Pandora (29 page)

“I love you, Marius,” I said. “You and my Father are the only men I’ve ever really loved. But I must go out alone now.”

“What did you say!” He was amazed. “It’s just past midnight.”

“You’ve been very patient, but I have to walk alone now.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“You will not,” I said.

“But you can’t simply roam around Antioch on your own, alone.”

“Why not? I can hear mortal thoughts now if I want to. A litter just passed. The slaves are so drunk it’s a wonder they don’t drop the thing and heave the Master into the road, and he himself is fast asleep. I want to walk alone, out there, in the city in the dark places and the dangerous places and the evil places and the places where even . . . where even a god would not go.”

“This is your vengeance on me,” he said. I walked
towards the gate and he followed. “Pandora, not alone.”

“Marius, my love,” I said, turning, taking his hand. “It is not vengeance. The words you spoke earlier, ‘girl’ and ‘woman,’ they have always circumscribed my life. I want only now to walk fearlessly with my arms bare and my hair down my back, into any cavern of danger I choose. I am drunk still from her blood, from yours! Things shimmer and flicker that should shine. I must be alone to ponder all you’ve said.”

“But you have to be back before dawn, well before. You have to be with me in the crypt below. You can’t merely lie in some room somewhere. The deadly light will penetrate—”

He was so protective, so lustrous, so infuriated.

“I will be back,” I said, “and well before dawn, and for now, my heart will break if we are not, as of this moment, bound together.”

“We are bound,” he said. “Pandora, you could drive me mad.”

He stopped at the bars of the gate.

“Don’t come any farther,” I said as I left.

I walked down towards Antioch. My legs had such strength and spring, and the dust and pebbles of the road were nothing to my feet, and my eyes penetrated the night to see the full conspiracy of owls and little rodents that hovered in the trees’, eyeing me, then fleeing as if their natural senses warned them against me.

Soon I came into the city proper. I think the resolution
with which I moved from little street to little street was enough to frighten anyone who would have contemplated molesting me. I heard only cowardice and erotic curses from the dark, those tangled ugly curses men heap on women they desire—half threat, half dismissal.

I could sense the people in their houses fast asleep, and hear the guards on watch, talking in their barracks behind the Forum.

I did all the things the new blood drinkers always do. I touched the surfaces of walls and stared, enchanted at a common torch and the moths that gave themselves up to it. I felt against my naked arms and fragile tunic the dreams of all Antioch surrounding me.

Rats fled up and down the gutters and the streets. The river gave off its own sound, and there came a hollow echoing from the ships at anchor, even from the faintest stirring of the water.

The Forum, resplendent with its ever burning lights, caught the moon as if it were a great human trap for it, the very reverse of an earthly crater, a man-made design that could be seen and blessed by the intransigent heavens.

When I came to my own house, I found I could climb to the very top easily, and there I sat on the tiled roof, so relaxed and secure and free, looking down into the courtyard, into the peristyle, where I had really learned—alone on those three nights—the truths that had prepared me for Akasha’s blood.

In calmness and without pain, I thought it through
again—as if I owed this reconsideration to the woman I had been, the initiate, the woman who had sought refuge in the Temple. Marius was right. The Queen and King were possessed of some demon which spread through the blood, feeding upon it and growing, as I could feel it doing in me now.

The King and Queen did not invent justice! The Queen, who broke the little Pharaoh into sticks, did not invent law or righteousness!

And the Roman courts, bumbling awkwardly towards each decision, weighing all sides, refusing any magical or religious device, they did even in these terrible times strive for justice. It was a system based not upon the revelation of the gods, but upon reason.

But I could not regret the moment of intoxication when I’d drunk her blood and believed in her, and seen the flowers come down upon us. I could not regret that any mind could conceive of such perfect transcendence.

She had been my Mother, my Queen, my goddess, my all. I had known it as we were meant to know it when we drink the potions in the Temple, when we sing, when we are rocking in delirious song. And in her arms I had known it. In Marius’s arms I’d known it as well, and in a safer measure, and I wanted only to be with him now.

How ghastly her worship seemed. Flawed and ignorant, being elevated to such power! And how revealing suddenly mat at the core of mysteries there
should lie such degrading explanations. Blood spilt on her golden gown!

All images and meaningful glimpses do but teach you deeper things, I thought again, as I had in the Temple, when I had settled for the consolation of a basalt statue.

It is I, and I alone, who must make of my new life a heroic tale.

I was very happy for Marius that he had such comfort in reason. But reason was only a created thing, imposed with faith upon the world, and the stars promise nothing to no one.

I had seen something deeper in those dark nights of hiding in this house in Antioch, in mourning for my Father. I had seen that at the very heart of Creation there very well might lie something as uncontrollable and incomprehensible as a raging volcano.

Its lava would destroy trees and poets alike.

So take this gift, Pandora, I told myself. Go home, thankful that you are again wed, for you have never made a better match or seen a more tantalizing future.

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.

ELL
, 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.