A Matter of Taste

Chapter 19

Feeling doubly repulsed by the behavior of Duke Cesare and the blackened and hideous spectacle of his father's body, I hastened to distance myself from the Vatican through which, for some eleven years, they had sought to dominate the world. Rome in general agreed with me in being ready to see the last of the Borgias; Alexander's death was celebrated in a general wave of rejoicing. At the same time, out in the farms and villages of the Romagna, many mourned the impending fall from power of his son, the young man who had given their towns the best government they could remember.

As for myself, I rejoiced in my new freedom. Indeed it was freedom in a degree that I had never yet experienced; that night marked the first time since the beginning of my life as a vampire that I felt myself under no obligation, either to the Borgias or to that even grimmer master called Revenge.

Of course my liberty was not perfect; I suppose that in this world no one's ever is. In my case the sharpest boundary was drawn by the beautiful Lucrezia, for whom my love was undiminished. She had not accepted my explanation as to why I had severed relations with her brother in his hour of great need; but I convinced myself that if I were to go about the matter properly, she could eventually be made to understand. Though devoted to Cesare, she understood as clearly as anyone that he really was a treacherous scoundrel.

Before leaving Rome I had one more opportunity to speak to Madonna in the underground complex where we had met on my most recent return to Rome. The murdered bear was gone now, but ropes and chains still hung from the ceiling, as if in readiness for some other creature to take its place.

At the time of our final meeting in that chamber, days had passed since Alexander's death, but Lucrezia was reluctant to start back for Ferrara as long as her beloved brother's life, health, and fortune still hung so perilously in the balance.

I presented myself before her, and we began a conversation that quickly turned into an argument. Madonna Lucrezia declared, with great spirit and passion, that dear Cesare at this moment needed all the help that everyone could give him, and I was a scoundrel for choosing this time to leave his service. I in turn described the way in which her brother had mortally insulted me, and assured the lady that if he were not her brother, he would even now be sharing in the funeral rites, such as they were, of Alexander.

To vindicate myself in Lucrezia's eyes, I justified, in legalistic detail, my reasoned refusal to take part in the ordered cleaning-out of her father's treasury, the thievery of money that, as everyone admitted, belonged to the Church. As far as I was concerned, their father might have stolen freely from the Church he was sworn to protect, and Cesare might continue to do so, if he considered such actions compatible with the Borgia honor—but theft of any kind has always been utterly repugnant to the honor ofDrakulya, and that the contemplated thievery was sacrilegious only made the matter considerably worse.

I asked Lucrezia whether she had never heard of my reputation as a ruler, of the thousands—the numbers grew with the stories, from year to year—of impaled bodies of bandits that lined my highways? Her reply—something to the effect that if I could impale all those people, why should I draw back at a little pilfering in a good cause?—showed her failure to grasp the true moral principles involved.

It argues much for the closeness of our relationship that, after we had such a discussion, we were still on speaking terms. I of course volunteered to escort Lucrezia safely home to Ferrara, Word had reached her in Rome that her husband had come home from one of his artillery outings rather sooner than expected, and was complaining of her absence. Or if she preferred, I was available to carry a message there for her.

But haughtily she said: "If you will not help me to save my brother, then I will accept no other gifts or favors from you." And as we parted matters between us were left in that unsatisfactory state.

I felt the need of rest, but at the same time I was troubled by a vague uneasiness—from my early youth (as I have explained elsewhere) I have been immune to fear, but no sane person made an enemy of Cesare without feeling some unease about it. Therefore I chose for my place of retirement the newest of my several Roman earths, one I felt confident the Borgias did not know about.

The location I had chosen for this facility was not far from dear Lucrezia's poison laboratory. Intrigued by the riches of ruins underground, I had spent some of my spare time in reconnoitering the vicinity and had in the process located another buried chamber that was eminently suited to my special needs.

The chamber in which I now established my new earth was another remnant of imperial Rome. Once it too must have been located on the surface of the ground. But now it formed a subterranean hideout, cut off virtually completely from the surface as far as access by breathers was concerned.

To this remote cavern I had managed to convey most of the Transylvanian soil from one of the caches that I now considered only doubtfully secure. Naturally I did this work at night, when the smallest crevice served as well as an open door to let me through. And in my new earth I was able to rest securely through the following day.

When night dawned again, I awoke feeling utterly tired of Rome, of Italy, of the entire situation in which I found myself. I felt convinced that the best thing to do was to put as much distance as I could between myself and the affairs of the Borgias as soon as possible. There was really nothing to hold me in the city any longer, nothing to keep me in Italy but my wavering affair with Lucrezia, and I foresaw no very smooth course for that in the immediate future. And there would of course be danger, subtle and miasmic, without any real prospect of anything in compensation. Borgia at the moment was too intensely concerned with his own survival to spend much time scheming for revenge, but with him one could never be too careful. I had no inclination to break my vow to Lucrezia with respect to her brother's safety, and certainly no positive wish to die.

(Here there follows a period of silence on the tape, broken occasionally by sighs and mutterings too faint for intelligibility.)

* * *

There is a small narrative problem here, but I shall handle it this way: The following three or four years of my life, until approximately the end of 1506, constitute an interlude having little or nothing to do with the Borgias, belonging rather with a series of unrelated events that I may decide to chronicle at some time in the future. Therefore I shall now pass over this interlude in silence. Suffice it to say that I spent the bulk of those three or four years out of Italy, and most of the time away from my homeland also. Thus a considerable period elapsed in which I saw neither Lucrezia nor Cesare, though news of Duke Valentino did reach me on rare occasions.

It was in late 1506 that I began to interest myself closely in Borgia affairs once again. The proximate cause of this renewed concern was a message from Lucrezia brought to me, in a far land, by Constantia, who had committed it to memory, word for word. This was the first time in several years that I had seen my little gypsy friend, and her visit, apart from any news she brought, gladdened my heart.

In the interval since our last meeting, of course, the world had changed, though as so often happens the greatest changes were not immediately perceptible. Tomas de Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor, had died in 1498, and Columbus in 1506. The newest Pope, Julius II, was directing his considerable fierce energies to the task of creating St. Peter's as we know it today, and to this end he had summoned to Rome a horde of artists and craftsmen, Michelangelo among them.

Lucrezia, at the time I received her urgent message, had already begun to be intensely on my mind. Ferrara would have been the natural place for me to seek her, and indeed I was considering such a pilgrimage when her communication arrived. Her situation in Ferrara had not changed drastically, except that her husband's father had died in the interval, and she was now the Duchess.

Her message began appealingly, telling me that I was the only one she considered strong and trustworthy enough to save her brother now, from whatever immediate danger was posed by his swarm of enemies and his own nature. She was not specific about the danger. None of this surprised me particularly; what did somewhat surprise me was that I was not urged to go immediately to Navarre, where Cesare was now, but summoned to Ferrara first.

I have said that it was not at all unexpected to hear that her brother was in trouble. I already knew that once the prop of his father's powerful support had been knocked from under him, his own career had gone downhill rapidly. He had careened briefly around Italy, surviving episodes of imprisonment, escape, and exile. He had confounded his enemies by recovering from his near-fatal illness of 1503, and then rebounding from one fresh political and personal setback after another, but in three years the total sum of his bad fortune had proved too much for him. As it would have done, I suppose, for any man.

Among his legion of enemies it was certainly necessary to number the new Pope, Julius II, a harsh autocrat who had long been a Borgia rival and was certainly no friend to Valentino now.

I found Madonna Lucrezia predictably in Ferrara, to all appearances happily and comfortably settled in there with her third husband, the fortunate Duke, and their several bambini. It was apparent to me at once that she had no wish ever again to play a role upon the world's stage, that great arena in which the power-hungry, vengeful, and materially ambitious act out their lives.

Meanwhile, Lucrezia herself, in opting to remain in Ferrara, enjoying the consolations of religion, and sharing the life of the breathing man who had given her a decent life along with their children, had with clear eyes given up all thought of vampirism—for herself. She was not even tempted, finding the idea increasingly repulsive despite its promise of certain enhanced powers and a much extended life.

She was, however, even more concerned about her brother than her message had indicated. And she knew that her brother would never rest, in this world, until he could get back upon that stage himself.

Adding to Lucrezia's burden, so she informed me, was her increasing concern lest Cesare become a vampire, whether fully intending to do so or not; and she persisted in viewing this outcome as somehow bad for his soul. Madonna had some difficulty in expressing this latter objection in plain terms, at least to me, but eventually I managed to grasp her meaning.

"But that is not his main problem at the moment, dearest Vlad. He now serves King Jean of Navarre. At that court intrigue is rife." She nodded solemnly.

"Indeed?" And at what court, I wondered silently, was it not?

"Oh, you are right, perfectly right, to look at me with such cynicism. But my brother has repented his shameful treatment of you. The more he has seen of adversity, the more he has come to respect a man of honor like yourself. If you were only there to counsel him! I will be very grateful indeed—words alone will certainly not be able to express my gratitude—if you will help him now."

How could I refuse?

As I was on the point of leaving, Madonna Lucrezia provided me with several small glass jars, cryptically labeled, each containing a different potion. Cesare would have need of these, she said, among such dangerous surroundings as the royal court of Navarre—as a matter of self-protection, of course. And as I wasmaking the trip so speedily, I could bring them to him.

Before I left Lucrezia in Ferrara, I renewed in the most solemn terms my vow to her that, no matter what new disagreements might arise between us, I would never kill Cesare; nor would I ever do him any harm except when absolutely necessary to preserve my own honor or my life. She would have liked to extract an even stronger pledge, but beyond what I had already given I would not go.

And that, dear reader, was the last I ever saw of Lucrezia Borgia. It was at about this time, I believe, that she began her affair with a certain breathing poet, Pietro Bembo. Fortunately for Bembo, I was not in those days—in the case of Lucrezia, at least—a particularly jealous man.

Inhabitants of the late twentieth century know the district of Navarre, if they are aware of it at all, as one of the northern provinces of Spain. But at the time of which I write, it persisted as a rather more than semi-independent kingdom. The land was, and is, beautiful in its own way, delighting the traveler who is susceptible to such things with a great variety of scenery. As I made my way in that direction, as always keeping my eyes and ears open in inns, taverns, and along the roads, particularly as I approached my goal, I had little difficulty in gathering bits of information from which to piece together the latest adventures of Cesare.

***

Viana, the town near which I was advised to look for Cesare, lay near the frontier between Navarre and Castile. A few months past, Borgia had taken service under Jean d'Albret, King of Navarre, who happened to be the brother of Cesare's long-suffering and almost forgotten wife. I have had no reason to mention the name of that unfortunate woman in these pages previously, and I see no reason to introduce it now.

The King of Navarre's chief problem was not very unusual. Don Juan, rebellious Count of Beaumont, held a nearby castle in defiance of his monarch, and Cesare Borgia, who had once threatened to make himself King of Italy, had been given the task of putting down this minor-league rebellion against his brother-in-law. It was almost as if the Pope himself, demoted to the office of priest in some obscure parish, were sent to a remote village to hear a few confessions and teach a class in catechism.

It caused me no surprise, on reaching the vicinity of Viana, to find that my old friend Constantia was there, keeping attendance on the man she loved. I talked with her briefly on the evening of my arrival, before I presented myself to Cesare, and expressed to her my doubts as to whether Lucrezia might have been over-optimistic about her brother's desire for a reconciliation with me.

My little gypsy vampire nervously twisted a strand of her long hair. "No—no, he wants you as his friend. I am sure of that."

I was surprised to hear her say that. Constantia's attitude toward me during this meeting was somewhat awkward and strained. But when I pressed her to tell me what was wrong, she assured me there was nothing. At one point I considered showing her the poison jars that had been entrusted to me by Lucrezia, but in the end I decided not to do so.

In the course of this encounter Constantia told me wistfully of her hope—it was scarcely any longer a plan—that she could someday convert Borgia to a vampire, perhaps even without his specific approval. Though this would necessarily mean the end of their passionate love, yet she thought it would save his life.

She had evolved a scheme, she told me, in which Cesare's death in a skirmish would be faked. He would then disappear and take up a new nosferatu life. All his breathing enemies would be convinced that he was indeed dead.

"But your lover, I suppose, will have none of this."

"No, he will not," Constantia admitted softly. Then she burst out: "Vlad, Vlad, will you help him?"

I thought. "I make no promises," I said at last. "At least I must speak to the man himself again before I can promise anything."

Half an hour later, arriving officially at Cesare's camp in the guise of a breathing messenger from his sister in Ferrara, I found him living in a military tent again. It was a scene somewhat reminiscent of our first meeting.

Michelotto, who had been with us then, was present once more, to improve the similarity. Corella from his first sight of me watched me warily, as I had known he must if ever we met again. But still he greeted me cordially enough and seemed ready to let bygones be bygones, to accept me once more as his comrade in arms if fate should so decree.

And Cesare himself was—penitent. There was really no other word. I was reminded of the repentant Bogdan.

As I entered the tent Duke Valentino rose from his folding camp chair, his dark eyes lighting up with joy at the sight of my face. "Drakulya! It has been many years—far too long a time! Not that I blame you—you have had good cause to turn away from me. But a man of your generous soul cannot forever hold against me what I said in fever, on the day of my father's death."

I grasped the hand that Borgia extended toward me. "My lord is gracious," I said, "to give me credit for a generous soul."

"But nonsense! Of course you have. Here, sit down. Michelotto, have them bring wine—but how foolish of me, I had forgotten."

"Drink your wine by all means, Captain General," I said. "If you are moved to celebration."

"I am moved to rejoicing that you have come—but tell me, what news of Lucrezia? You bring me a message from her?"

I handed over the sealed paper that I had brought, and sat silently watching Cesare as he broke the seal and perused the contents. I could well imagine that this man might have brooded long and darkly on what he perceived as my betrayal at a crucial moment. It was quite true that with a faithful vampire at his side, he might never have been brought to his present comparatively low condition. At the very least, he could have avoided his several bouts of imprisonment, or at least could have escaped from a certain castle without being forced to drop from a too-short rope, breaking several bones.

During my visit with his sister I had taken great pains to make it plain to her that, beyond the immediate aid that I would give for her sake, I had no intention of ever going back to work for Cesare. Nor did his warm welcome in Navarre change my mind. When he made the effort, he could be charm personified. Otherwise he was—to understate the case—a very difficult man to deal with, and sooner or later we would be bound to have another falling out.

***

Before we parted, on that first evening in Navarre, I handed over to him also the jars of drugs with which Lucrezia had entrusted me.

A moment later I wondered aloud whether one of the vessels contained the sweet-tasting drug so specific against vampires.

He shook his head lightly; the question seemed to have no impact on him. "No. Alas, if only I could get along with my fellow breathers as well as I do with the nosferatu."

Dawn was not far off by that time. I was tired from my long journey, and it was time for me to seek my rest. I had had to carry my own earth with me on the trip, of course.

Constantia spoke with me again briefly before I retired. She was anxious to discover how my encounter with Cesare had gone.

"It went well enough," I told her. "He seems, as you say, quite willing to let bygones be bygones."

"And you, Vlad?" she burst out, obviously in the grip of some emotion she could no longer repress. "Are you not willing to do the same?"

"I have taken my solemn oath to Madonna Lucrezia," I assured her, "that I will not harm this man, unless under the most dire necessity of self-defense. I take the same oath now, again, to you."

"Vlad, if I could only believe you!"

I looked at her steadily for some moments. Then I said: "He has arranged with you to kill me, has he not? He has convinced you that I am planning to kill him?"

She could not utter a word, but the stricken look in her dark gypsy eyes was all the answer that I needed.

I gripped her hands, and was reminded of that first meeting, decades earlier, the young would-be witch and the apprentice vampire. I saw in Constantia's eyes that the same memory had come back to her.

"Go now," I said "Tell him you have slain me, if you like. Tell him anything you choose. I am going to rest for the day, or through two days perhaps. After that I shall depart, and if the matter is left up to me, I shall never lay eyes again on Duke Valentino in this world. The oath that I have taken still binds me."

"Vlad!" And she kissed my hands before she hurried away.

"Guard yourself." I called after her, softly. I was sure that she heard me, but she did not turn.

It was on the evening of the next day, in March in the year of Our Lord 1507, when Cesare Borgia, alone in his field tent, opened one of the small sealed jars that I had carried to him from Ferrara on the instructions of his beloved sister. He followed his sister's instructions, these printed in tiny coded symbols on the label, as he measured a small amount of the jar's contents into a cup of wine that stood on his small folding table. He put the jar, and the spoon he had used as a measure, carefully away, well out of sight. Then he blew out his light, as a signal to his troops that he did not wish to be disturbed, except for some grave emergency.

Around him the encampment of his modest army—no more than a couple of thousand men—was quiet.

Presently, Constantia, unseen and unheard by any of those other men, came to him, moving wraithlike through the tiny opening at the closed flap of his tent. In solid woman-form again, she cast aside her clothing and joined Cesare in his narrow military bed.

He had been lying very still, but he was not asleep.

"Tell me" were his first whispered words. "What of Drakulya?"

Constantia began weeping softly. "He is dead," she said.

"Staked properly through the heart, with wood? By your own hand?"

"Yes."

"You actually saw his body disappear?"

"Yes." She was weeping more hopelessly than ever now. "Yes, I have seen him disappear."

"My dearest love! I knew that I could count on you!" Cesare sat bolt upright in the narrow bed and reached for the cup of wine that until now had sat untasted on the nearby table. In a moment he had drained it to the dregs. Throwing the cup aside, he seized the woman who lay with him.

Borgia in his triumphant lust then knew her carnally, in the way of breathing man with breathing woman. Constantia wept on—for a little while—and yielded herself in silence to her deceived lover.

Presently, as he had on so many other nights, he pulled her mouth against his body, offering her his blood in return for further ecstasy. And then, drunken as he was with wine and Borgia drugs and revengeful triumph over a hated enemy, feeling invincibly secure in his good fortune, he tempted fate. Taking my little gypsy's unresisting hand, he used one of her own sharp nails to open the skin upon her breast. Then as a breather he enjoyed the final ecstasy, that of drinking vampire blood.

A little after that, as debauchees, like other folk, are wont to do, Cesare Borgia fell asleep.

And then, in the small hours of the morning, the gods of war threw dice and rolled a chance that altered all our lives. What actually occurred was some puny blunder of patrols in darkness, not a real attack on the camp—the rebellious Count Beaumont had neither the men or the nerve for any undertaking so bold as that. But the effect was disproportionate.

Roused before dawn while still under the influence of the drug, given confused misinformation by some frightened sentries, Cesare behaved quite uncharacteristically. He mounted quickly and went charging out recklessly toward the reported enemy position, accompanied only by a terrified squire. All who saw him said later that Valentino acted in a bellicose, drunken fashion, all but losing control of his horse, superb horseman that he had always been.

When he came upon a small squad of the enemy, he rode alone, rampaging in berserk fashion, right in among them—and was brutally butchered for his pains.

When this happened Michelotto was still back in camp, not dreaming that his master was reacting to a minor crisis in such a mad, seemingly suicidal way.

It was midmorning before Borgia's friends and attendants could locate the place where he had fallen and gather him up. And by that time Cesare's butchered body had long since ceased to breathe.

It was midafternoon of the same day before a haggard, grief-stricken Michelotto entered, alone, a certain crumbling mausoleum in a long-disused cemetery on the far side of Viana. He was carrying a carpenter's maul, and a long, thick, keenly sharpened wooden stake. Grunting, he dragged the heavy lid off the coffin on the right-hand side and stared down with hatred at the woman's form, young and attractive in appearance, that lay so peacefully within.

Corella raised his stake—and in an instant was seized from behind, turned around, and thrown staggering across the little room. I had been waiting in ambush beside Constantia's still form, expecting that sometime during the daylight hours a would-be assassin would appear.

"Drakulya!"

"As you see—but I was expecting that your master would come to perform this task himself."

Michelotto's features worked. "My master is dead."

For once the man had surprised me. I knew that Cesare had gone to answer some military alarm during the hours of darkness, for he had not been in his tent when I found Constantia there before dawn, heavily drugged and almost totally unconscious. Under my ministrations she had regained her senses long enough to whisper, as I was conveying her safely to her earth, a few details of what had happened to her in Borgia's bed.

Now she slept on, unwaking and undead, in a slumber that for all I knew might endure for years. And Michelotto, a wooden stake securely through his own heart, was soon laid to rest on the floor of the mausoleum near her feet.

By the time I was able to rejoin the innocent breathing citizens who were mourning Borgia's fall, and had laid my hands on his fresh corpse, the time was after noon. At the first touch of his cooling, stiffening flesh, I could sense that Borgia had been changed. His last drunken session with the drugged Constantia had been too much for him. Until I learned of his death I had been in a quandary as to what to do next, having taken an oath not to kill this man; and now my position was complicated further.

For the time being, it was easy enough simply to let the breathing people of Navarre, soldiers, servants, and loyal citizens under good King Jean, bury the King's brother-in-law. Among a modest host of mourners I followed to his grave my quondam friend and former employer, more recently my enemy. Then I settled back to wait, prepared to allow nature to take its course.

I am reasonably sure that no one but myself among the crowd at his first interment—the breathers' ceremony—realized that we were burying a vampire—although some might have suspected. Cesare did start to come out of his death-sleep when being taken to the tomb—his original tomb, in the church. Those of his pallbearers with particularly keen senses might have been aware of him stirring lightly inside his coffin. At one point I even heard him giggling.

Whether he now comes back and walks or not, I told myself, the news of what has happened to him is going to come as a devastating shock to Lucrezia. Well, I was not going to be the one to carry it back to her. The more I thought the matter over, the more firmly I understood that she must be as guilty as her brother in their plot to use two vampires, an old enemy and an inconvenient lover, to remove each other from the scene.

It was while I was listening to the tombside prayers that another interesting point first struck me. It was highly unlikely that Cesare, determined to the end not to become a vampire, would have made provision to have on hand a supply of his native earth against that eventuality. I supposed Constantia in her earlier concern for his welfare might have considered the matter, might even have done something about it. But Constantia was beyond consultation now.

But as I thought the matter over I realized that there really ought to be no problem at all. The Borgias, as everyone knew, were originally Spanish. Rodrigo, the patriarch, had brought his illegitimate family to Rome only when his climb to high church office compelled him to spend almost all his time in that city. Therefore the ground we trod on here in Navarre—or at least that just across the border in Castile—was Cesare's native earth.

Actually, of course, although I did not know it at the time, his birthplace had been Rome.

And now my enemy was dead—well, more or less—but certainly not by my hand or connivance. I considered that my vow to Lucrezia was still proudly intact.

The minor war between King Jean and the rebellious Count dragged on, as such things will. The world of breathers saw me as Lucrezia's emissary hanging around, doing such occasional intelligence service for the King of Navarre as made me for the time being a welcome guest. I made an earth for myself near Constantia's resting place, and rested there myself in daytime, slumbering lightly. I considered it my responsibility to be her guardian. Several times at dusk I allowed myself to be seen near the spot, in one impressive shape or another, by a few local inhabitants. After that I felt reasonably sure we were not going to be disturbed.

And each night, when the last worshipper had left the church in Viana, I stepped in to visit the tomb in which Lucrezia's brother had been laid to rest. Each night I expected that he would wake, and walk. But night after night went past, and there was no sign of Cesare. Could I have been mistaken? Had he not been made nosferatu after all?

And then, one night, he—stirred. I could hear him scratching and twitching in his tomb, behind the modest depth of marble.

It took some maneuvering to get him out, even vampire as I was, without disturbing any of the pious stonework. But once I had him out, there was no possible doubt as to what had happened to Cesare. He was alive, but suffering grievously from want of his native earth. In the process of transformation he had gone from being a drugged breather to a drugged vampire. He could not come properly out of his dazed and dangerous condition: not totally unconscious, but totally helpless. As he lay sprawled on the stone floor of the church, his glazed eyes widened in astonishment to see me still alive, then fixed on me malignantly. But he could not speak.

I have never been one to agonize at length over any problem, moral or otherwise. By my lights, to stand by while Cesare died would have been a certain violation of my oath to Lucrezia, as much as directly killing him. I assumed that burying him in Castile would take care of his problem, but my current watch over Constantia took precedence. I considered myself fortunate in being able to enlist some local gypsies—relatives, in some degree, of those dwelling near my home castle, and no strangers to the ways of nosferatu—to take him over the border and plant him there, somewhere, wherever they could find a likely spot, in what was indubitably Castilian soil.

I should add here, parenthetically, that nearly two hundred years passed before a Spanish bishop, having studied Cesare's original grave marker in the Viana church and read his history, became incensed that such a scoundrel should lie in such a holy place, and ordered his bones removed. Those relics—or someone's—were dug up accordingly, and the pieces that did not crumble into dust were reburied under a nearby road. When, in a more scientific spirit, the supposed site of this second interment of Valentino was excavated in 1871, the bones unearthed on that occasion all disintegrated before anything of a scientific nature could be accomplished with them.