“ ‘It’s a woman,’ he replied, ‘and she is ancient, as old as the Mother was, and she has no desire to rule, only to keep the root safe and to live as a witness to time, in a place apart from the world and its worries. With that kind of age comes a peace from the blood. She no longer needs to drink it.’

“ ‘When will that peace come for me?’ I asked.

“He laughed softly, gently. ‘Not for thousands of years,’ he said. ‘Though with the blood I gave you, you can go many nights with just the Little Drink or even nothing. You’ll suffer but you won’t become weak unto dying. That’s the trick, remember. Don’t become so weak that you can’t hunt. That you must never do. Promise me.’

“ ‘It matters to you what happens to me?’

“ ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be with you here if it didn’t. I gave you my blood, did I not?’ He laughed but it was kindly. ‘You don’t know what a gift it was, my blood. I’ve lived for so long. In the parlance of our kind, I’m a Child of the Millennia, and my blood is considered too strong for the young and unwise, but I hold you to be wise and so I gave it. Live up to it.’

“ ‘What do you expect of me now? I know that I’m to kill those who are evil and no others, yes, and the Little Drink must be done with stealth and grace, but what else do you expect?’

“ ‘Nothing, really,’ he said. ‘You go where you wish to go and do what you wish to do. What will sustain you, how you will live, these are things you must figure out for yourself.’

“ ‘How did you do it?’ I asked.

“ ‘Oh, you ask me to go back so many years,’ he said. ‘My Master and my Maker were one, a great writer of the Greek tragedy just before and during the time of Aeschylus. He had been something of a roamer before he set to work in Athens writing for the theater, and he had traveled into India, where he bought me from a man I scarcely remember who kept me for his bed, and had educated me for his library, and who sold me for a dear price to the Athenian who brought me home to Athens to copy for him and be his bed slave. I loved it. The world of the stage delighted me. We worked hard on the scenery, the training of the chorus and of the solitary actor whom Thespis had introduced into the mix of the early theater as it was then.