The Dreamthief's Daughter: A Tale of the Albino Page 6

  Deep blue patterns like gigantic butterfly wings. It was a dream of flying, but unlike any I had heard of. I was seated in a great black saddle which appeared to have been carved from a single piece of ebony yet which fitted my body perfectly and from which radiated a kind of membrane blending with the living creature. I leaned forward to place my hand on a scaly skin that was hot to the touch, suggesting an alien metabolism, and something reared up in front of me, all rustle and clatter and jingling of harness, casting a vast shadow. The monstrous head of what I first took to be a dinosaur and then realized was a dragon, absolutely dwarfing me, its mouth carrying a bit of intricately decorated gold whose tasseled decorations were as long as my body and which threatened to sweep against me when the head turned and a vast, glowing yellow eye regarded me with an intelligence that was inconceivably ancient, drawing on experience of worlds which had never known mankind. And yet, was I foolish to read affection there?

  Emerald green. The subtle language of color and gesture.

  Flamefang.

  Was it my voice which spoke that name?

  That vibrant stink filled my lungs. There was a hint of smoke wreathing the beast’s huge nostrils and something like acid boiled between its long teeth. This beast’s metabolism was extraordinary. Even as I dreamed I recalled stories of spontaneous combustion and would not have been surprised if my steed had suddenly burst into flames beneath the saddle. There was a sensual movement of huge bones and muscles and sinews, of scraping scales, a booming rush as the dragon’s wings beat against gravity and all the laws of common sense and then, with another thrust which thrilled my whole body, we were airborne. The world fell away. It seemed so natural to fly. Another thrust and we had reached the clouds. It felt strangely familiar to be riding on the back of a monster, yet guiding her with all the gentle fluid ease of a Viennese riding master. A gentle touch above the ear with the staff, a fingertip movement of the reins.

  While my left hand held the traditional dragon goad, the other gripped Ravenbrand, pulsing with a horrible darkness and perpetually running with blood, the runes in her blade glowing a brilliant scarlet. And I heard that voice again. My own voice.

  Arioch! Arioch! Blood and souls for my Lord Arioch!

  Such barbaric splendor, such splendid savagery, such ancient, sophisticated knowledge. But all offering a vocabulary of image, word and idea utterly alien to the Enlightenment humanist that was Ulric von Bek. Here were ideals of courage and battle prowess which whispered in my ear like enticing obscenities, thoroughly at odds with my training and traditions. Cruel, unthinkable ideas taken for granted. Here was a power greater than any modern human being could ever know. The power to transform reality. The power of sorcery in a war fought without machines, yet more terrifying, more all-encompassing than the Great War which had recently passed.

  Arioch! Arioch!

  I could not know who Arioch was, but something in my bones conjured a strong sense of subtle, alluring evil, an evil so sophisticated it could even believe itself to be virtuous. This was some of the scent I had smelled on Gaynor and Klosterheim, but nothing like the wholesome beast stink of my dragon, her massive, sinuous multicolored wings beating a leisurely course across the sky. Her scales clashed faintly and her spiky crests folded back against her spine. My modern eye marveled at these natural aerodynamics which enabled such a creature to exist. Her heat was almost uncomfortable and every so often a droplet of venom would form on her lips and flash to earth, burning stone, trees, even setting water ablaze for a short while. What strange twist of fate had made us allies? Allies we were. Bonded in the same way that ordinary men are bonded to ordinary animals, almost telepathic, a deep empathetic heartbeat that made our blood one, our souls’ fates united. When at the dawn of time had we come together to form this complementary union?

  Now man and beast climbed higher and higher into the chilly upper air, steam wafting from the dragon’s head and body, her tail and wings growing faintly sluggish as we reached our maximum altitude and looked down on a world laid out like a map. I felt an indescribable mixture of horror and ecstasy. This was how I imagined the dreams of opium or hashish eaters. Without end. Without meaning. A burning world. A martial world. A world which could have been my own, my twentieth-century world, but which I knew was not. Armies and flags. Armies and flags. And in their wake, the piled corpses of innocents. In the name of whom the flags are raised and the armies sent to war. To fight to the death to defend the virtues of the dead.

  Now, as the clouds parted completely, I saw that the sky was filled with dragons. A great squadron of flying reptiles whose wings were at least thirty feet across and whose riders were dwarfed. A squadron that waited lazily, adrift in the atmosphere, for me to lead it.

  In sudden terror I woke up. And looked directly into the cold eyes of Lieutenant Klosterheim.

  “My apologies, Count von Bek, but we have urgent business in Berlin and must leave within the hour. I thought you might have something to tell us.”

  Confused by my dream and furious at Klosterheim’s graceless intrusion, I told him I would see him downstairs shortly.

  In the breakfast room, where one of my old servants was blearily doing his best to attend to my guests, I found them munching ham and bread and calling for eggs and coffee.

  Gaynor waved his cup at me as I came in. “My dear fellow. How kind of you to join us. We received word from Berlin that we must return immediately. I’m so sorry to be a bad guest.”

  I wondered how he had received such news. A private radio, perhaps, in the car?

  “Well,” I said, “we shall just have to be content with our dull tranquillity.”

  I knew what I was doing. I saw a contradiction in Klosterheim’s eye. He was almost smiling as he glanced down at the table.

  “What about the sword, cousin?” Gaynor impatiently directed the servant to unshell his eggs. “Have you decided to give it up to the care of the State?”

  “I don’t believe it has much value to the State,” I said, “whereas it has great sentimental value to me.”

  Gaynor scowled and rose up in his chair. “Dear cousin, I am not speaking for myself, but if Berlin were to hear your words—you would not have a home, let alone a sword to keep in it!”

  “Well,” I said, “I’m one of those old-fashioned Germans. I believe that duty and honor come before personal comfort. Hitler, after all, is an Austrian and of that happy-go-lucky, tolerant nature, which thinks less of such things, I’m sure.”

  Gaynor was not slow to understand my irony. He seemed to relish it. But Klosterheim was angry again, I could tell.

  “Could we perhaps see the sword, cousin?” Gaynor said. “Just to verify that it is the one Berlin seeks. It could be that it’s the wrong blade altogether!”

  I was in no mood to put myself or the sword in jeopardy. Fantastic as it seemed, I believed both my cousin and his lieutenant to be capable of hitting me over the head and stealing the sword if I showed it to them.

  “I’ll be delighted to show it to you,” I said. “As soon as it comes back from Mirenburg, where I left it with a relative of von Asch’s, to be cleaned and restored.”

  “Von Asch? In Mirenburg?” Klosterheim sounded alarmed.

  “A relative,” I said. “In Baudissingaten. Do you know the man?”

  “Von Asch disappeared, did he not?” Gaynor interrupted.

  “Yes. In the early days of the War. He wanted to visit a certain Irish island, where he expected to find metal of special properties for a sword he wished to make, but I suspect he was too old for the journey. We never heard from him again.”

  “And he told you nothing about the sword?”

  “A few legends, cousin. But I scarcely remember them. They didn’t seem remarkable.”

  “And he mentioned nothing of a sister sword?”

  “Absolutely nothing. I doubt if ours is the blade you seek.”

  “I’m beginning to suspect that you’re right. I’ll do my best to put your point of view to
Berlin, but it will be difficult to present it in a sympathetic light.”

  “They have called on the spirit of Old Germany,” I said. “They’d be wise to respect that spirit and not coarsen its meaning to suit their own brutal agendas.”

  “And perhaps we would be wise to report such treacherous remarks before we are somehow contaminated by them ourselves.” Klosterheim’s strange, cold eyes flared like ice in sudden firelight.

  Gaynor tried to make light of this threat. “I would remind you, cousin, that the Führer will look very positively on someone who bestows such a gift to the nation.” He seemed a little too emphatic, revealing his desperation. He cleared his throat. “Any preconceptions that you, like so many of your class, are a traitor to the New Germany will be dispelled.”

  He was almost unconsciously speaking the language of deceit and obfuscation. The kind of double-talk which always signals a dearth of moral and intellectual content. He was already, whatever he had said to me, a Nazi.

  I went with them to the outside door and stood on the steps as their driver brought the Mercedes around. It was still dark, with a sliver of moon on a pale horizon. I watched the black and chrome car move slowly away down the drive towards those ancient gates, each topped by a time-worn sculpture. Firedrakes. They reminded me of my dream.

  They reminded me that my dream had been considerably less terrifying than my present reality.

  I wondered when I would be receiving my next Nazi guests and whether they would be as easily refused as Gaynor and Klosterheim.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Visiting Strangers

  T hat same evening I received a telephone call from the mysterious “Gertie.” She suggested that around sunset I go down to the river which marked the northern edge of our land. There someone would contact me. There was a snap in the air. I was perfectly happy to stroll down through that lovely rolling parkland to the little bridge which connected, via a wicket gate, with a public path which had once been the main road to the town of Bek. The ruts were hardened into miniature mountain ranges. Few used the path. Now one rarely saw anything but an occasional pair of lovers or an old man walking his dog.

  Just on that point of dusk between night and day, when a faint shivering mist had begun to rise from the river, I saw a tall figure appear on the bridge and wait patiently at the gate for me to unlock it. I moved forward quickly, apologetically. Somehow I had not seen the man approach. I opened the gate, welcoming him onto my land. He stepped swiftly through, closely followed by a slighter figure, who I thought at first must be a bodyguard, since it carried a longbow and a quiver of arrows.

  “Are you Gertie’s friends?” I asked the prearranged question.

  “We know her very well,” answered the archer. A woman’s voice, low and commanding. Her face hooded against the evening chill, she stepped forward out of the tall man’s shadow and took my hand. A strong, soft, dry handshake. The cloth of her cloak and the tunic beneath had a strange shimmering quality and the shades were unfamiliar. I wondered if this were some sort of stage costume. She might have been a German demigoddess in one of those interminable folk plays the Nazis encouraged everywhere. I invited them up to the house, but the man declined. His head lifted from within a darkness it seemed to carry as a kind of aura. He was gaunt, relatively young, and his blind eyes were glaring emeralds, as if he stared past me into a future so monstrous, so cruel and so agonizing that he sought any distraction from its constant presence.

  “I believe your house has already been microphoned,” he said. “Even if it has not been, it’s always wise to behave as if the Nazis could be listening. We’ll stay out here for a while and then, when our business is done, perhaps go into the house for some refreshment?”

  “You will be welcome.”

  His voice was surprisingly light and pleasant, with a faint Austrian accent. He introduced himself as Herr El and his handshake was also reassuring. I knew I was in the presence of a man of substance. His dark green cape and hat were familiar enough clothing in Germany to cause no comment, but they also had the effect of disguising him, for the great collar could be pulled around the face and the brim tugged down to put what remained in shadow. There was something familiar about him and I was sure we had met at least once before, probably in Mirenburg.

  “You’re here to help me join the White Rose Society, I presume?” I strolled with them through the ornamental shrubberies. “To fight against Hitler.”

  “We are certainly here to help you fight against Hitler,” said the young woman, “since you, Count Ulric, are destined for specific duties in the struggle.”

  She, too, gave me the impression that we had met before. I was surprised at her outlandish costume, which I would have thought would have attracted unwanted attention in the streets of the average German town, but guessed she was taking part in some celebration, some charade. Were they on their way to a party?

  “Perhaps you know that I had a visit from my cousin Gaynor yesterday. He has Germanized his name and calls himself Paul von Minct. He’s become a Nazi, though he denies it.”

  “Like so many, Gaynor sees Hitler and Company as furthering their own power. They cannot realize to what extent Hitler and his people are both fascinated by power and addicted to it. They desire it more than ordinary people. They think of nothing else. They are constantly scheming and counter-scheming, always ahead of the game, because most of us don’t even know there’s a game being played.” He spoke with the urbanity of an old Franz Josef Viennese cosmopolitan. For me he represented a reassuring past, a less cynical time.

  The young woman’s face remained hidden, and she wore smoked glasses so that I could not see her eyes. I was surprised she could see at all as the dusk turned to darkness. She chose to sit on an old stone bench, she said, and listen to the last of the birdsong. Meanwhile Herr El and myself slowly walked amongst formal beds and borders which were just beginning to show the shoots of our first flowers. He asked me ordinary questions, mostly about my background, and I was happy to answer. I knew that the White Rose had to be more than careful. One informer and the best these people could hope for would be the guillotine.

  He asked me what I hoped to achieve by joining. I said that the overthrow of Hitler was the chief reason. He asked me if I thought that would rid us of Nazis, and I was forced to admit that I did not.

  “So how are we to defeat the Nazis?” asked Herr El, pausing beneath one of our old ornamental statues, so worn that the face was unrecognizable. “With machine guns? With rhetoric? With passive resistance?”

  It was as if he was trying to dissuade me from joining, telling me that the society could not possibly have effect.

  I answered almost unthinkingly. “By example, sir, surely?”

  He seemed pleased with this and nodded slightly. “It is pretty much all most of us have,” he agreed. “And we can help people escape. How would you function in that respect, Count Ulric?”

  “I could use my house. There are many secret parts. I could hide people. I could probably hide a radio, too. Obviously, we can get people into Poland and also to Hamburg. We’re fairly well positioned as a staging post, I’d say. I can only make these offers, sir, because I am naive. Whatever function you find for me, of course I will fulfill.”

  “I hope so,” he said. “I will tell you at once that this house is not safe. They are too interested in it. Too interested in you. And something else here . . .”

  “My old black sword, I think.”

  “Exactly. And a cup?”

  “Believe me, Herr El, they spoke of a cup, but I have no idea what they meant. We have no legendary chalice at Bek. And if we had, we would not hide our honor!”

  “Just so,” murmured Herr El. “I do not believe you have the chalice either. But the sword is important. It must not become their property.”

  “Does it have more symbolic meaning than I know?”

  “The meanings to be derived from that particular blade, Count Ulric, are, I would say, almost infinite
.”

  “It’s been suggested that the sword has a power of her own,” I said.

  “Indeed,” he agreed. “Some even believe she has a soul.”

  I found this mystical tenor a little discomforting and attempted to change the subject. The air was growing cold again and I had begun to shiver a little. “My visitors of yesterday, who left this morning, looked as if they could use a soul or two. They’ve sold their own to the Nazis. Do you think Herr Hitler will last? My guess is that his rank and file will pull him down. They are already grumbling about betrayal.”

  “One should not underestimate a weakling who has spent most of his life dreaming of power, studying power, yearning for power. That he has no ability to handle power is unfortunate, but he believes that the more he has, the easier it will be for him to control. We are dealing with a mind, Count Ulric, that is at once deeply banal and profoundly mad. Because such minds are beyond our common experience, we do our best to make them seem more ordinary, more palatable to us. We give them motive and meaning which are closer to our own. Their motives are raw, dear Count. Savage. Uncivilized. The naked basic greedy primeval stuff of existence, unrefined by any humanity, which is determined to survive at any cost or, if that is its only option, to be the last to die.”

  I found this a little melodramatic for my somewhat puritanical education. “Don’t some of his followers call him Lucky Adolf?” I asked. “Isn’t he just a nasty little street orator who has, by sheer chance, been elevated to the Chancellory? Are his banalities not simply those you will find in the head of any ordinary Austrian petite bourgeois? Which is why he’s so popular.”

  “I agree that his ideas mirror those you’ll find in any small-town shopkeeper, but they are elevated by a psychopathic vision. Even the words of Jesus, Count Ulric, can be reduced to sentimental banalities. Who can truly describe or even recognize genius? We can judge by action and by what those actions accomplish. Hitler’s strength could be that he was dismissed too readily by people of our class and background. Not for the first time. The little Corsican colonel appeared to come from nowhere. Successful revolutionaries rarely announce themselves as anything but champions of the old virtues. The peasants supported Lenin because they believed he was going to return the Tsar to his throne.”