8
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 painter!"
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. Ikons 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.
He picked up the small pitcher and poured the water into the yoke.
"You mix it, mix your colors and work. Remind these-."
"He works when God calls him to work," declared the Elder, "and when God calls him to bury himself within the Earth, to live the life of the reclusive, the hermit, then will he do that."
"Like Hell," said my Father. "Prince Michael himself has asked for an Ikon of the Virgin. Andrei, paint! Paint three for me that I may give the Prince the Ikon for which he asks, and take the others to the distant castle of his cousin, Prince Feodor, as he has asked."
"That castle's destroyed, Father," I said contemptuously. "Feodor and all his men were massacred by the wild tribes. You'll find nothing out there in the wild lands, nothing but stones. Father, you know this as well as I do. We've ridden plenty far enough to see for ourselves."
"We'll go if the Prince wants us to go," said my Father, "and we'll leave the ikon in the branches of the nearest tree to where his brother died."
"Vanity and madness," said the Elder. Other priests came into the room. There was much shouting.
"Speak clearly to me and stop the poetry!" cried my Father. "Let my boy paint. Andrei, mix your colors. Say your prayers, but begin."
"Father, you humiliate me. I despise you. I'm ashamed that I'm your son. I'm not your son. I won't be your son. Shut your filthy mouth or I'll paint nothing."
"Ah, that's my sweet boy, with the honey rolling off his tongue, and the bees that left it there left their sting too."
Again, he struck me. This time I became dizzy, but I refused to lift my hands to my head. My ear throbbed.
"Proud of yourself, Ivan the Idiot!" I said. "How can I paint when I can't see or even sit in the chair?"
The priests shouted. They argued amongst one another.
I tried to focus on the small row of earthen jars ready for the yoke and the water. Finally I began to mix the yoke and the water. Best to work and shut them all out. I could hear my Father laugh with satisfaction.
"Now, show them, show them what they mean to wall up alive in a lot of mud."
"For the love of God," said the Elder.
"For the love of stupid idiots," said my Father. "It isn't enough to have a great painter. You have to have a saint."
"You do not know what your son is. It was God who guided you to bring him here."
"It was money," said my Father. Gasps rose from the priests.
"Don't lie to them," I said under my breath. "You know damned good and well it was pride."
"Yes, pride," said my Father, "that my son could paint the Face of Christ or His Blessed Mother like a Master! And you, to whom I commit this genius, are too ignorant to see it."
I began to grind the pigments I needed, the soft brownish-red powder, and then to mix it over and over with the yoke and water until every tiny fragment of pigment was broken up and the paint was smooth and perfectly thin and clear. On to the yellow, and then to the red.
They fought over me. My Father lifted his fist to the Elder, but I didn't bother to look up. He wouldn't dare. He kicked my leg in his desperation, sending a cramp through my muscle, but I said nothing. I went on mixing the paint.
One of the priests had come round to my left, and he slipped a clean whitewashed panel of wood in front of me, primed and ready for the holy image.
At last I was ready. I bowed my head. I made the Sign of the Cross in our way, touching my right shoulder first, not my left.
"Dear God, give me the power, give me the vision, give my hands the tutelage which only your love can give!" At once I had the brush with no consciousness of having picked it up, and the brush began to race, tracing out the oval of the Virgin's face, and then the sloping lines of her shoulders and then the outline of her folded hands.
Now when their gasps came, they were tributes to the painting. My Father laughed in gloating satisfaction.
"Ah, my Andrei, my sharp-tongued, sarcastic, nasty ungrateful little genius of God."
"Thank you, Father," I whispered bitingly, right from the middle of my trancelike concentration, as I myself watched the work of the brush in awe. There her hair, cleaving close to the scalp and parted in the middle. I needed no instrument to make the outline of her halo perfectly round.
The priests held the clean brushes for me. One held a clean rag in his hands. I snatched up a brush for the red color which I then mixed with white paste, until it was the appropriate color of flesh.
"Isn't that a miracle!"
"That's just the point," said the Elder between clenched teeth. "It's a miracle, Brother Ivan, and he will do what God wills."
"He won't wall himself up in here, damn you, not as long as I'm alive. He's coming with me into the wild lands."
I burst out laughing. "Father," I said sneering at him. "My place is here."
"He's the best shot in the family, and he's coming with me into the wild lands," said my Father to the others, who had flown into a flurry of protests and negations all around.
"Why do you give Our Blessed Mother that tear in her eye, Brother Andrei?"
"It's God who gives her the tear," said one of the others.
"It is the Mother of All Sorrows. Ah, see the beautiful folds of her cloak."
"Ah, look, the Christ child!" said my Father, and even his face was reverent. "Ah, poor little baby God, soon to be crucified and die!" His voice was for once subdued and almost tender. "Ah, Andrei, what a gift. Oh, but look, look at the child's eyes and his little hand, at the flesh of his thumb, his little hand."
"Even you are touched with the light of Christ," said the Elder. "Even such a stupid violent man as you, Brother Ivan."
The priests pressed in close around me in a circle. My Father held out a palmful of small twinkling jewels. "For the halos, Andrei. Work fast, Prince Michael has ordained that we go."
"Madness, I tell you!" All voices were set to babbling at once. My Father turned and raised his fist.
I looked up, reached for a fresh, clean panel of wood. My forehead was wet with sweat. I worked on and on.
I had done three ikons.
I felt such happiness, such pure happiness. It was sweet to be so warm in it, so aware of it, and I knew, though I said nothing, that my Father had made it possible, my Father, so cheerful and ruddy-cheeked and overpowering with his big shoulders and his glistening face, this man I was supposed to hate.
The Sorrowful Mother with her Child, and the napkin for her tears, and the Christ Himself. Weary, bleary-eyed, I sat back. The place was intolerably cold. Oh, if there were only a little fire. And my hand, my left hand was cramped from the cold. Only my right hand was all right because of the pace at which I had done my work. I wanted to suck the fingers of my left hand, but this would not do, not here at this moment, when all gathered to coo over the ikons.
"Masterly. The Work of God."
An awful sense of time came over me, that I had traveled far from this moment, far from this the Monastery of the Caves to which I had vowed my life, far from the priests who were my brethren, far from my cursing, stupid Father, who was in spite of his ignorance so very proud.
Tears flowed from his eyes. "My son," he said. He clutched my shoulder proudly. He was beautiful in his own way, such a fine strong man, afraid of nothing, a prince himself when among his horses and his dogs and his followers, of which I, his son, had been one.
"Let me alone, you thick-skulled oaf," I said. I smiled up at him to farther outrage him. He laughed. He was too happy, too proud, to be provoked.
"Look what my son has done." His voice had a telltale thickness to it. He was going to cry. And he wasn't even drunk.
"Not by human hands," said the priest.
"No, naturally not!" boomed my Father's scornful voice. "Just by my son Andrei's hands, that's all."
A silken voice said in my ear, "Would you place the jewels into the halos yourself, Brother Andrei, or shall I perform this task?"
Behold, it was done, the paste applied, the stones set, five in the Ikon of Christ. The brush was in my hand again to stroke the brown hair of the Lord God, which was parted in the middle and brought back behind His ears, with only part of it to show on either side of His neck. The stylus appeared in my hand to thicken and darken the black letters on the open book which Christ held in His left hand. The Lord God stared, serious and severe, from the panel, His mouth red and straight beneath the horns of His brown mustache.
"Come now, the Prince is here, the Prince has come."
Outside the entrance of the Monastery, the snow fell in cruel gusts. The priests helped me with my leather vest, my jacket of shearling. They buckled my belt. It was good to smell this leather again, to breathe the fresh cold air. My Father had my sword. It was heavy, old, taken from his long-ago fighting against the Teutonic Knights in lands far to the east, the jewels long ago chipped out of its handle, but a fine, fine battle sword.
Through the snowy mist a figure appeared, on horseback. It was Prince Michael himself, in his fur hat and fur-lined cape and gloves, the great Lord who ruled Kiev for our Roman Catholic conquerors, whose faith we would not accept but who let us keep to our own. He was decked out in foreign velvet and gold, a fancy figure fit for royal Lithuanian courts, of which we heard fantastical tales. How did he endure Kiev, the ruined city?
The horse reared up on its hind legs. My Father ran to catch the reins, and threaten the animal as he threatened me.
The Ikon for Prince Feodor was wrapped thickly in wool for me to carry.
I placed my hand on the hilt of my sword.
"Ah, you will not take him on this Godless mission," cried the Elder. "Prince Michael, Your Excellency, our mighty ruler, tell this Godless man that he can not take our Andrei."
I saw the face of the Prince through the snow, square and strong, with gray eyebrows and beard and huge hard blue eyes. "Let him go, Father," he cried out to the priest. "The boy has hunted with Ivan since he was four years old. Never has anyone provided such bounty for my table, and for yours, Father. Let him go."
The horse danced backwards. My Father pulled down on the reins. Prince Michael blew the snow from off his lips.
Our horses were led to the fore, my Father's powerful stallion with the gracefully curved neck and the shorter gelding which had been mine before I had come to the Monastery of the Caves.
"I'll be back, Father," I said to the Elder. "Give me your blessing. What can I do against my gentle, sweet-tempered and infinitely pious Father when Prince Michael himself commands?"
"Oh, shut your lousy little mouth," said my Father. "You think I want to listen to this all the way to the Castle of Prince Feodor?"
"You'll hear it all the way to Hell!" declared the Elder. "You take my finest novice to his death."
"Novice, novice to a hole in the dirt! You take the hands that have painted these marvels-."
"God painted them," I said in a biting whisper, "and you know it, Father. Will you please stop making a display of your Godlessness and belligerence."
I was on the back of my horse. The Ikon was strapped in wool to my chest.
"I don't believe my brother Feodor is dead!" the Prince said, trying to control his mount, to bring it in line with that of my Father. "Perhaps these travelers saw some other ruin, some old-."
"Nothing survives in the grasslands now," pleaded the Elder. "Prince, don't take Andrei. Don't take him."
The priest ran alongside of my horse. "Andrei, you will find nothing; you will find only the wild blowing grass and the trees. Put the Ikon in the branches of a tree. Place it for the will of God, so that when it is found by the Tatars they will know His Divine power. Place it there for the pagans. And come home."
The snow came down so fierce and thick I couldn't see his face.
I looked up at the stripped and barren domes of our Cathedral, that remnant of Byzantine glory left to us by Mongol invaders, who now exacted their greedy tribute through our Catholic Prince. How bleak and desolate was this, my homeland. I closed my eyes and longed for the mud cubicle of the cave, for the smell of the earth close around me, for the dreams of God and His Goodness which would come to me, once I was half-entombed.
Come back to me, Amadeo. Come back. Do not let your heart stop!
I spun around. "Who calls to me?" The thick white veil of the snow broke to reveal the distant glass city, black and glimmering as if heated by hellish fires. Smoke rose to feed the ominous clouds of the darkening sky. I rode towards the glass city.
"Andrei!" This was my Father's voice behind me.
Come back to me, Amadeo. Don V let your heart stop!
The Ikon fell from my left arm as I struggled to bridle my mount. The wool had come undone. On and on we rode. The Ikon fell downhill beside us, turning over and over, corner bouncing upon corner, as it tumbled, the swaddling of wool falling loose. I saw the shimmering face of Christ.
Strong arms caught me, pulled me upwards as if from a whirlwind. "Let me go!" I protested. I looked back. Against the frozen earth lay the Ikon, and the staring, questioning eyes of the Christ.
Firm fingers pressed my face on either side. I blinked and opened my eyes. The room was filled with warmth and light. There loomed the familiar face of my Master right above me, his blue eyes shot with blood. "Drink, Amadeo," he said. "Drink from me."
My head fell forward against his throat. The blood fount had started; it bubbled out of his vein, flowing thickly down onto the neck of his golden tissue robe. I closed my mouth over it. I lapped at it.
I let out a cry as the blood inflamed me.
"Draw it from me, Amadeo. Draw it hard!"
My mouth filled with blood. My lips closed against his silky white flesh so that not a drop would be lost. Deeply I swallowed. In a dim flash I saw my Father riding through the grasslands, a powerful leather-clad figure, his sword tied firmly to his belt, his leg crooked, his cracked and worn brown boot firmly in the stirrup. He turned to the left, rising and falling gracefully and perfectly with the huge strides of his white horse.
"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 dressed 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 fur 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 pestilential 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."
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 lie 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.
