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

Part 6 - Romans

During the day there was little danger. The children could come and go as they pleased. It was only  night, especially the little hours, that demanded vigilance. But that didn't mean there could be a routine, as the severe dangers are so because they surprise. Iovita was easy. A few years later, Cassius was easy, making it clear to me that he had little intention to stay. "Little master," he told me, calling me by the sweet formality to show respect, "you know that I will never be safe. The others will follow me. Give me a chance." Of all of them, Cassius had the most to lose. Bronzed and etched finely from swimming, from running, his skin was always feeling hot against my hands. He was a creature of Apollo, but right. He kissed Nonus and Aulus good bye, who could not understand his wanderlust, who protested to their brother to stay. "I will not eat if you go," Nonus told him. Cassius rejoined him, "Little cat, you will and quickly. You love a bread." It is difficult for me to recall hard things about Cassius. In my memory he is a dim star, warm and hazy with sun-bleached hair. I think that the life he led in Misenum meant freedom to him, to be able to swim as he pleased, to chase scallops that he could himself eat, to find associates for his own purposes. I do not think that he was willing to give up that freedom even if he had to give up the life.

He was right about Nonus as well. Nonus could not stop eating. After he began work at seventeen, the frail, hollow-cheeked boy filled out nicely. I feared a little that he was begging food at work, but he seemed to be getting away with it if he was. I was able to stop worrying about his bones growing brittle. Aulus drummed his little brother's stomach which made a nice sound now it was no longer concave. Nonus's hair took on a healthy sheen, and he developed pretty rosy cheeks. They preened each other like little birds. If Aulus ever talked about women around Nonus, the boy would start clucking like a chicken to make him stop. Though entirely platonic, their relationship was clearly exclusive. Nonus would not bear the presence of another friend to take away Aulus's attention. Puberty came and went uneventfully. "We've work to do don't get distracted," Aulus told his brother, and that was it. They had been through all of the earthly hells together, and refused the comforts of flesh. I worried they would become frigid and uncompromising, as men do who are ascetic, but they remained elastic all their lives. Aulus clearly seemed the kind likely to take a wife young. Nonus never expressed any interest. They were both completely possessed of enormous self control, and the only disagreement I ever heard between them was over dibs. I am certain they fought over dibs as an outlet for other frustrations. When questioned, Aulus told me once, "See the problem is I cheat like a dirty dog at dibs and always will." I don't understand how a person can cheat at dibs.

At twenty-five, Aulus came to me and he said, "Please may I ask you this?" I told him to speak at will. "You may say no if you will. Of course you can say no," he said, tripping over his words, "I know that it is dangerous here. I have not forgotten anything that has happened to us. But Nonus and I, we are surviving. I know that we cannot see what will happen, but I ask you for two more years."

"Only two?" I asked him. I took his long fingers to look at them. By then he had begun work at a dyer's, and his fingers were always stained with indigo, even the fingernails. It looked like he had gangrene. He looked cold. He had begun to make little enough to feed himself and Nonus both. He was asking for time for his brother to live life without work.

"Yes, and then we will be ready," he said. "I know that you are not a Death. I do not plead for my life. I know that it will wait until we ask for it."

I didn't tell Iovita about it, because my reaction was selfish. I knew that until the children were blooddrinkers, we would stay in Misenum. After that it was conceivable that we might move on. I wanted to stay there, near what had been Herculaneum. I still hoped that if we stayed there, certainly Faya would know where to find me if he cared to look. Surely he would. I was not yet ready to abandon hope. Fifteen years. Certainly he had not forgotten us. I am not disposed to be religious, but to believe this was my religion. I did not feel the children would understand. Like the most beloved lambs, I'd had little faith in it to begin with. It never even occurred to me that he wouldn't care what happened to the children, because I did. And so I belonged to them, though they called me master and treated me like one. 

Aulus insisted Nonus should be made first so that he could hold his brother's hand. By then Nonus had lived twenty-seven years, and Aulus twenty-nine. I had waited longer than he had asked. The time had come and I had not been ready. One unremarkable evening, Aulus brought Nonus to me by the wrist and said, "Now it's Nonus." Always younger, from then Nonus found himself two days older. I think that beyond caring for his brother, Aulus was frightened and wanted to watch. 

Aulus was no less frightened for having watched. He trembled against me, unused to being at another's mercy who was not his brother. Afterward, he seemed to sleep. Iovita told me not to worry. Nonus climbed into bed and Aulus moved to embrace him, still unconscious. "See," Iovita whispered to me, "he will wake up soon." When Nonus worried aloud, Iovita reminded him of how I had slept, saying, "Aulus must have had an illness he hid. This is what happens when you try it and you are ill." This explanation, on such little evidence, was the limit of what we knew. Iovita whispered to me out of Nonus's hearing that we needed to take to the road. He hissed to me, "Nataniellus, we are weaker now than we have ever been. We have too many vulnerabilities to defend. If some strong one or many others come, they will kill us. We must take to the road so that we can always be moving." I thought of the searching touch of Aulus's head against my neck as a child, which made my head tingle in memory, and how he had babbled his wise things to me, and I could not decide what to do. In fact it had always been Aulus who knew the best course. And so I did nothing, and sat on the floor, waiting. Finally, Iovita took the issue to Nonus. Nonus whispered to us, with all the venom his sweet voice could hold, that he would not let us kill Aulus, and that he would fight us. When we left Misenum, he carried Aulus on his back.

For many years, if touched, Aulus would still move. He seemed to know what it meant to hold his brother, and his breathing comforted us all with its slow regularity. After many ages, he began to move less and less. Even then his pupils were reactive, expanding and contracting in changing light. But that had lately stopped, and his ability to take blood had stopped, and when I heard that unearthly sound come from his room, I knew what had happened.

Iovita reached Nonus before I did, and I was present to see Iovita take hold of him and pull him back from the casket. Nonus went easily, as he was not seeing any of us, and so not defending himself. He wailed and tried to get at Iovita's face, nonverbal, wild, and Iovita only held onto him, keeping him low so that would be decent in his long workshirt. I had forgotten all about Escha, who came in and got close before I could catch him, and began speaking nonsense, and Iovita was not fast enough to hold Nonus back from hauling off and punching Escha in the face. "Vous etes un etranger!" You are a stranger, Nonus shouted at him in French. "Vous ne savez rien! Ne me parlez pas de lui!" You know nothing, and don't talk to me about him. "Iovita," he wept, "he was my entire life, and what will I do now?" Iovita kept quiet. "Iovita we are too few. Find Cassius. Find him," Nonus begged. To this as well, silence.

Sounds came from Nonus without his having willed them, and we could not restrain him if we had tried. He murmured to me, "We must destroy his body. We must destroy his body. I do not want him to come back. I will give him silver. He will cross the river. We will destroy his body." He was not mad, but determined. 

I wandered the house, lost. But all that evening, Escha had been working, and when he presented himself to me, all I could say to him was what I had been saying to myself for hours. "Corvus oculum corvi non eruit." A crow will not pull out the eye of another crow, about the blow Nonus had dealt him. I found myself afraid that Faya would punish me for the damage.

"I am not angry," he told me, in his Latin, which had always been somewhat faulty. In his voice was a patient respect that sounded unlike Laurent. "Pardon me, I do not know what to call you." 

"Whatever you wish. I do not care. I am the same Nataniellus as before, though now you see me as I am, in my own house."

He chose to call me Nataniellus, as he had done in Herculaneum. He was our Escha after all.

  He had arranged to have Aulus transported to America, where his body could be burned in the presence of his master. I did not know he could do this thing. I did not know it was possible to do such things with money. And my children returned to their master's house, amid disorder, for in our absence, Faya had found the intruder and his little knife.