by Rice, Anne
Armed with this new knowledge, no, driven to distraction by it, I went out into the night roaming, for now I had the proof on her of guilt immeasurable! Was this not sufficient to bring her over, to force the Dark Blood upon her, and then say, “No, my darling, I haven’t taken your life, I’ve given you eternity with me!”
Beyond the city I walked the country roads for hours, sometimes pounding my forehead with the heels of my palms.
I want her, I want her, I want her. But I could not bring myself to do it. At last I went home to paint her portrait. And night after night, I painted her portrait again. I painted her as the Virgin of the Annunciation, and the Virgin with Child. I painted her as the Virgin in the Lamentation. I painted her as Venus, as Flora, I painted her on small panels that I brought to her. I painted her until I could endure it no longer. I slumped on the floor of my painting room, and when the apprentices came to me in the dark hours of the dawn, they thought me sick and cried out.
But I couldn’t bring harm to her. I couldn’t bring my Evil Blood to her. I couldn’t take her over to me, and now a most great and grotesque quality attached itself to her in my eyes.
She was evil as I was evil, and when I watched her from the corner of her room, I fancied that I studied a thing which was like unto myself.
For her life, she dispatched her victims. For my life, I drank human blood.
And so this tender girl, in her costly gowns with her long blond locks and soft cheeks, took on a dark majesty for me; and I was fascinated by her more than ever before.
One night, so great was my pain, so dire was my need to separate myself from this young woman, that I went alone in my gondola, telling my oarsman to row back and forth through the smallest canals of the city and not bring me back to the palazzo until I gave the command.
What did I seek? The smell of death and rats in the blackest waters. The occasional merciful flashes of the moon.
I lay down in the boat, my head on my pillow. I listened to the voices of the city so that I would not hear my own.
And quite suddenly, as we came into the wider canals again, as we came into a certain district of Venice, there came a voice quite different from all the others, for it was speaking from a desperate and deranged mind.
In a flash I saw an image behind the cry of this voice, the image of a painted face. Indeed, I saw the paint laid on in marvelous strokes. I knew the painted face. It was the face of Christ!
What did this mean? In a solemn silence, I listened. No other voice mattered to me. I banished a city full of whispers.
It was a woeful crying. It was the voice of a child behind thick walls who on account of the recent cruelties done him could not remember his native language or even his name.
Yet in that forgotten language he prayed to be delivered from those who had cast him down in darkness, those who had tormented him and jabbered at him in a tongue he didn’t know.
Once again there came that image, the painted Christ staring forward. The painted Christ in a time-honored and Greek style. Oh, how well I knew this fashion of painting; oh, how well I knew this countenance. Had I not seen it a thousand times in Byzantium, and in all those places East and West to which its power had reached?
What did this mean, this mingled voice and imagery? What did it mean that the child thought again and again of an ikon and did not know that he prayed?
Once again there came the plea from one who thought himself to be utterly silent.
And I knew the language in which he prayed. It was no matter to me to disentangle it, to put the words in order, having as I did such a knowledge of languages the world wide. Yes, I knew his tongue and I knew his prayer. “Dear God, deliver me. Dear God, let me die.”
A frail child, a hungry child, a child who was alone.
Sitting up in the gondola, I listened. I delved for the images locked away inside the child’s most wordless thoughts.
He had once been a painter, this bruised and young one. The face of Christ had been his work. He had once mixed the egg yolk and the pigment just as I mixed them. He had once painted the face of Christ again and again!
Whence came this voice? I had to discover the source of it. I listened with all my skill.
Somewhere very near, this child was imprisoned. Somewhere very near, he offered up his prayer with his last breath.
He had painted his precious ikons in the far country of snowy Russia. Indeed, this child had been supremely gifted in the painting of ikons. But he could not remember that now. That was the mystery. That was the complexity! He could not even see the images which I was seeing, so broken was his heart.
I could understand what he himself could not understand. And he was pleading silently with Heaven in a Russian dialect to be delivered from those who had made him a slave in Venice and sought to make him serve others in a brothel through acts which to him were sins of the flesh which he could not abide!
I told my oarsman to stop.
I listened until I had found the exact source. I directed the boat to go back only a few doors until I found the precise place.
The torches were burning brightly before the entrance. I could hear the music inside.
The voice of the child was persistent, and yet there came that clear understanding on my part that the child did not know his own prayers, his own history, his own tongue.
I was greeted by the owners of the house with great fanfare. They knew of me. I must come in. I could have whatever I wanted under their roof. Just beyond the door lay paradise. Listen to the laughter, and the singing.
“What do you desire, Master?” a pleasant-voiced man asked of me. “You can tell me. We have no secrets here.”
I stood listening. How reticent I must have seemed—this tall, blond-haired man with such a chilly manner, who cocked his head to one side and looked away with his thoughtful blue eyes.
I tried to see the boy, but I could not. The boy was locked away where no one saw him. How would I proceed? Ask to see all of the boys of the house? That would not do it, for this one was in a chamber of punishment, cold and quite alone.
Then suddenly the answer came to me as though angels had spoken it, or was it the Devil? It came swiftly and completely.
“To purchase, you understand,” I said, “with gold of course, and now, a boy you want to be rid of. One recently arrived here who will not do as he’s told.”
In a flash I saw the boy in the man’s eyes. Only it could not be true. I could not have such luck. For this boy had beauty as bountiful as Bianca’s. I did not count upon it.
“Recently come from Istanbul,” I said. “Yes, I think that is correct, for the boy was no doubt brought from Russian climes.”
I need say no more words. Everyone was scurrying about. Someone had put a goblet of wine into my hands. I smelled the lovely scent of it, and set it down on the table. It seemed a flood of rose petals descended. Indeed there was everywhere the perfume of flowers. A chair was brought for me. I did not sit on it.
Suddenly the man who had greeted me returned to the room.
“You don’t want that one,” he said quickly. He was greatly agitated. And once again, I saw a clear image of the boy lying on a stone floor.
And I heard the boy’s prayers: “Deliver me.” And I saw the Face of Christ in gleaming egg tempera. I saw the jewels set into the halo. I saw the egg and pigment mixing. “Deliver me.”
“Can’t you understand me?” I asked. “I told you what I wanted. I want that boy, the one who won’t do what you try to force him to do.”
Then I realized it.
The brothel keeper thought the boy was dying. He was afraid of the law. He stood before me in terror.
“Take me to him,” I said. I pressed him with the Mind Gift. “Do it now. I know of him and won’t leave here without him. Besides, I’ll pay you. I don’t care if he’s sick and dying. Do you hear me? I’ll take him away with me. You’ll never have to worry about him again.”
It was a cruel small chamber in which they�
��d locked him, and into that chamber the light of a lamp flooded upon the child.
And there I saw beauty, beauty which has always been my downfall, beauty as in Pandora, as in Avicus, as in Zenobia, as in Bianca, beauty in a new and celestial form.
Heaven had cast down upon this stone floor an abandoned angel, of auburn curls and perfectly formed limbs, of fair and mysterious face.
I reached down to take him by the arms and I lifted him, and I looked into his half-opened eyes. His soft reddish hair was loose and tangled. His flesh was pale and the bones of his face only faintly sharpened by his Slavic blood.
“Amadeo,” I said, the name springing to my lips as though the angels willed it, the very angels whom he resembled in his purity and in his seeming innocence, starved as he was.
His eyes grew wide as he stared at me. In majesty and golden light, I saw again in his mind those ikons which he had painted. Desperately he struggled to remember. Ikons. The Christ he had painted. With long hair and burning eyes, I resembled the Christ.
He tried to speak, but the language had left him. He tried to find the name of his Lord.
“I’m not the Christ, my child,” I said, speaking to that part of him deep within the mind of which he knew nothing. “But one who comes with his own salvation. Amadeo, come into my arms.”
19
I loved him instantly and impossibly. He was fifteen years old at the most when I took him out of the brothel that night and brought him to live in the palazzo with my boys.
As I held him close to me in the gondola, I knew him certainly to have been doomed—indeed, snatched at the last moment from an inconsequential death.
Though the firmness of my arms comforted him, the beat of his heart was barely sufficient to drive the images which I received from him as he lay against my chest.
Reaching the palazzo, I refused Vincenzo’s assistance, sending him off for food for the child, and I took my Amadeo into my bedchamber alone.
I laid him upon my bed, a wan and ragged being, amid the heavy velvet hangings and pillows, and when the soup at last came, I forced it through his lips myself.
Wine, soup, a potion of honey and lemon, what more could we give him? Slowly, cautioned Vincenzo, lest he take too much after the starvation, and his stomach suffer as the result.
At last I sent Vincenzo away from us, and I bolted the doors of my room.
Was that the fateful moment? Was it the moment in which I knew my soul most completely, the moment in which I acknowledged that this would be a child of my power, my immortality, a pupil of all I knew?
As I looked at the child on the bed, I forgot the language of guilt and recrimination. I was Marius, the witness of the centuries, Marius, the chosen one of Those Who Must Be Kept.
Taking Amadeo into the bath, I cleansed him myself and covered him with kisses. I drew from him an easy intimacy which he had denied all those who had tormented him, so dazzled and confused was he by my simple kindnesses, and the words I whispered in his tender ears.
I brought him quickly to know the pleasures which he had never allowed himself before. He was dazed and silent; but his prayers for deliverance were no more.
Yet even here in the safety of this bedroom, in the arms of one he saw as his Savior, nothing of his old memory could move from the recesses of his mind into the sanctum of reason.
Indeed, perhaps my frankly carnal embraces made the wall in his mind, between past and present, all the more strong.
As for me, I had never experienced such pure intimacy with a mortal, except with those I meant to kill. It gave me chills to have my arms around this boy, to press my lips to his cheeks and chin, his forehead, his tender closed eyes.
Yes, the blood thirst rose, but I knew so well how to control it. I filled my nostrils with the smell of his youthful flesh.
I knew that I could do anything I wanted with him. There was no force between Heaven and Hell that could stop me. And I did not need a Satan to tell me that I could bring him over to me and educate him within the Blood.
Drying him gently with towels, I returned him to the bed.
I sat down at my desk, where turning to the side I might look directly at him, and there came the full-blown idea of it, as rich as my desire to seduce Botticelli, as terrible as my passion for the lovely Bianca.
This was a foundling who could be educated for the Blood! This was a child utterly lost to life who could be reclaimed specifically for the Blood.
Would his training be a night, a week, a month, a year? Only I need decide it.
Whatever it was, I would make of him a child of the Blood.
My mind went back swiftly to Eudoxia and how she had spoken of the perfect age for the Blood to be received. I remembered Zenobia and her quick wits and knowing eyes. I remembered my own long ago reflection on the promise of a virgin, that one could make of a virgin what one wished without price.
And this child, this rescued slave, had been a painter! He knew the magic of the egg and the pigments, yes, he knew the magic of the color spread upon the wooden panel. He would remember; he would remember a time when he cared about nothing else.
True it had been in far-away Russia, where those who worked in monasteries limited themselves to the style of the Byzantines which I had long ago rejected as I turned my back on the Greek Empire and came to make my home amid the strife of the West.
But behold what had happened: the West had had its wars, yes, and indeed, the barbarians had conquered all it did seem. Yet Rome had risen again through the great thinkers and painters of the 1400s! I beheld it in the work of Botticelli, and Bellini and Filippo Lippi and in a hundred others.
Homer, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch—they were all being studied once again. The scholars of “humanism” sang songs of “antiquity.”
In sum, the West had risen again with new and fabulous cities, whereas Constantinople, old golden Constantinople, had been lost to the Turks who had made it Istanbul.
But far beyond Istanbul, there lay Russia from which this boy had been taken prisoner, Russia which had taken its Christianity from Constantinople so that this boy knew only the ikons of strict somber style and rigid beauty, an art which was as remote from what I painted as night from day.
Yet in the city of Venice both styles existed: the Byzantine style and the new style of the times.
How had it come about? Through trading. Venice had been a seaport since its beginnings. Its great fleet had gone back and forth between East and West when Rome was a ruin. And many a church in Venice preserved the old Byzantine style which filled this boy’s tortured mind.
These Byzantine churches had never much mattered to me before, I had to admit. Not even the Doge’s chapel, San Marco, had much mattered to me. But they mattered now, because they helped me to understand again and all the better the art which this boy had loved.
I stared at him as he slept.
All right. I understood something of his nature; I understood his suffering. But who was he really? I posed the same question which Bianca and I had exchanged with each other. The answer I did not have.
Before I could think of moving forward with my plan to prepare him for the Blood I must know.
Would it take a night, or a hundred nights? Whatever the time, it would not be endless.
Amadeo was destined for me.
I turned and wrote in my diary. Never had such a design occurred to me before, to educate a novice for the Blood! I described all the events of the night so that I might never lose them to overwrought memory. I drew sketches of Amadeo’s face as he slept.
How can I describe him? His beauty did not depend on his facial expression. It was stamped already on the face. It was all wrought up with his fine bones, serene mouth, and his auburn curls.
I wrote passionately in my diary.
This child has come from a world so different from our own that he can make no sense of what has happened to him. But I know the snowy lands of Russia. I know the dark dreary life of Russian and Greek mona
steries, and it was in one of these, I am quite convinced, that he painted the ikons which he cannot speak of now.
As for our tongue, he’s had no experience with it except in cruelty. Perhaps when the boys make him one of them, he will remember his past. He will want to take up the paintbrush. His talent will come forth again.
I put the quill aside. I could not confide everything to my diary. No, not everything by any means. Great secrets I sometimes wrote in Greek rather than Latin, but even in Greek I could not say all that I thought.
I looked at the boy. I took up the candelabrum and I approached the bed and I looked down at him as he slept there, easy at last, breathing as though he were safe.
Slowly his eyes opened. He looked up at me. There was no fear in him. Indeed, it seemed that he still dreamed.
I gave myself over to the Mind Gift.
Tell me, child, tell me from your heart.
I saw the riders of the Steppes come down upon him and a band of his people. I saw a bundle drop from the boy’s anxious hands. The cloth wrapping fell away from it. It was an ikon, and the boy cried out fearfully, but the evil barbarians wanted only the boy. They were the same inevitable barbarians who had never ceased to raid along the Roman Empire’s long-forgotten Northern and Eastern frontiers. Would the world never see an end to their kind?
By those evil men, this child had been brought to some Eastern marketplace. Was it Istanbul? And from there to Venice where he fell into the hands of a brothel keeper who had bought him for high payment on account of face and form.
The cruelty of this, the mystery of it, had been overwhelming. In the hands of another, this boy might never be healed.
Yet in his mute expression now I saw pure trust.
“Master,” he said softly in the Russian tongue.
I felt the tiny hairs rise all over my body. I wanted so to touch him once more with my cold fingers but I did not dare. I knelt beside the bed and leant over and I kissed his cheek warmly.