“I drank wine,” I said. My head pulsed with pain. Something in me writhed and hungered at the scent of life coming from him, at the warmth of his hands on my face, at the guessed taste of his blood. “Someone bought me wine. A man.”
He nodded, unmoved. “Do you know this man? Was he anyone you’ve seen before? Anyone you knew from Rome? Anyone who might have something against me and have taken his revenge on you?”
His hands were warm and appetizing, the way warm bread is appetizing when you’re famished and cold. My head pounded more intensely. The nameless animal in me sniffed and lurked scenting prey. “I didn’t know him,” I said. “He was tall and pale, and blue eyed. He told me stories, said he was born before Rome, before… before, he said, the divine twins were kicked out of the wolf’s den.”
“What?”
“He said he had been born before the founding of Rome and”
“You’re telling me this man was eight hundred years old?”
“I didn’t say that, I said-”
“You said he was born before the founding”
Did he need to yell? My head would surely split open. “I didn’t either,” I answered, sullen. “I said he told me he was born before Rome, before the gentes streamed into the seven hills and laid the Sabines to waste. Of course I knew he was lying. I am not that stupid. I met old people in Rome and none of them remembered any of that. Also, he told me,” I said, in a whisper now, embarrassed to admit the enticement that had drawn me forth to that lonely field. I knew it was a lie like the rest. “He told me if I allowed him, if I allowed him to… satiate himself on me, he would make me immortal, and I would never age. I would be forever as I am now. Forever as… as you like me.”
Adriano whispered something I could not understand. His hands gripped my face tighter. “What did he do to you?” he asked.
What had he done to me? I could hardly remember. “Not what you think. He just… he just….” What had he done to me? My head pounded, pounded so loudly with the echo of Adriano’s heartbeats, the scent of his warm blood, the
My hand held his right arm in a vise grip and pulled, till his wrist was at my mouth. Urgently, my teeth tore the vein, allowed vital, warm liquid to flow onto my cold, cold, tongue, down my parched throat.
“Mithra’s crown!” he said, or some other legionary oath. His left hand held my wrist and pulled his right hand free. Then he backed two steps. His left hand held his right. Drop after drop of red liquid fell from his wrist. He watched me from the shadows of the room. There was surprise in his eyes and the fear of a man confronted with impossibility. “I have heard of such things,” he said. “I have heard of them, as I have heard of ghosts and witches and gods. I have heard them all, and believed them all in my moments of weakness, and laughed at all of them in the sunlight… but Hylas, sweet Hylas, what could make you crave living blood?”
I blinked, but could not answer. My eyes were riveted, mesmerized, by the drops falling from his wrist, their odor clear and pungent in the stale air of the room. I moved towards him, towards them. My movements were no longer painful. Those few drops of his blood, of his life, had restored some of my own.
But he evaded me easily, stepped back around the two low sleeping couches, took hold of the dark red curtains behind him and opened them in a quick tearing gesture.
Light burned my eyes, my skin. I was naked and every point of my body exposed to this strangely searing light. Pain, unbearable, stinging pain possessed me. I pulled the covers over myself and crouched, trembling, under them, uncomprehending, uncaring, longing for nothing so much as darkness. Darkness and life, to stanch my thirst.
Adriano’s laughter rang joyless and loud. Gently, slowly, he closed the curtain. “So it is true,” he said, his voice morose and tired. “It is true. There are such creatures. Lamias…. The legends say they’re women with serpent bodies. One of my Germanic mercenaries told me they can also be corpses, dead but living, needing blood to survive and fearing the life-giving sun. And Hylas, always bloodthirsty, has become one of them,” he finished with a sort of ironic gaiety.
Encouraged by darkness and the lack of threat in his voice, I pushed the covers back, sat up uncertainly, reached a hopeful hand for his wrist, just an arm’s length away, his wrist from which the merry river of life still ran, unheeded. But he was not to be caught unawares. He stepped back, away from my touch. “No, no you won’t, Hylas,” he said. “I will not trade my blood for death in life… nor for life in death.” His eyes were interested but repulsed. Thus had I seen him, once, examine a scorpion. With his left hand he tightened the open brass bracelet he wore on his right arm, tighter, tighter, tighter, till it would serve as a tourniquet. The flow of blood slowed to a mere trickle, then tiny droplets. “What am I to do with you?” he asked, coldly. “What did you think I would do with you? Give you my enemies as fodder?”
I found my voice. My head still pounded and my throat still felt desiccated but I found a little of my mind, of my humanity, a morsel of my outraged self. I had done this for him, to keep his love that relentless time and growth were plundering away. “I thought…” I said, then stronger, “I thought everything would be as it was… as it always was. I would never change, you wouldn’t worry about people saying you are pathic, or” I stopped as his expression clouded.
“Oh, no,” he said and smiled, ironically. “Not pathic, just necrophiliac.” Then with sudden force, “I do not share my bed with cold corpses, much less corpses who seek blood to replace a life they have lost.”
He stepped back into the shadows. The light of the candle forbore to show his face. “So, what can I do with you? I hear one can kill such monsters as you, Hylas. Light will kill lamias, and water, that sustain normal life. Should I kill you, Hylas?”
I got up. I clasped the covers about me. He couldn’t be serious. I had given him my love, such as it was. He had the enjoyment of my body while it pleased him. He could not kill me.
I protested all this in a high whine, but he interrupted me, “No, you’re right. I cannot kill you. Even if you are dead already… even if it is the most merciful thing, I can’t bring myself to do it.” He put the candle down, picked up his cloak from the couch facing mine, threw it haphazardly over his shoulders and said, “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. Be gone when I’m back. I’ll give instructions for you to be left alone till then.” He opened the door, and, framed in the muted light of the central courtyard, the faint light that made my eyes hurt and my skin smart, he turned around and said, “And Hylas, everyone in this house, to the least slave, better be alive and in good health when I return. Or I swear by Mars I’ll search you out, drag you from your den and hold you in midday light till you shrivel and die.”
He walked out.
I sat on my couch, in pain and anger as I heard voices on the other side of the door and smelled the living blood of the household. It did not occur to me to defy Hadrianus’s prohibition. I knew him too well, his prompt and merciless justice.
I found one of my tunics, dressed in it and waited. Now and then, I peeked through the draperies that encased the window. When evening fell, soothing and calm, I climbed out.
In the city, I found plenty to satiate my thirst.
Rich men in search of pleasure found quite something else and were too secure in my embrace by the time they thought of fighting. I learned blood was more than food, life was more than a means of slaking thirst. There was an exquisite pleasure to drinking from the springs of life… something, I suppose, like the contentment of a babe at his mother’s breast. Food and sex and ecstasy were mine when my teeth tore open the vein and life left my victim and streamed into me. I spared no one, didn’t leave any of my victims the tiny spark of life necessary to turn him into one such as I. I gave them nothing, and took all—their life, their gold, their jewels.