The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [62]
I stood when finished, making certain that no goblet had escaped. I had them all. I studied the dead men—my sleeping red-haired Martino, his face on the bare marble in a puddle of the slopped wine, and Francisco, from whose head did leak a small bit of darkened blood.
The flies buzzed and droned over this blood as they did over the grease pooled around the remnants of the roasted pig. A battalion of little black beetles had come, most common in Venice, for they are carried by the water, and it made its way over the table, towards Martino’s face.
A quiet warming light came in through the open doorway. The morning had come.
With one sweeping glance that imprinted on my mind the details of this scene for all time, I went out and home.
The boys were awake and busy when I arrived. An old carpenter was already there, fixing the door which I had shattered with the ax.
I gave to the maid my bulky sack of clanking cups, and she, sleepy and having just arrived, took it without a remark.
I felt a tightening inside me, a sickening, a sudden feeling that I would burst. My body seemed too small, too imperfect an enclosure for all I knew and felt. My head throbbed. I wanted to lie down, but before that I had to see Riccardo. I had to find him and the older boys.
I had to.
I went walking through the house until I came to them, all gathered for a lesson with the young lawyer who came from Padua only once or twice a month to begin our instructions in the law. Riccardo saw me in the door and motioned for me to be quiet. The teacher was speaking.
I had nothing to say. I only leant against the door and looked at my friends. I loved them. Yes, I did love them. I would die for them! I knew it, and with a terrible relief I began to cry.
Riccardo saw me turn away, and slipping out, he came to me.
“What is it, Amadeo?” he asked.
I was too delirious with my own torment. I saw again the slaughtered dinner party. I turned to Riccardo and wound him in my arms, so comforted by his warmth and his human softness compared to the Master, and then I told him that I would die for him, die for any of them, die for the Master too.
“But why, what is this, why vow this to me now?” he asked.
I couldn’t tell him about the slaughter. I couldn’t tell him of the coldness in me that had watched the men die.
I went off into my Master’s bedchamber, and I lay down and tried to sleep.
In late afternoon, when I woke to find the doors had been closed, I climbed out of the bed and went to the Master’s desk. To my astonishment I saw his book was there, the book that was always hidden when out of his sight.
Of course I could not turn a page of it, but it was open, and there lay a page covered in writing, in Latin, and though it seemed a strange Latin, and hard for me, there was no mistaking the final words:
How can so much beauty hide such a bruised and steely heart, and why must I love him, why must I lean in my weariness upon his irresistible yet indomitable strength? Is he not the wizened funereal spirit of a dead man in a child’s clothes?
I felt a strange prickling over my scalp and over my arms.
Is this what I was? A bruised and steely heart! The wizened funereal spirit of a dead man in a child’s clothes? Oh, but I couldn’t deny it; I couldn’t say it wasn’t true. And yet how hurtful, how positively cruel it seemed. No, not cruel, merely merciless and accurate, and what right had I to expect anything else?
I started to cry.
I lay down in our bed, as was my custom, and plumped the softest pillows to make a nest for my crooked left arm and my head.
Four nights. How should I endure it? What did he want of me? That I go forth to all the things I knew and loved and take my leave of them as a mortal boy. That is what he would instruct. And that I should do.
Only a few hours were allowed to me by fate.
I was awakened by Riccardo, who shoved a sealed note in my face
“Who’s sent this?” I asked sleepily. I sat up, and I pushed my thumb beneath the folded paper and broke the