Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (15 page)

“That’s their privilege, as long as they can connect with a moving supertanker in midocean. Now look, we’d better treat her with kid gloves. And bathe her, Abdel, if she will not bathe herself.”

“I can’t bathe somebody! A girl of twenty, Kurt! Come on.”

“I thirst.”

“And give her a Coke, if she’s so damn thirsty.”

The one called Abdel glared at her when Kurt left. Then he disappeared, returning again with a large phial containing dark brown liquid. He handed this to her. “Drink,” he said.

She lifted it to her nose, smelled it. Coming from the bottle was a sizzling, as if it was hot. But for some cunning reason, it was instead cold.

“Drink, come on, and take off that rag if I’m going to get you showering.”

Drink. But how? Where was a cup? Where was wine, beer, or water?

“Drink!”

“I thirst.”

“For the love of God, you’ve got a Coke!” He grabbed her hand, held the phial to her lips. “Drink the Coke.”

Out of the thing there came something strange indeed, candied water full of dancing bubbles. The sweetness had been married to some sort of a fruit. The water was pure enough, though. She was to take it into her mouth from the phial. She did so. A moment passed. She felt gas building within her. But she could not burp, for that was only to be done at the end of the meal. Surely this was not a meal now, among the humans.

He came behind her and drew off her cloak. So he was a servant, after all. He had spoken to her in an ungracious manner. Pharaoh would have had such an impudent servant whipped. But pharaoh was not here.

He manipulated handles, and water came spitting out of an opening. She went to it to slake her thirst, but it was unexpectedly warm, too warm to drink. She stood in it, enjoying the feeling of it upon her face, dreaming with her eyes closed of when the rain would come to her little valley, and she would watch her lilies dance, and raise her face to the weeping sky, and let the pure water soak her skin and make her as fragrant as the clouds.

“No, no, take off the damn dress! Holy God, how did you ever end up on an oil tanker? Were you dropped from Pluto?”

He handled her most roughly, trying to remove her garment. Well, then, she stepped out of it. He gasped, his eyes blinked, he turned his face away. Her beauty could shock her own children. A human being, it could stagger.

She stepped into the room of rain and lifted her face. The waters flowed strongly. He went away.

Abdel was in a state of some sort of sexual fever. He’d never known anything like it before. But seeing this filthy, crazy runaway naked had caused him to almost explode with desire. He dashed down the companion way and into his own stateroom. He was bursting. He’d never even known that such feelings were possible. He pulled off his trousers and stood in his shirttails, naked from the waist down. And there, all over his abdomen and running down his leg, was what he could not believe he was seeing. Just like that, the instant she was unclothed, he had ejaculated.

He was damned if the Lybian pigs who did the cleaning and laundry were going to see this mess. He went into the john and washed the trousers under the tap until he was sure there was nothing more than a water mark visible. Then he put on fresh pants and went up to Kurt.

“Captain, we have to do something about this woman. You know, the men say she’s a demon. They say she’s wanted by the Cairo police for killing people.”

“Oh, come on. That’s an autistic child. She couldn’t swat a fly. Or if she did, she’d probably eat it.”

“Have you e-mailed about her yet?”

“Sure. Athens says to keep her in confinement. They’ve already informed the INS and put out a description to Interpol. Her people will undoubtedly be sending us a congratulatory bottle of champagne on arrival.”

“Nothing about turning around?”

Kurt looked up, his eyebrows raised. The instant he’d said it, Abdel had realized that the question had carried with it the gulf of difference between a man of the East and a man of the West. “The men call her a devil,” he repeated hastily. “I think that we’re going to have problems.”

“I’m sure we are. But she’s here, and I hardly think that we’re going to go off schedule for her. So that’s it. She’s your responsibility, Mr. T. I don’t want her stealing anything or sleeping in any more coffins.” He leaned back, lit a cigarette. “That’s something—a long black cloak, sleeping in a coffin. No wonder the men are concerned.” He laughed. “The vampire of the
Seven Stars.”

“They’re all believers in djin. It’s a bad business.”

Lilith drank by laying her mouth open to the stream, and slowly took her fill of a water that had in it the thickness of various chemicals and was not a really good water. But it would do, it was slaking her thirst. The fruit-gas water had not been satisfactory.

A great deal of desert dust went down the drain at her feet, so much that the water in the bottom of the closet became slow. She would have rubbed herself with sand, but there was no sand, only a block of green clay. This clay was obviously intended for a servant to use in washing, but she used it herself, and found that drawing it along her skin was really a rather pleasant thing to do. Embossed on it were letters in the Roman alphabet: IRISH SPRING. She wondered if they were words, or the initials of an association, like SPQR, Senatus Populusque Romanus, the Senate and People of Rome. They had all sorts of associations, the Romans. Perhaps this was a Roman ship.

She began to enjoy the clay. The idea of this bath was to melt it by the heat of the water. She needed only for a serving woman to be here with her. But no, in this little closet you must bathe alone. She put it all over herself, and when she ran it in her hair, a great deal of dirt came out.

Again, she raised her face into the swarming rain. Steam rose around her as if from a bubbling pot, or from the water in the
calidarium
at Alexandria. She let the water roll off her skin until she felt well and truly clean. Then she went out into the larger part of the room, but there was still no servant there. Finally, she laid what appeared to be a part of a toga around herself and dried her skin in the manner of the Romans.

Dropping the cloth to the floor, she stepped out through the door. The man was there, but he leaped up and rushed away when she appeared. She went into the corridor, and then saw through a glass panel the single most magnificent sight that she had beheld since she had cruised with Hadrian and his boyfriend up the Nile. It was so vast, and so vastly blue, this water. She went a short distance to a doorway, then walked out to the front of the row of windows through which she’d first seen it. From here, the ship was almost unimaginably huge. A thousand of Hadrian’s most magnificent ships could have been laid out upon this deck, had it not been complicated with pipes and machines.

She raised her arms and cried out to the sea, “You child of earth and sky, O leap, leap to the sun, you waves!” The words were from the hymn to Poseidon that Hadrian’s child-friend Antinous had composed one afternoon when the ribs of their ship were creaking from the slaughter of the waves.

Hadrian had been the last of the human beings she had thought of as pharaoh and treated accordingly. There had been jealousies. One of her own people had devoured Antinous, then said he had fallen into the Nile.

“My dear girl, get out of there! My God, child, what can you be thinking!” The fair-haired one came running up to her and threw a coarse jacket over her shoulders. “You poor, mad thing,” he said as he drew her away from the majesty of the sea and the admiring crowd of men who had gathered on the deck below.

“Why do you call me mad?” she asked him. She was hot with anger that this impudent human being would so describe her. How dare he make comment on his betters?

They went into the large room full of machineries and glowing screens that lay behind the long row of forward-facing windows. He pushed at her, his impotent strength expending itself against her shoulder. “God, she’s strong.”

“As a demon,” Abdel Tahrir said.

“Look, you put down any talk like that, Mr. T. I’ve got the little bitch on my passenger manifest now. If the men do anything to her—anything at all, Abdel, my friend—there’s going to be trouble in New York.” He switched into another language. “Do you understand English, missy? Look at her, Abdel, what do you think?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then we’ll use English. My God, how could anybody be so beautiful? Look at her, look at her!”

“It’s a caution.”

“A caution? They’ll tear her apart. I want her up here at all times. Either in my cabin or Officer’s Rec or here. And one of us—you or me—we must keep her in sight at all times. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir. But I think that the men will not rape her. They fear her too much.”

“Oh, then it’s a shiv across the damned throat, eh? Kill the beast. I’ve already had one death aboard. If I have another, it’ll be my ticket, no questions asked. You remember that.” He advanced toward the other man. “Because if they take my ticket, I’ll take your balls. Custom of the sea!”

Whatever the long string of gutturals had been about, they ended with Kurt bursting out laughing. He did not seem to understand how angry he had made Abdel. When an Egyptian smiles like that, he has been humiliated, and should be feared.

However, Lilith was enjoying this loud, rough northerner, and feeling a distinct sense of conflict. She thought that she would like to lie with him. Look at all that muscle, that youth and health. But also he was food, rich, satisfying food. There was in his eyes a sweetness made the more endearing because the gruffness in his voice said that he himself did not know that it was there.

Abdel yanked her arm, causing the still-tender parts within her to smart. He drew her along the corridor to a chamber. In this chamber was a bedstead, a chair that at least was not covered with those odd, plump cloths of theirs, and a basin. It also had a window that overlooked the ocean, a most wonderful window.

“I’m placing you under house arrest,” he said. “Do you understand me?”

“No.”

With the speed of an enraged cat, he leaped at her. “You’ll be locked in here, see! You’ll not come out, not even for meals. Because if the captain loses his ticket, I lose mine. And some damn—I don’t know what—some damn crazy female isn’t going to be the reason.”

His hands were shaking, his eyes blinking rapidly, which indicated unsureness in a human being. He closed and locked the door.

She waited for some time, lying on the bed until she grew restless at the idea of being imprisoned. Just a little while ago, she would have been content to remain here forever, or anywhere she happened to be, as long as she could eat what she needed. She had been empty, incurious, and, she realized now, so afraid of the ominous presence of time that she had reduced herself almost to a state of catalepsy. She thought that she had slept for days, for months—how long, she did not know, perhaps would rather not guess.

But now all that had changed. She had successfully escaped from Cairo, had eluded the men who wanted to kill her—and they had been good hunters, oh, indeed. With such ones about, the day of her capture would certainly come, perhaps already had. The door was locked, although she could break through it. Where then?

She got up and went to the small, round window. Outside, there was nothing but great Ocean. She knew that they were beyond the Pillars of Hercules, where the ships of man had not gone in vast immemorial ages.

She paced uneasily to the door and shook it, assuming that she would shake the simple iron tumblers right off their stems. But it did not happen. There was no sound of grating metal from within, no click of a lock tongue falling free.

A flash of anger crossed through her, making her stamp and growl. She ought to tear the door off—that, she knew, she could certainly do. But then they would only find some hole deep in the ship for her, a place enclosed by iron.

She stepped back from the door. She’d seen the way they looked at her. She knew the effect that she had on the male, her own kind or human. So she went to the mirror and patted some color into her cheeks, then began smoothing her hair. Once, she would have wanted to paint her eyes, but she had seen women as they were now, and knew that the formal making up of home was no longer done here. Her careful fingers worked long on the hair, until the sun had gone low and the waves turned gold with his last grace. Then she made from the tight-woven bedclothes a
stola
of sorts, ripping strips until she had a band to raise her bosom, and a flowing skirt to conceal the curves of her hips. Her arms she left bare. She smelled her skin, which was as sweet now as the juice of the pomegranate. Her sweetness mingled with the scents of human cooking coming up from below.

As she had expected, it was not long before the men returned. It was Abdel and a bearded servant with a tray. The food was strange—two round slabs of bread with slices of cooked muscle between them. A glass contained more of the candied liquid, hissing like a baby serpent. Both men’s faces had been impassive until they saw her. Then they changed, in ways that made her so happy that she tossed her hair and laughed. Abdel’s eyes became hooded and his cheeks flushed as humans did when they were agitated. The servant began trembling, his spittle running in his beard.