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I’d followed his prayers to one of the local brothels and there, in a dark and shabby room, more like a cell, I saw him. A little boy, no older than fifteen, younger perhaps, curled up on a moldy mattress, a picture of misery. He didn’t pray to be saved but for deliverance.
Eighteen boys. That’s how many were currently living at my palazzo. That’s how many I could keep there while making sure that each and every one was getting enough attention and was being properly cared for. I couldn’t save everyone. And this one was closer to death than he was to life anyways, his emaciated body carrying the gruesome marks of violence, both fresh and old. As was his soul. The cruelty of men was wondrous.
I should give this young boy what he was praying for, I thought, make it quick and painless, as only a vampire could, give him comfort in those final moments.
I bought him for the price of a cheap meal you could get at an Osteria. The oldest one of my boys would soon start his own life anyways and what was one more mouth to feed? He was young, he would learn our language and until then I could talk to him in his own melodic tongue.
When I lifted him into my arms, he barely reacted. Not because he trusted me, but because he’d learned that he simply didn’t hold any power over his own fate and that struggling would only make it worse. I had carried sacks of flour heavier than him, his ribs could be counted even through the dirty rags he was wearing as clothes and the bones of his legs were pressing against my arms in a way that made me wonder if I’d arrived too late.
We left that wretched place behind and I brought him into a private room at the palazzo where no one would disturb us. I asked him his name, but he remained silent, and when I tried to coax it from his mind, there was only a blur of colors, like colors used in painting. I saw images, religious icons of Christ, Mary … and a small hand that guided the brush. "Oh, do you like to paint?" I asked him. When I was met with no response, I fetched him a canvas, brushes and paint, along with a cup of warm milk (the thick and nourishing kind, not the watery stuff that people of the new age dare to call 'milk') with honey, supposing it might go down easier than solid food. However, when I presented him with one of the brushes, he flinched, almost as if the object was cursed. "Not that then, shh, shh, I’ll take it away, look," I spoke softly in the boy’s tongue. "Here, have some milk instead. There’s honey in it, have you ever tasted honey?"
The boy just looked at me with large, fearful eyes. Then something in his expression changed and his face became a blank mask once more, like he was barely even there. I lifted the cup to his lips and, to my great astonishment, he started taking small sips from it. I watched his throat bob and a feeling of relief spread inside my chest. I hadn’t come too late after all! Of course, I had to temper myself, the boy’s survival was still far from certain, even though the milk had been laced with a few drops of my blood, but seeing him cling to life like that … or at least no longer actively trying to end it, yes, that was a more accurate description, I suppose … but it was something, something I could build on.
When it started to get harder for the boy to swallow, I quickly took the cup away. There was no use in making him sick by wanting to give him too much too fast. I let him doze off for a while and when he woke up again, I fed him the rest and he swallowed it just as obediently as he had before.
Since this boy seemed so compliant, a part of me wanted to get him out of those rags, put him in a tub and scrub him down as quickly as possible, but again, I tempered myself. I fetched a large bowl of heated water, put some thyme, lemon balm and other good things in it and started cleaning his hands with a soft nail brush. They were so small against mine and when I first took hold of them, they were trembling. However, he didn’t try to pull away from my grasp. I worked slowly, careful not to make any sudden movements that might startle him. Once his hands were clean, I tentatively lifted a sponge to his face. The boy took a deep breath and closed his eyes.
"You’re so brave, let me know if it gets too much, okay?"
There was no reaction. The boy’s eyes remained closed and he sat on the mattress like a little statue. This was not a display of trust but of utter surrender and submission. The only thing I could do was pretend it was the former, until one day, hopefully, it would be - if I would get this much time with him. "You’re strong, right, you’ll stay with me?" I murmured. "Tomorrow, when the sun has set and I can visit you again, I will still find you breathing, won’t I?" No response. I gently continued washing the boy’s face.
"That’s it, all done! Let’s get you another cup of milk."
The next evening, as I slowly drifted back into consciousness, the very first thought on my mind was the new boy I had saved from the brothel. If I reached out with my senses, would I find his fluttering heartbeat? Or had he passed away during the day without me noticing, all alone and scared? I wished I could have left him with the other boys, they knew how to take care of each other or who to call for help, but I knew better than to do that before cleaning him properly and making sure he’d gotten rid of all the lice and fleas. Besides, if he really did pass away, I didn’t want the other boys to see. That would be my burden, not theirs.
I gathered my courage and reached out, and … there, there it was, strong and steady, the most beautiful music to my ears. Before I rushed to his room, I quickly checked on the other boys. First the youngest, then the troublemakers and, last but not least, the older ones, Albinus, Riccardo, Francesco… All seemed to be in good order.
As I made my way to the new boy’s room, I was ambushed by Silvio. I didn’t know if he was lying in wait for hours, shielding his thoughts from me, or if he simply had a talent for approaching me whenever I wasn’t paying attention. Whatever the case, he always managed to catch me by surprise. "Marius, Marius, is it true, did you bring a new boy? Can I meet him?!" He was bouncing excitedly and I had to grab him by his narrow shoulders to keep him in place. "Not yet, he needs to settle in first. And when you do, you will do it in a way that is calm and polite, do you understand?"
"Yes, yes, of course, I’m always calm!" Silvio wriggled from my grip to bounce around some more.
"I can see that," I remarked with a mild smile. "I take it you're done with your Greek essay?"
Silvio froze, then hit his head so hard against the wall that it made me flinch. "Shit, I forgot!" With that, he sprinted down the hallway.
"No cursing!"
"Sorry!" He disappeared around the next corner.
I smiled again, shaking my head. I’d found Silvio in a dark corner of an abandoned street three years ago when he'd been seven, weak and feverish, coughing his little lungs out, no family or anyone who cared about him. I always chose boys. People had more sympathy for girls, they were more likely to be taken in by a kind soul or some young man who was looking for a wife. After all, a girl could still bear children some day. A young boy, however, too sick for physical labor and without any kind of education … don’t get me wrong, if it had been possible, I would have taken in every single one of them, boys and girls alike … but I had to make choices, hard choices, every time I went into the city, when I was faced with those large, begging eyes. I owed that to the ones I’d already saved.
Whenever I received guests who came to buy pieces of my art, the boys addressed me as their master, however, when it was just us, there was no such requirement. Not when I had taken some of them in when they were only seven years old. I didn’t want to be a master to anyone who didn’t reach above my hip. Or to whom I was the only father figure they’d ever get to have.
I knocked gently at the door, about to call the new boy’s name – and remained silent. This child genuinely didn’t remember his own name, it was buried so deep that even I couldn’t pick it from his mind. I unlocked the door. The boy looked better than he did the other day. Two cups of milk, a few drops of my blood, a little bit of cleaning and the fresh clothes I’d left for him had apparently gone a long way.
"Hello there, how are you feeling today?" I approached him slowly, showing him my open hands. "We still need to wash your hair and the rest of your body and once we did that, I no longer need to keep you locked up inside here like a prisoner. But, of course, you can have breakfast first. Would you like that?"
The boy looked at me as if he was waiting for me to make the choice.
"Breakfast first," I decided. This time, I brought him a slice of bread with butter and cheese and a cup of milk (just milk, no vampire blood from now on). I had cut the slice into several little squares and the boy slowly reached for one of them. He nibbled at it like a little child would, and I let him. It took him a long time, but eventually half the slice of bread and the whole cup of milk were gone.
Next I carried in a large wooden washtub and filled it with steaming water before sprinkling in a mixture of healing herbs. I could see the boy tense, but before I could say anything or suggest that he wore a towel, the tension eased. It was replaced by a vacant faraway look in his eyes and he moved almost like a sleepwalker as he slowly took off his clothes. I didn’t like it, but at least it was better than having him scared or struggling.
The pattern of bruises and gashes on his body had vanished, thanks to my powerful blood. I carefully got to work, removing any remaining filth from his body and hair. The water had to be changed twice until the boy had finally lost the smell of that awful cell I’d found him in.
He sat there calmly, looking up at me, but his eyes didn’t look like anyone was home. He sat there before me, skin like milk, dark auburn hair, the face of a Botticelli angel. And for a moment I felt no better than his perpetrators. I might have washed the marks off his skin, but what if by doing so, I had worsened the ones on his soul?
Well, it couldn’t be helped now, I thought to myself as I lifted him from the washtub, dried him off with a towel and put some new clothes on him as if he was a doll. Then I took him by the hand and lead him to a room I had cleared out for him. I explained to him that he could decide whether he wanted to sleep in this room, in the dormitory where all the younger boys were sleeping, or alternate between the two options depending on his mood and needs.
"Look, …" Again, I had wanted to address the boy by his name. I heaved a sigh. "I fear I need to give you a name to go by. Just until you can remember your real one, okay? So I can introduce you to the other boys." Of course, the boy just stared back, but at least the life seemed to have returned to his eyes. His mind seemed no longer absent.
His hair was slowly drying off, starting to form soft shiny curls that framed his delicate face. He really was beautiful. "If someone told me that God had sent one of his angels down to earth, I’d believe it," I whispered quietly, more to myself. That is, if I would have believed in God, of course.
Did God send this man to save me?
The thought had been clearer than anything else I had picked up from the boy. I met the boy’s eyes. "God loves you, little one." Or at least he would if he existed. Surely he would love you then, how could he not? "You are beloved by God." Te a deo amari.
I felt something within the boy change and suddenly his eyes started to fill with tears. He believed it to be a sign from above, not a blood-sucking monster responding to a little boy’s thoughts, but what did it matter? "Yes, you are," I confirmed, "and to remind you of that, your name here at the palazzo will be Amadeo. It means beloved by God in my native t-, in Latin. A language I will soon teach you after you’ve mastered our common tongue. Do you like being Amadeo?"
The boy, Amadeo, gave an emphatic nod. It was the very first time he had ever responded in any way to a question of mine.
From that moment on, things were different between us. He still didn’t speak a word, yet he always answered my questions as best and as clearly as he could. His trust was unconditional. He still had those moments where his mind seemed to go to a place very far away, but they were no longer tied to me or any of my actions.
Whenever he had a bad dream and the other boys couldn’t soothe him, he slipped into my room, small feet on terracotta tiles, and then the mattress dipped as he snuck under my blanket. I had purchased the bed solely for the purpose of comforting my boys when they couldn’t sleep or still had something important to talk about. The others visited me as well, especially the younger ones, and often there were several. I would lie in their midst with a book in my hands, and their human warmth would seep into my cold, undead flesh. In those moments, I almost felt mortal again for a few precious minutes.
The other boys had immediately taken Amadeo into their midst and it mattered little that he didn’t speak a single word, not to young boys who loved to fence, chase each other or kick a ball around.
One day, Riccardo, who had made it his own personal task to make Amadeo feel welcome at the palazzo and to protect him like he protected all of the younger ones, came running towards me, bubbling with uncharacteristic excitement. "Marius, you won’t believe this, Amadeo is talking!"
"He is?!"
"Yes, come and see for yourself!"
And indeed, he was. Interestingly enough, he didn’t speak his first words in his own native tongue but in Venetian. And once he’d started, he never seemed to stop. Usually, he was holding the palette on which the colors were mixed while the other boys were painting, chattering happily away. However, he never touched the brush himself and no one tried to make him.
Quickly, I counted him amongst my brightest boys. Whenever he wanted to learn something, he did so with ease and at an incredible speed. Soon he could write and converse in Venetian, Italian, Greek, Latin and, of course, his own native tongue. He could play the harp and a few other instruments and excelled at Philosophy and Geography.
The years passed by and his future was looking bright. Then, one warm day in September, that was otherwise completely unremarkable, I picked up an image from Amadeo’s mind and along with it, a name. I usually didn’t try to listen in on my boys’ thoughts, but I couldn’t constantly shield myself from them either. It was the name of a place, a place that meant much to Amadeo and that had been buried deeply in his mind for so long, up until now. It was the name of his home village in Kievan Rus’.
I started studying maps and when Amadeo finally approached me, all shy and hesitant, I was ready to take him to his desired destination. Of course, the prospect of letting one of my boys go nearly broke my heart, yet I had always known that this could happen, especially with Amadeo.
There was no way I was letting him make a journey like this on his own, yet I also couldn’t leave the other boys to their own devices for several days. So I told Amadeo to put on some thick clothes and close his eyes, and only open them once I told him to do so. At the time, I didn’t believe that humans were made to travel at such speed or height since this was long before the invention of the first public railway, let alone airplanes, which is why I used the Cloud Gift very carefully.
Amadeo didn’t open his eyes until I told him to, and if arriving at his hometown village after travelling for only a couple of hours - a thing that should have been entirely impossible at the time - if that experience scared him or made him question what or who I really was, he didn’t let it show.
There we stood, and only as the first hard-working woodcutters approached us, I realized how out of place Amadeo must have looked in his expensive winter coat and polished kidskin boots, not to mention my own thin and foreign clothes.
One of the woodcutters yelled a name and then a man stepped from between the trees, arms like tree trunks, 6.5 feet tall, carrying a large axe. He drove the axe into the nearest tree before taking a look at us. "Father!" Amadeo cried out and started running towards the man.
And then this giant, this mountain of a man, dropped to his knees and cried like a child as he held his lost boy in his arms. Amadeo was crying as well. He looked so tiny in his father’s arms. There hadn’t been a second of hesitation on his father’s part, he had instantly recognized his boy. "I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry I couldn’t protect you from those bastards … every day I wondered if you were cold or hungry or worse, while I was sitting at home safe and sound with a warm meal, I didn’t know whether to pray for you to be alive or dead, oh, Andrei…"
After a while the man looked up at me, and my strange clothes or the fact that I looked more like an animated marble statue than a human being seemed to matter little to him. There was no fear in his eyes, just overwhelming gratitude. "You brought my boy back," he sobbed. "He didn’t have to suffer, did he? Please tell me that he didn’t have to suffer!"
I had opened my mouth, but Amadeo, no, Andrei, was faster. "Marius immediately found me and took me in, and he didn’t touch a single hair on my head! Father, he is a saint who was sent by the Lord himself!"
Andrei’s father heaved a long, shivering sigh of relief, then got to his feet, still holding his son in his arms, and started calling for his wife. When she took her son into her arms, my eyes were swimming with blood tears.
I wish my telling could end here. But alas, time matters much when you are this young. Amadeo had spend over two years with me and the other boys. 793 days, to be exact. Those days had inevitably shaped him. He was Andrei, yet also Amadeo. It had never been my intention to estrange a young boy from his loving parents and yet … well, when I revisited Andrei in his home village after a week, like we had agreed upon, Amadeo told me that he wanted to come back with me. Not immediately, but soon. He wanted to study at the university of Padua, together with Riccardo. Of course, his parents were heartbroken, but at the same time, they knew what that opportunity meant for their son. No hard labor, financial stability and more than anything … it was what their son wanted. Eventually, they understood. They let their boy go and I made sure that Amadeo could still visit them whenever he wanted to.
Amadeo graduated summa cum laude and I was so proud of my boy. He became a scribe and translator, had a wife and children, and he always remained close with Riccardo.
Unfortunately, like all tellings about humans that are told to the very end, this one ends with Amadeo's death. I came to him when he was old and weak and had lived his life to its fullest. I gave my Amadeo what he’d been praying for all those years ago, made it quick and painless, as only a vampire could, and gave him comfort in those final moments. He continues to exist in my paintings and in me. I loved him so much and still do to this day.