by Rice, Anne
“And now you come to Antioch, and I think, in my self-centered manner, as you will promptly note—if ever a woman was created for me, it is this woman. And I know as soon as I leave you in the morning, that I must somehow get the Mother and Father out of Antioch, get them away, but then this blood drinker has to be destroyed, and then and only then can you be safely left.”
“Safely abandoned,” I said.
“Do you blame me?” he asked.
The question caught me off guard. I looked at him for a seemingly endless moment, allowing his beauty to fill my eyes, and sensing with intolerable keenness his sadness and desperation. Oh, how he needed me! How desperately he needed not just any mortal soul in which to confide, but me.
“You really did want to protect me, didn’t you?” I asked. “And your explanation of all points is so completely rational; it has the elegance of mathematics. There is no need for reincarnation, or destiny, or any miraculous allowance for any part of what’s happened.”
“It’s what I believe,” he said sharply. His face grew blank, then stern. “I would never give you anything short of truth. Are you a woman who wants to be humored?”
“Don’t be fanatical in your dedication to reason,” I said.
These words both shocked and offended him. “Don’t cling to reason so desperately in a world of so many horrid contradictions!”
He was silenced.
“If you so cling to reason,” I said, “then in the passage of time reason may fail you, and when it does you may find yourself taking refuge in madness.”
“What on Earth do you mean?”
“You’ve made of reason and logic religion. It’s obviously the only way you can endure what’s happened to you, that you’re a blood drinker and custodian, apparently, of these displaced and forgotten deities.”
“They aren’t deities!” He grew angry. “Thousands of years ago, they were made, through some mingling of spirit and flesh that rendered them immortal. They find their refuge obviously in oblivion. In your kindness you characterize it as a garden from which the Mother gathered flowers and leaves to make a garland for you, a trap, as you said. But this is your sweet girlish poetry. We do not know that they string very many words together.”
“I am no sweet girl,” I said. “Poetry belongs to everyone. Speak to me!” I said. “And put aside these words, ‘girl’ and ‘woman.’ Don’t be so frightened of me.”
“I am not,” he said angrily.
“You are! Even as this new blood races through me still, eats at me and transforms me, I cling to neither reason nor superstition for my safety. I can walk through a myth and out of it! You fear me, because you don’t know what I am. I look like a woman, I sound like a man, and your reason tells you the sum total is impossible!”
He rose from the table. His face took on a sheen like sweat but far more radiant.
“Let me tell you what happened to me!” he said resolutely.
“Good, do tell me,” I said. “In straightforward manner.”
He let this go by. I spoke against my heart. I wanted only to love him. I knew his cautions. But for all his wisdom, he displayed an enormous will, a man’s will, and I had to know the source of it. I concealed my love.
“How did they lure you?”
“They didn’t,” he said calmly. “I was captured by the Keltoi in Gaul, in the city of Massilia. I was brought North, my hair allowed to grow long, then shut up amid barbarians in a great hollow tree in Gaul. A burnt blood drinker made me into a ‘new god’ and told me to escape the local Priests, go South to Egypt and find out why all the blood drinkers had been burnt, the young ones dying, the old one suffering. I went for my own reasons! I wanted to know what I was!”
“I can well understand,” I said.
“But not before I saw blood worship at its most grisly and unspeakable—I was the god, mind you, Marius, who followed you adoringly all over Rome—and it was to me that these men were offered.”
“I’ve read it in Caesar’s history.”
“You’ve read it but you haven’t seen it. How dare you throw at me such a trivial boast!”
“Forgive me, I forgot your childish temper.”
He sighed. “Forgive me, I forgot your practical and naturally impatient intellect.”
“I’m sorry. I regret my words. I had to witness executions of Rome. It was my duty. And that was in the name of law. Who suffers more or less? Victims of sacrifice or the law?”
“Very well. I escaped these Keltoi and went to Egypt, and there I found the Elder, who was the keeper of the Mother and the Father, the Queen and the King, the first blood drinkers of all time, from which this enhancement of our blood flows. This Elder told me stories that were vague but compelling. The Royal Pair had once been human, no more. A spirit or demon had possessed one or both, lodging itself so firmly that no exorcism could oust it. The Royal Pair could transform others by giving the blood. They sought to make a religion. It was overthrown. Again and again it was overthrown. Anyone who possesses the blood can make another! Of course this Elder claimed ignorance of why so many had been burnt. But it was he who had dragged his sacred and royal charges into the sun after centuries of meaningless guardianship! Egypt was dead, he said to me. ‘The granary of Rome,’ he called it. He said the Royal Pair had not moved in a millennium.”
This filled me with the most remarkable and poetic sense of horror.
“Well, one day’s hot light was not enough anymore to destroy the ancient parents, but all over the world the children suffered. And this cowardly Elder, given only pain for his reward, a burned skin, lost the courage required to continue the exposure of the Royal Pair. He had no cause, one or another.
“Akasha spoke to me. She spoke as best she could. In images, pictures of what had happened since the beginning, how this tribe of gods and goddesses had sprung from her, and rebellions had occurred, and how much history was lost, and purpose was lost, and when it came to the forming of words, Akasha could make but only a few silent sentences: ‘Marius, take us out of Egypt!’ ” He paused. “ ‘Take us out of Egypt, Marius. The Elder means to destroy us. Guard us or we perish here.’ ”
He took a breath; he was calmer now, not so angry, but very much shattered, and in my ever increasing vampiric vision, I knew more about him, how very courageous he was, how very determined to hold to principles in which he believed, in spite of the magic that had swallowed him whole before he had had time even to question it. His was an attempt at a noble life, in spite of all.
“My fate,” he said, “was directly connected to hers, to them! If I left them, the Elder would sooner or later put them in the sun again, and I, lacking the blood of centuries, would burn up like wax! My life, already altered, would have been ended. But the Elder did not ask me to install a new priesthood. Akasha did not ask me to install a new religion! She did not speak of altars or worship. Only the old burnt-out god in the Northern grove among the barbarians had asked me to do such a thing when he sent me to the South, to Egypt, the motherland of all mysteries.”
“How long have you kept them?”
“Over fifteen years. I lose count. They never move or speak. The wounded ones, those burnt so badly that time will take centuries to heal them, they learn that I am here. They come. I try to extinguish them before their minds can give forth a flash of a confirming image to other distant minds. She doesn’t guide these burnt children to where she is, as she once guided me! If I am tricked or overwhelmed, she moves only as you saw, to crush the blood drinker. But she has called you, Pandora, reached out for you. And we know now to what exact purpose. And I’ve been cruel to you. Clumsy.”
He turned to me. His voice grew tender. “Tell me, Pandora,” he asked. “In the vision you saw, when we were married, were we young or old? Were you the girl of fifteen I sought too early perhaps, or the mature full blossom of a creature you are now? Are the families happy? Are we comely?”
I was hotly embraced by the sincerity of his words. The anguis
h and the pleading that lay behind them.
“We were as we are now,” I said, cautiously answering his smile with my own. “You were a man fixed in the prime of life forever, and I? As I am at this hour.”
“Believe me,” he said with sweetness in his voice, “I would not have spoken so harshly on this of all nights, but you have now so many other nights to come. Nothing can kill you now, but the sun or fire. Nothing in you will deteriorate. You have a thousand experiences to discover.”
“And what of the ecstasy when I drank from her?” I asked. “What of her own beginnings and her suffering? Does she in no way connect herself to the sacred?”
“What is sacred?” he asked, shrugging his shoulder. “Tell me. What is sacred? Was it sanctity you saw in her dreams?”
I bowed my head. I couldn’t answer.
“Certainly not the Roman Empire,” he said, “Certainly not the temples of Augustus Caesar. Certainly not the worship of Cybele! Certainly not the cult of those who worship fire in Persia. Is the name Isis sacred anymore, or was it ever? The Elder in Egypt, my first and only instructor in all this, said that Akasha invented the stories of Isis and Osiris to suit her purposes, to give a poetry to her worship. I think rather she grafted herself upon old stories. The demon in those two grows with each new blood drinker made. It must.”
“But to no purpose?”
“That it may know more?” he said. “That it may see more, feel more, through each of us which carries its blood? Perhaps it is such a creature as that and each of us is but a tiny part of it, carrying all its senses and capacities and returning our experiences to it. It reaches out through us to know the world!”
“I can tell you this,” he said. He paused and put his hands on the desk. “What burns in me does not care if the victim is innocent or guilty of any crime. It thirsts. Not every night, but often! It says nothing! It does not talk of altars to me in my heart! It drives me as though I were the battle steed and it the mounted General! It is Marius who weeds the good from the bad, according to the old custom, for reasons you can well understand, but not this ravening thirst; this thirst knows nature but no morality.”
“I love you, Marius,” I said. “You and my Father are the only men I’ve ever really loved. But I must go out alone now.”
“What did you say!” He was amazed. “It’s just past midnight.”
“You’ve been very patient, but I have to walk alone now.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You will not,” I said.
“But you can’t simply roam around Antioch on your own, alone.”
“Why not? I can hear mortal thoughts now if I want to. A litter just passed. The slaves are so drunk it’s a wonder they don’t drop the thing and heave the Master into the road, and he himself is fast asleep. I want to walk alone, out there, in the city in the dark places and the dangerous places and the evil places and the places where even … where even a god would not go.”
“This is your vengeance on me,” he said. I walked towards the gate and he followed. “Pandora, not alone.”
“Marius, my love,” I said, turning, taking his hand. “It is not vengeance. The words you spoke earlier, ‘girl’ and ‘woman,’ they have always circumscribed my life. I want only now to walk fearlessly with my arms bare and my hair down my back, into any cavern of danger I choose. I am drunk still from her blood, from yours! Things shimmer and flicker that should shine. I must be alone to ponder all you’ve said.”
“But you have to be back before dawn, well before. You have to be with me in the crypt below. You can’t merely lie in some room somewhere. The deadly light will penetrate—”
He was so protective, so lustrous, so infuriated.
“I will be back,” I said, “and well before dawn, and for now, my heart will break if we are not, as of this moment, bound together.”
“We are bound,” he said. “Pandora, you could drive me mad.”
He stopped at the bars of the gate.
“Don’t come any farther,” I said as I left.
I walked down towards Antioch. My legs had such strength and spring, and the dust and pebbles of the road were nothing to my feet, and my eyes penetrated the night to see the full conspiracy of owls and little rodents that hovered in the trees’, eyeing me, then fleeing as if their natural senses warned them against me.
Soon I came into the city proper. I think the resolution with which I moved from little street to little street was enough to frighten anyone who would have contemplated molesting me. I heard only cowardice and erotic curses from the dark, those tangled ugly curses men heap on women they desire—half threat, half dismissal.
I could sense the people in their houses fast asleep, and hear the guards on watch, talking in their barracks behind the Forum.
I did all the things the new blood drinkers always do. I touched the surfaces of walls and stared, enchanted at a common torch and the moths that gave themselves up to it. I felt against my naked arms and fragile tunic the dreams of all Antioch surrounding me.
Rats fled up and down the gutters and the streets. The river gave off its own sound, and there came a hollow echoing from the ships at anchor, even from the faintest stirring of the water.
The Forum, resplendent with its ever burning lights, caught the moon as if it were a great human trap for it, the very reverse of an earthly crater, a man-made design that could be seen and blessed by the intransigent heavens.
When I came to my own house, I found I could climb to the very top easily, and there I sat on the tiled roof, so relaxed and secure and free, looking down into the courtyard, into the peristyle, where I had really learned—alone on those three nights—the truths that had prepared me for Akasha’s blood.
In calmness and without pain, I thought it through again—as if I owed this reconsideration to the woman I had been, the initiate, the woman who had sought refuge in the Temple. Marius was right. The Queen and King were possessed of some demon which spread through the blood, feeding upon it and growing, as I could feel it doing in me now.
The King and Queen did not invent justice! The Queen, who broke the little Pharaoh into sticks, did not invent law or righteousness!
And the Roman courts, bumbling awkwardly towards each decision, weighing all sides, refusing any magical or religious device, they did even in these terrible times strive for justice. It was a system based not upon the revelation of the gods, but upon reason.
But I could not regret the moment of intoxication when I’d drunk her blood and believed in her, and seen the flowers come down upon us. I could not regret that any mind could conceive of such perfect transcendence.
She had been my Mother, my Queen, my goddess, my all. I had known it as we were meant to know it when we drink the potions in the Temple, when we sing, when we are rocking in delirious song. And in her arms I had known it. In Marius’s arms I’d known it as well, and in a safer measure, and I wanted only to be with him now.
How ghastly her worship seemed. Flawed and ignorant, being elevated to such power! And how revealing suddenly that at the core of mysteries there should lie such degrading explanations. Blood spilt on her golden gown!
All images and meaningful glimpses do but teach you deeper things, I thought again, as I had in the Temple, when I had settled for the consolation of a basalt statue.
It is I, and I alone, who must make of my new life a heroic tale.
I was very happy for Marius that he had such comfort in reason. But reason was only a created thing, imposed with faith upon the world, and the stars promise nothing to no one.
I had seen something deeper in those dark nights of hiding in this house in Antioch, in mourning for my Father. I had seen that at the very heart of Creation there very well might lie something as uncontrollable and incomprehensible as a raging volcano.
Its lava would destroy trees and poets alike.
So take this gift, Pandora, I told myself. Go home, thankful that you are again wed, for you have never made a better m
atch or seen a more tantalizing future.
When I returned, and my return was very rapid, full of new lessons in how I might pass quickly over rooftops, scarce touching them, and over walls—when I returned, I found him as I had left him, only much sadder. He sat in the garden, just as he had in the vision shown to me by Akasha.
It must have been a place he loved, behind the villa with its many doors, a bench facing a thicket and a natural stream bubbling up and over the rocks and spilling down into a current through high grass.
He rose at once.
I took him in my arms.
“Marius, forgive me,” I said.
“Don’t say such a thing, I’m to blame for it all. And I didn’t protect you from it.”
We were in each other’s arms. I wanted to press my teeth into him, drink his blood, and then I did, and felt him taking the blood from me. This was a union more powerful than any I had ever known in a marriage bed, and I yielded to it as I never yielded in life to anyone.
I felt an exhaustion sweep me suddenly. I withdrew my kiss with its teeth.
“Come on, now,” he said. “Your slave is asleep. And during the day, while we must sleep, he will bring all your possessions here, and those girls of yours, should you want to keep them.”
We walked down the stairs, we entered another room. It took all Marius’s strength to pull back the door, which meant simply that no mortal man could do it.
There lay a sarcophagus, plain, of granite.
“Can you lift the lid of the sarcophagus?” Marius asked.
“I am feeling weak!”
“It’s the sun rising, try to lift the lid. Slide it to one side.”
I did, and inside I found a bed of crushed lilies and rose petals, of silken pillows, and bits of dried flower kept for scent.
I stepped in, turned around, sat and stretched out in this stone prison. At once he took his place in the tomb beside me, and pushed the lid back to its place, and all the world’s light in any form was shut out, as if the dead would have it so.
“I’m drowsy. I can hardly form words.”