Vampire in the Banyan Tree

Hart in the Hot Tub

Hart was young and drunk. He had little interest in history, the present tense being enough to handle. He was in a large wooden tub, the kind used for pressing wine, about eight feet across, filled with hot water. Some scent of its former purpose was still in the wood, stained by the grapes of past summers. He was in the southern tower of the ruinous strong-house Boll Gort had discovered in the thickets besides the Seven God's Dike, two decades earlier.

Although the intervening years had seen some industry on Boll's part, these upper regions showed little sign of it. The attic chamber was circular, its roof ascending like a conical wizard's hat, ribbed about its internal structure with wooden beams, through which the heavy tiles of the roof could be seen. There were gaps here and there, and the timber rafters bore their weight with nonuniform resolve. Some illumination was given by the numerous candles flickering along the tub's edge, and by the glow of a brazier that heated a large kettle nearby the wall, but the reach of these sources barely. With the darkness gaining on the faltering candles, the world felt uncannily unoccupied. The spirits of wind and rain were speaking in the eaves and swirling about their little island, their cold fingers ruffled the water's surface and fluttering the candle flames in their wax beds.

         'This place is a ruin,' he said, staring meditatively into the recesses of the converging rafters.

He raised himself partially over the edge, a wave of displaced water sloshing onto the stone floor, and grabbed another bottle. He receded back into the warm water, yanked the wax and refreshed his cup.

Keeping company with him was a girl of approximately his own age, reclining with feline ease against the far side of the tub, her back against the rough wood, her arms resting to either side upon the rim. She was lean as smoke, clean-lined and attractive, with a blush of colour to her cheeks that accentuated her pale skin. Her hair was straight, black, cut square at her shoulders and pulled back from her eyes into bangs, giving her an indefinable air of probity at erotic odds with her un-selfconscious nudity. Through the water ripple, a gleam of gold from the ring that pierced her navel could be glimpsed, her only ornament.

         'I know' she said, 'It's probably going to fall down one day and kill us all.' With one hand, she idly shepherd her wine cup, floating in the water and smiled. 'Your friends are all asleep.'

         'What was your name?' Hart asked.

         'Does it matter?'

         'Probably not.'

She laughed, and Hart thought the sound pleasant. Sly yet unaffected.

         'I'm sorry,' he said and shook his head, suddenly wanting it clearer. His gaze strayed down to his wooden cup, half full of the acrid red that the locals brought from the mountains and mixed with honey and water. How much of that had he had? Enough to know he wasn't eager to face tomorrow.

Hart had been pacing himself on the assumption that the wine was of the Swampland's usual, pisswater, but Boll, running contrary his normal swindling instinct in the interest of pandering to the aristocracy, had been giving them their money's worth. He took another sip. Growing on him was an unaccountable feeling that affairs had been left untended in the presence of danger. There was some cloud somewhere, intuited in the hazy prescience of drink. But where, he had no idea. The lean girl smiled her lazy smile, waiting for him to speak again. She seemed brightened to indistinction by the saturation of his physical senses. Outside the window, tall and empty-framed, only darkness and flying spits of rain were visible.

What time was it, anyway? Late. He tried to concentrate. All he could retrieve was a drunken bleeding-together of memory, a chimeric mass of flesh and noise, the eager faces of the mob, the smell of woodsmoke and humanity, an assault on senses long used to sequestration.

They had just concluded a week of hunting, drinking riding and general horseplay, running concurrent with the ending of the summer and the harvest, half under the yoke of state responsibilities and half of their own recognizance. Why this sudden liberty had been thrust upon them was still a mystery to Hart, who felt like some animal which wakes one morning to find its cage door inexplicably open, but to Aleron the terms of release were irrelevant.

According tot he plan, they were to go to Mithtoad to review the pumping stations and the workings of the Swampland Kingdom's great national project, the mighty Trunk Drain, started thirty years earlier by Aleron's grandfather and continued by his son, which now snaked all the way from the breakwaters of the sea to the northern reaches. As giant ditches went, it was impressive. Once the holding barriers were thrown down, it would flush incalculable quantities of water, to the sea, served by pumps that would dry new territories for farming and settlement. Having the princes tour this national project apparently sent the message that the capitol was paying attention, despite appearances, and that the emergence of the polity from barbarism was proceeding apace.

From there, the itinerary of their miniature progress was to travel across the nape of the campestral's upper reach, hunting and stopping at the houses of prominent loyalists on the way, curving northward and back to the west through the wilder country, until they arrived at Minnowfett on the eleventh, to attend the wedding of the son of the Gaeleff of Red River, the King's old ally and comrade in arms, then, back down the Yellow road to the capitol by the thirteenth, completing their circuit.

And so they'd galloped out of the beggar's gate of morning of the third, just before the dawn, supplied with a bodyguard and some youthful companions of their own station which they'd managed to dump, drunk and snoring, at a public house only sixteen hours later. Aleron always rode out from under the shadow of his father's palace as if one step ahead of the devil but they'd almost immediately struck a mass of livestock being driven to the gates across the wooden causeway, and no amount of cursing or shoving could force a way until the shaggy mass had passed the bottleneck. That's where they'd met the Idiot, but it was hard to remember his face now.

Gaining the road, they'd ridden to Chattering Gael and then across the fields, their cursing retinue of armed babysitters clattering in pursuit at a white-knuckled gallop and the local farmers shaking fists at them as bravely as they dared. In the absence of a trunk road, they tacked between an east and north-eastern course, working their way towards Mithtoad along the strips of settled country that lay along the dikes and levied rivers, finding the countryside bustling with late season activity. The heat lay low, the wind off the distant ocean clipping the green tree lines and making them sway. The sky was vanilla and hazy, pale under the roof of clouds, waiting for the storms that would signal winter and the rising of the waters.

As they passed the wagon lines, crowding the narrow roads, it seemed to Hart that the vital life of the season was coming up through their feet, filling the horses with restless energy, skipping them, unrecognized, across the flats and yellow roads and townships like a scudding cloud, past the laborers lying in the shade of the orchards, panting like dogs in the heat and fat publicans sweeping the smell of sawdust and beer out of their doorways. In the rows, men strained to scythe in the last of the harvest before the fields were bent under rain.

Already, they'd seen the signs of the great public works. There were work camps and storage yards and kilns. New pumping stations, built of red brick, fed straight feeding canals that seemed to extend into the distance, broken only here and there by farmer's bridges. However, it wasn't until they approached Mithtoad, that they saw the drain itself and found a band playing and the whole locality lining the roads to meet them.

That was six days ago.

         'I gotta piss' said Hart and pulled himself abruptly out of the water, sending a small tidal wave over the wooden sides. His tubmate squealed in protest and several of the thick candles sputtered and popped.

He walked, wet, to the window. As he crossed, he noticed one of the fallen crossbeams wedged under the handle of the chamber door, making it difficult for anyone coming up the stairs to force, and that his unsheathed sword was propped against the tub on his right hand side. He couldn't remember taking either of these precautions, but it was good to know that the paranoid habits Old Clubfoot's training had beaten into him were still in effect, even with his brain pickled in wine and his head wedged between the breasts of slutty fen girls. Observation, Preparation and Position. Together, these principles formed the basis of Situational Awareness, or what Clubfoot called 'taking your head out of your ass'. When Hart had been somewhere between fearing that Clubfoot's training might kill him and hoping it would, he had wondered if their teacher hated them. But for that one, who knew what or hate was, or love. That old oak, cut so deep in its wood, knew light only though pain, and thought suffering grace. Only he, undoubted in loyalty, could speak as a man before the throne, and the King, hearing what he needed to, instead of what he wanted to, must kill him for his candor or swallow it whole. No wonder he was banned from court.

         See the world is fallen, how silent are the brave, thought Hart, wondering if that was some drunken thought or a scrap of remembered poetry. He stepped up on the broad edge of the sill, feeling the wind prickle specks of rain on his skin. The stream of urine danced away into the gloom below, abraded into glittering droplets by the swirling updrafts. Was that the courtyard down there? He was probably pissing on somebody's horse. The honeysuckle cladding the exterior wall hissed and sighed in the wind.

The sky was black. No lights could be seen. He could be staring out into the end of the world. This was what the Swamplanders called the plelegiddon, the lid of the pot, a phenomena of late summer. Cloud from the ocean banked up in the swampland basin, penned by the mountains, which prevented them rising high enough to shed their water. It generally broke with thunderstorms and a change of weather, but while it lasted, the phenomena spelled stuffy, gloomy days (which could weigh heavy on the souls of those melancholicly inclined), and abyssal nights. It locked the land down, so that no beam of moon or gleam of star could penetrate, leaving the children of Adam nervous and alone, in primal darkness.

The heat was evaporating, like threads off steam off his flesh. An unpleasant feeling, like the premonition of sobriety and its consequences, was creeping up. He shivered, shook off the last drops, and hopping backwards off the sill. The tub needed a re-heating.

Hart went to the boiling kettle. This worthy, wrought in the shape of a crowing rooster, its open beak the pourer, sat on its swart backside above a peat-fire brazier. As it came periodically to boil, they'd emptied it into the tub, refilling from a barrel of rain water that stood near the window.

         'Whatever gold you came with will be with my uncle by now,' called the girl from the tub.

         'Never mind,' said Hart absently, wrapping a rag around the iron handle so he could grasp it without burning himself. He grunted a little from the effort as he lifted. The kettle, two feet across and full of boiling water, was heavy and needed to be held clear of the body. 'We're not supposed to worry about money.'

The girl pulled her feet back, bringing her knees up near her chin as the youth hoisted the kettle onto the tub's rim with a thump of iron on oak. He leaned it, and boiling water steamed from its beak. 'Princes,' she smiled, biting her lip as if savoring something delectable.

         'I'm not exactly,' he said. 'My father is Chief Custodian of the City Under the Mountain. And I'm the youngest son of thirteen, so it's not likely I'd ever take the Chain.'

         'Unless your brothers kill each other.'

         'Fingers crossed.'

         'But your father's a king really,' she said. 'That makes you a prince, really, if not in name.'

         'I suppose.'

         'And anyway, you're like a brother to Aleron.'

         'That's true.'

         'Although better looking than him.'

         'Also true' said Hart.

It was true, sort of. In Hart's face, some strange alchemy had combined to form the perfect object of female fascination. Whereas the lines Aleron's features seemed drafted in arrogant perfection, Hart's were drawn in more human lines. His mouth was wide without effeminacy, his face strong but not brutal, the exercise of power that often coarsened the soul of feudal offspring had yet left him generous in his character and intelligence. His body had been hardened by the rough martial regimens of the local nobility, which held their privileges through boldness and force, not a correct knowledge of dining etiquette. Hart's eyes were guileless hazel, his hands were lean and strong. His brown hair framed his face with just enough wildness that female hands itched to get at it, then push him down onto a convenient surface and get on top of him. That was the cross he had to bear. On this dark night of wind and brooding change, he and Aleron were just past seventeen.

Hart poured out the last and walked over to the rainwater barrel, dunking the empty kettle in to refill it before clattering it back onto its brazier. The smell of the fire came up to meet him. That was the strongest memory he had, when he had first come here as a child, to live amongst his father's enemies, the smell of the peat they burned in this country, a scent like hot earth.

The girl watched him in the dim light, a young thoroughbred, the musculature tensing on his nude body as he dunked the hissing kettle into the rainwater barrel then hoisted it back onto its brazier. He was beautiful, she thought, but the world was full of beautiful boys and, if it were no easy place for the wise, it was a deal harder for fools.

         'They say,' she said, playfully, as Hart climbed back into the civilizing embrace of hot water, 'that any woman who gazes into your eyes loses all power to resist you.'

         'Has it worked?'

         'No. Nothing does. How is the King?'

Hart glanced up from his cup, startled. Her tone was idle, indicating nothing of the alarming divergence in topic. The eyes that met his were guileless and unwavering. He noticed that they were green-grey, like the sea under clouds. They were pleasant, disarming but unsettling.

         'I- the King is fine. The King is a lion. The King will live a hundred years.'

         'That's not what people say.'

Hart felt at a loss, as if any answer his encumbered brain could fashion would be a poor fit. It did not occur to him that he could simply refuse to answer. 'I don't know what people say. The King is fine.'

         'That's a relief.' The jet-haired girl smiled and raised her cup.

         The king is fine thought Hart, his eyes returning to his own. The king is fine, God is in heaven and all is well.

They'd ridden up the drain in a barge fitted out for that purpose. Hart's impression was of a people desperate to satisfy a vast and frustrated curiosity. The band battered them with cymbal crashes and trumpets like a drunken assailant, the people cheered, every face strained to see the son of Cutburt the Giant Killer, like flowers turning to the sun. The sheer pressure of it was blinding after in the cavernous gloom of the citadel, like going from a monastery to an orgy.

From there, the horses, men and baggage had been sent ahead. Only the dour Captain Jaice, their chief babysitter, and three of his men went on board with them, fretting watchfully in the background as the ring of local prominences closed around the youths like the jaws of a genial trap. Whips cracked and oxen began to draw the barge against the slow current. The people lining the banks cheered and waved, royal signatories fluttered, the children ran to keep pace.

Hart realized, for the first time, that the great drain was actually a great canal, of smooth, dark water, busy with traffic, that ran between elevated banks and was fed on every side by tributaries and pump stations. Over the fluttering bunting of the platform he could see a row of new windmills receding into the summer, turning slowly in the lazy weather. 'This is all new,' said the Mayor and it was a little stunning. That meant this tremendous, dark-watered canal snaked away south, almost three hundred miles, to the sea and the grand trunk drain was now, officially, penetrating into the north. No less impressive was the effect it could be seen to have on the surrounding country. Gone were the grey-green fens, as far as the eye could see

It seemed to Hart that the menagerie of local dignitaries that hemmed them in seemed decked out in a modern and unfamiliar taste. They had about all of them the breath of ambition, of energetic money and commerce. It was if some force of the larger world had burst the seawalls of the ancient country, flooding its stagnant backwaters with a fresh current, bringing with it news of things afar. These people were rising with that tide and they seemed tremendously pleased about it. The women wore gleaming shoes better suited to treading lawns than bog, pearls instead of silver. They were capped in style. Reds and ochres, black and white were the most common colors. It was if some fashionable seed of distant capitols had blown over the mountains to take root in wilder soil. There were no shaggy cloaks of wolf skin, no leather leggings, bound with chords to trim long, curve-toed boots, no thistle-headed hoods. No plaited beards, or swords or daggers shoved through belts. And there was a distinct scarcity of nobility. Those foremost in this assembly seemed not to be aristocrats at all, but technocrats and politicians. New men, Hart thought.

Hart looked past the chattering faces to Aleron, who was leaning over the rail with the king's engineer, Stoal, hearing, with actual interest, about embankment cladding, pumping stations and the wily ways of the great foe and unsleeping enemy of the civil engineer, water. In winter it crept into the thinnest crevice, froze and expanded, breaking apart joins and mortar with the strength of a crowbar. In summer, it washed away unfounded roads and undermined strong ones, dragged topsoil off the fields and choked the spillways with it. It tested its muscles against the embankments, tirelessly seeking for a faulty infill or bad foundation to undermine so that it could break through and gleefully reoccupy territories thought conquered by man. Its fingers pried at retaining walls and culverts, waterlogged wood and rusted iron. It seeped into foundations and basements and had to be ceaselessly pumped out. It undermined dikes and seawalls, turned flood debris into battering rams to knock away bridge supports. In fact, the impermanence of man’s works in the face of nature seemed to be a gloomy fixture of the Chief Engineer's imagination, having set his shoulder to that thankless wheel his whole life.

The Mayor went on about commerce, the women chatted brightly, the party pressed in all around, a jovial susurrus of conversation and questions. Hart's drink was refilled as dozen features of the slowly unfolding terrain were pointed out, and he forced himself to relax. He told himself that he was unused to attention and the press of society. Maybe because he was an outsider here, and always would be, in the country in which he had grown up, but not been born.

Hart pulled free of the crowd, waving away people's concern, saying he needed air. He stepped down to the lower deck and stood in the narrow space between the bunting-clad walls and the water, breathing. He thought maybe he would throw up, to clear his stomach a little, then decided not to. It seemed uncouth. He watched the banks pass.

The flat land made for wide vistas, and, for a tremendous distance, all they could see were patchworks of new fields, more symmetrical, in their long layouts, than the traditional, terrain-sculpted clusters which curved around river bend settlements in the swampland country, where the natural rise of the lee allowed people to bank up land for cultivation. Here and there, copses of trees still stood, where the ox and chain crews hadn't managed to comb out the tougher scruffs of the earth, and the glitter of water could be seen, but it had been disciplined into a tracery, a geometry of drainage ditches and sedimentary ponds. The long line of the canal ran straight to the horizon, like a heavy downward stroke on an otherwise pastoral canvas, lined with new pumps and windmills like an endlessly receding procession of tombs. Yellow roads curved about the higher contours, the original thoroughfares in the time of fen and flood, but they were servants now to more efficient upstarts, the little traceries that ran along the strip allotments. Cattle could be seen moving and, everywhere, new buildings seemed to be in construction.

Again, Hart felt the indefinable unease. The disciplined roads, the canals, fields and new settlements, all seemed unsoundly lodged, as if the Swampland Kingdom, a sodden wilderness of marginal governability, was pretending to something unsustainable. This is all new, the Mayor had said. Why did that bother him? All was well. This was Aleron's family's doing, his grandfather's vision bearing fruit. The population was booming. People were heading north, for once, government numbers in hand, waiting in tent villages and embankments for the lotteries to be called on the new land. 'God save the king', sang the people in the hedgerows, 'God preserve the Prince', and they meant it. So what was wrong about it all? Maybe it was that he had no idea how any of it was happening. The withdrawal of the king from society had cut the cord of royal oversight, leaving Aleron a bystander to state matters, unprepared to intervene. Worse, Hart was now old enough to suspect that was how certain people wanted it. A son of a line of fighters and drinkers barely able to hold sway over their own fractious capitols and stay ahead of their failing livers long enough to sire children, his friend seemed, instead, expected to preside over something that had begun to resemble an actual nation. Hart didn't know what that meant, but he knew it was a problem that Aleron didn't either and didn't seem to sense anything dangerous about it.

Hart could heard rougher voices on the other side of the paper bunting, servants maybe or retainers, gabbling at each other and issuing orders, working invisibly to oil wheels of polite society.

One, a man's, became suddenly clearer. 'Two more of the small barrels, mother,' it said, 'the brandy and the wine poured out to air before they go in. And mind we don't set the decanters on the brace, Lord I'd never hear the end of it.'

         'Sure enough, sure enough,' replied the reedy voice of an old woman. 'Here they are, all laid out pretty.'

         'What a day,' came a second male voice.

         'I'd like to take that table master and throw him overboard, the way he's running us down here' growled the first. 'Here mother, I'll find a use for that one anyway, while we're waiting. By God, I've worked up an honest man's thirst.'

         'Don't drink too much!'

         'Ah take one too.'

         'Well, as you're having one. I suppose the quality won't miss it. Cheers.' There was a pause as they drank, then the second man said 'Ah! That'll do the necessary. What a Day.'

         'Does us all good to have the royalty out from that rock and among the people. Like old times. When the king went from house to house.'

         'Who's here?' asked the old woman's quavery voice, 'The king?'

         'No mother, the princes. We're going up to Mithtoad with the princes.'

         'Is it the King?'

         'No, you old baggage!' said the second man, raising his voice against her apparent deafness. 'The princes! The princes are here! Not the king.'

         'Ahh,' said the old woman sadly, 'Poor boys. I suppose they'll be killed.'

         'Who'll kill 'em?' demanded the first, in outrage.

         'Don't listen to her. She's as mad as mist.'

         'If anyone raises a hand against our prince they'll have me to deal with!' yelled the first.

         'All right, all right!' said the second, in alarm, as if his colleague, martial blood roused in defense of the crown and lacking a ready enemy to expend it on, might punch him instead. 'No one's going to kill anyone! I told you, she's dopey as a punch-swung oar. Have another drink.'

         'Don't mind if I do, and I'll toast to the good health of our King and his son and God defeat all enemies and traitors.'

         'Hear, hear' said the other.

Amused, Hart had crept away and rejoined the press and noise of the party. It wasn't until much later that the old woman's words came back to him. She'd sounded so sad, resigned. Poor boys. I suppose they'll be killed.

He turned the wine in his cup and watched the liquid turn like a witch's mirror. The jet-haired girl watched him in silence. Apparently, if there was nothing to say, she simply didn't speak. It occurred to Hart how strange that was, and how welcome.

The wind moaned in the ragged eves. The surface between them stippled in the gust, rolling delicate ribbons of steam, and again the flames fluttered and struggled in their wax beds. The room was a cavern, the beams above almost lost. The great world lay under a flying sky, the spirits of rain and wind were all about them. They listened for a while, together and alone.

         'What's going to happen?' she asked, softly.

         'I don't know. It'll be alright.'

         'They say the dragon-'

         'I don't want to talk about it.' He drank again. His companion rolled the wine but didn't drink, the point of her chin resting on the surface of the warm water. This girl. He tried to bring his mind into focus. Did she say Boll Gort was her uncle? Beneath the water, her foot was idly stroking the inside of his thigh, but his member didn't take the hint. However diligently as his second favorite organ had served him tonight, it seemed to think it deserved a rest. The wine probably wasn't helping.

It was helping with everything else, though.