Paradise for the Damned. - 11. Chapter 11

A year had passed by and Claude was not dead yet. Not yet taken by demons. Had not ravished the lads or virgins. Had not stolen the purse. He was stuffed with French, roasted in Latin, and pickled in tears whenever Paire Dennis declared, Ploremus (let us wail) instead of Oremus (let us pray). Yet he was unblemished, unbled, and unbroken.

With severe dispassion, Calm reigned in the hut, but outside in the backyard during fencing lessons, it was no king. Claude fought to skewer it upon the naked nacreous target of Guy’s heart. One such damp afternoon when Claude lunged into the Guy’s attack without taking care to parry first, Guy grabbed the end of the blade with his bare hand and whacked Claude over the head with his blunt blade.

“Ow!” Claude struggled to free his blade from Guy’s grip.

“Thou oat-brained pumpion,” Guy barked then wrested the sword easily from Claude and threw it aside. “You're ever a milkhead.”

Claude scowled, rubbing his sore head. Faith and hope still ravaged with weeds in his heart. One of these days, one of these rainy blustery days, he would stab Guy’s heart and gain freedom from his debt.

Still rubbing his stinging head, he went to pick up the sword lying on the grass. The ground squelched under his boots leaving behind soft and soggy footprints. Not two days before, Whitsuntide had assaulted the joy of spring with a hailstorm. His vegetables flailed ruined leaves and misshapen flowers upon the black soil pelted with tiny puddles. As he picked up the hilt of braided steel, he glimpsed a sliver of blue and muddy shoes at the backdoor, then his belly cramped.

“Sabrine, teach the little whore his defenses. The coxcomb would have me take his heart sooner rather than later.”

“You wait too long to bleed sheep,” Sabrine said, taking the sword from Guy. She proceeded to hike up her skirts with a solid look about her face hatted with a black capotain.

Claude stabbed his sword into the ground. “I will not be taught by a woman.”

“Now you remember your manhood, not when Serge rode you?” Guy asked.

“For the last time, Serge and I knew no shame—”

“Engarde!”

Claude refused to harden into the defensive position, instead twisted his chemise collar, thinking precisely of how odious it was to dash upon a woman with rouged cheeks and plucked eyebrows. How now must he aim his blade at the plump mounds of her breasts?

Sabrine stomped over to him and slapped his buttocks with the blade, barking in his ear, “Engarde.”

Merciful considerations for her bosom fizzled away as stinging spanned his buttocks. “Your woman aims for my blood,” Claude yelled.

At the backdoor, Guy cocked his head, nonchalant. “The day she draws your blood is the day she dies. Now show her your parry quatre.”

Guy’s bastardy feelings was ever dependable to give Claude cause mock Sabrine. Claude wagged the rapier over his ridges of carrots, smiling at her, “Sabrine, ’tis a wondrous love. He thinks nothing of killing you.”

The words were indeed like flies, efficient in finding the rot in the crags of her spirit. The veins in Sabrine’s forearms inflamed plump and menacing, and her eyes ballooned into red globs. She twisted to Guy, flinging the sword at him. Metal clanged dully on the soggy ground.

“I won’t teach a milk-livered boar-pig. Force-feed him some manners,” she said.

Guy’s height over her seemed to diminish underneath her flapping canopy of ire. “Claude,” he drawled in a grand show of defeat. “Make amends or I shall slice off your fingers one by one.”

“My fair lady, do forgive my muddy tongue,” Claude mocked.

“Cut out his tongue!”

“My puss,” Guy was more paternal than loving, “Why be angry so? Ysabeau will have no trouble teaching him.”

“Ysabeau? The common-kissing rat?” Sabrine thrust her hands akimbo. “I’ll call upon Francois to give lessons instead.”

“The little whore would give more heed to Francois’ cock than a proper parry.”

“I won’t have your wenches here.”

“I allow you Henri-Laure. But you turn green-eyed over Ysabeau?”

“Your giglet called me a nettle face,” she asserted.

Quite entertained and yet perplexed, Claude tendered an indecisive grin. Why they argued about side lovers instead of Guy’s selfishness escaped him. Surely Sabrine cared that she yielded her blood while Guy gave not one drop of his. But this must be the mystery of love.

“Jean-Baptiste,” Sabrine declared.

And that was how Claude began fencing lessons with another blood-drinker Jean-Baptiste. The man along with ten other blood-drinkers lived in an imposing chateau with boarded windows. Lessons proceeded in a curtained room walled with the eyes of candles blinking and blinking to the sounds of fencer’s shoes clopping against the marble floor.

Jean-Baptiste, at first glance, would strike you with his hunched stature, and the slight way in which he kicked as he walked. He looked much older than Sabrine or Guy, as his eyes looked wrinkled like slivered cabbages and his neck dripped a generous wattle. But his mouth was bedecked with perfect teeth.

“My liege,” Jean-Baptiste would say to Guy in greeting. Ignoring the inanity of his deference to Guy, Claude found him patient, too patient. Careful and accommodating. Claude took care not to fall into his lake of warmth. Keep to parries and feints. Return thrust for thrust. Stay an insistent arm’s length away from the teacher, who must be thinking of his itchy neck. Nevertheless, Jean-Baptiste gabbed gossip from the demon grapevine.

Apparently newborn demons were feral beasts with no memories of their human lives. The awareness of reason and restraint would come with the long years. Even then they were still at the mercy of the sun.

“Guy and Sabrine walk in the day,” Claude contradicted.

“They are the terrible ones. They are the strong ones, more so Guy. To gain strength even unto sorcery you must kill your kind and take their hearts. Human blood only sustains. It does not strengthen. But blood of the high born…” Jean-Baptiste’s eyes lit up red in anticipation of aristocratic blood on his lips.

Claude squirmed, reconsidered his earlier bread and cheese lunch. “How you came to his evil company?”

“He saved me once from a school of rogue fangs. As such I owe him my blood and life.”

The square designs on the floor appeared to move and ripple, causing Claude to totter in doubt of his perceptions. This Guy—Claude gripped the jerkin fabric over his left breast and felt the old pain of Guy’s talons digging his flesh. The blue curtains sheared to the thin edges of grey and yellow in the light. “The imp would save a man freely?”

“No, not freely. He would have killed me too, but his damaged lute distracted him.”

Claude became hardier, laughing. “It was his lute that saved you.”

“You quibble.”

Claude laughed louder. “And what of this Roland? He saved him too?”

“Roland?”

“Roland Delayer from Rouen gave him a strange white sword?”

“Edjya you mean, the man who made him.”

“Ah, that’s his true name.” Claude nodded. “Edjya, what manner of man is he?”

“You may not call him that.”

“It is his name,” Claude asserted.

“Our world is crueler than yours. Strength must be acknowledged, and politeness given. Or you die very quickly.”

“Decorum among demons?” Claude puffed another round of laughter.

“Roland’s a legend. As old as earth itself. His blood is precious. Not one can claim it...” His voice died over the warm eddies of dust twinkling in the light. He turned back to Claude with a wild glimmer smearing his eyes. “They say Edjya allows Guy his blood. They even say Guy has sorcery.”

“Sorcery…” Guy’s eyes burnished in Claude’s mind, and a dagger of heat worked its way inside his skull. Breathlessly, he tumbled into seating on the ground. It was cool and somewhat yielding under his palms. Jean-Baptiste hovered a blank look over him then reached for a smile.

“Verily Guy would be God,” Claude said.

It was Jean-Baptiste’s turn to laugh. “Guy is no God. Some are more wicked than him, like Betrada or Edjya. Then again, Guy’s been trying to kill him.”

“The imp would make war with everybody,” Claude blurted, still feeling the dagger between his eyes.

“I see no sense in it myself. To fight the one who made you, is like fighting against your heart. And Edjya is forgiving about it. Perchance he sees some jest in a fly trying to fight against a wolf.”

“The imp escapes reason.”

“Who knows what lies in Guy’s heart?”

Claude nodded, a bit perplexed over his curiosity. The curiosity he quickly deemed his conceit to fashion something human out of Guy. There could be no good in disappearing down long dark corridors in search of clarity. It was wondrously simple. Guy was a demon, not human, not friend, not lover, just a murderous imp.

There was an inane jangle at the door, and Guy’s black head peered in, blood dribbling round the curve of his trimmed beard. A pall unfurled over Claude’s spirit.

“We found a good horse for you to ride,” Guy boomed as he dragged a clammy Claude off the ground.

Claude abandoned himself to Guy’s brash direction through the candle-lit corridors fraught with the heavy smell of cedar. Still, it was difficult to attach horns and hooked noses onto the thing boasting and jeering about swift stallions. He faltered. Forget the uneven black line of hair glancing over the violet doublet. Forget the cold grip at his wrists. The man in front of him flinging wide the doors was the fair demon blessed with eternal youth. And God made him. Oc, God allowed him life just to confound the wise with the specimen of ornate evil, just to showcase His glory. A capricious glory it was, Claude madly concluded. A tainted glory God would have, for He let the demons live without the fear of judgment while brave men like Antoine were bones and dust.

“This time next year, you should know enough Latin to go to University,” Guy said, interrupting his thoughts.

Claude gave up thinking. He had made his choice. to live with a demon.

They came to the stables and its reek of damp earth and dung. Then again he felt the trembling of unease. What would Antoine think of his choice?

Two

With Greek, philosophy and dry southerly winds came an excess of choler and lessons under the chestnut tree. Guy was appareled in a black sable coat, balloon hose and white stockings that clung to his firm calves. As it would not do if Claude acquired the peasant’s tan, he was likewise clothed in constricting finery, and so struggled against the idiocy of a cartwheel ruff on a summer’s day. His mind frayed in the heat calling him to the stream. Guy called him to feel pretty in velvet, to feel the romance in philosophy.

“According to Parmenides, change is an illusion. My dark affliction a few night ago was but an illusion—”

“What night?” Guy asked maliciously.

“It was all an illusion. The state of existence of my dark affliction cannot be passed into a state of existence of flaccidness. Therefore I have had a dark affliction for eternity. Even right now.”

Guy swooped his gaze down to Claude's wool-stuffed codpiece. “You would be more convincing, if you were afflicted now. As your tutor—” Claude’s face darkened. Guy had a smirk hinting mischief. “Beg me to bite you. Men get hard on a good strong bite.”

Nothing like fangs of a pet wolf chewing an erection to stop cold errant passions. Claude coughed a prayer to the heat to melt Guy into the beautiful Alphonse.

“Dilate on Zeno,” Guy said.

“Christ’s wounds, I had only enough inspiration for Parmenides.”

“Allow me. According to Zeno, you will stay limp forever. After all to be hard, you must be half as hard, to get half as hard, you need to be half as half as hard, and ad infinitum.” Guy sounded winded, strangely as he was not capable of breathing. “A stubborn goat had not the wherewithal for a hard implement.”

“This stubborn goat begs leave from this lascivious lesson and other diatribes on your idol.” The sound of the stream grew louder in Claude’s ears now, and he shifted impatiently.

“Bless me. My idol is the greatest possible thing I can think of. Naturally I think of it all the time.”

Claude snapped his book shut. “A false god it is.”

“Little whore, you care so much about measuring the truth and falsity of God. Why measure God? His nature is a logical morass. I can think of better things to measure, like me perhaps. I give a good length. Forsooth, my measure measures all men.”

Claude brooded over the ornate wall of Guy’s doublet. “You’re drunk in the wine of your person. At least ‘tis not your idol that measures all things.”

Guy waffled his head about like a rooster cock. “Don’t smatter. Make war with me. How does my measure compare to your measure?”

With that Claude’s resolve whooshed away away. He would have flung his book at Guy's face, but books were sacred and the pet wolf would become big killer wolf. He took a deep breath and dreamed of the snow-capped Pyrenees.

“Write me an ode to cabbages,” Guy said.

“Cabbages?”

“That or my idol and the theory of forms?”

“I’d read about real things.”

“Real things? What couldn't be more real than cabbages or my idol?”

Then Guy discoursed on men with withered members, exhaling excrement deemed knowledge. Claude listened half-heartedly and half in agreement. Perchance the scrolls exhaling vituperations for virtue and dilations on daimons would mean something when he attended university, but not now, not even after a year of head-balding study. Books were still the screeds of wasted imaginations, still the tomes of men with drunk on their body milk. Claude took another deep breath and rubbed his eyes. They felt hot and peppery. The dome of green above him breathed light and leaves and quivered with the slight rustle of the branches. And he crumpled on himself again in capitulation to the green life hammering its reality. These tedious books were his only escape from the tedium of plow and sickle. And by God, he must persist with this labor of learning, for it would lift him up above the ragged multitude.

“Cabbages or my idol?” Guy demanded his ear.

Claude clawed his hands into his thighs for one furious moment but refrained from exploding on his dear tutor. Instead he pushed off the tree, shoved the book into Guy’s chest, and marched away. Inside the cottage, he tossed his cape and ruff onto the table. A cool comfort drizzled over his nape, even better soothing were the bright scent of oranges.

Claude had never had an orange before. And now looking at a bowl of them on the table, shaded with green shadows and silver patinas in the light, he wondered what possessed Guy to procure them, undoubtedly, from somewhere criminal. He sighed into a smile and proceeded to cut an orange into quarters. The orange was sweet and good even if it was the demon’s gift. He slapped his dress dagger onto the table and swished tongue from cheek to cheek in search of something bitter. Still sweet, still good, and still would be a mistake to find something good and sweet in Guy’s wide cheeriness. God was ever cruel to curse him with a cherub-demon for a tutor.

The light on the wall greyed into a sheared shadow of a profile, Guy—black sable coat, a sliver of white satin, and the face, the light of the moon. In sooth, a divine demon. One did well not to mistake the shine of Guy’s smile for bonhomie. Claude swallowed hard then shifted reins of feeling to the worn-out and rubbed-out idol of Alphonse.

Alphonse was just a parched peasant boy of matted hair and scabbed hands while Guy was ever more the light of moon as he sat by him and strummed the lute. Ambergris and earth tones—Guy was childishly particular about his perfumes. The scents eddied in Claude’s mind a picture of a book-walled room wherein Guy laid claim to a light-crowned corner, winking deliciously at a maid. Claude reached for another orange and cuffed away embarrassment.

“What’s this I hear of you trying to kill Edjya?” Claude asked brusquely to expel the gentle air.

Guy’s eyes swirled with snaky streaks of red. “You’re not fit to call him by his given name. To you little human, he is Roland Delayer, Sieur of St. Rouge.”

Claude sliced, rather daggered, then quartered and sub-quartered wedges. His question had been effective, perhaps too effective at banishing cheer. The cold seep of Guy’s hardness was becoming unbearable.

He plopped the knife onto the table. “What respect do I give to those who lived too long on the blood of others?”

“The respect that is accorded to those of superior strength.”

“Methinks, it should be more than strength that demands respect to Ed—Sieur.”

With a cool deliberateness Guy placed the lute on the table. “Sabrine is my inferior and so she bends to me as I am Edjya’s inferior, and I bend to him. I am blood bound to honor him all my days. There is a lesson for you.”

Claude clucked. “Demons claim more honor than angels. What I hear of you trying to kill him?”

The corners of Guy’s mouth were pinched now. “My quarrel with Edjya is with him alone. It concerns you not. What you know of honor? You tried to steal my hat. You bend over for pigs in the dark. Your mouth ever leaks with lies on your nature. Tell me what of this honor you have.”

In a rush to dampen the serious air, Claude swallowed a fruit segment. The moist and fragrant air passed over him, relinquishing him no sweet understanding of his tutor. Christ’s wounds, a thief hath honor!

“What little I have of honor, methinks, ‘tis a store compared to yours, a fig,” Claude concluded.

“Who claims this honor of yours?”

“I strive for no one.”

“And Andre?”

Claude neighed some indifference to Guy’s consuming curiosity and recalled Andre was supposed to be Antoine. The jest had lasted too long, and perchance he should tell Guy the truth. But Andre had become a winsome lad of broad chest, imperial heft, who could stiffen him to spilling on sight alone, nothing like the plump and diminutive Antoine. And now Guy shined teases and raillery in his face, searching for more inky details on Andre. Claude puckered his mouth, thought oranges tasted sour.

“Bless my cock, have you bedded someone without regard for your gain?”

“What’s the good of it? There’s the eternal risk, the moral risk and personal risk to weigh.”

“Your life is too short for such a barren philosophy.”

Feeling the graininess of the wood under his cool palms, Claude sucked in and gathered words. “Men leave me content. Sabrine cowers before you, men die in your wake. Whose life is more barren?”

Guy’s lace cuffs twirled and glimmered as hands wagged in concession of the point. “Oui … human therefore better.”

“I am better than you or this beneficent Edjya—”

Chaos thumped. Oranges and books bounced in the air as Guy snatched the knife and stabbed the table, barely slicing the edge of Claude’s right hand.

“Blessed Mother!” Claude barked. “Is this your honor?”

Guy remained still, his eyes slit with a red gleam. “Next time….” And then he repositioned the lute on his lap and offered a pavane—bright and practiced with the finesse of an assassin.