by Anne Rice
He did not acknowledge my presence.
The crystal chandelier above was on its highest power, flooding the room with merciless light, and sconces along the walls were also lighted with their tiny candle-flame electric bulbs glowing. And no one in this illumination looked even remotely human. It was an assembly of immortals, some of whom might easily have provoked the label of monster. But they all looked perfectly fine and beautiful to me because their preternatural skin and glittering eyes were completely familiar.
And there were two creatures here who were not blood drinkers. Not at all.
Now for those of you new to this narrative, I’ll tell you who was assembled in the room in some detail.
At the far end of the table sat Gregory Duff Collingsworth, the eldest vampire among us now, who looked as he usually did, very like a Swiss or German businessman. He wore a simple gray suit and a red tie, and his arms were folded across his chest; he nodded to me with a quick and agreeable smile. His hair was always clipped short, and for all I knew then, it could never be anything else, as our hair never grows once we’re made and, if cut, grows back overnight. He appeared cheerful and happy to see me.
On his right was Seth, who very likely was the next in age, having been made a vampire by Queen Akasha some thirty years or so after Gregory. And he wore a simple black cassock like a Catholic priest, his black hair trimmed very short, and his black eyes fixed on me as if he were not really seeing me. Beside him sat Dr. Fareed, our beloved scientist and physician, an Anglo-Indian with beautiful green eyes, in his usual white doctor’s coat. He was scribbling on a legal pad of yellow paper with his black fountain pen. The scratching of his pen was the only sound in the room. Beside him was Sevraine, born a thousand years after the Blood had come to Akasha, making Akasha the first vampire. And Sevraine, known by everyone as the Great Sevraine, looked the part with her glorious hair coiffed with pearls and diamonds. Her jeweled tunic of dark green silk looked very much like the kurta or sherwani worn by Indian males. And there were enough genuine diamonds and rubies on it to constitute a great fortune.
“Good evening, Prince,” she said as soon as I was seated. “We’re glad to see you’ve returned.”
“Thank you, chèrie,” I said at the risk of being condemned for patronizing women with easy endearments. But I hadn’t had time to restrain myself.
On the other side of the table, right after Louis, came David Talbot, my fledging, in his Anglo-Indian body, dressed as usual in a modern suit of brown wool with a caramel-colored shirt and golden tie, his wavy black hair short and combed. He too appeared to be making notes of some sort on paper, but his pen made no sound.
To his right was Jesse Reeves, made by the great Maharet, a painfully thin birdlike woman who in life had been pale and freckled and was now as white as alabaster, her rippling copper hair streaked with white, a woman who looks more ghostly than human due to her natural pallor infused with the powerful blood of the twins, Maharet and Mekare, who had been as old as Gregory. Then came Teskhamen, the Child of the Millennia who had made Marius two thousand years ago in a Druid forest. He wore the same type of bejeweled tunic as Sevraine, only his was of black velvet and studded all over with beads of black jet, rather than jewels, which gave it a wild glitter.
And next to him sat two immortal creatures also made of flesh and blood who weren’t human, the first being Amel—Amel the spirit that had thousands of years ago fused with Akasha to produce the first vampire, and who had connected all the vampires of the tribe to that host body—Amel, now in the slender well-proportioned flesh-and-blood body of a young male, with thick curly red hair and green eyes that were fixed attentively on me, his beautiful face breaking into a generous smile as I looked at him.
And to his right the female Replimoid, the Child of Atlantis, the stunning dark-skinned Kapetria, who had constructed Amel’s body for him, a being made on another world and sent to our Earth aeons ago, equipped with great genius and cleverness and conscience, who had awakened in the twentieth century from a tomb of ice to go in search of her ancient brethren. Kapetria’s quick dark eyes were fixed on me, and she too smiled. Her thick wavy black hair was long and free to frame her face, and she wore, as she often did, a doctor’s white stiff, starched coat, like that worn by Fareed, and her arm was around the figure beside her.
This was Pandora—Pandora who centuries ago had made the unfortunate Arjun and become his slave rather than his mentor; Pandora who often radiated a sadness so dark and bittersweet that it invited tears in others. She wore a black robe and a black veil, and her eyes were closed as if she were dreaming. Her head was bowed and her two hands were clasped on the shining mahogany of the table. I could see very little of her curly brown hair. And not a sound emanated from her. Bianca, at her side, was also silent, with downcast eyes.
And there was Armand with his arms folded, studying Marius, his auburn hair carelessly veiling his face, his brown eyes narrow and focused.
Minds locked.
“All right,” I said. “It’s obvious that you’ve all been waiting for me.” I wanted to ask all sorts of questions and, first and foremost, why Amel and Kapetria were here, but as I was glad to see them and Marius began to speak at once, I listened to him.
“Well, of course,” said Marius in an abrupt and hostile voice. He turned to me and brought his chair up to the table. “I’ve broken our laws,” he said. “I’ve struck down another blood drinker and burned him until there was nothing left of him.”
Silence. No one else spoke up.
“So of course,” Marius went on. “I’m waiting for your judgment, and the judgment of all assembled here. I accept that Kapetria is one of us now, and is here due to this matter, and as for Amel, well, yes, Amel, our beloved Amel—.” He stopped. His eyes misted and he swallowed as if his voice had dried up in him, and then fighting his emotion, he said, “Our beloved Amel has a right to be here too now.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” said Gregory. “There is no need for this meeting or any judgment.” He sounded completely human. If one were to go by centuries in the Blood, Gregory ought to appear the most unearthly of all of us. But the very opposite was true. Because of his centuries of maneuvering in the mortal world, building a vast pharmaceutical empire, he had taken on a human varnish that was as thick and concealing as any emollient any of us used to pass for human, and his demeanor and his voice were completely human. His skin was tanned by his carefully planned exposure to the sun while he slept through the paralysis of the daytime, and he had the polish of a great executive used to giving orders to others and gracious to all. He went on talking,
“Everyone here understands exactly what happened,” Gregory said. “No one here has questioned what Marius did. Marius is the one questioning Marius.”
“That’s ridiculous!” said Marius. “I murdered another blood drinker. I broke the very rules that I’ve written as binding for all of us.” He looked from me to Gregory. “Yea gods,” he said angrily, “are we to make rules for young blood drinkers throughout the world and break those laws ourselves in moments of passion?”
“Any of us would have done the same in the same circumstances,” said Seth in a low voice. He looked at me and continued in a calm and even voice. “Prince, there were witnesses, though all of them were young. But they agreed on what they saw. Arjun attacked Marius, taunted him and insulted him, and threatened his life. Arjun sent the fire at Marius with a stream of curses, and Marius retaliated. Just as I would have retaliated.”
Another silence fell. Behind me, the doors opened and I saw Cyril and Thorne come into the room and take seats along the wall. This was never a good sign, but I wanted to remain attentive to the council.
Sevraine spoke up.
“Arjun was terrorizing Pandora,” she said. “For this blood drinker, Arjun, women are not persons. Arjun asked for what happened to him.”
“Pandora, do you have anyt
hing to say?” asked Jesse. She looked to the others. And then to me. “Should we not hear from Pandora?”
Pandora didn’t stir. She didn’t open her eyes. She might have been a statue.
Bianca, beside her, quite close to her, attuned it seemed to the mixture of grief and confusion that must have been making this miserable for Pandora, did not move either.
Armand remained silent but I could see now he was angry.
“Marius,” I said. “What would you have us do?”
“Something should be done,” Marius said. He bowed his head. “Something should be said. Something should attach to my breaking rules to which I mean to hold others with mortal consequences. I broke the law.”
“Ah, the Roman, always the old Roman,” said Pandora in a soft voice. “Always the man of reason.” She opened her eyes and looked straight forward. “Arjun tormented me for centuries. And you have rid me of him and I am thankful. I didn’t want for him to die, no, I didn’t want anything for him that was bad, but I longed with all my soul to be free of him.”
“But you couldn’t do anything about it yourself, could you?” Marius blazed. I had never seen him so angry. He was glaring at her across the table. “You couldn’t stand up to him yourself. No, and so I had to do it, I had to stand against him and his brutal assumptions and cover my hands in blood when the survival of our tribe is now the only thing under Heaven I care about!”
He brought his right fist down on the table. I feared the wood would splinter, but it didn’t. He clenched this fist and I caught the scent of the blood coming from his palm.
“Listen to me,” said Seth. “Surely no law we make will ever deprive a blood drinker of the right to defend himself against one who attacks him with the fire.”
“I could easily have restrained him,” said Marius. He was quivering with rage. His head was bowed and he rubbed his hands together now as if he couldn’t control the gesture. “I could have restrained him and—.”
“And what? We would have another Rhoshamandes on our hands?” asked Gregory. “He might have come back at any time and sought revenge on Pandora or on you or on all of us! He broke the peace, Marius. You have rid us of one not made for these times, and not made for the enterprise here that is dear to us.”
“I agree,” I said without thinking. Then I realized they were all looking at me. “I agree, and this our enterprise, as you put it, Gregory, is everything. We want this Court to endure. We want the tribe to endure, and Arjun was not a being who cared about this, not if he sought to take Pandora from here by force.”
“And that he did,” said Pandora. Again her voice was soft, as though she were engaging in another conversation. “And I am grateful to be free. And Marius, I beg your forgiveness that I couldn’t free myself of Arjun. I beg your forgiveness that I lacked the strength, but I was his maker and his mother as well as his lover, and simply could not do it.”
I knew this to be true. I had not paid a great deal of attention to Pandora or Arjun in the last year or more, but I had seen and heard enough to know that Arjun made Pandora miserable, and that her misery was increasing, and that she clung to the Court in the last few months, choosing not anymore to travel with Arjun, even as far as Paris.
“I should have had your strength,” Pandora continued, looking at Marius. “But I don’t have it. And so you did this thing for me, more out of disgust—.”
“Oh, don’t deceive yourself!” he fired back at her.
She paused and then went on, “Perhaps more out of disgust for my weakness than any—.”
Marius made a sharp derisive sound and looked away from her.
“For whatever reason,” I said, “it’s done. And I rule based on all you’ve told me that it was done with good reason and in self-defense, and that this be the end of it.”
“I heartily agree,” said Gregory. There were murmurs of assent all around, even from Amel.
“Is there anyone who objects to this?” I asked.
Marius rose to his feet.
He looked at me and then at the others.
“I am sorry for what I did,” he said. “I am sorry for my impatience, my rage, and my weakness. I’m sorry that I struck down Arjun. And I want you to know, I want all to know, that I believe we must abide by the laws we make for one another. We the council, we the elders, enjoy no exception to these laws, no special prerogative to break them. I am sorry and I give you my word that I will never again in wanton rage take the life of another blood drinker.”
Again there were murmurs of assent from everyone.
Amel seemed deeply moved by all this, and seemed on the edge of tears for a moment, but then this was very much his way, to have the easily kindled emotions of a young man, though he was far older than any of us. He looked up at Marius plaintively as if he wished with all his strange unnatural heart that he could do something to stop the torment Marius couldn’t conceal.
“Then it’s done,” said Pandora.
She too was looking pleadingly at Marius, but he would not look at her.
“And now,” she said, “you can despise me for this as well as for so many other things.”
“That is too trivial and foolish and self-indulgent to deserve a response,” he said. “I thank you all for your forgiveness.”
“Then we can get to the more pressing matter,” said Gregory.
“And what is that?” I asked. I wanted now more than anything in the world to tell them about Fontayne, to tell Pandora about him, and have her assurance that I might bring him to Court, but I could see all eyes on me now, even the eyes of Pandora.
“Rhoshamandes,” said Gregory, looking directly at me. “Lestat, you must give the order to put an end to Rhoshamandes.”
Chapter 6
I was quietly infuriated. Rhoshamandes. Five thousand years in the Blood. Living on his own private island of Saint Rayne. Visited from time to time by his fledglings, Eleni, Allesandra, and cohabiting with his lover, Benedict. A blood drinker who clearly despised me for what I had done to him in the past, after his murder of the great Maharet, and while he was holding my son, Viktor, captive. A blood drinker who had agreed to leave us in peace if we left him in peace.
“Why in the world are we talking of this again?” I demanded. “What’s happened?”
For a moment, nothing was said, and it was easy for me to understand why. We had argued this out over and over again. They, one and all, were for the destruction of Rhoshamandes, and I alone had held out against it, insisting over and over again that Rhoshamandes had been formally forgiven for what he had done to Maharet and that he had done nothing to break the peace, committed no act of aggression against us.
It maddened me that I could not get any of them to understand what it meant to me to pass judgment on a blood drinker who had walked the earth for thousands of years, who had seen empires rise and fall, and worlds I could only imagine—to strike down such a being for an error he had made due to the enticements of a spirit voice that had lied to him and manipulated him and goaded him to attack Maharet and destroy her.
But never was there the slightest bit of understanding. Most of the council was positively adamant that Rhoshamandes should be destroyed, and those who seemed to care very little weren’t in disagreement.
“Amel,” I said. “This is the first time, to my knowledge, that you’ve been at this table. Can’t you speak up for Rhoshamandes?”
“Lestat, why would I do that?” he asked in his boyish voice, his face suddenly flushed as he looked at me. We had seen each other many times in the last year, and I had grown used to him in this new immortal body, and at times it was as if the spirit, Amel, that bizarre and terrifying being, had never existed.
“Because it was you, you coming to consciousness, Amel, who goaded him into killing Maharet. Have you forgotten that?”
This was a painful moment for the others,
and I could see it. They were gazing at Amel uneasily, as if they had not forgotten, not for a moment, the ancient spirit that he had been, and were unable to trust the youthful red-haired Amel who sat before them. They seemed not reassured by his obvious emotions but suspicious of them. But Amel had always from the very first moment he uttered a coherent word in spirit form been a victim of his emotions. And he was now.
I found myself deep in my thoughts, remembering that it had not been two years ago that, at a table like this one at Trinity Gate in New York, these very immortals had spoken of imprisoning the spirit Amel in some chamber of fluid in which, blind and deaf, and unable to speak, he might have lapsed back into a mindless existence of torment. I tried to drive this from my mind because this was not a time to speak of this, but the Replimoids, whatever their immense powers, could not read our minds, and Amel, who had once been our central mind, so to speak, who could move from mind to mind among us, was now for all practical purposes a Replimoid.
What was that like, I wondered, for this strange incarnate spirit who had been in a physical body now for months—walking, talking, reading, perhaps making love, living as an enfleshed immortal again—to be sitting amongst us now, the blood drinkers of the tribe he had created and inhabited and sustained for centuries? Thoughts like this do not lead to easy or simple conclusions. They persist in me because I am driven to go to the root of things. And I wanted to understand everything that was happening now, and the emotions I could feel all about me were sadly as real as words or actions.
No. I wasn’t going to linger on this, the baffling relationship between this person whom I loved devoutly and the blood drinkers who didn’t share that love or even understand him.
If Amel remembered that council of cold immortals dispassionately discussing his fate—when none of us knew precisely what he was, or whence he’d come, or why or how he’d fused with a human being to make the first vampire—he didn’t let on.