The Journal of Vincent Du Maurier Trilogy (Books 1, 2, 3) (75 page)

“But she is. Everything is as real as it will ever
be.”

I stepped forward and touched the body I had come to
know. Her skin had softened, her nails and teeth no longer those of a vampire.
Her hair had returned to the length it was when she lived with me once upon a
time.

“She is not real.”

“You touch her and yet you say she is not real. She
is as real as ever.”

“She is not real.”

“She stands before you,” he said. “What makes her
unreal?”

I could not keep a steady hand on her skin for it
felt too fleshly, no longer the stone I admired. “She cannot be here.”

“Why not? You are.”

Laszlo Arros stepped forward and stroked my arm, as
I caressed the replica. I reached for the tube and yanked it out of her flesh,
and he did not stop me. Freed from captivity, her body folded forward onto
itself, and she fell from the pedestal, pinning me beneath her. Her weight was
nothing, her body as light as it had once been, but still I could not lift her
off me.

Laszlo Arros dropped down beside me and said, “Absorb
her while you can, every last bit of her before she lies on the bier.”

I clung to her wilted body, as my own sunk into the
floor, too weak to bear the weight of my sin.

Beneath the Hearth

Vincent rose from the corner, insisting it was time.

“For what?” I asked.

“We must go to the hearth.”

“But was that Evelina in the facility? Was she dead?
I still don’t understand how Laszlo Arros—”

He bolted toward me and shot up a hand, placing his
finger to his lips. “Shush,” he said. “Now is the time.”

He tore me from the stool without touching me, and I
gave in to the levitation, as if I had a choice to combat it. He dragged me
backward, pulling me into the dark corner where he sat, and then I fainted, or
at least I think I did. The next thing I knew, I was in a space so dim, I could
not tell if I was still in the tower.

“Rest, Dagur.” It was a female voice, I was certain
of it. “Rest, sweet child.”

“Mother?”

“Hush,” she said. “Keep quiet now. Go back to sleep.”

“My body hurts,” I whispered. “I hurt.”

“I know,” she said. “It can’t be helped. But you
have done well.”

She sounded far away. “Take his pain,” I heard, and then
oblivion swept me up again.

Endless minutes, hours or days may have passed. I
had no idea how long I had been out when I woke, but I was famished. “Food,” I
groaned.

A cool cup was brought to my lips and I sipped the
water. With my eyes closed, I tasted the next morsel brought to my lips. The
salty savor of Freyit’s dried strips of Arctic fox made my toes curl. The
refreshment eased my emptiness, and I fell back asleep satisfied.

I called out for Evelina, as I woke. I had dreamed
of her and mumbled her name in my sleep. Silence greeted me, and I lay in the
dim space comforted by it, my ache lessened. I wanted to sit up but my body
seemed held in paralysis, which may have explained why my pain had dulled. Fear
did not nag at me, but loneliness seemed to pluck my nerve. Vincent had gone. I
could feel it.

I woke a third time to the softest voice. “I am
here,” he said. “See me. I have returned.”

I opened my eyes and a figure seemed to rise before
me. His outline darkened with the dimness of the room, but he grabbed a source
of light, as if from the outlying blackness, and held a candle to his face.
“See me,” he said again.

“Gerenios?”

“I am here.”

“You’re back.”

“You must not speak, Dagur. Your silence will keep
you safe.”

“How,” I mumbled.

The candlelight shadowed his face, and the seasons I
had spent with him showed in the creases of his eyes.

“Tell me,” I whispered.

He covered his lips with his finger, and leaned
forward.

Evelina
, I mouthed her name unable
to forget my nightmares.

“You must remain quiet. We cannot give up your
position.”

His booming voice had shrunk to a gruff whisper,
instilling me with a calm. Gerenios’s generosity had tempered my life with the settlers.
He used to bring me slingshots made with branches from the tea-leaved willows he’d
camp beneath while on a hunt. One time, he gave me a satchel he’d made from a
reindeer hide and told me it was for the day I ventured beyond the colony. “I
didn’t think you’d ever let me leave,” I’d said, jokingly. “We’ll all leave one
day,” he’d replied without his usual smile.

“I assure you Evelina is alive and well,” he said.
“She and the others will return to rid us of the nimrod.”

“Where am I?”

“Listen, don’t speak. This is all part of the plan.
We knew this day would come, and I have waited.”

I bit my lip, though a million questions rushed to the
surface.

“The world is not what it once was,” he said. “I
know he has already explained that and you have seen the truth in his journals.
The pieces he has you recording are the missing ones, those that tie it all
together. But no story truly ever ends, and yours is only beginning.”

He touched my hand, and tapped it gently. “I have
wanted to tell you for a long time, but swore to hold my tongue until he
returned. He has granted me permission now, and I falter as eager as I am.”

He looked away and darkness fell over his face. The
candle wax dripped onto the handle, and then his hand. The sting of the heat
brought him back to the present moment and he cursed, placing the candle on the
ledge beside him.

“They came to me long ago,” he said. “It was another
world then, and this colony was nothing. We had only just begun laying the
foundation for the hearth. Did you know it was named for a great hall written
about in old poetry? Your guardian told me it was actually older still, from a
song about a hero who saves a group of foreigners from a monster. The hero rode
the seas to save the foreigners, wanting to claim fame and fortune. Heorot was
where the king gathered with his people to dole out rings and celebrate unions,
and so it became the name of our hearth, too.”

Gerenios had a knack for telling stories, but this was
one of his favorites. I had heard the story of our hearth’s namesake many times
through the seasons.

“Our hearth was to be a similar place,” he said.
“And as we laid its foundation, they came, your ancestors, bringing a young
girl with them for safe haven. She was unlike any I had seen before, with her
chestnut hair and bright green eyes. Her bronze skin glistened like a god’s and
I worshipped her.”

He looked away, hiding his sorrow.

“She did not stay that way forever,” he said. “Soon she
grew up and became a woman, and they returned for her.”

“The hearth,” I whispered.

He gestured for silence again, and looked up at the
darkness that surrounded us, suggesting we were underground, beneath the planks
of Heorot.

“The hearth,” he said, “is above us. You are safe
here as long as you remain out of sight.”

I looked around the cramped space and shivered at
its dampness. Gerenios pulled on a cover that lay at my feet.

“There is more,” he said. “Her arrival is not the
thing, and neither is her parting. It is what transpired between them which is
most important.”

My mother
, I mouthed the words as I
had done for Evelina’s name, and Gerenios nodded.

“You do understand,” he said. “Let me tell you how I
came to love Béa Bijarnarson, and how you came to be.”

The Arrival of
Béa Bijarnarson

The band of visitors frightened us at first, but
once we saw that one of them was a child, we welcomed them. We hadn’t seen
others for so long we believed we were the last men. Our colony was small then,
and many of us had barely escaped the first settlement. We rode the seas, like
the hero of the epic, to find new land to begin again. Beginning and ending are
the same thing, and one is always rushing into the middle of things.

“We have come for the girl’s sake,” the stranger
said. “She needs a hearth to warm her.”

I didn’t know at the time I spoke to the one who
would change my life forever. I thought he was her father, though she looked
more like the woman at his side. It was just the three of them, Vincent, Lucia
and her daughter, Béa.

“I have a proposition for you,” Vincent said. “If
you accept, you will not die today.”

I had been elected our leader, and bore our guests
with as much hospitality as I could muster. They didn’t want food. “Only for
the girl,” Vincent said.

After that first night, after many hours of
conversation with this enigmatic figure, this god of war and time, my life took
a new course and found its purpose. I was to become Béa’s protector.

“One day she will be yours,” Vincent said. “But not
until she has come of age, and I return.”

He explained some things, and others were left to
what I knew of our biology. She was not like the rest of us, we determined that
right away. She was a curious child, and when Lucia left her at the horned
gates marking the entrance to the settlement, she didn’t weep for her mother’s departure.
She showed a resolve I’d never witnessed in another.

She grew into a fine member of our colony, taking to
our ways, learning how to hunt and fish and keep watch, all as I kept watch
over her. When Vincent finally returned, many seasons had passed and she and I
had fallen into an easy routine. As much as she was a child when she arrived,
she had ripened, and I admired her.

We were sitting alone at the hearth one evening,
after the others had gone to their shelters. She asked me to stay with her and
finish the story I had begun the night before. “Where did I leave off?” I
asked.

“The men and children scoured the tract of snow for
the women,” she said. “But none were to be found.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, let me see. There were none
to be found because they were buried deep beneath the snow.”

Béa’s eyes grew wide and she squeezed the mug of
cider she held. Her face had come into a certain maturity, and she seemed to blossom
right there in front of me by the firelight. My heart burned with a sorrow I
could not explain, or have felt since.

“Go on,” she said. “Why’d you stop.”

“No reason,” I said. “I shall go on. So they had
been transformed into little seeds, falling out of the pockets of gods and
rooting down deep beneath the soil. The seeds could only grow alone in the dark
without the bother of men and children. The men grieved for the women’s
transformation, and the children wept. They would never again taste their
favorite current and berry bread, and the almond butter they loved so well, and
the cherry syrup they licked from their fingers after the thaw. But one
day—”

The heavy door made from birch trees I’d felled flew
open, letting the wind rush in and threaten to douse the fire.

“Keep close to the hearth,” I said to Béa. “Let me
see who has arrived.”

The planks beneath my feet seemed to creak with each
step, as I made my way to the open door. “Who’s there?” I called. The whipping
wind answered with a scream, and I stood in the doorway for a moment,
contemplating whether the zephyr had actually pushed her way into Heorot.

“Gerenios,” Béa’s soft voice called to me. She had
gotten up and come to where I stood by the door, her gentle hand touching mine,
as she said, “I am ready.”

I turned to her and almost fell over when I saw that
she was covered in blood from the waist down. “What has happened?” I pulled her
up into my arms and carried her to the hearth. I could not see well enough
until I fed the fire, but once I did, the moistness on her front seemed to
darken.

“Where are you hurt?” I said. “I will send for
Freyit.”

She steadied my hand and calmed me with her touch.
“There is no need,” she said. “This is as expected.”

“What is?”

It may seem strange to say, but I was relieved when
Vincent stepped forward from the darkness, and approached Béa. For a moment, I
considered he would think I had harmed her, but he said, “Her ways of being are
different from yours. She, unlike you, may perform miracles.”

Dumbfounded, I watched as he contemplated her
physique and whispered in her ear something that made her smile. She nodded,
and turned to go, leaving him to remove the scales from my eyes.

He explained many things to me that night, and I was
aghast for most of them. I didn’t come from a place that would afford me such
learning, but I believed everything Vincent told me, trusting him and the
responsibility he forced on me.

“She is unlike you in so many ways,” Vincent said.
“Her blood is pure, something you may not understand now, but will in time. She
is one of the last of her race, and must not be the end.”

“Her differences mark her,” I said. “But she has
fallen in with the settlers and we have grown to love her as one of our own.”

“I know,” he said. “You, especially.”

I dropped my head in shame. He had seen the desire I
had tried so hard to hide. He had not been far from her, and had watched over
her, witnessing her induction into the second colony of the resurrected.

“You have proven your worth, Gerenios, and you shall
receive the reward I promised.”

I couldn’t imagine the ecstasy to come, my union
with Béa brought me the greatest joy, and I would not forget it when even
greater suffering was urged on me two seasons later. We had grown together as
one, until that somber morning when she was taken from me. She had gone out to
feed the fowl, only to disappear without explanation. We sent a search party
out, and I combed the vast land in every direction until I couldn’t carry the
burden of my suffering any longer, and returned to the colony, defeated and
angry.

I began work on the tower that day, raising a summit
so that I might see her return. Once completed, I sat in the studio at the top,
my lookout, every night before sunset, and rose before dawn to witness first
light. For days, and through the seasons, I waited for her to return, wondering
if she had only ever been a dream.

Then one day, as I pruned a tea-leaved willow on the
outer edge of the northernmost fence, I fell to my knees at the sound of her
voice. “Gerenios,” she said. “I have returned.”

I could not turn to confirm if the wind had simply
mocked me. I stood with my back to her for moments that seemed to last too
long, until she reached out and touched me with a warm hand.

She had not changed a bit, she was as beautiful as
ever, and when I looked upon her I wept. “Come now,” she said. “I have a gift
for you.”

She stepped forward and wiped the tear from my
cheek, and I pulled her into my arms, wanting to keep her between them forever.
It was from that embrace that I spied the tot who had been hiding a few paces
behind her. The small boy had a face I recognized.

“Hello,” I said, dropping to the ground to greet him
properly. “I am Gerenios.”

The little boy mumbled a greeting, and Béa said,
“This is Dagur. He is to stay with you for a time.”

“And you?” I asked, looking up at the only woman I
could ever love.

She dropped her chin and shook her head, hesitantly.
“I must return,” she said. “The others are waiting.”

“Where is Vincent?” I asked.

“He will come soon.”

She kissed my cheek and placed the child’s tiny hand
in mine. Then she bent down and touched the tip of his nose with hers, pressing
her forehead to his, telling him to be good. He was barely of speaking age, but
mumbled a term of endearment before she turned and headed down the path from
which she had come. The lump in my throat prevented my calling after her, and
the warmth of the little boy’s hand in mine made me stay.