The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [89]
This, and this alone, was enough to absorb me utterly, young as I was.
But Marius had no intention of letting me wallow in blood, the hasty young predator, with no other thought but to glut himself night after night.
“You must really begin to learn history and philosophy and the law in earnest,” he told me. “You are not destined for the University of Padua now. You are destined to endure.”
So after our stealthy missions were completed, and we returned to the warmth of the palazzo, he forced me to my books. He wanted some distance between me and Riccardo and the others anyway, lest they become suspicious of the change that had occurred.
In fact, he told me they “knew” about the change whether they realized it or not. Their bodies knew that I was no longer human, though it might take their minds some time to accept the fact.
“Show them only courtesy and love, only complete indulgence, but keep your distance,” Marius told me. “By the time they realize the unthinkable is the fact, you will have assured them that you are no enemy to them, that you are indeed Amadeo still, whom they love, and that though you have been changed, you yourself have not changed towards them.”
I understood this. At once I felt a greater love for Riccardo. I felt it for all of the boys.
“But Master,” I asked, “don’t you ever become impatient with them, that they think more slowly, that they are so clumsy? I love them, yes, but surely you see them in a more pejorative light even than I do.”
“Amadeo,” he said softly, “they are all going to die.” His face was charged with grief.
I felt it immediately and totally, which was always the way with feelings now. They came on in a torrent and taught their lessons at once.
They are all going to die. Yes, and I am immortal.
After that, I could only be patient with them, and indeed, I indulged myself in the manner in which I looked at them and studied them, never letting them know it, but glorying in all the details of them as if they were exotic because … they were going to die.
There is too much to describe, too much. I can’t find a way to put down all that became clear to me in the first few months alone. And there was nothing made known to me in that time which was not deepened afterwards.
I saw process everywhere I looked; I smelled corruption, but I also beheld the mystery of growth, the magic of things blossoming and ripening, and in fact all process, whether towards maturity or towards the grave, delighted and enthralled me, except, that is, the disintegration of the human mind.
My study of government and law was more of a challenge. Though reading was accomplished with infinitely greater speed and near instantaneous comprehension of syntax, I had to force myself to be interested in such things as the history of Roman Law from ancient times, and the great code of the Emperor Justinian, called the Corpus Juris Civilis, which my Master thought to be one of the finest codes of law ever written.
“The world is only getting better,” Marius instructed me. “With each century, civilization becomes more enamored of justice, ordinary men make greater strides towards sharing the wealth which was once the booty of the powerful, and art benefits by every increase in freedom, becoming ever more imaginative, ever more inventive and ever more beautiful.”
I could understand this only theoretically. I had no faith or interest in law. In fact, I had a total contempt in the abstract for my Master’s ideas. What I mean is, I didn’t have contempt for him, but I had an underlying contempt for law and for legal institutions and governmental institutions that was so total that I did not even understand it myself.
My Master said that he understood it.
“You were born in a dark savage land,” he said. “I wish I could take you back two hundred years in time to the years before Batu, the son of Genghis Khan, sacked the magnificent city of Kiev Rus, to the time when indeed the domes of its Santa Sofia were golden, and its people full of ingenuity and hope.”
“I heard ad nauseam of that