by Anne Rice
It seemed an audience of little angels to watch and listen as Marius spoke, so many, many tiny faces peering indifferently forth from the silver, quite immune to the falling rivulets of pure, melted wax.
"I cannot live without this beauty," I said suddenly, though I had meant to wait. "I cannot endure without it. Oh, God, you have shown me Hell and it lies behind me, surely in the land where I was born."
He heard my little prayer, my little confession, my desperate plea.
"If Christ is the Lord," he said, returning to his point, returning us both to the lesson, "if Christ is the Lord, then what a beautiful miracle it is, this Christian mystery-." His eyes filmed with tears. "That the Lord Himself should come to Earth and clothe Himself in flesh the better to know us and to comprehend us. Oh, what God, ever made in the image of Man by His fancy, was ever better than one who would become Flesh? Yes, I would say to you, yes, your Christ, their Christ, the Christ even of the Monks of Kiev, He is the Lord! Only mark forever the lies they tell in His Name, and the deeds they do. For Savonarola called on His Name when he praised a foreign enemy bearing down on Florence, and those who burnt Savonarola as a false prophet, they too, as they lit the faggots beneath his dangling body, they too called on Christ the Lord."
I was overcome with tears.
He sat in silence, respecting me perhaps, or only collecting his thoughts. Then he dipped his pen again and wrote for a long time, much faster than men do, but deftly and gracefully, and never marking out a word.
At last, he set down the pen. He looked at me and he smiled.
"I set out to show you things, and it's never as I plan. I wanted you tonight to see the dangers in this power of flight, that we can too easily transport ourselves to other places, and that this feeling of slipping in and out so easily is a deception of which we must beware.
But look, how differently it has all gone."
I didn't answer him.
"I wanted you," he said, "to be a little afraid."
"Master," I said, wiping my nose with the back of my hand, "count on me to be properly frightened when the time comes. I'll have this power, I know it. I can feel it now. And for now, I think it's splendid, and because of it, this power, one dark thought falls over my heart."
"What is that?" he asked in the kindest way. "You know, I think your angelic face is no more fit for sad things than those faces painted by Fra Angelico. What's this shadow I see? What is this dark thought?"
"Take me back there, Master," I said. I trembled, yet I said it. "Let us use your power to cover miles and miles of Europe. Let us go north.
Take me back to see that cruel land that has become a Purgatorio in my imagination. Take me back to Kiev."
He was slow in giving his answer.
The morning was coming. He gathered up his cloak and robe, rose from the chair and took me with him up the stairs to the roof.
We could see the distant already paling waters of the Adriatic, twinkling under the moon and stars, beyond the familiar forest of the masts of the ships. Tiny lights flickered on the distant islands. The wind was mild and full of salt and sea freshness, and a particular deliciousness that comes only when one has lost all fear of the sea.
"Yours is a brave request, Amadeo. If you really wish it, tomorrow night we'll begin the journey."
"Have you ever traveled so far before?"
"In miles, in space, yes, many times," he said. "But in another's quest for understanding? No, never so very far."
He embraced me and took me to the palazzo where our tomb lay hidden.
I was cold all over by the time we reached the soiled stone stairway, where so many of the poor slept. We picked our way among them, until we reached the entrance to the cellar.
"Light the torch for me, Sir," I said. "I am shivering. I want to see the gold around us, if I may."
"There, you have it," he said. We stood in our crypt with the two ornate sarcophagi before us. I lay my hand on the lid of the one which was mine, and quite suddenly there came over me another presentiment, that all I loved would endure for a very brief time.
Marius must have seen this hesitation. He passed his right hand through the very fire of the torch, and touched his warmed fingers to my cheek. Then he kissed me where this warmth hovered, and his kiss was warm.
11
IT TOOK us four nights to reach Kiev. Only in the early hours before dawn did we hunt. We made our graves in actual burial places, the dungeon vaults of old neglected castles and in the sepulchers beneath forlorn and ruined churches where the profane were wont now to stash their livestock and their hay.
There are tales I could tell of this journey, of those brave fortresses we roamed near morning, of those wild mountain villages where we found the evildoer in his rude den.
Naturally, Marius saw lessons in all this, teaching me how easy it was to find hiding places and approving the speed with which I moved through the dense forest, and had no fear of the scattered primitive settlements which we visited on account of my thirst. He praised me that I didn't shrink from the dark dusty nests of bones in which we lay down by day, reminding me that these burial places, having already been pillaged, were the least likely for men to trouble even in the light of the sun.
Our fancy Venetian clothes were soon streaked with dirt, but we were provided with thick fur-lined cloaks for the journey, and these covered all. Even in this Marius saw a lesson, that we must remember what fragile and meaningless protection our garments provide. Mortal men forget how to wear their garments lightly and that they are a mere covering for the body and no more. Vampires must never forget it, for we are far less dependent upon our raiment than men.
By the last morning before our arrival in Kiev, I knew the rocky northern woods only too well. The dread winter of the north was all around us. We had come upon one of the most intriguing of all my memories: the presence of snow.
"It no longer hurts me to hold it," I said, gathering the soft delicious cold snow in my hands and pressing it to my face. "It no longer chills me to see it, and indeed how beautiful it is, covering the poorest of towns and hovels with its blanket. Master, look, look how it throws back the light even of the weakest stars."
We were on the edge of the land that men call the Golden Horde- the southern steppes of Russia, which for two hundred years, since the conquest of Genghis Khan, had been too dangerous for the farmer, and often the death of the army or the knight.
Kiev Rus had once included this fertile and beautiful prairie, stretching far to the East, almost to Europe, as well as south of the city of Kiev, where I had been born.
"The final stretch will be nothing," my Master told me. "We make it tomorrow night so that you will be rested and fresh when you catch the first sight of home."
As we stood on a rocky crag looking out at the wild grass, flowing in the winter wind beneath us, for the first time in the nights since I'd become a vampire, I felt a terrible longing for the sun. I wanted to see this land by the light of the sun. I didn't dare confess it to my Master. After all, how many blessings can a being want?
On the final night, I awoke just after sunset. We had found a hiding place beneath the floor of a church in a village where no one lived now at all. The horrid Mongol hordes, which had destroyed my homeland over and over again, had long ago burnt this town to nothing, or so Marius had told me, and this church did not even possess a roof. There had been no one left here to pull the stones of the floor away for profit or building, and so we had gone down a forgotten stairway to lie with monks buried here some thousand years ago.
Rising from the grave, I saw high above a rectangle of sky where my Master had removed a marble paving block, an inscribed tombstone no doubt, for me to make my ascent. I propelled myself upwards. That is, I bent my knees and, using all my strength, shot upwards, as if I could fly, and passed through this opening to land on my feet.
Marius, who invariably rose before me, was sitting nearby. He immediately gave out the expected appreciative laugh.
"Have you been saving that little trick for such a moment?" he said.
I was dazed by the snow, as I looked around me. How afraid I was, merely looking at the frozen pines that had everywhere sprung up on the ruins of the village. I could scarce speak.
"No," I managed to say. "I didn't know I could do it. I don't know how high I can leap, or how much strength I have. You're pleased, however?"
"Yes, why shouldn't I be? I want you to be so strong that no one can ever hurt you."
"And who would, Master? We travel the world, but who even knows when we go and when we come?"
"There are others, Amadeo. And there are others here. I can hear them if I want to, but there is a good reason for not hearing them."
I understood. "You open your mind to hear them, and they know you are there?"
"Yes, clever one. Are you ready now to go home?"
I closed my eyes. I made the Sign of the Cross in our old way, touching the right shoulder before the left. I thought of my Father. We were in the wild fields and he stood high in his stirrups with his giant bow, the bow only he could bend, like unto the mythical Ulysses, shooting arrow after arrow at the raiders who thundered down on us, riding as if he were one of the Turks or Tatars himself, so great was his skill. Arrow after arrow, drawn out with a swift snap from the pouch on his back, went into the bow and was shot across the high blowing grass even as his horse galloped at full speed. His red beard was blowing in the fierce wind, and the sky was so blue, so richly blue that-.
I broke off this prayer and almost lost my balance. My Master held me.
"Pray, you'll be finished with all this very quickly," he said.
"Give me your kisses," I said, "give me your love, give me your arms as you always have, I need them. Give me your guidance. But give me your arms, yes. Let me rest my head against you. I need you, yes. Yes, I want it to be quick and done, and all its lessons in here, in my mind, to be taken back home."
He smiled. "Home is Venice now? You've made the decision so soon?"
"Yes, I know it even at this moment. What lies beyond is the birth land, and that's not always home. Shall we go?"
Gathering me in his arms, he took to the air. I shut my eyes, even forfeiting my last glimpse of the motionless stars. I seemed to sleep against him, dreamlessly and fearlessly.
Then he set me down on my feet.
At once I knew this great dark hill, and the leafless oak forest with its frozen black trunks and skeletal branches. I could see the gleaming strip of the Dnieper River far below. My heart scudded inside me. I looked about for the bleak towers of the high city, the city we called Vladimir's City, which was old Kiev.
Piles of rubble which had once been city walls were only yards from where I stood.
I led the way, easily climbing over them and wandering among the ruined churches, churches which had been of legendary splendor when Batu Khan had burnt the city in the year 1240.
I had grown up among this jungle of ancient churches and broken monasteries, often hurrying to hear Mass in our Cathedral of Santa Sofia, one of the few monuments which the Mongols had spared. In its day, it had been a spectacle of golden domes, dominating all those of the other churches, and was rumored to be more grand than its namesake in faraway Constantinople, being larger and packed with treasures.
What I had known was a stately remnant, a wounded shell.
I didn't want to enter the church now. It was enough to see it from the outside, because I knew now, from my happy years in Venice, just what the glory of this church had once been. I understood from the splendid Byzantine mosaics and paintings of San Marco, and from the old Byzantine church on the Venetian island of Torcello what glory had once been here for all to see. When I thought of the lively crowds of Venice, her students, scholars, lawyers, merchants, I could paint a dense vitality on this bleak and wasted scene.
The snow was deep and thick, and few Russians were out in it this frigid early evening. So we had it to ourselves, walking through it with ease, not having to pick our way as mortals would.
We came to a long stretch of ruined battlement, a shapeless guardrail now beneath the snow, and standing there, I looked down on the lower city, the city we called Podil, the only real city of Kiev that remained, the city where in a rough timber and clay house only a few yards from the river, I had grown up. I looked down on deep-pitched roofs, their thatch covered in cleansing snow, their chimneys smoking, and on narrow crooked snow-filled streets. A great grid of such houses and other buildings had long ago formed against the river and managed to survive fire after fire and even the worst Tatar raids.
It was a town made up of traders and merchants and craftsmen, all bound to the river and the treasures she brought from the Orient, and the money some would pay for the goods she took south into the European world.
My Father, the indomitable hunter, had traded bear skins which he himself had brought back singlehanded from the interior of the great forest which spread towards the north. Fox, martin, beaver, sheep, all these skins he had dealt in, so great was his strength and luck, that no man or woman of our household ever sold their handiwork or wanted for food. If we starved, and we had starved, it was because the winter ate the food, and the meat was gone, and there was nothing for my Father's gold to buy.
I caught the stench of Podil as I stood on the battlements of Vladimir's City. I caught the stench of rotting fish, and livestock, of soiled flesh, and river mud.
I pulled my fur cloak around me, blowing the snow off the fur when it came up to my lips, and I looked back up at the dark domes of the Cathedral against the sky.
"Let's walk on, let's go past the castle of the Voievoda," I said. "You see that wooden building, you would never call it a palace or a castle in fair Italy. That is a castle here."
Marius nodded. He made a little soothing gesture. I owed him no explanation of this alien place from which I'd come.
The Voievoda was our ruler, and in my time it had been Prince Michael of Lithuania. I didn't know who it would be now.
I surprised myself that I used the proper word for him. In my deathly dream vision, I had no consciousness of language, and the strange word for ruler, "voievoda," had never passed my lips. But I had seen him clearly then in his round black far hat, his dark thick velvet tunic and his felt boots.
I led the way.
We approached the squat building, which seemed more a fortress than anything else, built as it was out of such enormous logs. Its walls had a graceful slope as they ascended; its many towers had four-tiered roofs. I could see its central roof, a great five-sided wooden dome of sorts, in stark outline against the starry sky. Torches blazed at its huge doorways and along the outer walls of its enclosures. All its windows were sealed against the winter and the night.
Time was when I thought it was the grandest building yet standing in Christendom.
It was no task at all to dazzle the guards with a few swift soft words and darting movements, to pass them and to enter the castle itself.
We found our way in by means of a rear storage room, and quietly made our way to a vantage point where we could spy upon the small crowd of fur-trimmed nobles or lords who clustered in the Great Room, beneath the bare beams of a wooden ceiling around the roaring fire.
On a great sprawling mass of brilliant Turkey rugs they sat, in huge Russian chairs whose geometrical carvings were no mystery to my eye.
They drank from gold goblets, the wine being provided by two leather- clad serving boys, and their long belted robes were the colors of blue and red and gold as bright as the many designs in the rugs.
European tapestries covered the rudely stuccoed walls. Same old scenes of the hunt in the never-ending woodlands of France or England or Tuscany. On a long board set with blazing candles sat a simple meal of joints and fowl.
So cold was the room that these lords wore their Russian far hats.
How exotic it had looked to me in boyhood when I'd been brought with my Father to stand before Prince Michael, wh
o was eternally grateful for my Father's feats of bravery in bringing down delicious game in the wild fields, or delivering bundles of valuables to the allies of Prince Michael in the Lithuanian forts to the west.
But these were Europeans. I had never respected them.
My Father had taught me too well that they were but lackeys of the Khan, paying for the right to rule us.
"No one goes up against those thieves," my Father had said. "So let them sing their songs of honor and valor. It means nothing. You listen to the songs that I sing."
And my Father could sing some songs.
For all his stamina in the saddle, for all his dexterity with the bow and arrow, and his blunt brute force with the broadsword, he had the ability with his long fingers to pluck out music on the strings of an old harp and sing with cleverness the narrative songs of the ancient times when Kiev had been a great capital, her churches rivaling those of Byzantium, her riches the wonder of all the world.
Within a moment, I was ready to go. I took one last memorial glance at these men, huddled as they were over their golden wine cups, their big fur-trimmed boots resting on fancy Turkish foot rests, their shoulders hunkered, their shadows crowding the walls. And then, without their ever having known we were there, we slipped away.
It was time now to go to the other hilltop city, the Pechersk, under which lay the many catacombs of the Monastery of the Caves.
I trembled at the mere thought of it. It seemed the mouth of the Monastery would swallow me and I should burrow through the moist Mother Earth, forever seeking the light of the stars, never to find my way out.
