by Anne Rice
I understood these images, even as they froze my soul. My head swam and the heat of the island and the quiet Cathedral made me sick in my stomach. But I stayed there. I drifted about the Iconostasis and prayed.
I thought sure no one could find me here. Towards dusk, I became truly sick. I knew I had a fever, but I sought a corner of the church and took comfort in only the cold of the stone floor against my face and my outstretched hands. Before me, if I raised my head I could see terrifying scenes of the Last Judgment, of souls condemned to Hell. I deserve this pain, I thought.
The Master came for me. I don't remember the journey back to the palazzo. It seemed that somehow in a matter of moments he had put me in bed. The boys bathed my forehead with cool cloths. I was made to drink water. Someone said that I had "the fever" and someone else said, "Be quiet."
The Master kept watch with me. I had bad dreams which I couldn't bring with me into my waking state. Before dawn, the Master kissed me and held me close to him. I had never loved so much the chill hardness of his body as I did in this fever, wrapping my arms around him, pushing my cheek against his.
He gave me something hot and spiced to drink from a warm cup. And then he kissed me, and again came the cup. My body was filled with a healing fire.
But by the time he returned that night my fever was bad again. I did not dream so much as I wandered, half asleep, half awake, through terrible dark corridors unable to find a place that was either warm or clean. There was dirt beneath my fingernails. At one point, I saw a shovel moving, and saw the dirt, and feared the dirt would cover me, and I started to cry.
Riccardo kept watch, holding my hand, telling me it would soon be nightfall, and that the Master would surely come.
"Amadeo," the Master said. He hoisted me up as if I were truly still a small child.
Too many questions formed in my mind. Would I die? Where was the Master taking me now? I was wrapped in velvet and furs and he carried me, but how?
We were in a church in Venice, amid new paintings of our time. The requisite candles burned. Men prayed. He turned me in his arms and told me to look up at the giant altarpiece before me.
Squinting, my eyes hurting, I obeyed him and saw the Virgin on high being crowned by her beloved Son, Christ the King.
"Look at the sweetness of her face, the natural expression to her," the Master whispered. "She sits there as one might sit here in the church. And the angels, look at them, the happy boys clustered around the columns beneath her. Look at the serenity and the gentleness of their smiles. This is Heaven, Amadeo. This is goodness."
My sleepy eyes moved over the high painting. "See the Apostle who whispers so naturally to the one beside him, as men might at such a ceremony. See above, God the Father, gazing down so contentedly on all."
I tried to form questions, to say it was not possible, this combination of the fleshly and the beatific, but I couldn't find eloquent words. The nakedness of the boy angels was enchanting and innocent, but I could not believe it. It was a lie of Venice, a lie of the West, a lie of the Devil himself.
"Amadeo," he continued, "there is no good that is founded in suffering and cruelty; there is no good that must root itself in the privation of little children. Amadeo, out of the love of God grows beauty everywhere. Look at these colors; these are the colors created by God."
Secure in his arms, my feet dangling, my arms about his neck, I let the details of the immense altarpiece sink into my consciousness. I went back and forth, back and forth, over those small touches I loved.
I raised my finger to point. The lion there, just sitting so calmly at the feet of St. Mark, and look, the pages of St. Mark's book, the pages are actually in motion as he turns them. And the lion is tame and gentle as a friendly fireside dog.
"This is Heaven, Amadeo," he said to me. "Whatever the past has hammered into your soul, let it go."
I smiled, and slowly, gazing up at the saints, the rows and rows of saints, I began to laugh softly and confidentially in the Master's ear.
"They're all talking, murmuring, talking amongst themselves as if they were the Venetian Senators."
I heard his low, subdued laughter in answer. "Oh, I think the Senators are more decorous, Amadeo. I've never seen them in such informality, but this is Heaven, as I said."
"Ah, Master, look there. A saint holds an ikon, a beautiful ikon. Master, I have to tell you-." I broke off. The fever rose and the sweat broke out on me. My eyes felt hot, and I couldn't see. "Master," I said. "I am in the wild lands. I'm running. I have to put it in the trees."
How could he know what I meant, that I spoke of that long-ago desperate flight out of coherent recollection and through the wild grasses with the sacred bundle in my keep, the bundle that had to be unwrapped and placed in the trees. "Look, the ikon."
Honey filled me. It was thick and sweet. It came from a cold fount, but it didn't matter. I knew this fount. My body was like a goblet stirred so that all that was bitter dissolved in the fluids of it, dissolved in a vortex to leave only honey and a dreamy warmth.
When I opened my eyes, I was in our bed. I was cool all over. The fever was gone. I turned over and pulled myself up.
My Master sat at his desk. He was reading over what he had apparently just written. He had tied back his blond hair with a bit of cord. His face was very beautiful, unveiled as it were, with its chiseled cheekbones and smooth narrow nose. He looked at me, and his mouth worked the miracle of the ordinary smile.
"Don't chase these memories," he said. He said it as if we'd been talking all the while that I slept. "Don't go to the church of Torcello to find them. Don't go to the mosaics of San Marco. In time all these harmful things will come back."
"I'm afraid to remember," I said.
"I know," he answered.
"How can you know?" I asked him. "I have it in my heart. It's mine alone, this pain." I was sorry for sounding so bold, but whatever my guilt, the boldness came more and more often.
"Do you really doubt me?" he asked.
"Your endowments are beyond measure. We all know it, and we never speak of it, and you and I never speak of it."
"So why then don't you put your faith in me instead of things you only half recall?"
He got up from the desk and came to the bed.
"Come," he said. "Your fever's broken. Come with me."
He took me into one of the many libraries of the palazzo, messy rooms in which the manuscripts lay helter-skelter, and the books in stacks. Seldom if ever did he work in these rooms. He threw his purchases there to be cataloged by the boys, taking what he needed back to the writing desk in our room.
He moved among the shelves now until he found a portfolio, a big flopping thing of old yellowed leather, frayed at the edges. His white fingers smoothed a large page of vellum. He laid it down on the oak study table for me to see.
A painting, antique.
I saw there drawn a great church of gilded domes, so beautiful, so majestic. Letters were blazoned there. I knew these letters. But I couldn't make the words come to my mind or my tongue.
"Kiev Rus," he said. Kiev Rus.
An unsupportable horror came over me. Before I could stop myself, I said, "It's ruined, burnt. There is no such place. It's not alive like Venice. It's ruined, and all is cold, and filthy and desperate. Yes, that's the very word." I was dizzy. I felt I saw an escape from desolation, only it was cold and dark, this escape, and it led by twists and turns into a world of eternal darkness where the raw earth gave the only smell to one's hands, one's skin, one's clothes.
I pulled back and ran from the Master.
I ran the full length of the palazzo.
I ran down the stairs, and through the dark lower rooms that opened on the canal. When I came back, I found him alone in the bedroom. He was reading as always. He had his favorite book of late, The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, and he looked up from it patiently when I came in.
I stood thinking of my painful memories.
I couldn't catch t
hem. So be it. They scurried into the nothingness rather like the leaves in the alleyways, the leaves that sometimes tumble down and down the stained green walls from the little gardens whipped in the wind up there on the rooftops.
"I don't want to," I said again.
There was but one Living Lord. My Master.
"Some day it will all come clear to you, when you have the strength to use it," he said. He shut his book. "For now, let me comfort you."
Ah, yes, I was all too ready for this.
4
HOW LONG the days could be without him. By nightfall, I clenched my fists as the candles were lighted. There came nights when he didn't appear at all. The boys said he had gone on most important errands. The house must run as if he were there.
I slept in his empty bed, and no one questioned me. I searched the house for any personal trace of him. Questions plagued me. I feared he would never come back.
But he always came back.
When he came up the stairs, I flew into his embrace. He caught me, held me, kissed me and only then let me fall gently against his hard chest. My weight was nothing to him, though I seemed to grow taller and heavier every day.
I would never be anything but the seventeen-year-old boy you see now, but how could a man so slight as he heft me with such ease? I am not a waif and never have been. I am a strong child.
I liked it best-if I had to share with the others-when he read to us aloud.
Surrounding himself with candelabra, he spoke in a hushed and sympathetic voice. He read The Divine Comedy by Dante, the Decameron by Boccaccio, or in French The Romance of the Rose or the poems of Francois Villon. He spoke of the new languages we must understand as well as we understood Greek and Latin. He warned us that literature would no longer be confined to the classic works.
We sat in silence around him, on pillows, or on the naked tile. Some of us stood near him. Others rested back on their heels.
Sometimes Riccardo played the lute for us and sang those melodies he'd learned from his teacher, or even the wilder ribald tunes he'd picked up in the streets. He sang mournfully of love and made us weep over it. The Master watched him with loving eyes.
I had no jealousy. I alone shared the Master's bed.
Sometimes, he even had Riccardo sit outside the bedroom door and play for us. Obedient Riccardo never asked to come inside.
My heart raced as the curtains closed around us. The Master pulled open my tunic, sometimes even ripping it playfully, as if it were no more than a castoff thing.
I sank into the satin quilted down beneath him; I opened my legs and let my knees caress him, numbed and vibrating from the graze of his knuckles against my lips.
Once I lay half asleep. The air was rosy and golden. The place was warm. I felt his lips on mine, and his cold tongue move serpentlike into my mouth. A liquid filled my mouth, a rich and burning nectar, a potion so exquisite that I felt it roll through my body to the very tips of my outstretched fingers. I felt it descend through my torso and into the most private part of me. I burned. I burned.
"Master," I whispered. "What is this trick now which is sweeter than kissing?"
He laid his head down on the pillow. He turned away.
"Give it to me again, Master," I said.
He did, but only when he chose, in droplets, and with red tears he now and then let me lick from his eyes.
I think a whole year passed before I came home one evening, flushed from the winter air, dressed in my very finest dark blue for him, with sky blue stockings and the most expensive gold enameled slippers that I could find in all the world, a year before I came in that night and threw my book into the corner of the bedroom with a great world-weary gesture, putting my hands on my hips and glaring at him as he sat in his high thick arch-back chair looking at the coals in the brazier, putting his hands over them, watching the flames.
"Well, now," I said cockily and with my head back, a very man of the world, a sophisticated Venetian, a prince in the Marketplace with an entire court of merchants to wait on him, a scholar who had read too much.
"Well, now," I said. "There's a great mystery here and you know it. It's time you told me."
"What?" he asked obligingly enough.
"Why do you never . . . Why do you never feel anything! Why do you handle me as if I were a poppet? Why do you never ... ?"
For the first time ever I saw his face redden; I saw his eyes gloss and narrow and then widen with reddish tears.
"Master, you frighten me," I whispered.
"What is it you want me to feel, Amadeo?" he said.
"You're like an angel, a statue," I said, only now I was chastened and trembling. "Master, you play with me and I'm the toy that feels all things." I drew nearer. I touched his shirt, sought to unlace it. "Let me-."
He took my hand. He took my fingers and put them to his lips, and drew my fingers inside his mouth, caressing them with his tongue. His eyes moved so that he was looking up at me.
Quite enough, said his eyes. I feel quite enough.
"I'd give you anything," I said imploringly. I put my hand between his legs. Oh, he was wonderfully hard. That was not uncommon, but he must let me take him further; he must trust me.
"Amadeo," he said.
With his unaccountable strength he drew me back with him to the bed. You could hardly say he'd risen from the chair. It seemed we were there one moment and now fallen amongst our familiar pillows. I blinked. It seemed the curtains closed around us without his touching them, some trick of the breeze from the open windows. Yes, listen to the voices from the canal below. How voices sing out and up the walls in Venice, the city of palaces.
"Amadeo," he said, his lips on my throat as they'd come a thousand times, only this time there came a sting, sharp, swift and gone. A thread stitched into my heart was jerked all of a sudden. I had become the thing between my legs, and was nothing but that. His mouth nestled against me, and again that thread snapped and again.
I dreamed. I think I saw another place. I think I saw the revelations of my sleeping hours which never stayed for me when I awoke. I think I trod a road into those bursting fantasies I knew in sleep and sleep alone.
This is what I want of you.
"And you must have it," I said, words propelled to the near forgotten present as I floated against him, feeling him tremble, feeling him thrill to it, feeling him shudder, feeling him whip these threads from inside me, quickening my heart and making me nearly cry out, feeling him love it, and stiffen his back and let his fingers tremble and dance as he writhed against me. Drink it, drink it, drink it.
He broke loose and lay to the side.
I smiled as I lay with closed eyes. I felt my lips. I felt the barest bit of that nectar still gathered on my lower lip, and my tongue took it up and I dreamed.
His breathing was heavy and he was somber. He shivered still, and when his hand found me it was unsteady.
"Ah," I said smiling still, and kissing his shoulder.
"I hurt you!" he said.
"No, no, not at all, sweet Master," I answered. "But I hurt you! I have you, now!"
"Amadeo, you play the devil."
"Don't you want me to, Master? Didn't you like it? You took my blood and it made you my slave!"
He laughed. "So that's the twist you put on it, isn't it?"
"Hmmm. Love me. What does it matter?" I asked.
"Never tell the others," he said. There was no fear or weakness or shame in it.
I turned over and drew up on my elbows and looked at him, at his quiet profile turned away from me.
"What would they do?"
"Nothing," he answered. "It's what they would think and feel that matters. And I have no time or place for it." He looked at me. "Be merciful and wise, Amadeo."
For a long time I said nothing. I merely looked at him. Only gradually did I realize I was frightened. For one moment it seemed that fear would obliterate the warmth of the moment, the soft glory of the radiant light swelling in the curtains, of the poli
shed planes of his ivory face, the sweetness of his smile. Then some higher graver concern overruled the fear.
"You're not my slave at all, are you?" I whispered.
"Yes," he said, almost laughing again. "I am, if you must know."
"What happened, what did you do, what was it that-."
He laid his finger on my lips.
"Do you think me like other men?" he asked.
"No," I said, but the fear rose in the word and strangled out the wound. I tried to stop myself, but before I could I embraced him and tried to push my face into his neck. He was too hard for such things, though he cradled my head and kissed the top of it, though he gathered back my hair, and let his thumb sink into my cheek.
"Some day I want you to leave here," he said. "I want you to go. You'll take wealth with you and all the learning I've been able to give you. You'll take your grace with you, and all the many arts you've mastered, that you can paint, that you can play any music I ask of you- that you can do already-that you can so exquisitely dance. You'll take these accomplishments and you'll go out in search of those precious things that you want-."
"I want nothing but you."
"-and when you think back on this time, when in half-sleep at night you remember me as your eyes close on your pillow, these moments of ours will seem corrupt and most strange. They'll seem like sorcery and the antics of the mad, and this warm place might become the lost chamber of dark secrets and this might bring you pain."
"I won't go."
"Remember then that it was love," he said. "That this indeed was the school of love in which you healed your wounds, in which you learnt to speak again, aye, even to sing, and in which you were born out of the broken child as if he were no more than an eggshell, and you the angel, ascending out of him with widening, strengthening wings."
