"It was there when I woke up this morning, look," I said, inclining my neck so that Leechtin could investigate me.
"Where did you sleep?" he asked, taking my head between his hands. His fingers slid behind my ears, into my hair, the same black hair as his own. Slowly, he declined his own head, as if drawn to the twin pinpricks on my neck. He rested his heavy head against my collar, quietened.
I remained unmoved. Together we sat on a stacked stone retaining wall, edging a small lily pond. Ahead of us, on the green water, a dragonfly watched me from the closed bud of a lily. The stone beneath me warmed me.
My feet, dipped in the water so close to the surface, felt hot. Behind, the grassy verge crawled with harmless black ants.
"I dug a shallow hole and slept in your woods, from early morning until past late afternoon. Until maybe two hours ago. You see now that the sun is making itself ready to go to bed," I told him. "I wake, and here is a wound upon me, as if done by an insect. Ah, but what insect bites Kallines? His skin is too thick for their teeth."
"A villain bites, but he leaves you whole," he said, his breath insubstantial against my skin.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "No 'hush, be quiet, Kallines'? A villain?"
While he laid his head upon me, I did not hold him. I sat still in the fading afternoon light, waiting for the sound of frogs to come, what sound always made him talk of the past, even to someone like me, who has always disappointed him. No matter. No matter.
He weeps the way that a stone weeps, soundlessly, still, and only at rare but understood parts of the day, parts of the year. When I was a boy, of Macedonia, a boy of long marches and little vanity, he had come to me on a spring evening. He had murmured to me, my son, my blood, and taken my hands, and told me that I was his image. He was a little mad then, more mad than now. He had woken from a long sleep. In my tent, he told me stories of an old, burning world.
It is true that we are very like, in lips, in eyes, in hair. But I was then only twenty, the son of a seamstress and a soldier, a soldier myself, obedient only until the bite. Vain. Outspoken. Too young. But older now than his children, here to remain after them as before them. I am not moved by the weeping of stones. A hard man weeps; he is still hard. A hard ear listens, but it hears.
"A favor," he said. No breath on my neck. No sound.
"We will see," I said.
"Only you will say that."
"But only I will do this thing, you think. I will do it if I like to do it."
He laughed, and pulling back from me, dragged his fingers gently through my hair. Passing my face, he kissed my cheek.
"Oh what you are doing?" I asked, wagging my hand. "We are not dying."
"You will find someone for me. You can bring him here."
"The matter is what? What has he done?"
"Oh, I'm," he started, "no, you are not asking that."
His hands were folded in his lap. Thin ivory linen, cut loosely, black braided leather belt.
"Doing it?" he asked.
"Make a robe for me. I want some of your sewing."
"I will not trade it but I will do it," he said.
He opened his hand and I took it in mine. "Who are you wanting dead?" I asked.
"What his name is, I do not know. He calls himself 'Alois', but that is a false name."
"I come here for two days, and I am killing people."
"Not killing. You can bring him here," he said.
The dragonfly, wet from the pond, slowly opened and closed its wings. A frog, thinking itself safe because of our stillness, lifted its head from beneath the water.
"How old is he?" I asked.
"Maybe he has four centuries. No more."
"Give me a challenge," I said, letting go of his hand and striking the wall.
The dragonfly on the lily lit away, and I pressed my hands to the warm stone beneath me. The evening made quick work of taking the day's heat away, though my blood bloated body remained overhot. He took a gold bracelet off of his arm and put it on my wrist, dragging it over my skin without regard for pain. I looked at it, but said nothing.
"No harm," he said. "Do him no harm."
"Is he beautiful?"
To this, a smile crept across his face, like morning fog across deep water.
"What has he done?"
"Will you not leave me alone? This is why we do not associate so well."
"I am not curious. I have no qualms."
"He comes into my house, though he does so no longer, and he brings news away."
"He is not your blood," I said.
"None of mine."
"It will take time. Have you anything of his?"
"Photograph," he said, and he produced it.
I studied the photo. Alois, with long blond hair, petal pink lips, and a feeling of weariness in his shoulders. An ordinary beauty. Exceptional enough to be appealing, but not enough to be particularly remembered. Thousands of them. A shallow pit high on his cheek, noticeable to the vain, a smallpox scar the blood could not fill in. Where there is one, there are many scars, nearly invisible perhaps. Interesting flaws.
"It is foolish to submit to photographs, and it is easy to catch a fool. I will keep Dodo here," I said, referring to my Corsican, Leonardo the fair.
"No that will be unwise."
"Dodo has friends here."
He did not repeat himself but looked away, into the woods. I touched the mark upon my neck.
"How is your lover? The one you longed for," I asked, putting breath to my words.
"He is too vicious," he said, speaking aloud finally. His voice sounded thin, strained. His shoulders relaxed.
"Like me?" I asked, my head turned toward the wood. I looked upon it without studying it.
"No," he said, shaking his head. "You are a killer, but you do not tear them to pieces. You do not eat people."
"Still it is nice to talk to someone, isn't it?" I asked.
"Ah," he said.
Before I could say another word, he had slipped away, disappearing into the water and never coming up again while I looked.
**
The next evening, Dodo found me putting up my hair in his hotel room mirror.
"I don't care what you do," he said, bringing me my straight razor. "I'll go to Miriam's in Amsterdam. Cheating bastard owes me a foot race."
"You'd like that, wouldn't you? Being with your friends."
"Better than stay here where somebody'll be keeping track of me. The great old one is closing ranks and I'd rather not be caught in the net. He had Laurent call Miriam, even, and tell him to come around to stay. What's the story? I've no idea. There's more coming by the hour. He's afraid of something. I'm done with the place."
"You are talking too much," I said, opening the razor gently. "Do you think anybody wants to listen to you?"
"I'll go to Amsterdam."
"If you go there, I'll kill all of your friends," I said, deliciously. "Do what I tell you to do."
"If you do it, you'll regret it."
"Stop looking at me," I said.
"I like to watch you shave," he said, pulling up a chair and sitting on it backward. He rested his chin on its back and I thought to myself, "Crush him. He is mine. Crush him. Make him suffer," like the first time I ever saw him.
I looked away toward the mirror and turned my head. "Don't chatter at me anymore," I said.
"6'4" and nasty as a snake," he said.
"6'2" and empty as a well," I said.
He got up and went to the desk, switched on the lamp. I scraped the razor against my unlathered skin, a by now familiar feeling, like breathing. He investigated the drawers until I was done.
"I know this one," he said, holding up the photograph. "It's one of Laurent's many preeners. What do you want with him?"
"I do not want anything."
He considered me, looked at the photo, looked back up. After a pause, he said, "He has a twin, I hope you know. Looks just the same. Odder though."
"That was not mentioned to me," I said, casting around in my toiletry bag for a brush.
"Yes. I don't know his name or anything, but I heard it through the grapevine. Miriam hears everything and can't keep his mouth shut. The twin's name is Aureo. Miriam says Alois slipped up on the name once, which is one of the things Laurent was mad with him about. He doesn't like liars."
"Why would he hide the name?" I asked, untangling my hair with my fingers.
"Your brush is on the vanity in the restroom. I don't know. He's definitely using a false name, too. Who knows? Why do you call me Dodo? Maybe it's a nickname. Maybe he has a past and doesn't want to be recognized. Maybe he doesn't want his real name in strangers' mouths. Maybe this right now is the soon to be past he doesn't want anybody to know about."
"I knew that but I wanted to hear you say it," I said, continuing to manually untangle.
"If you keep doing that with your fingers it is going to take all night. You have so much hair."
"So what is his real name?" I asked. "Since your friends know everything."
"I am going to guess he's 'Aluysio', or 'Aloysius', or something like that. If he is Italian, and as Medieval as I am, it's not a big leap. He is not a Jew."
"How do you know he is not a Jew? How do you know he is Medieval like you?" I asked, idle.
"He wears a St. Christopher medal. I have seen it under his collar. Sometimes he wears a medal of Mary. I know it because his first language is Medieval Florentine. I know it from his gorgia tuscana. I am Corsican, think I wouldn't recognize it? His c's and his i's are like mine. He's smart about not talking to anyone but Laurent, but I heard him on the other end of the phone once, when Laurent was in Amsterdam."
"I like you because you remember everything, in order to use it against other people."
"You like to dominate me," he said, flicking away a feather on his cardigan.
"That is only what I like the most," I said.
"Thought I was empty as a well?" he asked.
"Sometimes there is shallow water at the bottom," I said, gesturing for him to come to bed. "Strawberry blond, fair as the plucked belly of a dove."
"You're the vainest, most superficial psychopath. I suspect you'd kill me on a whim, and that the only reason you don't is because then I would get to be right."
"I don't kill people on whims," I said, inviting him to bed with a crooked finger.
**
I found him on a snowy evening in December, 2003, after four months. A Florentine church. I had heard from a young vampire in the Tuscan countryside that he had seen a twin pair of blonds pretending to be one person. He said that they had been heading north, and that they were trying very hard not to be seen.
I stroked this young vampire's shaved head and asked him if his fragile tongue would be talking about a Macedonian with a Russian accent on his Italian. He put up his hands and went upon his way. "If you hear this tongue, come and take it," he told me. The younger ones are easily convinced.
He had spoken well. With ears open, a vampire is not hard to follow if his trail is located. Two is even easier. A nun found in the river. Dead wolves. Dogs silent at night. Fragile animals quiet themselves.
This is the old way of life. Finding each other. Ruin. Surviving.
In the fog, the church towers loomed. Long grass begged to be moved through slowly.
I waited for a long while after I arrived, knowing from the silence that I had found them. Listening, I knew them alone, smelling nothing that I could recognize as living. Nonetheless, I waited to enter. Thick windows, thick stone walls. I could not know what they were doing. Snow accumulated quietly on my eyelashes. I have lived since Philip II smoked pipe in Thessaly, in his perfumed silk. I like to wait.
At 3'o'clock in the morning, as read by the position of the moon, I left my place in the shadow of an arch, and slipped inside. The door, hour by hour, had slowly been opening itself by degrees, as the cold shrunk its wood and its security. As I had stood there, I had watched it. Enough to get a finger in, enough to open it and enter its darkness without a sound. The church was of medium size, lit by copper braziers. In the front, an empty altar, and an apse lost to the gloom. To the side small windows already grey with dew, and rows of warm candles lit by supplicants.
Near to this, a bowed blond head, sitting. I knocked on the other end of his wooden pew, and he looked up from the candle he had been praying over, startled.
For a moment he froze, looking at me.
"How now?" he said, calling quietly.
In response, I knocked again.
"How now, old one?" he asked, a firmness in his voice.
In the light of the supplicants' candles, I could see the shallow pit on his face. I did not need to see it. The point of his chin. His heart shaped face. Living had been good to him. His hair was curled cleanly. His face was clean. For spying upon our blood, he had been paid. What spying? I do not let feeling interfere with my oaths. I stood still, my hand on the wood. It vibrated. His heart beat heavily in his back, but I did not need to feel that to know he was afraid.
"What brings you?" he asked.
Until he tried to run, I admired him a little. Like Leechtin, I admire the brave. But he was a rabbit, darting as soon as I began my advance, sliding my hand along the wood as I moved. And so I darted after him, faster, more fluid, but sooner than I would have liked.
He said, "Please, for what crime is this?" struggling, and "Run," giving to me the knowledge of the other one.
I turned, I saw nothing, holding him.
It took only a few seconds for a phone call to be placed. Whispers from the apse.
Only a few seconds for the twin to tell Lecne they were found out, before I dragged him out from under the altar, crying, "Lecne, Lecne."