The Marquis Papers Volume Three: Arctic Refuge

To the elders who keep their Mi'kmaq (Micmac) language alive, and to you, dear reader, for helping it live on.

Preface

From the editor:

On a rainy Tuesday in the spring of 1967 in Breton, France, my father purchased an old chest inscribed with the chiseled name of Capt. C. Johnson. Whatever craft project the chest was meant for never took place, and it moldered in our attic for many years. Finally a few years ago my father decided it was time at last to move to assisted living, and we cleaned out the attic over several long weekends. In lifting the chest, I was startled that the bottom seemed to have rotted through. On closer inspection, it was made of two thin boards rather than one thick one. Between the boards was sandwiched a wrapped, yellowed, and mouse-eaten manuscript. In a moment of generosity, my father gifted me both rotten chest and smelly manuscript.

I have tried to piece together the manuscript and present it here, retyped to the best of my ability. I have modernized language and spelling, and was forced to complete some sections that were rendered illegible. As to the truthfulness of its claims, I cannot say.

- C. J. Maloney, February 1st, 2017.

1. Left Alone

In September of the year of our Lord 17-

The story thus far: I had been captured by vampire pirates who attempted to convert me and failed. I escaped and was recaptured. During my captivity I learned the basics of Blood Weaving and that allowed me to bargain my way to relative freedom. My freedom was short-lived, as I was taken by the Red Hand, an order sworn to destroy the vampires. I was rescued from torture by the vampires, but only after the Red Hand learned my blood was poison to the vampires and had nearly drained me of it. The Red Hand destroyed the vampire clan, but the remnants aboard the Albatross retaliated by destroying the Red Hand monastery and the Red Hand’s leader Sebastian. Sebastian was a vampire who had used trickery and a cream that allowed him to withstand sunlight to control the Hand. His goal was to win favor with the Grand Duke and regain his place at vampire court in Europe. After destroying Sebastian, we headed north into parts unknown.

As you may recall, dawn had just broken aboard the Albatross. My tutor was reading to me from the Latin Classics, and Captain Minuit had just gone below after ordering me to sail due west. Vampire Island had been attacked and destroyed, but we had retaliated by destroying the Red Hand’s monastery stronghold. Now we were to hole up somewhere until those seeking to end the vampires tired of searching for them. Although we had destroyed one outpost the Red Hand still had members elsewhere.

While I helped the Albatross tack with the wind, I recalled the Captain’s encounter with Thog, a lesser vampire Blood Weaver. Could it be true that Thog had shirked his duty while the rest of the clan perished? Or, even more horrible, that he had used the power of the other vampires to increase his own, draining their lives in the process?

The vampires always worked to preserve each member of the clan. Among Minuit’s crew that support was understood and Captain Minuit always put himself at risk for the others. But if vampires were generally more like Thog, then they had learned nothing from all their extra time on earth.

As nightfall came on, I spotted the small island atoll Captain Minuit had mentioned. My tutor was down below taking a nap. We usually spent part of the night awake as well as the whole day, and he needed more sleep than I did.

I wondered, as I had before, why the Captain went to such trouble to educate me. What did he gain by even keeping me alive? Would it not have been wiser to bury me over the side and leave my poisoned blood at the bottom of the shallow sea? I hadn’t the courage to ask him, lest he should recall what sort of threat I represented and end me.

I circled back, out of sight of the island, making a curving loop until sunset. At sunset the crew took over, and my tutor and I were ordered below. From the vampires’ short discussions I learned that a pirate band made the island their home. They had been preying on the local fishermen and the vampires planned to use them to slake their thirst before we moved farther north.

My tutor and I stayed below decks. I felt us anchor and the shift of weight as the crew left the ship. They even managed to enter the water silently.

Sometime later I heard a splash, but kept dozing. Then I heard someone scrabbling for the anchor chain. He may have thought he was being stealthy, but compared to the vampires his attempts were like a small child splashing water. I nudged my tutor awake.

We crept silently up and my tutor made ready with his sword. I had a piece of iron bar about the length of my forearm. Above, we could hear the deck creak, and shuffling steps as of someone descending into the hold. He bumped about for a bit, then lit one of the lanterns left by the entrance for my benefit. The flaring was bright in the darkness.

After a few moments our intruder made his way out into the hold. We crouched down behind the bit of wall that was the Captain’s area. But it seemed as if he was systematically checking the hold for any valuables.

As he approached my tutor stood to face him. The man holding the lantern was a bear of a man, with a great shaggy beard and small beady eyes lost in the hanging hair. He stopped as he saw my tutor, then grinned. He pulled a blade from his boot, a nasty looking thin blade meant for piercing a pig or a man and letting him bleed out slowly.

My tutor squared off against the man, his own sword blade thin in the lantern light. They moved left and right, then my tutor darted a thrust. The man moved his knife to parry the blow, but my tutor’s intention was to stab his knife hand all along. As my tutor’s blade stuck in the man’s hand, he swore and dropped the knife. It skittered and bounced toward me where I still crouched.

The man grasped my tutor’s sword with his injured hand, surprising my tutor. Grinning, the man pulled on my tutor’s blade, tearing his flesh and yanking my tutor forward into his arms’ reach. With his other fist still clutching the lantern, the man dealt my tutor a blow on the head with both fist and lantern. My tutor was thrown off his feet and landed heavily against the side of the hull. His head made a dull thunking sound and he slumped, dazed, to the deck.

2. First Kill

Grinning, the man went for his knife with his injured hand. Without thinking, I went for it as well. It was the man’s surprise at my appearance that gave me an edge. I had the knife in my hand, but the man traded his lantern to his injured hand and grasped me by the throat with his free one. He had both the strength and the length of limb to keep me at arm’s length while crushing the breath from my body, but he stumbled forward in his eagerness and fell heavily on top of me. He bent his elbow on his strangling hand and brought his chest into striking distance.

My arm came up, more to ward him off than to strike him, and the knife slid neatly between his ribs. When stabbing a man, I know too well, you either avoid his ribs or jar on them. Even if you get between his ribs, most often you are too high or on the wrong side, and only puncture his lung. Of these he has two, and may well outlive you with one. Rarely indeed do you pierce the greater vessels of his heart in such a way to cause him to bleed inside in sufficient quantity to end his life swiftly. Many are the times I’ve thrust and felt the rubbery organ avoid my blade, sliding to the side and leaving me cheated. Give me a cut to the throat or the back of the legs over poking about in the chest and hoping to skewer that most slippery of targets.

But this was the cleanest, neatest of cuts, the severing death blow. In stage plays I have seen such a thing end combat in an instant. One of the actors will collapse in his death throes, or, being a lesser character, simply collapse quietly to the floor. If only this was the case. It takes some time for the blood to be missed, and in that time the nearness of death lends the wounded a superhuman strength and determination. He will grapple with his adversaries, heedless of lesser hurts, attempting to drag as many of them as he can with him down his imminent dark journey to death and beyond.

Such was the case with the bearlike man before and above me. He tightened his grip on my throat, and set his lantern down to bring his injured hand into play as well. With both hands slick with his blood, he gripped my throat as if trying to rip my head free of my body. I stabbed him again, tilting the blade and jarring it fruitlessly against his ribs. My next wild thought was to stab him in the eye, a hopelessly difficult target. So I lifted my arm and struck at his face while he crushed my windpipe. He avoided the blow and the knife caught in his beard, driving itself towards his neck. I had the enormous luck of the blade piercing one of the small hollows of his neck, nearly severing the nerves to his uninjured arm. These are difficult to get at, and nearly impossible to strike unless you have a clean blow or a very heavy blade that can shear through the protective bone.

The sudden loss of his arm strength caused the man to shift his weight to his injured hand and allow me a sudden gasp of precious air. His arm was not completely severed in function and he scrabbled with my knife hand.

My other hand still held the chunk of iron rod. With my knife hand unable to act, I finally remembered its presence. This happens more often than one would think in battle and is the principle weakness of a two-handed swordsman. He will wield both swords inexpertly and fail to use them in unison to his advantage against a one-bladed opponent. I prefer to keep a free hand to aid in dodging and to throw things, which a two-handed swordsman will always attempt to deflect with blades rather than dodging with his body. Mud or other filth can be used to great advantage, leaving him blinded and helpless despite his doubled weaponry.

As soon as I remembered the rod, I brought it up against the man’s face. I was still in dire straits with his full weight bearing down on my windpipe. I will not say my life flashed before my eyes, for it did not. I saw stars, or those bright flickering spots in the corners of my vision, and my eyesight started going black around the edges.

My blow, then, was full of desperation. But without fortune, I would have simply bruised his thick skull and enraged him further. The angle was right, and the tip of the club smashed into the fragile bone at his temple with an audible crack. It startled him, and he released me to put his hands to his head. I struck at his arms with the club to no effect, but he moved off me briefly. Then I thrust at him and he gripped my knife hand fiercely with his injured hand. I slammed his fingers with my rod. He released the knife and tried to grasp my rod hand, but I hit them again with the rod. He retreated momentarily before gathering his wits and I scrambled to my feet. He, lowered his body, and rushed at me. I scrabbled out of his path, and my knife hand caught him a graze across the forehead.

A forehead scratch is one of the best and most underused of fighting techniques, for it blinds your opponent with his own blood and annoys him far more than a scratch elsewhere on his body.

A gout of blood streamed across the man’s eyes and he missed grappling with me, going down to his knees and clutching instead at my legs. I beat the back of his head with my rod, trying to evade his hands in the narrow space. The death blow from the knife finally began to catch him and he began drooling blood in the dim light of the fallen lantern. I must have struck him thirty times on the back of the head as he clutched less and less strongly at my legs. His crusted fingernails cut long gouges out of my lower legs and feet, which bled freely.

With a sigh, he finally slumped to the hull floor. Blood spittle frothed from his mouth, but still I struck on his head with my rod. He lay silent for some minutes, jarred only by my blows, before I came slowly to my senses. My body ached and my arm was numb from the forearm down as I gripped the rod with a terrible ferocity. My throat ached, and my breath came in ragged, painful gasps. But I was slowly filled with a terrible joy, a bloodlust so fierce that I wanted to keep striking the man’s corpse though I knew he had passed. There is a fierce pleasure in killing a man that few will acknowledge. I wanted to beat my chest and cry out. Then what I had done struck me and I vomited on the corpse.

3. Remorse

Never before had I killed a man. I had destroyed the partial chronic that came for us, but that was not a man. I had seen men die in the heat of battle, but never engaged another to the death. This was a living, breathing man, who’s life now lay pooled at my feet. I, like Cain, had committed an unpardonable sin before God. I was blighted, no better than the monsters with whom I made company.