by Anne Rice
I blinked my eyes. "How many died tonight to feed you?" I whispered. "And how can this be, and love be the very thing the world is made of? You are too beautiful to be overlooked. I'm lost. I cannot understand it. But could I, if I were to live from this moment on, a simple mortal boy, could I forget it?"
"You cannot live, Amadeo," he said sadly. "You cannot live!" His voice broke. "The poison's traveled in you too deep, too far and wide, and little draughts of my blood cannot overtake it." His face was filled with anguish. "Child, I can't save you. Close your eyes. Take my farewell kiss. There is no friendship between me and those on the far shore, but they must take what dies so naturally."
"Master, no! Master, I cannot try it alone. Master, they sent me back, and you are here, and were bound to be, and how could they not have known it?"
"Amadeo, they didn't care. The guardians of the dead are powerfully indifferent. They speak of love, but not of centuries of blundering ignorance. What stars are these that sing so beautifully when all the world is languishing in dissonance? I would you would force their hand, Amadeo." His voice all but broke in his pain. "Amadeo, what right have they to charge me with your fortune?"
I laughed a weak sad little laugh.
My fever shook me. A great wave of sickness overcame me. If I moved or spoke I would suffer a dread dry nausea that would shake me to no advantage. I'd rather die than feel this.
"Master, I knew you would give it some powerful analysis," I said. I tried not to make a bitter or sarcastic smile, but to seek the simple truth. My breath was now so hard for me. It seemed I could leave off breathing with no hardship at all. All Bianca's stern encouragements came back to me. "Master," I said, "there is no horror in this world that is without final redemption."
"Yes, but for some," he pressed, "what is the price of such salvation? Amadeo, how dare they requisition me to their obscure designs! I pray they were illusions. Don't speak anymore about their marvelous light. Don't think on it."
"No, Sir? And for whose comfort do I sweep my mind so clean? Who is dying here!"
He shook his head.
"Go ahead, wring the blood tears from your eyes," I said. "And for what death do you hope yourself, Sir, for you told me that it wasn't impossible for even you to die? Explain to me, that is, if there's time left before all the light I shall ever know winks out on me, and the Earth devours the incarnate jewel that you found wanting!"
"Never wanting," he whispered.
"Come now, where will you go, Sir? More comfort, please. How many minutes do I have?"
"I don't know," he whispered. He turned away from me and bowed his head. I had never seen him so forlorn.
"Let me see your hand," I said weakly. "There are closeted witches who in the shadows of the taverns of Venice have taught me how to read the lines in it. I'll tell you when you are like to die. Give it to me." I could scarcely see. A haze had come down over all things. But I meant my words.
"You come too late," he replied. "There are no lines left." He held up his palm for me to see. "Time has erased what men call fate. I have none."
"I am sorry that you come at all," I said. I turned away from him. I turned away against the clean cool linen of the pillow. "Would you leave me now, my beloved teacher? I would rather the company of a priest, and my old nurse if you haven't sent her home. I have loved you with my whole heart, but I don't want to die in your superior company."
Through a haze I saw the shape of him as he grew nearer to me. I felt his hands cup my face and turn it towards him. I saw the glimmer of his blue eyes, wintry flames, indistinct yet burning fiercely.
"Very well, beautiful one. This is the moment. Would you come with me, and be like me?" His voice was rich and soothing, though it was full of pain.
"Yes, always and forever yours."
"Forever to thrive in secret on the blood of the evildoer, as I thrive, and to abide with these secrets until the end of the world, if need be."
"I shall. I want it."
"To learn from me all the lessons I can give."
"Yes, all of them."
He picked me up from the bed. I tumbled against him, my head spinning and the pain in it so sharp, I cried out softly.
"Only a little while, my love, my young and tender love," he said in my ear.
I was lowered into the warm water of the bath, my clothes softly stripped away, my head laid back against the tiled edge ever so carefully. I let my arms float in the water. I felt it lap around my shoulders.
He broke up handfuls of water to bathe me. He bathed first my face and then all of me. His hard satiny fingertips moved over my face.
"Not a vagrant hair yet of your beard, and yet you have the nether endowments of a man, and must now rise above the pleasures you have so loved."
"I do, I will," I whispered. A terrible burning lashed my cheek. The cut was spread wide. I struggled to touch it. But he held my hand. It was only his blood fallen into the festering wound. And as the flesh tingled and burnt I felt it closing. He did the same with the scratch on my arm, and then with the small scratch on the back of my hand. With my eyes closed, I surrendered to the eerie paralyzing pleasure of it.
His hand touched me again, running smoothly down my chest, past my private parts, examining first one leg and then the other, searching out the smallest break or flaw in the skin, perhaps. Again the rich throbbing chills of pleasure overcame me.
I felt myself lifted from the water, warmly wrapped, and then there came that shock of moving air that meant he carried me, that he moved more swiftly than any spying eye could see. I felt the marble floor before my bare feet, and in my fever, this jolting cold was very good to me.
We stood in the studio. We had our backs to the painting on which he'd worked only nights ago, and faced another masterly canvas of immense size, on which beneath a brilliant sun and cobalt sky a great copse of trees surrounded two rushing windblown figures.
The woman was Daphne, her upstretched arms changing into the branches of the laurel, already thick with leaves, her feet grown into roots that sought the deep brown earth beneath her. And behind her, the desperate and beautiful god Apollo, a champion of golden hair and finely muscled limbs, come too late to stop her frantic magical escape from his threatening arms, her fatal metamorphosis.
"See the indifferent clouds above," my Master whispered in my ear. He pointed to the great streaks of sun he had painted with more skill than the men who daily beheld them.
He spoke words I confided to Lestat so long ago when I told him my story, words that he salvaged so mercifully from the few images of these times which I was able to give him.
I hear Marius's voice when I repeat these words, the last I was ever to hear as a mortal child:
"This is the only sun that you will ever see again. But a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has ever seen it, to snatch from the distant stars, as if you were Prometheus, an endless illumination by which to understand all things."
And I, who had beheld a far more wondrous celestial light in that realm from which I'd been turned away, longed only for him to eclipse it now forever.
9
THE MASTER'S PRIVATE SALONS: a string of rooms in which he had covered the walls with flawless copies of the works of those mortal painters he so admired-Giotto, Fra Angelico, Bellini.
We stood in the room of Benozzo Gozzoli's great work, from the Medici Chapel in Florence: The Procession of the Magi.
In the middle of the century, Gozzoli had created this vision, wrapping it around three walls of that small sacred chamber.
But my Master, with his supernatural memory and skill, had spread out the great work, rendering the whole flat from end to end on one great side of this immense and broad gallery.
Perfect as Gozzoli's original it loomed, with its hordes of beautifully dressed young Florentines, each pale face a study in thoughtful innocence, astride a cavalry of gorgeous horses following the exquisite figure of the young Lorenzo de' Medici himself, a youth with
soft curling brownish-blond hair to his shoulders, and a carnal blush in his white cheeks. With a tranquil expression he appeared to gaze indifferently at the viewer of the painting as he sat, regal in his fur- trimmed gold jacket with its long slashed sleeves, on a beautifully caparisoned white horse. No detail of the painting was unworthy of another. Even the horse's bridle and fittings were of beautifully worked gold and velvet, a match for the tight sleeves of Lorenzo's tunic and his red velvet knee-high boots.
But the enchantment of the painting arose most powerfully from the faces of the youths, as well as the few old men who made up the immense crowded procession, all with small quiet mouths and eyes drifting to the sides as if a forward glance would have broken the spell.
On and on they came past castles and mountains, winding their way to Bethlehem.
To illuminate this masterpiece, dozens of silver branching candelabra had been lighted up and down both sides of the room. The thick white candles of the purest beeswax gave off a luxurious illumination. High above a glorious wilderness of painted clouds surrounded an oval of floating saints who touched each other's outstretched hands as they looked down benevolently and contentedly upon us.
No furniture covered the rosy Carrara marble tiles of the highly polished floor. A wandering border pattern of green leafy vine marked off in great squares these tiles, but the floor was otherwise plain and deeply lustrous, and silken smooth to bare feet.
I found myself staring with the fascination of a feverish brain into this hall of glorious surfaces. The Procession of the Magi, rising as it did to fill the entire wall to the right of me, seemed to give off a soft plethora of real sounds ... the muted crunch of the hoofs of the horses, the shuffling steps of those who walked beside them, the rustling of the red-flowered shrubbery beyond them and even the distant cries of the hunters who, with their lean hounds, streaked along the mountain paths beyond.
My Master stood in the very center of the hall. He had taken off his familiar red velvet. He wore only an open robe of gold tissue, with long bell sleeves down to his wrists, his hem just skirting his bare white feet.
His hair seemed to make for him a halo of yellow brilliance, hanging softly to his shoulders.
I wore a gown of the same sheerness and simplicity.
"Come, Amadeo," he said.
I was weak, thirsting for water, barely able to stand. He knew this however, and no excuse seemed appropriate. I took my faltering steps one after another until I reached his outstretched arms.
His hands slid about the back of my head.
He bent his lips. A sense of dreadful awesome finality swept over me.
"You will die now to be with me in life eternal," he whispered in my ear. "Never for a moment must you really fear. I will hold your heart safe in my hands."
His teeth cut into me, deeply, cruelly with the precision of twin daggers, and I heard my heart thud in my ears. My very bowels contracted, and my stomach was knotted in pain. Yet a savage pleasure swept through all my veins, a pleasure which coursed towards the wounds in my neck. I could feel my blood rush towards my Master, towards his thirst and my inevitable death.
Even my hands were transfixed with vibrant sensation. Indeed, I seemed suddenly to be but a puppet map of circuitry, all of it aglow, as with a low, obvious and deliberate sound, my Master drank my life's blood. The sound of his heart, slow, steady, a deep reverberating pounding, filled my ears.
The pain in my intestines was alchemized to a soft sheer rapture; my body lost all weight, all knowledge of itself in space. The throb of his heart was within me. My hands felt the long satin locks of his hair, but I did not hold to them. I floated, supported only by the insistent heartbeat and thrilling current of all my swiftly flowing blood.
"I die now," I whispered. This ecstasy could not endure.
Abruptly the world died.
I stood alone on the desolate and windy shore of the sea.
It was the land to which I'd journeyed before, but how different it was now, devoid of its shining sun and abundant flowers. The priests were there, but their robes were dusty and dark and reeked of the earth. I knew these priests, I knew them well. I knew their names. I knew their narrow bearded faces, their thin greasy hair and the black felt hats that they wore. I knew the dirt in their fingernails, and I knew the hungry hollow of their sunken gleaming eyes.
They beckoned for me to come.
Ah, yes, back to where I belonged. We climbed higher and higher until we stood on the bluff of the glass city, and it lay to the far left of us, and how forlorn and empty it was.
All the molten energy which had lighted its multitudinous and translucent towers was now dead and gone, turned off at the source. Nothing remained of the blazing colors except a deep dull residue of tints beneath the featureless span of hopeless gray sky. Oh, sad, sad, to see the glass city without its magic fire.
A chorus of sounds rose from it, a tinkling, as of glass dully striking glass. There was no music in it. There was only a bleary luminous despair.
"Walk on, Andrei," said one of the priests to me. His soiled hand with its thin bits of caked mud touched me and pulled at me, hurting my fingers. I looked down to see that my fingers were thin and luridly white. My knuckles shone as though the flesh had already been stripped away, but it had not.
All my skin merely cleaved to me, hungry and loose as their skin.
Before us came the water of the river, filled with ice sloughs and great tangles of blackened driftwood, covering the flatlands with a murky lake. We had to walk through it, and its coldness hurt us. Yet on we went, the four of us, the three priest guides and me. Above loomed the once golden domes of Kiev. It was our Santa Sofia, standing still after the horrid massacres and conflagrations of the Mongols who had laid waste our city and all her riches and all her wicked and worldly women and men.
"Come, Andrei."
I knew this doorway. It was to the Monastery of the Caves. Only candles illuminated these catacombs, and the smell of the earth overpowered all, even the stench of dried sweat on soiled and diseased flesh.
In my hands, I held the rough wooden handle of a small shovel. I dug into the heap of earth. I opened up the soft wall of rubble, until my eyes fell on a man not dead but dreaming as the dirt covered his face.
"Still alive, Brother?" I whispered, to this soul buried up to his neck.
"Still alive, Brother Andrei, give me only what will sustain me," said the cracked lips. The white eyelids were never lifted. "Give me only that much, so that our Lord and Savior, Christ Himself, will choose the time that I am to come home."
"Oh, Brother, how courageous you are," I said. I put a jug of water to his lips. The mud streaked them as he drank. His head rested back in soft rubble.
"And you, child," he said with labored breaths, turning ever so slightly from the proffered jug, "when will you have the strength to choose your earthen cell among us, your grave, and wait for Christ to come?"
"Soon, I pray, Brother," I answered. I stepped back. I lifted the shovel.
I dug into the next cell, and soon a dreadful unmistakable stench assailed me. The priest beside me stayed my hand.
"Our Good Brother Joseph is finally with the Lord," he said. "That's it, uncover his face so that we may see for ourselves that he died at peace."
The stench grew thicker. Only dead human beings reek this strongly. It's the smell of desolate graves and carts coming from those districts where the plague is at its worst. I feared I would be sick. But I continued to dig, until at last we uncovered the dead man's head. Bald, a skull encased in shrunken skin.
Prayers rose from the brothers behind me. "Close it up, Andrei."
"When will you have the courage, Brother? Only God can tell you when-."
"The courage to what!" I know this booming voice, this big-shouldered man who barrels his way down the catacomb. No mistaking his auburn hair and beard, his leather jerkin and his weapons hung on his leather belt.
"This is what you do with my son, the ikon pai
nter!"
He grabbed me by the shoulder, as he'd done a thousand times, with the same huge paw of a hand that had beaten me senseless.
"Let go of me, please, you impossible and ignorant ox," I whispered. "We're in the house of God."
He dragged me so that I fell on my knees. My robe was tearing, black cloth ripping.
"Father, stop it and go away," I said.
"Deep in these pits to bury a boy who can paint with the skill of the angels!"
"Brother Ivan, stop your shouting. It's for God to decide what each of us will do."
The priests ran behind me. I was dragged into the workroom. Icons in rows hung from the ceiling, covering all of the far wall. My Father flung me down in the chair at the large heavy table. He lifted the iron candlestick with its fluttering, protesting candle to light all the tapers around.
The illumination made a fire on his huge beard. Long gray hairs sprung from his thick eyebrows, combed upwards, diabolical.
"You behave like the village idiot, Father," I whispered. "It's a wonder I'm not a slobbering idiot beggar myself."
"Shut up, Andrei. Nobody's taught you any manners here, that's clear enough. You need me to beat you."
He slammed his fist into the side of my head. My ear went numb.
"I thought I'd beaten you enough before I brought you here, but not so," he said. He smacked me again.
"Desecration!" cried the priest, looming above me. "The boy's consecrated to God."
"Consecrated to a pack of lunatics," said my Father. He took a packet out of his coat. "Your eggs, Brothers!" he said with contempt.
He lay back the soft leather and removed an egg. "Paint, Andrei. Paint to remind these lunatics that you have the gift from God Himself."
"And God Himself it is who paints the picture," cried the priest, the eldest of them, whose sticky gray hair was so soiled in time with oil that it was near black. He pushed his way between my chair and my Father.
My Father set down all but one egg. Leaning over a small earthen bowl on the table, he broke the shell of the egg, carefully gathering the yoke in one side, and letting all the rest spill into his leather cloth. "There, there, pure yoke, Andrei." He sighed, and then threw the broken shell on the floor.
