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The first thing your God does after he purchases you in the marketplace is wash your body in his splendid bath. He’s a God of this foreign city and he speaks in the only language you really understand—the language of coin. You change hands, as goods are exchanged. You’re very small—a mite—and he’s very large—an unfettered sky, a size fit for a God—and the bath matches his splendour. When you go into the water together, the water rocks beneath you, an overwarm cradle that accepts you without resistance. It scalds your tender, overripe infant skin. He scrubs the grime, soot, urine, from your body, uncovering the boy under all the filth of the places you’d been, the things that had been done to you. He calls you son. He calls you lover. He touches the most intimate part of you, speaking in soothing, loving words that don’t register the entire time. He holds you like a beloved doll in his arms, dumb thing, staring at his eyes which are the colour of noon skies that you haven’t seen in weeks, as he speaks to you, at you. Your skin turns as hot as his is cold beneath his gentle, loving touch.
“I know you’re in there child,” he says, when you don’t respond to his gentle conversation, but you see him peer into your eyes anyway, searching for the boy who belongs to the body he traded for a generous amount. You see the worry in his eyes when he searches and finds nothing in there, continues to wash you, coaxing you back to life slowly. You’re shifting restlessly in his arms, showing some animation by the time he’s finished, giving him enough confidence to let you support yourself as he leads you out of the bath.
“Come,” he says, “Amadeo.” There’s the name again, the one he had bestowed upon you in the cathouse even before he bought you.
You climb out of the bath, wet and dripping, shedding one skin for another. Amadeo. Your legs tremble beneath you. Like a newborn fawn you stumble after him, reaching out—crying out when he steps back. Master. Please. Help me. Your God’s eyes sparkle.
“Beloved,” he corrects, supporting you very lightly, letting you carry yourself most of the way to his bed. “I’m your beloved in this room, under this roof.”
You settle on Master in the end despite his admonitions, and God in the privacy of your mind. You learn how literal these choices of titles are when your white God takes you to bed and sinks his teeth into you.
The first time you raise the point of your rapier to your God’s throat, he laughs.
You’re still spindly, barely-there, and prone to breaking bones in such a state of undernutrition; so the swordmaster lets you hold a sword and strut around like an overly-proud peacock under the roof of the practice room because you’re your Lord’s favourite boy, and the other alternative would be to let you loose on the streets until evening lessons, unruly child that you are. You first learn to count your numbers in Venetian—primo, secondo, terso, quarto—when the swordmaster runs you through drills that some of the boys learnt when they were less than ten years of age. After three months of lessons, you walk into your God’s bedchambers and prod at him, complete with a complicated flourish you were proud to have mastered. “Somebody could kill you,” you say in your crooked Venetian, that Riccardo had helped you translate. The older boy says you’ve been learning their language fast, for somebody who isn’t otherwise familiar with the languages of the West. Sometimes you still fall mute from time to time, and nobody is more ashamed of those transient moments of aphasic idiocy than you are. “You’re so beautiful, that they couldn’t help but try, out of envy.” Your Master says such things to you sometimes, so you repeat it back to him in compliment.
He’s surprised by the words that spill from your mouth. “Clever boy. Why don’t you try?” your God asks you, smiling, a father humouring his son.
Your palm immediately gets sweaty around the exquisite handle of the rapier he’d selected for you personally before you started training. He watches the point of your rapier dip, in your wavering confidence. “Master,” you say, in a small voice. “I did not mean disrespect.”
Your gleaming God leans on the point of your rapier which is pointing, carelessly, at his heart now. Red blossoms and spreads over his heart. You drop the blade, horrified.
He catches it before it hits the ground and flips the sword, so that the point of the rapier he purchased for you is tilting up your chin. It is a movement so swift that your head spins. Your God has performed strange miracles such as this before, but you’ve often doubted what you’ve witnessed—the madam at the brothel used to say you were half-mad, an idolater born to a race of low peoples, and the barest hint of your mother tongue in your mouth used to drive her to conniptions.
“I’m invulnerable to most mortal wounds,” your God says, studying you with a strange, observant curiosity that makes you feel more stripped than his gentle peeling of your child’s garments in his bed in the night. “I’ve let you taste my blood—you know the power I possess. You’ve healed and progressed so quickly by the grace of my gift. Don’t worry on my behalf, or yours. Nothing can harm us here. Put away your disquieting thoughts and dedicate yourself to the lessons of your teachers. You’re a prince of the city, now. My joy, my pride.”
You climb into his lap and kiss him on the lips, overcome by his kindness. “Is there room for a lesson in bed tonight?” you ask him, desperate to see, once more, the loving look he gets in his eyes when he parts your flesh with the part of his flesh that gets just as hungry as any other man’s. Men, you have learned, have large appetites. You hope your God is famished, tonight.
“I’m a slave to your whims,” he says. Your Lord sets aside the rapier. He picks you up and carries you to his bed.
The first time a visiting artist touches you, your God cannot do anything to prevent it. You’re posed mostly nude, standing in for Ganymede as he’s snatched from his idyllic Trojan meadows. You’re still a weak thing, although not so frail anymore, body struggling to grow accustomed to the new pleasures being thrust your way, and your arms tremble, and sweat rolls down your back, down your face. The boys keep having to fan you and dab your face from time to time. You take breaks too often to recover. You stay still as a doll when the master painter dismisses the boys from the room, when he sits next to you and touches the most private part of you.
After, you go to your Master’s rooms, drifting through the corridors of his palatial home like a ghost, and climb into his arms. You both say nothing. You realise—he knows, and he will not punish you for what had transpired.
After he pays handsomely for the canvas next morning, you watch the servants take a nail to the wall in his magnificent dining hall, bring the rope, and hang the painting. The boy in the painting does not look like you, and yet he is you.
“It’s an ugly painting,” you tell your Master.
“It preserves a record of you,” your Master says. “There will be better paintings.” The thought distresses you, for reasons you can’t put into words—you don’t like the idea of being put into theatrical scenes picked by others for you. But Venetian is still a fickle, elusive language, and you have many years of study to look forward to in order to make up for a largely illiterate childhood. So you don’t argue.
The first time your God directly suggests a liaison with a visiting artist, you don’t understand. You stand in your shared bedroom staring at him dumbly. “Have I displeased you?” you ask.
“No,” your God says. He’s busy writing in that infernal book of his at his desk, which he is rarely parted from when he spends time in his home. He’s never expressed concern that you might read his most intimate thoughts—you’re still being taught the written word by the boys and maestros he hires for your benefit. You would never dare to touch it anyway. Your Master sometimes likes to tease that you erect pretty little cages for yourself wherever you go, that it is such a pleasure to him, always, to extract you from them and set you free.
“Have I unknowingly broken the laws of your house, Master? If so, please forgive me.” Punish me as you see fit, trembles on the edge of your tongue. But you fear that the punishment might be the loaning of your body.
“No, Amadeo. Don’t bother me now—I’m writing, child.”
You go to sit at his feet and curl your fingers in his clothes. “Will you sell me, Master? Have you grown bored with me?” Beautiful men like him often did that—they grew bored of their boys. The madam at the bordello had estimated that you were fifteen years old, but had adjusted your age to suit the clients’ tastes as she saw fit. Eleven, was the age you heard told was the estimate offered, once, because you were so emaciated from starvation, had been poor and wanting for food even before you’d been sold to the slavers. It wasn’t often that they got their hands on an exotic pet such as you, able to satisfy a virile European man’s replacement for an elusive son or a spurning slave woman, and even lying limp in your earning bed—starved, beaten, useless—you had still earned her a satisfactory income.
You think—It’s not even been a year. I still look young.
Your God finally sighs and looks down at you. “Never, Amadeo,” he says, and you nearly cry.
“You told me I alone of the boys belonged to you.”
“You can only paint what you love,” your God says. “And they cannot paint what they already do not love. Only the finest painters of our time will be granted the honour and privilege of bearing witness to your countenance, of placing their hands on your marbled features. You will adorn the walls of this home, perhaps even richer houses if they pay me in turn.”
“And you will love me, despite it?” you ask. “Is this a test? Am I doomed to fail if I agree, and fail again anyway if I do not?”
“Never doubt my love for you,” your God says. It becomes the lifeline by which you pass your days in his home after that.
You think about love when he sends you to the brothels, gently asking you to learn to enjoy yourself, to learn to fuck properly, after a master storms out of his villa one evening, saying you go limp as a puppet during couplings, so that it seems like fucking a corpse, which is worse than fucking nothing at all. “They used to like a struggle in the brothel,” you tell your God, and it’s a question.
It had been enough. Your God had been horrified. You did not understand why. “I want you to partake in pleasure, not endure it,” he says. And when you tell him you want no pleasure in the world except that of his company and his body, he laughs, calls you naive, and ignorant, and sends you to the brothel anyway.
You cannot help it—you enjoy the careful attention applied to you, in the way that is not entirely under your control. You know from the moment they tie ropes around your wrists that your Master had told them exactly how you enjoy taking your pleasure. It’s different, too, how the air in a house selling bodies tastes when your body is not the one being sold. You still can’t help dreaming that the hands on you belong to your Master, and when he comes to collect you, you breathe a long sigh of relief. You’re tired, wrung out like a washcloth, but nevertheless vibrating with anticipation by the time you get home, and when you climb into bed with him and start to strip your dear Master, eager to show him everything you’ve learned, he turns you away, indifferent.
“You’re shy,” you say. “Did you not send me to the pleasure houses to learn to better satisfy you? I know you did. Who cares what love the masters you invite find in me?” You reach for him once more.
“Not now, Amadeo,” he says. When you try to kiss him anyway, he pushes you away. “Unruly child.”
Hurt, you carefully crawl back from him and draw your legs to your chest, watching him over your knees. “You’re unhappy that I enjoyed myself. Don’t lie to me, Master. I can see it in your lovely weighted eyes. You can rest assured that I imagined you were servicing me even during the most excruciating throes of passion.”
“Go to bed,” he says.
You go to bed, because it is his command. Next morning you slip out of the villa, uncaring about the discipline your Master and your teachers will hand out when you return home. You roam the city, indulging its small pleasures as a only boy who’d been denied so much before can.
The first lover you pick for yourself in your eighteen entire years of existence is an Englishman who watches you hungrily while you purchase a pair of shoes, like a particularly sweet fruit he’d like to wrap his entire mouth around and crush between his teeth. You let him lead you back to his rooms in a beautiful palazzo, let him make love to you. You think, bored, while he fucks you, that his wife must take opium to escape the indignity of his poor skill. You’re aggravated when he makes offers of land and titles, later, as long as you promise to be his beautiful pet.
“I don’t want it,” you tell him, dull. You start to pull on your clothes. “I need to leave now. My—father—will worry.”
Lord Harlech pulls out a knife and brandishes it at you. “If I can’t keep you, I’ll kill you.”
This does not surprise you. You’ve been told you’re very beautiful by many men. Some of them love you so much that they capture you in the only way they can ever hope to as long as your Master lives—by immortalising you on their canvases. “I’m leaving now,” you tell him, again, and you pick up your new pair of shoes placed neatly against the wall. He gapes, watching you leave.
In this way, you show great bluster before the Englishman but the illusion of confidence shatters while you roam the streets that evening, hesitating. You had slept with a man your Master hadn’t given permission to share intimacies with—a crass, proud man; a violent one. You spend three days hiding in Bianca’s home because fear of punishment stirs up such a hot trouble in you. When you finally drag your hideous self home shamefully, your Master is nearly as mad and torn up from separation as you are. When the switch comes down on your thighs, you cry from relief because it means your Master still loves you enough to correct you.
It’s all forgiven and forgotten, you both agree next morning.
“I know how you think of me, Amadeo,” he tells you one day, while he sketches your form feverishly, page after page after page. You’re seated in the studio, quite alone—it’s the time of day when the other boys are at lessons. Your God has bid you sit still, and you keep squirming, curious, impatient.
You take your pleasures together in the studio often lately, to your dismay—you’ve developed a great loathing for the long hours you spend alone with other painters here—after your Master has satisfied his artistic pursuits for the day. But he has shown no desire to put aside his work today, and you have been impatient all morning, and restless and irritable. The urge to touch and be touched has become such a ritual after these sessions that you’ve accepted it as a matter of course, in the manner one accepts that feeding and pissing are indignities that the living have to endure.
Your Master is still speaking, saying, “I have never resented you for it, but you must shed the affectation for your own benefit.”
You moisten your lips. He watches your tongue dart out and lick your lips with an intensity that makes you shiver. “How do you mean, Master?” Was it presumption that he resented? Or ungratefulness? You were often ungrateful, despite your Master bearing the burden of your costly existence on his part, and you could admit that, even to yourself.
“I’m not the divine personage you believe me to be,” your God says, with all his disdain for religion and worship, and now his eyes have drifted to the painting hanging on the wall. You realise, suddenly, that your Master is jealous. He keeps comparing his sketches with the nativity scene you posed for. What had the man captured so accurately that your Master was in such pain over his inability to reproduce it?
“Why paint me when you can have me?” you ask, irritated now.
“You’re not ready for the gift,” Marius says, ignoring you, “because you count on my company to endure eternity. That will not do.”
“I like it here well enough.”
“You liked the Englishman too,” your most beloved one says. And then there’s silence. You stare at each other.
“I imagined you would cast me out. Abandon me.”
“Never. All you had to do was come home to me.”
“I did,” you remind him politely. “You’re cold, sometimes, Master. You treat me like a child, turning me away like a quarrelsome mutt. I’m a man. I want things, the same way you want things.”
“And how much of your reading have you actually bothered finishing, my child?” he asks.
You flush, humiliation stinging hot as a slap to the face.
“Finish Dante,” your God who is your father says. “And Machiavelli. And Ariosto. And Boccaccio. Then we’ll discuss manhood. And vampirism.”
You lower your eyes to the floor. “It will take me years to master Venetian with the proficiency necessary to read them all—truly read them.” You’ve struggled so much with learning. So much violence had been done to you over so many years, your God had explained, that you were still often a child in the mind if not the body. You certainly feel like a child in the body when the servants take you to the bath and shave all the hair they can find periodically. Sometimes your Master likes to shave your face himself.
“You have only time ahead of you,” your God says. “And plenty of it to grow. Meanwhile, enjoy childhood while you still can. Do you want me to make you toil for a living?”
You think—But I’m twenty. My body is large as yours. They call us sodomites now. A man tried to skewer me with a sword in the market last week, laughing about piercing me in a way fit for sinners of my kind.
You say—“Of course not, Master.”
You always spend the mornings, after, together. Your God washes your body clean of the evidence of the debauchery. The rituals are always the same as they were after he rescued you from the brothel—he takes you into the bath. He parts your lips, places his white fingers inside the dark cavity of your mouth and scrubs your teeth clean. He lathers your tongue with careful attention. He generously lets you suck on a sweet to soothe the sting of the soap while he washes your hair and uses fragrant oils that make you smell sweet as a budding maid for days after. The salt is cleansed from your eyes and the vicious white fluid buried in the recesses of you is rinsed out. He finds your sex, and touches every part of it. Sometimes you watch him reach down, expecting him to find a cunt there, loving Europa to the all-consuming divinity of Zeus. Most mornings you accuse of him neglect and frigidity until he rolls his eyes in exasperation and fucks you the way you want him to—he never fucks you unless you tell him exactly how you want to be taken, laughs when you’re timid and shy, uncertain how to explain that there’s a furnace of want in you that never seems to be able to quench its thirst.
It’s not one of those mornings. This morning is a different morning. You’re still bleeding, and the bathwater is red now. You’d been found unconscious on the floor of the studio when he came in—during, but what had been after for you, because you’d been lost to the world for most of it. He’d refused to tell you what had transpired, but you’d heard the boys whispering rape and knife, when he’d lifted you in his arms and carried you out, which made the relations you’d shared with other painters not-rape. You’re too sore and weak to hold yourself up even after the bath, despite sucking the blood he offers you, and need to be carried to the bed too.
The first thing he tells you that morning is: I would have prevented it if I had been sooner the wiser.
You lie there, body curled in a fetal position, shivering in his lap, the ragged, flayed flesh over your back and chest and thighs still covered in tissue which is placentous in its clinging. You haven’t cried yet. Your head is pillowed on his thigh, and you’re staring at the maroon of his doublet, thinking about red bathwater. One hand rests in your hair. He sings you a lullaby. You hate it when he does that. By Marius’s estimate, you’re roughly twenty-three years old now. But today you feel less than fifteen.
Your dear father runs mourning fingers over the wounds of your ravaged body, sealing them shut. “He will never hurt you again,” he promises, so you come to understand that he is dead, and take wretched, hollow satisfaction in that fact. His ghastly hands will never paint a canvas ever again—his memory will pass from the world. You imagine the boys of the villa putting your incomplete form into the fire.
You blink. Your eyes feel wet. “Amadeo,” your only father in the world says, “your tongue will wither from disuse. You torment me with your silence.”
You try to answer him and cry harder, shaking with your whole body when the syllables that stumble out of your mouth resemble the mad ravings of a halfwit. Your God soothes you—urges you to try again, while you worry about manhood and reading Dante and becoming a vampire. You mumble something, unthinking, in that mostly-forgotten savage tongue your God hates. But still incomprehensible. Your blood, you yearn to say when your God is shocked into silence at your incoherency—the last time his beloved one had been this unintelligible was when he had purchased you from the brothel. Give me blood. Give me your blood. Give it to me. Please. Make me yours. You will not make half a splendid God as the one who saved you but you will be more than God enough for the brutish men who come to you in the name of love and hurt you instead.
“Patience,” Marius says, and he runs a finger through a channel of your exposed flesh, your exposed everything. “You’re not ready yet.”
And then, violently, the thought rips through you: I hate you, you think for the very first time in your life, and it’s also the first coherent thought you’ve had since Marius rescued you earlier today.
The thought burned like fire. I was immune to the sun, but not the inferno of such hate. I pulled out of his mind, stunned. How insulting, to return to Marius, from God, and beloved, and Master. Amadeo lay still, breathing shallow, leaking tears into my clothes, but otherwise utterly silent. I was seized with the sudden urge to roll his ungrateful body off my lap, and ask him to clean himself up, as impulsive as the compulsion to whip him when he’d deigned to crawl home to me from his torrid affair with the Englishman—see how well he’d heal then, this boy who was so proud of his beauty, who made me helpless to his charms despite my infinite restraint, tempered by the passing centuries.
He cried harder, subsequently, as if he was ashamed of his resentful thoughts. I did not bother to confirm this for myself, muddled and broken as his mind was at the moment—and there was a flavour of desperation to the emotion that begged for pity he could no longer ask for, rendered mute again, from the shock of what had been done to him.
And I could be merciful.
I licked his blood off my fingers, relishing the sweetness of young flesh. I told him, “I forgive you.” I slit my wrist and poured my blood over his wounds. He moaned from pain and relief. Overwhelmed, he promptly fainted.
You’re starting to grow apart by the time you turn twenty-five, twenty-six. The word rape settles like an impurity in the sludgy, hot alloy of your insolent mind. Your Master often beats you for your misbehaviour. You cry, but always make up sweetly in his bed after. You don’t expect him to feel so jealous everytime you take a lover in secret. He knows of course. He always knows. He forgives more easily when you break off the dalliances quickly.
“Did you know,” you whisper to the male lover you’ve picked for the night, “‘It is necessary for a prince, if he wants to maintain his position, to develop the ability to be not good, and use or not use this ability as necessity dictates.’ Machiavelli said that.”
“Did he,” the forty-year-old man says, still busy kissing your navel, your sensitive nipples. His fingers are inside you, and pleasure is becoming pain, becoming annoyance now. He’s insatiable—you’ve been growing steadily irritated with men who tell you what to do and what not to do, over the years. What injures your oft-fragile ego is that this unread boor is still easily accepted as a man where you have fought hard so long to gain even a semblance of that same acknowledgement.
And now, he’s trying to bring you towards an orgasm you don’t think you want anymore. You act on an impulse: you grope at the sheets beside your head and smash the bottle of wine he’s tossed there into his head. Red splatters over your face, less viscous than the English Lord’s blood which had spilled all over you when you killed him. He slumps over you, unconscious. You’re older now, and stronger, so you don’t have to struggle beneath his weight and call for help. You clean yourself up and begin the long walk home, where your Master no doubt lays in wait to punish you for disrespecting the painter he’d summoned earlier today, playing truant when you were supposed to be modelling.
Perhaps it was he who gave you the venereal disease—or the man before him, or the paramour who’d come before. Perhaps it was one of the painters your Master summoned. But before you know it, you’re running an extraordinarily high fever in a couple of months, lying in your Master’s bed, and you’re dying. You pass your twenty-seventh birthday—which your Master had picked for you, since you no longer remembered the time which had come before your time in the brothel—in a delirium.
You see the approaching death in your Master’s sorrowful eyes when he comes to sit beside you one night. Your fevers are running so high now that your body is throwing seizures. He wipes the sickness from your mouth, gentle. “I learned Dante, Master,” you tell him.
He takes a moment, understanding the plea behind your words. “And do you not fear it, my child? Eternity in hell?”
“I only wanted you,” you whisper. “Always. If I can have it in hell—then so be it.”
He picks you up, gathering you into his arms. You bare your throat for him.
He plunges his fangs into your neck and starts stripping you of your mortality.
His mind quickly started to close itself to me. I pulled out of Amadeo’s mind for the last time in the winter of 1535 in Venice. I gave him some of my blood, and bade him stand by his own strength as I walked backwards from him. But the boy was so weak—all those years of care undone in a matter of months by youthful nerve and passion—and soon stumbled and fell, writhing on the ground, fragile, still caught in the throes of illness, body starting to die as my blood ran its course through his veins. He convulsed lightly. “Come to me, child,” I said.
Anger. Humiliation. Terror. Our minds were invulnerable to one another’s thoughts already, but I’d studied this child for half his life now. I knew how to translate every twitch of his lips, every furrowing of his brows. “Master, show mercy,” he cried.
“You count yourself as an inhabitant of the Savage Garden, at this very moment,” I said. “You think you’re in pain now. This is not pain. What came before was the pale mirror of it. You will see pain in all its glory and innumerable variations in the centuries to come, and you will learn to savour it, so that it may strengthen you where it drives other vampires to destruction. Understand—all these long years in my company spent in your human body were meant to give you the power to endure the gift you longed for.” I took another step back.
There was dumb disbelief, a wide-eyed look directed at me as if he was asking me—don’t I know pain? But Amadeo crawled. He pulled himself forward by his hands, legs dragging behind him uselessly. I sighed when he wrapped greedy fingers around my legs and sank his still-unformed fledgling teeth into my calf muscles.
“Not like a common mongrel, child,” I said, taking him by the scruff of his neck. “Up—come up. Take the sacrament you crave with dignity.”
He cried. He pleaded pity. “Come, Amadeo,” I commanded soft, unyielding. “You’ve made it this far.”
The name undid his sullen resistance. He levered himself up with some assistance, thighs shaking, feet crooked beneath him, and sank his teeth into my neck. I cradled his head. “Do you sense it? The power I give you?” I whispered. “Was it worth the wait?” My power would preserve him forever. I would preserve him forever.
He was too lost in his gluttony to respond. When I finally dragged his head back by his hair and brought my lips to his throat, he accepted the onslaught passively. “I love you, Master,” he said, eyes fluttering shut as I drained him. His tears leaked into my coat. He accepted the violation as a matter of course, obedient even at the point of death. “I love you. I love you. Are you killing me, Master?”
Irrational anger at this mortal child, who was stronger than me even when I had achieved heights of vampiric strength few ever did. I resented the weakness he stirred in me, even so vulnerable. Amadeo was a weakness—my greatest weakness.
I let him fall to the floor, drained. And I walked back again.
“Master,” he said, and he looked terrified. He looked up at me, eyes devoid of innocence, dark overtaken by orange. Eyes the colour of blood in a certain light. “Give it to me.”
I continued walking back, putting considerable distance between us. “Will you take the blood as I give it to you?” I asked, as Amadeo laid on the floor crying for me—red tears now. “Will you endure? Will you prove yourself worthy of my gift?” He nodded, frantic. “Then come, Amadeo.” The words I spoke would have been no less plain had I said exactly what I meant—submit, dear one. Your turbulent, rowdy childhood is past. Join me in the Savage Garden as my beloved.
Understanding dawned in his eyes. Amadeo lowered his eyes to the floor. And he crawled.