by Anne Rice
“And the other thing I must say, which is painful to say, is be careful when you strike a blow, be careful what type of blow you strike, be careful that you never, never, unless you must, strike a blow that another cannot forgive…such as the severing of a hand from an arm, or the severing of an arm from a shoulder—because that is a savage thing, that brings forth a hatred from the soul of the victim that is primitive and catastrophic.”
“Oh, come now, Benedict,” said Gregory. “Do you mean to say that the Prince should not have struck off Rhoshamandes’s hand and arm when Rhoshamandes held Mekare herself captive, and had slain Maharet beneath her own roof? Surely…”
“I don’t speak of justice now, Gregory,” Benedict said.
Armand interjected before Benedict could go on.
“You murdered Maharet, you miserable coward!” he said. He was plainly seething with rage. “You battered her to death with an ax in the sanctity of her own house, and you come here expecting sympathy for your master. I don’t care what the spirit moved either of you to believe. You’re murderers of the eldest of our kind.”
Benedict shut his eyes and put his hands over his face. He began to shake all over.
“Both you and your master should be destroyed!” Armand continued. His face flushed red.
Marius stood and came down the table to Armand and laid his hands on Armand’s shoulders. But Armand rose to his feet and ignored Marius as if he weren’t there.
I could feel the hostility blazing from Armand.
“I dreamed of some night going to her,” said Armand. “I dreamed of hours, nights, weeks, months in her divine company,” he said, his voice dropping low with its heat, his eyes fixed on Benedict. “I dreamed of asking her questions without end and roaming through her archives and her libraries. I dreamed of asking for her finest wisdom, and this you destroyed, you and your selfish fool of a master, you destroyed it, storming into her compound like barbarians with your weapons—.”
Benedict was hunched over weeping, choking with sobs. But suddenly he rose to his feet, the blood streaming down his face.
“And you, you vile miscreant,” he said back to Armand, “what did you do with your powers? Enslave the Children of Satan in rags and filth and rotten theologies under Les Innocents when you could have freed them to see the wonders Marius revealed to you, all the beauty of the world and its great art? Who are you to curse me? I’ll tell you what else I’ve learned before I die.”
“Oh, die and get on with it,” said Armand. “Do you want my help?”
“Yes, I do,” said Benedict. “But not in the way you think.”
Allesandra had risen, and after a moment’s hesitation she stood behind Benedict with her hands on his shoulders just as Marius stood behind Armand.
“I was the dupe of the Voice, and you know it,” said Benedict, “and I was doing my master’s bidding, I admit it. But she wanted to destroy us all, Maharet. She dreamed of it, of taking her sister with her into the volcano which would have destroyed us all.”
“No, she didn’t,” said Armand caustically. “She had her moments of suicidal despair as we all do, that’s all. She would have come round. Why didn’t you and your master talk to her, seek to comfort her, seek to turn her from that darkness?”
“She would not have let us kill her if she had wanted to live.”
Jesse Reeves’s voice broke in suddenly. She turned in her chair to look up at Benedict.
“That is not true and you know it,” she said. “Stop seeking to excuse what you did. You took my beloved Maharet by surprise. We are all vulnerable to surprise. Speed and surprise! And your blows fell on her body and on her soul.”
“Very well, I admit it. Yes, it’s true, all of it is true,” cried Benedict. But he didn’t look at Jesse. He was still looking at Armand.
And what a spectacle they made, the two of them, each Born to Darkness at such a young age, two “boys” facing each other with boyish cheeks and lips, and even boyish hair, two angels glaring at each other, and I realized as soon as the thought of it gripped me that Benedict was thinking this very thing.
“And now I’ll tell you what more I’ve learned and want to share before I leave this world,” he said. He looked at me and then back to Armand.
“Those of us made young,” he said, “we never grow up. Five hundred years or a thousand. It makes no difference. Time gives us room to be forever stupid and blind with the confusion and passions of the young, vulnerable to the masters who made us and ensnared us.”
“Oh, stuff and nonsense,” said Armand. “I was never a child. I was a man before I was ever Born to Darkness, you imbecilic creature! Maybe you were a child, in your monkish robes, with your dark Christian longings, and maybe you still are. But I was never young. And I have learned through suffering and anguish and loneliness such as you, cowering in the shadow of your master, have never known.”
Benedict was blinking as if Armand were a blinding light.
“I want to die now,” said Benedict. “I want to die here among the young ones—.” He pointed in the direction of the ballroom. “I’ve invited them to gather. I want to give them my blood. I want to take the sins of my master upon myself—.”
“You are no Christ who can take upon himself the sins of others,” said Armand. “You don’t even know what you’re doing with your staging of your own death. You bring a throne to the ballroom so the Prince will preside over your little spectacle, but you have no grasp of what you really mean to do.”
“He’s speaking the truth, Benedict,” said Allesandra. “Please delay this dreadful step.”
Allesandra had become more beautiful with every passing night, it seemed, since the Voice had called her forth from the catacombs of Paris, and she gathered Benedict to herself like a redemptive angel, her lovely hair falling all about her shoulders and his shoulders as she sought to embrace him. “Please listen to me, Benedict. Don’t do this thing.”
“There’s no time anymore to waste,” he said.
He reached inside his jacket and drew out a small silver box. He opened it and I could see the vampiric blood in it. The box was about half full of it, and it gave a gleam that mortal blood never gives. Closed up in a container as it was, vampiric blood stays liquid. He touched it now with the tip of his finger.
“Dr. Fareed, please come with me. I have something I must give you.”
He put the box back into his inner pocket.
“And, Prince, please do preside if you will, and see my blood is not wasted. I beg you, don’t let the flames take me. I’m in terror of the flames. Don’t commit my remains to the fire until my blood is gone.”
Without further ado he moved swiftly out of the Council Chamber, Fareed coming along behind him with Allesandra, and the rest of us following slowly as we approached the ballroom from which not a sound could be heard.
Chapter 11
Throughout the exchanges in the Council Chamber I’d heard activity in the ballroom, vampires gathering, cars entering the parking grounds, and feet ascending stairways, and others coming on the wind and entering through the terrace.
But even so, the size of the crowd astonished me. I think some thousand were assembled, and the orchestra sat waiting, and Antoine at his podium had his baton in his hand.
All eyes were fixed on us as we came in. I motioned for a path to be made, and in the center of this path Benedict stopped. He was facing Antoine. He was in the very middle of the room. And I saw now that lining both sides of this path were young ones—Sybelle and Benji, Rose, Viktor, and other fledglings who surely had been summoned by Benedict, and many I didn’t know. Older fledglings were gathered here as well—vampires who had perhaps four or five hundred years in the Blood. And I suppose by that reckoning, I myself could be seen as a fledgling, and Armand too. But many of these had never had the blood of the ancients. Made by makers long gone from t
he earth, they stared at Benedict with rapt attention, and the spectacle suddenly chilled me to my soul.
I felt a wild impulse to call a halt. This was horrible, what was happening, what I saw in the faces on either side of us. But Marius took my hand now and led me towards the gilded chair.
“Don’t stop it. Watch it and learn from it,” he said.
“But this is wrong,” I said to him in the softest whisper.
“No, not wrong, but what we are,” he said.
He gestured for me to step up to the platform and be seated on the medieval throne.
I found myself obeying him and now he stood to my left with his right hand on my shoulder, my Prime Minister.
Benedict raised his voice to address the throng.
“In ancient times,” he said, “when I was but a fledging in the Loire Valley of this country, in what we now call the Garden of France, I was welcomed into the sodality of the night by Rhoshamandes, and we lived in a great stone edifice which is long gone.
“When old ones in that time wanted to end their journey on the Devil’s Road, they gave their blood to the rest of us, and so it is with me now and it’s what I mean to do. I give my eyes first to Fareed that he may use them for some goodly purpose, but my body and my blood I give to you.”
A great gasp went up from the spectators as he plucked out his left eye and then his right and put them into that silver casket before snapping it shut and handing it to Fareed.
The silence was like something that grew deeper and deeper by the moment.
Benedict continued, the blood trickling down his face, his eyelids fluttering hideously as he spoke.
“I beg you not to give my remains to the flames in those fireplaces until all blood is gone from me, and my head severed from my body and my heart silenced. And, Antoine, I ask you, give me music as it was in the old days….Give me the Dies irae, dies illa…with the kettledrums, please, Antoine, and serenade me to my ruin.”
Antoine’s face was stricken with anguish. He looked at me, and I heard Marius tell him to do as Benedict asked.
And Antoine turned, lifted his baton, and at once I heard Notker’s boy sopranos raise their voices in Gregorian chant to sing the song as I knew it, but with the savage beat of the drums.
The words came in Latin, but I knew the meaning.
That day of wrath, that dreadful day, shall heaven and earth in ashes lay, as David and the Sybil say.
Benedict stood with his head bowed. He slipped a knife from inside his long monkly robe.
“Come, Sybelle; come, Benji,” he cried out. Then he tore open the robe and let it fall to the floor, revealing his entire naked body—a waxen image of a boy on the verge of manhood, the golden hair around his cock as bright and beautiful as the soft curling hair of his head.
“Come, Rose; come, Viktor,” he cried out. “Come all of you young ones. Take the blood of a thousand years.”
The hymn went on.
What horror must invade the mind, when the approaching Judge shall find and sift the deeds of all mankind.
With a movement so swift I didn’t see it, Benedict slashed his left wrist, then his right, and then his throat. He plunged the knife into his heart, withdrew it, and it hit the floor clattering at his feet.
He vanished as the fledglings closed around him.
The mighty trumpet’s wondrous tone shall rend each tomb’s sepulchral stone and summon all before the Throne.
I sat there watching with the same sense of horror, of something unholy and hideous and yet beautiful, the music pumping through the heart of the kettledrums, as Allesandra and Eleni and Everard de Landen came up close to me, gathering to the left of the throne. They turned their backs on what was happening, Allesandra collapsing in Everard’s arms.
“It’s what he wants,” Everard whispered. “That monster should be the one dying, not him.”
The voices grew more urgent, the drums beating a faster cadence.
O King of dreadful majesty! grace and mercy You grant free; as Fount of Kindness, save me!
I heard the unmistakable sound of preternatural flesh tearing, of bones breaking. A ghastly roar rose from the crowd and I saw Benedict’s head held aloft, like that of a prisoner executed by the guillotine, the empty eyelids still fluttering, and the music grew louder, the horns joining the voices of the singers, and finally the strings took up the grim song.
Out of the mass of blood drinkers, there wandered a fledgling I didn’t know, a female in a velvet gown, with a severed hand to her lips, drinking the very last of the blood from its white flesh and then licking her lips. I saw her eyes open wide as the powerful blood flooded her senses, her blind gaze drifting over all in front of her until a great shudder passed through her, and she moved as if in a trance away to the far side of the room.
Others too were now moving away. But others hastened to pick up the fragments of the body which had been discarded. And I saw now as more and more abandoned the ritual that the limbs lay all scattered about.
“Come with me, Prince, please,” sobbed Allesandra. “Help me gather them and put them on the fire.”
I did as she asked. And Marius came with us.
It was finished.
We took up the broken pieces of what had once been Benedict and threw them into the flames. Marius held the head in both hands, then passed it to Allesandra, who held it to her breast, her fingers pressing into the golden hair.
“Come, it’s over,” whispered Marius to her.
I took the head from her, looked at the empty white face. Not a drop of blood remained to the hollow sockets. The head looked drawn and ancient.
I laid it as reverently as I could in the dancing flames.
There was nothing left now. Everard and Eleni had picked up the smallest remnants of flesh and brought them to us, and it was all done.
I stood there dazed. I couldn’t grasp what had happened, even though I had seen it, that this Benedict, this beloved child of Rhoshamandes who had lived with him for over a thousand years, was gone—simply gone.
The music slowed. The hymn had finished.
I walked back to my new chair because I didn’t know what else to do or where to go.
What would come now? The soft sad music of Albinoni in the Adagio in G Minor? That’s what I wanted with all my soul.
But something different happened.
The orchestra broke into a riot of blazing sound. It was the pounding “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana—with voices rising high above the roaring strings, and frantic drums.
From the shadows on all sides came blood drinkers to dance, skirts swirling, arms out, and the music moved away from its first theme into a dark and turgid waltz—a crashing and frenzied waltz fit for the denizens of Hell.
The room was quaking. Shrieks and ecstatic cries came from everywhere.
I put my hands over my ears and bowed my head. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the great mass of dancers and their ecstatic movements, their voices rising to join the voices of the chorus.
I slumped back against the chair. I felt Marius’s hand tighten on my right shoulder and his lips against the left side of my face.
“This is it. This is the dark part of us,” he said, but not with spite, his voice soothing as though he meant only to comfort me. “We are killers and we thrive on death. It’s the part of us you can’t erase, not with all the love in broken Christendom.”
I couldn’t answer.
Allesandra dropped to the wooden platform at my feet and leaned back against my knees, crying. I looked down and saw she held Benedict’s brown robe in her hands. She held it to her breast. I had forgotten about that robe. And something about the way she held it chilled me, brought back out of fractured and wounded memory a moment so painful I wanted to turn away from it; myself over a hundred years ago, holding Claudia’s blood
stained dress, after her death in the cellar beneath the Théâtre des Vampires. I reached for Allesandra’s hair. The music swallowed my thoughts, my memories, any meager attempt to reach beyond these moments.
Far down the hill, it must have roused the mortals from their beds, this dark savage dance. It must have been heard all through the snow-covered mountain valleys, this great dark surging waltz and all the searing preternatural voices mingling with it.
Through the fingers of my right hand I saw Louis among the dancers, his head back, his eyes closed, swaying with his feet in place, buffeted, it seemed, by the sounds around him, and Armand dancing with Sybelle in his arms, her silken skirts flying. And Rose and Viktor dancing as well, and others spinning like dervishes in their madness.
The Great Sevraine danced alone, a glittering figure in her shimmering white gown, lifting her arms with the grace of a ballerina, and beside her, in the very midst of it all, stood my mother, my Gabrielle, as if she were floating on the music. She wore her usual khaki coat and jeans, but her hair was loose, and she only smiled as hands reached for it, tore at it, picked it up, and let it fall in golden strands in the light of the chandeliers. Her eyes appeared glazed and distant as if the music was making her dream.
And where was Benedict? Where was his soul? Had his soul soared into the light, the eternal child, welcomed by some great forgiving power? Or had Memnoch, that evil and tenacious spirit, come to dazzle him with astral purgatorial nightmares?
A deafening crash shattered the dance.
The orchestra stopped. The voices stopped.
A great wind swirled through the ballroom, rocking the chandeliers on their chains, and snow descended in a soft silent avalanche of flakes.
I rose to my feet.
The crowd fell back away from the hearth on the far-left wall. Indeed the blood drinkers shrank into the corners.
I saw the Great Sevraine come towards me like a white comet. Gregory suddenly stood at my side, and so did Cyril, and Seth.