by Rice, Anne
My Master looked at me sadly. “I hope so,” he said. “What I know of your past, I learnt from your mind when it was open to me, but it’s closed now, closed because I’ve made you a vampire, the same as I am, and we can never know each other’s minds. We’re too close, the blood we share makes a deafening roar in our ears when we try to talk in silence to one another, and so I let go forever of those awful images of that underground Monastery which flashed so brilliantly in your thoughts, but always with agony, always with near despair.”
“Yes, despair, and all that is gone like the pages of a book torn loose and thrown into the wind. Just like that, gone.”
He hurried me along. We were not going home. It was another way through the back alleys.
“We go now to our cradle,” he said, “which is our crypt, our bed which is our grave.”
We entered an old dilapidated palazzo, tenanted only with a few sleeping poor. I didn’t like it. I had been brought up by him on luxury. But we soon entered a cellar, a seeming impossibility in rank and watery Venice, but a cellar it was, indeed. We made our way down stone stairs, past thick bronze doors, which men alone could not open, until in the inky blackness we had found the final room.
“Here’s a trick,” my Master whispered, “which some night you yourself will be strong enough to work.”
I heard a riot of crackling and a small blast, and a great flaring torch blazed in his hand. He had lighted it with no more than his mind.
“With each decade you’ll grow stronger, and then with each century, and you will discover many times in your long life that your powers have made a magical leap. Test them carefully, and protect what you discover. Use cleverly all that you discover. Never shun any power, for that’s as foolish as a man shunning his strength.”
I nodded, staring spellbound at the flames. I had never seen such colors in simple fire before, and I felt no aversion to it, though I knew that it was the one thing that could destroy me. He had said so, had he not?
He made a gesture. I should regard the room.
What a splendid chamber it was. It was paved in gold! Even its ceiling was of gold. Two stone sarcophagi stood in the middle of it, each graced with a carved figure in the old style, that is, severe and more solemn than natural; and as I drew closer, I saw that these figures were helmeted knights, in long tunics, with heavy broadswords carved close to their flanks, their gloved hands clasped in prayer, their eyes closed in eternal sleep. Each had been gilded, and plated with silver, and set with countless tiny gems. The belts of the knights were set with amethyst. Sapphires adorned the necks of their tunics. Topaz gleamed in the scabbards of their swords.
“Is this not a fortune to tempt a thief?” I asked. “Lying as it does here beneath this ruined house?”
He laughed outright.
“You’re teaching me to be cautious already?” he asked, smiling. “What back talk! No thief can gain access here. You didn’t measure your own strength when you opened the doors. Look at the bolt I’ve closed behind us, since you are so concerned. Now see if you can lift the lid of that coffin. Go ahead. See if your strength meets your nerve.”
“I didn’t mean it to be back talk,” I protested. “Thank God you’re smiling.” I lifted the lid and then moved the lower part of it to one side. It was nothing to me, yet I knew this was heavy stone. “Ah, I see,” I said meekly. I gave him a radiant and innocent smile. The inside was cushioned in damask of royal purple.
“Get into this crib, my child,” he said. “Don’t be afraid as you wait for the rise of the sun. When it comes you’ll sleep soundly enough.”
“Can I not sleep with you?”
“No, here in this bed which I have long ago prepared for you, this is where you belong. I have my own narrow place there next to you, which is not big enough for two. But you are mine now, mine, Amadeo. Vouchsafe me one last bevy of kisses, ah, sweet, yes, sweet—.”
“Master, don’t let me ever make you angry. Don’t let me ever—.”
“No, Amadeo, be my challenger, be my questioner, be my bold and ungrateful pupil.” He looked faintly sad. He pushed me gently. He gestured to the coffin. The purple satin damask shimmered.
“And so I he in it,” I whispered, “so young.”
I saw the shadow of pain in his face after I’d said this. I regretted it. I wanted to say something to undo it, but he gestured that I must go on.
Oh, how cold this was, cushions be damned, and how hard. I moved the lid into place above me and lay still, listening, listening to the sound of the torch snuffed, and to the grinding of stone on stone as he opened his own grave.
I heard his voice:
“Good night, my young love, my child love, my son,” he said.
I let my body go limp. How delicious was this simple relaxation. How new were all things.
Far away in the land of my birth, the monks chanted in the Monastery of the Caves.
Sleepily, I reflected on all I’d remembered. I had gone home to Kiev. I had made of my memories a tableau to teach me all that I might know. And in the last moments of nighttime consciousness, I said farewell to them forever, farewell to their beliefs and their restraints.
I envisaged The Procession of the Magi splendidly glowing on the Master’s wall, the procession which would be mine to study when the sun set again. It seemed to me in my wild and passionate soul, in my newborn vampiric heart, that the Magi had come not only for Christ’s birth but for my rebirth as well.
9
If I had thought my transformation into a vampire meant the end of my tutelage or apprenticeship to Marius, I was quite wrong. I wasn’t immediately set free to wallow in the joys of my new powers.
The night after my metamorphosis, my education began in earnest. I was to be prepared now not for a temporal life but for eternity.
My Master gave me to know that he had been created a vampire almost fifteen hundred years ago, and that there were members of our kind all over the world. Secretive, suspicious and often miserably lonely, the wanderers of the night, as my Master called them, were often ill prepared for immortality and made nothing of their existence but a string of dreary disasters until despair consumed them and they immolated themselves through some ghastly bonfire, or by going into the light of the sun.
As for the very old, those who like my Master had managed to withstand the passage of empires and epochs, they were for the most part misanthropes, seeking for themselves cities in which they could reign supreme among mortals, driving off fledglings who attempted to share their territory, even if it meant destroying creatures of their own kind.
Venice was the undisputed territory of my Master, his hunting preserve, and his own private arena in which he could preside over the games which he had chosen as significant for him in this time of life.
“There is nothing that will not pass,” he said, “except you yourself. You must listen to what I say because my lessons are first and foremost lessons in survival; the garnishes will come later on.”
The primary lesson was that we slay only “the evildoer.” This had once been, in the foggiest centuries of ancient time, a solemn commission to blood drinkers, and indeed there had been a dim religion surrounding us in antique pagan days in which the vampires had been worshiped as bringers of justice to those who had done wrong.
“We shall never again let such superstition surround us and the mystery of our powers. We are not infallible. We have no commission from God. We wander the Earth like the giant felines of the great jungles, and have no more claim upon those we kill than any creature that seeks to live.
“But it is an infallible principle that the slaying of the innocent will drive you mad. Believe me when I tell you that for your peace of mind you must feed on the evil, you must learn to love them in all their filth and degeneracy, and you must thrive on the visions of their evil that will inevitably fill your heart and soul during the kill.
“Kill the innocent and you will sooner or later come to guilt, and with it you will come t
o impotence and finally despair. You may think you are too ruthless and too cold for such. You may feel superior to human beings and excuse your predatory excesses on the ground that you do but seek the necessary blood for your own life. But it won’t work in the long run.
“In the long run, you will come to know that you are more human than monster, all that is noble in you derives from your humanity, and your enhanced nature can only lead you to value humans all the more. You’ll come to pity those you slay, even the most unredeemable, and you will come to love humans so desperately that there will be nights when hunger will seem far preferable to you than the blood repast.”
I accepted this wholeheartedly, and quickly plunged with my Master into the dark underbelly of Venice, the wild world of taverns and vice which I had never, as the mysterious velvet-clad “apprentice” of Marius De Romanus, really seen before. Of course I knew drinking places, I knew fashionable courtesans such as our beloved Bianca, but I really didn’t know the thieves and murderers of Venice, and it was on these that I fed.
Very soon, I understood what my Master meant when he said that I must develop a taste for evil and maintain it. The visions from my victims became stronger for me with every kill. I began to see brilliant colors when I killed. In fact, I could sometimes see these colors dancing around my victims before I ever even closed in. Some men seem to walk in red-tinged shadows, and others to emanate a fiery orange light. The anger of my meanest and most tenacious victims was often a brilliant yellow which blinded me, searing me, as it were, both when I first attacked and while I drank the victim dry of all blood.
I was at the onset a dreadfully violent and impulsive killer. Having been set down by Marius in a nest of assassins, I went to work with a clumsy fury, drawing out my prey from the tavern or the flophouse, cornering him on the quay and then tearing open his throat as if I were a wild dog. I drank greedily often rupturing the victim’s heart. Once the heart is gone, once the man is dead, there is nothing to pump the blood into you. And so it is not so good.
But my Master, for all his lofty speeches on the virtues of humans, and his adamant insistence on our own responsibilities, nevertheless taught me to kill with finesse.
“Take it slowly,” he said. We walked along the narrow banks of the canals where such existed. We traveled by gondola listening with our preternatural ears for conversation that seemed meant for us. “And half the time, you needn’t enter a house in order to draw out a victim. Stand outside of it, read the man’s thoughts, throw him some silent bait. If you read his thoughts, it is almost a certainty that he can receive your message. You can lure without words. You can exert an irresistible pull. When he comes out to you, then take him.
“And there is never any need for him to suffer, or for blood actually to be spilt. Embrace your victim, love him if you will. Fondle him slowly and sink your teeth with caution. Then feast as slowly as you can. This way his heart will see you through.
“As for the visions, and these colors you speak of, seek to learn from them. Let the victim in his dying tell you what he can about life itself. If images of his long life trip before you, observe them, or rather savor them. Yes, savor them. Devour them slowly as you do his blood. As for the colors, let them pervade you. Let the entire experience inundate you. That is, be both active and utterly passive. Make love to your victim. And listen always for the actual moment when the heart ceases to beat. You will feel an undeniably orgiastic sensation at this moment, but it can be overlooked.
“Dispose of the body after, or make certain that you have licked away all sign of the puncture wounds in the victim’s throat. Just a little bit of your blood on the tip of your tongue will accomplish this. In Venice dead bodies are common. You need not take such pains. But when we hunt in the outlying villages, then often you may have to bury the remains.”
I was eager for all these lessons. That we hunted together was a magnificent pleasure. I came to realize quickly enough that Marius had been clumsy in the murders he had committed for me to witness before I’d been transformed. I knew then, as perhaps I’ve made plain in this story, that he wanted me to feel pity for these victims; he wanted me to experience horror. He wanted me to see death as an abomination. But due to my youth, my devotion to him and the violence done me in my short mortal life, I had not responded as he hoped.
Whatever the case, he was now a much more skilled killer. We often took the same victim, together, I drinking from the throat of our captive, while he fed from the man’s wrist. Sometimes he delighted in holding the victim tightly for me while I drank all of the blood.
Being new, I was thirsty every night. I could have lived for three or more without killing, yes, and sometimes I did, but by the fifth night of denying myself—this was put to the test—I was too weak to rise from the sarcophagus. So what this meant was that, when and if I were ever on my own, I must kill at least every fourth night.
My first few months were an orgy. Each kill seemed more thrilling, more paralyzingly delicious than the one which had gone before. The mere sight of a bared throat could bring about in me such a state of arousal that I became like an animal, incapable of language or restraint. When I opened my eyes in the cold stony darkness, I envisioned human flesh. I could feel it in my naked hands and I wanted it, and the night could have no other events for me until I had laid my powerful hands on that one which would be the sacrifice to my need.
For long moments after the kill, sweet throbbing sensations passed through me as the warm fragrant blood found all the corners of my body, as it pumped its magnificent heat into my face.
This, and this alone, was enough to absorb me utterly, young as I was.
But Marius had no intention of letting me wallow in blood, the hasty young predator, with no other thought but to glut himself night after night.
“You must really begin to learn history and philosophy and the law in earnest,” he told me. “You are not destined for the University of Padua now. You are destined to endure.”
So after our stealthy missions were completed, and we returned to the warmth of the palazzo, he forced me to my books. He wanted some distance between me and Riccardo and the others anyway, lest they become suspicious of the change that had occurred.
In fact, he told me they “knew” about the change whether they realized it or not. Their bodies knew that I was no longer human, though it might take their minds some time to accept the fact.
“Show them only courtesy and love, only complete indulgence, but keep your distance,” Marius told me. “By the time they realize the unthinkable is the fact, you will have assured them that you are no enemy to them, that you are indeed Amadeo still, whom they love, and that though you have been changed, you yourself have not changed towards them.”
I understood this. At once I felt a greater love for Riccardo. I felt it for all of the boys.
“But Master,” I asked, “don’t you ever become impatient with them, that they think more slowly, that they are so clumsy? I love them, yes, but surely you see them in a more pejorative light even than I do.”
“Amadeo,” he said softly, “they are all going to die.” His face was charged with grief.
I felt it immediately and totally, which was always the way with feelings now. They came on in a torrent and taught their lessons at once.
They are all going to die. Yes, and I am immortal.
After that, I could only be patient with them, and indeed, I indulged myself in the manner in which I looked at them and studied them, never letting them know it, but glorying in all the details of them as if they were exotic because … they were going to die.
There is too much to describe, too much. I can’t find a way to put down all that became clear to me in the first few months alone. And there was nothing made known to me in that time which was not deepened afterwards.
I saw process everywhere I looked; I smelled corruption, but I also beheld the mystery of growth, the magic of things blossoming and ripening, and in fact all process, whether
towards maturity or towards the grave, delighted and enthralled me, except, that is, the disintegration of the human mind.
My study of government and law was more of a challenge. Though reading was accomplished with infinitely greater speed and near instantaneous comprehension of syntax, I had to force myself to be interested in such things as the history of Roman Law from ancient times, and the great code of the Emperor Justinian, called the Corpus Juris Civilis, which my Master thought to be one of the finest codes of law ever written.
“The world is only getting better,” Marius instructed me. “With each century, civilization becomes more enamored of justice, ordinary men make greater strides towards sharing the wealth which was once the booty of the powerful, and art benefits by every increase in freedom, becoming ever more imaginative, ever more inventive and ever more beautiful.”
I could understand this only theoretically. I had no faith or interest in law. In fact, I had a total contempt in the abstract for my Master’s ideas. What I mean is, I didn’t have contempt for him, but I had an underlying contempt for law and for legal institutions and governmental institutions that was so total that I did not even understand it myself.
My Master said that he understood it.
“You were born in a dark savage land,” he said. “I wish I could take you back two hundred years in time to the years before Batu, the son of Genghis Khan, sacked the magnificent city of Kiev Rus, to the time when indeed the domes of its Santa Sofia were golden, and its people full of ingenuity and hope.”
“I heard ad nauseam of that old glory,” I said quietly, not wanting to anger him. “I was stuffed with tales of the olden times when I was a boy. In the miserable wooden house in which we lived, only yards from the frozen river, I listened to that rot as I shivered by the fire. Rats lived in our house. There was nothing beautiful in it but the ikons, and my Father’s songs. There was nothing but depravity there, and we speak now, as you know, of an immense land. You cannot know how big Russia is unless you have been there, unless you have traveled as I did with my Father into the bitter-cold northern forests to Moscow, or to Novgorod, or east to Cracow.” I broke off. “I don’t want to think of those times or that place,” I said. “In Italy one cannot dream of enduring such a place.”
