I left him with everything valuable I had in the world. I left him in a room in the Jewish quarter, where he might be kept a secret. Forgive me, I cannot speak about it. Do not make me talk of it. Mini, is it alright? If I do not talk about it, will you go? Say that you will stay here, even if I cannot give you everything you want.

Kissing. Do you think this is good for me? I am not a lover of kissing. Do you enjoy it? I would rather be touched, hummed to. If it is your wish to soothe me, do it that way. Here is my hand. Suck on my fingers. Kiss between them. You are shaking from blood. Soothe yourself. I will talk to you.

What did I feel? Horror. I have told you how he was as a child. His bravery and boldness, his beholdence to beauty and the glory of things, his obedience and earnesty. To see him suffer, it was not in my power. To see him beg for blood and cry in pain, to claw at his eyes and body until he bled. I try not to imagine that he was lucid, but I know that he was and knew his agony. I wrapped white linen around his eyes, whispering to him that it would protect them, but his eyes were raw and bloody in his delicate face already. In his sensitivity, the humid air had scalded them as if it had been steam, and when he wept, calling for me, he screamed at the fresh torment of blooded tears on ravaged eyes. It tore my spirit.

There is no usefulness in telling you my reasons. What reasons? I traveled across the sea and north. I walked on my own, away from people. I found the Danube and slept beside its waters, wishing to feel alone. I thought, "I will forget them all" and slept dreamlessly. But I knew that I could not leave my child.

His was not a character which could remain innocent for long. He was curious and had grown to like pain, and in his way, could not be turned away from the hard realities of life, or its pleasures. He loved easily, with loyalty. Perhaps you think him cruel, but vampires are not cruel. It is humans who are. A vampire takes only what it needs. A vampire is predictable and does not need cruelty, because it is an animal. It is the living who take pleasure or withhold it, who are playful or hard. What of your nature remains to you, Mini? I find you charming in your innocence and your willingness to mold your needs to those of others. I find you cunning and flexible. These things are naive. In time your nature will begin to suit the creature you are becoming, and then you will bloom, and we will see what you are. Perhaps you will not be able to accept it. Perhaps you will be many creatures. Perhaps you will have many lives.

Perhaps, in the flowering of your body, and in the loss of your youth, you will find old enemies have not forgotten what you were, and wish to harm neither body nor mind, but the flower of your love, and take from you your comfort, which is most precious in the world for us. I speak of another who came from the darkness, and found no contentment in harming my person, at cutting me open, mind and belly. He, who I could in no way placate. My dear, I have deserved my fate many times, and I have lived long enough to meet fate face to face more than once. Did I deserve what has been taken from me? Have I? I do not wonder it much, what is the use of it? But I ask it of the Fates. Is this what is due me? To pay for an old sin with all I had in the world? But what do I know of fairness, who is old and blind, who is tired?

I will tell you about the boy I knew in Etruria, who grew old in his young body, and came for me many evenings, and waited for my weakened child to show himself, so that he could gut my beautiful Escha like a bleeding pig. He was a former steward, a slave. Yes. I laid table for two hundred boys eight hundred years before Herculaneum, among the Etruscans. That boy who killed my child's name was Lecne then. He came to me a silent youth, twenty, tongue cut out, with his young son. I took him in and trained him to work for me well.

I will tell you that I was a mad and thirsting creature then, who did not know his own mind, or understand his wants. They called me "Raske" and I moved as fluid with the heat, a snake of gold and silks and coolness. Raske wanted the young child, I did, for its own, and Lecne would not give him up. He would look at me, in my bed, with his black eyes, hard and fearful. Shall I tell you the full horror of what I did? Of mutilating Lecne further? Of drinking the blood of his child and breaking its body? Of making it like me and destroying it to torture Lecne? Have I not told you that I have done things I must forget? What is this look, compassion? Is it the tone of my voice or that you have had my blood now and are as a slave to my body? Close your eyes. I am no Raske, but I betray nothing in telling you that when they say I am a snake, they are not wrong. You are swayed by my sadness. You are weak.

In fury I shut those many children, a hundred, two hundred boys, in the great hall of our camp, and I burned it down. Mini, I loved their screams. Do you have a horror of me now? I shivered with the pleasure at the odor, the putrid sweetness of burning flesh. I didn't do it to punish Lecne. I was done with him. I did it only because I wanted to do it, and because I was going to the Silva Ciminia, that great and primordial forest, and I wished to salt the very ground behind me, and wash my senses with that roar of screaming at the lick of flames, and I lay in the long grass while that tall fire lit the sky, in a way that electric lights light it now, and held my Ariel, who loved me for my cruelty and made my head dizzy with his miasma in that bloody atmosphere. I wanted to take the evening like a body and lick it of its blood, so good was it to me, washed clean of the milieu of the living, a creature of pleasured flesh and ancient violence. This is the memory that came to me in Herculaneum, when the city burned two days, and I lay without comfort, full with the odor of burning flesh, and staring into another time, in fear and madness at my condition, at what I had forgotten that I had done.

And in Etruria, came Lecne to where I lay, with his stumbling, and paled from how I had stabbed him and drunk of him of the morning, with my own sword, which in my ecstasy I did not sense him. He put it in my neck from behind, thrusting it upward and out from between my gasping lips. Lecne, of dark eyes and no tongue, drank the blood which flowed in its rivulets from my lips, as I lay in his arms, stunned into weakness and unable to feel my limbs. Lecne was always a man of self-interest, which had attracted me to his body, and he knew himself dying, and took from me what he wanted. He said, "Sweet dying," in my head, the first of his voice I knew, spat a bolus of my blood away, and left me to bleed to death.

But see here, we do not bleed to death who are ancient. We do not perish from a single blow of the blade. We languish by the waters of the earth, and drink of her air, and grow translucent like a moth fallen, but we do not die. And Ariel, who lay in the dirt like a shadow while Lecne availed himself of my body, watching from his cat eyes, took me from that place and into beloved Silva Ciminia, with its great trees. And Ariel kept me there awhile, like a second body of his own, until I woke again. But when I woke, Mini, I was Leechtin, who had many names before Raske, but is not Raske, because Raske is as I was as living, torn by desire and a sense of right, and Leechtin is not living or envious of living flesh. 

And Leechtin wept for what he had done, and called himself "Faya", and heard others call him "Stranger", and begged Ariel not to cleave to him as Death loves those who deal it. But Ariel has remained, and loved my child, my Escha, for his fear of death. And Ariel was there the evening Lecne took my child, ten years past now, and lay in my bed in rapture of this blow to me, and is here still, close. He does not torment me. He is death and has been near me always, and near you, all of you who run with my blood. Lecne is satisfied that he has destroyed my spirit, and taken away my ability to live, because he knows that he cannot easily kill me, but that perhaps I will do it on my own now, if I am without comforts. I am much without, yes. I have been cut so deeply that I fear I will never recover. I am disconnected from myself, floating in my body and missing my beautiful boy, who knew my mind and spirit, and whispered love, which I have so needed, selfish as I am. It is because of me that he suffered always, and because of me that he is dead. 

He weakened himself by refusing the blood for many years, which he learned to do from me, and when Lecne came for him, he was too weak to stand up against the blade, and I held him many hours, begging our mother, Moera, the goddess of time, not to take him, not to take him. And you, all of you, his children, took him from me, convinced me to give him up, and let him die. Raske would kill you all for it. Raske would tempt you into his bed with stories of old things and push his fingers into your eyes and make you blind like his child was, and love your screaming, and break your arms of you as if they were dry wood for fire, and push his hands into your quivering belly, and scoop you of your young, pink flesh. I would do this to all of you and throw you away as if you were straw figures for sacrifice to the old gods I have known. I would have my teeth in you, and rip skin from muscle while you live. And Raske would lie in wait for that doctor who protested love of its child, and drown him in cold water the way he threatened repeatedly to do to its child who was so afraid of drowning. And that child among you, who stabbed Escha so many times for his blood, there is planned special torture. But I am Leechtin.

Hear me? It is Leechtin who mourns, who aches for love, and a touch, and offers his blood to a young vampire so that it might live, and walk with him of the evening by the water, and comfort him with its pleasant, foolish voice. It is Leechtin who bleeds tears of grief, and stutters "help" and searches for his child when he wakes from dreams, and begs those spirits of his wife and son to return Escha, return him to his body, which I have kept for him if he would only come back from heaven. I know that my lover cannot stand it when I say their names, but if there is heaven, please, they must help me. They must help me. I am without help. Even as I fled Alexandria and washed my anguish in the waters of the blue Danube, I knew that I would return to Escha, who had won me, and that without him I could not live.

Do we know why these things happen to us? We do not. This child had become part of my body, and I journeyed back to him in Alexandria, him quieted by the comfort of time and its healing, and took him from the place where he had thrashed and screamed for some months. North. I took him across the water, and went into the Silva Ciminia, which by then was a much changed place from when it had been the border of Etruria, and the uneasy comfort of Imperial Rome. It was a hacked apart wilderness, bleeding itself constantly for its children, and I went there because the forest is as my spirit. It is still there, much diminished, as is the Hercynian of Germania, which would hold me in later years. In the Silva Ciminia, I cared for my blinded, mad Escha, and bled him when he moaned of fever, and listened to him when he spoke madness to me, holding onto my face with his beautiful hands. Sweet, beautiful child, so pale, so blond, his eyes white and blighted.

I would sit by him, his body resting in the water of a moonlit pool, and stroke his hair, and whisper that he was Escha, and not to forget, and that he was much loved by a creature desperate not to forget his own kind and quiet self. And gradually, over time, he came back to himself, and said, "Take me to that glorious city, of which I have heard much. I want to taste the heart's blood of the Empire, and kiss the throats of its youth, its young men, who will beg for me," and I took him to Rome.

It was still Escha then, not your master. He was still my child, though he was much changed.