" 'But the girls who prepared me, and the boy -- they spoke as if there had been others.’
" 'She plays with others, and then she destroys them. The servants? What do they know? They're told that the postulant is being prepared for great gifts, and then fails. That's all. Now the girl, I don't know about her. She's ignorant and greedy. But there is some spark in the boy. Perhaps Petronia will bring him to us.’
" 'And has it been well done?' I asked.
" 'Oh, yes, of course it's been well done,' he said, almost as if I'd insulted him with my question, 'not without much more cursing and kicking I think than was ever necessary, but in the main well done; I saw to it that it was well done, though I have more to tell you.’
"He made a little gesture with the coffee, playing with it, as though he liked to see it move in the cup and savor the aroma of it, which was dark and thick and alien to me. Then he spoke.
" 'I'm watching you, of course,' he said. 'When you drink from the evil ones you have to revel in it, not cringe from the evil. It's your chance to be evil as the one you kill. Follow your victim's evil as you empty his soul. Make it your adventure into crimes you yourself would never wantonly commit. When you've finished, you take your soul back with what you've learned and you're clean again.’
" 'I feel anything but clean,' I said.
" 'Then feel powerful,' he said. 'Disease can't touch you. Neither can age. Any wound you receive will heal. Cut your hair and it will grow back within the space of a night. Forever you will look just as you are now, my Caravaggio Christ. Remember, only fire and the sun can harm you.’
"I listened intently as he continued.
" 'Fire you must avoid at all costs,' he said, 'for your blood will burn, and terrible suffering may result, which you may survive, healing slowly over centuries. As for the sun -- one day of it cannot kill me. But in these early years, either can destroy you. Don't yield to the desire for death. It claims too many of the young in their impetuosity and grand emotions.’
"I smiled. I knew what he meant -- grand emotions.
" 'You needn't find a crypt every day of your life,' he said. 'You're strong from me and Petronia combined, and even the Old Man's blood has been good for you. A room that is shut up and sealed away from the sun, a hiding place, that will suffice, but eventually you should choose a refuge to which you can retire, a place that is yours where no one can find you. Remember when you do this that you are some ten times stronger than mortals now.’
" 'Ten times,' I marveled.
" 'Oh, yes,' he said. 'When you took the pretty bride you broke her neck in the final moments. You weren't even conscious of it. It was the same with the killer in the alley. You snapped his spine. You have to learn to be careful.’
" 'I'm drenched with murder,' I said. I looked at my hands. I knew I would never see Mona again, because I knew that a witch like Mona would see blood all over them.
" 'You feed from mortals now,' said Arion in his usual graceful manner. 'It's your nature. Blood Hunters have existed since the beginning of time, and probably before that. Old myths are told and written that we once had among us parents from whom the primal fount poured forth to us all, and that whatever happened to them happened to us and so they must be kept forever inviolate. But I'll give you the books to read which tell these tales. . .’
"He paused, looking around the café. I wondered what he saw. I saw blood in every face. I heard blood in every voice. At will I could receive the thoughts of any mind like so much static. He went on.
" 'Suffice it to say that the Mother rose from her slumber of thousands of years and on a rampage destroyed many of her children. It was at random that she moved. And I thank the gods that she passed over us. I could have done nothing against her power, because she had the Mind Gift -- that is, to destroy by will -- and the Fire Gift -- that is, to burn by will -- and she burnt those Blood Hunters whom she found, and they numbered in the hundreds.
" 'At last she herself was destroyed, and the sacred nucleus -- the primal blood from which we all come -- was passed into another, otherwise we would all have withered as so many flowers upon a dead vine. But that root has been preserved without interruption.’
" 'This one, this one who has the nucleus or the root, is he very old?’
" 'It's a woman,' he replied, 'and she is ancient, as old as the Mother was, and she has no desire to rule, only to keep the root safe and to live as a witness to time, in a place apart from the world and its worries. With that kind of age comes a peace from the blood. She no longer needs to drink it.’
" 'When will that peace come for me?' I asked.
"He laughed softly, gently. 'Not for thousands of years,' he said. 'Though with the blood I gave you, you can go many nights with just the Little Drink or even nothing. You'll suffer but you won't become weak unto dying. That's the trick, remember. Don't become so weak that you can't hunt. That you must never do. Promise me.’
" 'It matters to you what happens to me?’
" 'Of course,' he said. 'I wouldn't be with you here if it didn't. I gave you my blood, did I not?' He laughed but it was kindly. 'You don't know what a gift it was, my blood. I've lived for so long. In the parlance of our kind, I'm a Child of the Millennia, and my blood is considered too strong for the young and unwise, but I hold you to be wise and so I gave it. Live up to it.’
" 'What do you expect of me now? I know that I'm to kill those who are evil and no others, yes, and the Little Drink must be done with stealth and grace, but what else do you expect?’
" 'Nothing, really,' he said. 'You go where you wish to go and do what you wish to do. What will sustain you, how you will live, these are things you must figure out for yourself.’
" 'How did you do it?' I asked.
" 'Oh, you ask me to go back so many years,' he said. 'My Master and my Maker were one, a great writer of the Greek tragedy just before and during the time of Aeschylus. He had been something of a roamer before he set to work in Athens writing for the theater, and he had traveled into India, where he bought me from a man I scarcely remember who kept me for his bed, and had educated me for his library, and who sold me for a dear price to the Athenian who brought me home to Athens to copy for him and be his bed slave. I loved it. The world of the stage delighted me. We worked hard on the scenery, the training of the chorus and of the solitary actor whom Thespis had introduced into the mix of the early theater as it was then.
" 'My Master wrote scores of plays -- satires, comedies, tragedies. He wrote odes to celebrate victorious athletes. He wrote long epic poems. He wrote lyrics for his own pleasure. He was always waking me in the middle of the night to copy or merely to listen. "Wake up, Arion, wake up, you won't believe what I've done here!" he would say, shaking me and shoving a cup of water into my hands. You know that meter and rhythm were much more important to the Greeks back then. He was the past master of it all. He made me laugh with his pure cleverness.
" 'He wrote for every festival, every contest, every conceivable excuse, and was ever busy on every detail of the performance down to the procession that might precede it or the painting of the masks to be used. It was his life. That is, when we weren't traveling.
" 'It was his joy to go to other Greek colonies and there participate in the theater as well, and it was here in Italy that he encountered the sorceress who gave him the Power. We were living then in the Etruscan city that would later become Pompeii, and he had been involved in putting on a theatrical in the festival of Dionysus for the Greeks.
" 'I can still remember the night he came back to me, and how at first he would have nothing to do with me, and then he brought me into his presence and clumsily he drank from me, and when it seemed that I would die, when I was sure of it, he gave me the Blood in a blundering terrible moment, weeping and desperate and pleading with me to understand that he didn't know what had happened to him.
" 'We were neophytes together. We were Children in the Blood together. He burnt his plays, all of them. He said that all
he had written was worthless. He was no more among humankind. To the end of his existence he sought sorcerers and witches to try to find some way to cure the Evil Blood in himself. And he perished before my very eyes, immolating himself when scarcely twenty-five years had passed. He left me a hardened orphan.
" 'But I have always been a resourceful soul, and, never wanting death, have not been tempted by it. I saw Greece fall to Rome. I saw my Master's plays in the bookshops and the marketplaces for a very long time -- centuries. I saw my Master's personal poetry read and studied by young Roman boys, and then I saw the rise of Christianity and the loss of thousands of works -- poetry, the drama, yes, even plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides lost -- history, letters -- and with them the loss of my Master's name, and the salvage of a precious few from those days when I had known so many.
" 'I am content. I am resourceful still. I deal in diamonds and pearls. I use the Mind Gift to make me rich. I cheat no one. I am clever beyond what I need. And I keep Petronia always with me. I love the company of Manfred. He and I play chess and cards and we talk and we roam the streets of Naples together. I remember so vividly the night that she brought him here, cursing that she had had to keep a bargain.
" 'They had met here in Naples, she and he, and she had taken a fancy to visiting the swamps where he lived, and having there a hideaway. It had seemed to her an appropriate wilderness from which she could hunt the drifters and the drinkers and gamblers of New Orleans and all the Southland. And eventually, he built her a domicile and a fancy tomb such as she desired, and she loved to retreat to that place whenever she was angry with me, or whenever she wanted what was new and raw, and would be away from Italy, where everything had been done a hundred times over.
" 'But in time she'd come to promise Manfred that she would give him the Blood, because she had told him what she was, and at last she had had to keep her word, or so I told her, and do it she did, and brought him here, so that those he loved would think he had died in the swampland.
" 'Now it will be the same with you. They will imagine that you died in the swamp. Is that not so?’
"I didn't answer him.
"Then I said:
" 'Thank you for all you told to me, and for all you've taught me. I'm humble in your presence. I'd be a fool if I claimed to fully understand your age, the value of your perspective, your patience. I can only offer gratitude. May I put one more question to you?’
" 'Of course you may. Put any question.' He smiled.
" 'You've lived over two thousand years, perhaps closer to three,' I said.
"He paused, then he nodded.
" 'What have you given back to the world on account of this?' I asked.
"He stared at me. His face became thoughtful but it remained warm and cordial. And then he said gently, 'Nothing.’
" 'Why?' I asked.
" 'What should I give?' he asked.
" 'I don't know,' I said. 'I feel as though I'm going mad. I feel as though if I'm to live forever I have to give something back.’
" 'But we're not part of it, don't you see?’
" 'Yes,' I said with a gasp. 'I see only too clearly.’
" 'Don't torment yourself. Think on this matter for a while. Think. You have time, all the time in the world.’
"I was near to weeping. But I swallowed it back down.
" 'Let me ask you,' he said. 'When you were alive, did you feel you had to give back something for life?’
" 'Yes,' I said. 'I did.’
" 'I see. And so you are like my old Master with his poetry. But you mustn't follow his example! Imagine it, Quinn, what I have seen. And there are small things to do. There are loving things.’
" 'You think so?' I asked.
" 'I know so,' he said. 'But come, let's go back to the palazzo. I know Petronia is waiting for you.’
"I laughed a short ironic little laugh. 'That's comforting,' I said.
"As we stood to leave the café I stopped and looked at myself intently in the mirrored wall. I looked human enough even to my enhanced vision. And no one in the café had so much as stared at us, except for an occasional pair of pretty girls who had come and gone after their espresso. Human enough. Yes. I was pleased with it. I was magnificently pleased with it."
42
"WHEN WE RETURNED to the palazzo, which we did by ordinary means, that is, walking, we were told by the young serving girl, who was now frightened out of her wits, that Petronia was in her dressing room and wanted to see me there.
"I found the room entrancing. The entire wall was covered in mirrors, and Petronia sat at a great curve of granite, on a bench that appeared made of the same material, with a velvet cushion on it, while the young Adonis finished her hair.
"She was clad as a man in a buff-colored velvet coat and pants, with a ruffled white shirt that would have looked good in the eighteenth century, I well imagined, and at her throat was a huge rectangular cameo that was crowded with little figures, the whole thing surrounded by diamonds.
"Her hair was pulled straight back from her face, and the boy was plaiting it for her. She had two threads of diamonds running over her head, which as I've mentioned was beautifully shaped for this kind of severity, and the two threads of diamonds were being plaited into her hair.
"The room was open to the sea like all the rooms of the palazzo which I had seen, though I think I forgot to mention it with the bath.
"The sky appeared violet to me in spite of the hour, and once again the stars seemed to be moving; in fact the sky appeared to be moving into the room.
"My breath was quite literally taken away from me, not merely by the stars and their various patterns but by the sheer beauty of Petronia in her sharp male clothing, with her bold head once again revealed by the austerity of her pulled-back hair.
"I stood for a long few moments gazing at her as she looked back at me, and then the young Adonis told her softly that the plait was complete and the diamond clasp applied to the end.
"She turned around and gave him what appeared to be a very large amount of money and said, 'Go out, enjoy yourself, you've done well.' He bowed and backed out of the room, as though he'd been dismissed by the Queen of England, and then he was gone.
" 'So you find him beautiful, do you?' she asked.
" 'Do I? I don't know,' I said. 'Everything charms me. As a human being I was an enthusiast. Now I think I'm losing my mind.’
"She rose from the cushioned bench and came towards me, and then she took me in her arms. 'All the wounds I inflicted, they've healed. Am I right?’
" 'Yes, you're right,' I said. 'Except the wound no one can heal, the one I inflicted on myself, that I killed the innocent young woman, that I murdered her at her own wedding. No one can heal that. And no time will heal it either, and I don't suppose it should.’
"She laughed. 'Come, let's join the others,' she said. 'All your grandfather knows is how to play chess. He was a raving poker player when I first met him. He beat me at it, if you can believe it, and that Rebecca, she was cagey too, I tell you, and don't go moping after her, but I must tell you -- about the bride, I've had the most splendid night.’
"Within moments we were in the big room with the ominous and empty gold cage at the end of it. I pictured a giant bird inside it. Certainly I hadn't looked like a bird. I thought of Caravaggio's Victorious Cupid. Had I looked a little like that?
" 'I must tell you what happened,' Petronia went on, drawing the attention of Arion. 'It was the best luck. The bride's father and husband, you know, were first-rate killers, and of course the little minx knew it, so salve your conscience with that if you wish, Quinn. But they sent an armed guard here tonight, some four bravos as we used to call them, because we were recognized, it seems, and you can imagine the fun I had with them. Now it doesn't please me to bully mortals, no matter what you think to the contrary, Quinn, but there were four of them.’
" 'And where are they now?' said Arion. He sat at the table with the Old Man, who was looking at the ch
essboard. I sat between them.
"Petronia walked up and down in front of us.
" 'Gone, into the sea,' she responded. 'In their car, over the cliff. Like that. It was nothing. But the fighting here before I disposed of the bodies, now that was a class act.’
" 'I'm sure,' said Arion with faint disgust. 'And that's made you happy.’
" 'Supremely happy. I drank my fill from the last one, and that was the finest part of it. No. I take that back. The fight was the finest part of it, killing them before they could draw their weapons and make a nasty hole in my body! It was divinely exciting. It made me think I should fight more often, that it's not enough to kill.’
"Arion shook his head wearily. 'You should talk more elegantly for your fledgling. Tell him a few rules.’
" 'What rules?' she inquired. She continued to stride back and forth, almost to the windows and then again to the murals, her eyes sweeping the room around her and then seeming to drift over the stars.
" 'Oh, all right. Rules,' she said. 'You never disclose to any mortal what you are or what we are. How's that for a rule? You never kill one of our kind. Is that enough for you, Arion? I don't know that I remember anything else.’
" 'You know you do,' he said. He too was looking at the chessboard. He made a move with his queen.
" 'You cover up the kill as to bring no notice to yourself,' she said with a flair, 'and always, always!' she stopped and stared at me, pointing her finger in a declarative manner. 'Always, you respect your Maker as your Master, and to strike out at your Maker, your Master, is to merit destruction at his or her hands. How's that?’
" 'That's all very good,' said the Old Man in his deep bass with his jowls trembling. He squeezed my shoulder and smiled at me with his big loose mouth. 'Now give him the warnings. He needs warnings.’
" 'Such as what!' said Petronia disgustedly. 'Don't be scared of your own shadow!' she said pointedly. 'Don't act like you're old when you're immortal! What else?’
Rice, Anne - Vampire Chronicles 11 - Blackwood Farm (v3.0) Page 56