Pandora - New Vampires 01

by Anne Rice

  The boys had run away.

  "Marius, have you stopped up your ears to her commands? We are to hunt down and kill her renegade gods and see that new gods are born from her, gods who look into souls, gods who seek justice, not lies, gods who are not fantastical, lustful idiots or the drunken whimsical creatures of the Northern sky who hurl thunderbolts. Her worship is founded in the good, in the pure!"

  "No, no, no," he said. He stepped back as if that would make it all the more emphatic. "You're talking rot!" he said. "Stupidity, rank superstition!"

  "I don't believe you said those words!" I cried. "You are a monster!" I said. "She deserves her throne! So does the King, who sits beside her. They deserve their worshipers bringing flowers to them. Did you think you had the power to read minds for no good reason!" I came forward. "Do you remember when I first mocked you in the Temple? When I said you ought to station yourself at the courts and look into the minds of the accused? I had hit the mark in my ridicule!"

  "No." he roared. "This is absolutely not true," he said.

  He turned his back on me, rushing into the house.

  I followed him.

  He rushed down the stairway and into her sanctum, stopping short before her. She and her King sat as before. Not an eyelash moved. Only the flowers clung to life in the perfumed air.

  I looked down at my hands, so white! Could I die now? Would I live centuries like the burnt one?

  I studied their seemingly divine faces. They did not smile. They did not dream. They looked, and nothing more.

  I fell down on my knees.

  "Akasha," I whispered. "May I call you this name? Tell me what you want."

  There was no change in her. None whatsoever.

  "Well, speak, Mother!" declared Marius, his voice thick with sadness. "Speak! Is it what you've always wanted?"

  Suddenly he dashed forward, mounted the two steps of her dais and pounded on her breasts with his fists.

  I was horrified.

  She didn't move, she didn't blink. His fist struck a hardness he could not budge. Only her hair, struck by his arm, gave a little sway.

  I ran to him and tried to pull him away.

  "Stop it, Marius, she'll destroy you!"

  I was amazed at my strength. Surely it equalled his. But he allowed me to pull him back, his face flooded with tears.

  "Oh, what have I done!" he said staring at her. "Oh, Pandora, Pandora! What have I done! I've made another blood drinker when I swore that there would never, never be another made, not so long as I survived!"

  "Come upstairs," I said calmly. I glanced at the King and Queen. No sign of response or recognition. "It isn't proper, Marius, that we argue here in the Shrine. Come upstairs."

  He nodded.

  He let me lead him slowly out of the room. His head was bowed.

  "Your long barbarian hair is most becoming," I said. "And I have eyes now to see you as never before. Our blood is intertwined as it might be in a child born to us."

  He wiped at his nose, and didn't look at me.

  We walked into the large library.

  "Marius, is there nothing in me that fills your eye, nothing you find beautiful?"

  "Oh, yes, my dear, there is everything!" he said. "But for the love of Heaven, bring your wits with you into this! Don't you see! Your life's been stolen not for a sacred truth but for a degraded mystery! Reading minds doesn't make me any wiser than the next man! I kill to live! As she once did, thousands and thousands of years ago. Oh, and she knew she had to do this. She knew the time had come."

  "What time? What did she know?"

  I stared at him. I was gradually realizing that I could no longer read his thoughts, and surely he couldn't read mine. But the hovering boys, they were just open books in their fear, thinking themselves the servants of kindhearted but very loud-voiced demons.

  Marius sighed. "She did it because I had almost gained the courage to do what I had to do! To place them both and myself in the sun and finish forever what the Egyptian Elder had sought to do - rid the world of the King and Queen and all the fanged men and women who glut themselves on death! Oh, she is too clever."

  "You really planned to do that?" I asked. "To immolate them and yourself?"

  He made a small sarcastic sound. "Yes, of course, I planned it. Next week, next month, next year, next decade, after another hundred years, maybe in two hundred, maybe after I'd read all the books in the world and seen all the places, maybe in five hundred years, maybe... maybe soon in my loneliness."

  I was at first too stunned to speak.

  He smiled at me wisely and sadly. "Oh, but I cry like a child," he said softly.

  "Where comes the confidence," I asked, "to put an end so swiftly to such bold and complex evidence of divine magic!"

  "Magic!" he cursed.

  "I'd rather if you did not do this," I said. "I don't mean the crying, I mean burning up the Mother and Father and..."

  "I'm sure you would!" he answered. "And do you think I could bear to do it against your will, subject you to the fire? You innocent desperate idiot of a woman! Restore her altars! Oh! Restore her worship! Oh! You are out of your mind!"

  "Idiot! You dare sling your insults at me! You think you've brought a slave into your household? You haven't even brought a wife."

  Yes. Our minds were locked now to each other, and later I would find out that it was because of our heavy exchange of blood. But all I knew then was that we had to content ourselves with words like mortal men and women.

  "I did not mean to use petty insults!" he said. He was stung.

  "Well, then sharpen your great male reason and your lofty elegant patrician mode of expression!" I said.

  We glowered at one another.

  "Yes." he said. "Reason," he said. He held up his finger. "You are the most clever woman I've ever known. And you listen to reason. I will explain and you will see. That is what must be done."

  "Yes, and you are hotheaded and sentimental and give way to tears again and again - and you pound upon the Queen herself like a child throwing a tantrum!"

  His face went red with immediate anger. It sealed his lips against his words.

  He turned and went away.

  "Do you cast me out?" I said. "Do you want me gone!" I shouted. "This is your house. Tell me now if you want me gone. I'll go now!"

  He stopped. "No," he said.

  He turned around and looked at me, shaken, and caught off guard. In a raw voice, he said, "Don't go, Pandora!" He blinked as if to dear his vision. "Don't go. Please, don't." And then he let fall a final whisper. "We have each other."

  "And where do you go now, to get away from me?"

  "Only to change her dress," he said with a sad bitter smile. "To clean and recostume 'such bold evidence of complex and divine magic.' "

  He disappeared.

  I turned to the violet outdoors. To the clouds stirred in a cauldron by the moon, to defy the darkness. To the big old trees that said, Mount our limbs, we will embrace you! To the scattered flowers everywhere that said, We are your bed. Lie down with us.

  And so the two-hundred-year brawl began.

  And it never really ended.

  10

  With my eyes still closed, I heard voices of the city, voices from nearby houses; I heard men talking as they passed on the road outside. I heard music coming from somewhere, and the laughter of women and children. When I concentrated I could understand what they said. I chose not to do this, and their voices melded with the breeze.

  Suddenly, the state seemed unbearable. There seemed nothing to do but rush back to the chapel and kneel there and worship! These senses I had been given seemed fit for nothing else. If this was my destiny, then what was to become of me?

  Through it all, I heard a soul weeping in agony; it was an echo of my own, a soul broken from a course of great hope, who could scarce believe that such fine beginnings should end in terror!

  It was Flavius.

  I leapt into the old gnarled olive tree. It was as simpl
e as taking a step. I stood among the branches, and then leapt to the next, and then to the top of the wall, encrusted with vine. I walked along the wall towards the gate.

  There he stood, his forehead pressed to the bars, both hands clutching at the iron. He bled from several slash marks on his cheek. He gnashed his teeth.

  "Flavius!" I said.

  He looked up with a start. "Lady Pandora!"

  Surely by the light of the moon, he saw the miracle wrought in me, whatever its cause. For I saw the mortality in him, the deep wrinkles of his skin, the painful flutter of his gaze, a thin layer of soil clinging to him all over in the natural moisture of his mortal skin.

  "You must go home," I said, climbing to sit on the wall, with legs on the outside. I bent down so he could hear me. He didn't back away but his eyes were huge with fascination. "Go see to the girls, and sleep, and get those marks attended to. The demon's dead, you needn't worry anymore about him. Come back here tomorrow night at sundown."

  He shook his head. He tried to speak but he couldn't. He tried to gesture but he couldn't. His heart thundered in his chest. He glanced back down the road to the small far-flung lights of Antioch. He looked at me. I heard his heart galloping. I felt his shock, and his fear, and it was fear for me, not him. Fear that some awful fate had befallen me. He reached for the gate and clung to the bars, right arm hooked around and left hand clasping it as if he wouldn't be moved.

  I saw myself as he saw me in his mind - in a boy's sashed tunic, my hair wildly free, sitting atop the wall, as if my body were young and pliant. All lines of age had gone from me. He saw a face on me no one could have ever painted.

  But the point was this. The man had reached his limit. He could go no further. And I knew most fully how I loved him.

  "All right," I said. I stood up and leaned over with both my hands. "Come on, I'll lift you over the wall if I can."

  He raised his arms, doubtful, eyes still drinking up every detail of my transformation.

  He weighed nothing. I lifted him up and deposited him on his feet within the gate. I dropped down on the grass beside him and put my arm around him. How hot was his alarm. How strong his courage.

  "Still your heart," I said. I led him towards the house, as he looked down at me, his chest heaving as though he were out of breath, but it was mere shock. "I'll take care of you."

  "I had the thing," he said, "I had it by its arm." How opaque his voice sounded, how filled with living fluid and effort. "I sank my dagger into it over and over, but it just slashed at my face and it was gone over the wall like a swarm of gnats, just darkness, immaterial darkness!"

  "Flavius, it's dead, burnt to cinders."

  "Had I not heard your voice, oh, I was going mad! I heard the boys crying. I couldn't climb the wall with this damned leg. Then I heard your voice, and I knew, knew you were alive!" He was filled with happiness. "You were with your Marius." The ease with which I could feel his love was sweet, and awe

  inspiring.

  A sudden sense of the Shrine came back to me, of the Queen's nectar and the shower of flower petals. But I had to maintain my equilibrium in this new state. Flavius was also profoundly baffled.

  I kissed him on the lips, warm, mortal lips, and then quickly like an artful cat I licked all the blood from the slash marks on his cheeks, feeling a shiver run through me.

  I took him into the library, which in this house was the main room. The boys hovered somewhere about. They had been lighting lamps everywhere, and now they cowered. I could smell their blood and their young human flesh,

  "You'll stay with me, Flavius. Boys, can you make a bedroom for my steward on this floor? You have fruit and bread, don't you? I can smell it. Have you enough furniture to make him a comfortable place to the far right, where he is out of the way?"

  They came rushing out of their respective hiding places, and they too struck me as vividly human. I was distracted. The smallest natural things about them seemed precious, their thick black eyebrows, their round little mouths, their smooth cheeks.

  "Yes, Madam, yes!" they said almost in one voice. They hurried forward.

  "This is Flavius, my steward. He will stay with us. For now, take him to the bath, heat the water and attend to him. Get him some wine."

  They took Flavius in hand at once. But he paused.

  "Don't abandon me, Madam," he said suddenly with the most serious and thoughtful expression. "I am loyal in all respects."

  "I know," I said. "Oh, how clearly I understand. You cannot imagine."

  Then it was off to the bath with the Babylonian boys, who seemed delighted to have something to do.

  I found Marius's huge closets. He had enough clothes for the Kings of Parthia, Armenia, the Emperor's Mother, Livia, the dead Cleopatra, and an ostentatious patrician who paid no attention to Tiberius's stupid sumptuary laws.

  I put on a much finer, long tunic, woven of silk and linen, and I chose a gold girdle. And with Marius's combs and brushes, I made a clean free mantle of my hair, free of all tangles, rippled and soft as it had been when I was a girl.

  He had many mirrors, which, as you know, in those days were only polished metal. And I was rendered somber and mystified by the single fact that I was young again; my nipples were pink, as I had said; the lines of age no longer interrupted the intended endowments of my face or arms. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that I was timeless. Timeless in adulthood. And every solid object seemed there to serve in me my new strength.

  I looked down at the blocks of marble tile which made up the floor and saw in them a depth, a proof of process wondrous and barely understood.

  I wanted to go out again, speak to the flowers, pick them up in handfuls. I wanted to talk urgently with the stars. I dared not seek the Shrine for fear of Marius, but if he had not been around I would have gone there and knelt at the Mother and merely looked at her, looked at her in silent contemplation, listening for the slightest articulation, though I knew, quite certainly after watching Marius's behavior, that there would be none.

  She had moved her right arm without the seeming knowledge of the rest of her body. She had moved it to kill, and then to invite.

  I went into the library, sat down at the desk, where lay all my pages, and I waited.

  Finally, when Marius came, he too was freshly dressed, his hair parted in the middle and combed to his shoulders. He took a chair near me. It was ebony and curved and inlaid with gold, and I looked at him, realizing how very like the chair he was - a great preserved extension of all the raw materials which had gone into it. Nature did the carving and inlay, and then the whole had been lacquered.

  I wanted to cry in his arms, but I swallowed my loneliness. The night would never desert me, and it was faithful in every open door with its intruding grass, and the veined olive branches rising to catch the light of the moon.

  "Blessed is she who is made a blood drinker," I said, "when the moon is full, and the clouds are rising like mountains in the transparent night."

  "Probably so," he said.

  He moved the lamp that stood on the desk between us, so that it didn't flicker in my eyes.

  "I made my steward at home here," I said. "I offered him bath, bed and clothes. Do you forgive me? I love him and will not lose him. It's too late now for him to go back into the world."

  "He's an extraordinary man," Marius said, "and most welcome here. Tomorrow perhaps he can bring your girls. Then the boys will have company and there will be some discipline by day. Flavius knows books, among other things."

  "You're most gracious. I was afraid you would be angry. Why do you suffer st I cannot read your mind; I did not obtain that gift." No, this wasn't correct. I could read Flavius's mind. I knew the boys at this very moment were very relieved by Flavius's presence as they helped him dress for bed.

  "We are too closely linked by blood," he said. "I can never read your thoughts again either. We are thrown back on words like mortals, only our senses are infinitely keener, and the detachment we know at some times wil
l be as cold as the ice in the North; and at other times feelings will enflame us, carry us on waves of burning sea."

  "Hmmm," I said.

  "You despise me," he said softly, contritely, "because I quenched your ecstasy, I took from you your joy, your convictions." He looked quite genuinely miserable. "I did this to you right at the happiest moment of your conversion."

  "Don't be so sure you quenched it. I might still make her Temples, preach her worship. I'm an initiate. I have only begun."

  "You will not revive her worship!" he said. "Of that I assure you! You will tell no one about her or what she is or where she is kept, and you will never make another blood drinker."

  "My, if only Tiberius had such authority when he addressed the Senate!" I said.

  "All Tiberius ever wanted was to study at the gymnasium at Rhodes, to go every day in a Greek soak and sandals and talk philosophy. And so the propensity for action flowers in men of lesser mettle, who use him in his loveless loneliness."

  "Is this a lecture for my improvement? Do you think I don't know this? What you don't know is that the Senate won't help Tiberius govern. Rome wants an Emperor now, to worship and to like. It was your generation, under Augustus, which accustomed us to forty years of autocratic rule. Don't talk to me of politics as though I were a fool."

  "I should have realized that you understood it all," he said. "I remember you in your girlhood. Nobody could match your brilliance. Your fidelity to Ovid and his erotic writings was a rare sophistication, an understanding of satire and irony. A well-nourished Roman frame of mind."

  I looked at him. His face too had been wiped dean of discernible age. I had time now to relish it, the squareness of his shoulders, the straightness and firmness of his neck, the distinct expression of his eyes and well-placed eyebrows. We had been made over into portraits of ourselves in marble by a master sculptor.

  "You know," I said, "even under this crushing and annoying barrage of definition and declaration which you make to me, as if I were weeping for your ratification, I feel love for you, and know full well that we are alone in this, and married to one another, and I am not unhappy."