“He said in his letter that he’s getting ready to assume a new identity. He’s been Gaspar Valessi for… well, I forget how long. Much too long, certainly. He’s leaving Liege, he said. He plans to travel abroad for a while. He might be going to search for Zenzele. They haven’t been together in a very long time. He probably misses her.”
“Yes, but why send us so much?” Fatima insisted, frowning. “I tell you, Paulo, I don’t like it. It gives me a terrible foreboding.”
“I’m sure he’s just cleaning house. I assure you, what he’s sent us so far… it is nothing. The man is a sentimentalist. He probably has warehouses full of keepsakes. He is thirty thousand years old!”
Fatima, who was very fond of Gon, scowled fretfully. “I think you should go see him,” she said, looking away at the window. It was full dark now, the window a blank black rectangle. “You know he gets depressed when he’s been alone too long. Go and see him and bring him back to the island. He is always cheered by his visits here with us. It’s been almost ten years since he’s vacationed on Karpathos.”
Paulo, who hated to leave the house, much less the island, frowned.
“Paulo…!”
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“If you don’t, I will,” Fatima threatened, and then she turned and stalked out of the kitchen.
Paulo sighed and finished his soup. He wiped his mouth with his napkin, then rose and went to his bedchamber to dress. He walked past the kitchen doorway a few minutes later, attired in white linen pants and a loose white button-up shirt. He found Sunduk and asked his fledgling to accompany him out to the courtyard.
Leonora cleaned the kitchen. She turned off the stove, but left the pot on the burner. The family would drink all through the night, availing themselves of her “soup” whenever they got hungry. She would empty the pot and wash it in the morning when she arose. That was the routine.
Normally, she would have retired about then. It was nearly nine o’clock in the evening. But she was curious about the latest artifacts Paulo’s master had shipped to them. She lingered in the kitchen, gossiping with Ezra, while Paulo and Sunduk carried the boxes into the foyer. There would be a mess to clean in there in the morning, she knew. Splinters of wood and packing material to sweep up. She watched through the doorway as Paulo and Sunduk hauled in the last of the wooden crates, the largest one, the one shaped like a coffin.
“Is it heavy?” she asked, thinking perhaps it was a statue.
Paulo glanced at her. “No. It’s actually very light.” He set it down.
Rather than open the big crate, he started on the smaller ones. Ezra and Fatima came to watch. The first item out of its crate was some kind of African tribal mask. Paulo took a sheet of paper from the crate and read it aloud to them.
“This is a warrior’s mask from the region Zenzele was born,” he said. “It is from Gon and Zenzele’s visit to Africa in 1842.”
Sunduk held the mask over his face, then lowered it with a scowl. “Smells bad.”
“I’m not surprised. It is two hundred years old.”
Gon had sent them paintings by artists both famous and obscure, a Chinese puzzlebox from the Han Dynasty, a clay tablet from Uruk, statuettes of various gods and goddesses, a pair of ancient sandals that Gon claimed had once belonged to Aristotle, a Spartan shield, a Babylonian spear, and a large assortment of smaller nicknacks, jewelry and good luck charms, and even a double-headed phallus made of smooth black polished stone. This, he claimed, had belonged to a powerful queen who had ruled an empire that predated the earliest known civilizations of the Middle East.
“Queen Amar,” Paulo read, holding the Stone Age dildo in his free hand, “was famed for her sexual appetite, and was known to entertain as many as thirty men in a single evening. She asked me once to be her king, but I, doubting I had the stamina for the position, reluctantly declined. She died a few months later, poisoned by her palace priests. Their religion is as dead and forgotten as Amar now, and good riddance! I myself destroyed all evidence that they, and their gods, had ever existed.” Paulo grinned up at them, still gripping the phallus. “Never piss off Gon!” he laughed.
“We are going to have to build a new wing if he keeps sending us these things,” Fatima said.
“We can turn the house into a museum!” Ezra suggested. “Charge admission for a tour!”
“Let’s see what’s in the big one,” Sunduk said eagerly, and he pried the lid off with his fingertips. The nails squawked as they came loose. He hefted and tossed the lid to one side.
Everyone crowded forward to see what else Gon had sent them.
“What is that? Some kind of mummy?” Sunduk asked.
Leonora peered into the crate. Inside, nestled in packing material, was what appeared to be the likeness of a young woman.
Her face was made of gold, eyes closed as if sleeping, and her gleaming hands lay crossed upon her breast. It was a sarcophagus, the old woman realized, a gilded coffin, similar to the sarcophagi the Egyptians once buried their kings and queens in, though the young woman’s face was rendered in a more realistic fashion, rather than in the Egyptian style. And her garments, too, were different. More Roman than Egyptian.
Before anyone could stop him, Sunduk reached in and removed the lid of the sarcophagus. Fatima shouted no, but her son had already done it. He scowled sheepishly, setting the lid carefully to one side.
There was no mummy inside. Inside was a girl made of stone.
She lay prone in the coffin, her knees slightly bent, her head craned back. Her mouth gaped, frozen in mid-scream, and she clutched her chest, as if her heart had broken and she died grasping it in pain. The sculptor, whoever he had been, had made no attempt to replicate hair, or any other fine detail. It was just a gray, lumpy, ugly statue of a young woman writhing in agony.
There was a hole in the chest of the artifact, its serrated edges curled outwards, as if her heart had burst out of her at the last.
No, Leonora thought. Not a statue. It was a casting of some sort. A crude plaster casting, like a death mask, only of the entire woman’s body. The old woman peered through the hole in the chest. The figure was hollow, like a porcelain doll.
She looked up at Paulo, was about to ask him who had made the artifact, or if the casting was of some historically significant figure, and that’s when she saw the horror in his eyes.
Not just horror. There was pain there, too. Pain, despair, love and guilt, all mixed together in his glinting blue eyes.
“Julia!” he cried.
Rome
In the summer months, his dominus, Albanus Laevinus, often vacationed at his country villa to escape the heat and stress of the city. Laevinus was by trade a slaver, but he also owned a large country estate, worked by nearly one hundred slaves.
Laevinus was rich, one of the richest citizens of the eternal city, but he was most famous for two things: his generosity to his friends and his cruelty to his slaves. If not for the lavish gifts he showered on his associates, the elite of Rome, he might have been censured for his brutality long ago. It was well known that he had his slaves beaten, killed them when they displeased him, raped them, tortured them, and dispatched them without mercy when they were too old or worn out to work anymore. Such practices were illegal, of course, but as Laevinus liked to say, “Nothing is illegal when you own a couple magistrates!”
The boy, Apollonius, was accustomed to Laevinus’s mercurial temperament. He had been Laevinus’s body servant for seven years.
He was not born a slave. His father, Crispis Paullus, was a wealthy merchant when Apollonius was a boy. His father owned and operated a large shipping company, but the man had been an inveterate satyr, and he had made the mistake of cuckolding a senator. Actually, Apollonius once heard that his father had seduced the man’s wife and his only daughter-- both in the same night! In retaliation, Domitianus Sacerdos, the aforementioned cuckold, had had his father assassinated, raped and killed his mother, and sold Apollonius and his two sisters into slavery.
Laevinus, who was an accomplice in the massacre, had kept Apollonius for himself. Apollonius was a beautiful young boy, slim and fair, with brilliant sapphire blue eyes, and Laevinus had a great affection for beautiful young boys, especially blonds. Domitianus had wanted the boy castrated and sent to service the legionaries in Judea, but knowing how cruel Laevinus was, knowing the fate that awaited the child in Laevinus’s employ, he was perfectly content letting his friend keep the lad.
When he came for Laevinus’s dinner feasts, of which there were many, Domitianus always made sure to torment the boy, the son of the man who had humiliated him so thoroughly. Curse him. Beat him. Taunt him with his family. Domitianus had raped Apollonius, too, on several occasions. The rapes had increased in frequency in last couple years, as Apollonius matured into a young man.
Apollonius was not sure who he hated the most-- his dominus, or the man who had engineered the downfall of his family. He knew only one thing: tonight, when Domitianus tried to rape him, as he most certainly would try, Apollonius was going to kill him.
He even knew what he was going to say to the man as he died.
“I, Apollonius Paullus, take your life with my blade, Domitianus, just as my father took your manhood with his cock!”
The words were as practiced as his fantasy of killing the man, only now, tonight, he had the method to see them both made real.
He knew that he would die after he struck his enemy down. He would be tortured, crucified—the standard punishment for a murderous slave-- but no torment was too high a price to see Domitianus’s face contorted with shock and horror, to watch the lifeblood spurt from his wounds, to watch the light fade from his eyes. His own life was not something he would mourn too much in losing, and watching Domitianus die by his blade would be the perfect denouement to a brief and miserable existence.
Two days ago, shortly after arriving at the Villa Claudianis (the house was named after the slave trader’s mother), Laevinus had dispatched Apollonius down the road to purchase some wine from a local wine seller. Laevinus’s cousin, who had visited that day, had raved about how good the seller’s wine was this year, and Laevinus wanted to taste it for himself.
Apollonius had trotted down the road, coins in hand, running the old fantasy of murdering Domitianus through his thoughts again and again. He had overhead his dominus talking of the dinner party he planned to throw in two days time. Laevinus was excited about some new entertainer he had hired for the occasion, a sword swallower from Athens, and had let slip that Domitianus would be among the revelers, along with a very special visitor, a physician from Thessaly named Gaius Vestallis, who was reputed to be a magician.
If the boy’s murderous fantasy had been a real object, it would be polished to a high sheen with all his handling of it, but it was all that gave his life meaning anymore. If not for his desire to kill Domitianus, Apollonius would have died in despair long ago.
Apollonius had purchased two pots of wine, as he had been instructed to do. While he waited for the old man to fetch the pots, he had spied a knife sitting on a nearby shelf. He wouldn’t dare steal a knife from his own household. Theft in the Villa Claudianis was always quickly discovered, and Laevinus would beat him for it, possibly even kill him, thinking Apollonius meant to betray him. He had paid the old man the two coins, and while the wine seller was turned away making change, Apollonius had snatched the unguarded weapon and secreted it in his tunic. He took the two pots of wine and returned to the villa, so excited his body wouldn’t stop trembling all day.
He had hidden the weapon beneath a loose stone in his quarters, and that night, after a couple of the older house slaves had taken their pleasure of him, he took the knife out and ran his fingers over the blade.
“I, Apollonius Paullus, take your life with my blade, Domitianus, just as my father took your manhood with his cock!”
He pictured Domitianus’s crude, ugly face moving from cruel lust to horror before sagging, finally, into despair. He pictured the man’s throat opening in a ghastly red grin, the blood coursing down his chest in great spurting freshets. Apollonius meant to cut the man’s throat, just as Domitianus had cut his mother’s throat.
The senator had made them all watch-- husband, son, daughters—as he raped her, then drew his dagger across her neck. His mother’s blood had fanned across the floor, leaping four, five feet from the severed arteries. He imagined Domitianus’s blood jumping out of him the same way, flying up into his face, hot and wet. The thought of his enemy’s blood squirting into his face was disturbingly sexual.
But where could he hide the weapon? The tunic the boy wore was too scanty to conceal the knife. And then he had realized where he was going to have to hide it, and the realization had a certain poetic symmetry. Justice, when it came for Domitianus, would issue from another Paullus cock!
The morning of the dinner feast, he arose early and used strips of cloth, which he had cut from the edge of his sheet, to secure the blade to the underside of his penis. Fortunately, he was very well endowed, and the blade of the knife extended only a couple inches past the tip of his foreskin. He practiced walking around his cell to make certain the blade wouldn’t fall free, and found himself growing aroused by the gentle tug of its weight. Later, as he attended to his duties, he felt it swinging there between his thighs, and it was all he could do to remain in a flaccid state. Imagine Laevinus’s shock if it should suddenly spring erect!
“What’s so funny?” Laevinus demanded, seeing the boy smile.
The boy rarely smiled. It made him suspicious.
Laevinus was a great fat man with porcine features and short cropped rusty red hair. He was reclining on the terrace, watching the slaves labor in the olive orchard below. They were all bald today, even the women, their skulls blistered by the late summer sun. Laevinus had ordered them shorn a few days ago, shortly after arriving at the villa. The hair would be sold to a wigmaker in Rome. It was a common practice at the Villa Claudianis.
“Apologies, dominus,” Apollonius said quickly. “It is a beautiful day.”
“It is hot and sticky and I hate it,” Laevinus snarled, dismissing the boy with a wave. After Apollonius scurried away, Laevinus lifted his cup and sniffed the wine the lad had poured for him, afraid the boy had poisoned it.
The guests began to arrive at midday, all the familiar and hated faces. Laevinus’s cousin, Faustus, a drunkard and fool. The publicanus Decimus Structus, who was a loud and demanding man. General Celsus Unimanus, his vain wife Drusa and her prancing hairdresser Remus. The patrician Caius Tudtanis. The disgraced philosopher Soranus, whose appetite for young boys had brought shame to his influential family.
Soranus’s arrival was a particularly unwelcome sight. The man was a pariah in Roman society, due to his proclivity for buggery, but he was always invited to Laevinus’s dinner parties, mainly because he was stupendously hilarious. Even Apollonius had to admit the man’s wit was without equal. He just had to stay out of the old toad’s reach. Soranus was a grabby bastard.
They all showed up several hours before the party was scheduled to commence, all but Domitianus, and the magician his dominus was so eager to meet.
The boy was afraid his enemy had canceled. It would not be without precedent. The senator was a very important man. But he overhead General Unimanus tell Laevinus that Domitianus would join them later that evening, along with the physician from Thessaly. Domitianus had been delayed but still planned to attend Laevinus’s party.
“That’s a relief, Celsus,” his dominus said. “I’ve heard wild tales about this physician. I want to see if they’re true.” He leaned toward the soldier and said in a conspiratorial tone, “They say he is a magician, and that he is able to divine the future!”
The general scoffed at that, but the thought worried Apollonius the rest of the afternoon. What if the Thessalonian was truly a magician? What if he should discern the boy’s intents?
Shortly after sundown, Domitianus arrived with his mysterious new companion, th
e physician from Thessaly. Apollonius, standing in the kitchen doorway, watched the two as they strode inside. Domitianus was a tall, rugged, stocky man, his once powerful physique gone slightly to fat, but the boy was especially struck by his hated enemy’s cohort.
The physician, Gaius Vestallis—at least, that’s who he assumed the man was—was obviously a foreigner. He was dressed in the Greek manner, in an unusual sort of heavily embroidered chiton and cloak. He had long, flowing brown hair, like a woman, and an unshaven face. He also had very smooth, pale flesh, as if he powdered his skin, and his eyes seemed to catch the light and glimmer when he chanced to look in Apollonius’s direction, like they were not eyes at all but glinting glass baubles.
He is most certainly a magician, Apollonius thought, and a little shiver passed through his body. When the physician from Thessaly glanced in his direction, he had the distinct impression that the man was peering into his soul.
What if he is? Apollonius suddenly thought, his stomach twisting into a knot. What if he sees your plan in your thoughts, exposes you before you can kill Domitianus?
He almost lost his nerve, almost retreated to his chamber and removed the dagger from his cock.
No! Be brave, Apollonius! he said to himself. Remember what he did to your father! Remember how he killed your mother!
He stood rooted to the spot as the latecomers passed, accompanied by one of the older house servants. Both men glanced at the boy as they passed. Domitianus sneered and squeezed his groin. The magician nodded his head very faintly and grinned, exposing a pair of especially long and sharp-looking eyeteeth.
Apollonius gaped at the physician, and the foreigner, unseen by his companion, raised a finger to his lips.
His master’s dinner party proceeded along the usual trajectory. The men gathered in the triclinium, lying recumbent on three wide couches placed in a U-shape around the table. Servants brought in course after course while Apollonius kept their cups full and a second slave boy named Blandus entertained them with the lute. The men got louder and more raucous as the evening wore on. They ate and drank until their stomachs could hold no more, then vomited into bowls so they could continue with their feast. Some of the men didn’t even bother to vomit into the bowls. They simply craned their heads forward and puked onto the floor.
Apollonius (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga) Page 2
