by Anne Rice
“This was a curious way to put it. I told him I had been up the Nile quite far, that I had seen many wonders. ‘But as for there being true gods,’ I said, ‘I can scarce accept the veracity of gods with the heads of animals—’
“He shook his head almost a little sadly.
“ ‘The true gods require no statues of them to be erected,’ he said. ‘They have the heads of man and they themselves appear when they choose, and they are living as the crops that come from the earth are living, as all things under the heavens are living, even the stones and the moon itself, which divides time in the great silence of its never changing cycles.’
“ ‘Very likely,’ I said under my breath, not wishing to disturb him. So it was zeal, this mixture of cleverness and youthfulness I had perceived in him. I should have known it. And something came back to me from Julius Caesar’s writings about Gaul, that the Keltoi had come from Dis Pater, the god of the night. Was this strange creature a believer in these things?
“ ‘There are old gods in Egypt,’ he said softly, ‘and there are old gods in this land for those who know how to worship them. I do not mean in your temples round which merchants sell the animals to defile the altars, and the butchers after sell the meat that is left over. I speak of the proper worship, the proper sacrifice for the god, the one sacrifice to which he will hearken.’
“ ‘Human sacrifice, you mean, don’t you?’ I said unobtrusively. Caesar had described well enough that practice among the Keltoi, and it rather curdled my blood to think of it. Of course I’d seen ghastly deaths in the arena in Rome, ghastly deaths at the places of execution, but human sacrifice to the gods, that we had not done in centuries. If ever.
“And now I realized what this remarkable man might actually be. A Druid, a member of the ancient priesthood of the Keltoi, whom Caesar had also described, a priesthood so powerful that nothing like it existed, so far as I knew, anywhere in the Empire. But it wasn’t supposed to exist in Roman Gaul anymore either.
“Of course the Druids were always described as wearing long white robes. They went into the forests and collected mistletoe off the oak trees with ceremonial sickles. And this man looked more like a farmer, or a soldier. But then what Druid was going to wear his white robes into a waterfront tavern? And it wasn’t lawful anymore for the Druids to go about being Druids.
“ ‘Do you really believe in this old worship?’ I asked, leaning forward. ‘Have you yourself been down to the bottom of Egypt?’
“If this was a real live Druid, I had made a marvelous catch, I was thinking. I could get this man to tell me things about the Keltoi that nobody knew. And what on earth did Egypt have to do with it, I wondered?
“ ‘No,’ he said. ‘I have not been to Egypt, though from Egypt our gods came to us. It is not my destiny to go there. It is not my destiny to learn to read the ancient language. The tongue I speak is enough for the gods. They give ear to it.’
“ ‘And what tongue is that?’
“ ‘The tongue of the Keltoi, of course,’ he said. ‘You know that without asking.’
“ ‘And when you speak to your gods, how do you know that they hear you?’
“His eyes widened again, and his mouth lengthened in an unmistakable look of triumph.
“ ‘My gods answer me,’ he said quietly.
“Surely he was a Druid. And he appeared to take on a shimmer, suddenly. I pictured him in his white robes. There might have been an earthquake then in Massilia, and I doubt I would have noticed it.
“ ‘Then you yourself have heard them,’ I said.
“ ‘I have laid eyes upon my gods,’ he said. ‘And they have spoken to me both in words and in silence.’
“ ‘And what do they say? What do they do that makes them different from our gods, I mean aside from the nature of the sacrifice?’
“His voice took on the lilting reverence of a song as he spoke. ‘They do as gods have always done; they divide the evil from the good. They bring down blessings upon all who worship them. They draw the faithful into harmony with all the cycles of the universe, with the cycles of the moon, as I have told you. They fructify the land, the gods do. All things that are good proceed from them.’
“Yes, I thought, the old old religion in its simplest forms, and the forms that still held a great spell for the common people of the Empire.
“ ‘My gods sent me here,’ he said. ‘To search for you.’
“ ‘For me?’ I asked. I was startled.
“ ‘You will understand all these things,’ he said. ‘Just as you will come to know the true worship of ancient Egypt. The gods will teach you.’
“ ‘Why ever would they do that?’ I asked.
“ ‘The answer is simple,’ he said. ‘Because you are going to become one of them.’
“I was about to answer when I felt a sharp blow to the back of my head and the pain spread out in all directions over my skull as if it were water. I knew I was going out. I saw the table rising, saw the ceiling high above me. I think I wanted to say if it is ransom you want, take me to my house, to my steward.
“But I knew even then that the rules of my world had absolutely nothing to do with it.
“WHEN I awoke it was daylight and I was in a large wagon being pulled fast along an unpaved road through an immense forest. I was bound hand and foot and a loose cover was thrown over me. I could see to the left and right, through the wicker sides of the cart, and I saw the man who had talked to me, riding beside me. There were others riding with him, and all were dressed in the trousers and belted leather jerkins, and they wore iron swords and iron bracelets. Their hair was almost white in the dappled sun, and they didn’t talk as they rode beside the cart together.
“This forest itself seemed made to the scale of Titans. The oaks were ancient and enormous, the interlacing of their limbs blocked out most of the light, and we moved for hours through a world of damp and dark green leaves and deep shadow.
“I do not remember towns. I do not remember villages. I remember only a crude fortress. Once inside the gates I saw two rows of thatched-roof houses, and everywhere the leather-clad barbarians. And when I was taken into one of the houses, a dark low place, and left there alone, I could hardly stand for the cramps in my legs, and I was as wary as I was furious.
“I knew now that I was in an undisturbed enclave of the ancient Keltoi, the very same fighters who had sacked the great shrine of Delphi only a few centuries ago, and Rome itself not too long after, the same warlike creatures who rode stark naked into battle against Caesar, their trumpets blasting, their cries affrighting the disciplined Roman soldiers.
“In other words, I was beyond the reach of everything I counted upon. And if all this talk about my becoming one of the gods meant I was to be slain on some blood-stained altar in an oak grove, then I had better try to get the hell out of here.”
6
HEN my captor appeared again, he was in the fabled long white robes, and his coarse blond hair had been combed, and he looked immaculate and impressive and solemn. There were other tall white-robed men, some old, some young, and all with the same gleaming yellow hair, who came into the small shadowy room behind him.
“In a silent circle they enclosed me. And after a protracted silence, a riff of whispers passed amongst them.
“ ‘You are perfect for the god,’ said the eldest, and I saw the silent pleasure in the one who had brought me here. ‘You are what the god has asked for,’ the eldest said. ‘You will remain with us until the great feast of Samhain, and then you will be taken to the sacred grove and there you will drink the Divine Blood and you will become a father of gods, a restorer of all the magic that has inexplicably been taken from us.’
“ ‘And will my body die when this happens?’ I asked. I was looking at them, their sharp narrow faces, their probing eyes, the gaunt grace with which they surrounded me. What a terror this race must have been when its warriors swept down on the Mediterranean peoples. No wonder there had been so much written about the
ir fearlessness. But these weren’t warriors. These were priests, judges, and teachers. These were the instructors of the young, the keepers of the poetry and the laws that were never written in any language.
“ ‘Only the mortal part of you will die,’ said the one who had spoken to me all along.
“ ‘Bad luck,’ I said. ‘Since that’s about all there is to me.’
“ ‘No,’ he said. ‘Your form will remain and it will become glorified. You will see. Don’t fear. And besides, there is nothing you can do to change these things. Until the feast of Samhain, you will let your hair grow long, and you will learn our tongue, and our hymns and our laws. We will care for you. My name is Mael, and I myself will teach you.’
“ ‘But I am not willing to become the god,’ I said. ‘Surely the gods don’t want one who is unwilling.’
“ ‘The old god will decide,’ said Mael. ‘But I know that when you drink the Divine Blood you will become the god, and all things will be clear to you.’
“ESCAPE was impossible.
“I was guarded night and day. I was allowed no knife with which I might cut off my hair or otherwise damage myself. And a good deal of the time I lay in the dark empty room, drunk on wheaten beer and satiated with the rich roasted meats they gave to me. I had nothing with which to write and this tortured me.
“Out of boredom I listened to Mael when he came to instruct me. I let him sing anthems to me and tell me old poems and talk on about laws, only now and then taunting him with the obvious fact that a god should not have to be so instructed.
“This he conceded, but what could he do but try to make me understand what would happen to me.
“ ‘You can help me get out of here, you can come with me to Rome,’ I said. ‘I have a villa all my own on the cliffs above the Bay of Naples. You have never seen such a beautiful spot, and I would let you live there forever if you would help me, asking only that you repeat all these anthems and prayers and laws to me so that I might record them.’
“ ‘Why do you try to corrupt me?’ he would ask, but I could see he was tantalized by the world I came from. He confessed that he had searched the Greek city of Massilia for weeks before my arrival, and he loved the Roman wine and the great ships that he had seen in the port, and the exotic foods he had eaten.
“ ‘I don’t try to corrupt you,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe what you believe, and you’ve made me your prisoner.’
“But I continued to listen to his prayers out of boredom and curiosity, and the vague fear of what was in store for me.
“I began waiting for him to come, for his pale, wraithlike figure to illuminate the barren room like a white light, for his quiet, measured voice to pour forth with all the old melodious nonsense.
“It soon came clear that his verses did not unfold continuous stories of the gods as we knew them in Greek and Latin. But the identity and characteristics of the gods began to emerge in the many stanzas. Deities of all the predictable sorts belonged to the tribe of the heavens.
“But the god I was to become exerted the greatest hold over Mael and those he instructed. He had no name, this god, though he had numerous titles, and the Drinker of the Blood was the most often repeated. He was also the White One, the God of the Night, the God of the Oak, the Lover of the Mother.
“This god took blood sacrifice at every full moon. But on Samhain (the first of November in our present Christian calendar—the day that has become the Feast of All Saints or the Day of the Dead) this god would accept the greatest number of human sacrifices before the whole tribe for the increase of the crops, as well as speak all manner of predictions and judgments.
“It was the Great Mother he served, she who is without visible form, but nevertheless present in all things, and the Mother of all things, of the earth, of the trees, of the sky overhead, of all men, of the Drinker of the Blood himself who walks in her garden.
“My interest deepened but so did my apprehension. The worship of the Great Mother was certainly not unknown to me. The Mother Earth and the Mother of Ail Things was worshiped under a dozen names from one end of the Empire to the other, and so was her lover and son, her Dying God, the one who grew to manhood as the crops grow, only to be cut down as the crops are cut down, while the Mother remains eternal. It was the ancient and gentle myth of the seasons. But the celebration anywhere and at any time was hardly ever gentle.
“For the Divine Mother was also Death, the earth that swallows the remains of that young lover, the earth that swallows all of us. And in consonance with this ancient truth—old as the sowing of seed itself—there came a thousand bloody rituals.
“The goddess was worshiped under the name of Cybele in Rome, and I had seen her mad priests castrating themselves in the midst of their devoted frenzy. And the gods of myth met their ends even more violently—Attis gelded, Dionysus rent limb from limb, the old Egyptian Osiris dismembered before the Great Mother Isis restored him.
“And now I was to be that God of Growing Things—the vine god, the corn god, the god of the tree, and I knew that whatever happened it was going to be something appalling.
“And what was there to do but get drunk and murmur these anthems with Mael, whose eyes would cloud with tears from time to time as he looked at me.
“ ‘Get me out of here, you wretch,’ I said once in pure exasperation. ‘Why the hell don’t you become the God of the Tree? Why am I so honored?’
“ ‘I have told you, the god confided to me his wishes. I wasn’t chosen.’
“ ‘And would you do it, if you were chosen?’ I demanded.
“I was sick of hearing of these old rites by which any man threatened by illness or misfortune must serve up a human sacrifice to the god if he wished to be spared, and all the other sacrosanct beliefs that had to them the same childlike barbarity.
“ ‘I would fear but I would accept,’ he whispered. ‘But do you know what is so terrible about your fate? It is that your soul will be locked in your body forever. It will have no chance in natural death to pass into another body or another lifetime. No, all through time your soul will be the soul of the god. The cycle of death and rebirth will be closed in you.’
“In spite of myself and my general contempt for his belief in reincarnation, this silenced me. I felt the eerie weight of his conviction, I felt his sadness.
“My hair grew longer and fuller. And the hot summer melted into the cooler days of fall, and we were nearing the great annual feast of Samhain. “Yet I wouldn’t let up on the questions.
“ ‘How many have you brought to be gods in this manner? What was it in me that caused you to choose me?’
“ ‘I have never brought a man to be a god,’ he said. ‘But the god is old; he is robbed of his magic. A terrible calamity has befallen him, and I can’t speak of these things. He has chosen his successor.’ He looked frightened. He was saying too much. Something was stirring the deepest fears in him.
“ ‘And how do you know he will want me? Have you sixty other candidates stashed in this fortress?’
“He shook his head and in a moment of uncharacteristic rawness, he said:
“ ‘Marius, if you fail to Drink the Blood, if you do not become the father of a new race of gods, what will become of us?’
“ ‘I wish I could care, my friend—’ I said.
“ ‘Ah, calamity,’ he whispered. And there followed a long subdued observation of the rise of Rome, the terrible invasions of Caesar, the decline of a people who had lived in these mountains and forests since the beginning of time, scorning the cities of the Greek and the Etruscan and the Roman for the honorable strongholds of powerful tribal leaders.
“ ‘Civilizations rise and fall, my friend,’ I said. ‘Old gods give way to new ones.’
“ ‘You don’t understand, Marius,’ he said. ‘Our god was not defeated by your idols and those who tell their frivolous and lascivious stories. Our god was as beautiful as if the moon itself had fashioned him with her light, and he spoke with a voice that was a
s pure as the light, and he guided us in that great oneness with all things that is the only cessation of despair and loneliness. But he was stricken with terrible calamity, and all through the north country other gods have perished completely. It was the revenge of the sun god upon him, but how the sun entered into him in the hours of darkness and sleep is not known to us, nor to him. You are our salvation, Marius. You are the mortal Who Knows, and is Learned and Can Learn, and Who Can Go Down into Egypt.’
“I thought about this. I thought of the old worship of Isis and Osiris, and of those who said she was the Mother Earth and he the corn, and Typhon the slayer of Osiris was the fire of the sunlight.
“And now this pious communicator with the god was telling me that the sun had found his god of the night and caused great calamity.
“Finally my reason gave out on me.
“Too many days passed in drunkenness and solitude.
“I lay down in the dark and I sang to myself the hymns of the Great Mother. She was no goddess to me, however. Not Diana of Ephesus with her rows and rows of milk-filled breasts, or the terrible Cybele, or even the gentle Demeter, whose mourning for Persephone in the land of the dead had inspired the sacred mysteries of Eleusis. She was the strong good earth that I smelled through the small barred windows of this place, the wind that carried with it the damp and the sweetness of the dark green forest. She was the meadow flowers and the blowing grass, the water I heard now and then gushing as if from some mountain spring. She was all the things that I still had in this rude little wooden room where everything else had been taken from me. And I knew only what all men know, that the cycle of winter and spring and all growing things has within itself some sublime truth that restores without myth or language.
“I looked through the bars to the stars overhead, and it seemed to me I was dying in the most absurd and foolish way, among people I did not admire and customs I would have abolished. And yet the seeming sanctity of it all infected me. It caused me to dramatize and to dream and to give in, to see myself at the center of something that possessed its own exalted beauty.