Prince Lestat

by Anne Rice

  "But then how do we know?" asked Benji Mahmoud.

  "Because they found it like that the next night and all the others were gone, dead, burned. Benji, what can we do? Where are the old ones? Are they the ones doing this to us?"

  9

  The Story of Gregory

  GREGORY DUFF COLLINGSWORTH STOOD watching and listening in Central Park. A tall male of compact and well-proportioned build, with very short black hair and black eyes, he stood in the deep fragrant darkness of a thicket of trees, listening with his powerful preternatural ears and seeing with his powerful preternatural eyes all that was taking place--with Antoine and Armand and Benji and Sybelle--inside of the Belle Epoque mansion in which Armand's family now lived.

  In his English bespoke gray suit and brown shoes, and with his darkly tanned skin, Gregory looked very much like the corporate executive that he had been for decades. Indeed his pharmaceutical empire was one of the most successful in the international marketplace right now, and he was one of those immortals who had always been highly capable at managing wealth "in the real world."

  He had come from Switzerland not only to attend to business in his New York offices, but to spy upon the fabled coven of New York at close hand.

  He'd picked up the raging emotions of the young blood drinker Antoine as the boy had driven into the city this evening, and if Armand had tried to destroy Antoine, Gregory would have intervened, instantly and effectively, and taken the boy away with him. This he would have done out of the goodness of his heart.

  Decades ago, outside the Vampire Lestat's one and only rock concert in San Francisco, Gregory had intervened to save a black blood drinker named Davis, carrying him up and away from the carnage wreaked upon his hapless cohorts by the Queen of Heaven, who gazed pitilessly upon the scene from a nearby hill.

  In the case of this complex and interesting young blood drinker, Antoine, Gregory could easily have deflected any blast of the Fire Gift coming directly at the fledgling, especially from one so young and inexperienced as the notorious Armand.

  Not that Gregory had anything against Armand. Quite the opposite. He was as eager to meet him in some ways as he was to meet any blood drinker on the planet, though in his heart of hearts he nourished the precious dream of meeting Lestat above all other hopes. Gregory had come here this very evening to spy on the Upper East Side vampires because he thought surely Lestat had come to join them by now. If Lestat had been there, which he was not, Gregory would have come knocking at the door.

  Benji Mahmoud's broadcasts had Gregory's understanding and sympathy and he had wanted to assure himself once again that Benji was not the dupe of powerful brothers and sisters, but in fact an authentic soul putting forth the idea of a future for the blood drinker tribe. He had been assured. Indeed Benji was not only the genuine article but something of a rebel in the house, as arguments Gregory had overheard easily proved.

  "Oh, brave new world that hath such blood drinkers in it," Gregory sighed, pondering whether he should make himself known right now to the refined and erudite vampires of the residence in the middle of the block before him or hold back.

  Whenever he did reveal himself, the secretive existence he'd guarded for well over a thousand years would be inalterably influenced, and he was not in fact ready for the measures that would have to be taken when that occurred.

  No, best for now to hang back, to listen, to try to learn.

  That had always been his way.

  Gregory was six thousand years old. He'd been made by Queen Akasha and was very likely only the fourth blood drinker to be created by her, after the defection of her blood drinker steward Khayman and the accursed twins, Mekare and Maharet, who became the rebels of the First Brood.

  Gregory had been in the royal palace the night that the vampire race was born. He hadn't been called Gregory then, but Nebamun, and that was the name he'd used in the world until the third century after Christ--when he took the name of Gregory and began a new and enduring life.

  Nebamun had been a lover of Akasha, chosen from the special guard she'd brought with her from the city of Nineveh into Egypt, and as such, Nebamun had not expected to live very long. He was nineteen years old, robust and healthy, when the Queen selected him for the bedchamber and just twenty years old the night the Queen became a blood drinker and brought King Enkil over with her into the curse.

  He'd been hiding helpless inside a huge gold-plated chest, the lid propped so that he might see the full horror of the conspirators stabbing the King and the Queen on that night--unable to protect his sovereign. Then with fearful and horrified eyes, he'd seen a swirling cloud of blood particles above the dying Queen, and seen that cloud drawn down into her, seemingly through her many obviously fatal wounds. He'd seen her rise, eyes like the painted orbs of a statue, her skin flashing white in the lamplight. He'd seen her sink her teeth into the neck of the dying Enkil.

  Those memories were as vivid to him now as ever--he felt the desert heat, the cooling breeze off the Nile. He heard the cries and whispers of the murderous conspirators. He saw those gold-threaded curtains tied back to the blue-painted columns, and he saw even the distant indifferent and brilliant stars in the black desert sky.

  Like a loathsome thing she'd been when she crawled atop her husband's body. To see him jerked into life by the mysterious blood as he drank from her wrist had been a frightful sight.

  Nebamun might have gone mad after that, but he was too young, too strong, too optimistic by nature for madness. He had laid low, as they say now. He had survived.

  But he'd been living with a death sentence for quite some time. Everyone knew that to please her jealous King Enkil, Akasha did away with her lovers in a matter of months. The King was said not to mind a steady stream of consorts in and out of his Queen's bedroom in the cool of the evening, but he feared any one rising in power, and though Nebamun had been reassured a hundred times by Akasha's affectionate whispers that he was not to be put to death anytime soon, Nebamun knew otherwise, and he had lost all skill at pleasing her, and spent many hours merely thinking about his life, and the meaning of life in general, and getting drunk. He'd had a great passion for life ever since he could remember, and did not want to die.

  Once the Queen and King had been infected by the demon Amel, the Queen seemed utterly to have forgotten about Nebamun.

  He'd gone back into the guard, defending the palace against those who called the King and Queen monsters. He told no one what he had witnessed. Again and again, he pondered that eerie cloud of bloody particles, that living swirling mass of tiny gnatlike points that had been sucked into the Queen as if by an intake of breath. She'd tried to make a new cult of it, believing firmly that she was now a goddess, and the "will of the gods" had subjected her to this divine violence because of her innate virtue and the needs of the land she ruled.

  Well, that was, as they say these days, a load of bunk. Yes, Nebamun had believed in magic, and yes, he'd believed in gods and demons, but he had always been practical in a ruthless way, like many of his time. Besides, gods even if they did exist could be capricious and evil. And when the captive witches Mekare and Maharet explained how this seeming "miracle" had happened, that it was no more than the caprice of a vagrant spirit, Nebamun had smiled.

  Once the rebels were born under the rule of the renegade blood drinker Khayman, with Mekare and Maharet to spread "The Divine Blood" with them, Nebamun had been called back into the Queen's presence, and made into a blood drinker without explanation or ceremony until he'd risen thirsting and half mad, and dreaming only of draining human victims of all the life and blood they contained.

  "You are now the head of my blood army," the Queen had explained. "You will be called the 'Guard of the Queens Blood,' and you will hunt down the rebels of the First Brood as they dare to call themselves and all the misbegotten blood drinkers made by them who have dared to rebel against me and my King and my laws."

  Blood drinkers were gods, the Queen had told Nebamun. Now he too was a god. And
at that point, he'd actually started to believe it. How else to explain what he saw now with the new vision of the Blood? His heightened senses bedeviled and tantalized him. He fell in love with the song of the wind, with the rich colors that pulsed all around him in the flowers and drowsy palm trees of the palace gardens, with the chanting pulse of those succulent humans upon whom he fed.

  For a thousand years he'd been the dupe of superstition. The world had seemed a grim and unchangeable place to him, full of folly and misery and injustice, and blood drinker fighting blood drinker as incessantly as human fought human, when he'd finally sought the refuge of Mother Earth as so many others had done.

  He knew with an aching heart what young Antoine had suffered. Only one blood drinker in existence claimed to have never known such burial and rebirth, and that was the great indominable Maharet.

  Well, maybe the time had come for him to make himself known to Maharet, and to talk of those olden times. You've always known that it was I, Captain of the Queen's soldiers, who separated you aeons ago from your sister--who put the two of you in coffins, and sent you off on rafts in different seas.

  Was not the world of the Undead poised for destruction if old secrets and old horrors were not confronted and examined by those who knew the stories from the earliest nights?

  In truth, Gregory was no longer the Captain of the hated "Queens Blood" who had done those things. He remembered those times, yes, but not the force of personality or attitude behind the memories, or the means by which he'd survived those endless nights of war and bloodshed. Who was Maharet? He did not really know.

  When he rose in the third century of the Common Era, a new life for him had begun. Gregory was the name he'd chosen for himself in those nights, and he had been Gregory ever since, acquiring names and wealth over the millennia as he needed them, never again resorting to madness, or the earth, but slowly building a realm for himself with wealth and love. The wealth was easy to acquire, so easy in fact that he marveled at beggar mavericks like Antoine and Killer--and his beloved Davis--who tramped through eternity, and the love of other blood drinkers had been easy to acquire as well.

  His Blood Wife of all these centuries was named Chrysanthe, and it was she who'd educated him in the ways of the Christian era and the waning Roman Empire when he'd brought her from the great Arab Christian city of Hira--a shining capital on the Euphrates--to Carthage in North Africa, where they'd lived for many years. There she'd taught him Greek and Latin, offering the poetry, the histories, and the philosophies of cultures unknown to him when he'd gone into the earth.

  There she explained to him the marvels he'd embraced the moment he'd risen, and how the world had actually changed, changed when he had thought the world unchanging, as did all those with whom he had once shared humanity and the Blood.

  He came to love Chrysanthe as he had once loved his first Blood Wife of long ago, the lost pale-eyed and yellow-haired Sevraine.

  Ah, such wonders he'd discovered in those early years as the great Roman Empire came tumbling down around him--a world of metals, monuments, and art that had been inconceivable to his Egyptian mind.

  And ever since the world had been changing, each new miracle and invention, each new attitude, ever more astonishing than those which had come before.

  He had been on an upwards trajectory ever since those early centuries. And he held close to him the very same companions he'd acquired in those first few hundred years.

  Very soon after he and Chrysanthe had taken up residence in their palace by the sea in Carthage, they'd been joined by a comely and dignified one-legged Greek named Flavius who told of being made by a powerful and wise female blood drinker named Pandora, consort of a Roman blood drinker, Marius, the keeper of the King and Queen.

  Flavius had fled the household of Marius because Marius had never consented to his making, and when he'd come upon the household of Chrysanthe and Gregory in Carthage, he'd thrown himself on their mercy, and they had gladly taken him in--worthy to be Blood Kin. He'd lived in Athens as well as Antioch, in Ephesus and in Alexandria, and had visited Rome. He knew the mathematics of Euclid and the Hebrew scriptures in their Greek translation, and spoke of Socrates and Plato and the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius and the natural history of Pliny and the satire of Juvenal and Petronius, and the writings of Tertullian and Augustine of Hippo who had only lately died.

  What a marvel Flavius had been.

  No one in the courts of the old Queen would have dared to give the Blood to one marked with deformity. Not even to the ugly or the badly proportioned was the Blood given. Indeed every human offered to the remorseless appetite of the spirit of Amel had been a lamb without blemish and indeed with beauty and gifts of strength and talent that his maker must witness and approve.

  Yet here was Flavius crippled in his mortal years but burning brightly with the Blood, a meditative and well-spoken Athenian reciting the tales of Homer by memory as he played his lute, a poet and a philosopher who'd understood law courts and judgments, and who had memorized whole histories of peoples of the Earth he'd never known or seen. Gregory had imbibed so much from Flavius, sitting at his feet by the hour, prodding him with questions, committing to memory the stories and songs that came from his lips. And how grateful had been this honorable scholar. "You have my loyalty for all time," he'd said to Gregory and Chrysanthe, "as you have loved me for what I am."

  And to think, this gracious blood drinker knew the very location of the Mother and the Father. He had seen them in the eyes of Pandora who made him; he had lived beneath the very roof of Marius and Pandora where the Divine Pair were kept.

  How amazed Gregory--Nebamun of old--had been by Flavius's stories of King Enkil and Akasha, now mute and blind living statues who never showed the slightest sign of sentience as they sat on a throne above banks of flowers and fragrant lamps in a gilded shrine. And it was Marius, the Roman, who had stolen the unresisting King and Queen out of Egypt, from the old blood drinker priesthood that had thrived there for four thousand years. The elders of the priesthood had sought to destroy the Mother and the Father, as they had come to be called, by placing them in the killing rays of the sun. And indeed--as the King and Queen had suffered this blasphemous indignity--countless blood drinkers around the world had perished in flames. But the oldest had been doomed to continue, though their skin was darkened, even blackened, and their every breath was taken in pain. Akasha and Enkil had only been bronzed by this foolish attempt at immolation and indeed the elder himself had survived to share the torture of those he had hoped would all be burnt to death.

  But priceless as this history was to Gregory--that his old sovereign endured without power--it was not the Blood history that mattered to him, but the new Roman world.

  "Teach me, teach me everything," Gregory had said over and over again to Flavius and to Chrysanthe, and wandering the busy streets of Carthage, filled now with a melange of Romans and Greeks and Vandals, he struggled to explain to his two devoted teachers how astonishing was the wealth of this world which they took for granted, where common people had gold in their pockets, and plenty to eat on their tables, and spoke of "eternal salvation" as belonging to the most humbly born.

  In his time, so very long ago, only the royal court and a handful of nobles had lived in rooms with floors. Eternity had been the property of only that same handful of persons living and breathing under the stars.

  But what did it matter? He didn't expect Chrysanthe and Flavius to understand him. He wanted to understand them. And as always he drew knowledge from his victims, feeding on their minds as surely as he fed on their blood. What a vast world the common people inhabited, and how small and arid had been that geography belonging to him so very long ago.

  Less than two hundred years had passed before two more blood drinkers joined his Blood Kindred at Gregory's invitation. Carthage was no more. He and his family lived then in the Italian city of Venice. These newcomers had also known the infamous Marius, keeper of the King and Queen, as had Flavius.
Their names were Avicus and Zenobia and they came from the city of Byzantium and were glad of Gregory's invitation to find safety and hospitality beneath his roof.

  Avicus had been a blood god of Egypt same as Gregory, and indeed Avicus had been told tales of the great Nebamun and how he'd led the Queens Blood to drive the First Brood from Egypt, and they had much to talk about of those dark and dreary times and the torture of being blood gods encased within stone shrines, forced to dream and starve between great feast days when the faithful would bring them blood sacrifice and ask them to look into hearts and judge the innocent from the guilty with their blood drinker minds. How could the Queen have doomed so many to such misery and drudgery, such wretched heartbreaking isolation? Nebanum had had his own taste of that "Divine Service" in the end.

  No wonder Marius, forced into the priesthood, had stolen the Mother and the Father--rejecting out of hand the ancient superstition--and returned to a willful, rational Roman life of his own.

  Avicus was Egyptian, tall, dark skinned, and half mad still after a thousand years of serving the old blood cult. He had been a slave to the old religion right into the Common Era, whereas Nebamun had fled it thousands of years before. His Blood Wife, Zenobia, was a delicately built female with voluminous black hair and exquisite features; she brought into the house a universe of new learning, having been brought up in the palace of the Emperor of the East before being brought into the Blood by a wicked female named Eudoxia who had made war on Marius and ultimately lost.

  Zenobia had been left to the mercy of Marius, but he'd loved her, making her Blood Kin, and he had taught her how to survive on her own. He had approved her love for Avicus.

  Zenobia cut her long hair nightly, and went forth in the garb of a man. Only in the quiet sanctuary of the home did she revert to female garments and let her black hair flow over her shoulders.