by Rice, Anne
“No. It’s just I hate it when you go. I thought maybe if I taunted you, you wouldn’t.”
“Well, I will. And don’t taunt me. As a matter of policy, don’t taunt me.”
He was out the door before he changed his mind and returned. He came towards the bed. I expected the worst. He was going to slap me and then not be around to kiss the bruise.
But he didn’t.
“Amadeo, while I’m gone, think on it” he said.
I was sobered, looking at him. His very manner made me reflect before I uttered a word.
“On everything, Sir?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. Then he came again to kiss me. “Will you be this forever?” he asked. “This man, this young man, that you are now?”
“Yes, Master! Forever, and with you!” I wanted to tell him that there was nothing I couldn’t do that a man could do, but this seemed most unwise, and also it would not seem true to him.
He laid his hand fondly on my head, pushing my hair back.
“For two years, I’ve watched you grow,” he said. “You’ve reached your full height, but you’re small, and your face is a baby’s face, and for all your good health, you’re slight and not the robust man yet that you are surely meant to be.”
I was too enthralled to interrupt him. When he paused, I waited.
He sighed. He looked off as if he couldn’t find words.
“When you were gone, your English lord drew his dagger on you, but you weren’t afraid. Do you remember? It wasn’t two days ago.”
“Yes, Sir, it was stupid.”
“You could easily have died then,” he said with a raise of his eyebrow. “Easily.”
“Sir, please open up these mysteries to me,” I said. “Tell me how you came to your powers. Entrust these secrets to me. Lord, make it so that I can be with you forever. I don’t care anything for my own judgment of such things. I yield to yours.”
“Ah, yes, you yield if I fulfill your request.”
“Well, Sir, that is a form of yielding, to give myself up to you, your will and your power, and yes, I would have it and be like you. Is that what you promise, Master, is that what you hint at, that you can make me like you? You can fill me with this blood of yours that makes a slave out of me, and it will be accomplished? It seems at times I know this, Master, that you can do it, and yet I wonder if I know it only because you know it, and you are lonely to do it to me.”
“Ah!” He put his hands to his face, as though I had displeased him totally.
I was at a loss.
“Master, if I offended, hit me, beat me, do anything to me but don’t turn away. Don’t cover your eyes that would look on me, Master, because I can’t live without your gaze. Explain it to me. Master, take away what divides us; if it be only ignorance then take away that.”
“Oh, I will, I will,” he said. “You are so clever and deceiving, Amadeo. You would be the fool for God all right, as you were told a long time ago that a saint should be.”
“You lose me, Sir. I am no saint, and a fool, yes, because I conjecture it’s a form of wisdom and I want it because you prize wisdom.”
“I mean that you appear simple, and out of your simplicity comes a clever grasp. I am lonely. Oh, yes, I am lonely, and lonely to tell my woes if nothing else. But who would burden one so young as you with my woes? Amadeo, what age do you think I am? Gauge my age with your simplicity.”
“You have none, Sir. You neither eat nor drink, nor change with time. You need no water to wash you clean. You are smooth and resistant to all things of nature. Master, we all know this. You are a clean and fine and whole thing.”
He shook his head. I was distressing him when I wanted just the opposite.
“I have done it already,” he whispered.
“What, my Lord, what have you done?”
“Oh, brought you to me, Amadeo, for now—.” He stopped. He frowned, and his face was so soft and wondering that it made me ache. “Ah, but these are just self-serving delusions. I could take you, with a heap of gold, and plant you down in a distant city where—.”
“Master, kill me. Kill me before you do this, or make sure your city is beyond the compass of the known world, because I will journey back! I will spend the last ducat of your heap of gold to journey here and beat on your doors.”
He looked wretched, more a man than I’d ever seen him, in pain and trembling as he looked off, deep into the endless dark divide that separated us.
I clung to his shoulder and kissed him. There was a stronger, more virile intimacy due to my crude act of hours ago.
“No, no time for such comforts,” he said. “I have to be gone. Duty calls me. Ancient things call to me, things which have been my burden for so very long. I am so weary!”
“Don’t go tonight. When the morning comes, take me with you, Master, take me to where you conceal yourself from the sun. It is from the sun that you must hide, isn’t it, Master, you who paint blue skies and the light of Phoebus more brilliantly than those who see it, you never see it—.”
“Stop,” he begged me, pressing his fingers about my hand. “Stop your kisses and your reason, and do as I say.”
He took a deep breath, and for the first time in all my life with him, I saw him take a handkerchief from his coat and pat the moisture on his own forehead and his lips. The cloth was faintly red. He looked at it.
“I want to show you something before I go,” he said. “Dress yourself, quickly. Here, I’ll help you.”
I was fully dressed for the cold winter night in less than a few minutes. He put a black cape over my shoulders, and gave me gloves trimmed in miniver, and put a black velvet cap on my head. The shoes he chose were black leather boots, which he never wanted me to wear before. To him the ankles of the boys were beautiful, and he did not favor boots, though he did not mind if we wore them by day when he could not see.
He was so troubled, so distressed, and all his face, despite its blanched cleanliness, was so infused with it, that I couldn’t keep from embracing him and kissing him, just to make his lips part, just to feel his mouth locking onto mine.
I closed my eyes. I felt his hand cover up my face and cover my eyelids.
There was a great noise around me, as of the flapping of the wooden doors, and the flying about of the broken fragments of that door I’d shattered, and of draperies billowed and snapped.
The cold air of outside surrounded me. He set me down, blind, and I knew my feet were on the quay. I could hear the water of the canal near me, lapping, lapping, as the winter wind stirred it and drove the sea into the city, and I could hear a wooden boat knocking persistently against a dock.
He let slip his fingers, and I opened my eyes.
We were far from the palazzo. I was abashed to see us at such a distance, though I was not really surprised. He could do wonders, and so he let me know this now. We were in back alleyways. We stood on a small landing by a narrow canal. I had never ventured into this mean district where workmen lived.
I saw only the back porches of houses, and their ironclad windows, and a general squalor and blindness, and a rankness as refuse floated on the water of the dipping, splashing winter-blown canal.
He turned and drew me with him away from the water’s edge, and for a moment I couldn’t see. His white hand flashed out. I beheld one finger pointed and then I beheld a man sleeping in a long rotted gondola that had been drawn up out of the water and set on workmen’s blocks. The man stirred and threw back his covering. I saw his hulking fussing shape as he grumbled and cursed at us that we dared to disturb his sleep.
I reached for my dagger. I saw the flash of his blade. The white hand of the Master, glowing like quartz, seemed only to touch the man’s wrist and send the weapon flying and rolling on the stones. Befuddled and enraged, the man charged my Master in a great clumsy bid to knock my Master off his feet.
My Master caught him easily, as if he were no more than a great swaddling of evil-smelling wool. I saw my Master’s face. His mouth ope
ned. There came two tiny sharp teeth, like daggers unto themselves, as he bit down into the man’s throat. I heard the man cry out, but only for an instant, and then his stinking body went still.
Astonished and enthralled, I watched as my Master closed his smooth eyes, his golden eyelashes seeming silvery in the dimness, and I heard a low wet sound, barely audible but horribly suggestive of the flow of something, and that something had to be the man’s blood. My Master pressed himself ever more closely to his victim, his plainly visible white fingers coaxing the life fluid from the dying body, as he gave off a long sweet savoring sigh. He drank. He drank, and there was no mistaking it. He even twisted his head a little as if to bring the last draught all the more quickly, and at this the man’s form, now seemingly frail and plastic, shuddered all over, as if the man had gone into a final convulsion, and then was still.
The Master drew himself up and ran his tongue over his lips. There was not a drop of blood to be seen. But the blood was visible. It was visible inside my Master. His face took on a florid gleam. He turned and looked at me, and I could make out the vivid flush of his cheeks, the ruddy glister of his lips.
“This is where it comes from, Amadeo,” he said. He shoved the corpse towards me, the filthy clothes brushed all against me, and as the heavy head fell back in death, he pushed it even closer so that I had to look down at the doomed man’s coarse and lifeless face. He was young, he was bearded, he was not beautiful, and he was pale and he was dead.
A seam of white showed beneath each limp and expressionless eyelid. A greasy spittle hung from his decaying yellowed teeth, his breathless and colorless mouth.
I was speechless. Fear, loathing, these things had no part in it. I was simply amazed. If I thought, I thought it was wondrous.
In a sudden fit of seeming anger, my Master hurled the man’s body to his left and out into the water where it fell with a dull splashing and bubbling sound.
He snatched me up, and I saw the windows falling past me. I almost screamed as we rose above the roofs. His hands clamped over my mouth. He moved so swiftly it was as if something propelled him or thrust him upwards.
We spun round or so it must have been, and when I opened my eyes we stood in a familiar room. Long golden curtains settled around us. It was warm here. In the shadows I saw the glinting outline of a golden swan.
It was Bianca’s room, her private sanctuary, her very own room.
“Master!” I said in fear and revulsion, that we should come like this, into her chamber, without so much as a word.
From the closed doors a tiny seam of light laid itself out upon her parqueted floor and its thick Persian carpet. It laid itself upon the deep-carved feathers of her swan bed.
Then came her footsteps hastily, emerging from an airy cloud of voices, so that she might investigate alone the noise she heard.
The cold wind swept into the room from the open window as she opened her doors. Against the draught she slammed them shut, such a fearless creature, and she reached out with unerring accuracy and raised the wick of her nearby lamp. The flame rose and I saw her staring at my Master, though she had seen me as well, for sure.
She was herself, as I had left her a world of hours ago, in gold velvet and silk tissue, her braid coiled about the back of her head to weigh down her voluminous tresses which fell in their rippled splendor over her shoulders and down her back.
Her small face was quick with questioning and alarm.
“Marius,” she said. “How now, my Lord, do you come here like this, into my private room? How now, you come by the window, and with Amadeo? What is this, jealousy of me?”
“No, only I would have a confession,” my Master said. His very voice trembled. He held me tight by my hand as if I were a mere child as he approached her, his long finger flying out to accuse her … “Tell him, my darling angel, tell him what lies behind your fabulous face.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Marius. But you anger me. And I order you out of my house. Amadeo, what do you say to this abuse?”
“I don’t know, Bianca,” I murmured. I was totally in fear. Never had I heard my Master’s voice tremble, and never had I heard anyone address him so familiarly by name.
“Get out of my house, Marius. Go now. I speak to the honorable man in you.”
“Ah, and how then did your friend Marcellus go, the Florentine, the one you were told to lure here with your clever words, the one whose drink you laced with enough poison to kill twenty men?”
My damsel’s face grew brittle but never really hard. She seemed a porcelain princess as she appraised my angry, trembling Master.
“What is this to you, my Lord?” she asked. “Have you become the Grand Council or the Council of Ten? Take me up before the courts on charges, if you will, you stealthy sorcerer! Prove your words.”
There was a great high-strung dignity to her. She craned her neck and raised her chin.
“Murderess,” my Master said. “I see it now within the solitary cell of your mind, a dozen confessions, a dozen cruel and importunate acts, a dozen crimes—.”
“No, you cannot judge me! A magician you might be, but you are no angel, Marius. Not you with your boys.”
He dragged her forward, and once again I saw his mouth open. I saw his deadly teeth.
“No, Master, no!” I ripped loose of his slack neglected hand and flew at him with my fists, crashing my body between hers and his and pounding on him with all my might. “You can’t do it, Master. I don’t care what she’s done. You seek these reasons for what. Call her importunate? Her! And what is it with you?”
She fell backwards against her bed and struggled up onto it, her legs bent. She drew back into the shadows.
“You are the Fiend from Hell himself,” she whispered. “You are a monster, and I have seen it. Amadeo, he’ll never let me live.”
“Let her live, my Lord, or I die with her!” I said. “She’s no more than a lesson here, and I will not see her die.”
My Master was wretched. He was dazed. He pushed me away from him, steadying me so that I didn’t fall. He moved towards the bed, but not in pursuit of her. He sat down beside her. She recoiled ever deeper against the headboard, her hand reaching out vainly for the sheer gold drapery as if it could save her.
She was wan and small, and her fierce blue eyes remained fixed and wide.
“We are killers together, Bianca,” he whispered to her. He reached out.
I rushed forward, but only to be stopped casually by his right hand, and with his left he smoothed her few tiny loose curls back from her forehead. He rested his hand on her as if he were a priest giving a blessing.
“Of rude necessity, Sir, all of it,” she said. “What choice after all did I have?” How brave she was, how strong like fine silver suffused with steel. “Once given the commissions, what am I to do, for I know what is to be done and for whom? How clever they were. It was a brew which took days to kill its victim far from my warm rooms.”
“Call your oppressor here, child, and poison him, instead of those he points out.”
“Yes, that ought to do it,” I said hastily. “Kill the man who put you up to it.”
She seemed in truth to think on this and then to smile. “And what of his guards, his kinsmen? They would strangle me for the grand betrayal.”
“I’ll kill him for you, sweet,” said Marius. “And for that, you’ll owe me no high crimes, only your gentle forgetfulness of the appetite you have seen tonight in me.”
For the first time, her courage seemed to waver. Her eyes filled with clear pretty tears. A tiny weariness showed itself in her. She hung her head for a moment. “You know who he is, you know where he lodges, you know that he is in Venice now.”
“He’s a dead man, my beautiful lady,” my Master said.
I slipped my arm around his neck. I kissed his forehead. He kept his eyes on her.
“Come, then, cherub,” he said to me while he still looked at her. “We’ll go to rid the world of this Florentine, this ban
ker, who uses Bianca to dispatch those who have given him accounts in secret.”
This intelligence amazed Bianca, but once again she made a soft, knowing smile. How graceful she was, how devoid of pride and bitterness. How these horrors were cast aside.
My Master held me fast to him with his right arm. He reached inside his jacket with his left and took out of it a large beautiful pear-shaped pearl. It seemed a priceless thing. He gave it to Bianca, who took it only with hesitation, watching it drop into her lazy, open hand.
“Let me kiss you, darling princess,” he said.
To my astonishment, she allowed it, and he covered her now with feathery kisses, and I watched her pretty golden eyebrows pucker, and I saw her eyes become dazzled, and her body go limp. She lay back on her pillows and then fell into a fast sleep.
We withdrew. I thought I heard the shutters close behind us. The night was wet and dark. My head was pressed to my Master’s shoulder. I couldn’t have looked up or moved if I wanted to.
“Thank you, my beloved Lord, that you didn’t kill her,” I whispered.
“She is more than a practical woman,” he said. “She is unbroken still. She has the innocence and cunning of a duchess or a queen.”
“But where do we go now? ”
“We are there, Amadeo. We are on the roof. Look about you. Do you hear the din below?”
It was tambourines and drums and flutes playing.
“Ah, so, they will die at their banquet,” my Master said thoughtfully. He stood at the edge of the roof, holding to the stone railing. The wind blew his cloak back, and he turned his eyes up to the stars.
“I want to see it all,” I said.
He shut his eyes as if I’d struck him a blow.
“Don’t think me cold, Sir,” I said. “Don’t think me tired and used to things brutal and cruel. I am only the fool, Sir, the fool for God. We don’t question, if memory serves me right. We laugh and we accept and we turn all life into joy.”
“Come down with me, then. There are a crowd of them, these crafty Florentines. Oh, but I am so hungry. I have starved myself for a night such as this.”
