But his daughter, Julia, was infinitely more appealing.
She was beautiful, smart, refined and opinionated. Unlike most patrician women, she did not seem pretentious or spoiled by her advantages. Perhaps she might have been if the circumstances of her life had been different, if bad luck did not shadow her family’s every step. The deaths of her nearest and dearest, however, had given her an appreciation for what was truly important in life. “Which are, in my opinion, love, honor and justice,” the young woman said, reclining on the couch beside her father. She smiled, not the least bit self-conscious, and popped a grape into her mouth.
She had, Apollonius thought, the most finely shaped lips he had ever seen.
She was short and voluptuous, with curly light brown hair that she had pinned up with jeweled hairclips for the dinner party. When she glanced toward Apollonius, her eyes—pale blue like her father’s—twinkled as if some interior comment had secretly amused her. She wore a dress of the same pale blue color, the color of the sky in late October, cloudless and deep.
“It often seems that tragedy calls upon those least deserving of its visit,” his master said, and Apollonius nodded grimly. He thought of his mother, dying upon Domitianus’s cock. His mother, who was only ever kind to everyone around her.
“I sometimes think the gods are cruelly amused by our suffering,” Apollonius said. “As if our lives are theater to them, our torments their entertainment.”
“Like the games,” Julia said. “If I believed the gods were real, I would say this world is their coliseum, and we are mere beasts to be slaughtered for their amusement.”
“Julia!” her father cried. “You’ll offend our hosts!”
“I apologize if I’ve offended either of you,” she said, looking dutifully ashamed. “My father is overly indulgent of me. I’m afraid I’ve developed a tendency to speak my own mind.”
“Don’t apologize!” Apollonius said quickly, as the magician opened his mouth to speak. “I believe the same way!”
Encouraged by the lad, the senator’s daughter said, “I find it strange that people will believe in beings they cannot see or touch or sense in any way. That they devote their entire lives to them. Make sacrifice to them while their own children go hungry. And yet, where are these gods when we pray to them? When we plead, tears coursing down our cheeks, for their assistance? When has Jupiter ever answered your prayers? I know he has never answered mine. Not when my mother was dying. And not when my brothers were sent away to Judea.”
“Julia…” Cornelius warned, but he was gentle about it.
“Oh, now I know I’ve been ill-mannered. I’ll give us all indigestion! Let us talk of lighter things. Will you be attending the Vulcanalia this year?”
Apollonius could not believe she had spoken so frankly, or so insightfully. It was as if she had given voice to his own thoughts. He did not know for certain whether he believed in the gods, but he found the evidence for their existence scant and not very convincing.
He was also terribly attracted to her. She was, he believed, the most beautiful young woman he had ever seen. She was not beautiful in the traditional sense of the word. She was a bit too plump, a bit too freckled for that, but he couldn’t stop gawping at her throughout the entire meal. He liked the way she looked at things, her gaze sharp and measuring and always somewhat amused, as if she found everything just slightly preposterous.
I have already fallen a little bit in love with her, he thought, and he felt a jolt in his belly, as if a tiny thunderbolt had zigzagged through his innards.
“You should give your eyes a rest and eat, Paulo. You’ve barely touched your food all night,” Julia said to him suddenly, interrupting the conversation of their elders. “It’s no wonder you’re as thin as a rail.”
Her father looked from Julia to her admirer, and then roared laughter.
“Do you like heavy boys?” Apollonius asked, emboldened by her teasing. “If you do, I shall eat this entire course!”
Julia looked somewhat surprised, then blushed a little. “No. Actually, I like skinny boys.”
Grinning at her, Apollonius took the morsel he’d been chewing from his mouth and placed it on the table.
“I spoke in jest when I suggested we play matchmaker,” Cornelius said to the magician. “Now I think we needn’t bother.”
“Yes,” the magician said amiably, but he glanced at the boy when he said it, and his eyes were not so agreeable. In fact, he looked quite disconcerted. What do you think you’re doing? those glinting gold eyes demanded, and Apollonius, remembering what the magician had told him when he made him an immortal, had no answer for him.
Later, after Cornelius and his daughter had departed, thanking them for a wonderful evening, the magician gave voice to that unspoken question: “What do you think you’re playing at, son?”
Apollonius didn’t bother to prevaricate. “I don’t know.”
“I told you before I gave you the living blood what you would have to—what you must—give up for it!”
“I know.”
“You are not a mortal man anymore.”
“I know.”
“You cannot give her children. You cannot lie with her without the risk of losing control and killing her, or turning her into a lamia.”
“I know.”
The magician stared at the boy for a moment, disarmed by his lack of hostility. Finally, he sighed. “We have both been overly friendly with them,” the magician said. “I’m no less complicit. They’re a terribly charming pair, but they’re also very clever and observant. Already her father senses there is something strange about us. I noted tonight how closely he looks at me. I think he has noticed the unusual texture of my skin. He knows we are not albinos. He just doesn’t know what we really are.”
“Is there truly no way to undo this condition?” Apollonius asked.
Gon cocked his head to one side, sympathetic. “No. I’m sorry, Apollonius. I told you the truth before I gave you the blood. The curse cannot be undone. Cornelius and his daughter will age and they will pass away and they will turn to dust in their graves, and we will be exactly as we are now.”
“I never thought of it as a curse before,” Apollonius confessed. “You tried to warn me, but I didn’t see it that way. I was so afraid of dying I never stopped to think what it would be to live forever.” He looked into his maker’s eyes. “I know now,” he said, and then he trudged away.
Tempio di Venere
Like his true father, Crispis Paullus, the magician was not very good at following his own advice. Apollonius’s master had decreed that they should put some distance between themselves and their charming new neighbors. “The temptation to harm them, or bring them into our world, would be too great,” he said, and Apollonius agreed. But it was not a week later that Apollonius rose to find the retired senator at supper with the magician, eating a light meal of shellfish and soup, their faces flush with wine.
Well, in truth, only Cornelius’s face was flush. The magician was drinking with him, but intoxicating liquids have very little effect on striga. Sometimes, when Apollonius fed upon drunken criminals, he felt a momentary dizziness, but it passed quickly, no matter how stinking drunk his victim was.
His master’s embarrassment was quite naked to the boy when he stumbled upon the scene. Apollonius could not help but laugh, and the magician made a subtle shrugging gesture, smiling faintly over his cup.
So much for discretion, Apollonius thought.
The magician’s lack of self-control gave the boy license to seek out Julia.
Julia had moved into her father’s new villa days before. He had managed to stay away from her so far—barely-- but after finding Cornelius and his adopted father supping happily together, he felt vindicated indulging his own selfish desires.
Her nearness had tormented him all week. With his enhanced senses, it was like she was always standing just a few paces behind him, just out of sight. Her lilting contralto pursued him through the villa. The sce
nt of her, too, that mysterious perfume he couldn’t quite identify. He eavesdropped on her constantly—in truth, he couldn’t really help himself-- listening in as she spoke to her servants (always gentle and gracious), directed the artisans decorating her chambers (she wanted a garden painted on her walls), or conversed with her father or quietly to herself.
She had an amusing habit of talking to herself when no one else was around. “Now where did you put your brush?” she would murmur. “My goodness, Julia! You’d misplace your head if it wasn’t attached to your shoulders!” Her self-deprecating humor always made him smile, until he realized she was speaking to herself in another woman’s voice—probably her mother’s-- and the terrible tragedy of it made him feel depressed.
It also made him love her all the fiercer.
She is all alone, like me, Apollonius thought.
She wasn’t, of course, just as he was never truly alone. She had her father, and she was surrounded all day by servants, just as Apollonius was, and yet, he always felt alone, and he could hear in her voice that she felt the same way. Perhaps it was the loved ones they had lost. Her mother and two brothers. His family, destroyed by Domitianus. Death had caused them both to erect a barrier around their souls, to wall off their hearts. They never truly let anyone inside, let them get too close, for fear of loss and pain. They even kept their fathers at arm’s distance. Julia regarded her father as if he were an amusing distant relative, one she was mildly fond of, and Apollonius still could not think of Gon as anything but “dominus” or “the magician”, even though he loved him, even though he called the man “father” when he addressed his maker in public.
He sat on a bench beside the wall that divided their courtyards, listening to the young woman labor in her garden. She had been making a valiant effort to revive the garden since she took up residence in the villa. He listened to her toil in the earth, back against the rough stucco wall that divided them, still warm from the day’s heat, head turned slightly to the left and angled back. She had been working at night, as it was much too hot during the day for physical labor. The light of the oil lamps she had set about the peristyle illuminated the green spires of the cypress trees rising from her yard, throwing long shadows across the roofs of the two villas. Even though it was twenty degrees cooler than it had been that afternoon, it was still a sultry night. He could smell her sweat and the tantalizing perfume that she wore, the rich scent of freshly turned dirt and the smoke twining up from a crackling burn pile.
“Here, Cirio, put this one on the fire, too,” Julia said. The young Greek slave he had spied sweeping the steps, the one who had looked up suddenly and caught Apollonius peeking over the cant of the roof, was assisting her in the courtyard, as he had the previous few nights. Apollonius heard the fire snap and pop as the flames chewed on the crisp dead leaves. “Bring another rose bush over here,” Julie said, then: “No, the other one. The one with the small white blossoms. Yes, that one.”
“Would you like me to fetch some more water, domina?”
“Yes, please. Just scoop it out of the fountain.”
Apollonius wished it were he assisting his beautiful neighbor and not the Greek. He would like to see Julia perspiring, her hands smeared with dirt, her skin flush from her exertions. He wondered what she was wearing to labor in the garden, wondered that she was even doing such a menial chore herself. Her father must have thrown a fit! That is what a topiarius is for, he could hear the man say, not the daughter of a Roman senator! It was such a fine example of her unconventional nature that he could not help but grin.
He heard the patter of water.
“You must make sure that you water the plants very thoroughly after you place them in the earth,” Julia said to the Greek boy. “It will take time for their roots to grow. Until then, they must be watered every night, lest they wither and die in the heat.”
“Yes, domina.”
He heard the squelching of moist earth. “You have to press the earth in tight around the root ball, too. If there are any air pockets, the roots will fail to grow there.”
“Yes, domina.”
“There! That one is finished. Only twelve more!”
He thought of what the magician had said, that they must keep a distance between themselves and their new neighbors, for the sake of the Varuses, and for their own anonymity. Yet, his master had been the first to give in to their charms. In truth, he hadn’t even tried to resist them. Could he really expect any better of Apollonius?
The boy shifted restlessly, scanning Villa Eyya for movement. Most of the servants had gone to bed, and those who were still up were doing quiet things in their quarters. Gon was in the small atrium at the far end of the house, reading, as he usually did after they returned from their nightly hunt. He kept a large collection of scrolls and even a few rare codices in his private sitting room, some quite ancient and fragile, and could be found poring over them thoughtfully late at night, his brow furrowed, one finger pressed to his temple.
Writing, he said once to the boy, was mankind’s greatest invention. It enabled the preservation and dissemination of man’s collective knowledge. It allowed the minds of men to experience the thoughts and emotions of their fellows. “The world,” he said, “was a much smaller and lonelier place before it.”
How quickly would he realize that Apollonius had broken their pact? Would he even hear the boy slip stealthily over the wall, absorbed as he was in his books? Would he object, come and haul the boy back home, or would he overlook Apollonius’s indiscretions, knowing that he had been the first to buckle?
The magician was an impulsive creature. Despite his better judgment, Apollonius’s maker rarely refused himself the things he desired. How could he hold his adopted son to a higher standard than he held himself?
Apollonius rose. He checked the colonnaded terrace one more time, looked over his shoulder to the room where the porter slept, then placed his hands on the pebbled surface of the wall.
He lifted his sandals from the ground, hanging there from the wall.
It still amazed him how readily his palms clung to vertical surfaces when he wished to climb them. It reminded him of the iridescent little lizards that populated the garden, the way they could scurry up the garden walls when they were disturbed. He paused one last time, his desires warring with his conscience—warring, and losing-- and then he continued up.
He climbed to the slanted roof of the building next door and crept to its peak. Rising up a little, he peered down into the neighbor’s garden. He saw Julia kneeling on a mat in the sun withered grass, a moist lock of hair dangling in her face. She was dressed in a simple tunica, the kind of garment one of her servants might wear, no jewelry, no ribbons or fancy face powder. She was filthy and sweaty and absolutely radiant.
As he lay there on the warm tiles watching her, she finished digging a little pit and gestured for Cirio to hand her another rose bush. The slave obeyed, and she placed the roots of the plant in the hole and began to fill it in with dirt. The plants that could not be saved were burning in a small pile near the refurbished pool. In the past few days, she had planted roses and laurel bushes, hyacinth, lilies and tulips. She had placed terra cotta pots with bright blooming flowers and decorative shrubs on the stone walkways that crisscrossed the courtyard, grouping them near the fountains and the shallow central pool.
As Apollonius watched the young woman, the Greek twitched and spun around. The boy must have eyes in the back of his head! Julia glanced up, following the slave boy’s gaze, and Apollonius smiled and waved. Julia’s frown shifted slowly to a smile. She put aside her dirty spade and rose.
“What are you doing up there?” she called, walking in his direction.
“Watching you,” Apollonius said.
“Spying on me, you mean.”
“Yes, I suppose.”
“Well, come down from there. Unless you derive some perverse gratification from spying on oblivious women. If so, I’ll pretend I didn’t see you.”
If he were still a mortal man, he might have blushed. Apollonius crawled over the peak of the roof and hopped to the garden below. It was a great drop, far enough to make Julia jump back with a gasp. He landed in a crouch and stood up beside her, smiling.
Gon would be outraged if he knew that I did that, he thought.
“What do you think you’re doing? Don’t ever do that again! You’ll break an ankle!” Julia exclaimed.
“No, I won’t,” he boasted. He glanced up. “It isn’t that far…”
But it was. It was for a mortal man.
She sighed theatrically. “What am I going to do with you, Paulo? Cirio, would you be so kind as to fetch me a shawl from my chambers? And some wine, sweetened with honey… Cirio?”
The slave boy was staring at Apollonius with superstitious awe.
He knows, Apollonius thought.
The magician had warned him it might happen from time to time. Some mortals could see through their glamours, sometimes almost immediately, no matter how conscientiously they disguised their strange skin, or endeavored to move in a natural mortal manner. The boy was one of those people. He was frightened half to death, looked ready to bolt at any moment. Perhaps Apollonius had overplayed his hand, jumping from the roof as he had. Had Julia also realized there was something unnatural about him? He scanned her face, read the language of her body, inhaled her scent.
No. She had not.
Her heart was beating rapidly, and a strong smell wafted from her pores, but he did not detect fear. He knew the sounds and smells of fear. He experienced those often enough. Every time he took a man for his supper. The signs coming from Julia were different. He was not certain what they indicated exactly. His senses were as sharp as his maker’s, but woefully untrained. He hoped they were expressions of romantic interest, but judging from her countenance her feelings were more akin to amusement than anything else.
Apollonius (The Oldest Living Vampire Saga) Page 8
