by Anne Rice
"Sagas, ah yes, that's what he wrote, sagas of our kind," said Marius and again he smiled, almost brightly. "He suffers his own terrible wounds," said Marius. "He's been with angels, or with those beings who claim to be such and they have taken him to Hell and to Heaven."
"You believe these things?"
"I don't know. I can tell you only he wasn't on this Earth while these creatures claim to have had him. And he brought back with him a bloody Veil with the Face of Christ quite beautifully blazoned upon it." "Ah, and this you saw? "
"I did," said Marius, "as I have seen other relics. It was to see this Veil and to go into the sun and die that our Druid priest Mael was nearly taken from us."
"Why didn't Mael die," asked Thorne. He couldn't conceal his own emotion when he said this name.
"He was too old for such a thing," said Marius. "He was badly burnt nd brought low, as can happen with those of us who are very old, and after one day in the sun, he hadn't the courage for more suffering. Back to his companions he went and there he remains."
"And you? Will you tell me now with your full heart; do you truly despise him for what he did to you? Or is it your distaste for anger which makes you turn away from this thing?"
"I don't know. There are times when I can't look on Mael's face. There are times when I want to be in his company. There are times when I can't seek out any of them. I've come here with Daniel alone. Daniel always needs someone to look after him. It suits me to be near Daniel. Daniel doesn't have to speak. That he is here is sufficient."
"I understand you," said Thorne.
"Understand this as well," said Marius. "I want to continue. I am not one who wishes to go into the sun or seek some other form of obliteration. If you have truly come out of the ice to destroy Maharet, to anger her twin—."
Thorne lifted his right hand, gesturing for patience and silence.
Then he spoke:
"I have not," he said. "Those were dreams. They've died in this very place. It will take longer for memory to die—."
"Then remember her beauty and her power," Marius said. "I asked her once why she had never taken a blood drinker's eyes for her own. Why always the weak and bleeding eyes of a mortal victim? She told me she had never come upon a blood drinker whom she would destroy or even hurt, save for the Evil Queen herself and the Queen's eyes she couldn't take. Pure hatred prevented it."
Thorne thought on this for a long time without replying.
"Always mortal eyes," he whispered.
And with each pair, as they endure, she sees more than you and I can see," said Marius.
"Yes," said Thorne, "I understand you."
I want the strength to grow older," Marius said. "I want to find wonders around me as I always have. If I don't, I'll lose the strength to continue and that is what bites into me now. Death has put its hand on
my shoulder. Death has come in the form of disappointment and fear of scorn"
"Ah, these things I understand, almost perfectly," said Thorne. "When I went up into the snow, I wanted to flee from these things. I wanted to die and not die, as so many mortals do. I don't think I thought I would endure in the ice or snow. I thought it would devour me, freeze me solid as it would a mortal man. But no such thing ever happened. And as for the pain of the cold I grew used to it, as if it were my daily portion, as if I had no right to anything else. But it was pain that drove me there, and so I understand you. You would fight pain now rather than retreat."
"Yes, I would," said Marius. "When the Queen rose from her underground shrine, she left me buried in ice and indifference. Others came to rescue me and bring me to the council table where we sought to reason with her. Before this happened, I could not have imagined such contempt from the Queen or such injury. I could not have imagined
my own patience and seeming forgiveness.
"But at that council table, Akasha met her destruction. The insult to me was avenged with utter finality. This creature whom I had guarded for two thousand years was gone from me. My Queen, gone from me . . .
"And so I can see now the larger story of my own life, of which my beautiful Queen was only a part, even in her cruelty to me. I can see all the stories of my life. I can pick and choose from among them."
"Let me hear these stories," said Thorne. "Your words flow over me like warm water. They bring me comfort. I hunger for your images. I hunger for all you might say."
Marius pondered this.
"Let me try to tell my stories," Marius said. "Let my stories do what stories always do. Let them keep you from your darker dreams and from your darker journey. Let them keep you here."
Thorne smiled.
"Yes," he said, "I trust in you. Go on."
THE STORY
5
As I HAVE TOLD YOU, I was born in the Roman times, in the age of Augustus when the Roman Empire was immense and powerful, though the Northern tribes of barbarians who would eventually overrun it had long been fighting on its Northern frontiers.
Europe was a world of big and powerful cities just as it is now.
As for me, as I've said I was a bookish individual, and it had been my bad luck to be stolen from my world, taken into Druid precincts and there delivered to a blood drinker who believed himself to be a sacred God of the Grove and gave me nothing but superstition along with the Dark Blood.
My journey to Egypt to find the Mother was for myself. What if this fire described by the blackened and suffering god should come again?
Well, I found the Divine Pair and I stole them from those who had long been their guardians. I did it not only to possess the Sacred Core of the Divine Queen but because of my love of Akasha, my belief that she had spoken to me and commanded me to rescue her, and because she had given me her Precious Blood.
Understand there was nothing as strong as that primal fount. The blood rendered me a formidable blood drinker who could fight off any of the old burnt gods who came after me in the years to come.
But you must also understand: no religious impulse guided me. I had thought the "god" of the Druid woods to be a monster. And I understood that in her own way Akasha was a monster. I was a monster as well. I had no intention of creating a devotion for her. She was a secret. And from the moment she came into my hands she and her consort were most truly Those Who Must Be Kept.
This did not stop me from adoring her in my heart, and creating the most lavish shrine for her, and dreaming that, having spoken to me once with the Mind Gift, she would speak to me again.
The first city to which I took the mysterious pair was Antioch, a most marvelous and interesting place. It was in the East as we said in those days, yet it was a Roman city and had been shaped by the tremendous influence of Hellenism—that is, the philosophy and ideas of the Greeks. It was a city of new and splendid Roman buildings, and it was a city of great libraries and schools of philosophy, and though I haunted it by night, the ghost of my former self, there were brilliant men to be spied upon and wondrous things to be heard.
Nevertheless my first years as the keeper of the Mother and the Father were bitter in my loneliness, and the silence of the Divine Parents struck me often as particularly cruel. I was pitifully ignorant as to my own nature, and perpetually brooding on my eternal fate.
Akasha's silence struck me as terrifying and confusing. After all, why was I asked by Akasha to take her out of Egypt if she meant only to sit upon her throne in eternal stillness? It seemed sometimes that self-destruction was preferable to the existence I endured.
Then came the exquisite Pandora into my midst, a woman I'd known since her girlhood in Rome. Indeed, I'd once gone to her father to seek her hand in marriage when she'd been only a precocious child. And here she was in Antioch, as lovely in the prime of life as she'd been in her youth, flooding my thoughts with impossible desire.
Our lives became fatally intertwined. Indeed the speed and violence with which Pandora was made a blood drinker left me weak with guilt and confusion. But Pandora believed that Akasha had willed our un
ion; Akasha had hearkened to my loneliness; Akasha had drawn Pandora
to me
If you saw our council table, round which we sat when Akasha rose, then you have seen Pandora, the tall white-skinned beauty with the distinct rippling brown hair, one who is now a powerful Child of the Millennia just as you are and just as I am.
Why am I not with her now, you may ask? What is it in me that will not acknowledge my admiration for her mind, her beauty, her
exquisite understanding of all things?
Why can't I go to her!
I don't know. I know only that a terrible anger and pain divides us just as it did so many years ago. I cannot admit how much I have wronged her. I cannot admit how much I have lied about my love of her and my need of her. And this need, perhaps this need is the thing which keeps me at a distance, where I am safe from the scrutiny of her soft and wise brown eyes.
It's also true that she judges me harshly for things I have lately done. But this is too difficult to explain.
In those ancient times, when it was scarce two centuries that we lived together, it was I who destroyed our union in a foolish and dreadful way. We had spent almost every night of our lives quarreling, and I could not admit her advantages, and her victories, and it was as the result of my weakness that I foolishly and impetuously left her when I did.
This was the single worst mistake of all my long years.
But let me tell quickly the little tale of how we came to be divided by my bitterness and pride.
Now as we kept the Mother and the Father, the old gods of the dark groves of the North woods died out. Nevertheless an occasional blood drinker would discover us and come to press his suit for the blood of Those Who Must Be Kept.
Most often such a monster was violent and easily dispatched in the heat of anger, and we would return to our civilized life.
One evening, however, there appeared in our villa outside Antioch a band of newly made blood drinkers, some five in number, all dressed in simple robes.
I was soon amazed to discover that they perceived themselves as serving Satan within a Divine Plan that held the Devil to be equal in power to the Christian God.
They did not know of the Mother and the Father, and understand, the shrine was in that very house, down, beneath the floor. Yet they could hear no inkling of the Divine Parents. They were far too young and too innocent. Indeed, their zeal and sincerity was enough to break one's heart.
But though deeply touched by their mishmash of Christian and Persian ideas, of their wild notions, and by their curious appearance of innocence, I was also horrified by the fact that this was a new religion among the blood drinkers, and they spoke of other adherents. They spoke of a cult.
The human in me was revolted; and the rational Roman was more confused and alarmed than I can express.
It was Pandora who quickly brought me to my senses and gave me to know that we must slaughter the whole band. Were we to let them go, others would come to us, and soon the Mother and Father might fall into their hands.
I, who had slain old pagan blood drinkers with ease, seemed somehow unable to obey her, perhaps because I realized for the first time that if we remained in Antioch, if we maintained our household and our lives, more and more blood drinkers would come and there would be no end to killing them in order to protect our fine secret. And my soul suddenly could not endure this possibility. Indeed I thought once more of death for myself and even for Those Who Must Be Kept.
We slaughtered the zealots. It was a simple thing to do for they were so young. It took only moments with torches and with our swords. We burnt them to ashes and then scattered those ashes as, I'm sure you know, must be done.
But after it was over, I lapsed into a terrible silence and for months would not leave the shrine. I abandoned Pandora for my own suffering.
I couldn't explain to her that I had foreseen a grim future, and when she had gone out to hunt the city or to do whatever amused her, I went to Akasha.
I went to my Queen. I knelt before her and I asked her what she meant for me to do.
"After all," I said, "these are your children, are they not? They come in new battalions and they don't know your name. They likened their fangs to those of serpents. They spoke of the Hebrew prophet Moses, holding up the serpent staff in the desert. They spoke of others who might come."
No answer came from Akasha. No real answer was to come from Akasha for two thousand years.
But I was only beginning my awful journey then. And all I knew in those anxious moments was that I had to conceal my prayers from Pandora, that I couldn't let her see me—Marius, the philosopher—on bended knee. I went on with my praying, I went on with my feverish worship. And as always happens when one prays to an immobile thing, the light played upon the face of Akasha; the light gave some
semblance of life.
Meantime, Pandora, as embittered by my silence as I was by Akasha's silence, became utterly distraught.
And one night she hurled at me a simple household insult, "Would that I were rid of them and rid of you."
She left the house and she did not return the next night or the night after that.
As you can see, she was merely playing the same game with me that I had played with her. She refused to be a witness to my hardness. But she could not understand how desperately I needed her presence, and even her vain pleas.
Oh, it was so shamefully selfish of me. It was such a needless disaster
but powerfully angry with her, I took the irrevocable step of arranging for my departure from Antioch by day.
Indeed, by the light of the dim lamp, so as not to arouse my mortal agents, I gave orders for myself and Those Who Must Be Kept to be transported in three immense sarcophaghi to Rome by sea. I abandoned
my Pandora. I took with me all that was mine and left her only the empty villa, with her own possessions strewn rather carelessly and insultingly around it. I left the only creature in the world who could have patience with me, who could give me understanding, and who had done so, no matter how often or how hard we had fought.
I left the only being who knew what I was!
Of course I didn't know the consequences. I didn't realize that I would not find Pandora for hundreds of years. I didn't know that she would become a goddess in my mind, a being as powerful in my
memory as Akasha was to me night after night.
You see, it was another lie, like unto the lie I've told about Akasha. I loved Pandora and I needed her. But in our verbal combat, I had always, no matter how emotional, played the role of the superior mind who was in no need of her seemingly irrational discourse and always evident affection. I remember the very night that I gave her the Dark Blood how she had argued with me.
She said, "Don't make a religion of reason and logic. Because in the passage of time reason may fail you and when it does, you may find yourself taking refuge in madness." I was so offended by these words coming from the mouth of this beautiful woman whose eyes so entranced me that I could scarce follow her thoughts.
Yet in those months of silence, after we had slain the New Believers,
this was precisely what had happened. I had lapsed into a form of badness and refused to speak a word.
And only now can I admit the full folly of it, that my own weakness was unsupportable to me, and that I could not endure having her as the
witness of the melancholy which shrouded my soul.
Even now, I cannot have her as a witness to my suffering. I live here alone, with Daniel. I speak to you because you are a new friend and can take from me fresh impressions and fresh suggestions. You don't look at me with old knowledge and old fear. But let me go on with my tale.
Our ship arrived at the port of Ostia in good order, and once we had been transported in three sarcophaghi to the city of Rome, I rose from my "grave," made arrangements for an expensive villa just outside the city walls, and arranged an underground shrine for Those Who Must Be Kept in the hills well away from the house.
A great guilt weighed me down that I had placed them at such a distance from the place in which I lived, read my books, and took to my crypt at night. After all, they had been within my very house in Antioch,
though safely beneath it, and now they were some miles away.
But I wanted to live close to the great city, and indeed within a few short years, the walls of Rome were built out and around my house so that Rome enclosed it. I had a country villa in town.