The Blood of Kings

by John Michael Curlovich

  “Should we stop and visit your relatives?”

  “Good God, no. They’d lynch us.”

  “Or try to and live to regret it.”

  “Thanks, but I’d just as soon never see Ebensburg again.”

  We kept driving, northeast. After a few hours we were in the Poconos. Lush, green, rolling hills, giving way to even lusher, greener mountains. Eventually he turned off onto a dirt road.

  “Where on earth are we?”

  “A million miles from Greg, and even farther from your relatives.”

  It was mid-afternoon. Shadows were stark and the sun beamed brilliantly overhead. We crept slowly along the road. Trumpet vines blossomed bright orange among the trees, and vivid purple wisteria cascaded everywhere. Among the trees, here and there, was a dead, rotted one.

  The road led to an old stone house, almost a small castle, tucked among the hills. A turret soared up to the treetops; rainspouts carved into gargoyles adorned the four corners. Dark green ivy climbed the walls and the tower. Heavy leaded-glass windows looked out onto the mountains and the forest. A house out of Poe, I thought.

  “Danilo, it’s incredible.”

  “It’s ours for the next week.”

  I mentioned Poe and almost before I had the words out, he said what I somehow knew he would, that Poe was one of us too.

  “How on earth did you find this place?”

  “Online. How else?” Again, hearing something so contemporary from him seemed… not quite right… out of place, maybe.

  He seemed to know what I was thinking. “We have to change with the times. We have to use what the times give us. Come inside.”

  We walked to the door, holding hands. Large door, eight feet tall, heavy wood, stained-glass coat of arms in the center of it. He pulled out a set of large, heavy old keys and opened it. Then, quite unexpectedly, he picked me up and carried me across the threshold. Part of me felt silly, like a kid or a girl. Another part of me fell more in love than I had been before.

  “Jamie, welcome home.”

  Inside, the house was a wonder. There were the most fabulous antiques everywhere, eighteenth century things mostly. I couldn’t stop grinning. “Danilo, it’s perfect, it’s a museum. We have our own private museum.”

  “With no Professor Feld prowling around.”

  In one corner was a piano, a concert grand. I ran to it, opened the cover and played a few notes. It was in perfect tune. Even more excited, I sat down and played the opening bars of the “Minute Waltz.” Danilo moved behind me and put his arms around me; it hampered my playing, but I didn’t care.

  I found myself wondering whose house it was.

  “No one’s. The owner’s dead, and all his family. Old money from Philadelphia. They owned a department store. The last of them died 20 years ago. The estate rents it out to help cover the taxes.”

  I played some from a brief nocturne. The dark tone seemed to reflect the dark forest outside.

  “I had them tune the piano for you, made it a condition of our lease.”

  I had never been so excited. I stopped in mid-bar and ran to the largest of the windows. “This is wonderful. You could live here for years without seeing another human being.” I turned to look at him. “Just you and me. We’re the only ones in the world.”

  “Well, not quite. There’s a caretaker. Part-time.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t want anything to bring me down. “Well, tell him to stay away.”

  “He has a room, in the basement around back. But I think he usually sleeps at his own place.”

  “Danilo, I don’t want to see anyone else. Just you.”

  That night we went for a walk in the woods. There was a quarter moon and more stars than I had ever seen. The Milky Way arced high overhead. We held hands and ambled without much aim. The mountain air was cool, even in August. I was a bit chilly in my shorts.

  “Do you know the sky, Jamie?”

  “Not on a first-name basis, no.”

  “Do I love you despite the fact you’re such a smartass, or because of it?”

  “Face it, professor, I’m irresistible.”

  He ignored this. “Only in Egypt, in the middle of the Great Desert, have I seen a sky so vast, filled with so many stars.”

  “It’s marvelous, Danilo. I used to think Pittsburgh’s sky looked empty after living in the country. But Ebensburg nights were nothing compared to this.”

  “You Americans have lost touch with so much.”

  It was still another of his odd comments, but they hardly seemed to register any more. “Where are you from, then?”

  He smiled. I could see it clearly in the moonlight. “The Old World.”

  “Would you like to be more specific?”

  “My parents were Egyptian.”

  It surprised me. “I thought you were from somewhere in Eastern Europe.”

  “Europe is where I’ve lived most of my life.” He put an arm around me and gestured with the other. “That bright star over there—the one with a reddish cast to it, just above the moon?”

  I looked where he was indicating.

  “Mars,” he said. He stroked my hair in his familiar way. “Or Set, if you prefer.”

  “Let’s honor him, Danilo. Let’s shatter all the patterns.”

  “I thought we were already doing that.”

  “Make love to me here, where he and all the stars can see us.”

  Slowly he began to undress me. “Do you understand what the ancients saw in the stars and the planets?”

  “They thought they were gods.” His touch warmed me.

  “Not exactly. The ancients understood that the soul and the body are not necessarily one.”

  I opened his shirt and kissed his chest. “I don’t know what you mean.” The gods were the last thing on my mind just then.

  “The lights in the sky are the gods’ souls.”

  Despite myself I had to ask him, “Then your soul can be somewhere other than in your body?”

  “Of course. Why not?” He never stopped teaching me. Or teasing me. There were times I wasn’t sure which.

  I got the last of his clothes off. We put our arms around each other. From the corner of my eye I could see the moon and, just above it, Mars, tinged with blood, shining steadily.

  Suddenly there were headlights shining through the trees. We quickly got back into our clothes. Danilo seemed more disappointed than I was. Our first night together in our own world. I had meant it when I said I never wanted to see another human face.

  We went back to the house as quickly as we could in the dark woods. A jeep was parked at the back of the house. There was a man knocking at the front door. Danilo strode up to him. He must have been 6’6” and he was overweight, dressed in jeans, a flannel shirt and heavy work boots.

  “Good evening. Can we help you?”

  “You Mr. Semenkaru?” He had trouble pronouncing it.

  “Yes, and this is Mr. Dunn. What can we do for you?”

  “I’m Albert Little Bear.” He looked from one of us to the other suspiciously.

  Danilo looked at me and mouthed the words, “The caretaker.”

  “I just wanted to make sure you got here and everything’s all right.”

  I spoke up. “Everything’s perfect, Mr. Little Bear. You’re Native American?”

  “One eighth. This land used to belong to the Iroquois.” He stared at us. “You shouldn’t go out in the forest at night. It’s easy to get lost.”

  “We didn’t go too far.” Danilo didn’t want him there any more than I did. “Is there something you need?”

  “No. Like I said, I just wanted to make sure you got here okay.” He looked from Danilo to me again, not seeming to approve of us. “What are you planning to use this place for?”

  “Just rest and relaxation, Mr. Little Bear.”

  “Albert.” He took a step toward us, then stopped. “This is a quiet region. People don’t like anything funny.”

  “I’ll try to restrain my sense of humo
r, then.” I pointedly crossed to him and shook his hand.

  It seemed to startle him. “I think you know what I mean. How old are you, Mr. Dunn?” He leaned on the “Mr.” with heavy sarcasm.

  “Twenty” I decided an extra year couldn’t hurt. “Want to see my driver’s license?”

  Danilo quickly got between us. “You’ve stocked the pantry for us?”

  “Enough food for a week.” He smiled to show he didn’t care if we starved. “You want me to light a fire before I go?”

  “We’ll manage.” Danilo smiled back at him, a polite “screw you.” “Why don’t you stop back in a few days?”

  Without saying a word Albert got in his jeep and drove off down the road.

  I couldn’t help smirking about the encounter. “It’s so hard to find good help nowadays.”

  Danilo watched till his taillights disappeared. “He could be trouble.”

  “For you?” I didn’t believe it.

  “For us. I wanted this trip to be a break from that kind of thing. You get enough of it at home.” He took my hand and we went inside. The night air held a chill. “I should have had him start that fire.”

  “We can warm each other up.”

  And we did. We made love again and again. When the night became too chilly, we lit a fire and made love again, there in front of it. Then we sat, spoon-wise, his arms around me from behind, and we talked about our lives, and about our life—together.

  At one point I felt him get a bit tense. When I looked over my shoulder he was staring at the window.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” He didn’t sound convincing, and I said so. “I thought I saw our Albert looking in the window at us.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s gone now. He ducked away as soon as he knew I had seen him.”

  “Another closet case?”

  “Maybe. He could merely be a generic brute, or a lunatic.”

  “I saw the look on his face when we came out of the woods. He’s a closet case.”

  “I don’t want him to ruin this, Jamie.”

  “He won’t. No one could.”

  * * *

  The next few days were paradise. There was me, there was Danilo and there was our little castle in the mountains. If anything else existed I didn’t want to know about it.

  We made a few trips into a nearby town to eat at a little diner that had surprisingly good food. Especially pies, which Danilo seemed quite partial to. On our third visit, the owner mentioned Albert Little Bear. It seemed our caretaker had been spreading gossip. The owner did not exactly tell us we weren’t welcome in his diner, but that was what came through.

  I played for Danilo every night.

  The third night Albert was at the window again. This time I was the one who saw him. He grinned at us like a vicious animal. We got into our pants quickly and went out to deal with him. But he was gone. He knew the woods better than we possibly could; he even knew the house better, if it came to that. He could have been anywhere.

  Two more nights we had to ourselves. Our interval of solitude, or near-solitude, was ending. Late, very late, Albert was at the window again, watching us make love, leering and grimacing. This time when we saw him, he stayed there for a long moment and held up a huge hunting knife. The threat could not have been clearer.

  Danilo jumped to his feet and headed for the door, quite naked. “Stay here, Jamie. I have to deal with this.”

  “You can’t go like that.”

  “Yes, I can. I don’t want him to get away again. Stay here. I’ll be back.”

  He took a flashlight and went outside. I rushed to the window, but all I could see was the light, heading into the moonlit woods.

  I climbed quickly up to the turret. All week long I had been too preoccupied to go there. The steps spiraled. The top room was empty, full of dust, debris and boxes; a storeroom, nothing more. The moon’s light poured in. At the window I could see Danilo’s light heading into the forest.

  I should have gone with him. Albert was a large man. Against him, two of us would have been… I didn’t know what. I was terrified he’d do something to Danilo and then come for me. We should have fought together.

  Then Danilo’s light went out.

  Terrified, I waited.

  It was forever. I was so worried what would happen to my Danilo, my lover, my… absurdly I found myself thinking “father.” And I knew in a way that’s what he was. After all my life I had found him, and now he was in the dark nighttime forest with a hateful fiend. I pressed my hands against the window as if that could have made me closer to him.

  Then I saw a figure emerge from the trees. Large, enormous in fact, but moving quickly and with a kind of grace. When it finally entered a patch of moonlight, I realized the shadows had created an illusion.

  It was Danilo.

  He seemed unhurt, no evident limp or wound. He was naked. Then I saw something dark on his face and throat.

  I was afraid to move. He stopped walking and looked up to the turret. He knew where I was.

  I waited there. In a moment he entered the house; I heard him climbing the steps, and he came into the room. He stood there naked and beautiful in the moonlight. There was a large smear of blood from the corner of his mouth down to his chin, then down the side of his throat.

  We stared at each other for a time. Then he said softly, “Albert will not bother us any more.”

  He had beaten a man who was much taller and heavier, who must have been stronger. I felt so many conflicting emotions. Danilo had fought him for me. To protect me. In all my life no one had done such a thing. In that moment I knew that he truly loved me. Yet there was blood.

  “Danilo, I want to know who you are.”

  He stayed silent.

  “Please, Danilo. I love you, but part of me is terrified.”

  He took a step toward me. I tensed. He sensed it and stopped. Very gently he said, “Achilles was the first. I was there when his mother hid him among the women, to keep him out of Agamemnon’s insane war. I saw his rage when his lover Patroclus died. I helped bury him.

  “And there were all the others, long, sad generations of them. Socrates and Pericles, Marc Antony and Dellius, Erasmus, Richard Lionheart, Ludwig of Bavaria, who they called mad.”

  Hearing him say this did not surprise me. I had known, in a way.

  “We were not the first, Jamie, my father and I. There had been Gilgamesh, who loved the warrior Enkidu. There had been…” He stopped and smiled. “But by now you know the catalog. My father and I were not the first to have the blood. But when they killed him—”

  “Your father?”

  “My father was Akhenaten.”

  Smenkhare. I don’t know why the similarity in names had never struck me before.

  “You have their blood, Jamie. The royal blood, the blood of kings. I’ve told you so before.”

  I had thought it was love talk, the kind of silly thing an older man would say to a younger one to flatter him.

  “We were not the first. No. But when they killed my father, when they did the most awful things to his corpse, right in front of me…” He looked and sounded lost. “Then two years later, when it became clear how much I was my father’s son, they decided to do away with me, too. I escaped. I honestly don’t remember how. I had been trained as a priest. I knew what the ancient scrolls said. A cousin of mine had died recently. We looked alike, and I dressed him in some of my things, so when they found him, they thought he was me.

  “Then I lived for a generation like a desperate hermit in an abandoned rock-cut tomb, collecting all the papyri, learning the spells, mastering the words. Some of them are even in the Bible. ‘The blood is the life.’”

  All of this… I had suspected something, but nothing this immense, this timeless. “And I…?”

  “There are more of us. More than anyone could guess, more than even I know. But you… I have mentored so many men, hoping to revive the power we once knew, and the pride we once too
k in it. Keeping the flame alive, however dimly. You are the one. Jamie, love, of all the ones I’ve known, you are the one, the blood prophet who can—”

  “I am not. I am no such thing.”

  “You are. A thousand generations of kings and prophets speak through you. When you play, I hear the hand of Frederic Chopin himself.”

  The universe was in a whirling chaos. I could not make sense of it. I could not know what to say.

  “The power will be yours, Jamie. Only take it. You have the blood of kings.”

  Across the moonlit room he stood tall and naked. I knew that he loved me. And I could hear in his voice that he was terrified I’d reject him and what he was offering.

  All my life I had been alone, no family, no one to love who loved me in return, no one, even, who understood the passion I felt for my music.

  I took a step toward him. He was afraid to move or say anything, I could see it. I crossed the room to him and touched his chest. He was sweating. From the struggle? From fear of what I’d say to him?

  But I didn’t say a word. I touched his face, still wet with blood. I pulled him to me and licked the blood from his lips. It was sweet, much sweeter than I expected.

  We made love, there in that empty, dirty room, and it was more intense, even, than the most intense things I had felt before. In that moment we were the Kissing Kings, and I knew something of what he meant. I could feel the blood of 100 artists pounding in my heart; I felt the power of a thousand kings.

  When we were finished, we slept in each other’s arms, there on the dirty floor. It didn’t seem to matter.

  Then, very late, when I was certain he was sound asleep, I got up quietly and got dressed. There was something I had to do, something I had to see.

  It took me a few minutes to find another flashlight. On a table just inside the door I noticed a knife, the golden one I had seen in Danilo’s office once. It was soaked with blood. Then I headed out into the woods. The moon had wheeled round to the other side of the sky, making everything look different. It took me a moment to get oriented and find the place where, I thought, he had come out of the trees. Even so it took me a time to be quite certain. My flashlight and the moonbeams pouring down through the branches were not really much help. Mars shone brightly.