I did not sleep.
That was the part I had not anticipated, and the part that nearly broke me before anything else did.
I had assumed the day would be a clean cut. In the game, when dawn came, the screen went black and a small line of text appeared and you were already in the following night. And in every story I had read in my life, the vampire slept. He slept in his coffin, he slept in his crypt, he slept the sleep of the earth, and the day was not an experience but an ellipsis.
I did not sleep for a single second.
I was conscious for all fourteen hours.
I was on my back under nearly two metres of earth, in a hollow so narrow I could not turn my shoulders. My arms were pinned to my sides. There was sand in my ears, in my eyelids, between my teeth again. I was not breathing, so there was no rhythm to mark the passing of time. My heart was not beating, so I had no metronome there either. I had no thirst, no cold, no heat, no urge to move, not one of the thousand small discomforts by which a living body knows it is still there.
All I had was my head.
At first I tried to manage it. I told myself this was a situation and that situations are administered. I started doing what I always do: lists. I listed everything I knew about the game, map by map, character by character. I listed everything I knew about ancient history, which turned out to be a great deal less than I thought. I listed, for want of anything better, the capitals of Europe, and halfway through I realised that not one of those cities existed yet and that I was reciting the index of a world that had not happened.
I held out that way for about three hours.
Then Timarchos started.
He had not gone. That is what nobody had explained to me and what I had no way of knowing. I had thought it was a scene, information that comes in and is filed away. No. Blood does not file. Blood stays, and it does not stay as a borrowed memory but as one of your own, with the same weight and the same texture as the rest.
Buried in that hollow, with nothing to look at and nothing to hear but the earth, my head did what any head does when it is left alone: it began to play back whatever was nearest.
And what was nearest was the bread with too much ash on the crust.
And the wet gunwale under the forearm.
And a woman named Aristea pressing his knuckles one at a time, and the ache of those knuckles, which I felt in my own hands, my twenty-four-year-old hands that had never worked at anything heavier than a mouse.
And the jug. The jug of water in his hand as he came back to the house.
I went through it forty times. Fifty. I could not switch it off, because there was nothing to put on top of it. At some point I stopped being able to tell which of those memories were his and which were mine, and when I noticed that — that was when I lost my head for a good long while.
I started digging upward. Without thinking, with both hands, in a blind animal panic that had absolutely no plan behind it. I got up half a metre before the heat reached me through the earth, a heat that was not temperature but something else, a pressure coming down from above as though the sky had weight.
I stopped. I lay still with my hands over my face. And then, very slowly, I covered myself back up.
It was the hardest thing I have ever done. Burying myself a second time, awake, knowing what was waiting for me down there.
What saved me was noise.
Because above me, from a certain hour, the city went to work.
And I could hear all of it.
I could hear cartwheels, which were not rubber on asphalt but hoops of wood and iron over stone and packed earth, and each one sounded different according to its load. I could hear pulleys. I could hear one man, always the same man, giving an order every few minutes in a voice tired of giving it. I could hear mallets, and from the sound I could tell which struck stone and which struck wood. I could hear someone sharpening something. I could hear goats. I could hear, three or four times across the day, a child running, and I knew it was a child and not an adult from the frequency of the steps.
I held on to that. I turned the noise into a clock. The hammers began early and stopped for a while around midday, when the heat came, and returned afterwards with less energy. The carts thinned out in the afternoon. In a single day I learned the timetable of an entire city without ever seeing its face.
And there was something else, stranger, that kept me company and that I did not know how to read until much later.
I could hear the hearts.
Through two metres of earth. Not all of them: the near ones, above me, the men working over my head with no idea whatsoever of what was underneath. Eleven, I counted. Eleven hearts. One of them had the same stumble I had heard the night before in the old man in the house at the end of the row, which meant the old man was working in spite of the arrhythmia, which meant he needed the day's wage.
I spent fourteen hours buried and came out knowing more about that city than many of the people living in it.
That was my first true discovery, and it had nothing to do with fangs: I was not a monster that heard heartbeats. I was a thing that gathered information constantly, whether I wanted to or not, even buried, even in the dark, and I had no way to switch it off.
It would take me years to understand what to do with that.
I came out when the pressure above me went out.
I did not wait for full dark, because I did not yet know how to wait; I went by my skin, by that itch I had learned to read in less than a day. When the itch became bearable, I pushed.
The earth opened and I got my head out into an air of deep blue, with two stars already showing and the rim of the sky still orange in the west. The scaffolding on the works stood empty. The tools were still there, dropped where they had been left, and that told me something about that city which took me a while to appreciate: nobody stole the tools.
I shook myself off as best I could. There was earth in every seam of the coat. I ran my hands over my face and found that the dried blood of the night before had turned into a crust that came away in flakes, and that the collar of the coat was stiff and black.
I went down to the beach.
Not by decision. I went because my feet took me and because I had nowhere else in the world to go.
The boat was still upturned. The lamp was gone. So was the blade.
So was Timarchos.
There was an area of disturbed sand, churned by many feet, and a wide drag mark leading inland, and in the middle of it a dark stain the size of a plate, dry, almost black, with a crust of sand stuck to it.
I stood looking at that for a long time.
I remember thinking, with a coldness that disgusted me in the very moment of thinking it, that the volume of the stain was a great deal less than the wound accounted for, and that this confirmed my estimate from the night before.
And after that I knelt in the sand and put my hands over my face and stayed like that for a length of time I cannot measure.
Nobody saw me. In that I was lucky and did not deserve to be.
I heard them from a distance and knew where I was going before I decided it.
The third house in the row.
It was lit from inside. There were people. Several women at once, and the sound they were making was not talking and was not weeping; it was some other thing I had never heard in my life and recognised at once regardless, a lament with a shape to it, with rhythm, almost a music, and I understood without anyone explaining it that this was a trade, that there were women who knew how to do it, and that the family sent for them.
I came as far as the corner opposite and stood there, in the shadow, flat against the wall.
People went in and out through the doorway. An old man came out, leaned on the wall two metres from me and stood staring at the ground, and I could hear his heart and count his beats and smell his sweat and his clothes, and he did not see me because I was still in the dark and because it does not occur to anyone to look.
And at some point, among the women, I heard a girl's voice.
She was not crying. That was the worst of it. She was asking something, two or three words, with that rising note of a question, and a woman would answer her in a low voice, and she would ask the same thing again. Four times. Five. The same short question, over and over, like someone pushing at a door that will not give.
Melita.
Nine years old. She counted the stars aloud and always came out with a different number.
I was twelve metres from her. I could have crossed that distance in less than a second; I had proved it the night before on her father. And I could not enter that house. I could not set foot in the house I myself had emptied. Someone had made that rule for me, whoever they were, and of all the cruel things I discovered that week, it was the only one that struck me as just.
I stayed on the corner until the last lamp went out. I did nothing. There was nothing I could do. And that was the first night of my life on which I understood, in the body and not in the head, the enormous difference between not being able to fix something and not being able to leave.
When I finally moved, I took two words and a number with me, and repeated them as I walked, the way a man prays who does not believe:
Melita. Third house. Four drachmas.
After that I set about solving problems, because it was that or lose my mind, and because solving problems is the only thing I have ever done well.
I made the list as I walked.
One: my clothes. I was dressed in English wool from 1918, stiff with blood, in a climate that must have been twenty-five degrees that night. I did not overheat, but anyone who saw me was going to look twice, and I did not want anyone looking once.
Two: the language. I understood nothing anyone said and could ask nothing.
Three: money. Even if I could ask, I had nothing to buy with, and nothing I bought would be food I could eat.
Four: somewhere to spend the day that was not a hole in the ground, because I was not doing that again.
Five — and this one I wrote at the bottom of the list in small letters, the way one writes the things one does not want to see: feeding.
I started with the easy part.
I found a drying line. It was an open yard between two houses, with a rope strung wall to wall and clothes on it that had not been brought in. I touched the cloth and it was linen, coarse, hand-woven, with the irregularities of the thread plainly visible. I took a long undyed tunic and a brown cloak with a darker border. I left the rest.
I changed in an alley, and that was worse than I expected, because taking off the coat meant taking off the last thing I had of the only thing in all of this I believed I understood. I folded Reid's clothes with a ridiculous care, wrapped them in the coat itself, and hid the bundle under loose stones at the edge of the works. I did not take off the ring. More than that: I turned it inward so the gold would not show.
The tunic was short on me. I threw the cloak over my shoulder in imitation of what I had seen the old man on the corner do, and got it wrong, and had to redo it four times.
And somewhere in those four attempts, with my hands busy in a knot of cloth, it occurred to me to look at myself.
I had no mirror. But there was a stone trough on the corner, with still water in it.
I leaned over.
And I saw my face.
I mean: I saw my face. Mine. The twenty-four-year-old one, the one belonging to the boy who died in a chair in front of a screen. The same eyes, the same nose I never liked, the mark of a tiny scar in the eyebrow from falling off a bicycle at nine.
And it was set on a body that was Jonathan Reid's.
Taller than me. Broader in the shoulder. Bigger hands, long-fingered, the nails short and clean, hands that knew things I did not. On the left forearm, a shrapnel scar I had not earned. And the face, my face, fitted on top of it like a photograph pasted into somebody else's papers.
It took me a long time to understand what I was looking at and I am not sure I understand it now. That was not a disguise and it was not a possession. It was a mixture. Something had taken the two of us and fused us, and the result was a man who had never existed, not in 1918, not in my own century, not in any other.
And the surface of the water gave me nothing strange back. No haze, no absence, no trembling reflection of a monster. Just a pale man in a stolen tunic worn badly.
That hurt more than no reflection would have. That after everything, the mirror insisted I was still me.
The money came to me by luck, and the luck took the shape of two men throwing dice against a wall.
I heard them before I saw them: two hearts running fast from something that was neither fear nor desire, and a small dry sound repeating. I came round the corner and there they were, squatting beside the wall of a tavern, a clay lamp on the ground between them and a little heap of metal.
I stayed in the dark ten paces off and watched them for nearly an hour.
It was the best thing I could have done, and I did not do it out of cunning but because I did not dare go closer.
In that hour I learned three things.
The first: what the language sounded like in the mouths of people who were not working. I began to separate words out of the noise. There was one they repeated whenever a man won, and another when he lost, and another that turned up in both cases and had to be a god or a mother. And there was a structure to it, a rise and fall in the sentence, that felt less alien each time I heard it. Not that I understood it. It was that I stopped hearing it as a wall.
The second: that these people counted on their fingers differently. They started with the little finger.
The third: that one of the two was cheating.
I saw it because I could not not see it. He kept two dice in his left hand the whole time and swapped one as he gathered them up. He was clumsy. In my own century he would not have lasted two throws. There, in that light, with that drunk man opposite him, it was working.
And then something curious happened to me, and it was the first sign of what I was going to become.
I did not want to kill them. I did not even feel hunger, not yet. What I felt was the impulse, pure and automatic, to sit down with them and clean the cheat out. To use what I knew. I realised I had spent ten minutes working out how to force him to show his left hand, and I realised too that it had made me feel good for the first time in two days.
Note it, I told myself. This is you as well, and the bite did not do this to you.
When they left, one of them dropped a coin on the ground without noticing.
I waited until they turned the corner and picked it up.
I took it up to a roof.
I climbed a mud-brick wall by driving my fingers into the render, without effort, and sat on the parapet with my legs hanging over, and that was the first thing I had done since waking that I did for pleasure rather than out of necessity.
From up there you could see the whole city.
And it was new. That was the word that came to me and the one I have not been able to replace with a better one: it was a new city. Straight. Absurdly straight. The streets crossed at exact angles as far as I could see, with a regularity I associated with the planned districts of my own century and had not expected to find here. There was a central avenue so wide it looked like a mistake. There were whole blocks that were empty lots with the street already laid out around them, waiting. There were cranes. There was, along the northern edge, a band of half-built houses with their beams bare, and behind them the sea, and over the sea the long causeway, and at the end of the causeway the half-finished tower, black against a sky that already had all its stars out.
And there were too many stars.
That struck me in a way I had not expected. I had seen dark skies; I had camped, I had been out on moorland. This was something else. There was not a single artificial light within a hundred kilometres that was not a flame, and the Milky Way crossed the whole sky from edge to edge like spilled milk, with structure to it, with knots and dark lanes. You could see it. Actually see it, not as an idea.
I sat looking at that for a long while, with the coin in my fist.
Then I opened my hand and looked at it by starlight, which for my eyes was light enough.
It was small, silver, worn at the rim. On one face a man's head in profile, with a strong nose and a heavy jaw, and a band tied round the hair. On the other, an eagle standing on a thunderbolt, wings folded.
And letters.
Greek. Large, clumsy, around the eagle.
I looked at them a long time, letter by letter, recognising them with the humiliating slowness of a man who passed a course six years ago and never opened the book again. Pi. Tau. Omicron. Lambda. Epsilon. Mu.
ΠΤΟΛΕΜΑΙΟΥ.
And then, on the other side of the eagle, another word that came to me whole and at once, because I had seen it a thousand times in a thousand places:
ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ.
Of the king.
Of King Ptolemy.
I lowered the coin and looked at the half-built tower at the end of the causeway, and in that moment every piece came together at once and did me real harm.
Ptolemy. Alexandria. The Pharos unfinished.
I knew four things. That Alexander had died very young and that his generals had divided the world between them. That one of them, Ptolemy, had taken Egypt and founded a dynasty that ended, three hundred years later, in Cleopatra. That this first Ptolemy had declared himself king some time after Alexander's death, not immediately — twenty years or so. And that the Pharos had been completed early in the third century before Christ.
Before Christ.
I heard myself say it aloud, on that roof, alone, with a silver coin in my hand:
"Before Christ."
I did the arithmetic twice and got it wrong twice, and on the third attempt I accepted the answer.
Three hundred years before Christ. Give or take a decade. Three hundred.
And with that came the rest, in a cascade.
Rome existed. Rome was a middling republic stuck in the middle of Italy, quarrelling with its neighbours, and it had not yet crossed the sea. There was no empire. No Colosseum, no Caesar, no roads running from one end of the continent to the other.
Carthage existed and was whole, and was, if I remembered rightly, the richest naval power in the Mediterranean, and had not the faintest idea what was coming for it.
The Great Wall had not been built.
Christianity did not exist. Nor Islam. Nor the rabbinate as I knew it. Half the things humanity would spend two thousand years killing each other over had not yet occurred to anyone.
And underneath all of it, the simple sum, the one that required no knowledge of history and the one that finished me:
It was two thousand two hundred years until my mother would be born.
I do not know how long I was on that roof. I know that at some point I noticed I was making a noise, a hoarse repeating sound, and that it took me a while to identify it as coming from me, because I had not cried since I was fifteen and because it came out dry: the ducts did not work, or had nothing to work with.
A dead body weeping without tears on a mud-brick roof.
And the worst was still to come.
Because when it passed, when I could think again, the machine in my head started up on its own, without permission, with the stupid loyalty machines have, and began to do the only thing it knows how to do.
It began to calculate.
I am in the year 300 before Christ, approximately. I have a body that does not age. I have, therefore, two thousand three hundred years ahead of me.
And the conclusion came behind it, clean, horrible, inevitable:
I am going to get there. If nothing kills me, I am going to reach 1918. I am going to reach the day that man wakes in that grave in London, and by then I will have been here twenty-three centuries.
I looked at my hands, which belonged to someone else.
And I understood, on that roof, with the coin still in my fist, that I had not fallen into a story I knew.
I had fallen two thousand three hundred years before it began.
The hunger came back three hours before dawn, and it came back slowly, which is the worst way.
It began in the gums again. A dull ache, in the bone, so exactly like the night before that I was able to recognise it by its shape, the way you recognise the onset of a migraine. And this time, precisely because I recognised it, I had to face something that surprise had spared me the night before.
This time I knew what was going to happen. And I had time.
I came down off the roof and sat in a doorway, and made myself think about it as one thinks about a problem and not as one thinks about a misfortune.
Take it in order.
One: I cannot avoid it. That much is clear. I can delay it, for how long I do not know, and I have already seen what happens when I delay it too long, and last night it started from nothing. If I wait until I am in that state again, there will be no decision left to take. The decision has to be taken now, with a cold head, not in three hours' time.
Two: therefore the question is not whether I am going to do it. The question is how.
And there, sitting in a mud-brick doorway, I began to do what I had been doing all my life with things that did not matter at all, and for the first time I did it with something that did: I took the problem apart.
What went wrong last night?
Everything, obviously. But I did not want "everything". I wanted the cause. And the cause had a name, and the name was anatomical.
The throat.
I went for the throat because that is what they do in films, because it is what the character did in the game, because that is where the smell is strongest. And the throat is the worst possible choice if what you want is control. The carotid is a large-calibre artery at high pressure. When you open it, you do not drink: you receive. The heart sends it to you in spurts and you have no way of regulating the flow, and the man dies in under a minute even if you let go, because he has already emptied himself into the sand.
With Timarchos I did not choose to kill him. I chose the wrong place, and the place killed him.
That did not take the guilt away. It changed its shape, which is sometimes worse.
Very well. What is there that is not a large-calibre artery?
And the answer arrived in my head with the exact words and the whole diagram, in a technical language I had never studied, in another man's voice:
Cephalic vein. Basilic vein. Anterior surface of the forearm, superficial course, low pressure, slow flow, collapsible under digital compression.
I sat looking at the street for a good while after that.
The dead man I was wearing knew how to take blood. He had done it thousands of times. It was in the hands.
Three: the person must not know, or must not be able to tell.
And this is where I would like to be able to say that I hesitated a great deal. I hesitated some. Not enough.
I went down toward the harbour and spent nearly an hour looking, and in that hour I ruled out four people.
I ruled out a woman coming back alone down a side street with a basket, because she was coming back alone down a side street with a basket and I disgusted myself.
I ruled out a boy asleep on some sacks beside a warehouse, and I am not going to explain why.
I ruled out two men walking together, for purely practical reasons: there were two of them.
And I found what I was looking for at the door of a tavern that had already closed, sitting on the ground with his back against the wall and his legs splayed, snoring with his mouth open.
He was old. Sixty-something, perhaps more; it was hard to say with that skin. He wore a tunic that had once been good and was not any longer. He smelled so densely of wine that it was coming out through his pores, and his breathing had the slow depth of a man who will not wake even if you move him.
I took his pulse first. Two fingers, at the wrist, the way it is done.
And that was the first time I touched the edge of the pit myself, because I realised I was taking the pulse of a man I was about to drink and that I was doing it out of professional habit, to assess whether he was fit for it. As though this were a consultation.
Seventy-eight. A little fast, dehydrated, alcohol. Blood pressure probably low. An old man and a battered one, but not a dying one.
I lifted his left arm and turned the wrist upward.
And there it was, under the thin skin of an old man, blue, thick, obvious. Almost offered.
I did it with my teeth because I had nothing else, but I did not bite. It is different and I cannot explain it better: I pricked. A single point, shallow, oblique. The blood came slowly, without pressure, the way it comes from a small wound.
And I drank that way, from the forearm of an old drunk sitting on the ground, with my mouth set on a point the size of a fingernail, swallowing what came and no more.
It was slow. It was humiliating. There was none of the savage relief of the night before, none of that hot tide; there was an administered trickle, and the hunger withdrew by centimetres, grudgingly, and at no point did I lose control.
At no point did I lose control.
I write that and it still seems incredible to me.
The memory came all the same. I could not prevent that. I do not know if anyone ever can.
The old man was called Nikanor.
He was Macedonian, not Egyptian and not a Greek from Greece, and he was proud of it in a tired, sour way. He had been a soldier. He had walked, and here the exhaustion of that walking reached me in the legs, an exhaustion of years, of month after month of dust, of an entire army moving across a world with no end to it.
There was an enormous plain. There was a noise I could not identify, an animal and metallic noise that rose and fell, and a line of dust on the horizon coming closer, and a fear that was a shared fear, the fear of standing in a line of men pressing shoulder to shoulder.
And there was a boy on a horse.
That was what came through strongest. A fair-haired young man on a black horse, bareheaded, riding along the front of the line at middle distance, and the absolute, total sensation, without criticism and without doubt, that if that boy said it could be done, then it could be done.
Nikanor had been there. On a plain, in the east, forty years ago.
And afterwards he had come back, and they had given him land, and the land had turned out to be poor, and his wife had left, and for seven years he had been sitting at the door of that tavern, and what hurt him most was not the wine or the land or the wife.
What hurt him most was that nobody asked him any more.
He was full to the brim with an enormous thing he had seen with his own eyes, and in the whole city there was not one person who wanted to hear it again, and he knew it, and so he told it to the wine.
I took my mouth away.
I could have gone on. I want that on the record: I could have gone on, and a part of me was screaming for it, and it cost me a physical effort to lift my head and sit down on the ground a metre away from him.
I pressed the wound with my thumb until it stopped welling, which was almost at once. I tore a strip from the hem of the tunic I had stolen and tied it round his forearm, tight but not too tight, with a knot my hands made by themselves and that I did not know how to tie.
Then I moved him. I dragged him half a metre to prop his back better, because as he was he would have woken with his neck ruined.
I put the coin in his hand.
I do not know why I did that. I had earned it, if that is the word, and I had no way of using it yet, and he would probably drink it the next day. I put it there anyway, and closed his fingers over it, and said quietly, knowing perfectly well that he would not have understood me awake:
"I want to hear it."
And I left before I started talking seriously to an unconscious man, because halfway through the sentence I realised I had gone two days without speaking to anyone and that I was becoming willing to speak to anybody at all.
Walking west, I took stock.
And the stocktaking left me cold, not because of what it said but because of how calm I was while doing it.
It can be done.
That was the important part. It can be done without killing. It is not comfortable, it is not quick, it requires choosing the site, it requires anatomy, it requires the person to be unconscious or very drunk or both, it requires control. But it can be done. Last night I did not kill Timarchos because it was unavoidable; I killed him because I did not know what I was doing.
I should have felt moral relief. What I felt was technical satisfaction.
And I made myself stop in the middle of the street and look at that squarely, because it mattered and because I did not want to forget it.
You have just solved the problem of eating people. And you are pleased because the method works.
That was the moment, if there was one, when I began to be afraid of the part of me that had not changed.
And even so, on that same walk, I took the first decision of my new life that I still defend:
That this would be the rule. Not an ideal, not a promise to anyone, not a penance for Timarchos. A technical rule, of the kind you post in a laboratory: never the throat, never the artery, never to the end. Because promises break when a man is hungry, and technical rules, once they become habit, do not break: they execute.
I thought it in those words, and I had no idea what it was going to cost me to keep it.
I gave the last hour to finding somewhere to sleep, and there I was competent.
I found it on the western edge, in a half-built block: a cistern. Finished below and unfinished above, a square shaft lined with stone and mortar, some four metres deep, still dry, waiting for its vault. They had left planks laid across the top and, on the planks, a heap of matting and a tarpaulin.
I went down. It was cool, it smelled of lime, and no light came in anywhere except through a gap in one corner between two planks.
I spent nearly an hour on that gap, setting a flat stone, wedging it, checking from below. I did it with a thoroughness I had not been capable of in years, and at some point I realised I was enjoying it, and that it was the first thing I had done with my hands since dying that had come out right.
When I finished I climbed out again, because there was still a little time left.
And it was there, at the lip of the cistern, in the last minutes, that I saw it.
On the roof opposite, across the street, some twenty metres off.
There was a figure.
It was standing completely still, the shape of a person wrapped in something, cut out against a sky that was already going pale behind it. It did not move. That is not a manner of speaking: it did not move at all, not even the cloth, and there was a breeze that night.
I froze. And then, out of a new habit, out of the reflex I already had after two days, I did the only thing I knew how to do in the dark: I listened.
And there was nothing.
I could hear old Nikanor four hundred metres away. I could hear eleven hearts through two metres of earth. I could hear the dogs, the goats, the people asleep across three blocks.
From that figure, twenty metres from me, in a straight line with not one wall between us, there came no sound at all.
It was not breathing. It had no heartbeat.
I glanced east, for a second, one second only, because the itch on my skin had spiked and my body made me.
When I looked back, the roof was empty.
I went down into the cistern, set the stone from the inside, wedged myself into the deepest corner with my back against the cold mortar, and lay still, eyes open, for fourteen hours.
Now I knew three new things.
That I was in the year three hundred before Christ. That I could feed without killing. And that in this city, up on the rooftops, there was something else that did not breathe either.
And a fourth, which I did not let myself say in full until many nights later, though I knew it from that very moment, in my stomach or in whatever was left in its place:
That it had seen me.
That it had been watching me for two nights.