by Rice, Anne
“Tomorrow night, we shall meet again,” I said, “here perhaps in this house where you are dwelling, where you are safe from the sound of the Mother and the Father. Wherever you wish. But wherever you can get used to me.”
She nodded. She lifted her hand and stroked my cheek with her fingers.
“How well you pretend,” she whispered. “How very fine you are, and always were. And to think those demons in Rome thought they had put out your brilliant light. I should have laughed at them.”
“Yes, and my light shines only for you,” I said, “and it was of you I dreamt when I was burnt black by the fire sent from that demon blood drinker Santino. It was of you I dreamt as I drank from the Mother to regain my strength, as I searched for you through the countries of Europe.”
“Oh, my love,” she whispered. “My great love. If only I could be again the strong one whom you remember.”
“But you will be,” I insisted. “You are. I shall take care of you, yes, just as you wish. And you and Bianca and I—we shall all love one another. Tomorrow night, we’ll talk. We’ll make plans. We’ll speak of all the great cathedrals we must see, the windows of colored glass, we’ll speak of the painters whose fine work we have yet to study. We’ll speak of the New World, of its forests and its rivers. Pandora, we will speak of everything.”
I went on and on.
“And you will come to love Bianca,” I said. “You will come to treasure her. I know Bianca’s heart and soul as ever I knew yours, I swear to you. We will exist together in peace, believe me. You have no idea of the happiness that awaits you.”
“Happiness?” she asked. She looked at me as though she hardly understood the words I had spoken. Then she said:
“Marius, I leave this city tonight. Nothing can stop it.”
“No, no, you can’t say this to me!” I declared. I grabbed her by the arms again.
“Don’t hurt me, Marius. I leave this city tonight. I told you. Marius, you’ve waited for one hundred years to see one thing, and one thing only—that I live. Now leave me to the existence I’ve chosen.”
“I won’t. I won’t have it.”
“Yes, you will,” she whispered. “Marius, don’t you see what I’m trying to tell you. I haven’t the courage to leave Arjun. I haven’t the courage to see the Mother and the Father. Marius, I don’t have the courage to love you anymore. The very sound of your angry voice frightens me. I don’t have the courage to meet your Bianca. The very thought that you might love her more than me frightens me. I am frightened of it all, don’t you see? And even now, I am desperate for Arjun that he may take me away from all of this. With Arjun there is for me a great simplicity! Marius, please let me go with your forgiveness.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said. “I told you I will give up Bianca for you. Good God, Pandora, what more can I do? You can’t be leaving me.”
I turned my back on her. The expression on her face was too strange. I couldn’t endure it.
And as I sat there in the darkness, I heard the door of the carriage open. I heard her quick step on the stones, and she was gone from me.
My Pandora, utterly gone from me.
I don’t know how long I waited. It was not a full hour.
I was too distressed, too perfectly miserable. I didn’t want to see her companion, and when I thought of banging on the doors of her house, I found it too utterly humiliating.
And in truth, in pure truth, she had convinced me. She wouldn’t remain with me.
I was about to tell my driver to take us home when a sound came to me. It was of her howling and crying, and of objects within the house being broken.
It was all I needed to push me into action. I left the carriage and ran to her door. I shot an evil glance at her mortal servants, which rendered them virtually powerless, and threw open the doors for myself.
I rushed up the marble steps. I found her going madly along the walls, pounding the mirrors with her fists. I found her shedding blood tears and shivering. There was broken glass all around her.
I took her wrists. I took them tenderly.
“Stay with me,” I said. “Stay with me!”
Quite suddenly behind me, I heard the presence of Arjun. I heard his unhurried step and then he entered the room.
She had collapsed against my chest. She was shaking.
“Don’t worry,” said Arjun in the same patient tone he had used with me in the Duke’s palace. “We can talk of all these things in a courteous way. I am not a wild creature, given to acts of destruction.”
He seemed the perfect gentleman with his lace handkerchief and high-heeled shoes. He looked about at the broken pieces of mirror which lay on the fine carpet, and he shook his head.
“Then leave me alone with her,” I said.
“Is this what you wish, Pandora?” he asked.
She nodded. “For a little while, my darling,” she said to him.
As soon as he had left the room, and shut the tall double doors behind him, I stroked her hair, and I kissed her again.
“I can’t leave him,” she confessed.
“And why not?” I asked.
“Because I made him,” she answered. “He is my son, my spouse, and my guardian.”
I was shocked.
I had never supposed such a thing!
In all these years I had thought him some dominating creature who kept her in his power.
“I made him so that he would take care of me,” she said. “I took him from India where I was worshiped as a very goddess by those few who had set eyes upon me. I taught him European ways. I placed him in charge of me so that in my weakness and despair, he would control me. And it is his hunger for life which drives us both. Without it I might have languished in some deep tomb for centuries.”
“Very well,” I said, “he is your child. This I understand, but Pandora, you are mine! What of this! You are mine, and I have you in my possession again! Oh, forgive me, forgive that I speak so harshly, that I use words such as possession. What do I mean to say? I mean to say I can’t lose you!”
“I know what you mean,” she said, “but you see, I can’t turn him away from me. He has done far too well in what I have asked of him, and he loves me. And he cannot live under your roof, Marius. I know you only too well. Where Marius lives, Marius rules. You will never suffer a male such as Arjun to dwell with you on my account or for any other reason.”
I was so deeply wounded that for one moment I couldn’t answer her. I shook my head as though to deny what she had said, but in truth I didn’t know whether or not she was wrong. I had always, always thought only of destroying Arjun.
“You can’t deny it,” she said softly. “Arjun is too strong, too willful, and has been too long his own master.”
“There must be some way,” I pleaded.
“There will come a night, surely,” she said, “when it is time for Arjun to part from me. The same may happen with you and your Bianca. But this is not the time. And so I beg you, let go of me, Marius, say farewell to me, and promise me that you will eternally persevere and I shall give you the same promise.”
“This is your vengeance, isn’t it?” I asked quietly. “You were my child and within two hundred years I left you. And so you tell me now that you won’t do the same to him—.”
“No, my beautiful Marius, it isn’t vengeance, it is only the truth. Now, leave me.” She smiled bitterly. “Oh, what a gift to me this night has been, that I have seen you alive, that I know the Roman blood drinker Santino was wrong. This night will carry me through centuries.”
“It will carry you away from me,” I said, nodding.
But then her lips caught me by surprise. It was she who kissed me ardently, and then I felt her tiny sharp teeth pierce my throat.
I stood rigid, eyes closed, letting her drink, feeling the inevitable pull on my heart, my head suddenly full of visions of the dark forest through which she and her companion so often rode and I couldn’t know whether these were her visions or mine.
On and on she drank, as though she was starving, and deliberately I created for her the luscious garden of my most cherished dreams, and in it I envisioned the two of us together. My body was nothing but desire for her. Through every sinew I felt the pull of her drinking and I gave no resistance. I was her victim. I held to no caution.
It seemed I was not standing any longer. I must have fallen. I didn’t care. Then I felt her hands on my arms, and I knew I was on my feet.
She drew back, and with blurred eyes I saw her gazing at me. All of her hair had spilled down on her shoulders.
“Such strong blood,” she whispered. “My Child of the Millennia.”
It was the first time I had heard such a name for those of us who have lived so long and I was faintly charmed by it.
I was groggy, so strong had she been, but what did it matter? I would have given her anything. I steadied myself. I tried to clear my vision.
She was far away across the room.
“What did you see in the blood?” I whispered.
“Your pure love,” she answered.
“Was there any doubt?” I asked. I was growing stronger by the moment. Her face was radiant with the blood flush and her eyes were fierce as they had always been when we quarreled.
“No, no doubt,” she said. “But you must leave me now.”
I said nothing.
“Go on, Marius. If you don’t, I can’t bear it.”
I stared at her as if I were staring at a wild thing of the wood, and so she seemed to be, this creature whom I had loved with all my heart.
And once again, I knew it to be finished.
I left the room.
In the grand hallway of the house, I stood stunned, and there Arjun was standing in the corner, staring at me.
“I am so sorry, Marius,” he said, as if he meant it.
I looked at him, wondering if anything could work me into a rage to destroy him. Were I to do that, she would have to stay with me. And oh, how the thought of it blazed in my mind. Yet I knew she would utterly and completely hate me for it. And I would hate myself. For what did I have against this creature who wasn’t her vile master as I’d always supposed, but her child!—a fledgling vampire of some five hundred years or less, young in the Blood and full of love for her.
I was far far from such a possibility. And what a sublime being he was as he surely read these thoughts in my desperate and unveiled mind and yet stood his ground with such poise, merely looking at me.
“Why must we part!” I whispered.
He shrugged. He gestured eloquently with his hands.
“I don’t know,” he said, “except she wants it so. It is she who wants ever to be on the move; it is she who draws designs upon the map. It is she who draws the circles in which we travel, now and then making Dresden the center of our roamings, now and then choosing some other city, such as Paris or Rome. It is she who says we must go on and on. It is she. And what can I say, Marius, except that it delights me.”
I went towards him and for one moment he thought I meant to harm him and he stiffened.
I took his wrist before he could move. I studied him. What a noble being he was, his grand white wig in sharp contrast to his lustrous brown skin, his black eyes staring at me with such earnestness and seeming comprehension.
“Stay with me here,” I said. “Both of you. Remain with me. Stay with me and my companion, Bianca.”
He smiled and shook his head. There was no contempt in his eyes. We were male to male and there was no contempt. He told me only No.
“She will not have it,” he said, his voice very placating and calm. “I know her. I know all her ways. She brought me to herself because I worshiped her. And once having her blood I have never ceased in that worship.”
I stood there, clutching his wrist still, and staring about me as if I were ready to cry out to the gods. And it seemed my cry would break the very walls of this house if I let it loose.
“How can this be!” I whispered. “That I should find her and know her only for one night, one precious night of quarreling.”
“You and she are equals,” he said. “I am but an instrument.”
I closed my eyes.
Quite suddenly I could hear her weeping, and when this sound came to my ears, Arjun gently freed himself from me and said in his soft gentle voice that he must go to her.
I walked slowly out of the hallway, and down the marble steps and into the night, ignoring my carriage.
I walked home through the forest.
When I reached my house, I went into my library, took off the wig which I had worn to the ball, threw it across the room and sat in a chair at my writing table.
I put my head down on my folded arms and silently wept as I had not wept since the death of Eudoxia. I wept. And the hours passed, and at last I realized that Bianca was standing beside me.
She was stroking my hair with her hand, and then I heard her whisper.
“Time to come down the steps to our cold grave, Marius. It is early for you, but I must go and I can’t leave you this way.”
I rose to my feet. I took her in my arms and gave way to the most awful tears, and all the while she held me silently and warmly.
And then we went down to our coffins together.
The following night, I went immediately to the house where I’d left Pandora.
I found it deserted and then I searched all of Dresden and the many palaces or schlosses around it.
She and Arjun were gone, there was no doubt of it. And going up to the Ducal Palace where there was a little concert in progress I soon learned the “official” news of it, of how the handsome black coach of the Marquis and the Marquisa De Malvrier had left before dawn for Russia.
Russia.
Being in no mood for the music, I soon made my apologies to those gathered in the salon and I went home again, as miserable as I have ever been in my existence. As heartbroken.
I sat down at my desk. I looked out over the river. I felt the warm spring breeze.
I thought of all the many things she and I should have said to each other, all the many things I might have said in a calmer spirit to persuade her. I told myself she wasn’t gone beyond reach. I told myself that she knew where I was, and that she could write to me. I told myself anything I needed to keep my sanity.
And I did not hear it when Bianca came into the room. I did not hear it when she sat down in a large tapestried armchair quite near to me.
I saw her as if she were a vision when I looked up—a flawless young boy with porcelain cheeks, her blond hair pulled back in a black ribbon, her frock coat embroidered in gold, her shapely legs in spotless white hose, her feet in ruby buckled shoes.
Oh, what a divine guise it was—Bianca as the young nobleman, known to the few mortals who mattered as her own brother. And how sad were her peerless blue eyes, as she looked at me.
“I feel sorry for you,” she said quietly.
“Do you?” I asked. I said these words with my broken heart. “I hope you do, my precious darling, because I love you, I love you more than I have ever loved you, and I need you.”
“But that’s just the point, you see,” she said in a low compassionate voice. “I heard the things you said to her. And I’m leaving you.”
33
For three long nights I pleaded with her not to go as she made her preparations. I went down on my knees. I swore to her that I had said only what needed to be said to make Pandora remain with me.
I told her in every way I knew how that I loved her, and would never have abandoned her.
I told her that she would never be able to survive alone, and that I feared for her.
But nothing would turn her from her decision.
Only on the beginning of the third night did I realize that she was really going. Up until then, I had thought that such was absolutely inconceivable. I couldn’t lose her. No, such a thing could not happen.
At last, I begged her to sit down and listen to me as I poured
out my honest heart, confessing every bad thing which I had said, every cheap denial of her which had come from my lips, every desperate foolish thing I’d said to Pandora.
“But what I want now is to talk of you and me,” I said, “and how it’s always been between us.”
“Yes, you may do that if you wish,” she said, “if it makes the pain less for you, but Marius, I am going.”
“You know how it was with me and Amadeo,” I said. “I took him into my house when he was very young and gave him the Blood when mortality gave me no quarter. We were Master and pupil always, and there was mockery and a dark division. Perhaps you never saw this, but it was there, I assure you.”
“I saw it,” she said. “But I knew your love was greater.”
“And so it was,” I said. “But he was a child, and my man’s heart always knew there was something finer and greater. Much as I cherished him, much as the mere sight of him delighted me, I could not confide to him my worst fears or pains. I could not tell him the tales of my life. They were too big for him.”
“I understand you, Marius,” she said gently. “I always have.”
“And Pandora. You saw it with your own eyes. The bitter quarrel again, just as it had been so many centuries ago, the bitter fighting in which no real truth can be discovered.”
“I saw it,” she said in her quiet way. “I follow your meaning.”
“You saw her fear of the Mother and the Father,” I pleaded. “You heard her say that she couldn’t come into the house. You heard her speak of her fear of everything.”
“I did,” she answered.
“And what was this one night between me and Pandora but misery, as it had been long ago, misery and misunderstanding.”
“I know, Marius,” she answered.
“But Bianca, what has it always been with you and me but harmony? Think of our long years when we dwelt in the shrine, and went out on the night winds where I could carry us. Think of the quiet between us, or the long conversations in which I talked of so many things and you listened. Could two beings have been closer than we were?”
She bowed her head. She didn’t answer.