by Rice, Anne
The snow and the wolves. I dreamed of wolves. I felt myself drift away, back into my own mind, into my own dreams and memories. I saw a pack of fleet wolves racing over the newly fallen snow.
I saw myself as a young man fighting them—a pack of wolves that had come in deep winter to prey upon my father’s village two hundred years ago. I saw myself, the mortal man, so close to death that I could smell it. But I had cut down the wolves one by one. Ah, such coarse youthful vigor, the pure luxury of thoughtless irresistible life! Or so it seemed. At the time it had been misery, hadn’t it? The frozen valley, my horse and dogs slain. But now all I could do was remember, and ah, to see the snow covering the mountains, my mountains, my father’s land.
I opened my eyes. She had let me go and forced me back a pace. For the first time I understood where we really were. Not in some abstract night, but in a real place and a place that had once, for all purposes, been mine.
“Yes,” she whispered. “Look around you.”
I knew it by the air, by the smell of winter, and as my vision cleared again, I saw the broken battlements high above, and the tower.
“This is my father’s house!” I whispered. “This is the castle in which I was born.”
Stillness. The snow shining white over the old floor. This had been the great hall, where we now stood. God, to see it in ruins; to know that it had been desolate for so long. Soft as earth the old stones seemed; and here had been the table, the great long table fashioned in the time of the Crusades; and there had been the gaping hearth, and there the front door.
The snow was not falling now. I looked up and I saw the stars. The tower had its round shape still, soaring hundreds of feet above the broken roof, though all the rest was as a fractured shell. My father’s house.…
Lightly she stepped away from me, across the shimmering whiteness of the floor, turning slowly in a circle, her head back, as if she were dancing.
To move, to touch solid things, to pass from the realm of dreams into the real world, of all these joys she’d spoken earlier. It took my breath away, watching her. Her garments were timeless, a black silk cloak, a gown of silken folds that swirled gently about her narrow form. Since the dawn of history women have worn such garments, and they wear them now into the ballrooms of the world. I wanted to hold her again, but she forbade it with a soft sudden gesture. What had she said? Can you imagine it? When I realized that be could no longer keep me there? That I was standing before the throne, and he had not stirred! That not the faintest response came from him?
She turned; she smiled; the pale light of the sky struck the lovely angles of her face, the high cheekbones, the gentle slope of her chin. Alive she looked, utterly alive.
Then she vanished!
“Akasha!”
“Come to me,” she said.
But where was she? Then I saw her far, far away from me at the very end of the hall. A tiny figure at the entrance to the tower. I could scarce make out the features of her face now, yet I could see behind her the black rectangle of the open door.
I started to walk towards her.
“No,” she said. “Time to use the strength I’ve given you. Merely come!”
I didn’t move. My mind was clear. My vision was clear. And I knew what she meant. But I was afraid. I’d always been the sprinter, the leaper, the player of tricks. Preternatural speed that baffled mortals, that was not new to me. But she asked for a different accomplishment. I was to leave the spot where I stood and locate myself suddenly beside her, with a speed which I myself could not track. It required a surrender, to try such a thing.
“Yes, surrender,” she said gently. “Come.”
For a tense moment I merely looked at her, her white hand gleaming on the edge of the broken door. Then I made the decision to be standing at her side. It was as if a hurricane touched me, full of noise and random force. Then I was there! I felt myself shudder all over. The flesh of my face hurt a little, but what did that matter! I looked down into her eyes and I smiled.
Beautiful she was, so beautiful. The goddess with her long black plaited hair. Impulsively I took her in my arms and kissed her; kissed her cold lips and felt them yield to me just a little.
Then the blasphemy of it struck me. It was like the time I’d kissed her in the shrine. I wanted to say something in apology, but I was staring at her throat again, hungry for the blood. It tantalized me that I could drink it and yet she was who she was; she could have destroyed me in a second with no more than the wish to see me die. That’s what she had done to the others. The danger thrilled me, darkly. I closed my fingers round her arms, felt the flesh give ever so slightly. I kissed her again, and again. I could taste blood in it.
She drew back and placed her finger on my lips. Then she took my hand and led me through the tower door. Starlight fell through the broken roof hundreds of feet above us, through a gaping hole in the floor of the highest room.
“Do you see?” she said. “The room at the very top is still there? The stairs are gone. The room is unreachable. Except for you and me, my prince.”
Slowly she started to rise. Never taking her eyes off me she traveled upwards, the sheer silk of her gown billowing only slightly. I watched in astonishment as she rose higher and higher, her cloak ruffled as if by a faint breeze. She passed through the opening and then stood on the very edge.
Hundreds of feet! Not possible for me to do this.…
“Come to me, my prince,” she said, her soft voice carrying in the emptiness. “Do as you have already done. Do it quickly, and as mortals so often say, don’t look down.” Whispered laughter.
Suppose I got a fifth of the way up—a good leap, the height, say, of a four-story building, which was rather easy for me but also the limit of—Dizziness. Not possible. Disorientation. How had we come to be here? It was all spinning again. I saw her but it was dreamlike, and the voices were intruding. I didn’t want to lose this moment. I wanted to remain connected with time in a series of linked moments, to understand this on my terms.
“Lestat!” she whispered. “Now.” Such a tender thing, her small gesture to me to be quick.
I did what I had done before; I looked at her and decided that I should instantly be at her side.
The hurricane again, the air bruising me; I threw up my arms and fought the resistance. I think I saw the hole in the broken boards as I passed through it. Then I was standing there, shaken, terrified I would fall.
It sounded as if I were laughing; but I think I was just going mad a little. Crying actually. “But how?” I said. “I have to know how I did it.”
“You know the answer,” she said. “The intangible thing which animates you has much more strength now than it did before. It moved you as it has always moved you. Whether you take a step or take flight, it is simply a matter of degree.”
“I want to try it again,” I said.
She laughed very softly, but spontaneously. “Look about this room,” she said. “Do you remember it?”
I nodded. “When I was a young man, I came here all the time,” I said. I moved away from her. I saw piles of ruined furniture—the heavy benches and stools that had once filled our castle, medieval work so crude and strong it was damn near indestructible, like the trees that fall in the forest and remain for centuries, the bridges over streams, their trunks covered with moss. So these things had not rotted away. Even old caskets remained, and armor. Oh, yes, the old armor, ghosts of past glory. And in the dust I saw a faint bit of color. Tapestries, but they were utterly destroyed.
In the revolution, these things must have been brought here for safekeeping and then the stairs had fallen away.
I went to one of the tiny narrow windows and I looked out on the land. Far below, nestled in the mountainside, were the electric lights of a little city, sparse, yet there. A car made its way down the narrow road. Ah, the modern world so close yet far away. The castle was the ghost of itself.
“Why did you bring me here?” I asked her. “It’s so painful t
o see this, as painful as everything else.”
“Look there, at the suits of armor,” she said. “At what lies at their feet. You remember the weapons you took with you the day you went out to kill the wolves?”
“Yes. I remember them.”
“Look at them again. I will give you new weapons, infinitely more powerful weapons with which you will kill for me now.”
“Kill?”
I glanced down at the cache of arms. Rusted, ruined it seemed; save for the old broadsword, the fine one, which had been my father’s and given to him by his father, who had got it from his father, and so forth and so on, back to the time of St. Louis. The lord’s broadsword, which I, the seventh son, had used on that long ago morning when I’d gone out like a medieval prince to kill the wolves.
“But whom will I kill?” I asked.
She drew closer. How utterly sweet her face was, how brimming with innocence. Her brows came together; there was that tiny vertical fold of flesh in her forehead, just for an instant. Then all went smooth again.
“I would have you obey me without question,” she said gently. “And then understanding would follow. But this is not your way.”
“No,” I confessed. “I’ve never been able to obey anyone, not for very long.”
“So fearless,” she said, smiling.
She opened her right hand gracefully; and quite suddenly she was holding the sword. It seemed I’d felt the thing moving towards her, a tiny change of atmosphere, no more. I stared at it, at the jeweled scabbard and the great bronze hilt that was of course a cross. The belt still hung from it, the belt I’d bought for it, during some long ago summer, of toughened leather and plaited steel.
It was a monster of a weapon, as much for battering as for slashing or piercing. I remembered the weight of it, the way it had made my arm ache when I had slashed again and again at the attacking wolves. Knights in battle had often held such weapons with two hands.
But then what did I know of such battles? I’d been no knight. I’d skewered an animal with this weapon. My only moment of mortal glory, and what had it got me? The admiration of an accursed bloodsucker who chose to make me his heir.
She placed the sword in my hands.
“It’s not heavy now, my prince,” she said. “You are immortal. Truly immortal. My blood is in you. And you will use your new weapons for me as you once used this sword.”
A violent shudder went through me as I touched the sword; it was as if the thing held some latent memory of what it had witnessed; I saw the wolves again; I saw myself standing in the blackened frozen forest ready to kill.
And I saw myself a year later in Paris, dead, immortal; a monster, and on account of those wolves. “Wolfkiller,” the vampire had called me. He had picked me from the common herd because I had slain those cursed wolves! And worn their fur so proudly through the winter streets of Paris.
How could I feel such bitterness even now? Did I want to be dead and buried down below in the village graveyard? I looked out of the window again at the snow-covered hillside. Wasn’t the same thing happening now? Loved for what I’d been in those early thoughtless mortal years. Again I asked, “But whom or what will I kill?”
No answer.
I thought of Baby Jenks again, that pitiful little thing, and all the blood drinkers who were now dead. And I had wanted a war with them, a little war. And they were all dead. All who had responded to the battle call—dead. I saw the coven house in Istanbul burning; I saw an old one she had caught and burned so slowly; one who had fought her and cursed her. I was crying again.
“Yes, I took your audience from you,” she said. “I burnt away the arena in which you sought to shine. I stole the battle! But don’t you see? I offer you finer things than you have ever reached for. I offer you the world, my prince.”
“How so?”
“Stop the tears you shed for Baby Jenks, and for yourself. Think on the mortals you should weep for. Envision those who have suffered through the long dreary centuries—the victims of famine and deprivation and ceaseless violence. Victims of endless injustice and endless battling. How then can you weep for a race of monsters, who without guidance or purpose played the devil’s gambit on every mortal they chanced to meet!”
“I know. I understand—”
“Do you? Or do you merely retreat from such things to play your symbolic games? Symbol of evil in your rock music. That is nothing, my prince, nothing at all.”
“Why didn’t you kill me along with the rest of them?” I asked, belligerently, miserably. I grasped the hilt of the sword in my right hand. I fancied I could see the dried blood of the wolf still on it. I pulled the blade free of the leather scabbard. Yes, the blood of the wolf. “I’m no better than they are, am I?” I said. “Why spare any of us?”
Fear stopped me suddenly. Terrible fear for Gabrielle and Louis and Armand. For Marius. Even for Pandora and Mael. Fear for myself. There isn’t a thing made that doesn’t fight for life, even when there is no real justification. I wanted to live; I always had.
“I would have you love me,” she whispered tenderly. Such a voice. In a way, it was like Armand’s voice; a voice that could caress you when it spoke to you. Draw you into itself. “And so I take time with you,” she continued. She put her hands on my arms, and looked up into my eyes. “I want you to understand. You are my instrument! And so the others shall be if they are wise. Don’t you see? There has been a design to all of it—your coming, my waking. For now the hopes of the millennia can be realized at last. Look on the little town below, and on this ruined castle. This could be Bethlehem, my prince, my savior. And together we shall realize all the world’s most enduring dreams.”
“But how could that possibly be?” I asked. Did she know how afraid I was? That her words moved me from simple fear into terror? Surely she did.
“Ah, you are so strong, princeling,” she said. “But you were destined for me, surely. Nothing defeats you. You fear and you don’t fear. For a century I watched you suffer, watched you grow weak and finally go down in the earth to sleep, and I then saw you rise, the very image of my own resurrection.”
She bowed her head now as if she were listening to sounds from far away. The voices rising. I heard them too, perhaps because she did. I heard the ringing din. And then, annoyed, I pushed them away.
“So strong,” she said. “They cannot drag you down into them, the voices, but do not ignore this power; it’s as important as any other you possess. They are praying to you just as they have always prayed to me.”
I understood her meaning. But I didn’t want to hear their prayers; what could I do for them? What had prayers to do with the thing that I was?
“For centuries they were my only comfort,” she continued. “By the hour, by the week, by the year I listened; it seemed in early times that the voices I heard had woven a shroud to make of me a dead and buried thing. Then I learned to listen more carefully. I learned to select one voice from the many as if picking a thread from the whole. To that voice alone I would listen and through it I knew the triumph and ruin of a single soul.”
I watched her in silence.
“Then as the years passed, I acquired a greater power—to leave my body invisibly and to go to the single mortal whose voice I listened to, to see then through that mortal’s eyes. I would walk in the body of this one, or that one. I would walk in sunshine and in darkness; I would suffer; I would hunger; I would know pain. Sometimes I walked in the bodies of immortals as I walked in the body of Baby Jenks. Often, I walked with Marius. Selfish, vain Marius, Marius who confuses greed with respect, who is ever dazzled by the decadent creations of a way of life as selfish as he is. Oh, don’t suffer so. I loved him. I love him now; he cared for me. My keeper.” Her voice was bitter but only for that instant. “But more often I walked with one among the poor and the sorrowful. It was the rawness of true life I craved.”
She stopped; her eyes clouded; her brows came together and the tears rose in her eyes. I knew the power of whi
ch she spoke, but only slightly. I wanted so to comfort her but when I reached out to embrace her she motioned for me to be still.
“I would forget who I was, where I was,” she continued. “I would be that creature, the one whose voice I had chosen. Sometimes for years. Then the horror would return, the realization that I was a motionless, purposeless thing condemned to sit forever in a golden shrine! Can you imagine the horror of waking suddenly to that realization? That all you have seen and heard and been is nothing but illusion, the observation of another’s life? I would return to myself. I would become again what you see before you. This idol with a heart and brain.”
I nodded. Centuries ago when I had first laid eyes upon her, I had imagined unspeakable suffering locked within her. I had imagined agonies without expression. And I had been right.
“I knew he kept you there,” I said. I spoke of Enkil. Enkil who was now gone, destroyed. A fallen idol. I was remembering the moment in the shrine when I’d drunk from her and he’d come to claim her and almost finished me then and there. Had he known what he meant to do? Was all reason gone even then?
She only smiled in answer. Her eyes were dancing as she looked out into the dark. The snow had begun again, swirling almost magically, catching the light of the stars and the moon and diffusing it through all the world, it seemed.
“It was meant, what happened,” she answered finally. “That I should pass those years growing ever more strong. Growing so strong finally that no one … no one can be my equal.” She stopped. Just for a moment her conviction seemed to waver. But then she grew confident again. “He was but an instrument in the end, my poor beloved King, my companion in agony. His mind was gone, yes. And I did not destroy him, not really. I took into myself what was left of him. And at times I had been as empty, as silent, as devoid of the will even to dream as he was. Only for him there was no returning. He had seen his last visions. He was of no use anymore. He has died a god’s death because it only made me stronger. And it was all meant, my prince. All meant from start to finish.”