Pandora (28 page)

“The next night I sought Lucius out again. This time the Greek had a surprise for him. A letter had just come from your Father by military ship. This was perhaps four days before your own arrival. The letter plainly stated that a favor was being asked of the Greek by your Father in the name of Hospitality and Honor. If the favor was granted, all debts were canceled. Everything would be explained by a letter accompanying a cargo destined for Antioch. The cargo would take some time, as the ship had many stops to make. The favor was of crucial importance.

“When your brother saw the date of this letter, he was stricken. The Greek, who was thoroughly sick of Lucius by this time, slammed the door in his face.

“I accosted Lucius only steps away. Of course he remembered me, the eccentric Marius of long ago. I pretended surprise to see him here and asked after you. He was in a panic and made up some story about your being married and living in Tuscany, and said that he was on his way out of town. He hurried off. But the moment’s contact had been enough to see the testimony he’d given the Praetorian Guard against his family—all lies—and to imagine the deeds that had resulted from it.

“The next time, on waking, I couldn’t find him. I kept watch on the house of the Greeks. I weighed in my mind a visit to the old man, the Greek merchant, some way to lay down a friendship with him. I
thought of you. I pictured you. I remembered you. I made up poems in my head about you. I didn’t hear or see anything of your brother. I presumed he’d left Antioch.

“Then one night I awoke and came upstairs and looked out to see the city full of random fires.

“Germanicus had died, never retracting his accusations that Piso had poisoned him.

“When I reached the house of the Greek merchant, it was nothing but burnt timbers. I caught no sight or sound of your brother anywhere. For all I knew they were all dead, your brother, and the Greek merchant family.

“All through the nights after, I searched for sight or sound of Lucius. I had no idea you were here, only an obsessive longing for you. I tried to remind myself that if I mourned for every mortal tie I had had when alive, I would go mad long before I had learnt anything about my gifts from our King and Queen.

“Then, I was in the bookseller’s and it was early evening and the Priest slipped up to me. He pointed to you. There you stood in the Forum, and the philosopher and students were bidding you farewell. I was so close!

“I was so overcome with love I didn’t even listen to the Priest until I realized he was speaking of strange dreams as he pointed to you. He was saying that only I could put it all together. It had to do with the blood drinker who had recently been in Antioch,
not an uncommon occurrence. I have slain other blood drinkers before. I’ve vowed to catch this one.

“Then I saw Lucius. I saw you come together. His anger and guilt were nearly blinding to me with this blood drinker’s vision. I heard your words effortlessly from a great distance, but would not move until you were safely away from him.

“I wanted to kill him then, but the wiser course seemed to stay right with you, to enter the Temple and stay by your side. I was not certain of my right to kill your brother for you, that it was what you wanted. I didn’t know that until I’d told you of his guilt. Then I knew how much you wanted it done.

“Of course I had no idea how clever you had become, that all the talent for reason and words I’d loved in you when you were a girl was still there. Suddenly you were in the Temple, thinking three times faster than the other mortals present, weighing every aspect of what faced you, outwitting everyone. And then came the spectacular confrontation with your brother in which you caught him in the most clever net of truths, and thereby dispatched him, without ever touching him, but instead drawing three military witnesses into complicity with his death.”

He broke off, then said, “In Rome, years ago, I followed you. You were sixteen. I remember your first marriage. Your Father took me aside, he was so gentle. ‘Marius, you’re destined to be a roaming historian,’ he said. I didn’t dare tell him my true estimation of your husband.

“And now you come to Antioch, and I think, in my self-centered manner, as you will promptly note—if ever a woman was created for me, it is this woman. And I know as soon as I leave you in the morning, that I must somehow get the Mother and Father out of Antioch, get them away, but then this blood drinker has to be destroyed, and then and only then can you be safely left.”

“Safely abandoned,” I said.

“Do you blame me?” he asked.

The question caught me off guard. I looked at him for a seemingly endless moment, allowing his beauty to fill my eyes, and sensing with intolerable keenness his sadness and desperation. Oh, how he needed me! How desperately he needed not just any mortal soul in which to confide, but me.

“You really did want to protect me, didn’t you?” I asked. “And your explanation of all points is so completely rational; it has the elegance of mathematics. There is no need for reincarnation, or destiny, or any miraculous allowance for any part of what’s happened.”

“It’s what I believe,” he said sharply. His face grew blank, then stern. “I would never give you anything short of truth. Are you a woman who wants to be humored?”

“Don’t be fanatical in your dedication to reason,” I said.

These words both shocked and offended him. “Don’t cling to reason so desperately in a world of so many horrid contradictions!”

He was silenced.

“If you so cling to reason,” I said, “then in the passage of time reason may fail you, and when it does you may find yourself taking refuge in madness.”

“What on Earth do you mean?”

“You’ve made of reason and logic religion. It’s obviously the only way you can endure what’s happened to you, that you’re a blood drinker and custodian, apparently, of these displaced and forgotten deities.”

“They aren’t deities!” He grew angry. “Thousands of years ago, they were made, through some mingling of spirit and flesh that rendered them immortal. They find their refuge obviously in oblivion. In your kindness you characterize it as a garden from which the Mother gathered flowers and leaves to make a garland for you, a trap, as you said. But this is your sweet girlish poetry. We do not know that they string very many words together.”

“I am no sweet girl,” I said. “Poetry belongs to everyone. Speak to me!” I said. “And put aside these words, ‘girl’ and ‘woman.’ Don’t be so frightened of me.”

“I am not,” he said angrily.

“You are! Even as this new blood races through me still, eats at me and transforms me, I cling to neither reason nor superstition for my safety. I can walk through a myth and out of it! You fear me, because you don’t know what I am. I look like a woman, I
sound like a man, and your reason tells you the sum total is impossible!”

He rose from the table. His face took on a sheen like sweat but far more radiant.

“Let me tell you what happened to me!” he said resolutely.

“Good, do tell me,” I said. “In straightforward manner.”

He let this go by. I spoke against my heart. I wanted only to love him. I knew his cautions. But for all his wisdom, he displayed an enormous will, a man’s will, and I had to know the source of it. I concealed my love.

“How did they lure you?”

“They didn’t,” he said calmly. “I was captured by the Keltoi in Gaul, in the city of Massilia. I was brought North, my hair allowed to grow long, then shut up amid barbarians in a great hollow tree in Gaul. A burnt blood drinker made me into a ‘new god’ and told me to escape the local Priests, go South to Egypt and find out why all the blood drinkers had been burnt, the young ones dying, the old one suffering. I went for my own reasons! I wanted to know what I was!”

“I can well understand,” I said.

“But not before I saw blood worship at its most grisly and unspeakable—I was the god, mind you, Marius, who followed you adoringly all over Rome—and it was to me that these men were offered.”

“I’ve read it in Caesar’s history.”

“You’ve read it but you haven’t seen it. How dare you throw at me such a trivial boast!”

“Forgive me, I forgot your childish temper.”

He sighed. “Forgive me, I forgot your practical and naturally impatient intellect.”

“I’m sorry. I regret my words. I had to witness executions of Rome. It was my duty. And that was in the name of law. Who suffers more or less? Victims of sacrifice or the law?”

“Very well. I escaped these Keltoi and went to Egypt, and there I found the Elder, who was the keeper of the Mother and the Father, the Queen and the King, the first blood drinkers of all time, from which this enhancement of our blood flows. This Elder told me stories that were vague but compelling. The Royal Pair had once been human, no more. A spirit or demon had possessed one or both, lodging itself so firmly that no exorcism could oust it. The Royal Pair could transform others by giving the blood. They sought to make a religion. It was overthrown. Again and again it was overthrown. Anyone who possesses the blood can make another! Of course this Elder claimed ignorance of why so many had been burnt. But it was he who had dragged his sacred and royal charges into the sun after centuries of meaningless guardianship! Egypt was dead, he said to me. ‘The granary of Rome,’ he called it. He said the Royal Pair had not moved in a millennium.”

This filled me with the most remarkable and poetic sense of horror.

“Well, one day’s hot light was not enough anymore to destroy the ancient parents, but all over the world the children suffered. And this cowardly Elder, given only pain for his reward, a burned skin, lost the courage required to continue the exposure of the Royal Pair. He had no cause, one or another.

“Akasha spoke to me. She spoke as best she could. In images, pictures of what had happened since the beginning, how this tribe of gods and goddesses had sprung from her, and rebellions had occurred, and how much history was lost, and purpose was lost, and when it came to the forming of words, Akasha could make but only a few silent sentences: ‘Marius, take us out of Egypt!’ ” He paused. “ ‘Take us out of Egypt, Marius. The Elder means to destroy us. Guard us or we perish here.’ ”

He took a breath; he was calmer now, not so angry, but very much shattered, and in my ever increasing vampiric vision, I knew more about him, how very courageous he was, how very determined to hold to principles in which he believed, in spite of the magic that had swallowed him whole before he had had time even to question it. His was an attempt at a noble life, in spite of all.

“My fate,” he said, “was directly connected to hers, to them! If I left them, the Elder would sooner or later put them in the sun again, and I, lacking the blood of centuries, would burn up like wax! My life, already altered, would have been ended. But the Elder did not ask me to install a new priesthood. Akasha did not ask me to install a new religion! She
did not speak of altars or worship. Only the old burnt-out god in the Northern grove among the barbarians had asked me to do such a thing when he sent me to the South, to Egypt, the motherland of all mysteries.”

“How long have you kept them?”

“Over fifteen years. I lose count. They never move or speak. The wounded ones, those burnt so badly that time will take centuries to heal them, they learn that I am here. They come. I try to extinguish them before their minds can give forth a flash of a confirming image to other distant minds. She doesn’t guide these burnt children to where she is, as she once guided me! If I am tricked or overwhelmed, she moves only as you saw, to crush the blood drinker. But she has called you, Pandora, reached out for you. And we know now to what exact purpose. And I’ve been cruel to you. Clumsy.”

He turned to me. His voice grew tender. “Tell me, Pandora,” he asked. “In the vision you saw, when we were married, were we young or old? Were you the girl of fifteen I sought too early perhaps, or the mature full blossom of a creature you are now? Are the families happy? Are we comely?”

I was hotly embraced by the sincerity of his words. The anguish and the pleading that lay behind them.

“We were as we are now,” I said, cautiously answering his smile with my own. “You were a man fixed in the prime of life forever, and I? As I am at this hour.”

“Believe me,” he said with sweetness in his voice,
“I would not have spoken so harshly on this of all nights, but you have now so many other nights to come. Nothing can kill you now, but the sun or fire. Nothing in you will deteriorate. You have a thousand experiences to discover.”

“And what of the ecstasy when I drank from her?” I asked. “What of her own beginnings and her suffering? Does she in no way connect herself to the sacred?”

“What is sacred?” he asked, shrugging his shoulder. “Tell me. What is sacred? Was it sanctity you saw in her dreams?”

I bowed my head. I couldn’t answer.

“Certainly not the Roman Empire,” he said, “Certainly not the temples of Augustus Caesar. Certainly not the worship of Cybele! Certainly not the cult of those who worship fire in Persia. Is the name Isis sacred anymore, or was it ever? The Elder in Egypt, my first and only instructor in all this, said that Akasha invented the stories of Isis and Osiris to suit her purposes, to give a poetry to her worship. I think rather she grafted herself upon old stories. The demon in those two grows with each new blood drinker made. It must.”

“But to no purpose?”

“That it may know more?” he said. “That it may see more, feel more, through each of us which carries its blood? Perhaps it is such a creature as that and each of us is but a tiny part of it, carrying all its senses and capacities and returning our experiences to it. It reaches out through us to know the world!”

“I can tell you this,” he said. He paused and put his hands on the desk. “What burns in me does not care if the victim is innocent or guilty of any crime. It thirsts. Not every night, but often! It says nothing! It does not talk of altars to me in my heart! It drives me as though I were the battle steed and it the mounted General! It is Marius who weeds the good from the bad, according to the old custom, for reasons you can well understand, but not this ravening thirst; this thirst knows nature but no morality.”