NOVEL SIMPLE Chapter 175: A Scottish Flashback (pt2.)
-Present Day-
“So the vampire who turned you left you out in the rain like that?” I asked while Aileen took a bit of a break from telling her story.
She nodded. “Yep, well at least he made sure that I wasn’t laying face down in the mud but when I met him for the first time I did chew him out about not putting me in the hay next to my horse. Although, to his defense, Eilidh was attempting to kick him away from me so he didn’t want to tempt fate too much before getting kicked in the head by her. Vampire or no, that does hurt. Maybe a bit less for you though.”
“At least there’s that…” I nodded back and leant back into the sofa. “Can I ask you something on the side before you continue your story?”
“Sure.” Aileen extended her hand to beckon my question along.
“As I’ve not met the vampire who turned you, I take it he is not around anymore?”
Aileen puffed her cheeks and nodded. “Yeah, he ain’t… I’ll tell you more about this another time but Roland and I found ourselves on opposite sides during the war.”
“Oh…” The air in the room suddenly turned rather depressed. “Did you…”
“Kill him?” Aileen cut me off before I could ask the question. “Aye, I did. I had to. When talk was coming up about the fight in front of us, Alessia proposed that she wanted to do it instead, however I felt like he was my responsibility as he had sired me.”
“I can imagine that being rather hard.”
Aileen softly shook her head. “We didn’t have a great relationship, not like what Viktor and you have at all. His attitude towards humans was… well… You heard what he said to me in my story, didn’t you? That’s no way to talk to people, but if you consider yourself superior… Let’s just say that I wished that things had gone differently. But in the end, it wasn’t my hardest kill…”
“Hmmm, yeah, I understand.” I looked down to the glass I was holding.
“Anyway, that aside.” Aileen quickly shifted topics and sat upright to pour herself some more blood. “Would you like to hear what happened next, after I was turned?”
I took on her invitation to continue on with the first story with open arms. “Definitely. So, when you left the stables of the inn you had no clue you were a vampire yet, right?”
“Exactly.” Aileen smiled as she held her newly filled glass out in front of her. “The concept of vampires wasn’t really well known back then, and that’s aside from me not really realizing much had changed about my body at that time. That only really dawned on me the day after the battle of Clitheroe when I survived something I really shouldn’t have.”
“After you got your scar?”
“Aye.” Aileen nodded. “During the battle I wasn’t at my best thanks to an unquenchable thirst. And in a moment of inattention an English billman managed to launch me off my horse, almost cleaving me in twain. Just like this.” She brushed aside the opening of her shirt to show the scar, making a cleaving motion towards it. “Everything immediately went dark and I remember the pain and knowing that I was done for. I didn’t expect to wake up the day after in a tent on a small hill near the site of the battle together with Captain Flint. The Commander of the mercenary band I had joined.”
-Back to the 11th of June 1138 AD-
The sound of crows woke me up, a feeling I hadn’t expected to experience anymore. My throat felt as dry as the highland hills after years of drought and my head wasn’t feeling much better. The canvas of the tent I was in flapped gently in the summer breeze which carried the smell of blood. A smell that fired up my taste buds and made me salivate like crazy.
As I sat upright I saw Captain Flint sitting on a stool in the corner, hunched over and looking at me with a serious look in his eyes. That’s when I remembered the hit I had taken during the battle, but a quick patting down with my hand revealed that I was somehow okay. My neck and shoulder had been bandaged but the bandages were spotless. Something they really shouldn’t be.
Captain Flint sighed. “So you don’t have any clue how you are still alive either, MacInally…”
I quickly shook my head. “Not the foggiest, Ser.” I hadn’t made the link yet to the night before, nor would I for a very long time.
He wanted to reply to me but as he opened his mouth his view hard-locked onto my eyes. He put his hand over his mouth and stayed silent for a couple of moments before speaking up again. “We found you in the field after the battle, an English billhook lodged soundly into your shoulder. The English chap who got you still holding onto it in his deathgrip. As we were about to drag you over to the corpse cart we noticed that you were still breathing. A miracle of God we thought… At first at least.”
“What d’you mean, Captain?” It was getting hard to talk with the constant salivating.
“MacInally, it saddens me to say this, but it seems you have been touched by the devil.” He took up his sword and approached me, for few good moments I feared for me life, but the Captain didn’t slash at me. Instead he showed me the side of his blade and held it so that I could see my own reflection, eyes red as cherries in its reflection.
I flinched, I couldn’t believe my own eyes. “By God…” I then looked up to Captain Flint. “Wh-what do I do? Should we go get the priest?”
Flint shook his head and brought his sword back down, he was visibly shaking.
“Are you… going to kill me?”
Captain Flint sighed again and rested his sword on the ground, putting his free hand behind his back. “MacInally… Aileen… You’ve saved my life plenty of times over the years and besides that you were probably the best of us when it comes to character too… So I don’t know what kind of devilry you performed to deserve this fate…” From behind his back he took a pouch and tossed it at me, it landed in the palm of my hand weighing heavy with the coin inside. “I would get out of here as fast as you can. There should be enough money in there to buy a trip to France, although I would recommend making your way further south than that… A place where the church doesn’t have that much reach…”
“But Captain, I…” I tried to get closer to the Captain but the moment I did, he raised the tip of his sword to me.
“Aileen, please don’t make this harder than it already is. Take it and leave. The others were already on their way to the church, they’ll be back here shortly.”
I slumped back down into the field bed. “I…. I will… Thank you… for everything.”
Captain Flint lowered his sword again and made the sign of the cross in front of himself. “I pray God will come through for you once more to cleanse you from your sins so that you may find yourself seated next to Him in Heaven when your time comes. Farewell." And just like that, the Captain sheeted his sword and left the tent I was in. That was the last time I had seen him. A man I looked up to for guidance during my formative years. Gone in an instant.
-Present Day-
“What did you do afterwards?” I asked, sitting on the tip of my seat.
“I listened to the Captain’s words and made sure I got out of there. Taking my horse and a cloak with me together with the bag of gold I had received. I went to France and continued making my way south through Europe and into Africa. I only really returned back to Europe a century later.”
“Did you ever find out what happened to him?”
Aileen nodded. “If anything, the church is rather good at keeping documents. I found out that he was blamed for letting me get away with the eased circumstance being that I was clearly influenced by the Devil himself… To get an indulgence he then went on to join the Second Crusade where he died during the attack on Damascus. Later on I even went to find his grave, but it had already been a couple of centuries since his death so there wasn’t exactly much left of it.”
“Wow…”
“Yeah, that’s quite the story, isn’t it?” Aileen had a soft smile on her face. “It might sound sad but honestly, to this day, I’m still really grateful to the man. It shows how much he cared for me, not to immediately hand me over to the church, even if he held me at the point of his sword. But, for what it’s worth, I also am very happy the times are so different nowadays. At least you didn’t have to go figure out all this by yourself.”
-Yeah… I don’t think I need to worry much about the church being called in on me by my girlfriends…-