Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life (42 page)

I
t stood in an ancient part of Cairo, had stood there for perhaps a thousand years. To the street, it offered little promise, but behind its old walls were wonders. In the ancient manner, it was built around courtyards. Perhaps it had started life as a Roman
praetoria,
an elaborate roadside inn fit for an emperor, when this spot was in the countryside, on the road to Heliopolis. After that, the number of rooms along the west wall suggested that part of it, at least, had become a
khan,
a caravanserai.

The place had belonged to the family Karas since the days of the Mamelukes, and many a soldier had girded himself in armor here and marched to meet the battles of history. But it was not the history of the family Karas that interested Ian Ward, it was a girl, the third daughter of Adel Karas, Hamida. He had first seen Hamida behind a latticed window, watching as his father was brought back from the hospital, his heart newly catheterized by Dr. Radwan Faraj, a small man with a neat beard and a catalog of ancient jokes delivered in improbable English.

Dad had almost died, but he was getting better fast. If they weren’t careful, he’d soon be back in the vampire ruin beneath the Giza Plateau, before the scientists were let in and it fulfilled its destiny as the archaeological wonder of the world, the hall where the record of man was stored.

Now he waited for Hamida beside a fountain in the Karases’ first and largest courtyard. He sat on its edge, watching slow carp moving in the clear, cool water that bubbled up from a copper flower in its center. The fountain itself was tiled in an intricate design of lilies.

More flowers festooned a plum tree that stood a short distance away. He was really more interested in the tree than the fountain, and most especially in the cool patch of grass concealed beneath its shade.

He dragged his fingers in the water, letting the carp come up and nibble at them. Far away in the house, his mother was singing. In all of his life, she had never done this, not before now. A great burden had been lifted from her shoulders, he knew, when it had become clear that he was not going to feed. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but that he absolutely would not, not ever. The way it had felt within him—as if he had briefly been a god—would haunt him forever, but his reverence for life went deep, arising as it did out of the love that was the truest definition of his soul.

Then the bells jangled that indicated that the outside door was being opened. He raised his eyes. Hamida came down the long colonnade and into the courtyard. He had loved beautiful women, but never one like Hamida. He had not known what innocence was before he met her, or just how pure the eyes of a girl could be. He had been drawn to her by an overwhelming power, greater even than the power that had drawn him to Leo, even than Lilith’s hypnotizing beauty.

Hamida laughed when she saw him. She drew off her dark glasses and came down beside him. She’d been at the hairdresser. As a Copt, she did not seek the mystery of sunna. She would never wear the Muslim veil, nor did this house seek to find itself in the path of the Prophet’s own family. The olive skin of her face and her great, dark eyes were framed by beautiful black hair, now freshly and fetchingly curled.

“Do you know what’s so funny?” she said.

He shook his head.

“I thought you’d end up here. This fountain has a legend attached to it.”

“So does everything in the house.”

“But this one is special.” When she looked up at him out of those wonderful eyes, he saw nothing else, heard nobody else—which was as well, because he probably didn’t need to see the parents assembled along the second-story colonnade, tasting of young love from afar.

“There was a boy living here some time ago—”

“A boy you knew?” She had no brothers.

Again, she laughed. “Ian, this is Egypt. I’m talking about at least a couple of thousand years. Anyway, he was waiting for his lover to return. She had promised him it would only be an hour. One hour went by, and no lover. Two hours, no lover. But he had promised her that he would wait. So he stayed there. He stayed there all night and all day, and then more nights and more days—right where you’re sitting now—and nobody could budge him. The story is, he stayed there not just for weeks or months or years, but for a thousand thousand years, listening to the water and watching the carp, just like you’ve been doing.”

“Except I’ve only been here thirty minutes. Not even an hour.”

“In Egypt, you don’t know. Time is different here, Ian. There are eternities around every corner.”

He gazed at her. How he loved the sound of her voice. He knew that it was the blood, the blood of the Karases and the Wards…Lilith living on within them. But he would never feed, and she was as innocent as he once had been, without the least idea even of what a vampire was. He only knew this: like him, she could speak many languages, like him she knew math and physics and the poets (unlike him, the Egyptian and Arab and Persian poets, also) and hungered and thirsted to understand the wonders of the world.

“So what happened to him?”

“One day, late in the afternoon, there came a tinkle of that bell over there. He looked up—he had no hope by now, he wasn’t crazy—and there, in the doorway, was his lover. She came to him in beauty greater than he had ever remembered, and sat down where I am sitting, and he said, ‘Where have you been so long?’ And she said, ‘Just down to the river to wash my hair.’ He got angry at her and would not believe her. But he loved her so much, he forgave her, and when he would ask her what it was that had taken so long, sometimes she would laugh and sometimes she would cry, but she would never tell him.”

“That’s it? That’s the whole story?”

“Is it too Egyptian? I’m so sorry.” She tossed her head, and in that moment he knew that he must marry her, that he belonged to Hamida already. “Forever after that,” she continued, “people would whisper that these two lovers had been a thousand years apart, and hadn’t died, and maybe they were djin or something. He would laugh when he heard that in the coffeehouse or the market, and say, ‘No, you’re mistaken, it was only an hour that I waited.’ So that’s why we call it the Fountain of the Hours.”

He had long since lost interest in the story. She herself was the story that interested him. He gazed toward the plum tree and the concealing shadows beneath it. “What’s it called? Since everything here has a name.”

“Oh, it keeps its name a secret.”

“How can a tree keep a secret?”

“It’s an Egyptian tree. Want to see if it’ll tell us?”

His arm around her waist, he drew her toward the plum tree…or so it appeared to him. In the colonnade above, of course, her parents both thought, She’s taking him to kiss him. Violet knew that her actions would be seemly. Adel rumbled uneasily in his throat. “Be quiet,” Violet whispered. Becky’s hand touched hers, an intimate gesture of motherly complicity. Both women already knew that Hamida and Ian would marry, as certainly as the two Niles become one.

“What’s going on?” Paul asked.

“There is coffee for us on the veranda,” Violet said.

“You didn’t call for coffee,” Adel said in Egyptian.

“We will go to the veranda, husband.”

The parents went quietly away and watched feluccas and tourist boats going along the Nile, and the pyramids shimmering in the late sun.

“Look at that,” Violet said.

Again it came, a light flickering at the top of the Great Pyramid—nothing much, just a flash in the setting sun.

“It’s a reflection,” Paul said. “A tourist’s sunglasses.”

Violet smiled across her coffee cup. Adel said, “In this country, nothing is quite as certain as that.”

Beneath the old plum tree, Ian and Hamida listened for secrets, but heard only a little breeze whispering in its flowers.

“What’s it saying, Ian?”

“I love you, Hamida.”

They came closer, twining their fingers.

“My father used to get mad if a boy wanted to kiss me. But I’m older now.”

He would have done it into the night and eternity, but she turned her head away after only a moment. “We must go to them now. They’ll be expecting us on the veranda.”

“That wasn’t much of a kiss.”

“Oh, no? It was eternal.”

“Three seconds?”

“All kisses are eternal.”