off the pillows and coming towards me. "Let's go out. Let's find Bianca, and dress her up as a man for a while. Bring your finest. She needs to be freed of those rooms for a spell."
"Sir, this may come as a rude shock to you, but Bianca, like many women, already has that habit. In the guise of a boy, she slips out all the time to make the rounds of the city."
"Yes, but not in our company," he said. "We shall show her the worst places!" He made a dramatic comical face. "Come on."
I was excited.
As soon as we told the little plan to her, she was excited too.
We came bursting in with an armful of fine clothes, and she immediately slipped away with us to get dressed.
"What have you brought me? Oh, I'm to be Amadeo tonight, splendid," she said. She shut the doors on her company, who as usual carried on without her, several men singing around the Virginal and others arguing heatedly over their dice.
She stripped off her clothes and stepped out of them, naked as Venus from the sea. We both dressed her in blue leggings and tunic and doublet. I pulled her belt tight, and Marius caught her hair up in a soft velvet hat.
"You're the prettiest boy in the Veneto," he said stepping back. "Something tells me I'll have to protect you with our life."
"Are you really going to take me to the worst haunts? I want to see dangerous places!" She threw up her arms. "Give me my stiletto. You don't expect me to go unarmed."
"I have all the proper weapons for you," Marius said. He had brought a sword with a beautiful diamond-studded diagonal belt which he clasped at her hip. "Try to draw this. It's no dancing rapier. It's a war sword. Come on."
She took the handle with both hands and brought it forth in a wide sure sweep. "I wish I had an enemy," she cried out, "who was ready to die."
I looked at Marius. He looked at me. No, she couldn't be one of us.
"That would be too selfish," he whispered in my ear.
I couldn't help but wonder, if I had not been dying after my fight with the Englishman, if the sweating sickness had not taken me over, would he have ever made me a vampire?
The three of us hurried down the stone steps to the quay. There was our canopied gondola waiting. Marius gave the address.
"Are you sure you want to go there, Master?" asked the gondolier, shocked because he knew the district where the worst of the foreign seamen congregated and drank and fought.
"Most sure of it," he said.
As we moved off in the black waters, I put my arm around tender Bianca. Leaning back on the cushions, I felt invulnerable, immortal, certain that nothing would ever defeat me or Marius, and in our care Bianca would always be safe.
How very wrong I was.
Nine months perhaps we had together after our trip to Kiev. Nine or maybe ten, I cannot mark the climax by any exterior event. Let me say only, before I proceed to bloody disaster, that Bianca was always with us in those last months. When we were not spying upon the carousers, we were in our house, where Marius painted her portraits, devising her as this or that goddess, as the Biblical Judith with the head of the Florentine for her Holofernes, or as the Virgin Mary staring rapt at a tiny Christ child, as perfectly rendered by Marius as any image he ever made.
Those pictures-perhaps some of them endure to this very day.
One night, when all slept except for the three of us, Bianca, about to give up on a couch as Marius painted, sighed and said, "I like your company too much. I don't ever want to go home."
Would that she had loved us less. Would that she had not been there on the fatal evening in 1499, just before the turn of the century, when the High Renaissance was in its glory, ever to be celebrated by artists and historians, would that she had been safe when our world went up in flames.
Chapter 14
14
IF YOU'VE READ The Vampire Lestat you know what happened, for I showed it all to Lestat in visions two hundred years ago. Lestat set down in writing the images I made known to him, the pain I shared with him. And though I now propose to relive these horrors, to flesh out the