The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (25 page)

I felt myself, a human, held together by the intricate threads of blood which Marius had given me. I felt the design of its support It had no weight my body.

I was lifted towards her. Her arm came around me and pulled my hair back from my face. I put out my arms to embrace her neck because I could do nothing else. We were too dose for any other possible sign of love.

I felt the soft silk of her real plaited hair, and the coldness and firmness of her shoulders, her arm. Yet she did not look at me. She was a petrified thing. Could she look at me? Did she choose to remain silent, staring forward? Did some evil spell hold her helpless, a spell from which a thousand hymns might waken her?

In my delirium I saw the words engraved in gold pieces among the jewels of her collar: “Bring to me the evildoer and I shall drink his blood.”

It seemed I was in the desert and the necklace was tumbling over and over in the sand, in the wind, rather
like the body of the burnt one had tumbled. Fallen, lost, to be remade.

I felt my head drawn to her neck. She had opened her fingers over my hair. She directed it, that my lips should feel this skin.

“It’s what you want, isn’t it?” I asked. But my words seemed remote from me, a pathetic expression of the fullness of my soul. “That I am to be your daughter!”

She tipped her head slightly, away from me, so that I saw her neck. I saw the vein displayed, the vein from which she wanted me to drink.

Her finger rose gently through my hair, never pulling it or hurting it, merely embracing my head, sending rampant ecstasy through me, and urging my head gently down so that my lips could no longer avoid her shimmering skin.

“Oh, my adored Queen,” I whispered. I had never known such certainty, such ecstasy without limits or mundane cause. I had never known such bursting, triumphant faith as my faith in her.

I opened my mouth. Nothing human could bite through this hard flesh! Yet it gave, as though it were thin, and the blood pumped into me, “the Fount.” I heard her heart driving it, a deafening force that vibrated in the drums of my ears. This was not blood. This was nectar. This was all that any created being could ever desire.

With the nectar flowing into me, there came another realm. Her ringing laughter filled the corridor; she ran ahead of me, girlish, feline, unencumbered by grandeur. She beckoned for me to follow. Out under the stars, Marius sat alone in his soft shapeless garden. She pointed to him. I saw Marius rise and take me in his arms. His long hair was such a fine adornment. I saw what she wanted. It was Marius I kissed in this vision as I drank from her; it was Marius with whom I danced.

A shower of flower petals descended upon us as upon a bridal couple in Rome, and Marius held my arm as though we had just been wed, and all around us people sang. There was a flawless happiness, a happiness so keen that perhaps there are those born who never even have the capacity for it.

She stood atop a broad black altar of diorite.

It was night. This was an enclosed place, filled with people, but it was dark and cool with the sandy wind off the valley floor, and she looked down at the
one they offered up to her. He was a man, his eyes closed, his hands were bound. He didn’t struggle.

She showed her teeth; a gasp rose from the worshipers who filled the place, and then she took the man by the throat and drank his blood. When she had finished, she let him fall and she held up her arms.

“All things are cleansed in me!” she cried out. Once again the petals fell, petals of all colors, and peacock feathers waved about us, and branches of palm, and there was singing in great lusty bursts, and the sound of a riotous drum, and she smiled looking down from where she stood, her face remarkably flushed and mobile and human, her black-painted eyes sweeping over her worshipers.

All began to dance, save she, who watched, and then her eyes rose slowly and she looked over their heads, out the high rectangular windows of this place, at the twinkling firmament. Pipes played. The dance had become a frenzy.

A weary and secretive darkness crept into her face, a distraction, as though her soul had traveled out of doors towards Heaven, and then she looked sadly down. She looked lost. Anger overcame her.

Then she cried out in a deafening voice, “The rogue blood drinker!” The crowd fell silent. “Bring him to me.”

The crowd parted to let this struggling furious god be forced to her altar.

“You dare judge me!” he cried. He was
Babylonian, with full long curly locks and beard and mustache. It took ten mortals to hold him.

“Into the burning place, in the mountains, in the sun, in the strongest fetters!” she cried. He was dragged away.

Once again she looked up. The stars grew big and age-old patterns were clear. We floated under the stars.

A boy in a delicate gilded chair argued with those around him. The men were old, half-invisible in the darkness. The lamp shone on the boy’s face. We stood in the door. The boy was frail, his little limbs like sticks.

“And you say,” said the incredulous boy, “that these blood drinkers are worshiped in the hills!”

I knew he was the Pharaoh by the sacred lock of hair that grew from his bald head, by the manner in which the others waited upon him. He looked up in horror as she approached. His guardians fled.

“Yes,” she said, “and you will do nothing to stop it!”

She lifted him, this small fragile boy, and tore at his throat as an animal might do it, letting the blood flood from the fatal wound. “Little King,” she said. “Little Kingdom.”

The vision ended.

Her cold white skin was closed beneath my lips. I kissed her now. I no longer drank.

I felt my own form, felt myself fall back over her arm, felt myself slipping out of her embrace.

In the dim radiance, her profile remained as it had before, silent and without feeling. Stark, a face
without a blemish or a line. I sank back into Marius’s arms. Her arm and hand returned to their former rigid position.

Everything was brilliantly clear, the motionless King and Queen, the artful figures fixed in lapis lazuli in the gold mosaics.

I felt a sharp pain in me, in the heart, in the womb, as if someone had stabbed me. “Marius!” I cried out.

He picked me up and carried me from the chamber.

“No, I want to kneel at her feet,” I said. The pain took the breath out of me. I tried not to scream from this pain. Oh, the world had just been reborn. And now this agony.

He set me down on the high grass, letting it be crushed under me. A flood of sour human fluid came out of my womb, even out of my mouth. I saw flowers right near me. I saw the friendly Heavens, vivid as in my vision. The pain was unspeakable.

I knew now why he had removed me from the Shrine.

I wiped at my cheek. I couldn’t bear this filth. The pain devoured me. I struggled to see again what she had revealed to me, remember what she said, but there was too much obstruction in this pain.

“Marius!” I cried.

He covered me and kissed my cheek. “Drink from me,” he said, “drink until the pain goes away. It’s only the body dying, drink. Pandora, you are immortal.”

“Fill me, take me,” I said. I reached down between his legs.

“It doesn’t matter now.”

But it was hard, this organ I sought, the organ forever lost to the god Osiris. I guided it, hard and cold as it was, into my body. Then I drank and drank, and when I felt his teeth again on my neck, when he began to draw from me the new mixture that filled my veins, it was sweet suckling, and I knew him and loved him and knew all his secrets in one flash which meant nothing.

He was right. The lower organs meant nothing. He fed on me. I fed on him. This was our marriage. All around us, the grass was waving softly in the breeze, a majestic conjugal bed, and the smell of the green flooded me.

The pain was gone. I flung out my arm and felt the softness of flowers.

He tore off my fouled dress and lifted me. He carried me into the pool where the marble Venus stood forever with back bent, and one foot raised above the cool water.

“Pandora!” he whispered.

The boys stood at his side, offering him pitchers.

He dipped a pitcher and poured the water over me. I felt beneath my feet the tile at the bottom of the pool as the water ran down my skin. I had never known such sensation! Another pitcherful washed over me, deliciously. I feared for one instant the pain would return, but no, it was gone.

“I love you with all my heart,” I said. “All my love belongs to them and to you, Marius. Marius, I can
see in the darkness, I can see in the deep dark beneath the trees.”

Marius held me. The boys slowly bathed us both, dipping their pitchers and pouring the silvery water over us.

“Oh, to have you with me,” Marius said, “to have you here; not to be alone, but to be with you, my beauty, you of all souls! You.” He stood back, and I gloried in him, drenched as I was, reached to touch his long wild foreign hair. He sparkled all over with droplets.

“Yes,” I said. “It was exactly what she wanted.”

His face stiffened. He scowled. He stared at me. Something had changed altogether, and for the worse. I could feel it.

“What?” he asked.

“It is what she wanted. She made it plain to me in the visions. She wanted me to be with you, so you wouldn’t be alone.”

He stood back. Was this anger?

“Marius, what is the matter with you? Can’t you see what she’s done?”

He stepped back again, away from me.

“You didn’t realize that’s what was happening?” I asked.

The boys thrust forth towels. Marius took one and wiped his face and his hair. I did the same.

He was furious. He shook with anger. This was a moment of mingled and inexplicable beauty and horror—his white body there, the shimmering
pool, the lights falling gracefully from the open doors of the house, and above, the stars, her stars. And Marius angry and bristling, his eyes full of outrage.

I looked at him.

“I am her Priestess now,” I said. “I’m to restore her worship. That’s what she wants. But she brought me also for you, because you were alone,” I said. “Marius, I saw all this. I saw our own wedding in Rome, as if it were the old days and our families were with us. I saw her worshipers.”

He was plainly horrified.

I didn’t want to see this. Surely I was misunderstanding him.

I stepped up on the grass. I let the boys dry my body. I looked up at the stars. The house with all its warm lamps seemed crude and fragile, a bumbled attempt to make an order of things, which could not compare to the making of one complete flower.

“Oh, how spectacular is the simple night,” I said. “It seems an insult to the night to speak of purpose and intent, when this common moment is so brimming full of blessed design and tranquillity. All things follow their course.”

I stood back and spun around, letting the water fly from me. I was so strong. No dizziness overcame when I stopped. I had a sense of infinite power.

One of the boys held out a tunic for me. It was a man’s, but as I’ve said so often here, Roman clothes are very simple. It was just a short tunic. I put it on
and let him tie the sash around my waist. I smiled at him. He trembled and stepped back from me.

“Dry my hair,” I told him. Ah, such sensations.

Slowly I looked up. Marius too was dried and dressed. He was still looking at me with violent protest, and downright indignation.

“Someone has to go in,” I said, “to change her golden gown. That blasphemer, he left her bloody.”

“I will do that!” Marius said in plain anger.

“Oh, so it comes to this,” I said. I looked around me, seduced by beauty to forget his altogether, to come back to him at some later hour after I had roamed beneath the olive trees and consorted with the constellations.

But his anger hurt me. The hurt was strange, and deep, without the various stages mortal flesh and mind command of pain.

“Oh, isn’t it splendid!” I said. “I learn that the goddess reigns, that she is real, that she has made all things! That the world is not just a giant graveyard! But I learn this as I find myself in an arranged marriage! And behold the groom! How he nurses his own temper.”

He sighed and bowed his head. Was I to see him cry again, this flawless familiar and beloved god among crushed flowers?

He looked up. “Pandora,” he said. “She’s not a goddess. She didn’t make the world.”

“How dare you say this!”

“I have to say it! I would have died for the truth when I was alive and will die for it now. But she will
not let this happen. She needs me and she needs you to make me happy!”

“So very well!” I threw my hands. “I am happy to do it. And we will restore her worship.”

“We will not!” he said. “How can you even think of such a thing.”

“Marius, I want to sing it from the tops of mountains; I want to tell the world that this miracle exists. I want to run through the streets singing. We are to restore her to her throne in a great Temple in the very middle of Antioch!”

“You’re talking madness!” he shouted.

The boys had run away.

“Marius, have you stopped up your ears to her commands? We are to hunt down and kill her renegade gods and see that new gods are born from her, gods who look into souls, gods who seek justice, not lies, gods who are not fantastical, lustful idiots or the drunken whimsical creatures of the Northern sky who hurl thunderbolts. Her worship is founded in the good, in the pure!”

“No, no, no,” he said. He stepped back as if that would make it all the more emphatic. “You’re talking rot!” he said. “Stupidity, rank superstition!”

“I don’t believe you said those words!” I cried. “You are a monster!” I said. “She deserves her throne! So does the King, who sits beside her. They deserve their worshipers bringing flowers to them. Did you think you had the power to read minds for no good reason!” I came forward. “Do you remember when I first mocked you in the Temple? When I said you
ought to station yourself at the courts and look into the minds of the accused? I had hit the mark in my ridicule!”

“No!” he roared. “This is absolutely not true,” he said.