Blood and Gold (31 page)

Then suddenly the answer came to me as though angels had spoken it, or was it the Devil? It came swiftly and completely.

“To purchase, you understand,” I said, “with gold of course, and now, a boy you want to be rid of. One recently arrived here who will not do as he’s told.”

In a flash I saw the boy in the man’s eyes. Only it could not be true. I could not have such luck. For this boy had beauty as bountiful as Bianca’s. I did not count upon it.

“Recently come from Istanbul,” I said. “Yes, I think that is correct, for the boy was no doubt brought from Russian climes.”

I need say no more words. Everyone was scurrying about. Someone had put a goblet of wine into my hands. I smelled the lovely scent of it, and set it down on the table. It seemed a flood of rose petals descended. Indeed there was everywhere the perfume of flowers. A chair was brought for me. I did not sit on it.

Suddenly the man who had greeted me returned to the room.

“You don’t want that one,” he said quickly. He was greatly agitated. And once again, I saw a clear image of the boy lying on a stone floor.

And I heard the boy’s prayers: “Deliver me.” And I saw the Face of Christ in gleaming egg tempera. I saw the jewels set into the halo. I saw the egg and pigment mixing. “Deliver me.”

“Can’t you understand me?” I asked. “I told you what I wanted. I want that boy, the one who won’t do what you try to force him to do.”

Then I realized it.

The brothel keeper thought the boy was dying. He was afraid of the law. He stood before me in terror.

“Take me to him,” I said. I pressed him with the Mind Gift. “Do it now. I know of him and won’t leave here without him. Besides, I’ll pay you. I don’t care if he’s sick and dying. Do you hear me? I’ll take him away with me. You’ll never have to worry about him again.”

It was a cruel small chamber in which they’d locked him, and into that chamber the light of a lamp flooded upon the child.

And there I saw beauty, beauty which has always been my downfall, beauty as in Pandora, as in Avicus, as in Zenobia, as in Bianca, beauty in a new and celestial form.

Heaven had cast down upon this stone floor an abandoned angel, of auburn curls and perfectly formed limbs, of fair and mysterious face.

I reached down to take him by the arms and I lifted him, and I looked into his half-opened eyes. His soft reddish hair was loose and tangled. His flesh was pale and the bones of his face only faintly sharpened by his Slavic blood.

“Amadeo,” I said, the name springing to my lips as though the angels willed it, the very angels whom he resembled in his purity and in his seeming innocence, starved as he was.

His eyes grew wide as he stared at me. In majesty and golden light, I saw again in his mind those ikons which he had painted. Desperately he struggled to remember. Ikons. The Christ he had painted. With long hair and burning eyes, I resembled the Christ.

He tried to speak, but the language had left him. He tried to find the name of his Lord.

“I’m not the Christ, my child,” I said, speaking to that part of him deep within the mind of which he knew nothing. “But one who comes with his own salvation. Amadeo, come into my arms.”

19

I loved him instantly and impossibly. He was fifteen years old at the most when I took him out of the brothel that night and brought him to live in the palazzo with my boys.

As I held him close to me in the gondola, I knew him certainly to have been doomed—indeed, snatched at the last moment from an inconsequential death.

Though the firmness of my arms comforted him, the beat of his heart was barely sufficient to drive the images which I received from him as he lay against my chest.

Reaching the palazzo, I refused Vincenzo’s assistance, sending him off for food for the child, and I took my Amadeo into my bedchamber alone.

I laid him upon my bed, a wan and ragged being, amid the heavy velvet hangings and pillows, and when the soup at last came, I forced it through his lips myself.

Wine, soup, a potion of honey and lemon, what more could we give him? Slowly, cautioned Vincenzo, lest he take too much after the starvation, and his stomach suffer as the result.

At last I sent Vincenzo away from us, and I bolted the doors of my room.

Was that the fateful moment? Was it the moment in which I knew my soul most completely, the moment in which I acknowledged that this would be a child of my power, my immortality, a pupil of all I knew?

As I looked at the child on the bed, I forgot the language of guilt and recrimination. I was Marius, the witness of the centuries, Marius, the chosen one of Those Who Must Be Kept.

Taking Amadeo into the bath, I cleansed him myself and covered him with kisses. I drew from him an easy intimacy which he had denied all those who had tormented him, so dazzled and confused was he by my simple kindnesses, and the words I whispered in his tender ears.

I brought him quickly to know the pleasures which he had never allowed himself before. He was dazed and silent; but his prayers for deliverance were no more.

Yet even here in the safety of this bedroom, in the arms of one he saw as his Savior, nothing of his old memory could move from the recesses of his mind into the sanctum of reason.

Indeed, perhaps my frankly carnal embraces made the wall in his mind, between past and present, all the more strong.

As for me, I had never experienced such pure intimacy with a mortal, except with those I meant to kill. It gave me chills to have my arms around this boy, to press my lips to his cheeks and chin, his forehead, his tender closed eyes.

Yes, the blood thirst rose, but I knew so well how to control it. I filled my nostrils with the smell of his youthful flesh.

I knew that I could do anything I wanted with him. There was no force between Heaven and Hell that could stop me. And I did not need a Satan to tell me that I could bring him over to me and educate him within the Blood.

Drying him gently with towels, I returned him to the bed.

I sat down at my desk, where turning to the side I might look directly at him, and there came the full-blown idea of it, as rich as my desire to seduce Botticelli, as terrible as my passion for the lovely Bianca.

This was a foundling who could be educated for the Blood! This was a child utterly lost to life who could be reclaimed specifically for the Blood.

Would his training be a night, a week, a month, a year? Only I need decide it.

Whatever it was, I would make of him a child of the Blood.

My mind went back swiftly to Eudoxia and how she had spoken of the perfect age for the Blood to be received. I remembered Zenobia and her quick wits and knowing eyes. I remembered my own long ago reflection on the promise of a virgin, that one could make of a virgin what one wished without price.

And this child, this rescued slave, had been a painter! He knew the magic of the egg and the pigments, yes, he knew the magic of the color spread upon the wooden panel. He would remember; he would remember a time when he cared about nothing else.

True it had been in far-away Russia, where those who worked in monasteries limited themselves to the style of the Byzantines which I had long ago rejected as I turned my back on the Greek Empire and came to make my home amid the strife of the West.

But behold what had happened: the West had had its wars, yes, and indeed, the barbarians had conquered all it did seem. Yet Rome had risen again through the great thinkers and painters of the 1400s! I beheld it in the work of Botticelli, and Bellini and Filippo Lippi and in a hundred others.

Homer, Lucretius, Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch—they were all being studied once again. The scholars of “humanism” sang songs of “antiquity.”

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 softly in the Russian tongue.

I felt the tiny hairs rise all over my body. I wanted so to touch him once more with my cold fingers but I did not dare. I knelt beside the bed and leant over and I kissed his cheek warmly.

“Amadeo,” I said to him so that he might know his new name.

And then using the very Russian tongue he knew, but did not know, I told him that he was mine now, that I was his Master just as he had said. I gave him to know that all things were resolved in me. He must never worry, he would never fear again.

It was almost morning. I had to leave.

Vincenzo came knocking. The eldest among the apprentices were waiting outside. They had heard that a new boy had been brought into the house.

I admitted them to the bedroom. I told them they must take care of Amadeo. They must acquaint him with all our common wonders. They must let him rest for a while, surely, but they could take him out into the city. Perhaps it was the perfect thing to do.

“Riccardo,” I charged the eldest. “Take this one under your wing.”

What a lie it was! I stood thinking of it. It was a lie to give him over to the daylight, to companionship other than my own.

But the rising sun gave me no more time in the palazzo. What else could I do?

I went to my grave.

I lay down in darkness dreaming of him.

I had found an escape from the love of Botticelli. I had found an escape from the obsession with Bianca and her tantalizing guilt. I had found one whom death and cruelty had already marked. The Blood would be the ransom. Yes, all things were resolved in me.

Oh, but who was he? What was he? I knew the memories, the images, the horrors, the prayers, but not the voice! And something tormented me savagely, even in my avowed certainty. Did I not love this child too much to do what I planned to do?

The following night a splendid surprise awaited me.

There was my Amadeo at supper gorgeously turned out in blue velvet, as splendidly clothed as the other boys!

They had hastened to complete the tailoring of his clothes to make me happy and indeed I was, almost to the point of being stunned.

As he knelt to kiss my ring, I was speechless, and with both my hands I bid him rise, and I embraced him, kissing him quickly on both cheeks.

He was still weak from his ordeals, I could see it, but the other boys as well as Vincenzo had gone a long way to put some color into his face.

As we sat down to supper, Riccardo explained that Amadeo could paint nothing. Indeed, Amadeo was afraid of the brushes and the pots of paint. And that he knew no language but he was picking up with amazing quickness our own tongue.

The beautiful boy with the auburn hair who was Amadeo gazed at me calmly as Riccardo spoke. And once again he said in the soft Russian tongue: Master, which the other boys did not hear.

You are for me.
That was my answer for him. The soft words in Russian that I gave to him through the Mind Gift.
Remember. Who were you before you came here? Before they hurt you? Go back. Go back to the ikon. Go back to the Face of Christ if need be.

A look of fear passed over him. Riccardo, not dreaming of the reason why, quickly took his hand. Riccardo began to name the simple objects of the supper table for him. And Amadeo as if waking from a nightmare smiled at Riccardo and repeated the words.

How sharp and fine his voice. How sure the pronunciation. How quick the look of his brown eyes.

“Teach him everything,” I said to Riccardo and to the teachers assembled. “See to it that he studies dancing, fencing, and most of all painting. Show him every picture in the house, and every sculpture. Take him everywhere. See that he learns all there is to know about Venice.”

Then I retired to the painting room alone.

Quickly I mixed up the tempera, and I painted a small portrait of Amadeo as I’d seen him at supper, in his fine tunic of blue velvet with his hair shining and combed.

I was weak from the heat of my own miserable thoughts. The fact was, my conviction had left me.

How could I take from this boy the cup he’d barely tasted? He was a dead creature brought back to life. I had robbed myself of my own Child of the Blood by my own splendid designs.

From that moment afterwards for months to come, Amadeo belonged to daylight. Yes, he must have every chance in the daylight to make of himself whatever he would!

Yet in his mind, unbeknownst to the others in any material way, Amadeo perceived himself, at my behest, as secretly and completely belonging to me.

It was for me a great and terrible contradiction.

I relinquished my claim upon the child. I couldn’t condemn him to the Dark Blood, no matter how great my loneliness or how great his former misery had been. He must have his chance now among the apprentices and scholars of my household, and should he prove to be a princeling as I fully expected from his immediate brightness, he should have his chance to move on to the University of Padua or the University of Bologna where my students were now going one after the other as my myriad plans came to fruition beneath my all-encompassing roof.

Yet in the late evenings, when the lessons had ceased and the little boys had been put to bed, and the older boys were finishing tasks in my studio, I couldn’t stop myself from taking Amadeo into my bedroom study, and there I visited on him my carnal kisses, my sweet and bloodless kisses, my kisses of need, and he gave himself to me without reserve.

My beauty charmed him. Is it pride to say so? I had no doubt of it. I need not work the Mind Gift to render him spellbound. He adored me. And though my paintings terrified him, something in his deep soul allowed him to worship my seeming talent—the deftness of my composition, my vibrant colors, my graceful speed.