by Rice, Anne
I didn’t answer for a moment. Something in her manner alarmed me. Or at least it seemed I should have been alarmed.
I should have heard a sound as sharp as the morning chime of Hell’s Bells.
I didn’t want to go into the jungles of Africa. And she knew I didn’t. I was anxiously awaiting news of my family from Roget, and I had it in my mind to seek the cities of the Orient, to wander through India into China and on to Japan.
“I understand the existence you’ve chosen,” she said. “And I’ve come to admire the perseverance with which you pursue it, you must know that.”
“I might say the same of you,” I said a little bitterly.
She stopped.
We were as near to the colossal statues as one should get, I suppose. And the only thing that saved them from overwhelming me was that there was nothing near at hand to put them in scale. The sky overhead was as immense as they were, and the sands endless, and the stars countless and brilliant and rising forever overhead.
“Lestat,” she said slowly, measuring her words, “I am asking you to try, only once, to move through the world as I do.”
The moon shone full on her, but the hat shadowed her small angular white face.
“Forget the house in Cairo,” she said suddenly, dropping her voice as if in respect for the importance of what she said. “Abandon all your valuables, your clothes, the things that link you with civilization. Come south with me, up the river into Africa. Travel with me as I travel.”
Still I didn’t answer. My heart was pounding.
She murmured softly under her breath that we would see the secret tribes of Africa unknown to the world. We would fight the crocodile and the lion with our bare hands. We might find the source of the Nile itself.
I began to tremble all over. It was as if the night were full of howling winds. And there was no place to go.
You are saying you will leave me forever if I don’t come. Isn’t that it?
I looked up at these horrific statues. I think I said:
“So it comes to this.”
And this was why she had stayed close to me, this was why she had done so many little things to please, this was why we were together now. It had nothing to do with Nicki gone into eternity. It was another parting that concerned her now.
She shook her head as if communing with herself, debating on how to go on. In a hushed voice she described to me the heat of tropical nights, wetter, sweeter than this heat.
“Come with me, Lestat,” she said. “By day I sleep in the sand. By night I am on the wing as if I could truly fly. I need no name. I leave no footprints. I want to go down to the very tip of Africa. I will be a goddess to those I slay.”
She approached and slipped her arm about my shoulder and pressed her lips to my cheek, and I saw the deep glitter of her eyes beneath the brim of her hat. And the moonlight icing her mouth.
I heard myself sigh. I shook my head.
“I can’t and you know it,” I said. “I can’t do it any more than you can stay with me.”
All the way back to Cairo, I thought on it, what had come to me in those painful moments. What I had known but not said as we stood before the Colossi of Memnon in the sand.
She was already lost to me! She had been for years. I had known it when I came down the stairs from the room in which I grieved for Nicki and I had seen her waiting for me.
It had all been said in one form or another in the crypt beneath the tower years ago. She could not give me what I wanted of her. There was nothing I could do to make her what she would not be. And the truly terrible part was this: she really didn’t want anything of me!
She was asking me to come because she felt the obligation to do so. Pity, sadness—maybe those were also reasons. But what she really wanted was to be free.
She stayed with me as we returned to the city. She did and said nothing.
And I was sinking even lower, silent, stunned, knowing that another dreadful blow would soon fall. There was the clarity and the horror. She will say her farewell, and I can’t prevent it. When do I start to lose my senses? When do I begin to cry uncontrollably?
Not now.
As we lighted the lamps of the little house, the colors assaulted me—Persian carpets covered with delicate flowers, the tentwork woven with a million tiny mirrors, the brilliant plumage of the fluttering birds.
I looked for a packet from Roget but there was none, and I became angry suddenly. Surely he would have written by now. I had to know what was going on in Paris! Then I became afraid.
“What the hell is happening in France?” I murmured. “I’ll have to go and find other Europeans. The British, they always have information. They drag their damned Indian tea and their London Times with them wherever they go.”
I was infuriated to see her standing there so still. It was as if something were happening in the room—that awful sense of tension and anticipation that I’d known in the crypt before Armand told us his long tale.
But nothing was happening, only that she was about to leave me forever. She was about to slip into time forever. And how would we ever find each other again!
“Damn it,” I said. “I expected a letter.” No servants. They hadn’t known when we would be back. I wanted to send someone to hire musicians. I had just fed, and I was warm and I told myself that I wanted to dance.
She broke her stillness suddenly. She started to move in a rather deliberate way. With uncommon directness she went into the courtyard.
I watched her kneel down by the pond. There she lifted two blocks of paving, and she took out a packet and brushed the sandy earth off it, and she brought it to me.
Even before she brought it into the light I saw it was from Roget. This had come before we had ever gone up the Nile, and she had hidden it!
“But why did you do this!” I said. I was in a fury. I snatched the package from her and put it down on the desk.
I was staring at her and hating her, hating her as never before. Not even in the egotism of childhood had I hated her as I did now!
“Why did you hide this from me!” I said.
“Because I wanted one chance!” she whispered. Her chin was trembling. Her lower lip quivered and I saw the blood tears. “But without this even,” she said, “you have made your choice.”
I reached down and tore the packet apart. The letter slipped out of it, along with folded clippings from an English paper. I unraveled the letter, my hands shaking, and I started to read:
Monsieur, As you must know by now, on July 14, the mobs of Paris attacked the Bastille. The city is in chaos. There have been riots all over France. For months I have sought in vain to reach your people, to get them out of the country safely if I could.
But on Monday last I received the word that the peasants and tenant farmers had risen against your father’s house. Your brothers, their wives and children, and all who tried to defend the castle were slain before it was looted. Only your father escaped.
Loyal servants managed to conceal him during the siege and later to get him to the coast. He is, on this very day, in the city of New Orleans in the former French colony of Louisiana. And he begs you to come to his aid. He is grief-stricken and among strangers. He begs for you to come.
There was more. Apologies, assurances, particulars … it ceased to make sense.
I put the letter down on the desk. I stared at the wood and the pool of light made by the lamp.
“Don’t go to him,” she said.
Her voice was small and insignificant in the silence. But the silence was like an immense scream.
“Don’t go to him,” she said again. The tears streaked her face like clown paint, two long streams of red coming down from her eyes.
“Get out,” I whispered. The word trailed off and suddenly my voice swelled again. “Get out,” I said. And again my voice didn’t stop. It merely went on until I said the words again with shattering violence: “GET OUT!”
4
I dreamed a dream of fami
ly. We were all embracing one another. Even Gabrielle in a velvet gown was there. The castle was blackened, all burnt up. The treasures I had deposited were melted or turned into ashes. It always comes back to ashes. But is the old quote actually ashes to ashes or dust to dust?
Didn’t matter. I had gone back and made them all into vampires, and there we were, the House de Lioncourt, white-faced beauties even to the bloodsucking baby that lay in the cradle and the mother who bent to give it the wriggling long-tailed gray rat upon which it was to feed.
We laughed and we kissed one another as we walked through the ashes, my white brothers, their white wives, the ghostly children chattering together about victims, my blind father, who like a biblical figure had risen, crying:
“I CAN SEE!”
My oldest brother put his arm around me. He looked marvelous in decent clothes. I’d never seen him look so good, and the vampiric blood had made him so spare and so spiritual in expression.
“You know it’s a damn good thing you came when you did with all the Dark Gifts.” He laughed cheerfully.
“The Dark Tricks, dear, the Dark Tricks,” said his wife.
“Because if you hadn’t,” he continued, “why, we’d all be dead!”
5
The house was empty. The trunks had been sent on. The ship would leave Alexandria in two nights. Only a small valise remained with me. On shipboard the son of the Marquis must now and then change his clothes. And, of course, the violin.
Gabrielle stood by the archway to the garden, slender, long-legged, beautifully angular in her white cotton garments, the hat on as always, her hair loose.
Was that for me, the long loose hair?
My grief was rising, a tide that included all the losses, the dead and the undead.
But it went away and the sense of sinking returned, the sense of the dream in which we navigate with or without will.
It struck me that her hair might have been described as a shower of gold, that all the old poetry makes sense when you look at one whom you have loved. Lovely the angles of her face, her implacable little mouth.
“Tell me what you need of me, Mother,” I said quietly. Civilized this room. Desk. Lamp. Chair. All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old as men. Nicki had lived to be thirty.
“Do you require money from me?”
Great beautiful flush to her face, eyes a flash of moving light—blue and violet. For a moment she looked human. We might as well have been standing in her room at home. Books, the damp walls, the fire. Was she human then?
The brim of the hat covered her face completely for an instant as she bowed her head. Inexplicably she asked:
“But where will you go?”
“To a little house in the rue Dumaine in the old French city of New Orleans,” I answered coldly, precisely. “And after he has died and is at rest, I haven’t the slightest idea.”
“You can’t mean this,” she said.
“I am booked on the next ship out of Alexandria,” I said. “I will go to Naples, then on to Barcelona. I will leave from Lisbon for the New World.”
Her face seemed to narrow, her features to sharpen. Her lips moved just a little but she didn’t say anything. And then I saw the tears rising in her eyes, and I felt her emotion as if it were reaching out to touch me. I looked away, busied myself with something on the desk, then simply held my hands very still so they wouldn’t tremble. I thought, I am glad Nicki took his hands with him into the fire, because if he had not, I would have to go back to Paris and get them before I could go on.
“But you can’t be going to him!” she whispered.
Him? Oh. My father.
“What does it matter? I am going!” I said.
She moved her head just a little in a negative gesture. She came near to the desk. Her step was lighter than Armand’s.
“Has any of our kind ever made such a crossing?” she asked under her breath.
“Not that I know of. In Rome they said no.”
“Perhaps it can’t be done, this crossing.”
“It can be done. You know it can.” We had sailed the seas before in our cork-lined coffins. Pity the leviathan who troubles me.
She came even nearer and looked down at me. And the pain in her face couldn’t be concealed anymore. Ravishing she was. Why had I ever dressed her in ball gowns or plumed hats or pearls?
“You know where to reach me,” I said, but the bitterness of my tone had no conviction to it. “The addresses of my banks in London and Rome. Those banks have lived as long as vampires already. They will always be there. You know all this, you’ve always known …”
“Stop,” she said under her breath. “Don’t say these things to me.”
What a lie all this was, what a travesty. It was just the kind of exchange she had always detested, the kind of talk she could never make herself. In my wildest imaginings, I had never expected it to be like this—that I should say cold things, that she should cry. I thought I would bawl when she said she was going. I thought I would throw myself at her very feet.
We looked at each other for a long moment, her eyes tinged with red, her mouth almost quivering.
And then I lost my control.
I rose and I went to her, and I gathered her small, delicate limbs in my arms. I determined not to let her go, no matter how she struggled. But she didn’t struggle, and we both cried almost silently as if we couldn’t make ourselves stop. But she didn’t yield to me. She didn’t melt in my embrace.
And then she drew back. She stroked my hair with both her hands, and leant forward and kissed me on the lips, and then moved away lightly and soundlessly.
“All right, then, my darling,” she said.
I shook my head. Words and words and words unspoken. She had no use for them, and never had.
In her slow, languid way, hips moving gracefully, she went to the door to the garden and looked up at the night sky before she looked back at me.
“You must promise me something,” she said finally.
Bold young Frenchman who moved with the grace of an Arab through places in a hundred cities where only an alleycat could safely pass.
“Of course,” I answered. But I was so broken in spirit now I didn’t want to talk anymore. The colors dimmed. The night was neither hot nor cold. I wished she would just go, yet I was terrified of the moment when that would happen, when I couldn’t get her back.
“Promise me you will never seek to end it,” she said, “without first being with me, without our coming together again.”
For a moment I was too surprised to answer. Then I said:
“I will never seek to end it.” I was almost scornful. “So you have my promise. It’s simple enough to give. But what about you giving a promise to me? That you’ll let me know where you go from here, where I can reach you—that you won’t vanish as if you were something I imagined—”
I stopped. There had been a note of urgency in my voice, of rising hysteria. I couldn’t imagine her writing a letter or posting it or doing any of the things that mortals habitually did. It was as if no common nature united us, or ever had.
“I hope you’re right in your estimation of yourself,” she said.
“I don’t believe in anything, Mother,” I said. “You told Armand long ago that you believe you’ll find answers in the great jungles and forests; that the stars will finally reveal a vast truth. But I don’t believe in anything. And that makes me stronger than you think.”
“Then why am I so afraid for you?” she asked. Her voice was little more than a gasp. I think I had to see her lips move in order to hear her.
“You sense my loneliness,” I answered, “my bitterness at being shut out of life. My bitterness that I’m evil, that I don’t deserve to be loved and yet I need love hungrily. My horror that I can never reveal myself to mortals. But these things don’t stop me, Mother. I’m too strong for them to stop me. As you said yourself once, I am very goo
d at being what I am. These things merely now and then make me suffer, that’s all.”
“I love you, my son,” she said.
I wanted to say something about her promising, about the agents in Rome, that she would write. I wanted to say …
“Keep your promise,” she said.
And quite suddenly I knew this was our last moment. I knew it and I could do nothing to change it.
“Gabrielle!” I whispered.
But she was already gone.
The room, the garden outside, the night itself, were silent and still.
Some time before dawn I opened my eyes. I was lying on the floor of the house, and I had been weeping and then I had slept.
I knew I should start for Alexandria, that I should go as far as I could and then down into the sand when the sun rose. It would feel so good to sleep in the sandy earth. I also knew that the garden gate stood open. That all the doors were unlocked.
But I couldn’t move. In a cold silent way I imagined myself looking throughout Cairo for her. Calling her, telling her to come back. It almost seemed for a moment that I had done it, that, thoroughly humiliated, I had run after her, and I had tried to tell her again about destiny: that I had been meant to lose her just as Nicki had been meant to lose his hands. Somehow we had to subvert the destiny. We had to triumph after all.
Senseless that. And I hadn’t run after her. I’d hunted and I had come back. She was miles from Cairo by now. And she was as lost from me as a tiny grain of sand in the air.
Finally after a long time I turned my head. Crimson sky over the garden, crimson light sliding down the far roof. The sun coming—and the warmth coming and the awakening of a thousand tiny voices all through the tangled alleyways of Cairo, and a sound that seemed to come out of the sand and the trees and the patch of grass themselves.
And very slowly, as I heard these things, as I saw the dazzle of the light moving on the roof, I realized that a mortal was near.
He was standing in the open gate of the garden, peering at my still form within the empty house. A young fair-haired European in Arab robes, he was. Rather handsome. And by the early light he saw me, his fellow European lying on the tile floor in the abandoned house.