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

Part 13 - A Little Family

They were difficult days, waiting for Nataniellus to wake up. We began to sleep during the day, because we were called upon so much in the night. Our interaction with the outside world limited to the occasional trip into town for bread. We stopped cleaning the house. We sold our two goats, because we had not been able to breed them over the winter for milk, and we could not afford to have them slaughtered for meat. The children climbed the trees in the orchard to round our diet. As we sold furniture, the villa began to look bare. The mosaics, because we could not pay to keep them up, began to look patchy in places, where stones were loose. 

Escha began to behave oddly, as if burdened, as if in deep and subtle physical pain. He began to behave like an animal that cannot communicate its illness. As much as he hid, he would equally turn up unexpectedly, hanging around me silently after the order came to drain my blood. 

It would have been logical to question the order, even to initially refuse. I cannot say I ever thought that way. I did it like I would do anything. I gave what I could so that the others would not have to give anything. It felt like sacrificing a chicken to Vesta, to the hearth. 

When Escha asked to cut himself instead, to do the task that had been set for me, I did not respect it. I did not condone it. He was eight years old. He was helping me delegate. I hoped that the little ones could be relied upon not to let him cut himself too deeply. It fell to me then to make sure that they had enough to eat. 

Even then, Cassius found the time to teach them how to care for leatherwork and trim back the orchard trees. He filled the little time we had in ways that made it all feel as normal as possible, for the children. The entire summer remains a blur to me. I feel distracted now. I have never felt that there was so much at stake as I did then. But as ir always seems, I did not quite know how much danger we were in. I still imagined that the way I knew the world, as out of the ordinary as it had become, operated in way of fairness and logic. I didn't explain things to myself, but I'm sure that if I had, it would have all made sense to me. It was necessary that it all make sense to me.

But it does not make sense. Not to such a boy. I have had a long time to understand things, but I am too different now from him to know what precisely he thought. I have not been in a position for a long time to fear things in the way that he feared them, or to be ignorant in the ways that he was ignorant. I now know that human life is far the more fragile than I believed, and that to someone like Leechtin, and to the little master to an extent, tolerated when necessary. We were not quite real to Leechtin, I think, especially those living who did not interest him very much. Nataniellus has said to me that he has had nightmares where he is alone in the dark, and that very far away, he can see very small, very dim fires. He says that when there is light so far away, the dark seems even darker. There is something in this to him about living, but I don't understand it. I don't like it when he turns introspective. I don't want an ideology. What must be excused by ideas? I don't know. 

What I wanted didn't matter. I didn't have anywhere to go. If I refused to provide blood, or to let Escha do it, and the master turned me out, would I take the children with me too? Would I deprive them of their bed and of their food? If I went alone, what life could I have? Especially at that time, in the weeks following that first of many earthquakes, large and small. If I had left the children alone, who would look after them? If I had any sort of fate, who would step into it in my place? If I left and Nataniellus died, how could I do that? Not knowing if he had lived, how could I travel away? He had been my confidant for a year, closer to me than my brothers in ways that I did not know how to express. 

Of course as I said, in the moment it is difficult to realize the full weight of the stakes. I did not for a moment think that if I refused, another option remained to the master. Not unduly, I wonder if he would have killed us all. To this day, I do not know if he is capable of seeing through passion to understand the value of anyone's life or love but his own. That is only reality, though these days particularly, having seen what Nonus shows me, I feel for him. But because that is reality, I fear for us. It is never clear who will live, or in what way live. I sit. I write.