A shock passed through Marius but he remained silent.
Teskhamen paused, eyes still fixed on the distant surf. His eyes returned to Marius. He looked past him for a moment and smiled at Daniel, who was listening as if rapt.
“I had never fully understood till that moment,” said Teskhamen, “that we are the sum of all we’ve seen and all we’ve appreciated and understood. You were the sum of sunshine on marble floors filled with pictures of divine beings who laughed and loved and drank the fruit of the vine as surely as you were the sum of the poets and historians and philosophers you’d read. You were the sum and the fount of what you’d cherished and chosen to abide and all you had loved.”
He left off talking.
Nothing had changed in the night.
Behind them the sparse traffic of early morning moved on the Avenida Atlântica. And the voices of the city rose and subsided beneath the hushed voice of the sea.
But Marius was changed. Changed forever.
“Tell me what happened,” Marius pressed. The intimacy of that long-ago blood exchange in the oak shimmered in his mind. “Where did you go? How did you survive?”
Teskhamen nodded. He was still looking out to sea. “The woods were thick in those times. You remember them. Moderns have no conception of that old woodland, that savage wilderness of trees ancient and young spreading across Europe—against which each hamlet or village or town must fight for its life. Into that woodland I slithered like a lizard. I fed on the vermin of the forest. I fed on what could not escape me even as I could not walk without pain, even as the sun found me again and again in dank hollows and claimed even more of my skin because I could not dig deep to protect myself from it with these hands.”
He looked at his fingers. “In time,” he said with a sigh, “I found a woman in a lowly hut, a cunning woman, a healer, such a thing as men call a witch and a hag. Hesketh was her name. She was a prisoner of hideousness as was I.
“But I begged for her patience. She could not destroy me and I fascinated her, and my suffering touched her heart. Oh, this was so remarkable to me. You cannot imagine. What did I know of compassion, of mercy, of love? She had pity on me, and curiosity burned within her. She would not have me suffer. And some bond was forged before language could express it even in the simplest form.
“Even in my weakened state, I worked small miracles for her effortlessly, told her when strangers were approaching, raked their minds for the questions they were coming to ask her, for the curses they wanted her to bring down on their enemies. I warned of anyone who sought to do her harm. An evil lad bent on murdering her, I easily overpowered and from him drank my fill before her unquestioning eyes. I read her thoughts and I found the poetry inside of her, beneath the misfortune of warts and pockmarked skin, of hunched shoulders and deformed limbs. I loved her. Indeed she became, whole and entire, quite beautiful to me—. And she came to love me with her whole heart.”
His eyes grew wide as if he were marveling at it all even now. “It was at her hearth I discovered my dormant powers, how with my mind I might kindle the fire when it had gone out, how I might make the water boil. I protected her. She protected me. We had the souls of each other. We loved in some realm where the natural and the preternatural meant nothing. And I brought her into the Blood.”
He turned to look at Marius again.
“Now you know what a crime that was against the old religion, to share the Blood with one so malformed. The old religion died for me in that act of defiance and a new religion was born.”
Marius nodded.
“I lived with Hesketh for over six hundred years after that, regaining my strength, healing in body and soul. We hunted the villages of the countryside. We fed on the thieves of the roads. But your beautiful Italy, your beautiful Roman world—which has so inspired me—was never to be mine except in the books I read, the manuscripts I stole from monasteries, the poetry I shared for myself with Hesketh by our humble hearth. Nevertheless we were happy, and we were clever. And as our boldness grew, we penetrated the crude castles and fortresses of country lords and even the streets of Paris in our lust to see and to learn. Those were not bad times.
“But you know how it is with the young in the Blood and how foolish they can be. And Hesketh was young and still misshapen, and all the blood in the world could not succor the pain she knew when mortals screamed at the very sight of her.”
“What happened?”
“We quarreled. We fought. She struck out on her own. I waited. I felt certain she’d return. But she was caught by mortals, a mob that overwhelmed her, and they burned her alive as the Druids had sought to kill me. I found her remains afterwards. I destroyed the village, down to the last mortal man, woman, and child. But Hesketh was gone from me, or so it seemed.”
“You revived her.”
“No, that was not possible,” he said. “Something infinitely more miraculous happened which was to give my life meaning from that time on. But let me continue: I buried her remains near a vast ruined monastery, deep in the untended forest, a collection of rude buildings made of crudely dressed stones and rough timbers where monks had once studied and worked and lived. There were no longer any fields or vineyards around it, for the woods had reclaimed all. But in the weed-infested cemetery, I found a place for her, thinking, Ah, it is consecrated ground. Maybe her soul will rest. Such superstition. Such nonsense. But the time of mourning is always the perfect time for nonsense. And I stayed nearby in the old scriptorium of the monastery, in a filthy corner, beneath a pile of old rotted furniture which no one, for one reason or another, had ever taken away. Each night on rising, I lit once more the small earthen oil lamp I’d placed on her unmarked grave.
“It was a dark and miserable night when she came to me. I had come to the point where death by any means seemed preferable to going on. All those splendid possibilities I’d seen in your blood, they had come to mean nothing—if Hesketh was not with me, if Hesketh was no more.
“And then Hesketh came, my Hesketh. Hesketh came into the old scriptorium. In the light of broken arched windows I saw Hesketh—solid as I am now. And gone was the warty and pockmarked skin that even the Blood had not been able to smooth, and the twisted and deformed limbs. This was the Hesketh I’d always loved, the pure and beautiful damsel inside the wreckage of malnourished and cruelly formed flesh. This was the Hesketh I’d loved with all my heart.”
He paused and studied Marius.