Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [138]
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 monasteries, 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