by Rice, Anne
“All right, leave me, you coward, you impudent and miserable boy! Leave me!” He looked before him. “I prayed for it, Andrei, I prayed they wouldn’t get you for their filthy catacombs, their dark earthen cells. Well, so my prayer is answered! Go with God, Andrei. Go with God. Go with God!”
My Master’s face was rapt and beautiful, a white flame against the wavering golden light of countless candles. He stood over me.
I lay on the floor. My body sang with the blood. I climbed to my feet, my head swimming. “Master.”
At the far end of the room he stood, his bare feet composed on the glowing rose-colored floor, his arms outstretched. “Come to me, Amadeo, walk towards me, come to me, to take the rest.”
I struggled to obey him. The room raged with colors around me. I saw the Procession of the searching Magi. “Oh, that it’s so vivid, so utterly alive!”
“Come to me, Amadeo.”
“I’m too weak, Master, I’m fainting, I’m dying in this glorious light.”
I took one step after another, though it seemed impossible. I placed one foot before the other, drawing ever closer to him. I stumbled.
“On your hands and knees, then, come. Come to me.”
I clung to his robe. I had to climb this great height if I wanted it. I reached up and took hold of the crook of his right arm. I lifted myself, feeling the gold cloth against me. I straightened my legs until I stood. Once again, I embraced him; once again I found the fount. I drank, and drank, and drank.
In a gilded gush the blood went down into my bowels. It went through my legs and my arms. I was a Titan. I crushed him under me. “Give it to me,” I whispered. “Give it to me.” The blood hovered on my lips and then flooded down my throat.
It was as if his cold marble hands had seized my heart. I could hear it struggling, beating, the valves opening and closing, the wet sound of his blood invading it, the swoosh and flap of the valves as they welcomed it, utilizing it, my heart growing ever larger and more powerful, my veins becoming like so many invincible metallic conduits of this most potent fluid.
I lay on the floor. He stood above me, and his hands were open to me. “Get up, Amadeo. Come, come up, into my arms. Take it.”
I cried. I sobbed. My tears were red, and my hand was stained with red. “Help me, Master.”
“I do help you. Come, seek it out for yourself.”
I was on my feet with this new strength, as if all human limitations had been loosened, as if they were bonds of rope or chain and had fallen away. I sprang at him, pulling back his robe, the better to find the wound.
“Make a new wound, Amadeo.”
I bit into the flesh, puncturing it, and the blood squirted over my lips. I clapped my mouth against it. “Flow into me.”
My eyes closed. I saw the wild lands, the grass blowing, the sky blue. My Father rode on and on with the small band behind him. Was I one of them?
“I prayed you’d escape!” he called out to me, laughing, “and so you have. Damn you, Andrei. Damn you and your sharp tongue and your magical painter’s hands. Damn you, you foul-mouthed whelp, damn you.” He laughed and laughed, and rode on, the grass bending and falling for him.
“Father, look!” I struggled to shout. I wanted him to see the stony ruins of the castle. But my mouth was full of blood. They had been right. Prince Feodor’s fortress was destroyed, and he himself long gone. My Father’s horse reared up suddenly as it came to the first heap of vine-covered stones.
With a shock, I felt the marble floor beneath me, so wondrously warm. I lay with both hands against it. I lifted myself. The swarming rosy pattern was so dense, so deep, so wondrous, it was like water frozen to make the finest stone. I could have looked into its depths forever.
“Rise up, Amadeo, once more.”
Oh, it was easy to make this climb, to reach for his arm and then his shoulder. I broke the flesh of his neck. I drank. The blood washed through me, once again revealing my entire form with a shock against the blackness of my mind. I saw the boy’s body that was mine, of arms and legs, as with this form I breathed in the warmth and light around me, as if all of me had become one great multipored organ for seeing, for hearing, for breathing. I breathed with millions of minute and strong tiny mouths.
The blood filled me so that I could take no more.
I stood before my Master. In his face I saw but the hint of weariness, but the smallest pain in his eyes. I saw for the first time the true lines of his old humanity in his face, the soft inevitable crinkles at the corners of his serenely folded eyes.
The drapery of his robe glistened, the light traveling on it as the cloth moved with his small gesture. He pointed. He pointed to the painting of The Procession of the Magi.
“Your soul and your physical body are now locked together forever,” he said. “And through your vampiric senses, the sense of sight, and of touch, and of smell, and of taste, you’ll know all the world. Not from turning away from it to the dark cells of the Earth, but through opening your arms to endless glory will you perceive the absolute splendor of God’s creation and the miracles wrought, in His Divine Indulgence, by the hands of men.”
The silk-clad multitudes of The Procession of the Magi appeared to move. Once more I heard the horses’ hooves on the soft earth, and the shuffle of booted feet. Once more I thought I saw the distant hounds leap on the mountainside. I saw the masses of flowered shrubbery wobble with the press of the gilded procession against them; I saw petals fly from the flowers. Marvelous animals frolicked in the thick wood. I saw the proud Prince Lorenzo, astride his mount, turn his youthful head, just as my Father had done, and look at me. On and on went the world beyond him, the world with its white rocky cliffs, its hunters on their brown steeds and its leaping prancing dogs.
“It’s gone forever, Master,” I said, and how rounded and resonant was my voice, responding to all that I beheld.
“What is that, my child?”
“Russia, the world of the wild lands, the world of those dark terrible cells within the moist Mother Earth.”
I turned around and around. Smoke rose from the wilderness of burning candles. Wax crawled and dripped over the chased silver that held them, dripping even to the spotless and shimmering floor. The floor was as the sea, so transparent suddenly, so silken, and high above the painted clouds in illimitable sweetest blue. It seemed a mist emanated from these clouds, a warm summer mist made up of mingling land and sea.
Once again, I looked at the painting. I moved towards it and threw out my hands against it, and stared upwards at the white castles atop the hills, at the delicate groomed trees, at the fierce sublime wilderness that waited so patiently for the sluggish journey of my crystal-clear gaze.
“So much!” I whispered. No words could describe the deep colors of brown and gold in the beard of the exotic magus, or the shadows at play in the painted head of the white horse, or in the face of the balding man who led him, or the grace of the arch-necked camels or the crush of rich flowers beneath soundless feet.
“I see it with all of me,” I sighed. I closed my eyes and lay against it, recalling perfectly all aspects as the dome of my mind became this room itself, and the wall was there colored and painted by me. “I see it without any omission. I see it,” I whispered.
I felt my Master’s arms around my chest. I felt his kiss on my hair.
“Can you see again the glassy city?” he asked.
“I can make it!” I cried. I let my head roll back against his chest. I opened my eyes, and drew out of the riot of painting before me the very colors I wanted, and made this metropolis of bubbling, leaping glass rise in my imagination, until its towers pierced the sky. “It’s there, do you see it?”
In a torrent of tumbling, laughing words I described it, the glittering green and yellow and blue spires that sparkled and wavered in the Heavenly light. “Do you see it?” I cried out.
“No. But you do,” said my Master. “And that is more than enough.”
In the dim chamber, we dres
sed in the black morn.
Nothing was difficult, nothing had its old weight and resistance. It seemed I only needed to run my fingers up the doublet to have it buttoned.
We hurried down the steps, which seemed to disappear beneath my feet, and out into the night.
To climb the slimy walls of a palazzo was nothing, to anchor my feet over and over in the chinks of the stone, to poise on a tuft of fern and vine as I reached for the bars of a window and finally pulled open the grate, it was nothing, and how easily I let the heavy metal grid drop into the glistening green water below. How sweet to see it sink, to see the water splash around the descending weight, to see the glimmer of the torches in the water.
“I fall into it.”
“Come.”
Inside the chamber, the man rose from his desk. Against the cold, he had wrapped his neck in wool. His dark blue robe was banded in pearly gold. Rich man, banker. Friend of the Florentine, not mourning his loss over these many pages of vellum, smelling of black ink but calculating the inevitable gains, all partners murdered by the blade and by poison, it seemed, in a private banquet room.
Did he guess now that we had done it, the red-cloaked man and the auburn-haired boy who came through his high fourth-story window in this frozen winter night?
I caught him as if he were the love of my young life, and unwound the wool from around the artery where I would feed.
He begged me to stop, to name my price. How still my Master looked, watching only me, as the man begged and I ignored him, merely feeling for this large pulsing, irresistible vein.
“Your life, Sir, I must have it,” I whispered. “The blood of thieves is strong, isn’t it, Sir?”
“Oh, child,” he cried, all resolve shattering, “does God send His justice in such an unlikely form?”
It was sharp, pungent and strangely rank this human blood, spiked with the wine he’d drunk and the herbs of the foods he’d eaten, and almost purple in the light of his lamps as it flowed over my fingers before I could lap them with my tongue.
At the first draught I felt his heart stop.
“Ease up, Amadeo,” whispered my Master.
I let go and the heart recovered.
“That’s it, feed on it slowly, slowly, letting the heart pump the blood to you, yes, yes, and gently with your fingers that he not suffer unduly, for he suffers the worst fate he can know and that is to know that he dies.”
We walked along the narrow quay together. No need anymore to keep my balance, though my gaze was lost in the depths of the singing, lapping water, gaining its movement through its many stonewalled connections from the faraway sea. I wanted to feel the wet green moss on the stones.
We stood in a small piazza, deserted, before the angled doors of a high stone church. They were bolted now. All windows were blinded, all doors locked. Curfew. Quiet.
“Once more, lovely one, for the strength it will give you,” said my Master, and his lethal fangs pierced me, as his hands held me captive.
“Would you trick me? Would you kill me?” I whispered, as I felt myself again helpless, no preternatural effort that I could summon strong enough to escape his grasp.
The blood was pulled out of me in a tidal wave that left my arms dangling and shaking, my feet dancing as if I were a hanged man. I struggled to remain conscious. I pushed against him. But the flow continued, out of me, out of all my fibers and into him.
“Now, once again, Amadeo, take it back from me.”
He dealt one fine blow to my chest. I almost toppled off my feet. I was so weak, I fell forward, only at the last grasping for his cloak. I pulled myself up and locked my left arm around his neck. He stepped back, straightening, making it hard for me. But I was too determined, too challenged and too determined to make a mockery of his lessons.
“Very well, sweet Master,” I said as I tore at his skin once again. “I have you, and will have every drop of you, Sir, unless you are quick, most quick.” Only then did I realize! I too had tiny fangs!
He started to laugh softly, and it heightened my pleasure, that this which I fed upon should laugh beneath these new fangs.
With all my might I sought to tug his heart out of his chest. I heard him cry out and then laugh in amazement. I drew and drew on his blood, swallowing with a hoarse disgraceful sound.
“Come on, let me hear you cry out again!” I whispered, sucking the blood greedily, widening the gash with my teeth, my sharpened, lengthened teeth, these fang teeth that were now mine and made for this slaughter. “Come on, beg for mercy, Sir!”
His laughter was sweet.
I took his blood swallow after swallow, glad and proud at his helpless laughing, at the fact that he had fallen down on his knees in the square and that I had him still, and he must now raise his arm to push me away.
“I can’t drink anymore!” I declared. I lay back on the stones.
The frozen sky was black and studded with the white blazing stars. I stared at it, deliciously aware of the stone beneath me, of the hardness under my back and my head. No care now about the soil, the damp, the threat of disease. No care now whether the crawling things of the night came near. No care now what men might think who peeped from their windows. No care now for the lateness of the hour. Look at me, stars. Look at me, as I look at you.
Silent and glistering, these tiny eyes of Heaven.
I began to die. A withering pain commenced in my stomach, then moved to my bowels.
“Now, all that’s left of a mortal boy will leave you,” my Master said. “Don’t be afraid.”
“No more music?” I whispered. I rolled over and put my arms around my Master, who lay beside me, his head resting on his elbow. He gathered me to him.
“Shall I sing to you a lullaby?” he said softly.
I moved away from him. Foul fluid had begun to flow from me. I felt an instinctive shame, but this quite slowly vanished. He picked me up, easily as always, and pushed my face into his neck. The wind rushed around us.
Then I felt the cold water of the Adriatic, and I found myself tumbling on the unmistakable swell of the sea. The sea was salty and delicious and held no menace. I turned over and over, and finding myself alone, tried to get my bearings. I was far out, near to the island of the Lido. I looked back to the main island, and I could see through the great congregation of ships at anchor the blazing torches of the Palazzo Ducale, with a vision that was awesomely clear.
The mingled voices of the dark port rose, as if I were secretly swimming amongst the ships, though I was not.
What a remarkable power, to hear these voices, to be able to hone in on one particular voice and hear its early-morning mumblings, and then to pitch my hearing to yet another and let other words sink in.
I floated under the sky for a while, until all the pain was gone from me. I felt cleansed, and I didn’t want to be alone. I turned over and effortlessly swam towards the harbor, moving under the surface of the water when I neared the ships.
What astonished me now was that I could see beneath the water! There was enough life for my vampiric eyes to see the huge anchors lodged in the mushy bottom of the lagoon, and to see the curved bottoms of the galleys. It was an entire underwater universe. I wanted to explore it further, but I heard my Master’s voice—not a telepathic voice, as we would call it now, but his audible voice—calling me very softly to return to the piazza where he waited for me.
I peeled off my rank clothes and climbed out of the water naked, hurrying to him in the cold darkness, delighted that the chill itself meant little. When I saw him I spread out my arms and smiled.
He held a far cloak in his arms, which he opened now to receive me, rubbing my hair dry with it and winding it around me.
“You feel your new freedom. Your bare feet are not hurt by the deep cold of the stones. If you’re cut, your resilient skin will heal instantly, and no small crawling creature of the dark will produce revulsion in you. They can’t hurt you. Disease can’t hurt you.” He covered me with kisses. “The most pestilen
tial blood will only feed you, as your preternatural body cleanses it and absorbs it. You are a powerful creature, and deep in here? In your chest, which I touch now with my hand, there is your heart, your human heart.”
“Is it really so, Master?” I asked. I was exhilarated, I was playful. “Why so human still?”
“Amadeo, have you found me inhuman? Have you found me cruel?”
My hair had shaken off the water, drying almost instantly. We walked now, arm in arm, the heavy fur cloak covering me, out of the square.
When I didn’t answer, he stopped and embraced me again and began his hungry kisses.
“You love me,” I said, “as I am now, even more than before.”
“Oh, yes,” he said. He hugged me roughly and kissed my throat all over, and my shoulders, and began to kiss my chest. “I can’t hurt you now, I can’t snuff out your life with an accidental embrace. You’re mine, of my flesh and of my blood.”
He stopped. He was crying. He didn’t want me to see. He turned away when I tried to catch his face with my impertinent hands.
“Master, I love you,” I said.
“Pay attention,” he said brushing me off, obviously impatient with his tears. He pointed to the sky. “You’ll always know when morning’s coming, if you pay attention. Do you feel it? Do you hear the birds? There are in all parts of the world those birds who sing right before dawn.”
A thought came to me, dark and horrid, that one of the things I had missed in the deep Monastery of the Caves under Kiev was the sound of birds. Out in the wild grasses, hunting with my Father, riding from copse to copse of trees, I had loved the song of the birds. We had never been too long in the miserable riverside hovels of Kiev without those forbidden journeys into the wild lands from which so many didn’t return.
But that was gone. I had all of sweet Italy around me, the sweet Serenissima. I had my Master, and the great voluptuous magic of this transformation.
“For this I rode into the wild lands,” I whispered. “For this he took me out of the Monastery on that last day.”
