by Rice, Anne
A boy in a delicate gilded chair argued with those around him. The men were old, half-invisible in the darkness. The lamp shone on the boy’s face. We stood in the door. The boy was frail, his little limbs like sticks.
“And you say,” said the incredulous boy, “that these blood drinkers are worshiped in the hills!”
I knew he was the Pharaoh by the sacred lock of hair that grew from his bald head, by the manner in which the others waited upon him. He looked up in horror as she approached. His guardians fled.
“Yes,” she said, “and you will do nothing to stop it!”
She lifted him, this small fragile boy, and tore at his throat as an animal might do it, letting the blood flood from the fatal wound. “Little King,” she said. “Little Kingdom.”
The vision ended.
Her cold white skin was closed beneath my lips. I kissed her now. I no longer drank.
I felt my own form, felt myself fall back over her arm, felt myself slipping out of her embrace.
In the dim radiance, her profile remained as it had before, silent and without feeling. Stark, a face without a blemish or a line. I sank back into Marius’s arms. Her arm and hand returned to their former rigid position.
Everything was brilliantly clear, the motionless King and Queen, the artful figures fixed in lapis lazuli in the gold mosaics.
I felt a sharp pain in me, in the heart, in the womb, as if someone had stabbed me. “Marius!” I cried out.
He picked me up and carried me from the chamber.
“No, I want to kneel at her feet,” I said. The pain took the breath out of me. I tried not to scream from this pain. Oh, the world had just been reborn. And now this agony.
He set me down on the high grass, letting it be crushed under me. A flood of sour human fluid came out of my womb, even out of my mouth. I saw flowers right near me. I saw the friendly Heavens, vivid as in my vision. The pain was unspeakable.
I knew now why he had removed me from the Shrine.
I wiped at my cheek. I couldn’t bear this filth. The pain devoured me. I struggled to see again what she had revealed to me, remember what she said, but there was too much obstruction in this pain.
“Marius!” I cried.
He covered me and kissed my cheek. “Drink from me,” he said, “drink until the pain goes away. It’s only the body dying, drink. Pandora, you are immortal.”
“Fill me, take me,” I said. I reached down between his legs.
“It doesn’t matter now.”
But it was hard, this organ I sought, the organ forever lost to the god Osiris. I guided it, hard and cold as it was, into my body. Then I drank and drank, and when I felt his teeth again on my neck, when he began to draw from me the new mixture that filled my veins, it was sweet suckling, and I knew him and loved him and knew all his secrets in one flash which meant nothing.
He was right. The lower organs meant nothing. He fed on me. I fed on him. This was our marriage. All around us, the grass was waving softly in the breeze, a majestic conjugal bed, and the smell of the green flooded me.
The pain was gone. I flung out my arm and felt the softness of flowers.
He tore off my fouled dress and lifted me. He carried me into the pool where the marble Venus stood forever with back bent, and one foot raised above the cool water.
“Pandora!” he whispered.
The boys stood at his side, offering him pitchers.
He dipped a pitcher and poured the water over me. I felt beneath my feet the tile at the bottom of the pool as the water ran down my skin. I had never known such sensation! Another pitcherful washed over me, deliciously. I feared for one instant the pain would return, but no, it was gone.
“I love you with all my heart,” I said. “All my love belongs to them and to you, Marius. Marius, I can see in the darkness, I can see in the deep dark beneath the trees.”
Marius held me. The boys slowly bathed us both, dipping their pitchers and pouring the silvery water over us.
“Oh, to have you with me,” Marius said, “to have you here; not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.” He stood back, and I gloried in him, drenched as I was, reached to touch his long wild foreign hair. He sparkled all over with droplets.
“Yes,” I said. “It was exactly what she wanted.”
His face stiffened. He scowled. He stared at me. Something had changed altogether, and for the worse. I could feel it.
“What?” he asked.
“It is what she wanted. She made it plain to me in the visions. She wanted me to be with you, so you wouldn’t be alone.”
He stood back. Was this anger?
“Marius, what is the matter with you? Can’t you see what she’s done?”
He stepped back again, away from me.
“You didn’t realize that’s what was happening?” I asked.
The boys thrust forth towels. Marius took one and wiped his face and his hair. I did the same.
He was furious. He shook with anger. This was a moment of mingled and inexplicable beauty and horror—his white body there, the shimmering pool, the lights falling gracefully from the open doors of the house, and above, the stars, her stars. And Marius angry and bristling, his eyes full of outrage.
I looked at him.
“I am her Priestess now,” I said. “I’m to restore her worship. That’s what she wants. But she brought me also for you, because you were alone,” I said. “Marius, I saw all this. I saw our own wedding in Rome, as if it were the old days and our families were with us. I saw her worshipers.”
He was plainly horrified.
I didn’t want to see this. Surely I was misunderstanding him.
I stepped up on the grass. I let the boys dry my body. I looked up at the stars. The house with all its warm lamps seemed crude and fragile, a bumbled attempt to make an order of things, which could not compare to the making of one complete flower.
“Oh, how spectacular is the simple night,” I said. “It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design and tranquillity. All things follow their course.”
I stood back and spun around, letting the water fly from me. I was so strong. No dizziness overcame when I stopped. I had a sense of infinite power.
One of the boys held out a tunic for me. It was a man’s, but as I’ve said so often here, Roman clothes are very simple. It was just a short tunic. I put it on and let him tie the sash around my waist. I smiled at him. He trembled and stepped back from me.
“Dry my hair,” I told him. Ah, such sensations.
Slowly I looked up. Marius too was dried and dressed. He was still looking at me with violent protest, and downright indignation.
“Someone has to go in,” I said, “to change her golden gown. That blasphemer, he left her bloody.”
“I will do that!” Marius said in plain anger.
“Oh, so it comes to this,” I said. I looked around me, seduced by beauty to forget his altogether, to come back to him at some later hour after I had roamed beneath the olive trees and consorted with the constellations.
But his anger hurt me. The hurt was strange, and deep, without the various stages mortal flesh and mind command of pain.
“Oh, isn’t it splendid!” I said. “I learn that the goddess reigns, that she is real, that she has made all things! That the world is not just a giant graveyard! But I learn this as I find myself in an arranged marriage! And behold the groom! How he nurses his own temper.”
He sighed and bowed his head. Was I to see him cry again, this flawless familiar and beloved god among crushed flowers?
He looked up. “Pandora,” he said. “She’s not a goddess. She didn’t make the world.”
“How dare you say this!”
“I have to say it! I would have died for the truth when I was alive and will die for it now. But she will not let this happen. She needs me and she needs you to make me happy!”
“So very well!” I t
hrew my hands. “I am happy to do it. And we will restore her worship.”
“We will not!” he said. “How can you even think of such a thing.”
“Marius, I want to sing it from the tops of mountains; I want to tell the world that this miracle exists. I want to run through the streets singing. We are to restore her to her throne in a great Temple in the very middle of Antioch!”
“You’re talking madness!” he shouted.
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 clear 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 somew
here, 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 simple 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.