Januarius, the eldest of the house servants, had the repugnant duty of mopping up the stinking vomitus. Just for laughs, Soranus vomited onto Januarius, too. He called for another slave to come clean the vomit off the vomit collector, and the men roared with laughter.
All but the magician.
The foreigner had feasted like the others, though he seemed to make use of the vomit bowls a little more often than the rest. He also seemed quite unaffected by the wine that he had drunk. He spoke little, and he watched the other revelers intensely, as if he were sizing them up. When Apollonius’s dominus questioned the man about the rumors he had heard, Gaius Vestallis claimed the gossip was untrue.
“Alas, I am but a simple physician from Thessaly,” he said. “Those rumors, I would hazard to guess, originated with my colleagues. There is no better way to promote your own interests than to slander the reputation of your rivals.”
“Too true!” Laevinus laughed, but he seemed disappointed.
Laevinus called for the sword swallower, who entertained the diners with his uncommon skill, tipping back his head and gliding one long blade after another down his gullet. He was a handsome young man and practiced his talent in the nude. “So there is no suspicion of trickery,” he explained-- a disingenuous claim, Apollonius suspected. Decimus, the tax collector, asked the lad how much it would cost to have the performer swallow his cock in like manner. The men roared with laughter again, but the sword swallower quoted a price, and Decimus escorted the lad from the chamber, to much laughter and good natured catcalls.
General Unimanus entertained the group with stories about Nero’s excesses. The old soldier had attended a great many of the emperor’s infamous feasts. He told how Nero had burned Christians at the stake to illuminate his gardens. He told them of the emperor’s orgies, and of his fabled revolving dining room.
“The dining rooms had ceilings of fretted ivory,” he said, “and these panels would slide back and let fall a magnificent rain of flower petals onto his guests! At other times, the Emperor dressed himself in the skin of an animal. He would lock himself in a cage in which the most beautiful men and women were tethered to posts, and then he would ravage them in turn, roaring like a beast. It was all quite entertaining, though his poetry recitals could sometimes feel interminable.”
Talk of Nero’s debauchery aroused Laevinus’s guests further. It wasn’t long before the men were grabbing at the serving girls. The slave girls struggled a little for show—just enough to excite their assailants—but they knew better than to frustrate the drunken men, and submitted with practiced distress to their lust.
Unimanus’s wife retired in disgust.
“Brutes!” she sniffed, swishing from the chamber.
Laevinus called for more wine, waving his cup in the air. Domitianus, reclining beside Laevinus, raised his cup too, leering at the boy.
“Yes, more wine!” Domitianus bawled.
Now comes the moment to claim your just revenge, Apollonius thought.
Several times throughout the evening Domitianus had exposed himself to the lad, lifting up the hem of his tunic to flash his cock and balls. His intent was not to entice the boy. He meant to frighten him with the prospect of rape, but Apollonius wanted Domitianus to try it. He wanted his enemy to seize him, wanted the senator to pull him close. As the night wore on and he did not make his play, Apollonius had grown more and more impatient. He had decided he would slosh some wine upon the man, and when he yanked the slave boy near, meaning to punish him for his clumsiness, Apollonius would draw his dagger from beneath his tunic and give the man a bloody cunt right beneath his chin.
He moved forward, raising the wine pitcher. In his mind, he brought the words, long practiced, to his lips: “I, Apollonius Paullus, take your life with my blade, Domitianus, just as my father took your manhood with his cock!”
Before he could carry out his plan, a pair of cold and powerful hands seized him from behind. He yelped as the strange man from Thessaly bore him onto his lap. He struggled for a moment, trying to wriggle from the foreigner’s embrace, then froze as one of those icy hands slipped beneath his tunic.
“Abandon your plot,” the magician whispered in his ear, fumbling with the boy’s cock. He disarmed Apollonius. An instant later, the weapon was concealed in his clothing. “Abide with me, and I will help you to have your revenge,” he hissed.
Apollonius nodded, and the tall foreigner rose with a triumphant shout, bearing the boy aloft. “Oho! Look what tender peach just fell into my lap! I might be wrong, but I think the boy likes me, Laevinus. With your leave, I would make use of your houseboy. It will only take a moment.”
Apollonius’s dominus nodded his assent, but he did not look happy about it. After the physician had dismissed the rumors about him, Laevinus had lost interest in the man, seemed more annoyed by him than anything else.
The foreigner strode from the triclinium with the boy.
The strange man was immensely strong, and his flesh was as cold as ice. He carried the lad into the passageway, found his way into an unused bedroom.
Putting the boy down on the bed, Gaius Vestallis retrieved the dagger from his cloak. “Who were you planning to murder with this blade?” he asked. “Your dominus? Or my friend Domitianus?” His pale flesh was strangely luminous in the dark, his eyes too bright in the gloom.
“Domitianus,” Apollonius whispered. His throat tried to squeeze shut when he spoke, he was so frightened.
“I would ask you why, but I am sure you have your reasons. I plan to kill the man myself. Tonight. Him and all of his associates.”
He seemed amused.
Apollonius gaped. “All of them? Even Laevinus?”
“Even your master.”
Apollonius frowned. Leaning toward the stranger, he asked, “Who are you, truly?”
“I am the enemy of all who mistreat their slaves,” the foreigner answered, his eyes darkening. “Bad enough that one man should own another, but to abuse them, rape them, murder them with impunity! That I cannot abide! These Roman scum are repellent to me, and I intend to send them to hell.”
“How did you know what I was planning to do?” Apollonius asked.
“I will let you in on a little secret, if you promise to keep it to yourself.”
The boy nodded.
“You can never tell a soul!”
Again, the boy nodded.
“I am a magician,” the foreigner said, and then he grinned broadly, showing his fangs in full. They were long and curved and wolf-like. Apollonius nearly wet himself at the sight of them, had to squeeze his thighs together to keep his bladder from spilling.
“Would you like to come with me tonight, after I have sent your master and his associates to their right reward?”
“Where?”
“I own a lovely villa in Pompeii. I haven’t lived there in several years, but it is a beautiful house, and Pompeii is a very exciting city to live in. I will not be able to stay in Rome, not after tonight. Too many people have seen me in the company of Domitianus.”
“Why do you want me to go with you?” Apollonius asked, thinking the magician wanted him for sex. It was always about sex with the grown ups of his world. Money, sex, or domination. Even the older slave men preyed upon the younger.
The magician’s face softened for an instant. “You remind me of my son,” he said. The expression of kindness faded quickly away, like water spilt onto the sunbaked earth. What remained was almost too frightening to look at. “I will allow you to have your revenge on Domitianus. Only wait here until I come to fetch you. Will you do that?”
Apollonius nodded, and the magician turned and stalked away. His cloak snapped as he vanished into the corridor.
Apollonius slid down from the bed and crouched beside the doorway. He listened in the dark as the magician returned to the triclinium. He heard the magician say something about the boy needing to rest after the fucking he had given him, and the others laughed. And then the strange man, the magician, yell
ed, “More wine!”
He waited for what felt like hours. The debauch in the dining room finally began to wind down. At last, in the still hours of the morning, as the twittering of birds began to drift in through the shutters, he heard a sharp cry. A dish broke with a crash, and then there came another despairing howl. A squawk. A curse. Someone ran, bare fleet slapping on the tiled floor of the corridor, and then a resounding thud, and a terrible slurping sound, just a short distance away.
The slurping sound faded.
“What is your name, boy?” the magician asked, on the other side of the wall.
“Apollonius,” the boy answered. “Apollonius Paullus.”
“Come, Apollonius. Your vengeance awaits.”
The boy rose and stepped into the corridor. Soranus lay in the passage, his corpulent flesh bled white as bleached bone. His eyes, bulging in terror, stared lifelessly at the ceiling.
“He was a rapist and murderer of children,” the magician said, putting a hand on Apollonius’s shoulder. The magician’s lower face was smeared with some dark fluid. Apollonius couldn’t tell what it was in the shadows, but the smell of blood was overpowering.
He led the boy down the corridor to the triclinium. The dining room looked as if a titan had lifted the room and rattled it. The table was overturned, the couches knocked askew. Blood and wine and vomit were strewn across the walls and puddled on the floor. Broken dishes. Sprawling bodies. Laevinus leaned against the wall, throat torn out, hands lying limp in his lap. General Unimanus was prone on one of the couches, arms thrown out to his sides, neck broken. Remus, the hairdresser, who liked to pinch, lay face down in a pool of his own blood. They were all dead, all but Domitianus, who was huddled in the corner of the room.
The magician placed the knife in his hand.
“I will do it if you cannot,” he said gently.
Apollonius thought of his mother. Saw her crying as Domitianus raped her. Saw her blood jet across the floor.
“I can do it,” he said.
Domitianus rolled over as Apollonius approached, eyes wide, arms strangely limp. His legs were twisted unnaturally. The magician had broken the man’s limbs, had rendered his enemy helpless.
“No, don’t do it, boy!” the senator pleaded, tears welling up in his eyes. Domitianus tried to scramble away but his arms and legs just flopped. A foul smell rose from his thighs. He had shit himself, Apollonius realized.
The boy smiled. “I, Apollonius Paullus, take your life with my blade, Domitianus,” he said, “just as my father took your manhood with his cock!” Then he gripped the man’s curly gray hair and bent his head back. Domitianus screamed until the boy sawed through his larynx.
Apollonius released his head and Domitianus slumped back, twitching at his feet. He looked down at the man, watched the life fade from his eyes.
It wasn’t enough.
He hiked up the front of his tunic. “Drink Paullus piss, cuckold,” Apollonius snarled. He pissed into the senator’s gaping mouth until the frothy fluid overflowed and coursed across his face.
He turned to see the house slaves cowering in the doorway. The magician saw them to. “I have killed your dominus,” he addressed them, one hand on Apollonius’s shoulder. “Run, if you yearn to be free. I wish I could take you all with me, but I cannot. If you are too afraid to run, then stay, and tell the magistrates that it was I, the magician Gaius Vestallis of Thessaly, who sent these Roman pigs to Hades!”
And then he lifted the boy into his arms and flew from the Villa Claudianis.
Uiam
His new master was a powerful magician.
He was strong, as strong as fabled Hercules. He removed the slave collar from Apollonius’s neck, bending the metal with his bare hands like it was made of papyrus. And he could fly. As they sped away from the Villa Claudianis, the boy in his arms, the magician took to the air in great bounds, like the god Mercury. At first, Apollonius was frightened, and he clung to the magician’s neck with panicky tightness, but after awhile the fear melted and he began to enjoy his flight through the sky. The wind whistling in his ears and blowing across his cheeks. The sight of the world dropping away beneath them, then swelling again as they descended.
They flew, and as they flew the magician talked to him. His savior said that he could see in the darkness like it was day, and he was old. Very, very old. He was born in a time when there was no Rome, he said, when there was no Egypt, and no Babylonia. He was born in a time when men had no written word, when they dressed in the skins of animals and worshipped strange gods in dirty caves.
He could not die, he claimed, but like all living creatures he had to eat. Unlike men, who fed on the flesh of beasts, the grain of the fields and the fruit of the vine, he subsisted on blood. He could, the magician said, live on the blood of animals, but he preferred to drink the blood of men—but only wicked men! Murderers. Slavers.
He was what the Romans called a strix, or a striga. He had been a mortal man once, he told the boy, with two wives and a hut full of squabbling children, but a foul creature had taken him hostage and cursed him with eternal life. His captor meant to make a slave of him, but he had destroyed the old monster and escaped.
The parallels to his own life did not escape Apollonius, but the boy did not comment. He didn’t want to interrupt his new master, who had a gentle and resonant voice.
They flew until the sun peeked over the hills, and then his master stopped and procured a room for them at an inn.
“I must sleep during the day,” he explained as they washed up in their room. “The light of the sun is painful to my eyes. They are very sensitive.”
Apollonius looked to the shutters. Wan light gleamed between the wooden blades.
“When I sleep, I will appear to be dead,” the magician went on, taking off his cloak and chiton. He ran a sponge over his strange flesh, cleaning all the blood and filth and vomit off of himself. His flesh had the look of marble, white and slightly luminescent, but it was soft and pliant, like mortal skin. “Do not be alarmed by this, for it is just an aspect of my curse. I will awaken the moment the sun touches the earth in the west. If you require my assistance, you need only shout my name, my true name, which is Gon, and I will awaken and fly to your aid. But only call upon me if you truly need me. If you are in danger.”
Apollonius nodded.
He was afraid the magician would want to have sex with him, but he did not. He lay down naked upon the bed and pulled the covers over himself. A moment after he closed his eyes, he went very still. Apollonius watched him closely, but did not see the tall man so much as quiver in repose. His chest did not rise and fall. His eyes did not twitch beneath their lids. He did appear, to all intents and purposes, to be a dead man.
“Gon?” Apollonius whispered, frightened by the illusion.
The magician cracked open one eye. “I said only if you truly need me.”
Apollonius smiled, relieved, and the magician’s eye closed again.
Exhausted, Apollonius bathed himself and slipped into the bed beside the magician. He jumped a little at the coldness of the magician’s flesh, but it was summer and the room was hot. After a while he found the man’s cool flesh quite pleasant. He slept and dreamed about killing Domitianus and awoke to find the magician dressed in fine new clothes. He had purchased new garments for Apollonius as well. An embroidered tunic. A boy’s toga, which only free citizens of Rome were allowed to wear.
“I own a large villa in Pompeii,” the magician said. “I am known as Germanis Vulso there, a dealer in rare antiquities. You will be my son Paulo. You must abandon the name your father gave you. You may call me Gon in private-- and I will call you Apollonius, if you wish-- but in public you must call me father, or Germanis, and I will address you as Paulo. Do you understand?”
Apollonius nodded.
“Good. Now get dressed. We’ll go down to the dining hall and buy you something to eat, and then we must continue on. I’d like to arrive in Pompeii by daybreak.”
T
he boy had slept all through the day, exhausted from the previous night, so Apollonius remained awake through most of their journey to Pompeii. He dozed off once as he sailed through the sky in the magician’s arms, secure in the knowledge that his new master would allow him to come to no harm. He woke a short time later, just before daybreak.
The world that greeted his eyes was a wholly unfamiliar one. They stood in the center of a winding, dusty road crowded by low trees. In the distance, like a great blue pyramid, Mount Vesuvias rose to stroke the heavens. At her feet, tiny with distance, dozed a city that could only be Pompeii. The sky was a royal purple, the clouds salmon pink in the east.
“Why have we stopped?” he asked the magician.
“There was a thief hiding beside the road,” the man answered. “I am hungry.”
“Oh,” Apollonius gulped. He glanced back over the magician’s shoulder.
“Wait here,” the magician said, and placed him on the ground. “I will return shortly.”
Apollonius watched the magician spring into the air, mouth agape, and then sat down in the grassy verge to wait as he was told. He worried over the thought that his new master might abandon him. What would he do then? Where would he go? But he dismissed the worry quickly. Gon would not abandon him. Monster or not, his new master had an honorable soul. And if he did, what of it? Apollonius could make his way in the world. He had survived seven years in cruel Laevinus’s employ. He had killed a senator of Imperial Rome!
After a short while, he imagined he heard a despairing wail. The cry died quickly, and then his master fell out of the sky, cloak flapping like a banner in a high wind.
The magician landed in a crouch beside the boy, a cloud of dust expanding around him in a swirling ring. His cape settled as he rose. “Are you ready to continue?” he asked.
Apollonius (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga) Page 3
