Blood And Gold (The Vampire Chronicles 8)

"Yes," I said.

"Let me take them only a small amount¡ª. "

"Make them rich if that's your wish. "

For a long moment, he was silent and then he made a small confession, murmuring it as though he were communing with himself:

"I must see the monastery where I painted the ikons. I must see the place where at times I prayed I would have the strength to be walled up alive. You know it was the way of the place, don't you? "

"Very well, I know it," I answered. "I saw it when I gave you the Blood. I saw you moving down the corridors, giving sustenance to those who still lived in their cells, half immured and waiting for the will of God to take them as they starved themselves. They asked you when you would have the courage for it, yet you could paint ikons that were magnificent. "

"Yes," he said.

"And your father hated them that they did not let you paint, that they made you a monk above all things. "

He looked at me as if he had not truly understood this until now, and perhaps he had not. And then came from his lips a stronger statement.

"So it is with any monastery, and you know it, Master," he retorted. "The will of God comes first. "

I was faintly shocked by the expression on his face. Was he speaking to his father or to me?

It took us four nights to reach Kiev.

I could have made the journey much more quickly had I been on my own, but I carried Amadeo close to me, his head bowed, his eyes closed, my fur-lined cloak wrapped around him to shelter him from the wind as best I could.

At last on the sunset of the fifth night, we reached the ruins of the city which had once been Kiev Rus. Our clothes were covered in dirt and our fur cloaks dark and nondescript, which would help to render us unremarkable to mortal eyes.

A thick snow lay over the high abandoned battlements, and covered the roofs of the Prince's wooden palace, and beneath the battlements simple wooden houses that ran down to the Dnieper River¡ªthe town of Podil. Never have I seen a place more forlorn.

As soon as Amadeo had penetrat

ed the wooden dwelling of the European ruler, and glimpsed to his satisfaction this Lithuanian who paid tribute to the Khan for his power, he wanted to move on to the monastery at once.

And into it he slipped using his immense blood drinker's skill to play the shadows and confuse those who might have seen him as he cleaved to the mud walls.

I was near to him always but it was not my place to interfere or instruct. Indeed, I was gripped with horror, for the place seemed infinitely worse than I had ever guessed from the probing of his fevered mind.

With quiet misery, he saw the room in which he'd made ikons with its tables and pots of paints. He saw the long mud corridors through which he'd walked once as a young monk, giving food and drink to those half buried alive.

At last he came out of it, shivering, and he clung to me.

"I would have perished in a mud cell," he whispered, looking at me, begging me to understand the import of it. His face was twisted with pain.

Then turning away swiftly, he went down towards the half-frozen river, searching for the house in which he'd been born.

With no difficulty he found it, and he entered it¡ªthe splendid Venetian, dazzling and confusing the family gathered there.

Once again I kept my distance, settling for the silence and the wind, and the voices I could hear with preternatural ears. Within moments he had left them with a fortune in gold coin and come out again into the falling snow.

I reached out to take his arm and comfort him. But he turned away. He wouldn't look at me. Something obsessed him,

"My mother was there," he whispered, as he looked down once more towards the river. "She didn't know me. So be it. I gave them what I had to give. "

Again I tried to embrace him, but he shook me off.

"What's wrong then?" I asked. "Why do you stare? Why do you look that way towards the river? What would you do? "

How I wished I could read his mind! His mind, and his alone, was shut to me! And how angry and determined he looked.