George Martin - Fevre Dream

Silence. Then, astonishingly, Joshua York laughed, long and loud. “Ah, Abner,” he said when he had quieted again, “you are a steamboatman. Half-dreamer and half-braggart and all fool. You sit there blind, when you know I can see perfectly well by the light leaking in through the shutters and drapes, and beneath the door. You sit there fat and slow, knowing my strength, my quickness. You ought to know how silently I can move.” There was a pause, a creak, and suddenly York’s voice came from across the cabin. “Like this.” Another silence. “And this.” Behind him. “And this.” He was back where he had started; Marsh, who had turned his head every which way to follow the voice, felt dizzy. “I could bleed you to death with a hundred soft touches you’d hardly feel. I could creep up on you in the darkness and rip out your throat before you realized I’d stopped talking. And still, despite everything, you sit there looking in the wrong direction, with your beard stuck out, blustering and threatening.” Joshua sighed. “You have spirit, Abner Marsh. Poor judgment, but lots of spirit.”

“If you’re fixin’ to try to kill me, come on and get it done,” Marsh said. “I’m ready. Maybe I never outrun the Eclipse, but I done most everything else I had a mind to. I’d rather be rottin’ in one of those fancy N’Orleans tombs than runnin’ a steamer for a pack of vampires.”

“Once I asked you if you were a superstitious man, or a religious one,” Joshua said. “You denied it. Yet now I hear you talking about vampires like some ignorant immigrant.”

“What’re you sayin’? You’re the one told me…”

“Yes, yes. Coffins full of dirt, soulless creatures that don’t show up in mirrors, things that can’t cross running water, creatures who can turn into wolves and bats and mists yet cringe before a clove of garlic. You’re too intelligent a man to believe such rubbish, Abner. Shrug off your fears and your angers for a moment, and think!”

That brought Abner Marsh up short. The mocking bite of Joshua’s tone made it all sound mighty silly, in fact. Maybe York did get all burned up by a little daylight, but that didn’t change the fact that he drank holy water and wore silver and showed up in mirrors. “You tellin’ me you ain’t no vampire now, or what?” Marsh said, lost.

“There are no such things as vampires,” Joshua said patiently. “They are like those river stories Karl Framm tells so well. The treasure of the Drennan Whyte. The phantom steamer of Raccourci. The pilot who was so conscientious he got up to stand his watch even after he’d died. Stories, Abner. Idle amusements, not to be taken seriously by a grown man.”

“Some of them stories is part true,” Marsh protested feebly. “I mean, I know lots of pilots who claim they seen the lights of the phantom when they went down the Raccourci cutoff, and even heard her leadsmen cussin’ and swearin’. And the Drennan Whyte, well, I don’t believe in no curses, but she went down just like Mister Framm tells it, and them other boats that came to raise her went down too. As for that dead pilot, hell, I knew him. He was a sleepwalker, is what it was, and he piloted the steamer while he was dead asleep. Only the story got exaggerated a mite goin’ up and down the river.”

“You’ve made my point for me, Abner. If you insist on the word, then yes, vampires are real. But the stories about us have gotten exaggerated a mite as well. Your sleepwalker became a corpse in a few years of telling stories about him. Think of what he’ll be in a century or two.”

“What are you then, if you ain’t no vampire?”

“I have no easy word for what I am,” Joshua said. “In English, your kind might call me vampire, werewolf, witch, warlock, sorcerer, demon, ghoul. Other languages offer other names: nosferatu, odoroten, upir, loup garou. All names given by your people to such poor things as I. I do not like those names. I am none of them. Yet I have nothing to offer in their stead. We have no name for ourselves.”

“Your own language…” Marsh said.

“We have no language. We use human languages, human names. Such has always been our way. We are not human, yet neither are we vampires. We are… another race. When we call ourselves anything, it is usually one of your words, in one of your languages, to which we have given a secret meaning. We are the people of the night, the people of the blood. Or simply the people.”

“And us?” Marsh demanded. “If you’re the people, what are we?”

Joshua York hesitated briefly, and Valerie spoke up. “The people of the day,” she said quickly.

“No,” Joshua said. “That is my term. It is not one my people use frequently. Valerie, the time for lies is past. Tell Abner the truth.”

“He will not like it,” she said. “Joshua, the risk…”

“Nonetheless,” Joshua said. “Valerie, tell him.”

Leaden silence for a moment. And then, softly, Valerie said, “The cattle. That’s what we call you, Captain. The cattle.”

Abner Marsh frowned and clenched a big, rough fist.

“Abner,” Joshua said, “you wanted the truth. I have been giving you a great deal of thought of late. After Natchez, I feared I might have to arrange an accident for you. We dare not risk exposure, and you are a threat to us. Simon and Katherine both urged me to have you killed. Those of my newer companions whom I have taken into my confidence, like Valerie and Jean Ardant, tended to concur. Yet, though my people and I would undoubtedly be safer with you dead, I held back. I am sick of death, sick of fear, endlessly weary of the mistrust between our races. I wondered if perhaps we might try working together instead, but I was never certain that you could be trusted. Until that night in Donaldsonville, that is, that night when Valerie tried to get you to turn the Fevre Dream. You proved stronger than I had any right to expect when you resisted her, and more loyal as well. Then and there, I decided. You would live, and if you came to me again, I would tell you the truth, all of it, the good and the bad. Will you listen?”

“Do I got much choice?” Marsh asked.

“No,” admitted Joshua York.

Valerie sighed. “Joshua, I plead with you to reconsider. He’s one of them, however much you like him. He will not understand. They’ll come up here with sharpened stakes, you know they will.”

“I hope not,” Joshua said. Then, to Marsh, he said, “She is afraid, Abner. This is a new thing I propose to do, and new things are always dangerous. Hear me out and do not judge me, and perhaps we can have a true partnership between us. I have never told the truth to one of you before…”

“To one of the cattle,” Marsh grumbled. “Well, I never lissened to no vampire before neither, so we’re even. Go on. This here bull is lissenin’.”

Of Days Dark and Distant

Listen then, Abner, but first hear my conditions. I want no interruptions. I want no outraged outbursts, no questions, no judgments from you. Not until I am finished. Much of what I have to say you will find grim and terrible, I warn you, but if you let me take you from the beginning to the end, then perhaps you will understand. You have called me a killer, a vampire, and in a sense I am. But you have killed as well, by your own admission. You believe your acts justified by the circumstances. So do I. If not justified, then at least mitigated. Hear all I have to say before you condemn me and my kind.

Let me begin with myself, my own life, and tell you the rest as I learned it.

You asked my age. I am young, Abner, in the first flush of adult life by the standards of my race. I was born in provincial France in the year 1785. I never knew my mother, for reasons I shall reveal later. My father was a minor noble. That is, he granted himself a title as he moved through French society. He had been in France several generations, so he enjoyed a certain status, though he claimed to be of Eastern European origin. He had wealth, a small amount of land. He accounted for his longevity by a ruse in the 1760s, whereby he posed as his own son and eventually succeeded himself.