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

Part 2 - Silk of Deepest Indigo

"Why've you been told to sleep here? What is it that you're meant to do here?"

"Nullo intelligo. Mirror!" he exclaimed, pointing at the polished silver mirror Nonus has found.

"Am I allowed to touch you? What the hell is going on?" I demanded, because as soon as I sat down at the table, he clambered onto my lap to look into the mirror. "How old are you? Where've they been keeping you before now?"

"Six," he said, which is something he repeatedly insisted over the course of his life, even though all of his papers said he was five years old at age of purchase. If he truly was that old, he was small for it. But he was small all his life. "My name is Escha. Mirror, now, all right?"

He was very light on my lap, and I pressed my arm against his stomach so he wouldn't fall. I had never met one of us who was so amenable to being held by complete strangers. He found familiarity with me immediately. It did not make me wonder for a very long time that perhaps this openness of character is why he had been chosen, and that it made his bow-legs not matter. I had always been taught to maintain physical distance, and carry myself as one below the temptation of affection. It did not yet make me wonder what he had been taught. I assumed that he had never received any training at all. I wondered if he was like what all children were before the rod. 

He made me smile, chattering to his reflection. "Hello, nose. Hello, eyes. It's me, it's me," he said. "What do you say this in Latin?" he asked, pointing at his face.

"Vanum," I joked. Vanity. Frivolity.

"Is that, what does it mean?" he asked.

"It's a joke. Are you wearing that to bed? Sleeping like this?"

He nodded, biting his lower lip to contain his laughter, and I picked him up with my one arm as I rose, making him laugh. 

He asked me to help him tie up his hair for bed, and so that is what I was doing when the others came in, and I heard Cassius cluck at me for not laying the covers on the bed or finishing my work, but the two younger ones had come over to look at Escha, and to pluck at him. He was their junior, and they had never had a junior, and so they had never been allowed to nitpick anyone before, and especially not one who was such a mystery. They plucked at his tunic and at his hair, pinched his arms and thighs for fat, which Escha submitted to like a well-trained puppy, without a single sound.

"You can talk to him tomorrow," I told them, shooing all three of the little ones towards bed. Cassius headed out to douse all but one lamplight, bringing over us immediate shadow. He came back in blowing on his fingers and shivering slightly. "Did you say a prayer for us yet?" I asked him.

"Yes and I put a piece of plum in the shrine for Venus."

"Cassius," I whispered, "I don't think that's what the boy is for."

"Well until we know, plum for Venus. Would you leave me alone?"

"Come over so I can give you a clout," I whispered.

"I hate you, Iovita. You're not funny," he hissed.

"Why don't you cry more," I whispered.

"Don't bully me I'm not going to fight you. What's wrong with you?"

I gestured to my junior to come sit with me on the floor, on the pallet in the corner where we often read together. Secretly, we held each other there often, and whispered. To be held by him, it was like we were really brothers, and the love between us an unbreakable bond. An illusion, certainly, but in the dark, a healthy one. Cassius and I had been brought into the house together, two years before, and that he was younger than me was all that separated us, really, beyond attitude. The younger, Aulus and Nonus, had been with us a year, arriving at the same time. And now Escha.