5
PERHAPS mortals feel this way when they hunt the big beasts of the forest and of the jungle. For me, as we went down the stairs from the ceiling into the banquet room of this new and highly decorated palazzo, I felt a rabid excitement. Men were going to die. Men would be murdered. Men who were bad, men who had wronged the beautiful Bianca, were going to be killed without risk to my all-powerful Master, and without risk to anyone whom I knew or loved.
An army of mercenaries could not have felt less compassion for these individuals. The Venetians in attacking the Turks perhaps had more feeling for their enemy than I.
I was spellbound; the scent of blood was already in me insofar as it was symbolic. I wanted to see blood flow. I didn't like Florentines anyway, and I certainly didn't understand bankers, and I most definitely wanted swift vengeance, not only for those who had bent Bianca to their will but on those who had put her in the path of my Master's thirst.
So be it.
We entered a spacious and impressive banquet hall where a party of some seven men was gorging itself on a splendid supper of roast pork. Flemish tapestries, all very new and with splendid hunting scenes of lords and ladies with their horses and hounds, were hung from great iron rods all through the room, covering even the windows and falling heavily to the very floor.
The floor itself was a fine inlay of multicolored marble, fashioned in pictures of peacocks, complete with jewels in their great fanlike tails.
The table was very broad, and three men sat behind the table all on one side, virtually slobbering over heaps of gold plates littered with the sticky bones offish and fowl, and the roasted pig himself, poor swollen creature, whose head remained, ignominiously grasping the inevitable apple as though it were the ultimate expression of his final wish.
The other three men-all young and somewhat pretty and most athletic, by the look of their beautifully muscled legs-were busy dancing in an artful circle, hands meeting in the center, as a small gathering of boys played the instruments whose pounding march we had heard on the roof.
All appeared somewhat greasy and stained from the feast. But not a member of the company lacked long thick fashionable hair, and ornate, heavily worked silk tunics and hose. There was no fire for heat, and indeed none of these men needed any such, and all were tricked out in velvet jackets with trimmings of powdered ermine or miniver or silver fox.
The wine was being slopped from the pitcher into the goblets by one who seemed quite unable to manage such a gesture. And the three who danced, though they had a courtly design to enact, were also roughhousing and shoving one another in some sort of deliberate mockery of the dance steps that all knew.
I saw at once that the servants had been dismissed. Several goblets had spilled. Tiny gnats, despite the winter, had congregated over the shiny half-eaten carcasses and the heaps of moist fruit.
A golden haze hung over the room which was the smoke from the tobacco of the men which they smoked in a variety of different pipes. The background of the tapestries was invariably a dark blue, and this gave the whole scene a warmth against which the rich varicolored clothes of the boy musicians and the dinner guests shone brilliantly.
Indeed, as we entered the smoky warmth of the room, I felt intoxicated by the atmosphere, and when my Master bid me sit down at one end of the table, I did so out of weakness, though I shrank from touching even the top of the table, let alone the edge of the various plates.
The red-faced, bawling merrymakers took no notice of us. The thumping din of the musicians was sufficient to render us invisible, because it overpowered the senses. But the men were far too drunk to have seen us in perfect silence. Indeed, my Master, after planting a kiss on my cheek, went to the very center of the table, to a space left there, presumably by one of those cavorting to the music, and he stepped over the padded bench and sat down.
Only then did the two men on either side of him, who had been shouting at one another adamantly about some point or other, take notice of this resplendent scarlet-clad guest.
My Master had let the hood of his cape fall, and his hair was wondrously shaped in its prodigious length. He looked the Christ again at the Last Supper with his lean nose and mild full mouth, and the blond hair parted so cleanly in the middle, and the whole mass of it alive from the damp of the night.
He looked from one to the other of these guests, and to my astonishment as I looked down the table at him, he plunged into their conversation, discussing with them the atrocities visited upon those Venetians left in Constantinople when the twenty-one-year-old Turk, Sultan Mehmet II, had conquered the city.
It seemed there was some argument as to how the Turks actually breached the sacred capital, and one man was saying that had not the Venetian ships sailed away from Constantinople, deserting her before the final days, the city might have been saved.
No chance at all, said the other, a robust red-haired man with seemingly golden eyes. What a beauty! If this was the rogue who misled Bianca, I could see why. Between red beard and mustache, his lips were a lush Cupid's bow, and his jaw had the strength of Michelangelo's superhuman marble figure.
"For forty-eight days, the cannons of the Turk had bombarded the walls of the city," he declared to his consort, "and eventually they broke through. What could be expected? Have you ever seen such guns?"
The other man, a very pretty dark-haired olive-skinned fellow with rounded cheeks very close to his small nose and large velvet black eyes, became furious and said that the Venetians had acted like cowards, and that their supported fleet could have stopped even the cannons if they had ever come. With his fist he rattled the plate in front of him. "Constantinople was abandoned!" he declared. "Venice and Genoa did not help her. The greatest empire on Earth was allowed on that horrible day to collapse."
"Not so," said my Master somewhat quietly, raising his eyebrows and tilting his head slightly to one side. His eyes swept slowly from one man to the other. "There were in fact many brave Venetians who came to the rescue of Constantinople. I think, and with reason, that even if the entire Venetian fleet had come, the Turks would have continued. It was the dream of the young Sultan Mehmet II to have Constantinople and he would never have stopped."
Oh, this was most interesting. I was ready for such a lesson in history. I had to hear and see this more clearly, so I jumped up and went round the table, pulling up a light cross-legged chair with a comfortable red leather sling seat, so that I might have a good vantage point on all of them. I put it at an angle so that I might better see the dancers, who even in their clumsiness made quite a picture, if only because of their long ornate sleeves flapping about and the slap of their jeweled slippers on the tile floor.
The red-haired one at table, tossing back his long richly curling mane, was most encouraged by my Master, and gave him a wild adoring look.
"Yes, yes, here is a man who knows what happened, and you lie, you fool," he said to the other man. "And you know the Genoese fought bravely, right to the end. Three ships were sent by the Pope; they broke through the blockade of the harbor, slipping right by the Sultan's evil castle of Rumeli Hisar. It was Giovanni Longo, and can you imagine the bravery?"
"Frankly, no!" said the black-haired one, leaning forward in front of my Master as if my Master were a statue.
"It was brave," said my Master casually. "Why do you say nonsense you don't believe? You know what had happened to the Venetian ships caught by the Sultan, come now."
"Yes, speak up on that. Would you have gone into that harbor?" demanded the red-haired Florentine. "You know what they did to the Venetian ships they caught six months before? They beheaded every man on board."
"Except the man in charge!" cried out a dancer who had turned to join the conversation, but went on so as not to lose his step. "They impaled him on a stake. This was Antonio Rizzo, one of the finest men there ever was." He went on dancing with an offhand contemptuous gesture over his shoulder. Then he slipped as he pivoted and almost fell. His dancing companions caught him.
The black-haired man at the table shook his head.
"If it had been a full Venetian fleet-," cried the black-haired man. "But you Florentines and you Venetians are all the same, treacherous, hedging your bets."
My Master laughed as he watched the man.
"Don't you laugh at me," declared the black-haired man. "You're a Venetian; I've seen you a thousand times, "you and that boy!"
He gestured to me. I looked at my Master. My Master only smiled. Then I heard him whisper distinctly to me, so that it struck my ear as if he were next to me rather than so many feet away. "Testimony of the dead, Amadeo."
The black-haired man picked up his goblet, slopped some wine down his throat and spilt as much down his pointed beard. "A whole city of conniving bastards!" he declared. "Good for one thing, and that's borrowing money at high interest when they spend everything they've got on fancy clothes."
"You should talk," said the red-haired one. "You look like a goddamned peacock. I ought to cut off your tail. Let's get back to Constantinople since you're so damned sure it could have been saved!"
"You are a damned Venetian yourself now."
"I'm a banker; I'm a man of responsibility," said the redhead. "I admire those who do well by me." He picked up his own goblet, but instead of drinking the wine, he threw it in the face of the black-haired man.
My Master did not bother to lean back, so undoubtedly some of the wine spilled on him. He looked from one to the other of the ruddy sweating faces on either side of him.
"Giovanni Longo, one of the bravest Genoese ever to captain a ship, stayed in that city during the entire siege," cried the red-haired man. "That's courage. I'll put money on a man like that."
"I don't know why," cried the dancer again, the same one as before. He broke from the circle long enough to declare, "He lost the battle, and besides, your Father had plenty enough sense not to bank on any of them."
"Don't you dare!" said the red-haired man. "Here's to Giovanni Longo and the Genoese who fought with him." He grabbed the pitcher, all but knocking it over, showered wine on his goblet and the table, then took a deep gulp. "And here's to my Father. May God have mercy on his immortal soul. Father, I have slain your enemies, and I'll slay those who make of ignorance a pastime."
He turned, jammed his elbow into my Master's clothes and said, "That boy of yours is a beauty. Don't be hasty. Think this over. How much?"
My Master burst out laughing more sweetly and naturally than I'd ever heard him laugh.
"Offer me something, something I might want," said my Master as he looked at me, with a secretive, glittering shift of his eyes.
It seemed every man in the room was taking my measure, and understand, these were not lovers of boys; these were merely Italians of their time, who, fathering children as was required of them and debauching women any chance they got, nevertheless appreciated a plump and juicy young man, the way that men now might appreciate a slice of golden toast heaped with sour cream and the finest blackest caviar.
I couldn't help but smile. Kill them, I thought, slaughter them. I felt fetching and even beautiful. Come on, somebody, tell me I make you think of Mercury chasing away the clouds in Botticelli's Primavera, but the red-haired man, fixing me with an impish playful glance, said:
"Ah, he is Verrocchio's David, the very model for the bronze statue. Don't try to tell me he is not. And immortal, ah, yes, I can see it, immortal. He shall never die." Again he lifted his goblet. Then he felt of the breast of his tunic, and pulled up out of the powdered ermine trim of his jacket a rich gold medallion with a table diamond of immense size. He ripped the chain right off his neck and extended this proudly to my Master, who watched it spin on the dangle in front of him as if it were an orb with which he was to be spellbound.
"For all of us," said the black-haired man, turning and looking hard at me. There was laughter from the others. The dancers cried, "Yes, and for me," "Unless I go second with him, nothing" and "Here, to go first, even before you."
This last was said to the red-haired man, but the jewel the dancer tossed at my Master, a carbuncle ring of some glittering purple stone, I didn't know.
"A sapphire," said my Master in a whisper, with a teasing looking to me. "Amadeo, you approve?"
The third dancer, a blond-haired man, somewhat shorter than anyone present and with a small hump on his left shoulder, broke free of the circle and came towards me. He took off all his rings, as if shearing himself of gloves, and tossed them all clattering at my feet.
"Smile sweetly on me, young god," he said, though he panted from the dance and the velvet collar was drenched. He wobbled on his feet and almost turned over but managed to make fan of it, twirling heavily back into his dance.
The music thumped on and on, as if the dancers thought it meet to drown out the very drunkenness of their Masters.
"Does anybody care about the siege of Constantinople?" asked my Master.
"Tell me what became of Giovanni Longo," I asked in a small voice. All eyes were on me.
"It's the siege of... Amadeo, was it? ... Yes, Amadeo, that I have in mind!" cried the blond-haired dancer.
"By and by, Sir," I said. "But teach me some history."
"You little imp," said the black-haired man. "You don't even pick up his rings."
"My fingers are covered with rings," I said politely, which was true.
The red-haired man immediately went back into the battle. "Giovanni Longo stayed for forty days of bombardment. He fought all night when the Turk breached the walls. Nothing frightened him. He was carried to safety only because he was shot."
"And the guns, Sir?" I asked. "Were they so very big?"
"And I suppose you were there!" cried the black-haired man to the redhead, before the redhead could answer me.
"My Father was there!" said the redhead man. "And lived to tell it. He was with the last ship that slipped out of the harbor with the Venetians, and before you speak, Sir, mind you, you don't speak ill of my Father or those Venetians. They carried the citizenry to safety, Sir, the battle was lost..."
"They deserted, you mean," said the black-haired man.
"I mean slipped out carrying the helpless refugees after the Turks had won. You call my Father a coward? You know no more about manners than you know about war. You're too stupid to fight with, and too drunk."
"Amen," said my Master.
"Tell him," said the red-haired man to my Master. "You, Marius De Romanus, you tell him." He took another slobbering gulp. "Tell him about the massacre, what happened. Tell him how Giovanni Longo fought on the walls until he was hit in the chest. Listen, you crackbrained fool!" he shouted at his friend. "Nobody knows more about all of it than Marius De Romanus. Sorcerers are clever, so says my whore, and here is to Bianca Solderini." He drained his glass.
"Your whore, Sir?" I demanded. "You say that of such a woman and here in the presence of drunken disrespectful men?"
They paid no mind to me, not the red-haired man, who was again draining his goblet, or the others.
The blond-haired dancer staggered over to me. "They're too drunk to remember you, beautiful boy," he said. "But not I."
"Sir, you stumble at your dance," I said. "Don't stumble in your rounds with me."
"You miserable little whelp," said the man, and fell towards me, losing his balance. I darted out of the chair to the right. He slipped over the chair and fell to the floor.
There was uproarious laughter from the others. The two remaining dancers gave up their patterned steps.
"Giovanni Longo was brave," my Master said calmly, surveying everything and then returning his cool glance to the red-haired man. "They were all brave. But nothing could save Byzantium. Her hour had come. Time had run out for the Emperors and chimney sweeps. And in the holocaust that followed, so much was irretrievably lost. Libraries by the hundreds were burnt. So many sacred texts with all their imponderable mysteries went up in smoke."
I backed away from the drunk attacker, who rolled over on the floor.
"You lousy little lapdog!" the sprawling man shouted at me. "Give me your hand, I tell you."
"Ah, but Sir," I said, "I think you want more than that."
"And I'll have it!" he said, but he only skidded and fell back down again with a miserable groan.
One of the other men at table-handsome but older, with long thick wavy gray hair and a beautifully lined face, a man who had been gorging himself in silence on a greasy joint of mutton-looked up at me over the joint and at the fallen, twisting man who struggled to get to his feet.
"Hmmm. So Goliath falls, little David," he said, smiling up at me. "Mind your tongue, little David, we are not all stupid giants, and your stones are not for throwing just yet."
I smiled back at him. "Your jest is as clumsy as your friend, Sir. As for my stones, as you put it, they'll stay right where they are in their pouch and wait for you to stumble in the way of your friend."
"Did you say the books, Sir," asked the red-haired man of Marius, completely oblivious to this little exchange. "The books were burnt in the fall of the greatest city in the world?"
"Yes, he cares about books, this fellow," said the black-haired man. "Sir, you better look to your little boy. He's a goner, the dance has changed. Tell him not to mock his elders."
The two dancers came towards me, both as drunk as the man who had fallen. They made to caress me, simultaneously becoming with great odoriferous and heavy breathing a beast with four arms.
"You smile at our friend rolling around on the ground?" one of them asked, sticking his knee between my legs.
I backed up, barely escaping the rude blow. "Seemed the kindest thing I could do," I answered. "Being that my worship was the cause of his fall. Don't plunge into such devotions, yourself, Sirs. I haven't the slightest inclination to answer your prayers."
My Master had risen.
"I tire of this," he said in a cold, clear voice that echoed through the tapestries off the walls. It had a chilling sound to it.
All looked at him, even the struggling man on the floor.
"Indeed!" said the black-haired man, looking up. "Marius De Romanus, is it? I've heard of you. I don't fear you."
"How merciful for you," said my Master in a whisper with a smile. He placed his hand on the man's head and the man whipped himself back and away, almost falling off the bench, but now he was most definitely afraid.
The dancers took their measure of my Master, no doubt trying to gauge whether he would be easy to overwhelm.
One of them turned on me again. "Prayers, Hell!" he said.
"Sir, mind my Master. You weary him, and in weariness he is a perfect crank." I snatched back my arm as he meant to take it.
I backed away even further, into the very midst of the boy musicians so that the music rose about me like a protective cloud.
I could see panic in their faces, yet they played all the faster, ignoring the sweat on their brows.
"Sweet, sweet, gentlemen," I said. "I like it. But play a requiem, if you will."
They gave me desperate glances but no other regard. The drum beat on and the pipe made its snaky melody and the room throbbed with the strumming of the lutes.
The blond-haired man on the floor screamed for help, as he absolutely couldn't get up, and the two dancers went to his aid, though one shot his watchful darts at me.
My Master looked down at the black-haired challenger and then pulled him straight up from the bench with one hand and went to kiss his neck. The man hung in my Master's grip. He froze like a small tender mammal in the teeth of a great beast, and I almost heard the great draught of blood run out of him as my Master's hair shivered and fell down to cover the fatal repast.
Quickly, he let the man drop. Only the red-haired fellow observed all this. And he seemed in his intoxication not to know what to make of it. Indeed he raised one eye, wondering, and drank again from his filthy sloppy cup. He licked the fingers of his right hand, one by one, as if he were a cat, as my Master dropped his black-haired companion facedown on the table, indeed, right into a plate of fruit.
"Drunken idiot," said the red-haired man. "No one fights for valor, or honor, or decency."
"Not many in any event," said my Master looking down at him.
"They broke the world in half, those Turks," said the red-haired man, still staring at the dead one, who surely stared stupidly at him from the smashed plate. I couldn't see the dead man's face, but it excited me tremendously that he was dead.
"Come now, gentlemen," said my Master, "and you, Sir, come here, you who gave my child so many rings."
"Is he your son, Sir?" cried the blond humpback, who was finally on his feet. He pushed his friends away from him. He turned and went to the summons. "I'll father him better than you ever did."
My Master appeared suddenly and without a sound on our side of the table. His garments settled at once, as if he had only taken a step. The red-haired man did not even seem to see it.
"Skanderbeg, the great Skanderbeg, I raise a toast to him," said the red-haired man, to himself apparently. "He's been dead too long, and give me but five Skanderbegs and I'd raise a new Crusade to take back our city from the Turks."
"Indeed, who wouldn't with five Skanderbegs," said the elderly man further down the table, the one nibbling and tearing at the joint. He wiped his mouth with his naked wrist. "But there is no general like unto Skanderbeg, and there never was, save the man himself. What's the matter with Ludovico? You fool!" He stood up.
My Master had put his arm around the blond one, who pushed at him, quite dismayed that my Master was immovable. Now as the two dancers offered my Master pushes and shoves to free their companion, my Master again planted his fatal kiss. He lifted the chin of the blond one and went right for the big artery in the neck. He swung the man around and appeared to draw up the blood from him in one great draught. In a flash, he closed the man's eyes with two white fingers and let the body slip to the floor.
"It is your time to die, good Sirs," he said to the dancers who now backed away from him.
One of them pulled his sword.
"Don't be so stupid!" shouted his companion. "You're drunk. You'll never-. "
"No, you won't, " said my Master with a little sigh. His lips were more pink than I had ever seen them, and the blood he'd drunk paraded in his cheeks. Even his eyes had a greater gloss, and a greater gleam.
He closed his very hand over the man's sword and with the press of his thumb snapped the metal, so that the man held only a fragment in his hand.
"How dare you!" cried the man.
"How did you is more to the point!" sang out the red-haired man at the table. "Cracked in half, is it? What kind of steel is that?"
The joint nibbler laughed very loud and threw back his head. He tore more meat from the bone.
My Master reached out and plucked from time and space the wielder of the broken sword, and now to bare the vein, broke the man's neck with a loud snap.
It seemed the other three had heard it-the one who ate the joint, the wary dancer and the man with the red hair.
It was the last of the dancers whom my Master embraced next. He caught the man's face in his hands as if it were love, and drank again, gasping the man's throat so that I saw the blood just for an instant, a veritable deluge of it, which my Master then covered with his mouth and his bent head.
I could see the blood pump into my Master's hand. I couldn't wait for him to raise his head, and this he did very soon, sooner even than he had left his last victim, and he looked at me dreamily and his countenance was all afire. He looked as human as any man in the room, even crazed with his special drink, as they were with their common wine.
His vagrant blond curls were plastered to his forehead by the sweat that rose in him, and I saw it was a fine sheen of blood.
The music abruptly stopped.
It was not the mayhem but the sight of my Master which had stopped it, as he let this last victim slip, a loose sack of bones, to the floor.
"Requiem, " I said again. "Their ghosts will thank you, kind Gentlemen. "
"Either that, " said Marius to the musicians as he drew close, "or fly the room. "
"I say fly the room," whispered the lute player. At once they all turned and made for the doors. They pulled and pulled upon the latch in their haste, cursing and shouting.
My Master backed up and gathered the jeweled rings from around the chair where I'd been seated before.
"My boys, you go without payment," he said.
In their helpless whining fear, they turned and beheld the rings being tossed to them, and stupidly and eagerly and fall of shame, they each caught a single treasure as my Master aimed it.
Then the doors flew open and cracked against the walls.
Out they went, all but scraping the doorframe, and the doors then shut.
"That's clever!" remarked the man with the joint which he laid aside at last, as all the meat was gone. "How you'd do it, Marius De Romanus? I hear tell you're a powerful magician. Don't know why the Great Council doesn't call you up on charges of witchcraft. Must be all the money you have, no?"
I stared at my Master. Never had I seen him so lovely as now when he was flushed with this new blood. I wanted to touch him. I wanted to go into his arms. His eyes were drunken and soft as he looked at me.
But he broke off his seductive stare and went back to the table, and around it properly, and stood beside the man who had feasted on the joint.
The gray-haired man looked up at him and then glanced at his red-haired companion. "Don't be a fool, Martino," he said to the redhead. "It's probably perfectly legal to be a witch in the Veneto as long as a man pays his tax. Put your money in Martino's bank, Marius De Romanus."
"Ah, but I do," said Marius De Romanus, my Master, "and it earns me quite a good return."
He sat down again between the dead man and the red-haired man, who seemed quite delighted and exhilarated to have him return.
"Martino," said my Master. "Let's talk some more of the fall of Empires. Your Father, why was he with the Genoese?"
The red-haired man, now quite aflame with the whole discussion, declared with pride that his Father had been the representative of the family bank in Constantinople, and that he had died afterwards due to the wounds he'd suffered on that last and awful day.
"He saw it," said the red-haired man, "he saw the women and children slaughtered. He saw the priests torn from the altars of Santa Sofia. He knows the secret."
"The secret!" scoffed the elderly man. He moved down the table and, with a big swipe of his left arm, shoved the dead man off over the bench so that he fell back on the floor.
"Good God, you heartless bastard," said the red-haired man. "Did you hear his skull crack? Don't treat my guest in that manner, not if you want to live."
I came closer to the table.
"Yes, do come on, pretty one," said the redhead. "Sit down." He turned on me his blazing golden eyes. "Sit here, opposite me. Good God, look at Francisco there. I swear I heard his skull crack."
"He's dead," said Marius softly. "It's all right for the moment, don't worry on it." His face was all the more bright from the blood he'd drunk. Indeed the color was even now, and radiant overall, and his hair seemed all the fairer against his blushing skin. A tiny spider's web of veins lived within each of his eyes, not detracting one jot from their awesome lustrous beauty.
"Oh, all right, fine, they're dead," said the redhead, with a shrug. "Yes, I was telling you, and you damned well better mark my words because I know. The priests, the priests picked up the sacred chalice and the Sacred Host and they went into a hiding place in Santa Sofia. My Father saw this with his own eyes. I know the secret."
"Eyes, eyes, eyes," said the elderly man. "Your Father must have been a peacock to have had so many eyes!"
"Shut up or I'll slit your throat," said the red-haired man. "Look what you did to Francisco, knocking him over like that. Good God!" He made the Sign of the Cross rather lazily. "There's blood coming from the back of his head."
My Master turned and, leaning down, swept up five fingerfuls of this blood. He turned to me slowly and then to the redhead. He sucked the blood off one finger. "Dead," he said with a little smile. "But it's plenty warm and thick." He smiled slowly.
The red-haired man was as fascinated as a child at a puppet show.
My Master extended his bloody fingers, palm up, and made a smile as if to say, "You want to taste it?"
The red-haired man grabbed Marius's wrist and licked the blood off his forefinger and thumb. "Hmmm, very good," he said. "All my companions are of the best blood."
"You're telling me," said my Master. I couldn't rip my eyes off him, off his changing face. It seemed now his cheeks did darken, or maybe it was only their curve as he smiled. His lips were rosy.
"And I'm not finished, Amadeo," he whispered. "I've only begun."
"He's not bad hurt!" insisted the elderly man. He studied the victim on the floor. He was worried. Had he killed him? "It's just a mere cut on the back of his head, that's all. Isn't it?"
"Yes, a tiny cut," said Marius. "What's this secret, my dear friend?" He had his back to the gray-haired man, speaking to the redhead with much more interest as he had been all along.
"Yes, please," I said. "What's the secret, Sir?" I asked. "Is that the secret, that the priests ran?"
"No, child, don't be dense!" said the red-haired man looking across the table at me. He was powerfully beautiful. Had Bianca loved him? She never said.
"The secret, the secret," he said. "If you don't believe in this secret, then you'll believe nothing, nothing sacred or otherwise."
He lifted his goblet. It was empty. I picked up the pitcher and filled it with the dark lovely-smelling red wine. I considered taking a taste of it, then a revulsion filled me.
"Nonsense," whispered my Master. "Drink to their passing. Go ahead. There's a clean goblet."
"Oh, yes, forgive me," said the redhead. "I haven't even offered you a cup. Good God, to think I threw a mere table diamond on the board for you, when I would have your love." He picked up the goblet, a rich fancy thing of inlaid silver with tiny stones. I saw now that all the goblets were a set, all carved with tiny delicate figures and set with these same bright little stones. He set down this goblet for me with a clonk. He took the pitcher from me and filled the goblet and then thrust it at me.
I thought I would become so sick I'd vomit on the floor. I looked up at him, at his near sweet face and his pretty blazing red hair. He gave a boyish smile, showing small but perfect white teeth, very pearly, and he seemed to dote on me and to drift, not uttering a word.
"Take it, drink," said my Master. "Yours is a dangerous road, Amadeo, drink for knowledge and drink for strength."
"You don't mock me now, Sir, do you?" I asked, staring at the red-haired man though I spoke to Marius.
"I love you, Sir, as I always have," said my Master, "but you do see something in what I say, for I'm coarsened by human blood. It's always the fact. Only in starvation do I find an ethereal purity."
"Ah, and you turn me from penance at every juncture," I said, "towards the senses, towards pleasure."
The red-haired man and I had locked eyes. Yet I heard Marius answer me.
"It's a penance to kill, Amadeo, that's the rub. It's a penance to slay for nothing, nothing, not 'honor, not valor, not decency,' as our friend says here."
"Yes!" said "our friend," who turned to Marius and then back to me. "Drink!" He thrust the goblet at me.
"And when it's all done, Amadeo, gather up these goblets for me and bring them home so I might have a trophy of my failure and my defeat, for they will be one and the same, and a lesson for you as well. Seldom is it all so rich and clear as it is to me now."
The red-haired man leaned forward, deep into the flirt, and put the goblet right against my lip. "Little David, you'll grow up to be the King, remember? Oh, I would worship you now, tender-cheeked little man that you are, and beg for one psalm from your harp, just one, were it given with your own will."
My Master whispered low, "Can you grant a man's dying request?"
"I think he is dead!" said the gray-haired man with obnoxious loud-ness. "Look, Martino, I think I did kill him; his head's bleeding like a damned tomato. Look!"
"Oh, shut up about him!" said Martino, the redhead, without taking his eyes off mine. "Do grant a dying man's request, little David," he went on. "We are all dying, and I for you, and that you die with me, just a little, Sir, in my arms? Let us make a little game of it. It will amuse you, Marius De Romanus. You'll see I ride him and stroke him with one artful rhythm, and you'll behold a sculpture of flesh that becomes a fountain, as what I pump into him comes forth from him in my hand."
He cupped his hand as if he had my organ already in it. He kept his eyes on me. Then in a low whisper, he said, "I'm too soft to make my sculpture. Let me drink it from you. Have mercy on the parched."
I snatched the goblet out of his wavering hand and drank down the wine. My body tightened. I thought the wine would come back up and spew. I made it go down. I looked at my Master.
"This is ugly, I hate it."
"Oh, nonsense," he said, barely moving his lips. "There's beauty all around!"
"Damned if he isn't dead," said the gray-haired man. He kicked the body of Francisco on the floor. "Martino, I'm out of here."
"Stay, Sir," said Marius. "I would kiss you good night." He clapped his hand over the gray-haired man's wrist and lunged at his throat, but what did it look like to the red-haired one, who gave it only a bleary glance before he continued his worship? He filled my goblet again.
A moan came from the gray-haired man, or was it from Marius?
I was petrified. When he turned from his victim, I would see even more blood teeming in him, and I would have given all the world to see him white again, my marble god, my graven Father in our private bed.
The red-haired man rose before me as he leant over the table and put his wet lips on mine. "I die for you, boy!" he said.
"No, you die for nothing," said Marius.
"Master, not him, please!" I cried.
I fell back, nearly losing my balance on the bench. My Master's arm had come between us, and his hand covered the red-haired man's shoulder.
"What's the secret, Sir?" I cried frantically, "the secret of Santa Sofia, the one we must believe?"
The red-haired man was utterly befuddled. He knew he was drunk. He knew things around him didn't make sense. But he thought it was because he was drunk. He looked at Marius's arm across his chest, and he even turned and looked at the fingers clutching his shoulder. Then he looked at Marius and so did I.
Marius was human, utterly human. There was no trace of the impermeable and indestructible god left. His eyes and his face simmered in the blood. He was flushed as a man from running, and his lips were bloody, and when he licked them now, his tongue was ruby red. He smiled at Martino, the last of them, the only one left alive.
Martino pulled his gaze away from Marius and looked at me. At once he softened and lost his alarm. He spoke with reverence.
"In the midst of the siege, as the Turks stormed the church, some of the priests left the altar of Santa Sofia," he said. "They took with them the chalice and the Blessed Sacrament, our Lord's Body and Blood. They are hidden this very day in the secret chambers of Santa Sofia, and on the very moment that we take back the city, on the very moment when we take back the great church of Santa Sofia, when we drive the Turks out of our capital, those priests, those very priests will return. They'll come out of their hiding place and go up the steps of the altar, and they will resume the Mass at the very point where they were forced to stop."
"Ah," I said, sighing and marveling at it. "Master," I said softly. "That's a good enough secret to save a man's life, isn't it?"
"No," said Marius. "I know the story, and he made our Bianca a whore."
The red-haired man strained to follow our words, to fathom the depth of our exchange.
"A whore? Bianca? A murderer ten times over, Sir, but not a whore. Nothing so simple as a whore." He studied Marius as though he thought this heated passionately florid man was beautiful, indeed. And well he was.
"Ah, but you taught her the art of murder," said Marius almost tenderly, his fingers massaging the man's shoulder, while with his left arm he reached around Martino's back, until his left hand might lock on the man's shoulder with his right. He bent his forehead to touch Martino's temple.
"Hmmm," Martino shook himself all over. "I've drunk too much. I never taught her any such thing."
"Ah, but you did, you taught her, and to kill for such paltry sums."
"Master, what is it to us?"
"My son forgets himself," said Marius, still looking at Martino. "He forgets that I am bound to kill you on behalf of our sweet lady, whom you so finagled into your dark, sticky plots."
"She rendered me a service," said Martino. "Let me have the boy!"
"Beg pardon?"
"You mean to kill me, so do it. But let me have the boy. A kiss, Sir, that's all I ask. A kiss, that is the world. I'm too drunk for anything else!"
"Please, Master, I can't endure this," I said.
"Then, how will you endure eternity, my child? Don't you know that's what I mean to give you? What power under God is there that can break me?" He threw a fierce angry glance at me, but it seemed more artifice than true emotion.
"I've learnt my lessons," I said. "I only hate to see him die."
"Ah, yes, then you have learnt. Martino, kiss my child if he'll allow it, and mark you, be gentle when you do."
It was I who leant across the table now and planted my kiss on the man's cheek. He turned and caught my mouth with his, hungry, sour with wine, but enticingly, electrically hot.
The tears sprang to my eyes. I opened my mouth to him and let his tongue come into me. And with my eyes shut, I felt it quiver, and his lips become tight, as if they had been turned to hard metal clamped to me and unable to close.
My Master had him, had his throat, and the kiss was frozen, and I, weeping, put out my hand blindly to find the very place in his neck where my Master's evil teeth had driven in. I felt my Master's silky lips, I felt the hard teeth beneath them, I felt the tender neck.
I opened my eyes and pulled myself away. My doomed Martino sighed and moaned and closed his lips, and sat back in my Master's grip with his eyes half-mast.
He turned his head slowly towards my Master. In a small raw drunken voice, he spoke. "For Bianca ..."
"For Bianca," I said. I sobbed, muffling it with my hand.
My Master drew up. With his left hand, he smoothed back Martino's damp and tangled hair. "For Bianca," he said into his ear.
"Never . . . never should have let her live," came the last sighing words from Martino. His head fell forward over my Master's right arm.
My Master kissed the back of his head, and let him slip down onto the table.
"Charming to the last," said he. "Just a real poet to the bottom of your soul."
I stood up, pushing the bench away behind me, and I moved out into the center of the room. I cried and cried, and couldn't muffle it with my hand. I dug into my jacket for a handkerchief, and just as I went to wipe my tears, I stumbled backwards over the dead humpbacked man and almost fell. I cried out, a terrible weak and ignominious cry.
I moved back away from him and away from the bodies of his companions until I felt behind me the heavy, scratchy tapestry, and smelled its dust and threads.
"Ah, so this was what you wanted of me," I sobbed. I veritably sobbed. "That I should hate it, that I should weep for them, fight for them, beg for them."
He sat at the table still, Christ of the Last Supper, with his neatly parted hair, his shining face, his ruddy hands folded one on top of the other, looking with his hot and swimming eyes at me.
"Weep for one of them, at least one!" he said. His voice grew wrathful. "Is that too much to ask? That one death be regretted among so many?" He rose from the table. He seemed to quake with his rage.
I pushed the handkerchief over my face, sobbing into it.
"For a nameless beggar in a makeshift boat for a bed we have no tears, do we, and would not our pretty Bianca suffer because we've played the young Adonis in her bed! And of some of those, we weep for none but that one, the very most evil without question, because he flatters us, is it not so?"
"I knew him," I whispered. "I mean, in this short time I knew him, and . . ."
"And you would have them run from you, anonymous as foxes in the brush!" He pointed to the tapestries blazoned with the Courtly Hunt. "Behold with a man's eyes what I show you."
There was a sudden darkening of the room, a flutter of all the many candles. I gasped, but it was only he, come to stand right in front of me and look down at me, a feverish, blushing being whose very heat I could feel as if every pore of him gave forth warm breath.
"Master," I cried, swallowing my sobs. "Are you happy with what you've taught me or not? Are you happy with what I've learnt or not! Don't you play with me over this! I'm not your puppet, Sir, no, never that! What would you have me be, then? Why this anger?" I shuddered all over, the tears veritably flooding from my eyes. "I would be strong for you, but I... I knew him."
"Why? Because he kissed you?" He leant down and picked up my hair in his left hand. He yanked me towards him.
"Marius, for the love of God!"
He kissed me. He kissed me as Martino had, and his mouth was as human and as hot. He slipped his tongue into mine, and I felt not blood but manly passion. His finger burnt against my cheek.
I broke away. He let me break away. "Oh, come back to me, my cold white one, my god," I whispered. I lay my face on his chest. I could hear his heart. I could hear it beating. I had never before heard it, never heard a pulse within the stone chapel of his body. "Come back to me, most dispassionate teacher. I don't know what you want."
"Oh, my darling," he sighed. "Oh, my love." And there came the old demon shower of his kisses, not the mock of a passionate man, but his affection, petal soft, so many tributes laid upon my face and hair. "Oh, my beautiful Amadeo, oh, my child," he said.
"Love me, love me, love me," I whispered. "Love me and take me into it with you. I am yours."
In stillness, he held me. I drowsed on his shoulders.
A little breeze came, but it did not move the heavy tapestries in which the French lords and ladies drifted in their eternal and leafy green forest among hounds that would forever bay and birds that would always sing.
Finally, he released me and he stepped back.
He walked away from me, his shoulders hunched, his head down.
Then with a lazy gesture he beckoned for me to come, and yet he moved out of the room too fast.
I ran after him, down the stone stairs to the street. The doors were open when I got there. The cold wind washed away my tears. It washed away the evil heat of the room. I ran and ran along the stone quays, over the bridges, and after him towards the square.
I didn't catch him until I reached the Molo, and there he was walking, a tall man in a red hood and cape, past San Marco and towards the harbor. I ran after him. The wind from the sea was icy and very strong. It blasted me, and I felt doubly cleansed.
"Don't leave me, Master," I called out. My words were swallowed up, but he heard.
He came to a stop, as if it really were my doing. He turned and waited for me to catch up with him, and then he picked up my outstretched hand.
"Master, hear my lesson," I said. "Judge my work." I caught my breath in haste and went on. "I saw you drink from those who were evil, convicted in your heart of some gross crime. I saw you feast as it is your nature; I saw you take the blood with which you must live. And all about you lies this evil world, this wilderness of men no better than beasts who will yield up a blood as sweet and rich for you as innocent blood. I see it. That's what you meant for me to see, and it's done."
His face was impassive. He merely studied me. It seemed the burning fever in him was already dying away. The distant torches along the arcades shone on his face, and it was whitening and as ever hard. The ships creaked in the harbor. There came distant murmurs and cries from those, perhaps, who cannot or never sleep.
I glanced up at the sky, fearful I would see the fatal light. He'd be gone.
"If I drink such as that, Master, the blood of the wicked and those whom I overpower, will I become like you?"
He shook his head. "Many a man has drunk another's blood, Amadeo," he said in a low but calm voice. His reason had come back to him, his manners, his seeming soul. "Would you be with me, and be my pupil and my love?"
"Yes, Master, always and forever, or for so long as nature gives to you and me."
"Oh, it isn't fanciful the words I spoke. We are immortal. And only one enemy can destroy us-it's the fire that burns in that torch there, or in the rising sun. Sweet to think on it, that when we are at last weary of all this world there is the rising sun."
"I am yours, Master." I hugged him close and tried to vanquish him with kisses. He endured them, and even smiled, but he didn't move.
But when I broke off, and made a fist of my right hand as if to hit him, which I could never have done, to my amazement he began to yield.
He turned and took me in his powerful and ever careful embrace.
"Amadeo, I can't go on without you," he said. His voice was desperate and small. "I meant to show you evil, not sport. I meant to show you the wicked price of my immortality. And that I did. But in so doing, I saw it myself, and my eyes are dazzled and I am hurt and tired."
He laid his head against my head, and he held tight to me.
"Do what you will to me, Sir," I said. "Make me suffer and long for it, if that's what you want. I am your fool. I am yours."
He released me and kissed me formally.
"Four nights, my child," he said. He moved away. He kissed his fingers and planted that last kiss on my lips, and then he was gone. "I go now to an ancient duty. Four nights. Till then."
I stood alone in the earliest chill of the morning. I stood alone beneath a paling sky. I knew better than to look for him.
In the greatest dejection, I walked back through the alleys, cutting across little bridges to wander into the depth of the waking city, for what I didn't know.
I was half-surprised when I realized I had returned to the house of the murdered men. I was surprised when I saw their doorway still open, as if a servant would at any moment appear.
No one appeared.
Slowly the sky above ripened to a pale white and then to a faint blue. Mist crawled along the top of the canal. I went over the small bridge to the doorway, and again went up the stairs.
A powdery light came in from the loosely slatted windows. I found the banquet room where the candles still burnt. The smell of tobacco and wax and of pungent food was close and hanging in the air.
I walked inside, and I inspected the dead men, who lay as we had left them, disheveled, and now slightly yellowed and waxen and a prey to the gnats and the flies.
There was no sound but the humming of the flies.
The spilt wine had dried on the table in pools. The corpses were clean of all the rampant marks of death.
I was sick again, sick to trembling, and I took a deep breath that I shouldn't retch. Then I realized why I had come.
Men in those days wore short cloaks on their jackets, sometimes affixed, as you probably know. I needed one of these, and took it, ripping it loose from the humpback man, who lay almost on his face. It was a flaring coat of canary yellow with white fox for its border and a lining of heavy silk. I tied knots in it and made a thick deep sack of it, and then I went up and down the table, gathering up the goblets, dashing out the contents first, and then putting them in my sack.
Soon my sack was red with drops of wine and grease from where I'd rested it on the board.
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 wax seal.
"Read it and you tell me. Four men came to deliver it, a company of four. Must be some damned important thing."
"Yes," I said unfolding it, "and to make you look so fearful too."
He stood there with his arms folded.
I read:
Dearest darling one,
Stay indoors. Do not on any account leave the house and bar any who seek to enter. Your wicked English lord, the Earl of Harlech, has discovered your identity through the most unscrupulous nosing about, and in his madness vows to take you back with him to England or leave you in fragments at your Master's door. Confess all to your Master. Only his strength can save you. And do send me something in writing, lest I too lose my wits over you, and over the tales of horror which are cried out this morning in every canal and piazza for every ear.
Your devoted Bianca
"Well, damn it," I said folding up the letter. "Four nights Marius will be gone, and now this. Am I to hide for these crucial four nights under this roof?"
"You had better," said Riccardo.
"Then you know the story."
"Bianca told me. The Englishman, having traced you there and heard tell of you being there all the time, would have torn her lodgings to pieces if her guests had not stopped him en masse."
"And why didn't they kill him, for the love of God," I said disgustedly.
He looked most worried and sympathetic.
"I think they count on our Master to do it," he said, "as it is you that the man wants. How can you be certain the Master means to stay away for four nights? When has he ever said such things? He comes, he goes, he warns no one."
"Hmmm, don't argue with me," I answered patiently. "Riccardo, he isn't coming home for four nights, and I will not stay cooped up in this house, and not while Lord Harlech stirs up dirt."
"You'd better stay here!" Riccardo answered. "Amadeo, this Englishman is famous with his sword. He practices with a fencing master. He's the terror of the taverns. You knew that when you picked up with him, Amadeo. Think on what you do! He's famous for everything bad and nothing good."
"So then come with me. You need only distract him and I'll take him."
"No, you're good with your sword, true enough, but you can't take a man who's been practicing with the blade since before you were born."
I lay back down on the pillow. What should I do? I was on fire to go out into the world, on fire to gaze at things with my great sense of the drama and significance of my last days among the living, and now this! And the man who had been worth a few nights' riotous roughhouse pleasure was no doubt advertising far and wide his discontent.
It was bitter, but it seemed I had to stay at home. There was nothing to do. I wanted very much to kill this man, kill him with my own dagger and sword, and even thought I had a good chance of it, but what was this petty adventure to what lay before me when my Master returned?
The fact was, I had already left the world of regular things, the world of regular scores to be settled, and could not be drawn now into a foolish blunder that might be my forfeit of the strange destiny towards which I moved.
"All right, and Bianca is safe from this man?" I asked Riccardo.
"Quite safe. She has more admirers than can fit in the door of her house, and she's marshaled all against this man and for you. Now write her something of gratitude and common sense, and swear to me as well that you'll remain indoors."
I got up and went to the Master's writing desk. I picked up the pen.
I was stopped by an awful clatter, and then a series of piercing irritating cries. They echoed through the stone rooms of the house. I heard people running. Riccardo leapt to attention and put his hand on the hilt of his sword.
I gathered up my own weapons, unsheathing my light rapier and my dagger, both.
"Good Lord Jesus, the man can't be in the house."
A horrid scream drowned out the others.
The smallest of us all, Giuseppe, appeared in the door, his face a luminous white, and his eyes big and round.
"What the hell's the matter," Riccardo demanded, catching hold of him.
"He's been stabbed. Look, he's bleeding!" I said.
"Amadeo, Amadeo!" It rang loudly from the stone stairwell. It was the Englishman's voice.
The boy doubled over in his pain. The wound was in the pit of his stomach, utterly cruel.
Riccardo was beside himself.
"Shut the doors!" he shouted.
"How can I," I cried, "when the other boys may blunder right into his path?"
I ran out and into the big salon and into the portego, the great room of the house.
Another boy, Jacope, lay crumpled on the floor, pushing at it with his knees. I saw the blood running on the stones.
"Oh, this is beyond all fairness; this is a slaughter of innocents!" I shouted. "Lord Harlech, show yourself. You're about to die."
I heard Riccardo cry out behind me. The little boy was obviously dead.
I ran towards the stairs. "Lord Harlech, I'm here!" I called out. "Come out, you brutish coward, you slayer of children! I have a millstone ready for your neck!"
Riccardo spun me around. "There, Amadeo," he whispered. "I'm with you." His blade sang out as he drew it. He was much better than me with the sword, but this battle was mine.
The man was at the far end of the portego. I had hoped he would be staggering drunk, but no such luck. I saw in a moment that any dream he might have had of taking me away by force was now gone; he had slain two boys, and he knew his lust had led him to a final stand. This was hardly an enemy crippled by love.
"Jesus in Heaven, help us!" whispered Riccardo.
"Lord Harlech," I cried. "You dare make a shambles of my Master's house!" I stepped aside from Riccardo to give us both room, as I motioned Riccardo to come forward, away from the head of the steps. I felt the weight of the rapier. Not heavy enough. I wished to God I had practiced with it more.
The Englishman came towards me, a taller man than I had ever noted, with a great reach to his arm that would be a powerful advantage, his cape flapping, his feet sheathed in heavy boots, his rapier raised and his long Italian dagger ready in the other hand. At least he didn't have a true and heavy sword.
Dwarfed by the great room, he was nevertheless big of stature and had a head of roaring British copper hair. His blue eyes were stewed in blood, but he was steady in his walk and in his murderous gaze. His face was wet with bitter tears.
"Amadeo," he called out over the vast room as he came on. "You cut my heart out of my chest while I lived and breathed, and you took it with you! We shall be together this night in Hell."