The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (29 page)

When I returned, and my return was very rapid, full of new lessons in how I might pass quickly over rooftops, scarce touching them, and over walls—when I returned, I found him as I had left him, only much sadder. He sat in the garden, just as he had in the vision shown to me by Akasha.

It must have been a place he loved, behind the villa with its many doors, a bench facing a thicket and a
natural stream bubbling up and over the rocks and spilling down into a current through high grass.

He rose at once.

I took him in my arms.

“Marius, forgive me,” I said.

“Don’t say such a thing, I’m to blame for it all. And I didn’t protect you from it.”

We were in each other’s arms. I wanted to press my teeth into him, drink his blood, and then I did, and felt him taking the blood from me. This was a union more powerful than any I had ever known in a marriage bed, and I yielded to it as I never yielded in life to anyone.

I felt an exhaustion sweep me suddenly. I withdrew my kiss with its teeth.

“Come on, now,” he said. “Your slave is asleep. And during the day, while we must sleep, he will bring all your possessions here, and those girls of yours, should you want to keep them.”

We walked down the stairs, we entered another room. It took all Marius’s strength to pull back the door, which meant simply that no mortal man could do it.

There lay a sarcophagus, plain, of granite.

“Can you lift the lid of the sarcophagus?” Marius asked.

“I am feeling weak!”

“It’s the sun rising, try to lift the lid. Slide it to one side.”

I did, and inside I found a bed of crushed lilies and
rose petals, of silken pillows, and bits of dried flower kept for scent.

I stepped in, turned around, sat and stretched out in this stone prison. At once he took his place in the tomb beside me, and pushed the lid back to its place, and all the world’s light in any form was shut out, as if the dead would have it so.

“I’m drowsy. I can hardly form words.”

“What a blessing,” he said.

“There is no need for such an insult,” I murmured. “But I forgive you.”

“Pandora, I love you!” he said helplessly.

“Put it inside me,” I said, reaching between his legs. “Fill me and hold me.”

“This is stupid and superstitious!”

“It is neither,” I said “It is symbolic and comforting.”

He obeyed. Our bodies were one, connected by this sterile organ which was no more to him now than his arm, but how I loved the arm he threw over me and the lips he pressed to my forehead.

“I love you, Marius, my strange, tall and beautiful Marius.”

“I don’t believe you,” he said his voice barely a whisper.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll despise me soon enough for what I’ve done to you.”

“Not so, oh, rational one. I am not as eager to grow old wither and die, as you might think. I should like a chance to know more, to see more …”

I felt his lips against my forehead.

“Did you really try to marry me when I was fifteen?”

“Oh, agonizing memories! Your Father’s insults still sting my ears! He had me all but thrown out of your house!”

“I love you with my whole heart,” I whispered. “And you have won. You have me now as your wife.”

“I have you as something, but I do not think that ‘wife’ is the word for it. I wonder that you’ve already forgotten your earlier strenuous objection to the term.”

“Together,” I said, scarce able to talk on account of his kisses. I was drowsy, and loved the feel of his lips, their sudden eagerness for pure affection. “We’ll think of another word more exalted than ‘wife.’ ”

Suddenly I moved back. I could not see him in the dark.

“Are you kissing me so that I will not talk?”

“Yes, that’s exactly what I was doing,” he said.

I turned away from him.

“Turn back, please,” he said.

“No,” I said.

I lay still, realizing dimly that his body felt quite normal to me now, because mine was as hard as his was, as strong perhaps. What a sublime advantage. Oh, but I loved him. I loved him! So let him kiss the back of the neck! He could not force me to turn towards him!

The sun must have risen.

For a silence fell on me which was as if the universe with all its volcanoes and raging tides—and all its Emperors, Kings, judges, Senators, philosophers and Priests—had been erased from existence.

Well, David, there you have it.

I could continue the Plautus-Terence style comedy for pages. I could vie with Shakespeare’s
Much Ado About Nothing
. But that is the basic story. That is what lies behind the flippant capsule version in
The Vampire Lestat
, fashioned into its final trivial form by Marius or Lestat, who knows.

Let me lead you through those points which are sacred and burn still in my heart, no matter how easily they have been dismissed by another.

And the tale of our parting is not mere dissonance but may contain some lesson.

Marius taught me to hunt, to catch the evildoer only, and to kill without pain, enwrapping the soul of my victim in sweet visions or allowing the soul to illuminate its own death with a cascade of fantasies which I must not judge, but merely devour, like the blood. All that does not require detailed documentation.

We were matched in strength. When some burnt
and ruthlessly ambitious blood drinker did find his way to Antioch, which happened only a few times and then not at all, we executed the supplicant together. These were monstrous mentalities, forged in ages we could hardly understand, and they sought the Queen like jackals seek the bodies of the human dead.

There was no argument between us over any of them.

We often read aloud to each other, and we laughed together at Petronius’s
Satyricon
, and we shared both tears and laughter later as we read the bitter satires of Juvenal. There was no end of new satire and history coming from Rome and from Alexandria.

But something forever divided Marius from me.

Love grew but so did constant argument, and argument became more and more the dangerous cement of the bond.

Over the years, Marius guarded his delicate rationality as a Vestal Virgin guards a sacred flame. If ever any ecstatic emotion took hold of me, he was there to grab me by the shoulders and tell me in no uncertain terms that it was irrational. Irrational, irrational, irrational!

When the terrible earthquake of the second century struck Antioch, and we were unharmed, I dared speak of it as a Divine Blessing. This set Marius into a rage, and he was quick to point that the same Divine Intervention had also protected the Roman Emperor Trajan, who was in the city at the time. What was I to make of that?

For the record, Antioch quickly rebuilt itself, the markets flourished, more slaves poured in, nothing stopped the caravans headed for the ships, and the ships headed for the caravans.

But long before that earthquake we had all but come to blows night after night.

If I lingered for hours in the room of the Mother and the Father, Marius invariably came to collect me and bring me back to my senses. He could not read in peace with me in such a state, he declared. He could not think because he knew I was downstairs deliberately inviting madness.

Why, I demanded, must his domination extend to every corner of our entire house and garden? And how was it that I was his match in strength when an old burnt blood drinker found his way to Antioch and we picked up the word of his killing and had to do away with him?

“We are not matched in minds?” I demanded.

“Only you could ask that question!” came his reply.

Of course the Mother and Father never moved or spoke again. No blood dreams, no divine directive ever reached me. Only now and then did Marius remind me of this. And after a long while, he allowed me to tend the Shrine with him, to see full well the extent of their silent and seemingly mindless compliance. They appeared utterly beyond reach; their cooperation was sluggish and frightening to witness.

When Flavius fell ill in his fortieth year, Marius
and I had the first of our truly terrible battles. This came early on, well before the earthquake.

It was, by the way, a wondrous time because the wicked old Tiberius was filling Antioch with new and wonderful buildings. She was the rival of Rome. But Flavius was ill.

Marius could scarce bear it. He had become more than fond of Flavius—they talked about Aristotle all the time, and Flavius proved one of those men who can do anything for you, from managing a household to copying the most esoteric and crumbling text with complete accuracy.

Flavius had never put a single question to us as to what we were. In his mind, I found, devotion and acceptance far superseded curiosity or fear.

We hoped Flavius had only a minor illness. But finally, as Flavius’s fever grew worse, Flavius turned his head away from Marius whenever Marius came to him. But he held on to my hand always when I offered it. Frequently I lay beside him for hours, as he had once lain beside me.

Then one night Marius took me to the gate and said, “He’ll be dead by the time I come back. Can you bear this alone?”

“Do you run from it?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But he doesn’t want me to see him die; he doesn’t want me to see him groan in pain.”

I nodded.

Marius left.

Marius had long ago laid down the rule that no
other blood drinker was ever to be made. I didn’t bother to question him on this.

As soon as he was gone, I made Flavius into a vampire. I did it just the way the burnt one, Marius and Akasha had done it to me, for Marius and I had long discussed the methods—withdraw as much blood as you can, then give it back until you are near to fainting.

I did faint and wake to see this splendid Greek standing over me, smiling faintly, all disease gone from him. He reached down to take my hand and help me to my feet.

Marius walked in, stared at the reborn Flavius in amazement and said, “Get out, out of this house, out of this city, out of this province, out of this Empire.”

Flavius’s last words to me were:

“Thank you for this Dark Gift.” That is the first I ever heard that particular phrase, which appears so often in Lestat’s writings. How well this learned Athenian understood it.

For hours I avoided Marius. I would never be forgiven! Then I went out into the garden. I discovered Marius was grieving, and when he looked up, I realized that he had been utterly convinced that I meant to go off with Flavius. When I saw this, I took him in my arms. He was full of quiet relief and love; he forgave me at once for my “absolute rashness.”

“Don’t you see,” I said, taking him in hand, “that I adore you? But you cannot rule over me! Can you
not consider in your reasonable fashion that the greatest part of our gift eludes you—it’s the freedom from the confines of male, female!”

“You can’t convince me,” he said, “for one moment that you don’t feel, reason and act in the manner of a woman. We both loved Flavius. But why another blood drinker?”

“I don’t know except that Flavius wanted it, Flavius knew all about our secrets, there was a … an understanding between me and Flavius! He had been loyal in the darkest hours of my mortal life. Oh, I can’t explain it.”

“A woman’s sentiments, exactly. And you have launched this creature into eternity.”

“He joins our search,” I replied.

About the middle of the century, when the city was very rich and the Empire was about as peaceful as it was ever going to be for the next two hundred years, the Christian Paul came to Antioch.

I went to hear him speak one night and came home, saying casually that the man could convert the very stones to this faith, such was his personal power.

“How can you spend your time on such things!” Marius demanded. “Christians. They aren’t even a cult! Some worship John, some worship Jesus. They fight amongst one another! Don’t you see what this man Paul has done?”

“No, what?” I said. “I didn’t say I was going to join the sect. I only said I stopped to hear him. Who is hurt by that?”

“You, your mind, your equilibrium, your common sense. It’s compromised by the foolish things in which you take an interest, and frankly the principle of truth is hurt!” He had only just begun.

“Let me tell you about this man Paul,” Marius said. “He never knew either the Baptizer John or the Galilean Jesus. The Hebrews have thrown him out of the group. Jesus and John were both Hebrews! And so Paul has now turned to everyone. Jew and Christian alike, and Roman and Greek, and said, ‘You needn’t follow the Hebrew observance. Forget the Feasts in Jerusalem. Forget Circumcision. Become a Christian.’ ”

“Yes, that is true,” I said with a sigh.

“It’s a very easy religion to take up,” he said. “It’s nothing. You have to believe that this man rose from the Dead. And by the way, I’ve combed the available texts which are floating all over the marketplaces. Have you?”

“No. I’m surprised you’ve found this search worthy of your time.”

“I don’t see anywhere in the writings of those who knew John and Jesus where these two are quoted as saying either one of them will rise from the Dead, or that all who believe in them will have life after death. Paul added all that. What an enticing promise! And you should hear your friend, Paul, on the subject of Hell! What a cruel vision—that flawed mortals could sin in this life so grievously that they would burn for all eternity.”

“He’s not my friend. You make so much of my passing remarks. Why do you feel so strongly?”

“I told you, I care about what is true, what is reasonable!”

“Well, there’s something you’re missing about this group of Christians, some way in which when they come together they share a euphoric love and and they believe in great generosity—”

“Oh, not again! And are you to tell me this is good?”

I didn’t answer.

He was returning to his work when I spoke.

“You fear me,” I said to him. “You fear that I’ll be swept off my feet by somebody of belief and abandon you. No. No, that’s not right. You fear that you will be swept up. That the world will somehow entice you back into it, so that you won’t live here with me, the superior Roman observer recluse, anymore, but go back, seeking mortal comforts of companionship and proximity to others, friendship with mortals, their recognition of you as one of them when you are not one of them!”