Pandora (20 page)

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

“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!”

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 instructions!” 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.”

“You are the one who is dreaming now, Marius; I am not going. Who is it precisely that you want me to flee? The weeping Queen on her throne? Or the prowling, burnt one? The former reaches me over miles and miles of sea with her summons. She
warns me against my evil brother. The other I can easily dispatch. I have no fear of him. I know what he is from the dreams, and I know how the sun has hurt him, and I will myself pin him to the wall in the sun.”

He was silent, biting his lip.

“I will do that for her, for the Queen in the dreams, to avenge her.”

“Pandora, I am begging you.”

“In vain,” I said. “Do you think I have come so far only to run again? And the woman’s voice—”

“How do you know it was this Queen of whom you dreamt? There could be other blood drinkers in this city. Men, women. They all want the same thing.”

“And you fear them?”

“Loathe them! And I must keep clear of them, not give them what they want! Never give them what they want.”

“Ah, I see it all,” I said.

“You do not!” he said, scowling down at me. So fierce, so perfect.

“You are one of them, Marius. You are whole. You are unburnt. They want your blood to heal themselves.”

“How could you think of such a thing?”

“In my dreams, they called the Queen ‘the Fount.’ ”

I flew at him and imprisoned him in my arms! He was powerfully strong, solid as a tree! I never felt such hardness of muscle in a man. I lay my head on
his shoulder, and his cheek against the top of my head was cold!

But he enfolded me gently with both arms, stroking my hair, pulling it down out of all the pins and letting it flow down my back. I felt a rich tingling all over the surface of my skin.

Hard, so hard, yet with no pulse of life. No warmth of human blood in his gentle, sweet gestures.

“My darling,” he said, “I don’t know the source of your dreams, but I know this. You will be protected from me and from them. You will never become part of this old tale that goes on verse by verse no matter how the world changes! I won’t allow it.”

“Explain these things to me. I will not cooperate with you until you explain everything. Do you know the anguish of the Queen of the dream? Her tears are like yours. Look. Blood. You stain your tunic! Is she here, this Queen; has she summoned me?”

“And what if she has and she wants to punish you for this former life you dreamt in which the evil gods kept her fettered. What if that is so!”

“No,” I said. “That is not her intention. Besides, I wouldn’t do what the dark gods of the dream said. I wouldn’t drink from ‘the Fount.’ I ran and that’s why I died in the desert.”

“Ah!” He threw up his hands! And walked away. He stared out into the dark peristyle. Only the stars lighted the trees there. I saw a faint glow coming from the far dining room on the other side of the house.

I looked at him, at his great height and the straightness of his back, and the way his feet were so firmly fixed on the mosaic floor. The lamps made his blond hair glorious.

I heard him, though he whispered with his back to me.

“How could this stupid thing have happened!”

“What stupid thing!” I demanded. I came to his side. “You mean that I am here, in Antioch. I’ll tell you how. My Father arranged my escape, that’s how . . . ”

“No, no, I don’t mean that. I want you to be safe, alive, out of all danger, protected, so that you flower as you are meant to do. Your petals aren’t even bruised at the edges, look at you, and your boldness heats your beauty! Your brother had no chance against your learning or your rhetoric. And yet you charmed the soldiers and made slaves of them with your superiority, never once rousing their resentment. You have years of life in you! But I must think of some way to make you safe. Look. This is the heart of it. You have to leave Antioch during the day.”