“All right,” the boy said shakily. “I will try.”
He closed his eyes and breathed slowly through his nostrils. After awhile, the tension in his neck and shoulders waned. He sighed. “That is better. For a moment it felt like I was drowning, with nothing to hold onto.”
“You do not need to breathe, you know,” the magician said.
“What?”
“You must take breath to speak, and to maintain the illusion that you are a mortal man. But you do not require it to live as mortal men and women require it. You will not die from lack of air, as they do. You have seen me when I sleep. Does my chest rise and fall with breath?”
“No.”
Apollonius took a lungful of air then, holding his breath like a tantrumming child. He stood there for a long time, cheeks puffed comically out. At last he released the breath. He seemed very disturbed. “I do not like it,” he confessed. “It frightens me a little.”
His master chuckled. “You will get used to it. In fact, I believe it is one of the more difficult things to adjust to. You are like a god now, Paulo. You have the strength of Hercules. The speed of Mercury. The hunting prowess of Diana, and the wisdom of Minerva. And yet you were only recently a mortal man, and so you have the thoughts and instincts of a mortal man. It will take a long time for you to shed those mental limitations. To fly without fear of falling. To move quickly without smashing into every obstacle in your path. To still your racing thoughts, and find the peaceful center of your spirit. It is like a serpent shedding its skin. It will not come off all at once, like a dirty tunic, ready for the fuller’s vats. You must peel it away in degrees, and not without great effort.”
Apollonius nodded, absorbing his master’s words like an eager student. Gon was his tutor now, wise beyond measure. The magician had once claimed that he was older than Egypt, older even than fabled Ur. If that were true—and Apollonius had no reason to doubt him—then such wisdom was priceless. Apollonius would have all of it, if the magician was willing to impart it to him.
“There’s a stream down below. You can wash the filth from your body there,” his master said. “I’m afraid your garments are ruined, though. You will have to borrow my toga after you’ve cleaned yourself. And then we can hunt, if you are hungry. Perhaps the fools who tried to kill you...?”
“Junius?” Apollonius said. And then he smiled wickedly. “Yes! He is an evildoer, isn’t he, father? He tried to kill an insolent boy, and for what? A bit of drunken sass? Yes, he deserves to die!”
But in truth, he wanted to kill Junius Sissena because he had given himself to the man, and because the man had been a senator, like Domitianus. He had shamed himself on the man’s cock, and so he wanted to erase him from the world, hoping it would erase his humiliation, too.
It was a tricky thing to race across the red tiled roofs of Pompeii. After they returned to the city, the magician leapt to the roofs and bid Apollonius follow. Twice a tile slipped loose beneath his bare feet and he nearly plunged to the ground below, once into the atrium of someone’s private dwelling. Wouldn’t that have been a shock!
The magician grasped his arm and lifted him to more stable footing.
“Your body is much lighter now that you are an immortal,” he said. “But you are stomping around like a living man. Try to move more softly across the tiles, and then you might not cause them to break loose beneath your feet.”
Apollonius thought lightly as he followed after his master. I am a cloud, he mused, running on the tips of his toes. I am a flower petal. I am a moth.
It actually seemed to help.
They did not find Junius that first night. Of course not. Pompeii was a big town, and the boy did not know where the satyr lived. He had met the man in the baths once, and hadn’t seen the senator since. Not until the man accosted him in the street. They did, however, come across a brutal looking sailor raping a child in an alley. The child, a little beggar girl, was naked, bleeding. He had beaten her, ripped her meager clothes off and was thrusting into her violently in the alley next to a baker’s shop, taking her in the Greek manner.
Moving as one, master and acolyte dropped into the alley behind him. They yanked him from the whimpering child and shoved him against the crumbling wall. He had a dagger, but Gon snatched it from his hand as soon as he drew it from his sheath, then used it cut open his throat.
“Drink,” he said to Apollonius, holding the jerking man against the wall, and Apollonius obeyed.
The sailor’s blood spurted into his open mouth, coppery and hot. Orgasmic pleasure stuttered through his entire body at the taste of it. It was as if Jupiter had struck the boy with a bolt of lightning. It was like the penultimate moment before climax, only magnified three, four, five-fold. He drank, amazed how much blood was in the man, and how much his belly could contain.
Finally, stomach sloshing, he stumbled away, and the magician leaned in to have his fill, too.
He saw the girl huddled on the filthy floor of the alley, and the question scurried rat-like through his thoughts: What would her blood taste like? Would it be as rich, as salty, as her assailant’s?
“No,” Gon said, as if he had read the boy’s thoughts. Licking his lips, he let the dead sailor slide down the wall and stepped between Apollonois and the beggar girl. He stared the boy down, then turned and lifted the little girl into his arms. She was limp as a rag. Her inner thighs and bottom were smeared with drying blood. “She is badly injured,” the magician said tersely. “Let us bring her back to the villa and summon a physician.”
“Can’t you heal her injuries with the blood, as you healed me?” Apollonius asked.
The magician swept from the alley, keeping to the ground, and the boy fell into step behind him.
“I do not think so,” his master said. “Her injuries are internal, and quite grave. If I gave her enough of the blood to heal her, she could very well become a striga like us. There is always the chance, when you heal a mortal’s injuries with the blood, that it will quicken in them, transform them into a blood drinker. And the more blood you must give them, the more likely they’ll become a striga. Or something else. A degenerate creature, more dead than alive. We call them ghouls. They are without reason, ravening beasts, like mad dogs.”
The thought chilled the boy. His master had spoken of other striga, but he had never mentioned degenerate ones. He had never spoken of ghouls.
“Will they attack us, these ghouls, if we chance to come across them?”
“Oh, yes. Us especially. Our two kinds have an instinctive hatred for one another.”
They hurried through the streets, dawn’s golden light spilling over the walls into the city like honey into a bowl. A few dim lanterns glowed in the arched windows of some of the buildings. The city was rousing. Already, a few of Pompeii’s residents were stumbling to their jobs, venturing out into the dark streets with bleary eyes and mussed up hair. No one they passed paid any attention to the two of them, however. It was still too early, and they kept to the side streets.
“What of the man we fed from?” Apollonius whispered. “Do we just leave him back there in the alley?”
“Here in Pompeii, there are always murdered men lying in the alleys,” Gon said. “It is one of the reasons Pompeii is such a wonderful home for a striga. But to answer your question, yes, we are safe to leave him in the alley. You should dispose of the bodies if you bite them, or heal their wounds with a drop of the living blood before you leave them, but I cut that one’s throat. No one will bat an eye.”
They passed the baths and Apollonius scowled, thinking of Junius Sissero.
How he would love to drink the senator’s blood! Bleed him dry and leave him lying in a gutter. Perhaps do even more terrible things to him. Make him suffer before he died, as his mother had suffered.
He recognized the cruelty of his own thoughts and felt ashamed. If his master knew the character of his imaginings, he would be mortified.
And yet, that was what he wanted.
They
came to the Villa Eyya. His master hammered on the door. After a moment, the new porter opened it, his eyes still crusty with sleep. He was a huge Nubian named Enuk. They had chanced across him at a slave auction, tall, proud, his black flesh crisscrossed with scars. The magician had purchased him, freed him, had his name entered in the city register as a libertini. He was the porter of the house now, and proud of his position and freedom.
“Master Germanis!” he said with some surprise, nostrils flaring. He saw the girl in his arms and looked even more surprised.
“Summon the physician, the old one named Acidinus. You know where he lives, correct? Rouse him from his bed and bring him here immediately.”
The porter nodded and loped away.
His master carried the girl into the villa, took her to his sitting room. He placed her gently on the couch. “Paulo, fetch me some rags and a basin of water so I can wash her,” he said. “And some sheets to cover her with. The poor thing is shivering.”
Apollonius hurried away.
When the boy returned, his master was brushing her stringy brown hair from her face. The girl’s eyes cracked open just a little, and she looked at him.
“What is your name, child?” Gon asked tenderly.
The girl opened her mouth. Apollonius thought she was going to answer, but she sighed, and then the life went out of her. Her arm went lax and tumbled away from her chest. A rain of tiny flower petals drifted to the floor.
“She must have been a flower seller,” his master said, looking down at the crumpled petals. “I gave her a little of the living blood. Just a drop or two. I didn’t want to transform her. It is very difficult for a child to be made a striga. They cannot defend themselves from other blood drinkers, you see. I was hoping it would be enough, but…”
He lifted her hand and kissed it. There were still a few bruised petals clinging to her flesh. He placed her hands upon her chest, then took the sheet from Apollonius and spread it over her body, head to toe.
Walking from the room, he called back, “Make sure you pay Acidinus when he arrives, and offer him some breakfast. There’s nothing he can do for her now, but we still roused him from his bed. It is the proper thing to do.”
“Yes, father,” Apollonius murmured, and then he turned back to the dead girl and sat beside her. He wiped his cheeks. His tears were streaked with blood.
Romulus et Remus
They were Romulus and Remus, and Pompeii was the she-wolf from which they suckled, their milk the blood of the brutal men who swarmed like fleas in her alleys and backstreets.
The murder of the beggar girl had a terrible effect on the magician. He hunted every night for weeks, scouring the city for evildoers, and dispatching them in the most violent of fashions. His cruelty was shocking to the boy, who until then had only known his new master to be a generous and soft-spoken man. Yes, he killed. He killed the wicked and depraved, the rapist and the murderer, but always before he had done it in an pragmatic manner, sending them to the underworld quickly, and with as little cruelty as possible.
Now he tormented them. He terrorized them, and he drew out their suffering as long as it was possible. Apollonius had considered himself the pitiless one—tainted by his years of brutal servitude to Laevinus—but the magician’s sadism was shocking, even to him.
Take Junius Sissero, for example. They found him on the fifth night following the boy’s transformation. The man was with his friend Camillus, again, and they were drunk, again, and having their way with a young slave boy in one of the forum’s latrines. The boy couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven years old, but they were having at him like he was a seasoned prostitute. He was begging them to finish it, blood running down the insides of his thighs, tears running down the contorted planes of his face. Gon tore out Camillus’s throat with his fingers, then blinded Junius by jamming his thumbs into his eye sockets. It was dark, the forum sparsely occupied, most of the shops and booths closed down for the day. Nevertheless, Gon clamped a hand over Junius’s mouth, holding him in his iron-like grip, so that he could not scream and attract any witnesses.
“Feed from Camillus,” the magician said to him, dodging the blind man’s wildly swinging limbs. “Junius here shall live, though he might wish otherwise when I am finished with him.”
Apollonius fed from Camillus as the slave boy huddled against the wall, too terrified to look at them, arms crossed over his trembling head. Apollonius got down on his hands and knees and sucked the blood still dribbling from the man’s ragged throat. It was distasteful to him, feeding in such a wretched place, but he was hungry. When he had drunk his fill, he rose, wiping his lips with the back of his hand. He turned to address his maker, wondering what the magician planned to do with the senator.
He didn’t have to wonder long.
“Finished?” Gon asked, grinning cruelly.
Apollonius nodded.
Gon glared down at Junius. The blind man’s nostrils flared as the wind blew in and out of them.
“You will not force yourself upon any more children, Junius Sissero,” he said, and then with his free hand he grasped the man’s cock and balls, flaccid little organs that they were, and tore them from between his thighs.
Junius screamed, the sound muffled by the striga’s palm. The man’s face turned beet red and his sandals slithered to and fro on the bloody concrete floor.
“I should make you devour your own diseased prick, but I will show you some small measure of compassion tonight,” Gon said, and then he flicked his hand and cast the senator’s organs into the pit. The bloody flesh splashed into the trough below and was swept away to the sea.
He released the man, who collapsed at their feet, wheezing and fumbling between his thighs for anatomy that no longer resided there. Apollonius felt sorry for the senator, writhing on the floor of the latrine, blind, castrated, begging his attackers to put him out of his misery.
Gon lifted the slave boy into his arms and said, “Come, Paulo. Don’t waste your pity on the likes of those two. There are others far more deserving of your sympathy.”
Even the earth seemed to echo the magician’s wrath. Twice in one week the ground shook violently, frightening the citizens of Pompeii. Tiles fell from the roofs of the buildings, killing one man and injuring several others. Statues fell and sidewalks cracked. The basilica of a prominent aedile collapsed when several of its columns shook free and toppled over into the street. Fortunately it was a holiday and no one was inside the building at the time.
The tremors were fierce but brief, and the people of Pompeii, long used to their city’s perpetual quiverings, went on with their lives as if little of import had happened. A joke made the rounds that Venus, the patron of Pompeii, had caught her husband Vulcan cheating with the harlots down at the House of Psyche.
The magician had the beggar girl interred in the necropolis in a beautiful white sarcophagus. He seemed ashamed of his sentimentality, of the lavish expense of it, but he did it all the same. He also purchased the slave boy who had been raped in the latrine by Junius. He bought the boy from the city (he was a city slave assigned to clean the public latrines) and employed him in their household.
After freeing him, of course.
“You cannot save everyone, you know,” Apollonius said to the magician one evening. “We already have too many servants.”
Gon, sitting at his desk writing in his journal, smiled guilty at the boy. He put aside his quill, clasped his hands together, index fingers touching his chin. “I know, Paulo.”
“We will have to build an addition to the villa just to house them all.”
“You are probably right,” he laughed. He looked at the sky through the compluvium, the rectangular opening of the atrium roof. It was a starry, cloudless night. “I think we’ll have young Aetius tutored. He is a clever boy. When he’s old enough, we’ll send him to the academy. I’m certain he’ll do well for himself with a proper education.”
“You have it all planned out,” Apollonius said.
/> “I have nothing but time,” his master replied. He looked at the boy, serious now. “As do you, Paulo. The blood has made you a powerful immortal. You will live for millennia. Perhaps, like me, forever. I cannot be certain that you are an Eternal. It is too close to tell. But you are strong. You need not fear death. Not for a very, very long time. You should ponder what you’ll do with a life as long as that.”
“I shall do as you do, father,” the boy said. “I shall give succor to the innocent, and feed upon the wicked. Is there anything better to do with these powers?”
The magician smiled proudly. “No, Paulo. There is nothing better than that.”
The next day, they heard that Junius Sissero had killed himself. Blind, mutilated, the man had thrown himself upon his sword, an honorable death for an dishonorable man. They heard this from Herminia, the cook, who’d heard it at the market that morning.
The news displeased Apollonius, who was sorry the man’s suffering had come to an end. Gon seemed shaken by the gossip, and he retreated to his chambers with a grim look upon his face.
Apollonius sought him out.
“You feel guilty,” the boy said, shutting the magician’s chamber door. “Why?”
“Because I was self-indulgent,” his master answered, lying in his bed. “I felt anger and disgust for the man, so I made him suffer. But Paulo, do not think that men come to wickedness of their own choosing. Not always. Evil is a sickness. Most men cannot help that they are wicked. It is a condition they’ve contracted, like the pox. Look within your own heart, Paulo. There is viciousness there. I see it in you from time to time. In your eyes. In your actions. But that bloodlust is not of your own making. And it is not something you were born with, like your blue eyes or your curly blond hair. You contracted it from Laevinus, like a sickness. You were infected by Domitianus, and all the rest who treated you so brutally.”
“Perhaps,” Apollonius responded. “But I choose not to act on my darker impulses. Most people do.”
Apollonius (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga) Page 6
