The Vampire Armand (The Vampire Chronicles 6)

"Yes, but we are not invisible, remember it," he whispered.

"But who died here today? People are full of torment and fear. Listen. There is satisfaction, and there is weeping. "

He didn't answer.

I grew uneasy.

"What is it? It can't be any common thing," I said. "The city is too vigilant and unquiet. "

"It's their great reformer, Savonarola," Marius said. "He died on this day, hanged, and then burnt here. Thank God, he was already dead before the flames rose. "

"You wish mercy for Savonarola?" I asked. I was puzzled. This man, a great reformer in the eyes of some perhaps, had always been damned by all I knew. He had condemned all pleasures of the senses, denying any validity to the very school in which my Master thought all things were to be learnt.

"I wish mercy for any man," said Marius. He beckoned for me to follow, and we moved towards the nearby street.

We headed away from the grisly place.

"Even this one, who persuaded Botticelli to heap his own paintings on the Bonfires of the Vanities?" I asked. "How many times have you pointed to the details of your own copies of Botticelli's work to show me some graceful beauty you wanted me to never forget?"

"Are you going to argue with me until the end of the world!" said Marius. "I'm pleased that my blood has given you new strength in every aspect, but must you question every word that falls from my lips?" He threw me a furious glance, letting the light of nearby torches fully illuminate his half-mocking smile. "There are some students who believe in this method, and that greater truths rise out of the continued strife between teacher and pupil. But not me! I believe you need to let my lessons settle in quiet at least for the space of five minutes in your mind before you begin your counterattack. "

"You try to be angry with me but you can't. "

"Oh, what a muddle!" he said as if he were cursing. He walked fast ahead of me.

The small Florentine street was dreary, like a passageway in a great house rather than a city street. I longed for the breezes of Venice, or rather, my body did, out of habit. I was quite fascinated to be here.

"Don't be so provoked," I said. "Why did they turn on Savonarola?"

"Give men enough time and they'll turn on anyone. He claimed to have been a prophet, divinely inspired by God, and that these were the Last Days, and this is the oldest most tiresome Christian complaint in the world, believe you me. The Last Days! Christianity is a religion based on the notion that we are living in the Last Days! It's a religion fueled by the ability of men to forget all the blunders of the past, and get dressed once more for the Last Days. "

I smiled, but bitterly. I wanted to articulate a strong presentiment, that we were always in the Last Days, and it was inscribed in our hearts, because we were mortals, when quite suddenly and totally I realized that I was no longer mortal, except insofar as the world itself was mortal.

And it seemed I understood more viscerally than ever the atmosphere of purposeful gloom which had overhung my childhood in far-off Kiev. I saw again the muddy catacombs, and the half-buried monks who

had cheered me on to become one of them.

I shook it off, and now how bright Florence seemed as we came into the broad torch-lighted Piazza del Duomo - before the great Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore.

"Ah, my pupil does listen now and then," Marius was saying to me in an ironic voice. "Yes, I am more than glad that Savonarola is no more. But to rejoice at the end of something is not to approve the endless parade of cruelty that is human history. I wish it were otherwise. Public sacrifice becomes grotesque in every respect. It dulls the senses of the populace. In this city, above all others, it's a spectacle. The Florentines enjoy it, as we do our Regattas and Processions. So Savonarola is dead. Well, if any mortal man asked for it, it was Savonarola, predicting as he did the end of the world, damning princes from his pulpit, leading great painters to immolate their works. The hell with him. "

"Master, look, the Baptistery, let's go, let's look at the doors. The piazza's almost empty. Come on. It's our chance to look at the bronzes. " I tugged on his sleeve.

He followed me, and he stopped his muttering, but he was not himself.

What I wanted so to see is work that you can see in Florence now, and in fact, almost every treasure of this city and of Venice which I've described here you can see now. You have only to go there. The panels in the door which were done by Lorenzo Ghiberti were my delight, but there was also older work done by Andrea Pisano, portraying the life of St. John the Baptist, and this, I didn't intend to overlook.

So keen was the vampiric vision that as I studied these various detailed bronze pictures, I could hardly keep from sighing with pleasure.

This moment is so clear. I think that I believed, then, that nothing ever could hurt me or make me sad again, that I had discovered the balm of salvation in the vampiric blood, and the strange thing is, that as I dictate this story now, I think the same thing once more.

Though unhappy now, and possibly forever, I believe again in the paramount importance of the flesh. My mind wanders to the words of D. H. Lawrence, the twentieth-century writer, who in his writings on Italy, recalled Blake's image of the "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night. " Lawrence's words are:

This is the supremacy of the flesh, which devours all, and becomes transfigured into a magnificent brindled flame, a burning bush indeed.

This is one way of transfiguration into the eternal flame, the transfiguration through ecstasy in the flesh.

But I have done a risky thing here for a storyteller. I have left my plot, as I'm sure The Vampire Lestat (who is more skilled perhaps than I am, and so in love with the image of William Blake's tiger in the night, and who has, whether he cares to admit it or not, used the tiger in his work in the very same way) would point out to me, and I must speedily return to this moment in the Piazza del Duomo, where I left myself of long ago standing, side by side with Marius, looking at the burnished genius of Ghiberti, as he sings in bronze of Sybils and saints.