The Vampire Armand

6

THE HIGH LONG PORTEGO of our house, the entrance hall, was a perfectly wonderful place to die. There was nothing in it to mar its gorgeous mosaic floors with their circles of colored marble stones, and their festive pattern of winding flowers and tiny wild birds.

We had the entire field upon which to fight, with not a chair in the way to stop us from killing each other.

I advanced on the Englishman before I had time to really admit that I wasn't very good with the sword yet, had never shown an instinct for it, and I had no inkling of just what my Master would have me do just now, that is, what he would advise if he were here.

I made several bold thrusts at Lord Harlech, which he parried so easily that I should have lost heart. But just when I thought I'd catch my breath and maybe even run, he swept in with his dagger and slashed my left arm. The cut stung me and infuriated me.

I went after him again, this time managing with considerable luck to get him across the throat. It was just a scratch, but it bled furiously down his tunic, and he was as angry as I was to be cut.

"You horrid damnable little devil," he said. "You made me adore you so you could draw and quarter me at your pleasure. You promised me you'd come back!"

In fact, he kept up this sort of verbal barrage the entire time we fought. He seemed to need it, rather like a goading battle drum and fife.

"Come on, you despicable little angel, I'll tear your wings off!" he said.

He drove me back with a fast volley of thrusts. I stumbled, lost my balance and fell but managed to scramble up again, using the low position to stab dangerously close to his scrotum as I did so, which gave him a start. I ran at him, knowing now there was nothing to be gained by drawing this out.

He dodged my blade, laughed at me and caught me with the dagger, this time on the face.

"Pig!" I growled before I could stop myself. I hadn't known I was so completely vain. My face, no less. He'd cut it. My face. I felt the blood gushing as it does from face wounds, and I rushed at him again, this time forgetting all the rules of the encounter and thrashing the air with my sword in a fierce crazy series of circles. Then as he parried frantically left and right, I ducked and caught him with the dagger in the belly and ripped upward, stopped by the thick gold-encrusted leather of his belt.

I backed up as he sought to slaughter me with both his weapons, and then he dropped them and grabbed, as men do, for the belching wound.

He fell down on his knees.

"Finish him!" shouted Riccardo. He stood back, a man of honor already. "Finish him now, Amadeo, or I do it. Think what he's done under this roof."

I lifted my sword.

The man suddenly grabbed up his own with his bloody hand and flashed it at me, even as he groaned and winced with his pain. He rose up and ran at me in one gesture. I jumped back. He fell to his knees. He was sick and shivering. He dropped the sword, feeling again for his wounded belly. He didn't die, but he couldn't fight on.

"Oh, God," said Riccardo. He clutched his dagger. But he obviously couldn't bring himself to hack away at the unarmed man.

The Englishman went over on his side. He drew his knees up. He grimaced and he laid his head down on the stone, his face formal as he took a deep breath. He fought terrible pain and the certainty that he would die.

Riccardo stepped forward and laid the tip of his sword on Lord Harlech's cheek.

"He's dying, let him die," I said. But the man continued to breathe.

I wanted to kill him, I really wanted to, but it was impossible to kill someone who lay there so placid and so brave.

His eyes took on a wise, poetical expression. "And so it ends here," he said in a small voice that perhaps Riccardo didn't even hear.

"Yes, it ends," I said. "End it nobly."

"Amadeo, he slew the two children!" said Riccardo.

"Pick up your dagger, Lord Harlech!" I said. I kicked the weapon at him. I pushed it right at his hand. "Pick it up, Lord Harlech," I said. The blood was running down my face and down my neck, tickling and sticky. I couldn't stand it. I wanted more to wipe my own wounds than to bother with him.

He turned over on his back. The blood came out of his mouth and out of his gut. His face was wet and shiny, and his breathing became very labored. He seemed young again, young as he had when he threatened me, an overgrown boy with a big mop of flaming curls.

"Think about me when you begin to sweat, Amadeo," he said, his voice still small, and now hoarse. "Think about me when you realize that your life, too, is finished."

"Run him through," said Riccardo in a whisper. "He could take two days to die with that wound."

"And you won't have two days," said Lord Harlech from the floor, panting, "with the poisoned cuts I gave you. Feel it in your eyes? Your eyes burn, don't they Amadeo? The poison goes into the blood, and it strikes the eyes first. Are you dizzy?"

"You bastard," said Riccardo. He stabbed the man with his rapier right through his tunic, once, twice, then three times. Lord Harlech grimaced. His eyelids fluttered, and out of his mouth came a final gout of blood. He was dead.

"Poison?" I whispered. "Poison on the blade?" Instinctively, I felt my arm where he had cut me. My face, however, bore the deeper wound. "Don't touch his sword or dagger. Poison!"

"He was lying, come, let me wash you," said Riccardo. "There's no time to waste."

He tried to pull me from the room.

"What are we going to do with him, Riccardo! What can we do! We're here alone without the Master. There are three dead in this house, maybe more."

As I spoke I heard steps at both ends of the great room. The little boys were coming out of their hiding places, and I saw one of the teachers with them, who had apparently been keeping them out of the way.

I had mixed feelings on this score. But these were all children, and the teacher an unarmed man, a helpless scholar. The older boys had all gone out, as was the custom in the morning. Or so I thought.

"Come on, we have to get them all to a decent place," I said. "Don't touch the weapons." I signaled for the little ones to come. "We'll carry him to the best bedchamber, come on. And the boys as well."

As the little ones struggled to obey, some of them began to cry.

"You, give us a hand!" I said to the teacher. "Watch out for the poisoned weapons." He stared at me wildly. "I mean it. It's poison."

"Amadeo, you're bleeding all over!" he cried shrilly in a panic. "What poisoned weapons? Dear God save us all!"

"Oh, stop it!" I said. But I could stand this situation no longer, and as Riccardo took charge of the moving of the bodies, I rushed into my Master's bedroom to attend to my wounds.

I dumped the whole pitcherful of water into the basin in my haste, and grabbed up a napkin with which to catch the blood that was flowing down my neck and into my shirt. Sticky, sticky mess, I cursed. My head swam, and I almost fell. Grabbing the edge of the table, I told myself not to be Lord Harlech's fool. Riccardo had been right. Lord Harlech had made up that lie about the poison! Poison the blade, indeed!

But as I told myself this story, I looked down and saw for the first time a scratch, apparently made by his rapier on the back of my right hand. My hand was swelling as if this were an insect's venomous work.

I felt my arm and my face. The wounds there were swelling, great welts forming behind the cuts. Again, there came the dizziness. The sweat dripped off me right into the basin, which was now full of red water that looked like wine.

"Oh, my God, the Devil's done this to me," I said. I turned and the entire room began to tilt and then to float. I rocked on my feet.

Someone caught me. I didn't even see who it was. I tried to say Riccardo's name, but my tongue was thick in my mouth.

Sounds and colors mingled in a hot, pulsing blur. Then with astonishing clarity I saw the embroidered baldaquin of the Master's bed, over my head. Riccardo stood over me.

He spoke to me rapidly and somewhat desperately, but I couldn't make out what he said. Indeed, it seemed he spoke a foreign tongue, a pretty one, very melodious and sweet, but I couldn't understand a word of it.

"I'm hot," I said. "I'm burning, I'm so hot that I can't bear it. I have to have water. Put me in the Master's bath."

He didn't seem to have heard me at all. On and on he went with his obvious pleading. I felt his hand on my forehead and it burned me, positively burned me. I begged him not to touch me, but this he didn't hear, and neither did I! I wasn't even speaking. I wanted to speak, but my tongue was too heavy and too big. You'll get the poison, I wanted to cry. I could not.

I closed my eyes. Mercifully I drifted. I saw a great sparkling sea, the waters off the island of the Lido, crenelated and beautiful beneath the noonday sun. I floated on this sea, perhaps in a small bark, or maybe just on my back. I couldn't feel the water itself, but there seemed nothing between me and its gentle tossing waves that were big and slow and easy and carried me up and then down. Far off, a great city gleamed on the shore. At first I thought it was Torcello, or even Venice, and that I had been turned around somehow and was floating towards the land. Then I saw it was much bigger than Venice, with great piercing reflective towers, as if it had been made entirely of brilliant glass. Oh, it was so lovely.

"Am I going there?" I asked.

The waves seemed then to fold over me, not with a suffocating wetness, but merely a quiet blanket of heavy light. I opened my eyes. I saw the red of the taffeta baldaquin above. I saw the golden fringe sewn on the velvet bed curtains, and then I saw Bianca Solderini there above me. She had a cloth in her hand.

"There wasn't enough poison on those blades to kill you," she said. "It's merely made you sick. Now, listen to me, Amadeo, you must take each breath with quiet force and resolve to fight this sickness and to get well. You must ask the very air itself to make you strong, and be confident of it, that's it, you must breathe deeply and slowly, yes, exactly, and you must realize that this poison is being sweated out of you, and you must not believe in this poison, and you must not fear."

"The Master will know," said Riccardo. He looked drawn and miserable, and his lips quivered. His eyes were flooded with his tears. Oh, ominous sign, certainly. "The Master will know somehow. He knows all things. The Master will break his journey and come home."

"Wash his face," said Bianca calmly. "Wash his face and be quiet." How brave she was.

I moved my tongue but I couldn't form words. I wanted to say that they must tell me when the sun sank, for then and only then might the Master come. There was surely a chance. Then and only then. He might appear.

I turned my head to the side, away from them. The cloth was burning me.

"Softly, quietly," said Bianca. "Take in the air, yes, and do not be afraid."

A long time passed as I lay there, hovering just below perfect consciousness, and thankful that their voices were not sharp, and their touch was not so terrible, but the sweating was awful, and I despaired utterly of being cool.

I tossed and tried to get up once, only to feel terribly sick, sick unto vomiting. With a great relief I realized they had laid me back down.

"Hold on to my hands," said Bianca, and I felt her fingers grasping mine, so small and too hot, hot like everything else, hot like Hell, I thought, but I was too sick to think of Hell, too sick to think of anything but vomiting up my insides into a basin, and getting to somewhere cool. Oh, just open the windows, open them on the winter; I don't care, open them!

It seemed quite a nuisance that I might die, and nothing more. Feeling better was of far greater importance, and nothing troubled me as to my soul or any world to come.

Then abruptly all things changed.

I felt myself rise upwards, as if someone had yanked me by my head out of the bed and sought to pull me up through the red cloth baldaquin and through the ceiling of the room. Indeed, I looked down, and to my utter amazement I saw myself lying on the bed. I saw myself as if there were no baldaquin above my body to block the view.

I looked far more beautiful than I ever imagined myself to be. Understand, it was utterly dispassionate. I did not feel an exultation in my own beauty. I only thought, What a beautiful young boy. How gifted he has been by God. Look at his long delicate hands, how they lie beside him, and look at the deep russet of his hair. And that was me all the time, and I didn't know it or think of it, or think what effect it had on those who saw me as I moved through life. I didn't believe their blandishments. I had only scorn for their passion. Indeed, even the Master had seemed before to be a weak and deluded being for ever desiring me. But I understood now why people had somewhat taken leave of their senses. The boy there, dying on the bed, the boy who was the cause of weeping all around in this large chamber, the boy seemed the very embodiment of purity and the very embodiment of youth on the verge of life.

What did not make sense to me was the commotion in the room.

Why did everyone weep? I saw a priest in the doorway, a priest I knew from the nearby church, and I could see that the boys argued with him and feared to let him near me as I lay on the bed, lest I be afraid. It all seemed a pointless imbroglio. Riccardo should not wring his hands. Bianca should not work so hard, with her damp cloth and her soft but obviously desperate words.

Oh, poor child, I thought. You might have had a little more compassion for everyone if you had known how beautiful you were, and you might have thought yourself a little bit stronger and more able to gain something for yourself. As it was, you played sly games on those around you, because you did not have faith in your own self or even know what you were.

It seemed very clear, the error in all this. But I was leaving this place! The same draught that had pulled me up out of the pretty young body that lay on the bed was pulling me upwards into a tunnel of fierce, noisy wind.

The wind swirled around me, enclosing me completely and tightly in this tunnel, yet I could see in it other beings who looked on even as they were caught in it and moved by the incessant fury of this wind. I saw eyes looking on me; I saw mouths open as if in distress. I was pulled higher and higher through this tunnel. I didn't feel fear, but I felt a fatality. I could not help myself.

That was your error when you were that boy down there, I found myself thinking. But this is indeed hopeless. And just as I concluded, so I came to the end of this tunnel; it dissolved. I stood on the shore of that lovely sparkling sea.

I wasn't wet from the waves, but I knew them, and I said out loud, "Oh, I'm here, I've come to the shore! Look, there are the towers of glass."

As I looked up, I saw that the city was far away, over a series of deep green hills, and that a path led to it, and that flowers bloomed richly and gorgeously on either side of the path. I had never seen such flowers, never seen such shapes and petal formations, and never never beheld such colors in all my life. There were no names in the artistic canon for these colors. I couldn't call them by the few weak inadequate labels which I knew.

Oh, would the painters of Venice ever be astonished at these colors, I thought, and to think how they would transform our work, how they would set ablaze our paintings if only they could be discovered in some source that might be ground into pigment and blended with our oils. But what a pointless thing to do. No more painting was needed. All the glory that could be accomplished by color was here in this world revealed. I saw it in the flowers; I saw it in the variegated grass. I saw it in the boundless sky that rose up and over me and behind the distant blinding city, and it too flashed and glowed with this great harmony of colors, blending and twinkling and shimmering as if the towers of this city were made of a miraculous thriving energy rather than a dead or earthly matter or mass.

A great gratitude flowed out of me; my whole being gave itself up to this gratitude. "Lord, I see now," I said aloud. "I see and I understand." It did at that moment seem very clear to me, the implications of this varied and ever increasing beauty, this pulsing, radiant world. It was so very pregnant with meaning that all things were answered, all things were utterly resolved. I whispered the word "Yes" over and over. I nodded, I think, and then it seemed quite absurd to bother to say anything in words at all.

A great force emanated from the beauty. It surrounded me as if it were air or breeze or water, but it was none of these. It was far more rarefied and pervasive, and though it held me with a formidable strength it was nevertheless invisible and without pressure or palpable form. The force was love. Oh, yes, I thought, it is love, it is complete love, and in its completeness it makes all that I have ever known meaningful, for every disappointment, every hurt, every misstep, every embrace, every kiss was but a foreshadowing of this sublime acceptance and goodness, for the bad steps had told me what I lacked, and the good things, the embraces, had shown me a glimpse of what love could be.

All my life this love made meaningful, sparing nothing, and as I marveled at this, accepting it completely and without urgency or questioning, a miraculous process began. All my life came to me in the form of all those I had ever known.

I saw my life from the very first moments and up until the moment that had brought me here. It was not a terribly remarkable life; it contained no great secret or twist or pregnant matter that changed my heart. On the contrary, it was but a natural and common string of myriad tiny events, and these events involved all the other souls whom I had ever touched; I saw now the hurts I'd inflicted, and the words of mine which had brought solace, and I saw the result of the most casual and unimportant things I had done. I saw the banquet hall of the Florentines, and again in the midst of them, I saw the blundering loneliness with which they stumbled into death. I saw the isolation and the sadness of their souls as they had fought to stay alive.

What I could not see was my Master's face. I could not see who he was. I could not see into his soul. I could not see what my love meant to him, or what his love meant for me. But this was of no importance. In fact, I only realized it afterwards when I tried to recount the entire event. What mattered now was only that I understood what it meant to cherish others and to cherish life itself. I realized what it had meant when I painted pictures, not the ruby-red bleeding and vibrant pictures of Venice, but old pictures in the antique Byzantine style, which had once flowed so artlessly and perfectly from my brush. I knew then I had painted wondrous things, and I saw the effects of what I had painted ... and it seemed then a great crowd of information inundated me. Indeed, there was such a wealth of it, and it was so easy to comprehend, that I felt a great light joy.

The knowledge was like the love and like the beauty; indeed, I realized with a great triumphant happiness that they were all-the knowledge, the love, and the beauty-they were all one.

"Oh, yes, how could one not see it. It's so simple!" I thought.

If I had had a body with eyes, I would have wept, but it would have been a sweet weeping. As it was, my soul was victorious over all small and enervating things. I stood still, and the knowledge, the facts, as it were, the hundreds upon hundreds of small details which were like transparent droplets of magical fluid passing through me and into me, filling me and vanishing to make way for more of this great shower of truth-all this seemed suddenly to fade.

There beyond stood the glass city, and beyond it a blue sky, blue as a sky at midday, only one which was now filled with every known star.

I started out for the city. Indeed, I started with such impetuosity and such conviction that it took three people to hold me back.

I stopped. I was quite amazed. But I knew these men. These were priests, old priests of my homeland, who had died long before I had even come to my calling, all of which was quite clear to me, and I knew their names and how they had died. They were in fact the saints of my city, and of the great house of catacombs where I had lived.

"Why do you hold me?" I asked. "Where's my Father? He's here now, is he not?" No sooner had I asked this than I saw my Father. He looked exactly as he had always looked. He was a big, shaggy man, dressed in leather for hunting, with a full grizzled beard and thick long auburn hair the same color as my own. His cheeks were rosy from the cold wind, and his lower lip, visible between his thick mustache and his gray-streaked beard, was moist and pink as I remembered. His eyes were the same bright china blue. He waved at me. He gave his usual, casual, hearty wave, and he smiled. He looked just like he was going off into the grasslands, in spite of everyone's advice, and everyone's caution to hunt, with no fear at all of the Mongols or the Tatars swooping down on him. After all, he had his great bow with him, the bow only he could string, as if he were a mythical hero of the great grassy fields, and he had his own sharpened arrows, and his big broadsword with which he could hack off a man's head with one blow.

"Father, why are they holding me?" I asked.

He looked blank. His smile simply faded and his face lost all expression, and then to my sadness, to my terrible shocking sadness, he faded in his entirety and he wasn't there.

The priests beside me, the men with their long gray beards and their black robes, spoke to me in soft sympathetic whispers and they said, "Andrei, it's not time for you to come."

I was deeply distressed, deeply. Indeed, I was so sad that I could form no words of protest. Indeed, I understood that no protest I might make mattered, and then one of the priests took my hand.

"No, this is always the way with you," he said. "Ask."

He didn't move his lips when he spoke, but it wasn't necessary. I heard him very clearly, and I knew that he meant no personal malice to me. He was incapable of such a thing.

"Why, then," I asked, "can't I stay? Why can't you let me stay when I want to, and when I've come this far."

"Think on all you've seen. You know the answer."

And I had to admit that in an instant I did know the answer. It was complex and yet profoundly simple, and it had to do with all the knowledge I had gained.

"You can't take this back with you," said the priest. "You'll forget all the particular things you learned here. But remember the overall lesson, that your love for others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters."

It seemed a marvelous and comprehensive thing! It seemed no simple small cliche. It seemed so immense, so subtle, yet so total that all mortal difficulties would collapse in the face of its truth.

I was at once returned to my body. I was at once the auburn-haired boy dying in the bed. I felt a tingling in my hands and feet. I twisted, and a wretched pain flamed down my back. I was all afire, sweating and writhing as before, only now my lips were badly cracked and my tongue was cut and blistered against my teeth.

"Water," I said, "please, water."

A soft sobbing came from those around me. It was mingled with laughter and expressions of awe.

I was alive, and they had thought me dead. I opened my eyes, and I looked at Bianca.

"I won't die now," I said.

"What is it, Amadeo?" she asked. She bent down and put her ear to my lips.

"It isn't time," I said.

They brought me cool white wine. It was mixed with honey and lemon. I sat up and I drank gulp after gulp of it. "It's not enough," I said softly, weakly, but I was falling asleep.

I went down into the pillows, and I felt Bianca's cloth wipe my forehead and my eyes. What a sweet mercy it was, and how very grand to give that small comfort, which was all the world to me. All the world. All the world.

I had forgotten what I had seen on the other side! My eyes snapped open. Recover it, I thought desperately. But I remembered the priest, vividly as though I had just talked to him in another room. He had said I couldn't remember. And there was so much more to it, infinitely more, such things as only my Master might understand.

I closed my eyes. I slept. Dreams couldn't come to me. I was too ill, too feverish, but in my own way, stretched thin upon a consciousness of the moist hot bed and the sluggish air beneath the baldaquin, upon the blurred words of the boys and Bianca's sweet insistence, I did sleep. The hours ticked. I knew them, and gradually some comfort came to me in that I got used to the sweat that smothered my skin, and the thirst that hurt my throat, and I lay without protest, drifting, waiting for my Master to come.

I have so many things to tell you, I thought. You will know about the glass city! I must explain that I was once . . . but I couldn't quite remember. A painter, yes, but what sort of painter, and how, and my name? Andrei? When had I been so called?