The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (374 page)

On this first excursion, it was magic. And high above the sky was the perfect blue of cobalt, and the breeze from the sea was fresh and moist and cool. There above were massed the scudding clouds I had seen so wondrously rendered in the paintings of the palazzo, and there came my first hint that the paintings of my Master were no He.

Indeed when we entered, by special permission, the Doges’ chapel, San Marco, I was caught by the throat by its splendor—its walls of gleaming tessellated gold. But another shock followed hard upon my finding myself virtually entombed in light and in riches. Here were stark, somber figures, figures of saints I knew.

These were no mystery to me, the almond-eyed tenants of these hammered walls, severe in their straight careful drapery, their hands infallibly folded in prayer. I knew their halos, I knew the tiny holes made in the gold to make it glitter ever more magically. I knew the judgment of these bearded patriarchs who gazed impassively on me as I stopped, dead in my tracks, unable to go on.

I slumped to the stone floor. I was sick.

I had to be taken from the church. The noise of the piazza rose over me as if I were descending to some awful denouement. I wanted to tell my friends it was inevitable, not their fault.

The boys were in a fluster. I couldn’t explain it. Stunned, sweating all over and lying limp at the base of a column, I listened dully as they explained to me in Greek that this church was only part of all I had seen. Why should it frighten me so? Yes, it was old, yes, it was Byzantine, as so much in Venice was. “Our ships have traded with Byzantium for centuries. We are a maritime empire.” I tried to grasp it.

What came clear in my pain was only that this place had not been a special judgment upon me. I had been taken from it as easily as I had been brought into it. The sweet-voiced boys with the gentle hands who surrounded me, who offered me cool wine to drink and fruit to eat that I might recover, they did not hold this place in any terrible dread.

Turning to the left of me, I glimpsed the quays, the harbor. I ran towards it, thunderstruck by the sight of the wooden ships. They stood at anchor four and five deep, but beyond them was enacted the greatest miracle: great galleons of deep ballooning wood, their sails collecting the breeze, their graceful oars chopping the water as they moved out to sea.

Back and forth the traffic moved, the huge wooden barks dangerously close to one another, slipping in and out of the mouth of Venice, while others no less graceful and impossible at anchor disgorged abundant goods.

Leading me stumbling to the Arsenale, my companions comforted me with the sight of the ships being built by ordinary men. In days to come I would hang about at the Arsenale for hours, watching the ingenious process by which human beings made such immense barks that to my mind should rightly sink.

Now and then in snatches I saw images of icy rivers, of barges and flatboats, of coarse men reeking of animal fat and rancid leather. But these last ragged tidbits of the winter world from which I’d come faded.

Perhaps had this not been Venice, it would have been a different tale.

In all my years in Venice, I never tired of the Arsenale, of watching the ships being built. I had no problem gaining access by means of a few kind words and coins, and it was ever my delight to watch these fantastical structures being constructed of bowed ribs, bent wood and piercing masts. Of this first day, we were rushed through this yard of miracles. It was enough.

Yes, well, it was Venice, this place that must erase from my mind, at
least for a while, the clotted torment of some earlier existence, some congestion of all truths I would not face.

My Master would never have been there, had it not been Venice.

Not a month later he would tell me matter-of-factly what each of the cities of Italy had to offer him, how he loved to watch Michelangelo, the great sculptor, hard at work in Florence, how he went to listen to the fine teachers in Rome.

“But Venice has an art of a thousand years,” he said as he himself lifted his brush to paint the huge panel before him. “Venice is in itself a work of art, a metropolis of impossible domestic temples built side by side like waxen honeycombs and maintained in ever flowing nectar by a population as busy as bees. Behold our palaces, they alone are worthy of the eye.”

As time passed he would school me in the history of Venice, as did the others, dwelling on the nature of the Republic, which, though despotic in its decisions and fiercely hostile to the outsider, was nevertheless a city of “equal” men. Florence, Milan, Rome—these cities were falling under the power of small elites or powerful families and individuals, while Venice, for all her faults, remained governed by her Senators, her powerful merchants and her Council of Ten.

On that first day, an everlasting love for Venice was born in me. It seemed singularly devoid of horrors, a warm home even for its well-dressed and clever beggars, a hive of prosperity and vehement passion as well as staggering wealth.

And in the tailor shop, was I not being made up into a prince like my new friends?

Look, had I not seen Riccardo’s sword? They were all noblemen.

“Forget all that has gone before,” said Riccardo. “Our Master is our Lord, and we are his princes, we are his royal court. You are rich now and nothing can hurt you.”

“We are not mere apprentices in the ordinary sense,” said Albinus. “We are to be sent to the University of Padua. You’ll see. We are tutored in music and dance and manners as regularly as in science and literature. You will have time to see the boys who come back to visit, all gentlemen of means. Why, Giuliano was a prosperous lawyer, and one of the other boys was a physician in Torcello, an island city nearby.

“But all have independent means when they leave the Master,” explained Albinus. “It’s only that the Master, like all Venetians,
deplores idleness. We are as well off as lazy lords from abroad who do nothing but sample our world as though it were a dish of food.”

By the end of this first sunlighted adventure, this welcome into the bosom of my Master’s school and his splendid city, I was combed, trimmed and dressed in the colors he would forever choose for me, sky blue for the stockings, a darker midnight blue velvet for a short belted jacket, and a tunic of an even fairer shade of azure embroidered with tiny French fleur-de-lis in thick gold thread. A bit of burgundy there might be for trimming and fur; for when the sea breezes grew strong in winter, this paradise would be what these Italians called cold.

By nightfall, I pranced on the marble tile with the others, dancing for a while to the lutes played by the younger boys, accompanied by the fragile music of the Virginal, the first keyboard instrument I had ever seen.

When the last of twilight had died beautifully into the canal outside the narrow pointed arched windows of the palazzo, I roamed about, catching random glances of myself in the many dark mirrors that rose up from the marble tile to the very ceiling of the corridor, the salon, the alcove, or whatever beautifully appointed room I should find.

I sang new words in unison with Riccardo. The great state of Venice was called the Serenissima. The black boats of the canals were gondolas. The winds that would come soon to make us all crazy were called the Sirocco. The most high ruler of this magical city was the Doge, our book tonight with the teacher was Cicero, the musical instrument which Riccardo gathered up and played with his plucking fingers was the lute. The great canopy of the Master’s regal bed was a baldaquin trimmed each fortnight with new gold fringe.

I was ecstatic.

I had not merely a sword but a dagger.

Such trust. Of course I was lamblike to these others, and pretty much a lamb to myself. But never had anyone entrusted to me such bronze and steel weapons. Again, memory played its tricks. I knew how to throw a wooden spear, how to … Alas, it became a wisp of smoke, and there lay in the air around it that I’d been committed not to weapons, but to something else, something immense which exacted all I could give it. Weapons were forbidden for me.

Well, no more. No more, no more, no more. Death had swallowed me whole and thrown me forth here. In the palazzo of my Master, in a salon of brilliantly painted battle scenes, with maps upon the ceiling, with windows of thick molded glass, I drew my sword with a great
singing sound and pointed it at the future. With my dagger, after examining the emeralds and rubies of its handle, I sliced an apple in two with a gasp.

The other boys laughed at me. But it was all friendly, kind.

Soon the Master would come. Look. From room to room the youngest fellows among us, little boys who had not come out with us, now moved quickly, lifting their tapers to torches and candelabra. I stood in the door, looking to yet another and another and another. Light burst forth soundlessly in each of these rooms.

A tall man, very shadowy and plain, came in with a tattered book in his hand. His long thin hair and plain wool robe were black. His small eyes were cheerful, but his thin mouth was colorless and belligerently set.

The boys all groaned.

High narrow windows were closed against the cooler night air.

In the canal below, men sang as they drove their long narrow gondolas, voices seeming to ring, to splash up the walls, delicate, sparkling, then dying away.

I ate the apple to the last juicy speck of it. I had eaten more in this day of fruit, meat, bread, sweets and candy than a human being could possibly eat. I wasn’t human. I was a hungry boy.

The teacher snapped his fingers, then took from his belt a long switch and cracked it against his own leg. “Come now,” he said to the boys.

I looked up as the Master appeared.

All the boys, big and tall, babyfied and manly, ran to him and embraced him and clung to his arms as he made his inspection of the painting they had done by the long day.

The teacher waited in silence, giving the Master a humble bow.

Through the galleries we walked, the entire company, the teacher trailing behind.

The Master held out his hands, and it was a privilege to feel the touch of his cold white fingers, a privilege to catch a part of his long thick trailing red sleeves.

“Come, Amadeo, come with us.”

I wanted one thing only, and it came soon enough.

They were sent off with the man who was to read Cicero. The Master’s firm hands with their flashing fingernails turned me and directed me to his private rooms.

It was private here, the painted wooden doors at once bolted, the
burning braziers scented with incense, perfumed smoke rising from the brass lamps. It was the soft pillows of the bed, a flower garden of stenciled and embroidered silk, floral satin, rich chenille, intricately patterned brocade. He pulled the scarlet bed curtains. The light made them transparent. Red and red and red. It was his color, he told me, as blue was to be mine.

In a universal tongue he wooed me, feeding me the images:

“Your brown eyes are amber when the fire catches them,” he whispered. “Oh, but they are lustrous and dark, two glossy mirrors in which I see myself even as they keep their secrets, these dark portals of a rich soul.”

I was too lost in the frigid blue of his own eyes, and the smooth gleaming coral of his lips.

He lay with me, kissed me, pushing his fingers carefully and smoothly through my hair, never pulling a curl of it, and brought the shivers from my scalp and from between my legs. His thumbs, so hard and cold, stroked my cheeks, my lips, my jaw so as to make the flesh quicken. Turning my head from right to left, he pressed his half-formed kisses with a dainty hunger to the inner shells of my ears.

I was too young for a wet pleasure.

I wonder if it was more what women feel. I thought it couldn’t end. It became an agony of rapture, being caught in his hands, unable to escape, convulsing and twisting and feeling this ecstasy again and again and again.

He taught me words in the new language afterwards, the word for the cold hard tile on the floor which was Carrara marble, the word for the curtains which was spun silk, the names of the “fishes” and “turtles” and the “elephants” embroidered onto the pillows, the word for the lion sewn in tapestry on the heavy coverlet itself.

As I listened, rapt, to all details both large and small, he told me the provenance of the pearls sewn into my tunic, of how they had come from the oysters of the sea. Boys had dived into the depths to bring these precious round white treasures up to the surface, carrying them in their very mouths. Emeralds came from mines within the earth. Men killed for them. And diamonds, ah, look at these diamonds. He took a ring from his finger and put it on mine, his fingertips stroking my finger gently as he made sure of the fit. Diamonds are the white light of God, he said. Diamonds are pure.

God. What is God! The shock went through my body. It seemed the scene about me would wither.

He watched me as he spoke, and it seemed now and then I heard him clearly, though he had not moved his lips or made a sound.

I grew agitated. God, don’t let me think of God. Be my God.

“Give me your mouth, give me your arms,” I whispered. My hunger startled and delighted him.

He laughed softly as he answered me with more fragrant and harmless kisses. His warm breath came in a soft whistling flood against my groin.

“Amadeo, Amadeo, Amadeo,” he said.

“What does this name mean, Master?” I asked. “Why do you give it to me?” I think I heard an old self in my voice, but maybe it was only this newborn princeling gilded and wrapped in fine goods that had chosen this soft respectful but nevertheless bold voice.

“Beloved of God,” he said.

Oh, I couldn’t bear to hear this. God, the inescapable God. I was troubled, panic-stricken.

He took my outstretched hand and bent my finger to point to a tiny winged infant etched in glittering beads on a worn square cushion that lay beside us. “Amadeo,” he said, “beloved of the God of love.”

He found the ticking watch in the heap of my clothes at bedside. He picked it up and smiled as he looked at it. He had not seen many of these at all. Most marvelous. They were expensive enough for Kings and Queens.