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

Part 10 - Silver Mirror

I hoisted him up, his legs hooked over my forearms. When I looked over at Nataniellus, I saw that he walked with his hands crossed behind him, as if bound. He still walks in such a way when thoughtful, eyes squinted towards the far distance. I could see that he did not want to chatter in front of the child.

"What are you supposed to be doing?" I asked. 

"No, nothing. Doing nothing. Going to market with you," Escha said, head tipped against my shoulder. "The others, they are mocking me."

"You're sensitive."

"No," he said. "In town, what?"

"I don't know. Something for Nataniellus."

"He goes himself. That is, he could go. For nothing, going together to market."

"Well I'd give you a swat but you're on my back."

For a moment we stood aside to let a donkey cart pass, nodding to the old man behind it. I loved Escha's weight on my back. I loved to sweat in the late summer heat. When we got going again, I hoisted him up a little higher on my back, so that he could lie over my shoulder-blades and drowse. After getting over the awkwardness of having my flirtation with Nataniellus interrupted, I enjoyed having Escha there, as I always did.

When met with the reality of Laurent's survival in 1960, about then, I thought to myself in wonder, "How old was he when he was made?" I couldn't tell. He wouldn't meet my eyes. He backed away. I said, "Veni huc," with a crooked finger, "Come along, and I will carry you." He was wearing a white, semi-sheer robe. My understanding is that he was made in his early 20s, around the same age as me. Because he wouldn't meet my eyes, and because of his height, his slight carriage, I thought him younger. At my Latin, he looked up at me with such weariness in his eyes that I knew him for all of his years. "Ignosce mihi," I had whispered, startled, "I don't know why I thought your eyes were brown." 

"Ei," ah, as Laurent had grimaced, "you are not wrong to remember a boy with brown eyes. Vah," he had sighed, as if embarrassed, "I lost him somewhere."

But I did not lose him. And I swear that in the years after 1960, I saw him whenever I could. We have lost many things. We have found others again. We have held on when those days of inevitable choices arrive, as it does so often arrive, to succumb. And on the road, in Herculaneum, I did not know it was such a day. I did not know what Nataniellus was planning that day in the market, what he was thinking. How could I have known what he had planned? He gave no sign of desperation or plotting.

Nataniellus always refused to wear fine things. He refused to wear gold, anything shimmering. He refused to update himself, ever watchful but never adopting new languages or patterns of behavior. Culture slipped over him like silk over clean flesh. For centuries, the earth seemed to revolve around him, for he, like the moon, would reveal himself as endless, not subject to the birth and death of ideologies. He wore shapeless clothes, combed his hair with his fingers, sat vigil for gods he never took as his own, yet kept across his hours. He only changed this in recent decades, for Leechtin. But he still says the night prayer with Nonus, and makes sacrifices in January and August. If he is feeling youthful, he sits beneath the sun with his head low, and counts the mercies we have been shown. He weaves baskets out of grass and he plaits my hair. He plaits anything he can get his hands on, as he likes to keep himself occupied. He is a simple person, of few wants. But I did not know this on the road.

To see Nataniellus, that day on the road, wearing eye kohl, wearing a gold arm ring tooled to coil like a snake, so real it seemed to move in the sunlight. To see him wearing a gold belt and his fingers stacked with rings. I did not know him. These were the things of value he could fit on his body without seeming suspicious to ignorant eyes. He wore the little make up that would make him appealing without attracting attention. Escha rode on my back, sleepy in the warmth, asking me funny questions, fresh without being offensive, and I entertained him. I was barely functioning. My blood roared for its poison, for the cup of unwatered wine I had left on the kitchen's counter. My head ached and my joints, my organs, weighed against my flesh like raw bronze.