The Story of the Vampire, L (Completed | Featured )

Chapter 6, part 1 - Leechtin, 76 AD

I would say that he was born in 71 AD. I think so. When he was brought before me to touch and look over, the slave in charge told me that the little one was five years old. This little baby, blond and pretty, tugged on me to be let up into my lap, and when he climbed me, he touched my face and pulled on my hair. He asked me, babbling, in a language I didn't know well, why my skin was so white, and lips so red. He tapped on my chest with his little fist and asked me, "Why are you looking like the devil?" That little beautiful baby had no fear. I told him that I was from a different place, very far away. He said, "Why do you speak Latin then? because you are foreign." I told the slave who had brought me this baby that I would keep him in my house. 

The first few months of his being in my possession had been spent in a camp along the road between Herculaneum, where I had my private house, which was a villa decorated in the Etruscan style, and Pompeii, where the trade was good, and the money better. My business was in the buying, training, and selling of slaves, which for many years, and in many places, had always been my business. I ran a tight household, but the day to day minutiae were the concern of my stewards, and before the beautiful baby, I lived a mundane, directionless existence. 

By then, I had lived some few thousand years, and had done great battles, and injustices, and put away grand emotion, for these things are tiring of us, who note time only when there seems too little of it. When he entered, I began to note time. Five years old. Titus, the emperor. One hundred and twenty slaves divided between combat skills and academia, the former to be sold into the military and the latter into private employ. Four learning the household trade, in my home. Two stewards. One pretty, problematic baby. I kept him in my bed. You called him Laurent, but that is not his name. I named him Escha, which he liked.

Escha was brave to the point of foolishness, bold. The other four in the house picked on him mercilessly. Feminine, sweet, favored, he was not like them and they knew it. He called them his brothers, but they wanted nothing to do with him. Whensoever as he was punished, they reveled in it. He cried easily when tormented.

There was a melancholy, wondering side to Escha even then. I clearly remember, in the first week of keeping him, walking outside in the evening, and finding him sitting in the dirt, looking up. His blond hair was wild, the tight curls frizzy and sticking out all directions in a mass on his head. He had his knees drawn up under his tunic. It was cold for that place, and I felt his shivering as a tremor in the air. I smelled his mood, sad, on the breeze, and thought he might be quaking more from tears than temperature.

When I sat behind him in the dirt, he didn't note me. "What do you want with the moon, little slave?" I asked him. 

"Faya," he said, which is the name my intimates have always called me, "I think that my mother is dead. Do you think that she can go to the afterlife without her piece of gold? They threw her in a pit."

"Poor thing," I said. "I believe the river god takes pity on the poor. What of your father?"

"He beat me. I don't care if he wanders forever. I hope he wanders forever in the fog. I hope he is blind." He was drawing circles in the dirt with his finger.

"Ah. You have been beaten often. Now I understand your nature."

"I didn't do anything. I am a good boy."

"No, Escha. I know you are a good boy. Did they beat you in the camp?"

"With a reed rod."

"I see. When you are finished with the moon, come back inside, little one."

He nodded, silent.

When I went inside, I found my steward in the peristyle garden, Vasvius, tall and striking of look, as is my preference, and told him what I had heard.