Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [163]
It took us four nights to reach Kiev.
I could have made the journey much more quickly had I been on my own, but I carried Amadeo close to me, his head bowed, his eyes closed, my fur-lined cloak wrapped around him to shelter him from the wind as best I could.
At last on the sunset of the fifth night, we reached the ruins of the city which had once been Kiev Rus. Our clothes were covered in dirt and our fur cloaks dark and nondescript, which would help to render us unremarkable to mortal eyes.
A thick snow lay over the high abandoned battlements, and covered the roofs of the Prince’s wooden palace, and beneath the battlements simple wooden houses that ran down to the Dnieper River—the town of Podil. Never have I seen a place more forlorn.
As soon as Amadeo had penetrated the wooden dwelling of the European ruler, and glimpsed to his satisfaction this Lithuanian who paid tribute to the Khan for his power, he wanted to move on to the monastery at once.
And into it he slipped using his immense blood drinker’s skill to play the shadows and confuse those who might have seen him as he cleaved to the mud walls.
I was near to him always but it was not my place to interfere or instruct. Indeed, I was gripped with horror, for the place seemed infinitely worse than I had ever guessed from the probing of his fevered mind.
With quiet misery, he saw the room in which he’d made ikons with its tables and pots of paints. He saw the long mud corridors through which he’d walked once as a young monk, giving food and drink to those half buried alive.
At last he came out of it, shivering, and he clung to me.
“I would have perished in a mud cell,” he whispered, looking at me, begging me to understand the import of it. His face was twisted with pain.
Then turning away swiftly, he went down towards the half-frozen river, searching for the house in which he’d been born.
With no difficulty he found it, and he entered it—the splendid Venetian, dazzling and confusing the family gathered there.
Once again I kept my distance, settling for the silence and the wind, and the voices I could hear with preternatural ears. Within moments he had left them with a fortune in gold coin and come out again into the falling snow.
I reached out to take his arm and comfort him. But he turned away. He wouldn’t look at me. Something obsessed him.
“My mother was there,” he whispered, as he looked down once more towards the river. “She didn’t know me. So be it. I gave them what I had to give.”
Again I tried to embrace him, but he shook me off.
“What’s wrong then?” I asked. “Why do you stare? Why do you look that way towards the river? What would you do?”
How I wished I could read his mind! His mind, and his alone, was shut to me! And how angry and determined he looked.
“My father wasn’t killed in the grasslands,” he said, his voice quavering, the wind whipping his auburn hair. “My father is alive. He’s in the tavern down there.”
“You want to see him?”
“I have to see him. I have to tell him that I didn’t die! Didn’t you listen to them talking in my house to me?”
“No,” I said. “I gave you your time with them. Was I wrong?”
“They said he’d become the drunkard because he had failed to save his son.” He glared at me as if I had done him some dreadful wrong. “My father, Ivan, the brave one, the hunter. Ivan, the warrior, the singer of songs whom everyone loved—Ivan is the drunkard now because he failed to save his son!”
“Be calm. We’ll go to the tavern. You can tell him in your own way—.”
He waved me off as though I were annoying him, and he set off down the street with a mortal tread.
Together we entered the tavern. It was dark and full of the scent of burning oil. Fishermen, traders, killers, drank here together. Everyone took notice of us for a moment and then ignored us, but Amadeo at once spied a man lying on a bench to the back of the rectangular room which made up the place.
Again, I wanted to leave him to what he meant to do, but I feared for him and I listened as he sat down now close to this sleeping man.
It was the man