called you to mind.'

         'No you didn't, liar. I found you. And it wasn't easy. So give me my name!'

         'Why would I know it? I am poor flotsam, swept over the edge of the earth.' Although its words were self-pitying, there was a sarcastic tone to them. The amber lamps glowed under their hoods, concealing their wells of cunning and wickedness, and the youngster met them with her own.

         'I notice,' she said, 'that you haven't said that you don't.'

         'You may find a name heavier than you'd like' said the Vampire. 'Doubtless your childish imagination envisions your vanished progenitors as paragons.'

         'Were they?' asked the girl, with eagerness she couldn't entirely conceal. It seemed that the fleshless creature smiled to hear it.

         'If you'd take my advice,' it replied, 'you'd be as I am, and free of the past. You already have the only wealth that matters, and yet you ask the dead for their troubles. Go make a new name.'

         'No.'

         'Why?'

         'Because it's mine! It's the only thing that really is mine. Clean or bloody, I own it. It's mine and I want it!'

         'So speaks obstinance. And it's bloody, by the way. Very.' This time the creature really did smile, and the girl saw its teeth for the first time. She felt an unpleasant sensation trickle like water down her back, but her temper flared the hotter for it.

         'Tell me, you rotten thing!' she yelled, 'Enough talk.' She seemed to involuntarily raise her arm before remembering her shattered wand. However, even as she cast about her memory for her limited repertoire of swear words and her substantially larger one of dangerous and ill-gotten levers, the creature's tone changed.

         'Come, little tiger!' it soothed, 'Why growl so fierce at a poor old cadaver? I'll charge you nothing for my time, since I have far too much of it, but surely you can't deny me some return.'

         'What do you want?' she asked suspiciously.

         'To give you what you want! I don't ask for much.'

         'But what?'

         'I propose to tell you a story and, as I tell it, we shall play a game.'

         'No.'

         'Are you sure? It's rather a good story. It has miraculous feats, a questing prince, various exercises in daring-do, a kingdom to be won from the scheming craft of a villainous sorcerer-'

         'No!'

         'There's a dragon.'

         'I don't care.'

         'And a princess.'

         'A beautiful princess?'

         'Oh of course.'

         'Does she have a horse?'

         'Yes, of snowy mane and velvet forelock, as swift as the wind, and a loyal groom to tend her, who is quite talented at riding horses himself, as it turns out.'

         'I'm not a child,' she scowled, knowing her petulant tone made her sound exactly like one. The wretched creature was turning out to be far more slippery than she'd hoped.

         'Oh I know,' it smiled, 'but you see, this story isn't just a story. It's all true. And once it's over, you'll know all you need.'

She stared up at the creature for a long time. It gazed back from under the hoods of its lantern eyes. In the deep darkness of the woods weird cry warbled, a high, shivering acoustic, like the shriek some ghostly murder, or maybe just a night bird. There came the croak of a solitary frog. The little fires of the fallen twigs had gone out and the clearing was hazed in a faint corona of acrid smoke.

         'There's a princess in it' she said. It was not quite a question. Finally, she conceded, without grace, to the silence. 'What's the game?'

         'A wager.'

         'Pertaining to the events in the story?'

         'Pertaining! That's a big word for a little girl,' it smiled, 'but yes.'

         'What are the rules?'

         'Let us say, first, that I will not lie.'

         'Unless that's a lie.'

         'No. The first rule is that I will not lie. Everything I say will be true.'

         'Fine. Then let's say I believe you, and pretend that's not a lie.'

         'The next rule,' said the vampire, ignoring her facetiousness, 'is that, at each hour tolled, I will ask you a question pertaining to the import of my soliloquy. Seven bells those foolish monks ring, seven questions before the dawn. As you answer each, I proceed to the next. If not, you lose.'

         'It sounds like a trick'.

         'What churlishness! Your father was similar. Or was it your mother? Ah, the stories I could tell. People of singular purpose in respect to - well the quality of their characters might become apparent in the course of my illuminating narrative.' It sighed sadly, ' But I suppose I must refrain, although my heart bursts with anecdotal impulse.'

         'And what it can't answer your questions, you villain?' demanded the girl. 'What is my stake?'

         'I suppose I might ask for your life, or your soul, but it's all too tedious. You'll find it hard enough to hold onto either, since you're barely at the first blood of womanhood and already up to your neck in Kleszian black magic. Let us, instead, say that in failing to answer my questions, you will simply forfeit the pleasure of my company. I shall vanish from this place and all places. You will never find me again, even should you search the Seven Earths from the Shamilyne to the throne of God. Your past will be cut from you, and ache forever in its absence, like a phantom limb.'

         'Now it sounds even more like a trick', said the girl but the other had fallen silent. She stood in thought and her eyes narrowed. It had occurred to her that her adversary seemed altogether too eager to give her what she wanted.

         'No.' she said.

At this, the creature's smug air evaporated. 'You are a hard and ungracious child!' it barked, 'I offer you every advantage!'

         'The terms of a cheater's game aren't to anyone's advantage but himself,' she replied, with an air of one quoting proverb.

         'Then I'll leaven the deal further,' it growled, 'let us add, then, that so long as I fail to reveal the name you desire, I shall hold myself contracted to remain hanging in this tree. Thus - assuming your continued perspicacity and my own intransigence - the sun will find your humble interlocutor so confined and return him to ashes. Thus I stake my life, if you could call it that, on our wager and you, nothing!'

There was a pause. The girl in the clean shoes and glossy red dress gazed at the creature, seemingly trying to stare holes through it, to the subterfuge she knew must be there. Probably the loquacious thing believed she could not answer its riddling questions, or else it would ask questions impossible to answer, like the number of grains of sand on a beach. However, if so, why take the trouble in the first place? It seemed to be wagering for nothing but her attention. If there was a catch or some treacherous clause hiding in its proposition, it may as well be sitting in plain sight for all the good it did her. She had little doubt it could make good on its boast to disappear thoroughly. The world, after all was very large. Much more so than she had expected on that day when she had left her master's house by the great window and flown out on the wind of the mountains.

She huffed resignedly. 'Agreed' she said and pointed to the forest floor. Immediately green, writhing shoots forced their way up through the litter of leaf mold in four intertwining columns, sprouting green branches as they grew. In a moment they had intertwined to form a four-legged platform, hardening and forming bark, then throwing up a screen of new growth at its back that soon burst into a corona of greenery. The center was reinforced by interlocking rootlets and sprouted a velvet cushion of moss. As a final touch, a pretty corona of white flowers blossomed about the frame like ornamentation, a rather girlish touch. The unnaturally swift growth slowed and stopped. Standing rooted in the clearing was an elegant chair of living vegetation, the sylvan furnishing of a forest dryad.

She plumped down in its mossy cushion with as little grace as she could manage and crossed her legs.

         'Begin,' she said.