by Rice, Anne
“He’ll welcome me,” I said. “If you wrote that, most likely he will,” said the old man.
Then we were off. The sun had fully risen. The square was filled with shoppers. Women carried baskets on their heads. The Temples were thriving. It was a game, darting through the crowd, one way and then another.
“Come on, Flavius,” I said.
It was a torture keeping to Flavius’s slow pace as we mounted the hill, turn by turn, drawing ever closer.
“You know this is madness!” said Flavius. “He can’t be awake during the light of day; you’ve proven this to me and to yourself! I, the incredulous Athenian, and you the cynical Roman. What are we doing?”
Up and up we climbed, passing one sumptuous house after another. Locked gates. The bark of guard dogs.
“Hurry up. Must I listen to this lecture forever? Ah, there, look, my beloved Flavius. The pink house, the last house. Marius lives in style. Look at the walls and the gates.”
At last I had my hands on the iron bars. Flavius collapsed on the grass across the small road. He was spent.
I pulled on the bell rope.
Trees laid down heavy limbs over the top of the walls. Through the mesh of leaf, I could make out a figure that came out on the high porch of the second floor.
“No admittance!” he cried out.
“I have to see Marius,” I said. “He’s expecting me!” I cupped my hands and shouted. “He wants me to come. He told me to come.”
Flavius said a quick prayer under his breath. “Oh, Mistress, I hope you know this man better than you knew your own brother.”
I laughed. “There is no comparison,” I said. “Stop complaining.”
The figure had disappeared. I heard running feet.
Finally two dark-headed young boys appeared before me, little more than children, beardless, with long black curls, and beautifully dressed in gold-trimmed tunics. They looked Chaldean.
“Open the gate, hurry!” I said.
“Madam, I can’t admit you,” said the speaker of the two. “I cannot admit anyone to this house until Marius himself comes. Those are his orders.”
“Comes from where?” I asked.
“Madam, he appears when he wishes, then he receives who he will. Madam, please, tell me your name and I will tell him that you have called.”
“You either open the gate or I will climb over the wall,” I said.
The boys were horrified. “No, Madam, you can’t do that!”
“Well? Aren’t you going to shout for help?” I asked.
The two slaves stared amazed. They were so pretty. One was slightly taller than the other. Both wore exquisite bracelets.
“Just as I thought,” I said. “There’s no one else here but you.” I turned and tested the thick snaggle of vine that rose over the plastered brick. I leapt up and planted my right foot as high as I could in the thick mesh and rose in one leap to throw my arms over the top of the wall.
Flavius had risen from the grass and rushed to me.
“Madam, I beg you not to do this,” said Flavius. “Madam, this is bad, bad, bad! You can’t just climb this man’s wall.”
The servants within were chattering frantically with one another. I think it was in Chaldean.
“Madam, I fear for you!” cried Flavius. “How can I protect you from such a man as this Marius? Madam, the man will be angry with you!”
I lay on the top of the wall, on my stomach, catching my breath. The garden inside was vast and lovely. Ah, what marble fountains. The two slaves had backed up and were staring at me as if I were a powerful monster.
“Please, please!” both boys pleaded with me at once. “He’ll exact a terrible vengeance! You don’t know him. Please, Madam, wait!”
“Hand me the sheets of paper, Flavius, hurry. I have no time for disobedience!”
Flavius complied. “Oh, this is wrong, wrong, wrong!” he said. “Nothing can come of this but the most fearful misunderstandings.”
Then I slid down the inside of the wall, tickled all over by the thick overlay of bristling and brilliant leaves, and I lay my head in the matted tendrils and blossoms. I didn’t fear the bees. I never have. I rested. I held tight to my written pages. Then moved to the gate so I could see Flavius.
“You let me handle Marius,” I said. “Now, you didn’t come out without your dagger.”
“No, I did not,” he said, lifting his cloak to reveal it, “and with your permission I would like to plunge it through my heart now so that I will be most assuredly stone-cold dead before the Master of this house arrives home to find you running rampant in his garden!”
“Permission denied,” I said. “Don’t you dare. Haven’t you heard all that has been said? You are on guard not against Marius but against a shriveled limping demon of burnt flesh. He’ll come at dark! What if he reaches here before Marius?”
“Oh, yea gods, help me!” His hands flew to his face.
“Flavius, straighten up. You are a man! Do I have to remind you of this perpetually? You are watching for this dreaded burnt bag of bones, and he is weak. Remember what Marius said. Go for his head. Stab him in the eyes, just cut him and cut him and shout for me, and I will come. Now go to sleep until dark. He can’t come till then, if he even knows to come here! Besides, I think Marius will arrive first.”
I turned and walked towards the open doors of the villa. The beautiful long-haired boys were in tears.
For a moment the tranquillity and moist cool air of the garden lulled all fear in me, and I seemed safe, among patterns I understood, far far from dark Temples, safe in Tuscany, in our own family gardens there, which had been so rich like this.
“Let me beg you one last time to come back out of this man’s garden!” Flavius shouted. I ignored him.
All the doors of this lovely plastered villa stood open to the porches above or the outdoors below. Listen to the trickling of the fountains. There were lemon trees, and many a marble statue of a lazy, sensuous god or goddess, round which flowers grew in rich purple or blue. Diana, the huntress, rose from a bed of orange blossoms, the marble old and pitted And there, a lazy Ganymede, half-covered in green moss, marked some path that had been overgrown. Far off, I could see the naked bending Venus at her bath on the edge of a pool. Water flowed into the pool. I glimpsed fountains all around me.
The small common white lilies had gone Wild and there stood old olive trees with marvelously twisted trunks, so wondrous to climb in childhood.
A pastoral sweetness hung over all, yet nature had been kept at bay. The stucco of the walls was freshly painted and so were the wooden shutters, opened wide.
The two boys were crying. “Madam, he’ll be so angry.”
“Well, not with you,” I said, as I entered the house. I had come across the grass and left scarcely any footprint on the marble floor.
“Boys, do stop sobbing! You don’t even have to plead with him to believe you. Isn’t that true? He’ll read the truth in your thoughts?”
This startled each in his own way. They looked at me warily.
I stopped just past the threshold. Something emanated from the house, not loud enough to be called a sound, but very like the rhythmic precursor of a sound. I had heard this very soundless rhythm before. When was it? In the Temple? When first I entered the room where Marius had hidden behind the screen?
I walked on marble floors from room to room. Breezes everywhere played with the hanging lamps. There were many lamps. And the candles. How many candles. And lamps on stands. Why, when this place was lighted up, it must have been bright as day!
And gradually I realized the entire lower floor was a library, except for the inevitable sumptuous Roman bath, and an enormous wardrobe of clothes.
Every other room was filled with books. Nothing but books. Of course there were couches for lying and reading, and desks for writing, but every wall had its prodigious stack of scrolls or shelves of bound books.
Also there were strange doors. They appeared to open onto conceale
d stairwells. But they had no locks and seemed to be made of polished granite. I found at least two of these! And one chamber of the first floor was totally enclosed in stone and locked in the same way, by impenetrable doors.
As the slaves trembled and sobbed I went outside and up the stairs to the second floor. Empty. Every room simply empty, except the room that obviously belonged to the boys! There were their beds, and their little Persian altars and gods, and rich rugs and tasseled pillows and the usual Oriental swirl of design. I came down.
The boys sat at the main door, as if positioned like marble statues, each with his knees up, head down, weeping softly, perhaps getting a bit worn out.
“Where are the bedrooms of this house? Where is Marius’s bedroom? Where is the kitchen? Where is the household shrine?”
One of them let out a soft choking cry. “There are no bedrooms.”
“Of course not,” I said.
“Our food is brought to us,” wailed the other. “Cooked and most delicious. But I fear that, unwittingly, we have enjoyed our last meal.”
“Oh, do take it easy. How can he blame you for what I’ve done? You’re merely children and he’s a gentle being, is he not? Here, put these pages on his desk, and weight them down so that they don’t fly away.”
“Yes, he is most gentle,” said the boy. “But most set in his ways.”
I closed my eyes. I sensed the sound again, the emanating encroaching sound. Did it want to be heard? I couldn’t tell. It seemed impersonal, like the beat of a sleeping heart or the flow of the water in the fountains.
I walked over to a large beautiful couch, draped in fine silk with Persian designs. It was very wide and seemed to bear, despite much straightening, the imprint of a man’s form. There was the pillow there, all fluffed and fresh, yet still I could see the indentation of the head, where the man had lain. “Does he lie here?”
The boys leapt to their feet, curls flying.
“Yes, Madam, that is his couch,” said the speaker of the two. “Please, please, don’t touch it. He lies there for hours and reads. Madam, please! He is most particular that we do not lie on it playfully in his absence, though he gives us free rein in every other regard.”
“He’ll know if you even touch it!” said the other boy, speaking up for the first time.
“I’m going to sleep on it,” I said. I lay down and closed my eyes. I rolled over and brought up my knees. “I am tired. I want only sleep. I feel safe for the first time in so long.”
“You do?” asked one of the boys.
“Oh, come here and lie by me. Bring pillows for your heads, so that he will see me before he sees you. He knows me well. The pages I have brought, where are they, yes, on the desk, well, they will make it clear why I have come in. It’s all changed now. Something is wanted from me. I have no choice. There is no road home. Marius will understand. I’ve come as close to him as possible for my protection.”
I lay back right in the hollow of the pillow where he lay. I took a long deep breath. “The breeze is like music here,” I whispered, “do you hear it?”
I slept the deep exhausted sleep which I had held off now for so many hours of both night and day.
Hours must have passed.
I woke with a start. The sky was purple. The slaves were curled up next to the couch, just beneath me, like terrified little animals.
I heard the noise again, the sound, distinct, a pulse. I thought oddly of something I used to like to do as a child. It was this: I would put my ear to my Father’s chest. And when I heard his heart, then I would kiss it. It had always made him happy.
I rose, realizing that I was not fully awake but certain this was no dream. I was in the beautiful villa of Marius in Antioch. The marble rooms opened one upon another.
I went to the last room, the room enclosed in stone. The doors were impossibly heavy. But suddenly, silently, they opened as if pushed from within.
I entered a massive chamber. Another pair of doors lay ahead of me. They too were made of stone. They had to lead to a stairwell, for the house ended just beyond.
These doors too suddenly opened, as if released by a spring! light from below.
A stairway went down from the threshold of the door. It was white marble, and newly made, with no wear of feet on it. So smooth, each slab, so clean.
A soft series of flames burned below, sending their antic shadows up the stairwell.
The sound now seemed louder. I dosed my eyes. Oh, that all the world were these polished chambers and all that exists could be explained within.
Suddenly, I heard a loud cry.
“Lady Pandora!”
I spun around.
“Pandora, he is over the wall!”
The boys came screaming through the house, echoing Flavius’s cry, “Lady Pandora!”
A great darkness gathered itself right before my eyes and then descended on me, throwing the helpless, beseeching boys to the side. I was almost pitched down the stairwell.
Then I realized I was in the grasp of the burnt thing. I looked down to see the black wrinkled arm, like old leather, that held me. Strong spices filled my nostrils. Fresh doming covered the hideously thin leg I saw, the dried-up foot.
“Boys, get the lamps, set it on fire!” I shouted. I fought desperately, driving us both back from the stairwell, but I couldn’t get loose from the creature. “Boys, the lamps downstairs!”
The boys clung to one another.
“I have you!” this creature said tenderly in my ear.
“No, you don’t!” I said, and gave him one fine blow with my right elbow. It drove him off balance. He nearly toppled. But he didn’t let me go. The whiteness of his tunic glowed in the shadows as he once more enclosed my arms, and rendered me almost helpless.
“Boys, downstairs, lamps full of oil!” I said. “Flavius!”
The creature hugged me as if he were a giant snake. I could scarce breathe.
“We can’t go downstairs!” one of the boys cried.
“We’re not allowed,” said the other.
The creature laughed in my ear, a rich deep laugh. “Not everyone is so bound to rebellion as you are, beautiful woman, outwitting your brother at the foot of the Temple steps.”
It was shocking to hear this clear articulate voice coming from a body which seemed burnt beyond all hope of life. I watched the blackened fingers moving over my own. I felt the touch of something cold on my neck. Then I felt the punctures. His fangs.
“Not!” I cried I thrashed back and forth in his grip, then threw all of my weight against him so that he almost toppled again but didn’t fall.
“Stop it, bitch, or I’ll kill you now.”
“Why don’t you?” I demanded.
I twisted to see his face. It was like that of a long-dead corpse dried in the desert, burnt black with a spine of a nose, and arched lips that seemed quite unable to dose over white teeth and the two fangs he bared now as he looked at me.
His eyes were full of blood as Marius’s eyes had been. His hair was a fine black mop very thick, fresh and clean, as though it had sprung from his body, renewing itself like magic.
“Yes,” he said confidently. “That is just what happened. And very soon I will have the blood I need to renew all of me! I won’t be this hideous monster you see. I’ll be what I was before those Egyptian fools put her in the sun!”
“Hmmm, so she kept her promise,” I said “She walked into the rays of Amon Ra so you would all burn up.”
“What do you know of it? She hasn’t moved or spoken in a thousand years. I was that old when they removed the stones that enclosed her. She couldn’t have walked into the sun. She is a great sacred vial of blood, an enthroned source of power, that’s all, and I will have that blood, which your Marius has stolen out of Egypt.”
I pondered, searching desperately for a means to free myself.
“You came to me as a gift,” said the burnt one. “You were all I needed to take on Marius! He wears his affections and weakness for you li
ke bright silk garments for me to see!”
“I see,” I said.
“No, you don’t!” he said. My head was pulled back by my hair. I screamed in annoyance.
His sharp teeth went into my neck. A series of heated wires threaded me through and through.
I swooned. An ecstasy rendered me motionless. I tried to resist, but I saw visions. I saw him in his glory, a golden man of an Eastern land, in a Temple of skulls. He was dressed in bright green silk breeches with an ornamented band around his forehead. Face delicate of nose and mouth. Then I saw him, without explanation, burst into flames that sent his slaves screaming. He twisted and turned in these flames, not dying but suffering exquisitely.
My head was swimming, and I was weakening. My blood flowed from all parts of my body into his wretched form. I thought of my Father, of my Father saying, “Live, Lydia!” I wrenched my neck away from him and turned, poking him hard with my shoulder, and then pushed him with two hands so that he slid backwards on the floor. I brought my knee up against him. Nothing could get him off me!
I tried to reach for my dagger, but I was too dizzy, and besides, I didn’t have my dagger. My only chance lay with the burning oil in the lamps at the foot of the stairs. I turned, reeling, and the monster caught me again with both hands by my long hair. He yanked me back.
“You demon!” I said. His strength had worn me out. He tightened his grip slowly. I knew that soon my arms would break.
“Ah,” he said, twisting free of me, and holding tight as ever. “My purpose is served.”
A brighter light suddenly filled up the stairway.
A torch was placed at the foot of the steps. Then Marius stepped into view.
He appeared utterly calm and he appeared to be looking past me into the eyes of my captor.
“And what will you do now, Akbar?” Marius asked. “Hurt her, violate her but one more time, and I shall kill you. Kill her, and you will die in agony. Let her go and you can run.”
He mounted the steps one by one.
“You underestimate me,” said the burnt thing, “you arrogant Roman bumbler, you think I don’t know you keep the Queen and the King, that you stole them out of Egypt? It is known. The word is spread through the world, through the Northern woods, through the wild lands, through the lands of which you know nothing. You killed the Elder who guarded the King and the Queen and stole them! The King and Queen have not moved or spoken in a thousand years. You took our Queen from Egypt. You think you are a Roman Emperor? You think she is a Queen you can take captive, like Cleopatra! Cleopatra was a Greek whore. This is our Isis, our Akasha! You blaspheming fool. Now let me into Akasha’s presence. Stand against me, and this woman, the only mortal whom you truly love, dies.”