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

Part 16 - Lecne and Raske

In fury I shut those many children, a hundred, two hundred boys, in the great hall of our camp, and I burned it down. Mini, I loved their screams. Do you have a horror of me now? I shivered with the pleasure at the odor, the putrid sweetness of burning flesh. I didn't do it to punish Lecne. I was done with him. I did it only because I wanted to do it, and because I was going to the Silva Ciminia, that great and primordial forest, and I wished to salt the very ground behind me, and wash my senses with that roar of screaming at the lick of flames, and I lay in the long grass while that tall fire lit the sky, in a way that electric lights light it now, and held my Ariel, who loved me for my cruelty and made my head dizzy with his miasma in that bloody atmosphere. I wanted to take the evening like a body and lick it of its blood, so good was it to me, washed clean of the milieu of the living, a creature of pleasured flesh and ancient violence. This is the memory that came to me in Herculaneum, when the city burned two days, and I lay without comfort, full with the odor of burning flesh, and staring into another time, in fear and madness at my condition, at what I had forgotten that I had done.

And in Etruria, came Lecne to where I lay, with his stumbling, and paled from how I had stabbed him and drunk of him of the morning, with my own sword, which in my ecstasy I did not sense him. He put it in my neck from behind, thrusting it upward and out from between my gasping lips. Lecne, of dark eyes and no tongue, drank the blood which flowed in its rivulets from my lips, as I lay in his arms, stunned into weakness and unable to feel my limbs. Lecne was always a man of self-interest, which had attracted me to his body, and he knew himself dying, and took from me what he wanted. He said, "Sweet dying," in my head, the first of his voice I knew, spat a bolus of my blood away, and left me to bleed to death.

But see here, we do not bleed to death who are ancient. We do not perish from a single blow of the blade. We languish by the waters of the earth, and drink of her air, and grow translucent like a moth fallen, but we do not die. And Ariel, who lay in the dirt like a shadow while Lecne availed himself of my body, watching from his cat eyes, took me from that place and into beloved Silva Ciminia, with its great trees. And Ariel kept me there awhile, like a second body of his own, until I woke again. But when I woke, Mini, I was Leechtin, who had many names before Raske, but is not Raske, because Raske is as I was as living, torn by desire and a sense of right, and Leechtin is not living or envious of living flesh. 

And Leechtin wept for what he had done, and called himself "Faya", and heard others call him "Stranger", and begged Ariel not to cleave to him as Death loves those who deal it. But Ariel has remained, and loved my child, my Escha, for his fear of death. And Ariel was there the evening Lecne took my child, ten years past now, and lay in my bed in rapture of this blow to me, and is here still, close. He does not torment me. He is death and has been near me always, and near you, all of you who run with my blood. Lecne is satisfied that he has destroyed my spirit, and taken away my ability to live, because he knows that he cannot easily kill me, but that perhaps I will do it on my own now, if I am without comforts. I am much without, yes. I have been cut so deeply that I fear I will never recover. I am disconnected from myself, floating in my body and missing my beautiful boy, who knew my mind and spirit, and whispered love, which I have so needed, selfish as I am. It is because of me that he suffered always, and because of me that he is dead. 

He weakened himself by refusing the blood for many years, which he learned to do from me, and when Lecne came for him, he was too weak to stand up against the blade, and I held him many hours, begging our mother, Moera, the goddess of time, not to take him, not to take him. And you, all of you, his children, took him from me, convinced me to give him up, and let him die. Raske would kill you all for it. Raske would tempt you into his bed with stories of old things and push his fingers into your eyes and make you blind like his child was, and love your screaming, and break your arms of you as if they were dry wood for fire, and push his hands into your quivering belly, and scoop you of your young, pink flesh. I would do this to all of you and throw you away as if you were straw figures for sacrifice to the old gods I have known. I would have my teeth in you, and rip skin from muscle while you live. And Raske would lie in wait for that doctor who protested love of its child, and drown him in cold water the way he threatened repeatedly to do to its child who was so afraid of drowning. And that child among you, who stabbed Escha so many times for his blood, there is planned special torture. But I am Leechtin.

Hear me? It is Leechtin who mourns, who aches for love, and a touch, and offers his blood to a young vampire so that it might live, and walk with him of the evening by the water, and comfort him with its pleasant, foolish voice. It is Leechtin who bleeds tears of grief, and stutters "help" and searches for his child when he wakes from dreams, and begs those spirits of his wife and son to return Escha, return him to his body, which I have kept for him if he would only come back from heaven. I know that my lover cannot stand it when I say their names, but if there is heaven, please, they must help me. They must help me. I am without help. Even as I fled Alexandria and washed my anguish in the waters of the blue Danube, I knew that I would return to Escha, who had won me, and that without him I could not live.

Do we know why these things happen to us? We do not. This child had become part of my body, and I journeyed back to him in Alexandria, him quieted by the comfort of time and its healing, and took him from the place where he had thrashed and screamed for some months. North. I took him across the water, and went into the Silva Ciminia, which by then was a much changed place from when it had been the border of Etruria, and the uneasy comfort of Imperial Rome. It was a hacked apart wilderness, bleeding itself constantly for its children, and I went there because the forest is as my spirit. It is still there, much diminished, as is the Hercynian of Germania, which would hold me in later years. In the Silva Ciminia, I cared for my blinded, mad Escha, and bled him when he moaned of fever, and listened to him when he spoke madness to me, holding onto my face with his beautiful hands. Sweet, beautiful child, so pale, so blond, his eyes white and blighted.

I would sit by him, his body resting in the water of a moonlit pool, and stroke his hair, and whisper that he was Escha, and not to forget, and that he was much loved by a creature desperate not to forget his own kind and quiet self. And gradually, over time, he came back to himself, and said, "Take me to that glorious city, of which I have heard much. I want to taste the heart's blood of the Empire, and kiss the throats of its youth, its young men, who will beg for me," and I took him to Rome.

It was still Escha then, not your master. He was still my child, though he was much changed.