The Blood of Kings

by John Michael Curlovich

  “I made love to a great many of them, yes, Jamie. But only you have I loved.”

  It didn’t really answer my question, not quite. But I knew him well enough to know I couldn’t get him to say more, not if he didn’t want to. Danilo, when he wanted to be, was even more impenetrable than the real sphinx.

  I switched off my reading lamp and we held each other in the night. He was warmer than anyone I had ever known or imagined. And we slept.

  * * *

  Dreams. There were always dreams. At times I could not shake the feeling they were prophetic. At other times they merely disturbed me, or excited me.

  There I was, playing Chopin. I was at the base of the Great Pyramid by night, and the full moon bathed everything in its light. The pyramid was still cased in gleaming white alabaster, as it was in the ancient world, and the moon made it seem almost to glow. Bubastis, now a large, fully-grown cat, sat atop the piano, watching me. Justin was there, listening to my music, crying. And Tim, and Mrs. Kolarik.

  The moon turned blood red. The world turned blood red.

  I woke. The bed was empty. Danilo was gone. I did not want to know where.

  I got up and went to the window. In the real world as in my dream one, the moon was full. I had never asked for the life Danilo was giving me. Or had I asked for it, indirectly and without realizing it, when I began to love him? I wished he had given me the choice.

  Bubastis began to rub herself against my legs, purring.

  If he had offered me the chance to choose, what would I have done?

  I had been alone and without love so many years.

  His manuscript, his memoir was on the desk in his study. What did it say about me?

  I switched on the reading lamp. It was a thick, heavy manuscript. Page after page was covered with hieroglyphs. I wasn’t good enough to read it all. Not even most of it, really. But here and there among the pages I could pick out words and even sentences. And there were familiar cartouches, framing the names of kings. Not all of them were pharaohs. I could decipher the names of the Caesars, of Alexander, of Richard Lionheart…

  Then, near the end, I saw my own name, framed in a cartouche like the other royalty.

  Chapter Nine

  December was colder than anyone could remember, and there was constant snow. I remember wondering how effectively it would cover the bodies of the dead, or the sacrificed.

  For two months I had had physical therapy, and my fingers were responding. The only actual studies I pursued that semester were with Roland, under the supervision of my therapist. Slowly my fingers got stronger and more responsive, and they both agreed that my pianism was improving every week, almost to the level of skill I had had before Greg. But when the weather grew especially icy my hands turned sore, and nothing anyone could do seemed to help.

  “You’re punishing yourself.” My therapist was on the sports faculty but had worked with a few musicians too, for some reason. His name was Michael Columbus. Roland had known him for years; and he told me I could trust him. I knew what he meant. “You should think about going a bit easier. Let them heal for a few months before you really start pounding the keys.”

  “What I pound, Michael, is my affair.”

  “And being a little bitch won’t help.” It hadn’t taken him long to get my range. “Let me see your gloves.”

  I got them out of my coat.

  “These are too thin. Get some that are thermal-lined. Keeping your hands warm will help.”

  “Yes, Auntie.”

  He was holding my hands in his, putting slight pressure on them to see if they hurt. “Watch your mouth, Rubinstein, or these might get broken again.”

  It bothered me that they were still hurting. It hadn’t seemed that Bubastis remained at all sore after that awful incident with Greg. I asked Danilo if there were ancient remedies, or even spells. But there was nothing. Michael kept telling me the condition would improve in time, but I wasn’t sure I believed him. I would be a warm-weather pianist, it seemed, at least in the short term.

  Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, swimming helped. Fighting the resistance of the water strengthened and toughened my fingers. It was when I realized that I really began to believe I’d be whole again.

  But there was still pain. Finally, Michael and Roland got together and applied some tough love. “No more piano. You’re barred from the department till at least the first of the year.” Roland was smiling as he said it, but I felt as if the ground was quaking under me. “Maybe till springtime.”

  “I have a grand at Danilo’s.”

  “Jamie, please. You need to let yourself heal. If you push too hard, you’ll only do more damage.”

  Michael seconded this. There wasn’t much point arguing. I left, feeling as if I’d had my tongue torn out.

  * * *

  On the third of the month, Greg Wilton was captured. He was hiding on an aunt’s farm in rural Indiana, near the Illinois border. His lawyer was fighting extradition. The district attorney was confident he’d get him back to Pittsburgh. I was notified I’d be needed to testify against him. Since I hadn’t actually witnessed the murders, so it didn’t make much sense, but apparently testifying about what he had done to my hands would help convince the jury to convict on the more serious charges too. His lawyer would fight that, too, so I might not be needed at all in the end.

  When his lawyers told him I might be testifying against him, he reportedly freaked, claiming I was dead or should be, that he had killed not only Justin but me. Everyone took it as part of the groundwork for an insanity defense.

  I told the D.A.’s office I was planning a trip to Europe and Africa. “We leave just before Christmas.”

  They replied that I should keep in touch with them, but that the case was unlikely to go to trial before next autumn, at the earliest. They were determined to find evidence linking him to all the campus murders.

  The campus murders.

  I don’t know if it was the cold weather, or if he simply wasn’t as hungry, but Danilo became more circumspect. When he began to age, he left Pittsburgh. He sacrificed victims in West Virginia, in southeast Ohio, even in the Maryland panhandle, not as frequently as he had before. And he was careful to cover up his killings. Most of them weren’t found. The two that were discovered were put down to a convenient but imaginary “copycat killer”.

  Weren’t found. So many of the victims around campus had simply vanished. Where were they? I wanted to ask him, of course, but I was afraid of the answer. Besides, I thought I already knew. I did not want to have it confirmed.

  * * *

  And then my world began to open. To blossom.

  The semester ended on the eighteenth. Danilo gave his class their papers and turned in their grades. I met him at the department that night; we had dinner, went home and began to pack. We were to leave for New York City on the twentieth, sailing on the Queen Mary on the 20 third, first stop London. Crossing the ocean had me a bit apprehensive, but I didn’t tell him so. I wanted the winter to end, but there was no sign of it.

  * * *

  It seems incredible, but I had never seen the ocean. Or, needless to say, an ocean liner. Except in movies, of course. I found that conjuring images from films I loved helped me get past my nervousness. Fred and Ginger in Shall We Dance? Alice Faye and John Payne in Week-End in Havana. I would have been embarrassed to tell Danilo so.

  I wasn’t quite prepared for New York, either. And On the Town didn’t help much. A city so huge, so busy, so full of energy. I had always imagined it a larger version of Pittsburgh, but the difference was not simply of size, it was one of kind. There was nothing like it in the world. Once I got over feeling intimidated, I fell a bit in love with it.

  The icy wind never stopped, and the snow hardly did. I missed Bubastis. Danilo’s next-door neighbor had offered to look after her. I called him and he told me not to worry, she was fine.

  Danilo showed me as much of the city as we had time for, the historic places, the Stonewall Inn
and the monument in Sheridan Square, everything. We spent a day at the Metropolitan Museum. Their Egyptian collection was enormous, larger than our campus museum in its entirety. Even deep inside it seemed to me I could hear the wind.

  There were a great many objects from the Amarna period, the time when Danilo’s father had tried to reform Egyptian religion. The art changed too, then. It became much more sensual, more emotionally direct, than the conventional, rather formal things we usually see. Was it at the orders of the pharaoh? Or did the change in thought brought about by the king’s new religion subtly change the way his artists saw their world? You could feel the sensuality in the pictures of the pharaoh and his family.

  I noticed an odd lack, though. “Danilo, there are none of you.”

  “No.” He smiled, but there was a bit of sadness in it. “The priests held the male members of our family responsible for their loss of power. Their revenge was near-total. All signs of my father and myself were expunged from the record, or nearly so. Even my brother, who the priests manipulated to restore the old gods, even he—Until Carter found his tomb, there were archaeologists who seriously thought he was a myth. And my own reign was the shortest of all, so it was easy for them to wipe it out.”

  In a small, unobtrusive case, he showed me a few things from his brother’s tomb. “He was a beautiful boy with a smooth, muscular body like yours. I loved him. we all did. But he was sickly. Easy for the priests to dominate. Easier for them to murder.”

  I remembered that Tutankhamen’s mummy had mysterious, unexplained wounds to the head.

  “He was your age when he died, Jamie.”

  I looked at him. “And Justin’s”

  “Yes.” He turned away from me. “And Justin’s.”

  He told me they used to have a relief of the Kissing Kings on display. But we couldn’t find it. Finally, Danilo asked an attendant where it had been moved.

  “Oh, it was taken off public display, sir.” In a stage whisper he added, “Complaints from conservative board members.” It was clear he understood why we wanted to see it. “It’s down in one of the storage rooms.”

  Danilo picked up on his lead. “Might we…?”

  He nodded, looked around to make certain no one could see, and without saying another word led us down a long flight of stairs. I was expecting dim sub-basements, like the ones in the museum on campus, but these were wider and better lit. In a large room there it was, on the floor, propped against a packing case. Akhenaten and his son/successor Smenkhare, depicted in that lush sensual style, their arms around each other, their lips touching. Akhenaten had his hand on his son’s hip, in a way I had myself so many times. The resemblance between the two of them—and between the image and the way Danilo still looked—was unmistakable.

  The attendant shifted his weight nervously. “You’d be surprised how many people want to see it.”

  There in front of him, Danilo and I kissed. He looked from the image to us and back again. It was clear he saw the resemblance. It was equally clear he couldn’t quite fathom it as anything more than a coincidence. “We shouldn’t be down here. I’ll have to take you back up, now. You understand.”

  We understood.

  We stayed at the Chelsea Hotel. Danilo told me about the great and near-great artists who had stayed there, the Beats and more.

  Then that night he disappeared, heading out into the desperate winter toward what he called the meat-packing district. When he came back, he was younger.

  * * *

  The ship was magnificent. Much larger than I had imagined. It had a weight, a solidity that seemed at odds with the fact it floated on the surface of the water. Everything was appointed in the most marvelous Art Deco.

  A hundred movies had prepared me for our stateroom to be tiny and cramped. But it was fairly roomy and quite comfortable.

  “The best and largest on board.” Danilo was pleased with himself.

  “And the most expensive?” It hardly seemed possible the university was paying for it.

  “They’re only paying part.”

  “Oh.” I knew he had money. He’d have to have been a dolt not to have accumulated a fortune over the years. “How much?”

  “Enough. Don’t be nosy.”

  I jumped onto the large double bed and stretched out. “Now this,” I said grandly, “is the life I was meant to lead.”

  “Part of it.” He unpacked patiently.

  “All we need is for Fred Astaire and Jane Powell to do a show for us tonight.”

  “You’ve lived your life in a fantasy world.”

  I nodded happily. “And look where it’s gotten me. Into the best fantasy of all.”

  He went off to leave some valuables with the purser. I decided to explore the ship. Leaving the stateroom, I happened to see myself in the mirror. The hair at my temples was beginning to turn grey. Seeing it made me go a bit numb. I knew what it meant, or what I thought it did.

  The wind in the harbor was even more vicious than the wind in the streets. I quickly checked out the dining hall, the theater, the gym. There was an indoor pool; I’d be able to swim.

  Later, when I asked Danilo about my graying hair, he was offhand. “Yes. I noticed it a day or two ago.”

  “But… but I’m 20.”

  “Or newborn. Your new life has its costs.” He stretched out on the bed. “Or perhaps I should say its requirements.”

  “Are you telling me I have to…?” Somehow, I had known. But I kept pushing the thought out of my mind. Now it seemed inescapable. “Suppose… suppose I don’t? Suppose I won’t do that?”

  “Then you will age and die.”

  “No.”

  “You were dead, Jamie. The gods of the underworld will have you, soon or late. You must placate them. Feed them. Keep them happy.”

  “You serve Set not Anubis, Danilo.” The image of the jackal-headed god of the graveyard had always seemed slightly unsettling to me. Perhaps this was why. I had seen films of real jackals, devouring the carcasses of freshly-slaughtered animals. During periods of when food was scarce, they were known to dig up freshly-turned graves and eat the corpses. The Egyptians chose the forms of their gods only too wisely.

  “I serve the gods of Egypt.” He smiled. “And they serve me. Or us.”

  “I don’t want them to serve me. I don’t want anyone to serve me.”

  “The alternative, Jamie, is for you to return to that death I interrupted. Do you want that?”

  “No.” I was 20 years old. I didn’t know what I wanted.

  He wanted to kiss me. I could tell. But I was too upset. I walked out of the room and left him alone there. The ship lurched. The tugs began pulling us out of the harbor.

  I spent long hours walking the decks, lost in troubled thought. It was cold and overcast, and there was still that bitter wind, but I needed to be alone. My fingers ached, despite my thick gloves. I had known from the beginning the time would come. It had come. I would have done anything to have it otherwise.

  It was nearly dark when I went back to our cabin. Danilo was lying on the bed, reading. He glanced at his watch and suggested we get some dinner. “Then…” He avoided looking at me. “Then you will have to… ”

  I sat down beside him. “I don’t know if I can.”

  “You can do anything you want to now. We are making this trip so you can learn that, so you can at least begin to learn the power you have.”

  “Not enough power to stay alive without doing awful things.”

  He kissed my cheek, but I moved away from him. “Set,” he whispered, “is the god who teaches us the gods do not exist.”

  * * *

  Night at sea was magnificent but quite arctic. The sky had cleared, and ahead of the ship a quarter moon hung in the sky, brighter and whiter than I had ever seen it. There were a million stars, more, and more vibrant, than in the mountains, even. But despite the fact that the sky was nearly cloudless, there were snowflakes. Not many of them, only occasional ones, but they glittered in the moo
nlight.

  I didn’t eat. I couldn’t. It was Christmas Day. Not that the holiday had ever meant much to me. I had always taken it for granted that you had to have a family, real loving family, for it to mean a thing. And now I had a family; I had Danilo.

  There was to be an especially lavish dinner on board. Danilo said he wasn’t hungry, and so I headed for the dining hall alone. But I didn’t have much appetite. The other passengers went into their meal and I stayed on deck. The sky began to cloud up again, and there was more snow and less light. The sea, which had been so lovely, turned black. Finally, I went back to our stateroom. Danilo was gone. I knew where.

  It would be a young crew member, or that suicidal passenger you see in so many old films. It would be a boy traveling with his grandmother, or… I sat in the room without turning on any lights, waiting.

  And he came to me.

  Slowly the door opened. In the light from the passageway he looked sad. “Jamie, it is time.” I got up and followed him.

  It was late. Nearly everyone else was asleep, or so it seemed. The ship was quiet. Even the rolling of the waves seemed to have subsided, mostly. But the bitter wind still blew. Neither of us bothered to put on a coat.

  At the stern rail a young man stood waiting. Young. Hardly older than myself. Dark hair, large dark eyes. He wore a thick parka, but the hood was down; the wind blew his hair. Danilo approached him. I stood a few paces away. Danilo touched his cheek, stroked it. He licked the side of his throat, and the boy shuddered with ecstasy.

  I saw him take that golden knife out of his pocket. Just as the boy’s passion reached its height, swiftly Danilo sank the knife into his throat and tore it open. Blood splattered across the deck. For a startled moment the boy stood still. His body shuddered again. I wondered if it was still with pleasure, or… Then he collapsed. Crumpled into a heap. Danilo bent down and, with the same golden knife, began his surgery.