Chapter Four #9
“Teach you? I can, yes. Only if you teach me Bulgarian in exchange. I see the way you flinch every time I speak Russian. Is my pronunciation so awful?”
“I wouldn’t say awful…” Mihaela muttered under her breath, tapping a finger against the tip of her nose. “I just don’t like the sound of it.”
“Ah, we shan’t have that!” The Comte exclaimed as they crossed the ground floor.
For Mihaela, learning Latin would help as she searched through archives.
It would be a boon, a necessity for the scholar she hoped to become one day.
But teaching Emerick Bulgarian? He already knew Russian; the Cyrillic would not prove an obstacle.
He spoke French, and most likely German, and their fluency would serve him well in navigating some of the Bulgarian vocabulary.
Despite being a Slavic language, it had borrowed many of its technical and cultural terminology from Western Europe.
There had to be a reason for it. Astra had taught her that knowledge rarely came without a price, it was never freely offered or given.
Emerick did not strike Mihaela as someone who liked owing favours.
He was quick to make matters transactional.
There is no harm in teaching, she chewed on the inside of her cheek, scolding herself, but what does he stand to gain from this?
Together they spent the following nights and weeks in the library, throwing the whole room into disarray.
Dictionaries and books were placed haphazardly over armchairs and tables.
Whatever system or catalogue previously kept the room in order, it was now ignored and disrupted for the sake of their convenience.
A volume of poetry in Latin kept finding its way by the window frame as Emerick left it there in the midst of explaining a stanza.
He got easily swept in, overcome with passion and eagerness to explain, to say more, to give her examples.
Sometimes his Latin became so archaic that he could not trace the reason behind it in a grammar book.
He flitted back and forth, gesticulating, flung his arms up and down, and even swayed his whole body as if the words moved him.
There was a lively spark in his eyes, his whole face and body were animated, and his voice grew louder from excitement.
Mihaela had trouble concentrating. It mesmerised her to watch him, he was captivating.
Her previous worries had evaporated at the sight of him.
When the poetry or diaries proved useless, he pulled out a collection of charts and maps.
He showed her how the names of cities, rivers and countries had changed over time.
Emerick unfolded a map—he called it a mappa mundi, sneering—and unfurled another piece of parchment over it.
The chart looked familiar, like an inverted tower of Babylon.
Instead of rising towards the Heavens, it was as if all of creation was collapsing, crashing into the earth.
Her eyes caught the word inferno at the bottom of the chart and she frowned.
“Would you prefer the chart for paradiso?” Emerick grinned and pried a big leather-bound tome from the bottom of the shelf.
He flipped through the pages and stopped at a beautiful illustration of the world, split in two, a circular bird’s eye view of the virtues across continents. Baby-faced angels with multiple wings struggled to fit in the margins of the map, some of them threatened to fall out of the gilded foliage.
“The Divine Comedy is a bit advanced for me,” Mihaela confessed and turned to the next page, the fine type and the craftsmanship of the tome left her in awe.
“Now—but in time you can embark on a pilgrimage with the Poet himself.” Emerick tapped his finger at the bottom of Hell and moved it further up the map until he stopped at Paradise. “Why don’t we start you off with the Aeneid?”
“Isn’t it too obscure?”
“That you will have to find out for yourself. And until you finish it…” he began rolling up the maps and putting back the books on the shelves. The only thing he left her was a yellowed dictionary and an intimidating booklet bound in red leather. “Until then, you will teach me your language.”
Between reading Virgil in Latin and doing a poor job at teaching a vampire how to combine and pronounce consonants—the ts sound being possible only due to Emerick’s extended knowledge of German—Mihaela was enjoying her time in Béziers.
She kicked back her slippers and rested her feet on an ottoman; her upper body disappeared in the pillows of the armchair.
Someone had draped back the curtains, and she could see the full magnificence of the stained-glass windows.
The panel nearest her depicted a man falling under the weight of a sword.
The hilt of the weapon was rendered into dozens of tiny shards, raining down as sun rays from the other window.
Everywhere she looked, she found either morphed mythical creatures or warriors caught in the instant of death’s mercy.
She tilted her head back and looked up, squinting so as not to be overwhelmed by the vastness of the painted ceiling.
An angel perched above her, its torso hidden in clouds and feathers; its androgynous face bore features that seemed oddly familiar.
A devil with a crown of smoke clawed through the angel’s wings, trying to seize it.
The devil’s features were also familiar, especially the way its black mouth curled in a smile, a long tongue peeking between sharp teeth.
She blinked and the devil’s head twitched in her direction. Its eyes bore into her.
“Ask your questions.”
The voice broke through her drowse, and Mihaela nearly dropped her book. When she looked up both the devil and the angel were oblivious of her, busy chasing each other.
“I didn’t say anything.” Mihaela propped herself up on her elbows and glanced over at Emerick who was fiddling with something on the work table.
When he remained silent she huffed and sat up straight.
“You are always in my head, reading my thoughts, rummaging. I don’t know how Silvio stands it.”
The words caused Emerick’s face to twitch, right around the eyes, too fast for a mortal to catch it, but Mihaela did. His smile felt forced, as if he was fighting the urge to laugh—at her.
“It is second nature for our kind, mind reading,” he said nonchalantly.
“What does it feel like for you—hearing thoughts?” Mihaela blurted before she could stop herself.
She had always been curious how it felt for others.
She could not ask a mortal. And Astra’s mind I could never read.
Despite being annoyed at his constant intrusiveness, Emerick was the only one around to ask.
“Thoughts—anyone’s thoughts—are an overwhelming drone, a buzzing.
As time goes on you will become used to it and, hopefully, be able to tune it out.
If not entirely stop it. If I were to explain it to a human I would compare it to the humming of electronics—a refrigerator or a fan.
A sound that is always there, at the back of your mind but one which you have grown accustomed to.
You’ve taught yourself how to ignore it, but if you were to deliberately concentrate on it, you will not be able to unhear it.
” He paused to flip over an hourglass he had been toying with.
The sound of the sand whispering through the glass neck was deafening in the silence.
That sand again, Michaela thought. And again, Emerick… Why is he making me think of sand?
Every time something stirred in her mind while Emerick was nearby, she found herself picturing sand.
Not the sandy beaches by the sea, during the long summers of her childhood.
But sand seeping down and coating her, dulling her senses, making her susceptible to…
To what? She felt like a child searching for her lost toy in a bottomless sandpit.
“There are surface thoughts, things that you can catch and pull from the air,” Emerick went on.
“And there are thoughts you have to dig up and find, and coax out. Ordering someone through the mind-gift is not as easy as it sounds. It takes time and practice, and if you are not careful you can inflict irreversible damage to the mortal.”
Mihaela flinched at the recollection of Emerick doing the very same thing to her years ago.
He had wanted her to twist and alter the perspective of one of her memories—the memory of how she was made—to look at her maker and let Emerick see him.
And Mihaela had refused. Rather than obey she had tried to gouge her eye out so that she would never have to see the man, the thing. Ingenuar. The All Father. My father.
“Once you master this gift and tone out every thought and craving around you, the silence can be deafening—merciless. It is at once freeing and maddening.”
“Do you have star charts from the East?” she asked, eager to change the topic. “Anything from the East, really. I think I got sidetracked with all the poetry, but it set me thinking.”
The library housed its own collection of land maps, nautical charts and celestial atlases.
Some of them, she was sure, were made by Emerick—started and left unfinished, or altered to how he perceived the world.
Mihaela had seen him take a small, intricate telescope out in the garden at night, but she never had the courage to join him.
He was always alone, and would answer to no one.
“I want to make my own chart with the connections between different religions and deities. I want to do a comparative study. The skies… the stars are the earliest form of divinity. Of worship,” said Mihaela.
“You are in the wrong place if you are looking for answers on religion.”
“Why?” Mihaela asked with genuine confusion. “I figured you and Silvio would know, considering…” She made a sweeping gesture encompassing the room—the whole tower even.