“It’s hard to say,” Diana replied, almost in a whisper. At any other time she would have admitted that she did not know what to make of him; he was not very natural, any more than the style of his invitation, but she felt that long explanations were out of place at that late hour. “It’s hard to say,” she repeated. “As for the other one, the steward of the blood, I think he’s repulsive.”
“I do too,” Bessian said.
His eyes, and then Diana’s, rested stealthily on the heavy oak bed and its heavy red woolen coverlet with a deep nap. On the wall, above the bed, there was a cross of oak.
Bessian went to one of the windows. He was still standing there when the man came back, holding his copper lamp in one hand and the two suitcases in the other.
He set them down on the floor and Bessian, his back to the man and his face pressed to the window-pane, asked, “What is that, down there?”
The man walked over with a light step. Diana watched them both for a moment, leaning on the window-sill, looking down as if into a chasm.
“It’s a sort of large room, sir, a sort of gallery, I don’t know what to call it, where you take in the people from all parts of the Rrafsh when they come to pay the blood tax.”
“Oh,” Bessian said. Because his face was right against the pane, his voice sounded strange to Diana. “That’s the famous murderers’ gallery.”
“Gjaks, sir.”
“Yes, gjaks…. I know. I’ve heard of them.”
Bessian stayed by the window. The servant of the castle withdrew a few steps, noiselessly.
“Good night, sir. Good night, madam.”
“Good night,” Diana said, without raising her head that was bent over the suitcase that she had just opened. She went through her things languidly, without deciding to choose this or that. The evening meal had been heavy, and she felt an unpleasant weight in her stomach. She looked at the red woolen coverlet on the broad bed, then turned again to her suitcase, hesitating about putting on her nightgown.
She was still undecided when she heard his voice.
“Come see.”
She got up and went to the window. He moved to make room for her and she felt the icy coldness of the glass go right through her. Outside, the darkness seemed to hover over an abyss.
“Look down there,” Bessian said faintly.
She looked into the darkness, but saw nothing; she was penetrated with the vastness of the black night and she shivered.
“There,” he said, touching the glass with his hand, “down there, don’t you see a light?”
“Where?”
“Down there, all the way down.”
At last she saw a glimmer. Rather than a light it was a feeble reddish glow on the rim of the abyss.
“I see,” she said. “But what is it?”
“It’s the famous gallery where the gjaks wait for days and sometimes weeks on end to pay the blood-tax.”
He felt her breath come faster by his shoulder.
“Why do they have to wait so long?” she asked.
“I don’t know. The kulla doesn’t make paying the tax easy. Perhaps so that there will always be people waiting in that gallery. You’re cold. Put something over your shoulders.”
“That mountaineer back there, at the inn, he must have come here, too?”
“Certainly. The innkeeper told us about him. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes, that’s right. It seems that he came here three days ago to pay the blood tax. That’s what he told us.”
“Just so.”
Diana could not suppress a sigh.
“So he was here….”
“Without exception, every killer on the High Plateau goes through that gallery,” he said.
“That’s terrifying. Don’t you think so?”
“It’s true. To think that for more than four hundred years, since the building of the castle of Orosh, in that gallery, night and day, winter and summer, there have always been killers waiting there.”
She felt his face near her forehead.
“Of course it’s frightening, it couldn’t be otherwise. Murderers waiting to pay. It’s truly tragic. I’d even say that in a certain way there is grandeur in it.”
“Grandeur?”
“Not in the usual meaning of the word. But in any case, that glimmer in the darkness, like a candle shining on death…. Lord, there really is something supremely sinister about it. And when you think that it’s not just a matter of the death of a single man, of a candle-end shining on his grave, but infinite death. You’re cold. I told you to put something over your shoulders.”
They stood there awhile, not turning their eyes from that light at the foot of the kulla, until Diana felt chilled to her marrow.
“Brr! I’m freezing,” she said, and moving away from the window she said, “Bessian, don’t stay there, you’ll catch cold.”
He turned and took two or three steps towards the centre of the room. At that moment, a clock on the wall that he had not noticed struck twice with a deep sound that made them both start.
“Goodness, how frightened I was,” Diana said.
She knelt down again to her suitcase. “I’m taking out your pyjamas,” she said a moment later.
He murmured a few words and began to walk up and down the room. Diana went over to a mirror that stood on a chest of drawers.
“Are you sleepy?” she asked.
“No. Are you?”
“Me neither.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette.
“It would have been better not to have had that second cup of coffee.”
Diana said something, but since she had a hairpin in her mouth, he could not make out the words.
Bessian stretched out now, and leaning on his elbow, looked on distractedly at his wife’s familiar gestures before the mirror. That mirror, the chest, the clock, as well as the bed and most of the other furniture of the kulla, were related, as their lines showed, to a baroque style, but simplified in the extreme.
As she combed her hair in the mirror, Diana watched out of the corner of her eye the wreaths of smoke floating over Bessian’s abstracted face. The comb moved ever more slowly through her hair. With an unhurried gesture she put it down on the chest, and watching her husband in the mirror, quietly, as if she did not want to attract his attention, she walked with light steps to the window.
Beyond the glass was anguish and night. She let their tremors pass through her while her eyes searched insistently for the tiny lost glimmer of light in the chaos of darkness. It was there down below, in the same place, as if suspended above the chasm, flickering wanly, about to be swallowed up by the night. For a long moment she could not take her eyes from the feeble red glow in that abyss of darkness. It was like the redness of primeval fire, a magma ages old whose pallid reflection came from the centre of the earth. It was like the gates of hell. And suddenly, with unbearable intensity, the guise of the man who had passed through that hell was present to her. Gjorg, she cried out within her, moving her cold lips. He wandered forbidden roads, bearing omens of death in his hands, on his sleeve, in his wings. He must be a demigod to face that darkness and primal chaos of creation. And being so strange, so unattainable, he took on enormous size, he swelled and floated like a universal howling in the night.
Now she could not believe that she had actually seen him, and that he had seen her. Comparing herself with him she felt colorless, stripped of all mystery. Hamlet of the mountains, she thought, repeating Bessian’s words. My black prince.
Would she ever meet him again? And there, by the window, her forehead icy from the frozen pane, she felt she would give anything to see him again.
Then she felt her husband’s breath behind her, and his hand resting upon her hip. For some moments he gently caressed that part of her body that moved him more than any other, then, not seeing what was happening in her face, he asked her in a muffled voice, “What’s the matter?”