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

Part 9 - I Have Loved Him For So Long

It was in this atmosphere that one day, as I was carefully scrubbing the painted wall in the bedroom that our teachers had left behind, that I felt a mouth on my neck, and hands fold around my waist. A warm mouth, lips, sucked upon my skin, kissing me, pushing me against the wall. "Nerva?" I asked, unsure, but that is all I was able to say. I never resisted. 

This intimacy felt in sharp contrast with the other intimacies in my life, which were defined by their silences. Sometimes, often, Escha would come and sit up with me while I practiced my letters at night, sitting in my lap, his head tucked against my shoulder. Still, I think he was aware of how rapidly he had been asked to grow up by our circumstances, and clutched at me as a way to hold onto his babyhood. Sometimes, if he began to weep against my shoulder, I put down my stylus and held him. I held his warm, heaving body, still so small for his age, and from neglecting his diet. Enfolding him in my arms felt almost nothing at all except for the heat of tears. He didn't apologize for biting me. It didn't occur to me to need an apology. For a moment, I had had a glimpse of the creature the master might accept Escha as, and the sorry party was me. 

At that age, it was easy to feel sorry for myself, and for the boys I loved. I felt sad about what I thought of as my fate, that it was no use to try to be a man if what I was meant to be was dead or a beast. The sound in my head of Vivacio mourning his body, the look on Escha's face, my understanding that the master might love both of them, and what that love looked like took away the smokescreen from my eyes of the mundane. Nothing had changed, only my ability to see. I had always wanted to guard my humanity in small ways, cultivating myself as gentle yet strong, conscientious, but open to fun and imagination with the little ones. For a little while, I replaced that drive with various vices. They left me feeling just as good as personal merit, or I thought so.

Immediately following Vivacio and Vasvius's departure, a hush fell over the house. Escha looked for the master, Escha who was still recovering from his immobile three days, and said that the master was present but sleeping. "I think we should keep quiet," he whispered to us, and we listened to him at first because we were all silenced by what the master had done. Escha knew him best. "We'll just keep quiet," he whispered to us. 

But Nonus, who was prone to weakness in the hands, was always dropping things. Aulus, on a hair trigger due to the tension and therefore acting younger than his age, grew easily upset with his friend, throwing things. And we realized that being quiet was not the problem. The problem was that we had been robbed. The real problem was that Vivacio must have been hoarding money a long time, and it quickly became clear that not only the silver from the shrine had been stolen, but the entire foundations of the master's worldly goods. 

We did not plant much, but we did put in a few acres of winter wheat every year. For that, we would send for labor from the camp, for boys with strong backs and the will to work hard. When we sent word for that labor, no runner came back. When we sent word again, we were told that there must be confusion, that there was no labor to be called upon unless we could pay. Vivacio, quietly, slowly, had sold away all of the master's investment in the slave camp, and taken that money, too.

So I started drinking. I would go into Nataniellus's room, the same that my teachers had once slept in, that he had found me cleaning that first day of our intimacy, and we sat on the floor playing Par Impar, or odds and evens. We had some knucklebones to play with, that the children had collected to play dibs, and we lay them on the floor between us. When it was my turn, I picked up an odd or even number of the dib bones, and Nataniellus had to guess which, and if he was wrong, he drank, and if he was right, I did. This game was increasingly entertaining the longer it went on. "Let's try it a little different way," I said, thinking myself subtle and the emperor of wit. He guessed wrongly, and I said, "I win a kiss."