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Benedict sat at the desk with his head down on his folded arms, sobbing.
Rhosh, known to so many others through the ages as Rhoshamandes, sat by the cavernous hearth in the old stone room looking at his fledgling with a mixture of impatience and irresistible sympathy. He had never been able to divorce himself entirely from Benedict's boiling emotions, and maybe he had never really wanted to do that. Of all his companions and fledglings through the centuries, he loved Benedict the most--this child of Merovingian royalty who had been such a dreamy Latin scholar in his time, so eager to understand those years which the world now called the Dark Ages. How he'd cried when brought into the Blood, sure of his ultimate damnation, and only come round to worship Rhoshamandes instead of his Christian god--never believing in a world untainted by fear of perdition. But this great superstitious fear was, however, part of Benedict's eternal charm.
And this hapless child had had a gift for making other blood drinkers better than himself as time passed. Now that was quite a mystery to Rhosh, but it was fact.
It was Benedict who had made the young Notker the Wise of Prum, who likely survived to this day, a mad genius sustained on music as much as human blood.
Pretty Benedict, always a joy to look at, if not to listen to, whose tears could be as beguiling as his smiles.
Rhoshamandes was dressed in what might have passed for a monk's long hooded robe of heavy gray wool with a thick black leather belt around the waist, and big deep sleeves. But the robe was in fact made from fine cashmere, and the buckle on his belt was pewter and revealed a delicately modeled face of Medusa with writhing snakes for hair and a howling mouth. He wore exquisitely crafted brown leather sandals because he didn't feel the cold here on this craggy green island in the Outer Hebrides.
He had short and very soft golden-brown hair and large blue eyes. He'd been born thousands of years ago on the island of Crete to parents of Indo-European descent, and gone down into Egypt when he was twenty. His skin was the smooth creamy tan of immortals who go into the sun often in order to pass for human, and it made his eyes appear wondrously bright and beautiful.
He and Benedict were speaking English now, the language they'd shared for the last seven hundred years, more or less, the Old French and the Latin having passed from their daily speech but not their libraries. Rhosh knew ancient tongues, tongues never known to Benedict.
"It burnt them all," Benedict sobbed. "It destroyed them completely," he said in his muffled, hopeless voice.
"Sit up and look at me," said Rhoshamandes. "I am talking to you, Benedict. Now look at me and tell me precisely what happened."
Benedict sat back in the chair, his long brown curly hair mussed and falling into his eyes, his boyish mouth quivering. Of course his face was smeared with blood and so were his clothes, his wool sweater and his tweed jacket. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Vampires who spilt blood on their garments either from victims or tears were anathema! Nothing so revolted Rhoshamandes about modern fictive and film vampires as their utter unrealistic sloppiness.
And Benedict looked perfectly like a cheap television vampire with that blood all over him.
He'd be the image of an eighteen-year-old youth forever because that is what he was when he'd been made a blood drinker, just as Rhoshamandes would always look like a man a few years older than that with a fuller chest and heavier arms. But Benedict had always had a childlike personality. No guile, no cunning. He might never have outgrown it in mortal life. Something to do with Christ's command, "Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven." Benedict had not only been a monk in his youth, he'd been a mystic.
Who could know?
Rhoshamandes, on the other hand, if it mattered, had been the eldest of ten mortal children and a man at the age of twelve, protecting his mother. Palace intrigue. The day she'd been murdered, he'd run away to sea and survived by his wits, amassing a fortune before he journeyed up the Nile to trade with the Egyptians. He had fought many a battle, survived unscarred, but made his wealth by instinct rather than violence--until the Queen's blood drinker slaves captured him and dragged him from his boat.
Rhoshamandes and Benedict were both comely and fine boned, chosen for the Blood on account of their seeming physical perfection. Rhoshamandes had brought over dozens of such beauties as Benedict into the Blood, but none had survived with him, stayed with him, loved him as had Benedict, and when he thought of the times he'd driven Benedict away, he shuddered inwardly and thanked some dark god of the blood-drinking world that he'd always been able to find Benedict and bring him back.
Benedict was sniffling and now and then moaning in his inimitable charming fashion, trying to regain possession of himself. Benedict's mortal soul had been formed in kindness and gentleness and true faith in goodness, and these traits he'd never lost.
"All right, that's better," said Rhoshamandes. "Now recall it all for me."
"Surely you saw it, Rhosh, you saw the images. All those blood drinkers couldn't have perished without your catching images."
"Yes, I did, of course," said the other, "but I want to know just how it got the jump on them when they'd been warned. They had all been warned."
"But that's just it, we didn't know where to go or what to do. And the young ones, they have to hunt. You don't remember what an agony it is for them. I don't know if it was ever an agony for you."
"Oh, stop with all that," said Rhosh. "They were told to get out of London, to get away from that hotel, to move into the countryside. Benji Mahmoud had been warning them for nights on end. You warned them."
"Well, a l
ot of them did," said Benedict sadly. "Plenty of them did. But then we got the word. They were being spotted and burned out there--in the Cotswolds and in Bath--and all over!"
"I see."
"Do you? Do you care?" Benedict wiped furiously at his eyes. "I don't think you care. You're exactly as Benji Mahmoud describes. You're an elder of the tribe who doesn't care. You never did."
Rhoshamandes was looking away, out of the arched window, at the darkened land below, and the thick jagged forest that clung to the bluff over the ocean. There was no way in the world he was going to disclose his true thoughts to his beloved Benedict. Elder of the tribe, indeed.
Benedict went on talking.
Old ones had perished the night before. On waking Benedict had discovered the burnt remains of two of them right there in the house. He'd run to alert the others. Get out.
"That's when the walls caught fire," he said. "I wanted to save them, save one of them, anything, anything that I could. But the roof exploded and I saw them in flames all around me. And I saw this thing, this thing standing there, and it looked ragged and grotesque and it was on fire too. Is that possible? I swear it was burning. I went up. I did what I had to do."
