Part 13 (1/2)

His breathing was stronger now, and the pain in his leg was going away. Soon, they'd come for him. Gene would send people back for him. Guglielmo wouldn't let him lie broken for long.

'Anyway Bruno, here's the story. A young actor from the country comes to the big city in search of fame and fortune on the stage. He can sing, he can dance, he can juggle, and he was a star in his university players' company. The young blood gains an audition with Tarradasch, and the great man is quite impressed. But not impressed enough to offer a place in his company. 'You're good,' Tarradasch says, 'you've got a lot of talent, you've got the looks of a leading man, you've got the strength of an acrobat, and you've the grace of a dancer. You've learned your audition pieces very prettily. But there's one thing you haven't got. You haven't got experience. You're not yet eighteen, and you know nothing of life. You've not loved, you've not lived. Before you can be a great player, and not just a talented mannequin, you must go out and live life to the full. Come back to me in six months, and tell me how you've fared.' '

Detlef's face was wet with tears, but his trained voice didn't break.

'So, Bruno, the lad leaves the theatre, Tarradasch's advice going round and round in his head. Six months later, he comes back, and he has a new story. 'You were so right, master,' he tells the great man, 'I've been out there in the city, living for myself, experiencing everything. I've met this girl and she's shown me things about myself I could never have imagined. This has never happened before. We're in love, and everything in my life dances like blossoms on a spring breeze.' '

Detlef looked at the slumped bulk of the man who'd been the Trapdoor Daemon.

' 'That's perfect,' Tarradasch says, 'now if only she would leave you' '

PART TWO.

THE COLD STARK HOUSE.

I.

Lying in his bed, he heard music from far away. To him, the music seemed to fill the endless rooms and pa.s.sageways of Udolpho like a sweet-scented but poisonous gas, drifting with invisible malevolence through the towers and turrets, suites and stables, garrets and gables of the immense, rambling, mostly derelict estate. Down in the great hall, the harpsichord was being played, not well but with a sorcerer's enthusiasm. Christabel, dark daughter of Ravaglioli and Flaminea, with her supple hands and sinister smile, was practising. It was a dramatic piece, expressing violent emotions.

Melmoth Udolpho understood violent emotions. Thanks to Dr. Valdemar's potions and infusions, he was a prisoner in his own shrunken body, his brain a spark of life in an already rotting corpse. But he still had violent emotions.

He thought again of his will. Poor Genevieve must come out, or she would hold up the succession forever. She was fresh now, butlike himshe would live long, too long. Pintaldi must be recognized as Melmoth's grandchild, in order to pa.s.s the fortune on to his current favourites, the twins. Young Melmoth was the purest Udolpho of the lot of them, and Flora would make a grand consort for him when he grew up and took his position in the world. Only the long-gone Montoni, whose b.a.s.t.a.r.d Pintaldi claimed to be, could possibly have matched him.

A few nights ago, Young Melmoth and Flora had surprised Mira, one of the maids, and tied her up. They had placed a mouse on her stomach, and then clapped a cup over the animal, fixing it in place with a scarf. After an hour, the mouse had got hungry, and tried to eat the soft floor of its cell. Young Melmoth thought that a fine experiment, and had kissed Flora on the lips to celebrate its success. They were of Montoni's line, undoubtedly; although Ulric alone knew what their mother had been.

The will must reflect the purity of Udolpho blood. Several times in past centuries, brothers had married sisters, cousins married cousins, simply to keep the blood pure.

Old Melmoth was nearly blind, but he hadn't left his bed in perhaps thirty years and didn't need his sight. He knew where the curtains hung around him, and where his tray was placed each day.

He could no longer taste food, and his sense of smell was also completely gone. He couldn't lift his limbs more than an inch or two and only then with great effort, or even raise his head from its deeply-grooved pillow. But he could still hear. If anything, his hearing was sharper than it had been when he was younger.

He heard everything that went on within the walls of Udolpho.

In the ruined west wing, where the roofs were gone and the exquisite mosaic floors designed by his mad great-uncle Gesualdo were open to the elements, wolves sometimes came to root around. In the stables, flies still buzzed around the neglected and dying horses. In the cellars, rats scratched against old oak doors, wriggling between the bones of forgotten prisoners. And, in her rooms, poor Mathilda, her swollen head almost insupportable, sometimes raged against her fate, smas.h.i.+ng the furniture and attacking the servants with an energy Old Melmoth could only envy. There must be provision in the will for Mathilda. So long as she remained human, she would be a beneficiary.

In the darkness that was forever before his face, a light appeared. It was small at first, but it grew. The light was blue and sickly, and there was a face in it. A familiar face. A long nose, and sunken hollows where eyes had been.

Old Melmoth recognized the features of his eldest son. 'Montoni,' he gasped, his papery throat spitting out the name like a hairball. The rightful heir to the House of Udolpho, vanished into stormy night sixty years earlier, looked down at the ruin of his father, and his empty eyesockets filled with pity.

Old Melmoth's face cracked as he smiled. His gums hurt. Not yet. He wasn't ready yet. He clung to his bedclothes as he clung to life. There was more to be done, more to be changed. He was not ready to die.

II.

Prince Kloszowski prayed to G.o.ds in which he no longer professed to believe that none of his travelling companions had died of the Yellow Ague. He guessed most of them had succ.u.mbed to simple malnutrition or the ministrations of an overenthusiastic torturer, but one of Marino Zeluco's permanent guests might have carried disease enough to provide a swift escape of the duce's dungeons. As the cart trundled along the rough road towards the marshes, he felt several of the bodies leaking onto him, and clamped his hand tighter over his mouth and nostrils. This close, he could taste the stench of the corpses. Breathing was becoming a problem. Naturally, Kloszowski was at the bottom of the pile, and the press of bodies was becoming insupportable. He could no longer feel his legs and feet, and his elbows burned every time he tried to move his arms. The darkness was hot, and getting hotter with every uncomfortable mile.

The duce had told him the only way out of the dungeons of Zeluco was in a corpse-cart, and here he was proving the parasite right. Unless the ordeal were to end soon, Kloszowski would sadly not be alive to benefit from the irony. His mother, the Dowager Princess, wouldn't have approved of his current situation. But his mother hadn't approved of any of his situations since early infancy, so that was hardly a novelty. He needed to cough but the weight on his back was too much. He could only choke feebly, grinding thinly-fleshed ribs against the rough wooden planks of the cart.

Of all his daring escapes, this was the least enjoyable. Through the cracks between the planks, he sucked cold, clean air, and occasionally caught glimpses of reflected light from puddles in the road. The novice of Morr, comfortable on his padded driver's seat, was humming a gloomy melody to himself as he transported human waste to the marsh that served the dungeons as a markerless graveyard. There were things in the marsh the Zelucos liked to keep well-fed, in the hope of dissuading them from forsaking watery homes in search of live meat. Tileans were like that, keener to come to an accommodation with the creatures of Chaos than on crusading against the filthy monstrosities.

Zeluco had too cosy a life extorting from the peasants to bother much with good works. He was a typical parasite, the fruit of ten generations of inbreeding, oppression and perfumed privilege. Come the revolution, Kloszowski swore, things would be different The weather was unpredictable in this benighted land where marsh met forest, and Kloszowski had several times heard the patter of rain on the canvas cart-cover. He was sure the occasional rumble of thunder stirred in with the steady creaking of cartwheels. This was flash-flood country. Most of the roads were little better than ill-maintained causeways.

Kloszowski rebuked himself again. His predicament was, as usual, his own fault. Along the road to revolution, there were always distractions, and too often he let himself be tempted. He had first preached the cause to Donna Isabella Zeluco, impressing upon her, between more conventional attentions, the justice of his struggle. She had seemed convinced the rule of the aristocracy was an obscenity that should be wiped, through violent revolution, from the face of the world. However, it proved unwise to proceed from his philosophical and amorous conquest of the duce's wife to pursue, in rapid succession, both of his daughters, Olympia and Julietta. The girls had been eager to learn of the revolution and of the casting-off of chains, especially when Kloszowski had demonstrated that the outmoded and hypocritical chast.i.ty fostered by their parents' cla.s.s would be swept away along with any notions of rank and t.i.tle. But as the sisters' enthusiasm rose, with enormously satisfying results, so that of their mother abated.

The cart b.u.mped over a stone in the road and someone's protruding bone stabbed into his side. He definitely heard thunder. The superst.i.tious said thunderclaps were tokens of the anger of Ulric, G.o.d of battle, wolves and winter. Kloszowski, who knew G.o.ds were fictions invented by the parasite clergy to excuse their position over the toiling ma.s.ses, prayed to Ulric for delivery from the bottom of this corpse-pile. A flash of lightning lit up the crack beneath his eye, and he saw the mud of the road, a tuft of gra.s.s white in the instant's lightburst. Very close, thunder drum-rolled again. There must be a storm coming.

One night, emerging in disarray from a tryst with one or other of the girls, he'd found himself seized by men-at-arms and hauled up before the duce for a lengthy lecture on the rights and duties of inherited wealth. Donna Isabella, her conversion forgotten, stood dutifully beside her gross and wealthy husband, nodding at every point as if his speech were not the self-interested prattle of an ape-brained idiot. After Zeluco had concluded his address, failing to give Kloszowski adequate opportunity to refute his infantile arguments through reasoned debate, he had ordered that the revolutionist be confined to the depths of the dungeons of Zeluco for the remainder of his life. The duce had introduced the prisoner to Tancredi, a hooded minion reputed to be the most exquisitely skilled torturer in all Tilea, and a.s.sured him, Kloszowski, that their acquaintance would deepen into a full and mutually entertaining relations.h.i.+p that would provide him, Zeluco, with many enjoyable hours. The duce was looking forwards to screams of agony, retractions of deeply-held political convictions and heart-rending, though futile, apologies, offers of rest.i.tution and pleas for mercy.

The bone broke his skin and cut deeper. The pain was good. It made Kloszowski aware he could still feel. His blood trickled and clogged under him. The fog that had been creeping into his brain dissipated. The cart was speeding up, as the novice tried to get his unpleasant task over with before the storm broke.

Were it not for the warmth, generosity and sympathy of Phoebe, the jailer's comely and impressionable daughter, Kloszowski would be in the dungeon still, stapled to the wall, waiting for Tancredi to heat up his branding irons, dust off his knuckle-cracking screws, and start leafing through anatomies for inspiration.

He might yet fail in this escape, if the breath were crushed out of him by the other corpses. He fought to draw in a double lungful of air, and held it inside as long as he could, exhaling in a steady, agonising, stream. Then, he fought for the next breath. Fires of pain were burning up and down his back. He could feel his feet now, as if they were being pierced by a thousand tiny knives. He tried to move, to s.h.i.+ft the weight of the dead from his spine.

He vowed, if he survived, to write The Epic of Phoebe, which would celebrate the jailer's daughter as a heroine of the revolution, worthy of comparison with the martyred Ulrike Blumenschein. But he recalled that he had frequently vowed to write epics, and invariably lost impetus after fewer than a score of pages had been filled. As a poet, he was more successful with more concise pieces, like the six stanzas of his well-remembered The Ashes of Shame. He tried to frame the first canto of The Ballad of Phoebe, planning a mere dozen or so verses. Nothing much came of it, and he wondered whether Phoebe: A Sonnet would suffice to repay his debt of grat.i.tude.

The cart was slowing. Kloszowski wondered what was bothering the novice.

These were bad days for the revolution. In the dungeons, he realized he had not written a word of poetry since his flight from Altdorf, shortly after the Great Fog Riots. Once, verse had spewed from his mind like liquor from a stabbed wineskin, carrying his pa.s.sion to those who heard him recite or read his pamphlets, stirring up suppressed dissent wherever it reached. Now, there was rarely anything. The revolutionist leaders were scattered, imprisoned or dead, but the cause lived on. The fire might be dwindled to a flame, but so long as there was breath in him, he would fan that flame, confident that it would eventually burn away the loathed worldwide conspiracy of t.i.tled thieves and murderers.

The cart halted, and Prince Kloszowski heard voices.

He could speak the elegant Tilean of the parasitical cla.s.ses, the dowager having ensured his complete education, but he found it hard to follow the coa.r.s.er argot of the oppressed ma.s.ses. That had proved an embarra.s.sment during his stay in Miragliano, where he had hoped to seed a revolt but found himself mainly ignored by potential revolutionists unable to understand his courtly speech. In the end, he had left the city when the Yellow Ague began to spread, and people started frothing yolky dribble in the streets. Tilea had more diseases going round than there were ticks on a waterfront dog.

Three different voices were engaged in a spirited conversation. One was the novice of Morr, the others men he had encountered on the road. The men were on foot and the cart was being drawn by two adequate horses from the duce's stables. The men obviously saw the inequity as an injustice, and were arguing that it should be rectified at once. Any other time, Kloszowski would have supported their just cause, but if this trip were extended any further, there was quite a chance that his absence from the dungeons of Zeluco would be noted, and a cadre of men-at-arms sent in pursuit.

The duce was not one to forgive a man who had, he alleged, wronged his wife and daughters, let alone spread sedition throughout his estates, suggesting his tenant farmers be allowed to retain the greater part of their produce for themselves rather than turning over nine-tenths to the castle granaries. And Donna Isabella was unlikely to look favourably upon a lover who had, she claimed, deserted him in favour of greener olives, no matter how much he had told her that fidelity was merely another of the chains society used to confine the true revolutionist into a dungeon of conformity.

The novice of Morr was insistent. He would not give up the horses, and be stranded on an open road with a cartload of fast-spoiling bodies.

Suddenly, the novice changed his mind. There were other voices. Other men, not on foot, had come out of a copse at the side of the road, and were insisting the novice turn over the duce's horses to their comrades, whose own mounts had been killed. There were voices all around and Kloszowski heard horses snorting as they drew near. The cart was surrounded. One of the hors.e.m.e.n spoke surprisingly well, addressing the novice in cultivated Old Worlder. He claimed his men had been unhorsed during a b.l.o.o.d.y battle with a band of foul skaven, the ratmen who were such a problem in the Blighted Marshes, and that the novice should be proud to help out such heroes.

The novice at least pretended to believe the man, and the horses were unharnessed. The foot-weary travellers strapped their saddles to new mounts, and the whole band rode off, hooves thumping against the soggy road.