Queen of the Damned

by Anne Rice

  “I shall make the rhyme or reason,” Akasha said, with a trace of anger. “I shall make the future; I shall define goodness; I shall define peace. And I don’t call on mythic gods or goddesses or spirits to justify my actions, on abstract morality. I do not call on history either! I don’t look for my mother’s heart and brain in the dirt!”

  A shiver ran through the others. A little bitter smile played on Santino’s lips. And protectively, it seemed, Louis looked towards the mute figure of Maharet.

  Marius was anxious lest this go further.

  “Akasha,” he said in entreaty, “even if it could be done, even if the mortal population did not rise against you, and the men did not find some way to destroy you long before such a plan could be accomplished—”

  “You’re a fool, Marius, or you think I am. Don’t you think I know what this world is capable of? What absurd mixture of the savage and the technologically astute makes up the mind of modern man?”

  “My Queen, I don’t think you know it!” Marius said. “Truly, I don’t. I don’t think you can hold in your mind the full conception of what the world is. None of us can; it is too varied, too immense; we seek to embrace it with our reason; but we can’t do it. You know a world; but it is not the world; it is the world you have selected from a dozen other worlds for reasons within yourself.”

  She shook her head; another flare of anger. “Don’t try my patience, Marius,” she said. “I spared you for a very simple reason. Lestat wanted you spared. And because you are strong and you can be of help to me. But that is all there is to it, Marius. Tread with care.”

  A silence fell between them. Surely he realized that she was lying. I realized it. She loved him and it humiliated her, and so she sought to hurt him. And she had. Silently, he swallowed his rage.

  “Even if it could be done,” he pressed gently, “can you honestly say that human beings have done so badly that they should receive such a punishment as this?”

  I felt the relief course through me. I’d known he would have the courage, I’d known that he would find some way to take it into the deeper waters, no matter how she threatened him; he would say all that I had struggled to say.

  “Ah, now you disgust me,” she answered.

  “Akasha, for two thousand years I have watched,” he said. “Call me the Roman in the arena if you will and tell me tales of the ages that went before. When I knelt at your feet I begged you for your knowledge. But what I have witnessed in this short span has filled me with awe and love for all things mortal; I have seen revolutions in thought and philosophy which I believed impossible. Is not the human race moving towards the very age of peace you describe?”

  Her face was a picture of disdain.

  “Marius,” she said, “this will go down as one of the bloodiest centuries in the history of the human race. What revolutions do you speak of, when millions have been exterminated by one small European nation on the whim of a madman, when entire cities were melted into oblivion by bombs? When children in the desert countries of the East war on other children in the name of an ancient and despotic God? Marius, women the world over wash the fruits of their wombs down public drains. The screams of the hungry are deafening, yet unheard by the rich who cavort in technological citadels; disease runs rampant among the starving of whole continents while the sick in palatial hospitals spend the wealth of the world on cosmetic refinements and the promise of eternal life through pills and vials.” She laughed softly. “Did ever the cries of the dying ring so thickly in the ears of those of us who can hear them? Has ever more blood been shed!”

  I could feel Marius’s frustration. I could feel the passion that made him clench his fist now and search his soul for the proper words.

  “There’s something you cannot see,” he said finally. “There is something that you fail to understand.”

  “No, my dear one. There is nothing wrong with my vision. There never was. It is you who fail to see. You always have.”

  “Look out there at the forest!” he said, gesturing to the glass walls around us, “Pick one tree; describe it, if you will, in terms of what it destroys, what it defies, and what it does not accomplish, and you have a monster of greedy roots and irresistible momentum that eats the light of other plants, their nutrients, their air. But that is not the truth of the tree. That is not the whole truth when the thing is seen as part of nature, and by nature I mean nothing sacred, I mean only the full tapestry, Akasha. I mean only the larger thing which embraces all.”

  “And so you will select now your causes for optimism,” she said, “as you always have. Come now. Examine for me the Western cities where even the poor are given platters of meat and vegetables daily and tell me hunger is no more. Well, your pupil here has given me enough of that pap already—the idiot foolishness upon which the complacency of the rich has always been based. The world is sunk into depravity and chaos; it is as it always was or worse.”

  “Oh, no, not so,” he said adamantly. “Men and women are learning animals. If you do not see what they have learned, you’re blind. They are creatures ever changing, ever improving, ever expanding their vision and the capacity of their hearts. You are not fair to them when you speak of this as the most bloody century; you are not seeing the light that shines ever more radiantly on account of the darkness; you are not seeing the evolution of the human soul!”

  He rose from his place at the table, and came round towards her on the left-hand side. He took the empty chair between her and Gabrielle. And then he reached out and he lifted her hand.

  I was frightened watching him. Frightened she wouldn’t allow him to touch her; but she seemed to like this gesture; she only smiled.

  “True, what you say about war,” he said, pleading with her, and struggling with his dignity at the same time. “Yes, and the cries of the dying, I too have heard them; we have all heard them, through all the decades; and even now, the world is shocked by daily reports of armed conflict. But it is the outcry against these horrors which is the light I speak of; it’s the attitudes which were never possible in the past. It is the intolerance of thinking men and women in power who for the first time in the history of the human race truly want to put an end to injustice in all forms.”

  “You speak of the intellectual attitudes of a few.”

  “No,” he said. “I speak of changing philosophy; I speak of idealism from which true realities will be born. Akasha, flawed as they are, they must have the time to perfect their own dreams, don’t you see?”

  “Yes!” It was Louis who spoke out.

  My heart sank. So vulnerable! Were she to turn her anger on him—But in his quiet and refined manner, he was going on:

  “It’s their world, not ours,” he said humbly. “Surely we forfeited it when we lost our mortality. We have no right now to interrupt their struggle. If we do we rob them of victories that have cost them too much! Even in the last hundred years their progress has been miraculous; they have righted wrongs that mankind thought were inevitable; they have for the first time developed a concept of the true family of man.”

  “You touch me with your sincerity,” she answered. “I spared you only because Lestat loved you. Now I know the reason for that love. What courage it must take for you to speak your heart to me. Yet you yourself are the most predatory of all the immortals here. You kill without regard for age or sex or will to live.”

  “Then kill me!” he answered. “I wish that you would. But don’t kill human beings! Don’t interfere with them. Even if they kill each other! Give them time to see this new vision realized; give the cities of the West, corrupt as they may be, time to take their ideals to a suffering and blighted world.”

  “Time,” Maharet said. “Maybe that is what we are asking for. Time. And that is what you have to give.”

  There was a pause.

  Akasha didn’t want to look again at this woman; she didn’t want to listen to her. I could feel her recoiling. She withdrew her hand from Marius; she looked at Louis for a long momen
t and then she turned to Maharet as if it couldn’t be avoided, and her face became set and almost cruel.

  But Maharet went on:

  “You have meditated in silence for centuries upon your solutions. What is another hundred years? Surely you will not dispute that the last century on this earth was beyond all prediction or imagining—and that the technological advances of that century can conceivably bring food and shelter and health to all the peoples of the earth.”

  “Is that really so?” Akasha responded. A deep smoldering hate heated her smile as she spoke. “This is what technological advances have given the world. They have given it poison gas, and diseases born in laboratories, and bombs that could destroy the planet itself. They have given the world nuclear accidents that have contaminated the food and drink of entire continents. And the armies do what they have always done with modern efficiency. The aristocracy of a people slaughtered in an hour in a snow-filled wood; the intelligentsia of a nation, including all those who wear eyeglasses, systematically shot. In the Sudan, women are still habitually mutilated to be made pleasing to their husbands; in Iran the children run into the fire of guns!”

  “This cannot be all you’ve seen,” Marius said. “I don’t believe it. Akasha, look at me. Look kindly on me, and what I’m trying to say.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether or not you believe it!” she said with the first sustained anger. “You haven’t accepted what I’ve been trying to tell you. You have not yielded to the exquisite image I’ve presented to your mind. Don’t you realize the gift I offer you? I would save you! And what are you if I don’t do this thing! A blood drinker, a killer!”

  I’d never heard her voice so heated. As Marius started to answer, she gestured imperiously for silence. She looked at Santino and at Armand.

  “You, Santino,” she said. “You who governed the Roman Children of Darkness, when they believed they did God’s will as the Devil’s henchmen—do you remember what it was like to have a purpose? And you, Armand, the leader of the old Paris coven; remember when you were a saint of darkness? Between heaven and hell, you had your place. I offer you that again; and it is no delusion! Can you not reach for your lost ideals?”

  Neither answered her. Santino was horror-struck; the wound inside him was bleeding. Armand’s face revealed nothing but despair.

  A dark fatalistic expression came over her. This was futile. None of them would join her. She looked at Marius.

  “Your precious mankind!” she said. “It has learned nothing in six thousand years! You speak to me of ideals and goals! There were men in my father’s court in Uruk who knew the hungry ought to be fed. Do you know what your modern world is? Televisions are tabernacles of the miraculous and helicopters are its angels of death!”

  “All right, then, what would your world be?” Marius said. His hands were trembling. “You don’t believe that the women aren’t going to fight for their men?”

  She laughed. She turned to me. “Did they fight in Sri Lanka, Lestat? Did they fight in Haiti? Did they fight in Lynkonos?”

  Marius stared at me. He waited for me to answer, to take my stand with him. I wanted to make arguments; to reach for the threads he’d given me and take it further. But my mind went blank.

  “Akasha,” I said. “Don’t continue this bloodbath. Please. Don’t lie to human beings or befuddle them anymore.”

  There it was—brutal and unsophisticated, but the only truth I could give.

  “Yes, for that’s the essence of it,” Marius said, his tone careful again, fearful, and almost pleading. “It’s a lie, Akasha; it’s another superstitious lie! Have we not had enough of them? And now, of all times, when the world’s waking from its old delusions. When it has thrown off the old gods.”

  “A lie?” she asked. She drew back, as if he’d hurt her. “What is the lie? Did I lie when I told them I would bring a reign of peace on earth? Did I lie when I told them I was the one they had been waiting for? No, I didn’t lie. What I can do is give them the first bit of truth they’ve ever had! I am what they think I am. I am eternal, and all powerful, and shall protect them—”

  “Protect them?” Marius asked. “How can you protect them from their most deadly foes?”

  “What foes?”

  “Disease, my Queen. Death. You are no healer. You cannot give life or save it. And they will expect such miracles. All you can do is kill.”

  Silence. Stillness. Her face suddenly as lifeless as it had been in the shrine; eyes staring forward; emptiness or deep thought, impossible to distinguish.

  No sound but the wood shifting and falling into the fire.

  “Akasha,” I whispered. “Time, the thing that Maharet asked for. A century. So little to give.”

  Dazed, she looked at me. I could feel death breathing on my face, death close as it had been years and years ago when the wolves tracked me into the frozen forest, and I couldn’t reach up high enough for the limbs of the barren trees.

  “You are all my enemies, aren’t you?” she whispered. “Even you, my prince. You are my enemy. My lover and my enemy at the same time.”

  “I love you!” I said. “But I can’t lie to you. I cannot believe in it! It is wrong! It is the very simplicity and the elegance which make it so wrong!”

  Her eyes moved rapidly over their faces. Eric was on the verge of panic again. And I could feel the anger cresting in Mael.

  “Is there not one of you who would stand with me?” she whispered. “Not one who would reach for that dazzling dream? Not even one who is ready to forsake his or her small and selfish world?” Her eyes fixed on Pandora. “Ah, you, poor dreamer, grieving for your lost humanity; would you not be redeemed?”

  Pandora stared as if through a dim glass. “I have no taste for bringing death,” she answered in an even softer whisper. “It is enough for me to see it in the falling leaves. I cannot believe good things can come from bloodshed. For that’s the crux, my Queen. Those horrors happen still, but good men and women everywhere deplore them; you would reclaim such methods; you would exonerate them and bring the dialogue to an end.” She smiled sadly. “I am a useless thing to you. I have nothing to give.”

  Akasha didn’t respond. Then her eyes moved over the others again; she took the measure of Mael, of Eric. Of Jesse.

  “Akasha,” I said. “History is a litany of injustice, no one denies it. But when has a simple solution ever been anything but evil? Only in complexity do we find answers. Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it’s the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has.”

  “Yes,” Marius said. “Exactly. Simplicity and brutality are synonymous in philosophy and in actions. It is brutal what you propose!”

  “Is there no humility in you?” she asked suddenly. She turned from me to him. “Is there no willingness to understand? You are so proud, all of you, so arrogant. You want your world to remain the same on account of your greed!”

  “No,” Marius said.

  “What have I done that you should set yourselves so against me?” she demanded. She looked at me, then at Marius, and finally to Maharet. “From Lestat I expected arrogance,” she said. “I expected platitudes and rhetoric, and untested ideas. But from many of you I expected more. Oh, how you disappoint me. How can you turn away from the destiny that awaits you? You who could be saviors! How can you deny what you have seen?”

  “But they’d want to know what we really are,” Santino said. “And once they did know, they’d rise against us. They’d want the immortal blood as they always do.”

  “Even women want to live forever,” Maharet said coldly. “Even women would kill for that.”

  “Akasha, it’s folly,” said Marius. “It cannot be accomplished. For the Western world, not to resist would be unthinkable.”

  “It is a savage and primitive vision,” Maharet said with cold scorn.

  Akasha’s face darkened again with anger. Yet even in rage, the prettiness of her expression remained. “You
have always opposed me!” she said to Maharet. “I would destroy you if I could. I would hurt those you love.”

  There was a stunned silence. I could smell the fear of the others, though no one dared to move or speak.

  Maharet nodded. She smiled knowingly.

  “It is you who are arrogant,” she answered. “It is you who have learned nothing. It is you who have not changed in six thousand years. It is your soul which remains unperfected, while mortals move to realms you will never grasp. In your isolation you dreamed dreams as thousands of mortals have done, protected from all scrutiny or challenge; and you emerge from your silence, ready to make these dreams real for the world? You bring them here to this table, among a handful of your fellow creatures, and they crumble. You cannot defend them. How could anyone defend them? And you tell us we deny what we see!”

  Slowly Maharet rose from the chair. She leant forward slightly, her weight resting on her fingers as they touched the wood.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I see,” she went on. “Six thousand years ago, when men believed in spirits, an ugly and irreversible accident occurred; it was as awful in its own way as the monsters born now and then to mortals which nature does not suffer to live. But you, clinging to life, and clinging to your will, and clinging to your royal prerogative, refused to take that awful mistake with you to an early grave. To sanctify it, that was your purpose. To spin a great and glorious religion; and that is still your purpose now. But it was an accident finally, a distortion, and nothing more.

  “And look now at the ages since that dark and evil moment; look at the other religions founded upon magic; founded upon some apparition or voice from the clouds! Founded upon the intervention of the supernatural in one guise or another—miracles, revelations, a mortal man rising from the dead!

  “Look on the effect of your religions, those movements that have swept up millions with their fantastical claims. Look at what they have done to human history. Look at the wars fought on account of them; look at the persecutions, the massacres. Look at the pure enslavement of reason; look at the price of faith and zeal.