Chapter 216 - Flos Vendit

The magician had spoken truthfully. The pain was bad.

After the living blood had turned his heart to ice, the pain bloomed inside him like a frost-limned flower, growing and growing until it was greater than the whole world, the whole universe, and then it clasped him in its glacial petals. It enfolded him, smothered him, froze him to the marrow. He lost all sense of himself to the pain. He was pain and voice and that was all. Like a babe, still dripping from his mother's womb, he shrieked.

The cave where he was remade was like a womb in many ways. Lightless. Insulating. In its embrace he felt his flesh grow cold and hard. He felt his eyeteeth slide from his gums, bits of enamel crumbling away so that they were pointed and had a razor's edge. His stomach cramped sickeningly, and he rolled onto his side and vomited. He vomited until his stomach was completely empty, and then the other end of his digestive tract voided. His bladder emptied in a gush of warm fluid. He sobbed in humiliation. He had not soiled himself since he was a babe.

Hearing his anguish, his master said, "Do not be ashamed. It is just the Strix ridding your flesh of its mortal freight. It happens to us all."

His eyes burned, and the darkness began to ebb. He realized he could make out the details of the cave's interior, dim, grainy, but growing ever brighter. He was assaulted by odors: shit and piss, the wine and food he had vomited, half-digested and mixed with bile.

Pain lanced through him again, this time in his bones, and he writhed in agony as the living blood flowed through his marrow, devouring the living tissue in them, hollowing them out.

"How much longer?" he gasped.

But his master could only say, "I do not know."

Pain, and then more pain, but finally it ended. He emerged from his mountain womb a trembling, newborn thing. He stood upon the eastern slope of Vesuvius, blinking out upon the world like it was a fresh creation, a strange new world that he had never seen before.

In fact, it was he who was newly minted. The world was still the world. Only he had changed.

"I can see… everything," Apollonius whispered. He looked down on Pompeii with eyes that caught the starlight and held it, like glimmering water in two cupped hands. His transformation had taken nearly a full day. It was good that his master had carried him to the mountain. His screams would have frightened the servants to death. Half the city would have heard him.

The magician stood behind him, looking at the young man. His face bore an expression of satisfaction and relief, tinged with guilt and a modicum of sadness.

"All of your senses should be fantastically amplified," he said. "Sight, smell, hearing, taste." He reached out and placed his hand on the boy's bare shoulder. "Touch."

Apollonius shivered at the contact. His father's brief touch ignited a lightning storm of sensation. He could even feel the whorls on the older man's fingertips. He turned with a wondering smile, stroked the magician's cheek, his glinting brown hair.

"Your form is a revelation," he said, cocking his head to one side. "Your skin has such an interesting quality. I never noticed..." He touched his own face then, his cheekbone and lips. He looked down at his belly, where the man from the baths had stabbed him. There was no sign of injury on the smooth white expanse of his flesh—just the curling blond hair that fuzzed his lower belly. There was not even a scar. An instant later, he was distracted by the chattering of a bird. Dawn was approaching, and the birds were rousing to greet the new day.

"I can smell them down there, the people of Pompeii," he said after he had listen, fascinated, to the birdsong for a little while. He thrust out his tongue, licking the air like a snake. "I can even taste them!" He flinched back then, and looked at his master with an anxious expression.

"Your senses are still emerging. They can overwhelm if you are not careful of them," the magician said. "You must insulate yourself, make a wall of your will and only pass what sensations you are interested in experiencing. Try to push the rest away from your thoughts. Make a fortress of your mind, like the city down below."

"All right," the boy said shakily. "I will try."

He closed his eyes and breathed slowly through his nostrils. After awhile, the tension in his neck and shoulders waned. He sighed. "That is better. For a moment it felt like I was drowning, with nothing to hold onto."

"You do not need to breathe, you know," the magician said.

"What?"

"You must take breath to speak, and to maintain the illusion that you are a mortal man. But you do not require it to live as mortal men and women require it. You will not die from lack of air, as they do. You have seen me when I sleep. Does my chest rise and fall with breath?"

"No."

Apollonius took a lungful of air then, holding his breath like a tantrumming child. He stood there for a long time, cheeks puffed comically out. At last he released the breath. He seemed very disturbed. "I do not like it," he confessed. "It frightens me a little."

His master chuckled. "You will get used to it. In fact, I believe it is one of the more difficult things to adjust to. You are like a god now, Paulo. You have the strength of Hercules. The speed of Mercury. The hunting prowess of Diana, and the wisdom of Minerva. And yet you were only recently a mortal man, and so you have the thoughts and instincts of a mortal man. It will take a long time for you to shed those mental limitations. To fly without fear of falling. To move quickly without smashing into every obstacle in your path. To still your racing thoughts, and find the peaceful center of your spirit. It is like a serpent shedding its skin. It will not come off all at once, like a dirty tunic, ready for the fuller's vats. You must peel it away in degrees, and not without great effort."

Apollonius nodded, absorbing his master's words like an eager student. Gon was his tutor now, wise beyond measure. The magician had once claimed that he was older than Egypt, older even than fabled Ur. If that were true—and Apollonius had no reason to doubt him—then such wisdom was priceless. Apollonius would have all of it, if the magician was willing to impart it to him.

"There's a stream down below. You can wash the filth from your body there," his master said. "I'm afraid your garments are ruined, though. You will have to borrow my toga after you've cleaned yourself. And then we can hunt, if you are hungry. Perhaps the fools who tried to kill you...?"

"Junius?" Apollonius said. And then he smiled wickedly. "Yes! He is an evildoer, isn't he, father? He tried to kill an insolent boy, and for what? A bit of drunken sass? Yes, he deserves to die!"

But in truth, he wanted to kill Junius Sissena because he had given himself to the man, and because the man had been a senator, like Domitianus. He had shamed himself on the man's cock, and so he wanted to erase him from the world, hoping it would erase his humiliation, too.

It was a tricky thing to race across the red tiled roofs of Pompeii. After they returned to the city, the magician leapt to the roofs and bid Apollonius follow. Twice a tile slipped loose beneath his bare feet and he nearly plunged to the ground below, once into the atrium of someone's private dwelling. Wouldn't that have been a shock!

The magician grasped his arm and lifted him to more stable footing.

"Your body is much lighter now that you are an immortal," he said. "But you are stomping around like a living man. Try to move more softly across the tiles, and then you might not cause them to break loose beneath your feet."

Apollonius thought lightly as he followed after his master. I am a cloud, he mused, running on the tips of his toes. I am a flower petal. I am a moth.

It actually seemed to help.

They did not find Junius that first night. Of course not. Pompeii was a big town, and the boy did not know where the satyr lived. He had met the man in the baths once, and hadn't seen the senator since. Not until the man accosted him in the street. They did, however, come across a brutal looking sailor raping a child in an alley. The child, a little beggar girl, was naked, bleeding. He had beaten her, ripped her meager clothes off and was thrusting into her violently in the alley next to a baker's shop, taking her in the Greek manner.

Moving as one, master and acolyte dropped into the alley behind him. They yanked him from the whimpering child and shoved him against the crumbling wall. He had a dagger, but Gon snatched it from his hand as soon as he drew it from his sheath, then used it cut open his throat.

"Drink," he said to Apollonius, holding the jerking man against the wall, and Apollonius obeyed.

The sailor's blood spurted into his open mouth, coppery and hot. Orgasmic pleasure stuttered through his entire body at the taste of it. It was as if Jupiter had struck the boy with a bolt of lightning. It was like the penultimate moment before climax, only magnified three, four, five-fold. He drank, amazed how much blood was in the man, and how much his belly could contain.

Finally, stomach sloshing, he stumbled away, and the magician leaned in to have his fill, too.

He saw the girl huddled on the filthy floor of the alley, and the question scurried rat-like through his thoughts: What would her blood taste like? Would it be as rich, as salty, as her assailant's?

"No," Gon said, as if he had read the boy's thoughts. Licking his lips, he let the dead sailor slide down the wall and stepped between Apollonois and the beggar girl. He stared the boy down, then turned and lifted the little girl into his arms. She was limp as a rag. Her inner thighs and bottom were smeared with drying blood. "She is badly injured," the magician said tersely. "Let us bring her back to the villa and summon a physician."

"Can't you heal her injuries with the blood, as you healed me?" Apollonius asked.

The magician swept from the alley, keeping to the ground, and the boy fell into step behind him.

"I do not think so," his master said. "Her injuries are internal, and quite grave. If I gave her enough of the blood to heal her, she could very well become a striga like us. There is always the chance, when you heal a mortal's injuries with the blood, that it will quicken in them, transform them into a blood drinker. And the more blood you must give them, the more likely they'll become a striga. Or something else. A degenerate creature, more dead than alive. We call them ghouls. They are without reason, ravening beasts, like mad dogs."

The thought chilled the boy. His master had spoken of other striga, but he had never mentioned degenerate ones. He had never spoken of ghouls.

"Will they attack us, these ghouls, if we chance to come across them?"

"Oh, yes. Us especially. Our two kinds have an instinctive hatred for one another."

They hurried through the streets, dawn's golden light spilling over the walls into the city like honey into a bowl. A few dim lanterns glowed in the arched windows of some of the buildings. The city was rousing. Already, a few of Pompeii's residents were stumbling to their jobs, venturing out into the dark streets with bleary eyes and mussed up hair. No one they passed paid any attention to the two of them, however. It was still too early, and they kept to the side streets.

"What of the man we fed from?" Apollonius whispered. "Do we just leave him back there in the alley?"

"Here in Pompeii, there are always murdered men lying in the alleys," Gon said. "It is one of the reasons Pompeii is such a wonderful home for a striga. But to answer your question, yes, we are safe to leave him in the alley. You should dispose of the bodies if you bite them, or heal their wounds with a drop of the living blood before you leave them, but I cut that one's throat. No one will bat an eye."

They passed the baths and Apollonius scowled, thinking of Junius Sissero.

How he would love to drink the senator's blood! Bleed him dry and leave him lying in a gutter. Perhaps do even more terrible things to him. Make him suffer before he died, as his mother had suffered.

He recognized the cruelty of his own thoughts and felt ashamed. If his master knew the character of his imaginings, he would be mortified.

And yet, that was what he wanted.

They came to the Villa Eyya. His master hammered on the door. After a moment, the new porter opened it, his eyes still crusty with sleep. He was a huge Nubian named Enuk. They had chanced across him at a slave auction, tall, proud, his black flesh crisscrossed with scars. The magician had purchased him, freed him, had his name entered in the city register as a libertini. He was the porter of the house now, and proud of his position and freedom.

"Master Germanis!" he said with some surprise, nostrils flaring. He saw the girl in his arms and looked even more surprised.

"Summon the physician, the old one named Acidinus. You know where he lives, correct? Rouse him from his bed and bring him here immediately."

The porter nodded and loped away.

His master carried the girl into the villa, took her to his sitting room. He placed her gently on the couch. "Paulo, fetch me some rags and a basin of water so I can wash her," he said. "And some sheets to cover her with. The poor thing is shivering."

Apollonius hurried away.

When the boy returned, his master was brushing her stringy brown hair from her face. The girl's eyes cracked open just a little, and she looked at him.

"What is your name, child?" Gon asked tenderly.

The girl opened her mouth. Apollonius thought she was going to answer, but she sighed, and then the life went out of her. Her arm went lax and tumbled away from her chest. A rain of tiny flower petals drifted to the floor.

"She must have been a flower seller," his master said, looking down at the crumpled petals. "I gave her a little of the living blood. Just a drop or two. I didn't want to transform her. It is very difficult for a child to be made a striga. They cannot defend themselves from other blood drinkers, you see. I was hoping it would be enough, but…"

He lifted her hand and kissed it. There were still a few bruised petals clinging to her flesh. He placed her hands upon her chest, then took the sheet from Apollonius and spread it over her body, head to toe.

Walking from the room, he called back, "Make sure you pay Acidinus when he arrives, and offer him some breakfast. There's nothing he can do for her now, but we still roused him from his bed. It is the proper thing to do."

"Yes, father," Apollonius murmured, and then he turned back to the dead girl and sat beside her. He wiped his cheeks. His tears were streaked with blood.