Pandora (21 page)

“ ‘Friend of the Temple,’ that’s what the Priest and Priestess called you. They said you could read the old script. They said you bought up all the Egyptian books when they came into the port. Why? If you seek her, the Queen, then seek her through me, because it is she who said that she had summoned me.”

“She didn’t speak in the dreams! You don’t know
who spoke the words! What if the dreams do have their root in your migrant soul? What if you have lived before? And now you come to the Temple and there is one of these loathed ancient gods on the prowl and you are in danger. You must get away, from here, from me, from this wounded hunter, whom I will find.”

“You’re not telling me all you know! What happened to you, Marius! What happened! Who did this to you, this miracle of your radiance. This is no cloak; the light comes from within!”

“Damn it, Pandora, do you think I wanted my life foreshortened and my destiny extended forever!” He was suffering. He looked at me, unwilling to speak, and I felt such pain coming from him, such loneliness, that for a moment it was unbearable.

I felt a wave of my own anguish of the long night before, when the utter vacuity of all religions and creeds had struck me hard and the sheer effort of a good life seemed a fool’s trap, and nothing more.

He suddenly closed his arms around me, surprising me, holding me firmly and rubbing his cheek gently against my hair, and kissing my head. Silken, polished, gentle beyond words. “Pandora, Pandora, Pandora,” he said. “The beautiful little girl grown into the marvelous woman.”

I held this hard effigy of the most spectacular and singular man I had ever known or seen: I held it and this time heard the beating of his heart, the distinct rhythm of it. I laid my ear on his chest.

“Oh, Marius, if only I could lay my head to rest
next to yours. If I could only yield to your protection. But you are driving me away! You don’t promise guardianship, you ordain flight for me, wandering and more nightmares, and mystery, and despair. No. I can’t.”

I turned away from his caresses. I could feel his kisses on my hair.

“Don’t tell me that I’ll never see you again. Don’t think I can bear that along with everything else that’s happened. I have no one here, and then who comes but one who left such a stamp on my girlish heart that the details are as deep as the finest coin. And you say you will never see me again, that I must go.”

I turned around.

It was lust shining in his eyes. Yet he checked it. In a soft voice, he confessed with a little smile:

“Oh, how I admired your work with the Legate. I thought the two of you would plan out the whole conquest of the Germanic tribes on your own.” He sighed. “You must find a good life, a rich life, a life where your soul and body are fed.” The color flared in his face. He looked at me, at my breasts, at my hips and then at my face. Ashamed and trying to conceal it. Lust.

“Are you a man still?” I asked.

He didn’t answer me. But his expression grew chilly.

“You will never know the full extent of what I am!” he said.

“Ah, but not a man!” I said. “Am I right? Not a man.”

“Pandora, you are deliberately taunting me. Why? Why do this?”

“This transformation, this induction into the blood drinkers; it’s added no inches to your height. Did it add any inches anywhere else?”

“Please stop this,” he said.

“Want me, Marius. Say that you do. I see it. Confirm it in words. What does that cost you?”

“You are infuriating!” he said. His face colored deeply with his rage, and pressed his lips together so hard that they went white. “Thank the gods that I don’t want you! Not enough to betray love for brief and bloody ecstasy.”

“The Temple people, they don’t really know what you are, do they?”

“No!” he said.

“And you will not lay open your heart to me.”

“Never. You will forget me and these dreams will fade. I wager I can make them fade, myself, through prayer for you. I will do it.”

“That’s a pious tack,” I said. “What grants you such favor with the ancient Isis, who drank blood and was the Fount?”

“Don’t say those words; it’s all lies, all of it. You do not know that this Queen you saw was Isis. What did you learn in these nightmares? Think. You learned that this Queen was the prisoner of those who drank blood and she condemned them! They were evil. Think. Go back into the dream. Think You thought them evil, evil then, and you think them evil now. In
the Temple, you caught the scent of evil. I know you did. I watched you.”

“Yes. But you’re not evil, Marius, you can’t convince me of this! You have a body like marble, you’re a blood drinker, but like a god, but not evil!”

He was about to protest when he stopped again. He looked out of the corner of his eye. And then slowly turned his head and let his gaze drift up through the roof of the peristyle.

“Is it the dawn coming,” I asked, “the rays of Amon Ra?”

“You are the most maddening human being I’ve ever known!” he said. “If I had married you, you would have put me in an early grave. I would have been spared all of this!”

“All of what?”

He called out for Flavius, who had been close all the while, listening to everything.

“Flavius, I’m leaving now,” he said. “I must. But guard her. When night falls, I’ll be here again, as quickly as I can. Should anything precede me, any badly scarred and frightening assailant, go for its head with your sword. The head, remember? And of course your Mistress here will no doubt be quite able to lend a hand in defending herself.”

“Yes, sir. Must we leave Antioch?”

“Watch your words, my faithful Greek,” I said. “I am Mistress here. We are not leaving Antioch.”

“Try to persuade her to prepare,” said Marius.

He looked at me.

A long silence fell between us. I knew he read my
thoughts. Then a shudder of the blood dreams passed over me. I saw his eyes brighten. Something quickened in his expression. I shook off the dream, filled with terror. I am no hostess to terror.

“It’s all interwound,” I murmured, “the dreams, the Temple, you being there, their calling on you for help. What are you, some white god put on Earth to hunt the dark blood drinkers? Does the Queen live?”

“Oh, I wish I were such a god!” he said. “I would be if I could be! That no more blood drinkers will ever be made, of that I am certain. Let them lay flowers on an altar before a statue of basalt!”

I felt such love for him and rushed to him suddenly. “Take me with you now, wherever you are going.”

“I can’t!” he said. He blinked as though something hurt his eyes. He couldn’t fully lift his head.

“It’s the coming light, isn’t it? You are one of them.”

“Pandora, when I come to you, be ready to leave this place!” he said. And he vanished.

Like that, he vanished. Like that, he was gone from my arms and from my Irving room and from my house.

I turned away and walked slowly about the shadowy living room. I looked at the murals on the walls; the happy dancing figures with their laurels and their crowns of leaves—Bacchus and his nymphs, so modestly covered for such a riotous crew!

Flavius spoke. “Madam, a sword which I found among your possessions, may I have it in readiness?”

“Yes, and daggers galore, and fire, do not forget fire. It will run from fire.” I sighed. How did I know this? I did. So much for it. “But Flavius.” I turned around. “It won’t come until dark. There is only a small margin of the night left. We can both sleep as soon as we see the sky turn purple.” I lifted my hand to my forehead. “I am trying to remember . . . ”

“What, Madam?” Flavius said. He looked no less splendid after the spectacle of Marius, simply a man of different proportion but equally fine, and with warm human skin.

“Whether the dreams ever came by day. Was it always night? Oh, I am sleepy and they summon me. Flavius, put a light in my bath. But I’m going to bed. I am drowsy. Can you watch?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“Look, the stars have all but faded. What is it like to be one of them, Flavius, to be admired only in the darkness, when men and women live with candles and lamps. To be known and described, only in the heaviness of night, when all the business of day has ended!”

“You are truly the most resourceful woman I’ve ever known,” he said. “How you brought justice to the man who accused you.” He took my arm, and we moved towards the bedchamber where I had dressed that morning.

I loved him. An entire lifetime of crises could not have made it stronger.

“You will not sleep in the great bed of the house, in the dining room?”

“No,” I said. “That is for the display of marriage, and I will never know marriage again. I want to bathe, but I’m so sleepy.”

“I can wake the girls.”

“No, to the bed. You have a chamber proper?”

“Yes,” he led the way. It was still quite dark. I thought I heard a rustling noise. Realized it was nothing.

And there lay the bed with its small lamp, and on the bed so many pillows in the Oriental style, a soft soft nest into which I fell, like a Persian.

At once, the dream:

We blood drinkers stood in a vast Temple. It was meant to be dark. We could see this dark, as certain animals must see in the dark. We were all bronze-skinned, or tanned, or golden. We were all men.

On the floor lay the Queen screaming. Her skin was white. Pure white. Her long hair was black. Her crown bore the horns and the sun! The crown of Isis. She was the goddess! It took five blood drinkers on either side to hold her down. She thrashed her head from side to side, her eyes seeming to crackle with Divine Light.

“I am your Queen! You cannot do this to me!” How purely white she was, and her screams grew ever more desperate and imploring. “Great Osiris, save me from this! Save me from these blasphemers! Save me from the profane!”

The Priest beside me sneered at her.

The King sat motionless on the throne. But it was not to this King that she prayed. She prayed to an Osiris beyond.

“Hold her more tightly.”

Two more came to secure her ankles.

“Drink!” said the Priest to me. “Kneel down and drink from her blood. Her blood is more powerful than any blood that exists in the world. Drink.”

She cried softly.

“Monsters, demon children!” she sobbed.

“I won’t do it,” I said.

“Do it! You must have her blood!”

“No, not against her will. Not like this! She’s our Mother Isis!”

“She is our Fount and our prisoner.”

“No,” I said.

The Priest shoved me forward. I knocked him down to the floor. I looked at her.

She looked at me as indiscriminately as she looked at the others. Her face was delicate and exquisitely painted. Her rage did not distort her features. Her voice was low and full of hatred.

“I will destroy you all,” she said. “Some morning, I will escape and walk into the sun’s light and all of you will burn! All of you will burn! As I burn! Because I am the Fount! And the evil in me will be burnt and extinguished in all of you forever. Come, you miserable fledgling,” she said to me. “Do as they say. Drink, and wait my vengeance.

“The god Amon Ra will rise in the East and I will walk towards him, and his deadly rays will kill me. I
shall be a sacrifice of fire to destroy every one of you who has been born of me, transformed by my blood! You greedy wanton gods who would use the power we possess for gain!”

Then a hideous transformation befell the entire dream. She rose to her feet. She was pristine and freshly adorned. Torches burst into flame around her, one and two and three and then many and more, flaring as if they’d just been ignited, till she was surrounded by flame. The gods were gone. She smiled and beckoned to me. She lowered her head; the white beneath her eyes shone as she looked up at me. She smiled. She was cunning.

I woke up screaming.

I was in my bed. Antioch. The lamp burned. Flavius held me. I saw the light shine on his ivory leg as it was stretched out. I saw the light shine on the carved toes.

“Hold onto me, hold me!” I said. “Mother Isis! Hold me.

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Only moments,” he said.

“No.”

“The sun has just risen. Do you want to go out, lie in the warm sun perhaps?”

“No!” I screamed.

He tightened his warm, desperate comforting grip. “It was only a bad dream, my beautiful lady,” he said. “Close your eyes. I’ll sleep by your side, with my dagger here.”

“Oh, yes, please, please, Flavius. Don’t let me go. Hold me,” I cried.

I lay down and he snuggled next to me, his knees behind mine, his arm over me.

My eyes opened. I heard Marius’s voice again:

“Thank the gods that I don’t want you! Not enough to betray love for brief and bloody ecstasy.”

“Oh, Flavius,” I said. “My skin! Is my skin burning!” I started to rise. “Put out the light. Put out the sun!”

“No, Madam, your skin is as beautiful as it always was. Lie down. Let me sing to you.”

“Yes, sing . . . ” I said.

I followed his song, it was Homer, it was Achilles and Hector, and I loved the way he sang it, the pauses he made, I pictured those heroes, and the high walls of doomed Troy, and my eyes grew heavy. I drifted. I rested.

He placed his hand over my head, as if to keep the dreams out, as if to be a human dream catcher. And I sighed as he smoothed my hair.

I pictured Marius, the sheen of his skin. It had been so like that of the Queen, and the dazzle of his eyes, so truly like that of the Queen, and I heard him say, “Damn it, Pandora, do you think I wanted my life foreshortened and my destiny extended forever!”

And there followed, before unconsciousness, the utter despair, the sense of worthlessness of all striving. Better that we be no more than beasts, like the lions in the arena.

AWOKE
. I could hear the birds. I wasn’t sure. I calculated that it was still morning, midmorning.