by Anne Rice
Such a transformation. The tunic went halfway to his knees. That must have been a great relief to him, to have on something clean. I should have thought of this before I left him. Stupid.
I admired him. Naked or clothed, you can't carry such beauty and dignity unless you have been cherished. He wore the raiment of the affection bestowed on him and inscribed in the art of his ivory leg.
In our brief encounter, a bond had been forged forever.
He greeted the girls. With his arms around them, he guided them out of the crowd.
I went straight to the Temple of Isis, and thereby, unwittingly, took the first firm step towards a larcenous immortality, an inglorious and unearned supernature, a never ending and utterly useless doom.
5
As soon as I entered the Temple Compound I was received by several rich Roman women, who welcomed me generously. They were all properly painted with white on their arms and their faces, well-drawn eyebrows, lip color - all the details of which I'd made a hash that morning.
I explained that though I had means, I was on my own. They were for helping me in every way. When
they heard I had been actually initiated in Rome, they were in awe.
"Thank Mother Isis they didn't discover you and execute you," said one of the Roman women.
"Go in and see the Priestess," they said. Many of them had not yet undergone the secret ceremonies
and were waiting to be called by the goddess for this momentous event. There were many other women here, some Egyptian, some Babylonian perhaps. I could only guess. Jewels and silks were the order of the day. Fancy painted gold borders lined their mantles; some wore simple dresses.
But it seemed to me that all of them spoke Greek.
I couldn't bring myself to enter the Temple. I looked up and saw in my mind our crucified Priests in Rome.
"Thank God you were not identified," said one.
"Quite a few people fled to Alexandria," said another.
"I raised no protest," I said dismally.
There came a chorus of sympathy. "How could you, under Tiberius? Believe me, every one who could escaped."
"Don't be laden with misery," said a young blue-eyed Greek woman, very properly dressed.
"I'd fallen away from the worship," I said.
Again came a comforting round of soft voices.
"Go in now," said one woman, "and ask to pray in the very sanctuary of Our Mother. You are an initiate. Most of us here are not."
I nodded.
I went up the steps of the Temple and entered inside it.
I paused to shake from my mantle the mundane, that is, all the trivia I had discussed. My mind was focused upon the goddess, and desperate to believe in her. I loathed my hypocrisy, that I used this Temple and this worship, but then it didn't seem significant. My despair of the three nights had penetrated too deep.
What a shock awaited me as I found myself inside.
The Temple was far more ancient than our Temple in Rome, and Egyptian paintings covered its walls. A shiver at once went through me. The columns were in the Egyptian style, not fluted but smoothly round, and brightly painted in orange, and rising to giant lotus leaves at the capitals. The smell of the incense was overpowering and I could hear music emanating from the Sanctuary. I could hear the thin notes of the lyre, and of the wires of the sistrum being plucked, and I could hear a litany being chanted.
But this was a thoroughly Egyptian place, which enveloped me as firmly as my blood dreams. I almost fainted.
The dreams came back - the deep paralytic sense of being in some secret Sanctuary in Egypt, my soul swallowed within another body!
The Priestess came to me. This too was a shock.
In Rome, her dress would have been purely Roman, and she might have worn a small exotic headdress, a little cap to her shoulders, perhaps.
But this woman wore Egyptian clothes of pleated linen, in the old style, and she wore a magnificent Egyptian headdress and wig, the broad mass of long black braids falling down stiffly over her shoulders. She looked as extravagant perhaps as Cleopatra had ever looked, for all I knew.
I had only heard stories of Julius Caesar's love of Cleopatra, then her affair with Mark Antony and Cleopatra's death. All that was before my birth.
But I knew that Cleopatra's fabulous entrance into Rome had much affrighted the old Roman sense of morality. I had always known the old Roman families feared Egyptian magic, In the recent punitive Roman massacre, which I've described, there was a lot of shouting about license and lust; but beneath it, there had been an unspoken fear of the mystery and the power hidden behind the Temple doors.
And now as I gazed at this Priestess, at her painted eyes, I felt in my soul this fear. I knew it. Of course this woman seemed to have stepped from the dreams, but it was not that which struck me so much, for after all, what are dreams? This was an Egyptian woman - wholly alien and inscrutable to me.
My Isis had been Greco-Roman. Even her statue in the Roman Sanctuary had been clothed in a gorgeously draped Greek dress and her hair had been done softy in the old Greek style, with waves around her face. She had held her sistrum and an urn. She had been a Romanized goddess.
Perhaps the same had happened with the goddess Cybele in Rome. Rome swallowed things and made them Roman.
In a very few centuries, though I had no thought of it then - how could I - Rome would swallow and shape the followers of Jesus of Nazareth, and make of his Christians the Roman Catholic church.
I suppose you are familiar with the modern expression, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."
But here, in this reddish gloom, among flickering lights and a deeper muskier incense than I had ever smelled, I resented my timidity in silence. Then the dreams did descend, like so many veils lowered one by one to enclose me. In a flash I saw the beautiful Queen weeping. No. She screamed. Cried for help.
"Get away from me," I whispered to the air around me. "Fly from me, all things that are impure and evil. Get away from me as I enter the house of my Blessed Mother."
The Priestess took me in hand. I heard voices from my dream in violent argument. I strained to dear my vision, to see the worshipers coming and going towards the Sanctuary to meditate or to make sacrifice, to ask for some favor. I tried to realize it was a big busy crowd, very little different from Rome.
But the touch of the Priestess enfeebled me. Her painted eyes struck terror. Her broad necklace caused me to blink my eyes. Row upon row of flat stones.
I was taken into a private apartment of the Temple by her, offered a sumptuous couch. I lay back exhausted. "Fly from me, all things evil," I whispered. "Including dreams."
The Priestess sat beside me and enfolded me in her silken arms. I looked up into a mask!
"Talk to me, suffering one," she said in Latin with a thick accent. "Speak all that must come forth."
Suddenly - uncontrollably - I poured out my whole family story, the annihilation of my family, my guilt, my travails.
"What if I was the cause of my family's downfall - my worship at the Temple of Isis? What if Tiberius had remembered it? What have I done? The Priests were crucified and I did nothing. What does Mother Isis want of me? I want to die."
"That she does not want of you," said the Priestess, staring at me. Her eyes were huge, or was it the paint? No, I could see the whites of her eyes, so glistening and pure. Her painted mouth let loose words like a tiny breeze in a monotone.
I was fast becoming delirious and totally unreasonable. I murmured what I could about my initiation, what details I could tell a Priestess, for all these things were highly secret, you know, but I confirmed for her that I had been reborn in the rites.
All the stored-up weakness in me was cut loose in a flood.
Then I lay down my guilt. I confessed that I had, early on, left the Cult of Isis, that in recent years, I had walked only in the public processions to the sea, when the goddess was carried to the shore to bless the ships. Isis, the goddess of Navigation. I had not lived a l
ife of devotion.
I had done nothing when the Priests of Isis were crucified, except speak out with many others behind the Emperor's back. There had been a solidarity between me and those Romans who thought Tiberius was a monster, but we had not raised our voices in defense of Isis. My Father had told me to remain silent. So I had. This was the same Father who had told me to live.
I turned over and slipped down off this couch and I lay on the tiled floor. I don't know why. I pressed my cheek to the cold tile. I liked the coldness against my face. I was in a state of madness, but not an uncontrollable state. I lay staring.
I knew one thing. I wanted to get out of this Temple! I didn't like it. No, this had been a very bad idea.
I hated myself suddenly for having become so vulnerable to this woman, whatever sort she was, and the atmosphere of the blood dreams beckoned to me.
I opened my eyes. The Priestess bent over me. I saw the weeping Queen of my nightmares. I turned away and shut my eyes.
"Be at peace," she said in her calculated and perfected voice. "You did nothing wrong," said the Priestess.
It seemed preposterous that such a voice should issue from such a painted face and form, but the voice was definite.
"First," the Priestess said, "you must understand that Mother Isis forgives anything. She is the Mother of Mercy." Then she said, "You have been more fully initiated by your description than most here or anywhere. You made a long fast. You bathed in the sacred blood of the bull. You must have drunk the potion. You dreamed and saw yourself reborn."
"Yes," I said, trying to revive the old ecstasy, the priceless gift of belief in something. "Yes. I saw the stars and great fields of flowers, such fields..."
It was no good. I was scared of this woman and I wanted to get out of there. I'd go home and confess all this to Flavius and make him let me weep on his shoulder.
"I am not pious by nature," I confessed. "I was young. I loved the free women who went there, the women who slept with whom they chose, the whores of Rome, the keepers of the houses of pleasure, I liked women who thought for themselves, and followed the goings-on of the Empire."
"You can enjoy such company here as well," said the Priestess, without batting an eye. "And don't fear that your old ties to the Temple caused your downfall in Rome. We have plenty of news to confirm that the highborn were not persecuted by Tiberius when he destroyed the Temple. It is always the poor who suffer: the street whore and the simple weaver, the hairdresser, the bricklayer. No noble family was persecuted in the name of Isis. You know that. Some women fled to Alexandria because they would not give up the worship, but they were never in danger,"
The dreams approached. "Oh, Mother of God," I whispered.
The Priestess went on talking.
"You, like Mother Isis, have been the victim of tragedy. And you, like Mother Isis, must take strength and walk alone, as Isis did when her husband, Osiris, was slain. Who helped her when she searched all over Egypt for the body of her murdered husband, Osiris? She walked alone. She is the greatest of the goddesses. When she recovered the body of her husband, Osiris, and could find no organ of generation for him with which she might be impregnated, she drew the semen right from his spirit. Thus, the god Horus was born of a woman and a god. It was the power of Isis who drew the spirit from the dead man. It is Isis who tricked the god Ra into revealing his name."
That was the old tale all right.
I looked away from the Priestess. I was unable to look at her decorated face! Surely she felt my revulsion. I must not hurt her. She meant well. It wasn't her fault that she looked to me like a monster. Why in hell had I come here!
I lay dazed. The room had a soft golden light coming mainly through its three doors, and they were cut Egyptian-style, these doors, wider at the base than at the top, and I let this light make a blur of my vision. I asked the light to do this.
I felt the Priestess's hand. Such silken warmth. So lovely, her touch, her sweetness.
"Do you believe all of it!" I suddenly whispered.
She completely ignored this question. Her painted mask gave forth the creed.
"You must be like Mother Isis. Depend on no one. You don't have the burden of recovering a lost husband or father. You are free. Receive into your house men with love as you choose. You belong to no one but Mother Isis. Remember, Isis is the goddess who loves, the goddess who forgives, the goddess of infinite understanding because she herself has suffered!"
"Suffered!" I gasped. I moaned, a very uncommon sound for me, most of my life. But I saw the weeping Queen of my nightmares, bound to her throne,
"Listen to this," I said, "the dreams I will now recount, and then tell me why it is happening." I knew my voice sounded angry. I was sorry for it. "These dreams don't come from wine or potions, or after long periods of wakefulness that twist the mind."
Then I launched into another totally unplanned confession.
I told this woman of the blood dreams, the dreams of ancient Egypt in which I had drunk blood - the altar, the Temple, the desert, the sun rising.
"Amon Ra!" I said. This was the Egyptian name for the sun god, but I had never spoken it to my knowledge. I said it now. "Yes, Isis tricked him into revealing his name, but he killed me and I was her blood drinker, do you hear me, a thirsty god!"
"No!" said the Priestess. She sat motionless.
She thought for a long while. I had scared her and now this scared me all the more.
"Can you read the ancient picture writing of Egypt?" she asked.
"No," I said.
Then she said, in a more relaxed and vulnerable tone:
"You speak of very old legends, legends buried in the history of our worship of Isis and Osiris; that they once did indeed take the blood of their victims as sacrifice. There are scrolls here that tell of this. But nobody can really decipher them, except for one..."
Her voice trailed off.
"Who is the one?" I asked. I sat up on my elbows. I realized the plaits of my hair had come undone. Good. It felt good because it was free now and clean. I raked my hair with both hands.
What did it feel like to be entombed in paint and wig like this Priestess?
"Tell me," I said, "who is the one who can read these legends. Tell me!"
"These are evil tales," she said, "that Isis herself and Osiris live on, somewhere, in material form, taking blood even now." She made an expression of denial and disgust. "But this is not our worship! We sacrifice no humans here! Egypt was old and wise before Rome was born!"
Who was she trying to convince? MD
"I've never had such dreams, in a string like this, with the same theme."
She became very worked up with her declarations.
"Our Mother Isis has no taste for blood. She has conquered death and set her husband Osiris as King of the Dead, but for us, she is life itself. She didn't send you these dreams."
"Probably not! I agree with you. But then who did? Where do they come from? Why did they pursue me at sea'? Who is this one who can read the old writing?"
She was shaken. She had let go of me and she stared off, her eyes taking on a deceptive ferocity due to the black lining.
"Perhaps somewhere in childhood you heard an old tale, maybe an old Egyptian Priest told it to you. You forgot it, and now it flames in your tortured mind. It feeds on fires to which it has no right - your Father's death."
"Yes, well, I certainly hope so, but I've never known an old Egyptian. At the Temple, the Priests were Roman. Besides, if we take the dreams and lay them out, what is the pattern there? Why is the Queen weeping? Why does the sun kill me? The Queen is in fetters. The Queen is a prisoner. The Queen is in agony!"
"Stop." The Priestess shuddered. Then she put her arms around me, as if it was she who needed me. I felt her stiff linen and the thick hair of her wig, and beneath it the hurried pounding of her heart. "No," she said. "You're possessed of a demon, and we can drive this demon out of you! Maybe the way was opened for this wretched demon when your Father was
attacked at his own Hearth."
"You really believe it's possible?" I asked.
"Listen," she said as casually now as one of the women outside. "I want you to be bathed, to have fresh garments. This money, what portion can you give me? If none, we will provide all for you. We are rich here."
"Here's plenty. I don't care." I pulled the purse loose from my girdle.
"I will have everything done for you. Fresh clothes. This silk is too fragile."
"You are telling me!" I said.
"This mantle is torn. Your hair is uncombed."
I spilled out a dozen or so gold coins, more than I had paid for Flavius.
It shocked her, but she covered up the shock very quickly. Suddenly she stared at me, and her painted mask managed to make a flexible expression, a frown. I thought it might crack.
I thought she might weep. I was becoming a regular expert in making people weep. Mia and Lia had wept. Flavius had wept. Now she was going to cry. The Queen in the dream was crying!
I laughed in madness, throwing back my head, but then I saw the Queen! I saw her in distant wavery recollection, and I felt such sorrow that I too could have cried. My mockery was blasphemy. It was a lie unto myself.
"Take the gold for the Temple," I said. "Take it for new clothes, for all I need. But my offering to the goddess, I want it to be flowers, and bread, warm from the oven, a small loaf."
"Very good," she said with an eager nod. "That is what Isis wants. She wants no blood. No! No blood!"
She started to help me up.
I paused. "In the dream, you understand that she weeps. She is not happy with these blood drinkers, she protests, she objects. She herself is not the one who drinks blood."
The Priestess was confounded, and then she nodded. "Yes, that is obvious, is it not?"
"I too protest and suer," I said.
"Yes, come," she said leading me through a thick tall door. She left me in the hands of the Temple slaves. I was relieved. I was weary.