by Rice, Anne
The citadel against time. Even in my ignorance the words had their power. And the fear in me expanded, reached out to compass a thousand other causes.
He seemed distant for a moment, indescribably beautiful in the firelight, the dark auburn strands of his hair barely touching his smooth forehead, his lips parted in a beatific smile.
“If we cannot have the old ways, can’t we have each other?” he asked, and now his voice was the voice of the summons again. “Who else can understand your suffering? Who else knows what passed through your mind the night you stood on the stage of your little theater and you frightened all those you had loved?”
“Don’t speak about that,” I whispered. But I was softening all over, drifting into his eyes and his voice. Very near to me was the ecstasy I’d felt that night on the battlements. With all my will I reached out for Gabrielle.
“Who understands what passed through your mind when my renegade followers, reveling in the music of your precious fiddler, devised their ghastly boulevard enterprise?” he asked.
I didn’t speak.
“The Theater of the Vampires!” His lips lengthened in the saddest smile. “Does she comprehend the irony of it, the cruelty? Does she know what it was like when you stood on that stage as a young man and you heard the audience screaming for you? When time was your friend, not your enemy as it is now? When in the wings, you put out your arms and your mortal darlings came to you, your little family, folding themselves against you …”
“Stop, please. I ask you to stop.”
“Does anyone else know the size of your soul?”
Witchcraft. Had it ever been used with more skill? And what was he really saying to us beneath this liquid flow of beautiful language: Come to me, and I shall be the sun round which you are locked in orbit, and my rays shall lay bare the secrets you keep from each other, and I, who possess charms and powers of which you have no inkling, shall control and possess and destroy you!
“I asked you before,” I said. “What do you want? Really want?”
“You!” he said. “You and her! That we become three at this crossroads!”
Not that we surrender to you?
I shook my head. And I saw the same wariness and recoiling in Gabrielle.
He was not angry; there was no malice now. Yet he said again, in the same beguiling voice:
“I curse you,” and I felt it as if he’d declaimed it.
“I offered myself to you at the moment you vanquished me,” he said. “Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me.”
I was shaken, more shaken even than I had been in the sad and awful finish with Nicolas at Renaud’s. I had never once known fear in the crypt under les Innocents. But I had known it in this room since we came in.
And some anger boiled in him again, something too dreadful for him to control.
I watched him bow his head and turn away. He became small, light, and held his arms close to himself as he stood before the blaze and he thought of threats now to hurt me, and I heard them though they died before they ever reached his lips.
But something disturbed my vision for a fraction of a second. Maybe it was a candle guttering. Maybe it was the blink of my eye. Whatever it was, he vanished. Or he tried to vanish, and I saw him leaping away from the fire in a great dark streak.
“No!” I cried out. And lunging at something I couldn’t even see, I held him, material again, in my hands.
He had only moved very fast, and I had moved faster, and we stood facing each other in the doorway of the crypt, and again I said that single negation and I wouldn’t let him go.
“Not like this, we can’t part. We can’t leave each other in hatred, we can’t.” And my will dissolved suddenly as I embraced him and held tight to him so that he couldn’t free himself nor even move.
I didn’t care what he was, or what he had done in that doomed moment of lying to me, or even trying to overpower me, I didn’t care that I was no longer mortal and would never be again.
I wanted only that he should remain. I wanted to be with him, what he was, and all the things he had said were true. Yet it could never be as he wished it to be. He could not have this power over us. He could not divide Gabrielle from me.
Yet I wondered, did he himself really understand what he was asking? Was it possible that he believed the more innocent words he spoke?
Without speaking, without asking his consent, I led him back to the bench by the fire. I felt danger again, terrible danger. But it didn’t really matter. He had to remain here with us now.
Gabrielle was murmuring to herself. She was walking back and forth and her cloak hung from one shoulder and she seemed almost to have forgotten we were there.
Armand watched her, and when she turned to him, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, she spoke aloud.
“You come to him and you say, ‘Take me with you.’ You say, ‘Love me,’ and you hint of superior knowledge, secrets, yet you give us nothing, either of us, except lies.”
“I showed my power to understand,” he answered in a soft murmur.
“No, you did tricks with your understanding,” she replied. “You made pictures. And rather childish pictures. You have done this all along. You lure Lestat in the Palais with the most gorgeous illusions only to attack him. And here, when there is a respite in the struggle, what do you do but try to sow dissension between us …”
“Yes, illusions before, I admit it,” he answered. “But the things I’ve spoken here are true. Already you despise your son for his love of mortals, his need to be ever near them, his yielding to the violinist. You knew the Dark Gift would madden that one, and that it will finally destroy him. You do wish for your freedom, from all the Children of Darkness. You can’t hide that from me.”
“Ah, but you’re so simple,” she said. “You see, but you don’t see. How many mortal years did you live? Do you remember anything of them? What you’ve perceived is not the sum total of the passion I feel for my son. I have loved him as I have never loved any other being in creation. In my loneliness, my son is everything to me. How is it you can’t interpret what you see?”
“It’s you who fail to interpret,” he answered in the same soft manner. “If you had ever felt real longing for any other one, you would know that what you feel for your son is nothing at all.”
“This is futile,” I said, “to talk like this.”
“No,” she said to him without the slightest wavering. “My son and I are kin to each other in more ways than one. In fifty years of life, I’ve never known anyone as strong as myself, except my son. And what divides us we can always mend. But how are we to make you one of us when you use these things like wood for fire! But understand my larger point: what is it of yourself that you can give that we should want you?”
“My guidance is what you need,” he answered. “You’ve only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance …”
“Millions live without belief or guidance. It is you who cannot live without it,” she said.
Pain coming from him. Suffering.
But she went on, her voice so steady and without expression it was almost a monologue:
“I have my questions,” she asked. “There are things I must know. I cannot live without some embracing philosophy, but it has nothing to do with old beliefs in gods or devils.” She started pacing again, glancing to him as she spoke.
“I want to know, for example, why beauty exists,” she said, “why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, then why do they retain for us such symbolic power? Lestat calls it the Savage Garden, but for me that is not enough. And I must confess that this, this maniacal curiosity or call it what you will, leads me away from my hum
an victims. It leads me into the open countryside, away from human creation.
And maybe it will lead me away from my son, who is under the spell of all things human.”
She came up to him, nothing in her manner suggesting a woman now, and she narrowed her eyes as she looked into his face.
“But that is the lantern by which I see the Devil’s Road,” she said. “By what lantern have you traveled it? What have you really learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do you know about us, and how we came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing.”
He was speechless. He had no art to hide his amazement.
He stared at her in innocent confusion. Then he rose and he slipped away, obviously trying to escape her, a battered spirit as he stared blankly before him.
The silence closed in. And I felt for the moment strangely protective for him. She had spoken the unadorned truth about the things that interested her as had been her custom ever since I could remember, and as always, there was something violently disregarding about it. She spoke of what mattered to her with no thought of what had befallen him.
Come to a different plane, she had said, my plane. And he was stymied and belittled. The degree of his helplessness was becoming alarming. He was not recovering from her attack.
He turned and he moved towards the benches again, as if he would sit, then towards the sarcophagi, then towards the wall. It seemed these solid surfaces repelled him as though his will confronted them first in an invisible field and he was buffeted about.
He drifted out of the room and into the narrow stone stairwell and then he turned and came back.
His thoughts were locked inside himself or, worse, there were no thoughts!
There were only the tumbling images of what he saw before him, simple material things glaring back at him, the iron-studded door, the candles, the fire. Some full-blown evocation of the Paris streets, the vendors and the hawkers of papers, the cabriolets, the blended sound of an orchestra, a horrid din of words and phrases from the books he had so recently read.
I couldn’t bear this, but Gabrielle gestured sternly that I should stay where I was.
Something was building in the crypt. Something was happening in the very air itself.
Something changed even as the candles melted, and the fire crackled and licked at the blackened stones behind it, and the rats moved in the chambers of the dead below.
Armand stood in the arched doorway, and it seemed hours had passed though they hadn’t and Gabrielle was a long distance away in the corner of the room, her face cool in its concentration, her eyes as radiant as they were small.
Armand was going to speak to us, but it was no explanation he was going to give. There was no direction even to the things he would say, arid it was as if we’d cut him open and the images were coming out like blood.
Armand was just a young boy in the doorway, holding the backs of his own arms. And I knew what I felt. It was a monstrous intimacy with another being, an intimacy that made even the rapt moments of the kill seem dim and under control. He was opened and could no longer contain the dazzling stream of pictures that made his old silent voice seem thin and lyrical and made up.
Had this been the danger all along, the trigger of my fear? Even as I recognized it, I was yielding, and it seemed the great lessons of my life had all been learned through the renunciation of fear. Fear was once again breaking the shell around me so that something else could spring to life.
Never, never in all my existence, not mortal or immortal, had I been threatened with an intimacy quite like this.
The Story of Armand
3
The chamber had faded. The walls were gone.
Horsemen came. A gathering cloud on the horizon. Then screams of terror. And an auburn-haired child in crude peasant’s clothes running on and on, as the horsemen broke loose in a horde and the child fighting and kicking as he was caught and thrown over the saddle of a rider who bore him away beyond the end of the world. Armand was this child.
And these were the southern steppes of Russia, but Armand didn’t know that it was Russia. He knew Mother and Father and Church and God and Satan, but he didn’t even understand the name of home, or the name of his language, or that the horsemen who carried him away were Tatars and that he would never see anything that he knew or loved again.
Darkness, the tumultuous movement of the ship and its never ending sickness, and emerging out of the fear and the numbing despair, the vast glittering wilderness of impossible buildings that was Constantinople in the last days of the Byzantine Empire, with her fantastical multitudes and her slave-auction blocks. The menacing babble of foreign tongues, threats made in the universal language of gesture, and all around him the enemies he could not distinguish or placate or escape.
Years and years would pass, beyond a mortal lifetime, before Armand would look back on that awesome moment and give them names and histories, the Byzantine officials of the court who would have castrated him and the harem keepers of Islam who would have done the same, and the proud Mameluke warriors of Egypt who would have taken him to Cairo with them had he been fairer and stronger, and the radiant soft-spoken Venetians in their leggings and velvet doublets, the most dazzling creatures of all, Christians even as he was a Christian, yet laughing gently to one another as they examined him, as he stood mute, unable to answer, to plead, even to hope.
I saw the seas before him, the great rolling blue of the Aegean and the Adriatic, and his sickness again in the hold and his solemn vow not to live.
And then the great Moorish palaces of Venice rising from the gleaming surface of the lagoon, and the house to which he was taken, with its dozens and dozens of secret chambers, the light of the sky glimpsed only through barred windows, and the other boys speaking to him in that soft strange tongue that was Venetian and the threats and the cajoling as he was convinced, against all his fear and superstitions, of the sins that he must commit with the endless procession of strangers in this landscape of marble and torchlight, each chamber opening to a new tableau of tenderness that surrendered to the same ritual and inexplicable and finally cruel desire.
And at last one night when, for days and days he had refused to submit and he was hungry and sore and would not speak any longer to anyone, he was pushed through one of those doors again, just as he was, soiled and blind from the dark room in which he’d been locked, and the creature standing there to receive him, the tall one in red velvet, with the lean and almost luminous face, touched him so gently with cool fingers that, half dreaming, he didn’t cry as he saw the coins exchange hands. But it was a great deal of money. Too much money. He was being sold off. And the face, it was too smooth, it might have been a mask.
At the final moment, he screamed. He swore he would obey, he wouldn’t fight anymore. Will someone tell him where he’s being taken, he won’t disobey anymore, please, please. But even as he was pulled down the stairs towards the dank smell of the water, he felt the firm, delicate fingers of his new Master again, and on his neck cool and tender lips that could never, never hurt him, and that first deadly and irresistible kiss.
Love and love and love in the vampire kiss. It bathed Armand, cleansed him, this is everything, as he was carried into the gondola and the gondola moved like a great sinister beetle through the narrow stream into the sewers beneath another house.
Drunk on pleasure. Drunk on the silky white hands that smoothed back his hair and the voice that called him beautiful; on the face that in moments of feeling was suffused with expression only to become as serene and dazzling as something made of jewels and alabaster in repose. Like a pool of moonlit water it was. Touch it even with the fingertip and all its life rises to the surface only to vanish in quiet once again.
Drunk in the morning light on the memory of those kisses as, alone, he opened one door after another upon books and maps and statues in granite and marble, the other apprentices finding him and leading
him patiently to his work—letting him watch as they ground the brilliant pigments, teaching him to blend the pure color with the yellow egg yolk, and how to spread the lacquer of the egg yolk over the panels, and taking him up on the scaffolding as they worked with careful strokes on the very edges of the vast depiction of sun and clouds, showing him those great faces and hands and angels’ wings which only the Master’s brush would touch.
Drunk as he sat at the long table with them, gorging himself on the delicious foods that he had never tasted before, and the wine which never ran out.
And falling asleep finally to wake at that moment of twilight when the Master stood beside the enormous bed, gorgeous as something imagined in his red velvet, with his thick white hair glistening in the lamplight, and the simplest happiness in his brilliant cobalt blue eyes. The deadly kiss.
“Ah, yes, never to be separated from you, yes,… not afraid.”
“Soon, my darling one, we will be truly united soon.”
Torches blazing throughout the house. The Master atop the scaffolding with the brush in his hand: “Stand there, in the light, don’t move,” and hours and hours frozen in the same position, and then before dawn, seeing his own likeness there in the paint, the face of the angel, the Master smiling as he moved down the endless corridor …
“No, Master, don’t leave me, let me stay with you, don’t go …”
Day again, and money in his pockets, real gold, and the grandeur of Venice with her dark green waterways walled in palaces, and the other apprentices walking arm in arm with him, and the fresh air and the blue sky over the Piazza San Marco like something he had only dreamed in childhood, and the palazzo again at twilight, and the Master coming, the Master bent over the smaller panel with the brush, working faster and faster as the apprentices gazed on half horrified, half fascinated, the Master looking up and seeing him and putting down the brush, and taking him out of the enormous studio as the others worked until the hour of midnight, his face in the Master’s hands as, alone in the bedchamber again, that secret, never tell anyone, kiss.