Pandora

by Anne Rice

  Nods and noble mumbles came from the other soldiers.

  “I was but a small child,” I said, “when word came of the ambush of General Varus. But I remember our Divine Emperor Augustus—how he let his hair grow long in mourning and how he would pound his head on the walls, crying, ‘Varus, bring me back my legions.’ ”

  “You actually saw him this way?”

  “Oh, many a time, and was present one night when he discussed his often mentioned thoughts—that the Empire must not try to push further. Rather it should police the states which it now contains.”

  “Then Caesar Augustus did say this!” said the Legate in fascination.

  “He cared about you,” I said to the Legate. “How many years have you been in the field? Do you have a wife?”

  “Oh, how I long to go home,” said the Legate. “And now that my General has fallen. My wife is gray-haired as I am. I see her when we go to Rome for parades.”

  “Yes, and compulsory service was only six years under the Republic, but now, you must fight for what? Twelve? Twenty? But who am I to criticize Augustus, whom I loved as I loved my Father and all my dead brothers?”

  Lucius could see what was happening. He sputtered when he spoke:

  “Tribune, read my Safe Conduct! Read it!”

  The Legate looked truly annoyed.

  My brother marshaled what he could of his rhetoric, which wasn’t much. “She lies. She is condemned. Her family is dead. I was compelled to bear witness to Sejanus because they sought to kill Tiberius himself!”

  “You turned on your own family?” asked the soldier.

  “Oh, don’t wear yourself out with this,” I said “The man has harried me all day. He has discovered that I am a woman alone, an heiress, and thinks that this is some uncivilized outpost of the Empire where he can bring a charge against a Senator’s daughter with no proof. Dear lunatic, do pay attention. Julius Caesar gave Antioch its municipal standing less than one hundred years ago. There are legions stationed here, are there not?”

  I looked at the Legate.

  The Legate turned and glowered at my trembling brother.

  “What is this Safe Conduct?” I asked. “This bears the name Tiberius.”

  The Legate snatched it from Lucius before Lucius could respond and handed the scroll to me. I had to take my hand off my dagger to unroll the paper.

  “Ah, Sejanus of the Praetorian Guard! I knew it. And the Emperor probably knows nothing of it. Tribune, do you know those palace guards make one and one half times what a Legionnaire makes? And now they have these Delatores, given incentive to charge others with crimes for one-third of the condemned man’s property!”

  The Legate was now sizing up my brother and every flaw in Lucius shone in the light; his cowardly posture, his trembling hands, his shifty eyes, his growing desperation in the pursing of his lips.

  I turned to Lucius.

  “Do you realize, you madman, whoever you are, what you are asking of this seasoned and wise Roman officer? What if he should believe your insane lies? What will become of him when the letter arrives from Rome inquiring into my whereabouts and the disposition of my fortune!”

  “Sir, this woman is a traitor!” shouted Lucius. “On my honor I swear—”

  “What honor is that?” asked the soldier under his breath. His eyes fixed on Lucius.

  “If Rome were such,” I said, “that families as old as mine could be so easily dispatched as this man asks you now to do with me, then why would the widow of Germanicus dare to go before the Senate for a trial?”

  “They are all executed,” said my brother, who was at his worst and most solemn, and seemed to have lost all touch with the effect of his words, “every one of them, because they were in a plot to kill Tiberius and I was given Safe Conduct and passage out for reporting them, as was my duty, to the Delatores, and to Sejanus, with whom I spoke myself!”

  The possibilities were making themselves known slowly to the Legate.

  “Sir,” I said to Lucius, “have you anything else on your person that identifies you?”

  “I don’t need anything else!” said Lucius. “Your fate is death.”

  “Same as it was for your Father?” asked the Legate, “and your wife? Had you children?”

  “Throw her into prison tonight, and write to Rome!” declared Lucius. “You’ll see that I speak the truth!”

  “Arid where will you be, whoever you are, while I am in prison? Looting my house?”

  “You slut!” shouted Lucius. “Don’t you see this is all feminine wiles and lurid distraction!”

  There was shock among the soldiers, revulsion in the face of the Legate. Flavius moved next to me.

  “Officer,” asked Flavius with tempered dignity, “what am I allowed to do on behalf of my Mistress against this madman?”

  “You use such words again, Sir,” I said firmly to Lucius, “and I’ll lose my patience.”

  The Legate took Lucius’s arm. Lucius’s right hand went to his dagger.

  “Just who are you?” the Legate demanded. “Are you one of the Delatores? You tell me you turned on your whole family?”

  “Tribune,” I said, laying the gentlest touch yet on his arm. “My Father’s roots went back to the time of Romulus and Remus. We know no origins other than those in Rome. It was the same with my Mother, who was herself the daughter of a Senator. This man is saying rather . . . horrible things.”

  “So it seems,” said the Legate, narrowing his gaze, as he inspected Lucius. “Where are your friends here, your companions; where do you live?”

  “You can’t do anything to me!” said Lucius.

  The Legate glared at Lucius’s hand on the dagger.

  “You prepare to draw that against me!” asked the Legate.

  Lucius clearly was at a loss.

  “Why did you come to Antioch?” I demanded of Lucius. “Were you the bearer of the poison that killed Germanicus?”

  “Arrest her!” shouted Lucius.

  “No, I don’t believe my own accusation. Not even Sejanus would put such treachery in the hands of a petty scoundrel like you! Come now, what else do you have on your person to connect you with this family, this Safe Conduct which you say came from the pen of Sejanus?”

  Lucius was utterly baffled.

  “I certainly have nothing belonging to me to connect me to your wild and bloody sagas and tales,” I said.

  The Legate interrupted me. “Nothing to connect you to this name?” He took the Safe Conduct from my hand.

  “Absolutely nothing,” I said, “nothing but this madman here who is spouting horrors, and would lead the world to believe that our Emperor has lost his wits. Only he connects me with his bloody plot without witness or verification, and hurls insults at me.”

  The Legate rolled up the Safe Conduct. “And your purpose here, Madam?” he asked in a whisper.

  “To live in peace and quiet,” I said softly. “To live in safety and under the true shelter of Roman rule.”

  Now I knew the battle had been won. But something else was required to seal the victory. I took another gamble.

  Slowly I reached for my dagger and slowly I brought it out of its sling.

  Lucius leapt back at once. He drew his dagger and lunged at me. He was immediately stabbed by the Legate and at least two of the soldiers.

  He hung there bleeding on their weapons, staring from right to left, and then he spoke, but his mouth was too full of blood. His eyes widened; it seemed again he would speak. Then, as the soldiers withdrew their daggers, his body folded up on the cobblestones at the foot of the stairs.

  My brother Lucius was quite mercifully dead.

  I looked at him and shook my head.

  The Legate looked at me. This was a significant moment, and I knew it.

  “What is it, Tribune,” I asked, “that separates us from the long-haired barbarians of the North? Is it not law? Written law? Traditional law? Is it not justice? That men and women are called to account for what they d
o?”

  “Yes, Madam,” he said.

  “You know,” I went on in a reverent voice, staring at this heap of blood and clothes and flesh that lay on the stones, “I saw our great Emperor Caesar Augustus on the day of his death.”

  “You saw him? You did?”

  I nodded. “When they were certain he was to die, we were rushed to him with a few other close friends. It was his hope to put down rumors in the capital that might lead to unrest. He had sent for a mirror and combed his hair. He was primly propped up. And he asked us as we entered the room: Didn’t we think he’d played his part well in the comedy of life?

  “I thought, what courage! And then he made some further joke, the old theatrical line they say after plays:

  If I have made you happy, kindly let me know

  your appreciation with a warm goodbye.

  “I could tell you more, but—”

  “Oh, please do,” said the Legate.

  “Well, why not?” I asked. “It was told to me that the Emperor said of Tiberius, his chosen successor, ‘Poor Rome, to be chewed slowly by those sluggish jaws!’ ”

  The Legate smiled. “But there wasn’t anyone else,” he said under his breath.

  “Thank you, Tribune, for all your assistance. Would you allow me to take from my purse sufficient funds to treat you and your soldiers to a fine dinner—”

  “No, Madam, I wouldn’t have it be said I or any man here was bribed. Now this dead man. Do you know anything more of him?”

  “Only this, Officer, that his body probably belongs in the river.”

  The soldiers all laughed among themselves.

  “Good night, Gracious Lady,” said the soldier.

  And off I went, striding across the blackness of the Forum, with my beloved one-legged Flavius at my side and the torchbearers round us.

  Only now did I shake all over. Only now did the sweat cover my whole body.

  When we had plunged deeply into the unbroken darkness of a small alleyway, I said, “Flavius, let these torchbearers go. There is no reason for them to know where we are headed.”

  “Madam, I don’t have any lantern.”

  “The night’s full of stars and has a near full moon. Look! Besides, there are others from the Temple who are following us.”

  “There are?” he asked. He paid off the torchbearers and they ran back towards the mouth of the street.

  “Yes. There is one watching. And besides, we can see well enough by the lighted windows and Heaven’s light, don’t you think? I am tired, so tired.”

  I walked on, reminding myself again and again that Flavius could not keep up. I began to weep.

  “Tell me something with your great philosophical knowledge,” I said as I walked on, determined to make the tears stop. “Tell me why evil people are so stupid? Why are so many of them just plain stupid?”

  “Madam, I think there are quite a few evil people who are quite clever,” he said. “But never have I seen such skilled rhetoric on the part of anyone, either bad or good, as your talents revealed just now.”

  “I’m delighted that you know that that is all it was,” I said. “Rhetoric. And to think he had the same teachers as I, the same library, the same Father—” My voice broke.

  He put his arm gingerly about my shoulder and this time I didn’t tell him to move away. I let him steady me. We walked faster as a pair.

  “No,” I said, “Flavius, the majority of the evil are just plain dumb, I’ve seen it all my life. The true crafty evil person is rare. It’s bumbling that causes most of the misery of the world, utter stupid bumbling. It’s underestimation of one’s fellow man! You watch what happens with Tiberius. Tiberius Caesar and the Guard. Watch what happens to that damned Sejanus. You can sow the seeds of distrust everywhere, and lose yourself in an overgrown field.”

  “We are home, Madam,” he said.

  “Oh, thank God, you know it. I could never have told you this was the house.”

  Within moments, he stopped and turned the key in a lock. The smell of urine was everywhere overpowering, as it always was in the back streets of ancient cities. A lantern threw a dim light on our wooden door. The light danced in the jet of water which fell from the lion’s mouth in the fountain.

  Flavius gave a series of knocks. It sounded to me as if the women answering the inner door were crying.

  “Oh, Lord, now what?” I said. “I am too sleepy. Whatever it is, tend to it.” I went inside.

  “Madam,” squealed one of the girls. I couldn’t remember her name. “I didn’t let him in. I swear I never unbolted the door. I have no key to the gate. We had this house, all this, ready for you!” She sobbed.

  “What on Earth are you talking about?” I asked.

  But I knew. I’d seen in the corner of my eye. I knew. I turned and saw a very tall Roman sitting in my newly refurbished living room. He sat relaxed with ankle on knee in a gilded wooden chair.

  “It’s all right, Flavius,” I said. “I know him.”

  And I did. Because it was Marius. Marius the tall Keltoi. Marius, who had charmed me in childhood Marius, whom I had almost identified in the shadows of the Temple.

  He rose at once.

  He came towards me, where I stood in the darkness on the edges of the atrium, and he whispered, “My beautiful Pandora!”

  7

  E STOPPED just short of touching me. “Oh, do, please,” I said. I moved to kiss him, but he moved away. The room had scattered lamps. He played the shadows.

  “Marius, of course, Marius! And you look not one day older than when I saw you in my girlhood. Your face is radiant, and your eyes, how beautiful are your eyes. I would sing these praises to the accompaniment of a lyre if I could.”

  Flavius had slowly withdrawn, taking the distressed girls with him. He made not a sound.

  “Pandora,” Marius said, “I wish I could take you in my arms, but there are reasons why I cannot, and you mustn’t touch me, not because I want it so much, but because I’m not what you think. You don’t see the evidence of youth in me; it is something so far afield of the promises of youth that I’ve only just begun to understand its agonies.”

  Suddenly he looked off. He raised his hand for my silence and patience.

  “That thing is abroad,” I said. “The burnt blood drinker.”

  “Don’t think on your dreams just now,” he said to me directly. “Think on our youth. I loved you when you were a girl of ten. When you were fifteen I begged your Father for your hand.”

  “You did? He never told me this.”

  He looked away again. Then he shook his head.

  “The burnt one,” I said.

  “I feared this,” he cursed himself. “He followed you from the Temple! Oh, Marius! You are a fool. You have played into his hands. But he is not as clever as he thinks.”

  “Marius, was it you who sent me the dreams!”

  “No, never! I would do anything in my power to protect you from myself.”

  “And from the old legends?”

  “Don’t be quick of wit, Pandora. I know your immense cleverness served you well back there with your loathsome brother Lucius and the gentleman Legate. But don’t think too much about . . . dreams. Dreams are nothing, and dreams will pass.”

  “Then the dreams came from him, this hideous burnt killer?”

  “I can’t figure it!” he said. “But don’t think on the images. Don’t feed him now with your mind.”

  “He reads minds,” I said, “just as you do.”

  “Yes. But you can cloak your thoughts. It’s a mental trick. You can learn it. You can walk with your soul locked up in a little metal box in your head.”

  I realized he was in much pain. An immense sadness came from him. “This cannot be allowed to happen!” he insisted.

  “What is that, Marius? You speak about the woman’s voice, you—”

  “No, be quiet.”

  “I will not! I will get to the bottom of this!”

  “You must take my ins
tructions!” He stepped forward and again he reached to touch me, to take me by the arms, as my Father might have done, but then he did not.

  “No, it is you who must tell me everything,” I said.

  I was amazed at the whiteness of his skin, its utter blemishless perfection. And once again the radiance of his eyes seemed almost impossible. Inhuman.

  Only now did I see the full glory of his long hair. He did look like the Keltoi, who had been his ancestors. His hair touched his shoulders. It was a gleaming gold, overly bright, yellow as corn and full of soft curls.

  “Look at you!” I whispered. “You’re not alive!”

  “No, take your last look, for you are leaving here!”

  “What?” I said. “Last look?” I repeated his words. “What are you talking about! I’ve only arrived, laid my plans, rid myself of my brother! I am not leaving here. Do you mean to say you are leaving me?”

  There was a terrible anguish in his face, a courageous appeal that I had never seen in any man, not even in my Father, who had worked swiftly in those last fatal moments at home, as if he were merely intent on sending me on an important appointment.

  Marius’s eyes were filmed with blood. He was crying, and his eyes were sore with the tears! No! These were tears like the tears of the magnificent Queen in the dream, who, bound to her throne, wept and stained her cheeks and her throat and her linen.

  He wanted to deny it. He shook his head, but he knew I was quite convinced.

  “Pandora, when I saw it was you,” he said, “when you came into the Temple and I saw it was you who had had these blood dreams, I was beside myself. I must get you far from this, far from all danger.”

  I separated myself from his spell, from the aura of his beauty. I beheld him with a cold eye, and I listened as he went on, noting all about him, from the glitter of his eyes to the way that he gestured.

  “You have to leave Antioch at once,” he said. “I will stay here the night with you. Then in the day, you pick up your faithful Flavius and your two girls, they are honest, and you take them with you. You put miles between you and this place by day, and this thing can’t follow you! Don’t tell me now where you mean to go. You can discuss all this at the docks in the morning. You have plenty of money.”