The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles)

by Rice, Anne

  On and on he went, going over it, talking again of the sapphiric Heavens and the angels’ song, arguing with himself and with you and with Dora, and the conversation seemed like so much shattered glass. I couldn’t bear it.

  The Blood of Christ inside him? The Blood of Christ passing his lips, his unclean lips, his Undead lips, the Blood of Christ making of him a monstrous Ciborium? The Blood of Christ?

  “Let me drink!” I cried out suddenly. “Lestat, let me drink, from you, let me drink your blood that has His blood inside it!” I couldn’t believe my own earnestness, my own wild desperation. “Lestat, let me drink. Let me look for the blood with my tongue and my heart. Let me drink, please; you can’t deny me that one moment of intimacy. And if it was Christ … if it was …” I couldn’t finish it.

  “Oh, mad and foolish child,” he said. “All you’ll know if you sink your teeth into me is what we learn from the visions we see with all our victims. You’ll learn what I think I saw. You’ll learn what I think was made known to me. You’ll learn that my blood runs in my veins, which you know now. You’ll learn that I believe it was Christ, but no more than that.”

  He shook his head in disappointment as he glared at me.

  “No, I’ll know,” I said. I rose from the table, my hands quivering. “Lestat, give me this one embrace and I’ll never ask another thing of you for all eternity. Let me put my lips to your throat, Lestat, let me test the tale, let me do it!”

  “You break my heart, you little fool,” he said with tears welling. “You always did.”

  “Don’t judge me!” I cried.

  He went on, speaking to me alone, from his mind as much as with his voice. I couldn’t tell if anyone else there could even hear him. But I heard him. I would not forget a single word.

  “And what if it was the Blood of God, Armand,” he asked, “and not part and parcel of some titanic lie, what would you find in me? Go out to the early morning Mass and snatch your victims from those just come from the Communion Rail! What a pretty game that would be, Armand, to feed forever only on Holy Communicants! You can have your Blood of Christ from any one of them. I tell you, I do not believe these spirits, God, Memnoch, these liars; I tell you, I refuse! I wouldn’t stay, I fled their damned school, I lost my eye as I battled them, they snatched it from me, wicked angels clawing at me when I ran away from them! You want the Blood of Christ, then go down now in the dark church to the fisherman’s Mass and knock the sleepy priest aside from the Altar, if you will, and grab the Chalice from his consecrated hands. Go ahead, do it!

  “Blood of Christ!” he continued, his face one great eye fixing me in its merciless beam. “If it was ever in me, this sacred blood, then my body has dissolved it and burnt it up like candle wax devours the wick. You know this. What’s left of Christ in the belly of His faithful when they leave the church?”

  “No,” I said. “No, but we are not humans!” I whispered, seeking somehow in softness to drown out his angry vehemence. “Lestat, I’ll know! It was His blood, not transubstantiated bread and wine! His blood, Lestat, and I’ll know if it’s inside of you. Oh, let me drink, I beg you. Let me drink so I can forget every damned thing you’ve told us, let me drink!”

  I could scarcely keep myself from laying hands on him, from forcing him to my will, never mind his legendary strength, his gruesome temper. I’d lay hold of him and make him submit. I’d take the blood—.

  But these thoughts were foolish and vain. His whole tale was foolish and vain, and yet I turned around, and in a fury I spit the words at him:

  “Why didn’t you accept? Why didn’t you go with Memnoch if he could have taken you from this awful living Hell we share, why didn’t you?”

  “They let you escape,” you said to him, David. You broke in, quieting me with a small pleading gesture of your left hand.

  But I had no patience for analysis or inevitable interpretation. I couldn’t get the image out of my mind, Our Bloody Lord, Our Lord with the crossbeam bound to His shoulders, and she, Veronica, this sweet figment with the Veil in her hands. Oh, how is it such a fantasy could get its hook so deep?

  “Back away from me, all of you,” he cried. “I have the Veil. I told you. Christ gave it to me. Veronica gave it to me. I took it with me out of Memnoch’s Hell, when all his imps tried to take it from me.”

  I scarcely heard. Veil, the actual Veil, what trick is this? My head ached. The fisherman’s Mass. If there was such a thing in St. Patrick’s below, I wanted to go there. I was weary of this glass-walled tower room, cut off from the taste of the wind and the wild refreshing wetness of the snow.

  Why did Lestat back up against the wall? What did he take out of his coat? The Veil! Some gaudy trick to seal this whole masterpiece of mayhem?

  I looked up, my eyes roaming over the snowy night beyond the glass and only slowly finding their mark: the opened cloth which he held up in his hands, his own head bowed, the cloth revealed as reverently as it might have been by Veronica.

  “My Lord!” I whispered. All the world was gone in curls of weightless sound and light. I saw Him there. “My Lord.” I saw His Face, not painted, printed or otherwise daintily tricked into the tiny fibers of the fine white cloth, but blazing with a flame that would not consume the vehicle that bore the heat of it. My Lord, my Lord the Man, my Lord, my Christ, the Man with black and sharpened crown of thorns, and long twisted brown hair so fearfully clotted with blood, and great wondering dark eyes that stared straight at me, the sweet and vivid portals of the Soul of God, so radiant their immeasurable love that all poetry dies before it, and a soft and silken mouth of unquestioning and unjudging simplicity, open to take a silent and agonizing breath at the very moment the Veil had come to soothe this hideous suffering.

  I wept. I clamped my hand to my mouth, but I couldn’t stop my words.

  “Oh, Christ, my tragic Christ!” I whispered. “Not made by human hands!” I cried out. “Not made by human hands!” How wretched my words, how feeble, how filled with sorrow. “This Man’s Face, this Face of God and Man. He bleeds. For the love of Almighty God, look at it!”

  But not a sound had come from me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I’d fallen down on my knees in my shock and in my helplessness. I never wanted to take my eyes from it. I never wanted anything anymore again ever. I wanted only to look at it. I wanted only to look at Him, and I saw Him, and I saw back, back over the centuries, back to His Face in the light of the earthen lamp burning in the house in Podil, His Face gazing at me from the panel between my quivering fingers amid the candles of the Scriptorium of the Monastery of the Caves, His Face as I had never seen it on those glorious walls of Venice or Florence where I had for so long and so desperately sought it.

  His Face, His manly Face infused with the Divine, my tragic Lord gazing at me from my Mother’s arms in the frozen sludge of the long-ago street of Podil, my loving Lord in bloody Majesty.

  I didn’t care what Dora said.

  I didn’t care that she screamed His Holy Name. I didn’t care. I knew.

  And as she declared her faith, as she snatched the Veil from Lestat’s very hands and ran with it out of this apartment, I followed, moving after her and after the Veil—though in the sanctuary of my heart I never moved.

  I never stirred.

  A great stillness had overtaken my mind, and my limbs no longer mattered.

  It did not matter that Lestat fought with her, and cautioned her that she must not believe this thing, and that the three of us stood on the steps of the Cathedral and that the snow fell like some splendid blessing from the invisible and fathomless Heavens.

  It did not matter that the sun was soon to rise, a fiery silver ball beyond the canopy of melting clouds.

  I could die now.

  I had seen Him, and all the rest—the words of Memnoch and his fanciful God, the pleas of Lestat that we come away, that we hide ourselves before the morning devoured us all—it did not matter.

  I could die now.

  “Not made by h
uman hands,” I whispered.

  A crowd gathered around us at the doors. The warm air came out of the church in a deep delicious gust. It didn’t matter.

  “The Veil, the Veil,” they cried. They saw! They saw His Face.

  Lestat’s desperate imploring cries were dying away.

  The morning came down in its thunderous white-hot light, rolling over roofs and curdling the night in a thousand glassy walls and slowly unleashing its monstrous glory.

  “Bear witness,” I said. I held up my open arms to the blinding light, this molten silvery death. “This sinner dies for Him! This sinner goes to Him.”

  Cast me into Hell, Oh Lord, if that is Your will. You have given me Heaven. You have shown me Your Face.

  And Your Face was human.

  19

  I shot upwards. The pain I felt was total, scalding away all will or power to choose momentum. An explosion inside me sent me skyward, right into the pearly snowy light which had come in a sudden flood, as it always does, from a threatening eye one moment, sending its endless rays over the cityscape, to a tidal wave of weightless molten illumination, rolling over all things great and small.

  Higher and higher I went, spinning as if the force of the interior explosion would not stop its intensity, and in my horror I saw that my clothes had been burnt away, and a smoke veered off my limbs into the whirling wind.

  I caught one full glimpse of my limbs, my naked outstretched arms and splayed legs, silhouetted against the obliterating light. My flesh was burnt black already, shiny, sealed to the sinews of my body, collapsed to the intricate tangle of muscles which encased my bones.

  The pain reached the zenith of what I could bear, but how can I explain that it didn’t matter to me; I was on the way to my own death, and this seemingly endless torture was nothing, nothing. I could endure all things, even the burning in the eyes, the knowledge that they would soon melt or explode in this furnace of sunlight, and that all that I was would pass out of flesh.

  Abruptly the scene changed. The roar of the wind was gone, my eyes were quiet and focused, and all around there arose a great familiar chorus of hymns. I stood at an altar, and as I looked up I beheld a church before me thronged with people, its painted columns rising like so many ornate tree trunks out of the wilderness of singing mouths and wondering eyes. Everywhere, to right and to left, I saw this immense and endless congregation. The church had no walls to bind it, and even the rising domes, decorated in the purest and most glittering gold with the hammered saints and angels, gave way to the great ever thinning and never ending blue sky.

  Incense filled my nostrils. Around me, the tiny golden bells rang in unison, and with one riff of delicate melody tumbling fast upon another. The smoke burnt my eyes but so sweetly, as the fragrance of the incense filled my nostrils and made my eyes water, and my vision become one with all I tasted and touched and heard.

  I threw out my arms, and I saw long golden-trimmed white sleeves covering them, falling back from wrists which were covered with the soft fleecy down of a man’s natural hair. These were my hands, yes, but my hands years past the mortal point where life had been fixed in me. They were the hands of a man.

  Out of my mouth there came a song, echoing loudly and singly over the congregation, and then their voices rose in answer, and once again I intoned my conviction, the conviction that had overcome me to the marrow of my bones:

  “Christ is come. The Incarnation is begun in all things and in all men and women, and will go on forever!” It seemed a song of such perfection that the tears flowed from me, and as I bowed my head and clasped my hands I looked down to see the bread and the wine in front of me, the rounded loaf waiting to be blessed and broken and the wine in the golden chalice there to be transformed.

  “This is the Body of Christ, and this is Blood shed for us now and before and forever, and in every moment of which we are alive!” I sang out. I laid my hands on the loaf and lifted it, and a great stream of light poured forth out of it, and the congregation gave forth their sweetest loudest hymn of praise.

  In my hands I held the chalice. I held it high as the bells pealed from the towers, towers and towers that crowded near the towers of this grand church, stretching for miles in all directions, the whole world having become this great and glorious wilderness of churches, and here beside me the little golden bells chimed.

  Once again came the gusts of incense. Setting down the chalice I looked at the sea of faces stretching before me. I turned my head from left to right, and then I looked Heavenward at the disappearing mosaics which became one with the rising, roiling white clouds.

  I saw gold domes beneath Heaven.

  I saw the endless rooftops of Podil.

  I knew it was Vladimir’s City in all its glory, and that I stood in the great sanctuary of Santa Sofia, all screens having been taken away that would have divided me from the people, and all those other churches which had been but ruins in my long-ago dim childhood were now restored to magnificence, and the golden domes of Kiev drank the light of the sun and gave it back with the power of a million planets basking eternal in the fire of a million stars.

  “My Lord, my God!” I cried out. I looked down at the embroidered splendor of my vestments, the green satin and its threads of pure metallic gold.

  On either side of me stood my brothers in Christ, bearded, eyes glowing as they assisted me, as they sang the hymns which I sang, as our voices mingled, pressing on from anthem to anthem in notes that I could almost see rising before me to the airy firmament above.

  “Give it to them! Give it to them because they are hungry,” I cried. I broke the loaf of bread in my hands. I broke it into halves, and then into quarters, and tore these hastily into small morsels which crowded the shining golden plate.

  En masse, the congregation mounted the steps, tender pink little hands reaching for the morsels, which I gave out as fast as I could, morsel after morsel, not a crumb spilling, the bread divided among dozens, and then scores, and then hundreds, as they pressed forward, the newcomers barely allowing those who had been fed to make their way back.

  On and on they came. But the hymns did not cease. Voices, muted at the altar, silenced as the bread was devoured, soon burst forth loud and jubilant again.

  The bread was eternal.

  I tore its soft thick crust again and again and put it into the outstretched palms, the gracefully cupped fingers.

  “Take it, take the Body of Christ!” I said.

  Dark wavering shadowy forms rose around me, rising up out of the gleaming gold and silver floor. They were trunks of trees, and their limbs arched upward and then down towards me, and leaves and berries fell from these branches, down onto the altar, onto the golden plate and onto the sacred bread now in a great mass of fragments.

  “Gather them up!” I cried. I picked up the soft green leaves and the fragrant acorns and I gave these too to the eager hands. I looked down and I saw grain pouring through my fingers, grain which I offered to opened lips, grain which I poured into open mouths.

  The air was thick with the soundless falling of the green leaves, so much so that the soft brilliant shade of green tinted all around it, broken suddenly everywhere by the flight of tiny birds. A million sparrows flushed Heavenward. A million finches soared, the brilliant sun flitting on their tiny outstretched wings.

  “Forever, ongoing, always in every cell and every atom,” I prayed. “The Incarnation,” I said. “And the Lord has dwelt among us.” My words rang out again as if a roof covered us, a roof that could echo my song, though our roof was now the roofless sky alone.

  The crowd pressed in. They surrounded the altar. My brothers had slipped away, thousands of hands tugging gently at their vestments, pulling them back from the table of God. All around me there pressed these hungry ones who took the bread as I gave it, who took the grain, who took the acorns by the handful, who took even the tender green leaves.

  There stood my Mother beside me, my beautiful and sad-faced Mother, a fine embroidered
headdress gracing her thick gray hair, with her wrinkled little eyes fastened on me, and in her trembling hands, her dried and fearful fingers, she held the most splendid of offerings, the painted eggs! Red and blue, and yellow and golden, and decorated with bands of diamonds and chains of the flowers of the field, the eggs shimmered in their lacquered splendor as if they were giant polished jewels.

  And there in the very center of her offering, this offering which she held up with shivering wrinkled arms, there lay the very egg which she had once so long ago entrusted to me, the light, raw egg so gorgeously decorated in brilliant ruby red with the star of gold in the very center of the framed oval, this precious egg which had surely been her finest creation, the finest achievement of her hours with the burning wax and boiling dye.

  It wasn’t lost. It had never been lost. It was there. But something was happening. I could hear it. Even under the great swelling song of the multitudes I could hear it, the tiny sound inside the egg, the tiny fluttering sound, the tiny cry.

  “Mother,” I said. I took it. I held it in both hands and brought my thumbs down against the brittle shell.

  “No, my son!” she cried. She wailed. “No, no, my son, no!”

  But it was too late. The lacquered shell was smashed beneath my thumbs and out of its fragments had risen a bird, a beautiful and fullgrown bird, a bird of snow-white wings and tiny yellow beak and brilliant black eyes like bits of jet.

  A long full sigh came out of me.

  Out of the egg, it rose, unfolding its perfectly feathered white wings, its tiny beak open in a sudden shrill cry. Up it flew, this bird, freed of the broken red shell, up and up, over the heads of the congregation, and up through the soft swirling rain of the green leaves and fluttering sparrows, up through the glorious clamour of the pealing bells, it flew.

  The bells of the towers rang out so loud that they shook the swirling leaves in the atmosphere, so loud that the soaring columns quivered, that the crowd rocked and sang all the more heartily as if to be in perfect unison with the great resounding golden-throated peals.