Blood Ritual Read online

  ‘If Istvan’s treatment fails?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Michael relapsed into silence, frowning. After a moment, he said, ‘Very well.’

  ‘You’ll try it?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ This time the grin was that of a gambler. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘I would. And the Viennese convent? Will you stay with the sisters?’ Forbes thought that Michael hesitated very slightly, and he said, ‘Sister Hilary is prepared to go with you.’

  Sister Hilary. That warm, faintly mocking amusement. The rebel, held in check beneath the surface.

  Michael said slowly, ‘Yes. Then I will go.’

  Hilary stood obediently in front of Sister Veronica’s neat desk.

  ‘The Reverend Mother in Vienna will expect you on 29 September,’ said Sister Veronica. ‘St Michael’s own feast day.’

  ‘Michaelmas,’ said Hilary, thoughtfully.

  ‘Yes.’ Sister Veronica pursed her lips. ‘We’ll hope that it is an auspicious date. Dr Forbes’s secretary has made the travel arrangements. A passport will be issued to you – Mr Devlin has his own, of course. A taxi will take you both to the airport, and one of the sisters – Sister Catherine – will meet you at the other end.’

  ‘Yes, I see.’ Hilary supposed that Sister Veronica knew, as they all knew, about planes and passports and fast travel. There was a small television set in the sisters’ recreation room, and viewing of news programmes was permitted to those whose recreation hour coincided with the television schedules. They could sometimes watch religious discussions, although Sister Veronica did not approve of some of the guests who appeared on them.

  ‘Worldly rebels,’ she said, drawing her mouth down. ‘The Church is not to be questioned.’

  ‘No, Sister,’ said Hilary obediently.

  Jack Field sat on the canvas chair next to Michael’s bed, emitting a faint drift of stale cigarette smoke and sounding enthusiastic.

  ‘It’s heaven sent. Jesus God, Michael, it’s the opportunity you’ll never get again.’ He leaned forward, Michael heard the chair creak, and felt the ruffle of air as Field stabbed the air with a didactic finger.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’d got enough for a full-length documentary as it was. Even a whole book. And very nice too. You’d have sold the documentary, of course – we’d certainly have bought it.’ ‘We’ was Carlyon TV, Field’s own network and one of the few remaining independently owned television companies, operating in the south-east. ‘But think of it now,’ he said. ‘Think of the publicity. Journalist blinded while looking for refugees. Journalist returns to site of trauma. You’d have every news editor and every paperback house falling over themselves.’

  ‘The books have been done.’ Michael did not bother to say: How would I write a book without my sight, because Field would have an answer. Dictate to a secretary, dear boy. Use a Braille typewriter.

  ‘I know the books have been done,’ said Field pouncing. ‘They all do it. Kate Adie, Tim Sebastian. That one from ITN who was shot . . . But you’d have news value. It’s very tragic, but you could turn a negative into a positive. You could make money from it.’

  ‘What a ghoulish idea,’ said Michael distastefully.

  ‘What a money spinner,’ said Field cynically. He felt in his pockets for tobacco, and then remembered regretfully where he was. Michael heard the progress of his thoughts perfectly; the sigh of impatience and the twitching fingers that were restless without a cigar. He said, ‘You hadn’t finished the original story, had you? Weren’t you on the track of the Bosnian refugees? Seeing how far they’d fled?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where was the base?’

  ‘Just outside of Debreczen – on the Hungarian outskirts. Close to the Romanian border. The embassy and Reuter’s managed to get visas for us and—’

  Field said, ‘Isn’t that a bit far for the Bosnians to have travelled?’

  ‘A bit.’ Michael thought he should have guessed that Field, wily old newsman, would have picked this up.

  ‘How did they get there?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was looking for their camp when I was wounded.’

  Field said, shrewdly, ‘Bosnian refugees never got that far without help, Michael. Has somebody opened an escape route that the Serbs haven’t cottoned on to? That the media haven’t found?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ Michael was not going to discuss the feeling he had had that there was something very curious indeed in the village just outside Debreczen.

  ‘It’d make a good story.’ Field leaned back expansively, creaking the chair again. ‘Of course you’ve got to go back. You’ve got to live and so you’ve got to work. You have to return to . . . the place outside Debreczen. The ruined castle – what did you say it was called?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Field waited and Michael sighed. ‘It was called Csejthe.’

  ‘Csejthe revisited. That’s what you have to do.’

  Michael said, ‘I don’t want to go back.’

  He did not want to go back to any of those places. He repeated this to himself several times after Field had left.

  But to travel to Vienna would not mean going back to those strange, untouched-by-time villages in the shadow of the mountains. It would not mean experiencing again the eerie feeling that somebody was using the war for some deep and grim purpose: manipulating the helpless and exhausted Bosnians for some dark and sinister purpose.

  Drawing them into the spider’s lair . . .

  Michael pushed the thoughts away, and thought instead about Vienna. It might mean the restoring of his sight. And Vienna was one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It was somewhere he had never been. It meant Mozart and Strauss and Haydn; the State Opera House and the Danube, and Wiener schnitzel. The seat of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, the thrones of the Hapsburgs. Drenched in the dark, romantic history of the strange, mountainous lands and the myth-laden, haunted forests.

  But you wouldn’t see any of it! cried his mind in silent anguish, and again the silvery voice, several layers down, made itself heard again.

  But Hilary would see it for you. She would describe it all.

  To write Field’s ghoulish book? To go back?

  The documentary had nearly been complete. He had been going to call it ‘Stone in a Pool’: a report by Michael Devlin on the ripples spreading outwards from Yugoslavia. It would have made a good programme. Maybe even ‘World in Action’ stuff. Field’s network had already agreed to take it, and he would probably have sold a two-page feature to one of the Sundays.

  He could still see the road they had taken. Innsbruck and Salzburg, skirting the war-ravaged Slovenia; through Graz and Budapest, and on into Debreczen, that strange cramped city clustered about an ancient fortress. They had used as their base a small, surprisingly comfortable inn, twelve or fifteen kilometres west of Debreczen, littering the dark panelled rooms with recording equipment. There had been a church nearby where the deposition of the Hapsburgs had been proclaimed somewhere around 1850. It had seemed odd to find such strong traces of the Hapsburgs after all this time. It was the stuff that dreams were made of and that legends were woven from, and Michael had found it beautiful and disturbing and just very faintly cruel. A shadow-land. He had found himself wondering whether there was a story here: nothing to do with wars or conflicts or aggressors, but something that had its roots far, far back in history.

  Above them, in a fold of the mountains, had been the little mountain town with the ruined castle. Csejthe. And it had been just outside Csejthe that they had found the shivering refugees – four or five families – hiding out in the castle’s shadow. The interpreter had prised a little of their story from them.

  Fled from the Serbian aggressors, they had said, glancing over their shoulders as if fearful of pursuit. Their homes burned, their children in danger. They did not like to run, for that was the coward’s way. But there had been no other choice open.

  They had come further than most in their flight from their rava
ged homeland. They had tried to stay within the shelter of the Sacred Crown of Hungary – yes, they had actually said that, even after the Sacred Crown had long since gone the way of all the other hollow crowns, even though the word ‘sacred’ meant so little now. But they had come too far: Csejthe was a bad place; a place of phantoms and voices. The castle itself was haunted. There were tales of ancient forest gods and witches. Memories for such things were long out here. Michael had started to ask how they had got here, who had helped them. How had the journey through the Serb-controlled lands to the east of Bosnia been achieved? How had they crossed Romania?

  They would not talk. Their eyes had slid away and they had stared westwards, to the lowering, jagged peaks silhouetted against the sky: the black, crescent-shaped Carpathian mountains that formed the natural division between Romania and that strange table land now also called Romania, but once known by another name.

  The Land Beyond the Forest. Transylvania.

  Chapter Two

  It was difficult not be overwhelmed by the size and the noise and the bustle of Gatwick. To one accustomed to the tranquillity of the cloister, and to the soft-voiced nuns and the convalescing patients, it was a huge, bewildering assault on every sense.

  Eight years, thought Hilary, walking at Michael’s side, his hand on her arm. Eight years since I was properly out in the world; since I dealt with travelling and machines and cars. Memory stirred her mind. Driving . . . The exhilaration of accelerating along a stretch of open road. Fear and delight mingled in equal parts. Not to be remembered, not even for a moment. She would concentrate on what lay ahead. She had never flown before and she would enjoy the journey.

  And although it was undoubtedly vanity to pretend she was accustomed to airports and customs and walking through the arch to detect sinister metal objects, she pretended anyway.

  She did not pretend with Michael. It still felt strange and a bit impolite to call him Michael, but he had been very firm about it.

  ‘We’ll be together in some degree of intimacy, Sister,’ he had said, the disturbing eyes looking not at her, but somehow through her. ‘You’ll have to guide me into the men’s loo when I need it, and you’ll have to help me with my seat-belt.’ The grin slid out. ‘I’ll hold your hand during take-off,’ he said. ‘So wouldn’t it be the maddest thing ever to call me Mister Devlin?’ There it was for the first time, the faintest Irish intonation.

  She thought they were managing quite well. They had sat together in the international lounge, waiting for the flight to be called. Hilary discovered that, once you had surrendered your luggage, it was a simple enough procedure: you found your flight number on a huge screen and then listened for it to be announced by an electronic voice. She had fetched two cups of coffee for them to drink while they waited, unfamiliar with the self-service routine, but listening carefully to how the other travellers ordered, and copying them. Sister Veronica had given her a zipped leather purse with fifty pounds: a mixture of ordinary English coins and notes and Austrian schillings. It seemed an enormous amount, but the coffee had been over a pound for each cup.

  She had deliberately walked alongside the gentlemen’s wash-room, one hand lightly on Michael’s arm to guide him, and she had tried to anticipate any need by saying, ‘If you walk six feet ahead – say four steps – on your left is a washroom. You’ll maybe like to go in before we set off. I’ll wait outside, and come up to you.’

  ‘Tactful Sister Hilary,’ said Michael, and slid the white stick out so that it rasped the wall. The doorway was there, just as she had said, and once inside, it was an easy enough task to feel his way to the urinals.

  The procedure of air travel was too familiar for Michael to feel anything other than impatience. He detected, not for the first time, a stridency about people, and an over-emphatic haste. See how busy we are. See how important and fulfilled our lives are. Being blind heightened your responses.

  But waiting for the flight to be called, and then moving to the gate, Michael was strongly aware of a dark disquiet that had nothing to do with the off-balance claustrophobia of blindness. He had almost come to terms with that now, with the feeling that if you took a step forward you might topple off a cliff, or that a brick wall might rear up to smack you in the face. There had been the suggestion of a guide dog, which he had rather liked. But he had not yet accepted his blindness as permanent, and he would wait to see if Dr Istvan’s treatment worked.

  The feeling was a dark uncoiling, a lure.

  I am going back . . .

  There was a sense of unease deep within his mind, as if something was blowing noisome breath across a still pool.

  I am going back . . .

  Nightmare creatures seated around a candlelit banquet, with night descending on the mountains outside . . .

  He pushed the memory aside in the pleasure he was deriving from Hilary’s enjoyment of the flight. He thought she was managing very creditably; she had plainly never flown before, but she was neither embarrassingly childlike or what Field called hayseed-gape-mouthed, nor did she try to be falsely blasé. She thanked the stewardess who helped them to their seats and asked about the stowing of their hand-luggage. Michael, reaching for his seat-belt almost without thinking about it, felt a ruffle of content from her.

  ‘All serene, Sister?’

  ‘I was only thinking how wonderful this is. I had never expected to travel.’

  ‘Did you want to?’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ she said. ‘But at nineteen one doesn’t always understand . . .’ She paused, and Michael said, ‘Have you been in the – Order for very long?’

  ‘Eight years.’ There was the slightest edge of defiance in her voice. Michael suddenly wished very strongly that he could see her.

  When the stewardess asked about drinks, Hilary hesitated, unsure whether they were required to pay, but Michael said, in a disinterested-sounding voice, ‘I daresay we could take a drink since Austrian Airlines are so hospitable, don’t you, Sister?’ and Hilary understood that it was his way of telling her that drinks were included in their tickets. She asked for a glass of mineral water, which came in a plastic cup, but with a cube of ice and a wafer-thin slice of fresh lime. At her side, Michael drank a chilled Chablis with pleasure.

  ‘Is it good, your wine?’

  ‘Very. You wouldn’t be used to wine, I daresay.’

  ‘Only communion wine,’ she said, deadpan. ‘Sister Veronica buys – is it called off the wood?’

  ‘Dear God,’ said Michael, feelingly, and felt the becoming-familiar ruffle of amusement. He said, ‘Tell me about this convent we are going to.’

  ‘It’s near to the centre of the city, I believe. But in one of the older parts.’

  ‘Of your own House?’

  ‘Yes, the Order of St Luke. There are about a dozen Houses in Europe, and, quite recently, one in America.’

  It was unexpectedly refreshing to hear somebody say ‘America’, simply and unfrilled, rather than ‘the U S of A’, or the ‘Big Apple’.

  ‘Luke the Gospeller?’ asked Michael.

  ‘Yes, but he was also a physician. That is why our Houses are dedicated to helping people regain health.’ Hilary glanced at him and saw that his expression held the interested, absorbed look. She said, ‘As you know, they aren’t hospitals, precisely, but places where people can recover from severe illnesses or injuries. Perhaps the illnesses are not always physical,’ said Hilary. ‘Sometimes, it is only a period of tranquillity that is needed. What is called a retreat is sometimes helpful then.’

  ‘Yes.’ Michael knew about retreats, where you spent two or three days in silence, praying and meditating; attending various services and liturgical readings, sometimes receiving counselling from priests. ‘Have you to be given special training?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Things like massage and physiotherapy which is especially useful for those who have suffered a stroke. We have many very good successes there. Lip-reading for the deaf. In your case there is Braille, which I teach, and the new sk
ills to live in the world without sight.’

  ‘How to boil a kettle without scalding your hands, how to walk across a room without falling over, how to get dressed, tie shoelaces, run a bath, eat spaghetti—’

  ‘All of those,’ she said, and he heard the smile in her voice again. But then she said, ‘It is a worthwhile thing to do.’

  ‘Certainly.’ Michael thought the words were just a little too emphatic, but he said, ‘And the Vienna House does the same kind of work?’

  ‘Yes, I believe,’ said Hilary, ‘that the convent itself is in a rather sinister quarter of the city.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s in a place called the Singerstrasse, behind the Cathedral of St Stephen, close to where the Knights Templar had their sanctuary.’ Michael felt her send him a sideways glance, as if waiting for his quick nod of comprehension.

  He said, ‘The Order of St John of Jerusalem. Rich in secrets and in worldly chattels also. And . . . slaughtered wholesale by one of the popes of the day, weren’t they? Yes, I know a little about it.’ He finished his wine and felt for the slot in the table to set it down. ‘We’re going to a place stiff with rather grisly legend, it seems.’ And then, with a mental shake, ‘We’re coming in to land.’

  Hilary thought fleetingly that it might have been nice to have done the classic line, ‘For the first time I set foot on foreign soil.’ But she was not here for pleasure. It was important to keep remembering it. She was here to help Michael. It was extraordinary how easy it was becoming to think of him as Michael.

  Sister Catherine was waiting in the passengers’ lounge, a small, slender figure, wearing the plain navy high-necked dress of their Order. Her face, framed by the white coif and dark veil was pale, and she had huge dark eyes and high slanting cheekbones. A triangular face. An inverted triangle. Slav ancestry? Magyar? Certainly a lineage immeasurably older than the present-day mix of Czech and German. It was not a face you would expect to find in a twentieth-century convent in the depths of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.