ITH my eyes still closed, I heard voices of the city, voices from nearby houses; I heard men talking as they passed on the road outside. I heard music coming from somewhere, and the laughter of women and children. When I concentrated I could understand what they said. I chose not to do this, and their voices melded with the breeze.
Suddenly, the state seemed unbearable. There seemed nothing to do but rush back to the chapel and kneel there and worship! These senses I had been given seemed fit for nothing else. If this was my destiny, then what was to become of me?
Through it all, I heard a soul weeping in agony; it was an echo of my own, a soul broken from a course of great hope, who could scarce believe that such fine beginnings should end in terror!
It was Flavius.
I leapt into the old gnarled olive tree. It was as simple as taking a step. I stood among the branches, and then leapt to the next, and then to the top of the wall, encrusted with vine. I walked along the wall towards the gate.
There he stood, his forehead pressed to the bars, both hands clutching at the iron. He bled from several slash marks on his cheek. He gnashed his teeth.
“Flavius!” I said.
He looked up with a start. “Lady Pandora!”
Surely by the light of the moon, he saw the miracle wrought in me, whatever its cause. For I saw the mortality in him, the deep wrinkles of his skin, the painful flutter of his gaze, a thin layer of soil clinging to him all over in the natural moisture of his mortal skin.
“You must go home,” I said, climbing to sit on the wall, with legs on the outside. I bent down so he could hear me. He didn’t back away but his eyes were huge with fascination. “Go see to the girls, and sleep, and get those marks attended to. The demon’s dead, you needn’t worry anymore about him. Come back here tomorrow night at sundown.”
He shook his head. He tried to speak but he couldn’t. He tried to gesture but he couldn’t. His heart thundered in his chest. He glanced back down the road to the small far-flung lights of Antioch. He looked at me. I heard his heart galloping. I felt his shock, and his fear, and it was fear for me, not him. Fear that some awful fate had befallen me. He reached for the gate and clung to the bars, right arm hooked around and left hand clasping it as if he wouldn’t be moved.
I saw myself as he saw me in his mind—in a boy’s sashed tunic, my hair wildly free, sitting atop the wall, as if my body were young and pliant. All lines of age had gone from me. He saw a face on me no one could have ever painted.
But the point was this. The man had reached his limit. He could go no further. And I knew most fully how I loved him.
“All right,” I said. I stood up and leaned over with both my hands. “Come on, I’ll lift you over the wall if I can.”
He raised his arms, doubtful, eyes still drinking up every detail of my transformation.
He weighed nothing. I lifted him up and deposited him on his feet within the gate. I dropped down on the grass beside him and put my arm around him. How hot was his alarm. How strong his courage.
“Still your heart,” I said. I led him towards the house, as he looked down at me, his chest heaving as though he were out of breath, but it was mere shock. “I’ll take care of you.”
“I had the thing,” he said, “I had it by its arm!” How opaque his voice sounded, how filled with living fluid and effort. “I sank my dagger into it over and over, but it just slashed at my face and it was gone over the wall like a swarm of gnats, just darkness, immaterial darkness!”
“Flavius, it’s dead, burnt to cinders!”
“Had I not heard your voice, oh, I was going mad! I heard the boys crying. I couldn’t climb the wall with this damned leg. Then I heard your voice, and
I knew, knew you were alive!” He was filled with happiness. “You were with your Marius.” The ease with which I could feel his love was sweet, and awe inspiring.
A sudden sense of the Shrine came back to me, of the Queen’s nectar and the shower of flower petals. But I had to maintain my equilibrium in this new state. Flavius was also profoundly baffled.
I kissed him on the lips, warm, mortal lips, and then quickly like an artful cat I licked all the blood from the slash marks on his cheeks, feeling a shiver run through me.
I took him into the library, which in this house was the main room. The boys hovered somewhere about. They had been lighting lamps everywhere, and now they cowered. I could smell their blood and their young human flesh.
“You’ll stay with me, Flavius. Boys, can you make a bedroom for my steward on this floor? You have fruit and bread, don’t you? I can smell it. Have you enough furniture to make him a comfortable place to the far right, where he is out of the way?”
They came rushing out of their respective hiding places, and they too struck me as vividly human. I was distracted. The smallest natural things about them seemed precious, their thick black eyebrows, their round little mouths, their smooth cheeks.
“Yes, Madam, yes!” they said almost in one voice. They hurried forward.
“This is Flavius, my steward. He will stay with us. For now, take him to the bath, heat the water and attend to him. Get him some wine.”
They took Flavius in hand at once. But he paused.
“Don’t abandon me, Madam,” he said suddenly with the most serious and thoughtful expression. “I am loyal in all respects.”
“I know,” I said. “Oh, how clearly I understand. You cannot imagine.”
Then it was off to the bath with the Babylonian boys, who seemed delighted to have something to do.
I found Marius’s huge closets. He had enough clothes for the Kings of Parthia, Armenia, the Emperor’s Mother, Livia, the dead Cleopatra, and an ostentatious patrician who paid no attention to Tiberius’s stupid sumptuary laws.
I put on a much finer, long tunic, woven of silk and linen, and I chose a gold girdle. And with Marius’s combs and brushes, I made a clean free mantle of my hair, free of all tangles, rippled and soft as it had been when I was a girl.
He had many mirrors, which, as you know, in those days were only polished metal. And I was rendered somber and mystified by the single fact that I was young again; my nipples were pink, as I had said; the lines of age no longer interrupted the intended endowments of my face or arms. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that I was timeless. Timeless in adulthood. And every solid object seemed there to serve in me my new strength.
I looked down at the blocks of marble tile which made up the floor and saw in them a depth, a proof of process wondrous and barely understood.
I wanted to go out again, speak to the flowers, pick them up in handfuls. I wanted to talk urgently with the stars. I dared not seek the Shrine for fear of Marius, but if he had not been around I would have gone there and knelt at the Mother and merely looked at her, looked at her in silent contemplation, listening for the slightest articulation, though I knew, quite certainly after watching Marius’s behavior, that there would be none.
She had moved her right arm without the seeming knowledge of the rest of her body. She had moved it to kill, and then to invite.
I went into the library, sat down at the desk, where lay all my pages, and I waited.
Finally, when Marius came, he too was freshly dressed, his hair parted in the middle and combed to his shoulders. He took a chair near me. It was ebony and curved and inlaid with gold, and I looked at him, realizing how very like the chair he was—a great preserved extension of all the raw materials which had gone into it. Nature did the carving and inlay, and then the whole had been lacquered.
I wanted to cry in his arms, but I swallowed my loneliness. The night would never desert me, and it was faithful in every open door with its intruding grass, and the veined olive branches rising to catch the light of the moon.
“Blessed is she who is made a blood drinker,” I said, “when the moon is full, and the clouds are rising like mountains in the transparent night.”
“Probably so,” he said.
He moved the lamp that stood on the desk between us, so that it didn’t flicker in my eyes.
“I made my steward at home here,” I said. “I offered him bath, bed and clothes. Do you forgive me? I love him and will not lose him. It’s too late now for him to go back into the world.”
“He’s an extraordinary man,” Marius said, “and most welcome here. Tomorrow perhaps he can bring your girls. Then the boys will have company and there will be some discipline by day. Flavius knows books, among other things.”
“You’re most gracious. I was afraid you would be angry. Why do you suffer so? I cannot read your mind; I did not obtain that gift.” No, this wasn’t correct. I could read Flavius’s mind. I knew the boys at this very moment were very relieved by Flavius’s presence as they helped him dress for bed.
“We are too closely linked by blood,” he said. “I can never read your thoughts again either. We are thrown back on words like mortals, only our senses are infinitely keener, and the detachment we know at some times will be as cold as the ice in the North; and at other times feelings will enflame us, carry us on waves of burning sea.”
“Hmmm,” I said.
“You despise me,” he said softly, contritely, “because I quenched your ecstasy, I took from you your joy, your convictions.” He looked quite genuinely miserable. “I did this to you right at the happiest moment of your conversion.”
“Don’t be so sure you quenched it. I might still make her Temples, preach her worship. I’m an initiate. I have only begun.”
“You will not revive her worship!” he said. “Of that I assure you! You will tell no one about her or what she is or where she is kept, and you will never make another blood drinker.”
“My, if only Tiberius had such authority when he addressed the Senate!” I said.
“All Tiberius ever wanted was to study at the gymnasium at Rhodes, to go every day in a Greek cloak and sandals and talk philosophy. And so the propensity for action flowers in men of lesser mettle, who use him in his loveless loneliness.”
“Is this a lecture for my improvement? Do you think I don’t know this? What you don’t know is that the Senate won’t help Tiberius govern. Rome wants an Emperor now, to worship and to like. It was your generation, under Augustus, which accustomed us to forty years of autocratic rule. Don’t talk to me of politics as though I were a fool.”
“I should have realized that you understood it all,” he said. “I remember you in your girlhood. Nobody could match your brilliance. Your fidelity to Ovid and his erotic writings was a rare sophistication, an understanding of satire and irony. A well-nourished Roman frame of mind.”
I looked at him. His face too had been wiped clean of discernible age. I had time now to relish it, the squareness of his shoulders, the straightness and firmness of his neck, the distinct expression of his eyes and well-placed eyebrows. We had been made over into portraits of ourselves in marble by a master sculptor.
“You know,” I said, “even under this crushing and annoying barrage of definition and declaration which you make to me, as if I were weeping for your ratification, I feel love for you, and know full well that we are alone in this, and married to one another, and I am not unhappy.”
He appeared surprised, but said nothing.
“I am exalted, bruised in the heart,” I said, “a hardened pilgrim. But I do wish you would not speak to me as if my full indoctrination and education were your primary concern!”
“I have to speak this way!” he said gently. His voice was all kindness in its heat. “It is my primary concern,” he said. “If you can understand what happened with the end of the Roman Republic, if you can understand Lucretius and the Stoics, whole, then you can understand what we are. You have to do this!”
“I’ll let that insult pass,” I answered. “I’m not in the mood for listing for you every philosopher or poet I have read. Nor for recounting the level of talk around our nighttime table.”
“Pandora, I don’t mean any offense! But Akasha is not a goddess! Remember your dreams. She is a vial of precious strength. Your dreams told you she could be used, that any unscrupulous blood drinker could pass on the blood to another, that she is a form of demon, host to the power we share.”
“She can hear you!” I whispered, outraged. “Of course, she can. For fifteen years I’ve been her guardian. I’ve fought off those renegades from the East. And other connivers from the African hinterlands. She knows what she is.”
No one could have guessed his age, save from the seriousness of his expression. A man in perfect form, that was what he seemed. I tried not to be dazzled by him, by the pulsing night behind him, and yet I wanted so to drift. “Some wedding feast,” I said. “I have things to say to the trees.”
“They will be there tomorrow night,” he said.
The last image I had of her passed before my eyes, colored in ecstasy; she took the young Pharaoh from his chair and broke him into sticks. I saw her before that revelation, at the beginning of the swoon, running down the corridor laughing.
A slow fear crept over me.
“What is it?” Marius asked. “Confide in me.”
“When I drank from her, I saw her like a girl, laughing.” I recounted then the marriage, the flood of rose petals, and then her strange Egyptian Temple full of frenzied worshipers. At last I told him how she had entered the chamber of the little King, whose advisors warned him of her gods.
“She broke him up as if he were a boy of wood. She said, ‘Little King, little Kingdom.’ ”
I picked up my pages, which earlier I had placed on this desk. I described the last dream I had had of her, when she threatened, screaming, to walk into the sun and destroy her disobedient children. I described all the things I had seen—the many migrations of my soul.
My heart hurt so much. Even as I explained, I saw her vulnerability, the danger that was embodied in her. I explained finally how I had written all this in Egyptian.
I was weary and wished truly that I had never opened eyes on this life! I felt the keen and total despair again of those nights of weeping in my little house in Antioch when I had pounded on walls, and driven my dagger into the dirt. If she had not run, laughing down that corridor! What did the image mean? And the little boy King, broken so helplessly?
I made a sum of it easily enough. I waited for Marius’s belittling remarks. I hadn’t much patience for him now.
“How do you interpret it?” he asked gently. He tried to take my hand but I withdrew it.
“It’s bits and pieces of her recollection,” I said. I was heartbroken. “It’s what she remembers. There is but one suggestion of a future in it all,” I said. “There is only one comprehensible image of a wish: our wedding, that we be together.” My voice was full of sadness, yet I asked him.
“Why do you weep again, Marius?” I asked. “She must gather recollections like flowers picked at random from the garden of the world, like leaves falling into her hands, and from these recollections she fastened for me a garland! A wedding garland! A trap. I have no migrant soul. I think not. If I did have a migrant soul, then why would she alone, one so archaic, helpless, irrelevant to the world itself, so out of fashion and out of power, be the one to know this? To make it known to me? The only one to know?”
I looked at him. He was engaged yet crying. He showed no shame in it, and would obviously render no apology.
“What was it you said before?” I asked. “ ‘That I can read minds makes me no wiser than the next man’?” I smiled. “That is the key. How she laughed as she led me to you. How she wanted me to behold you in your loneliness.”
He only nodded.
“I wonder how she knew to cast her net so far,” I said, “to find me across the rolling sea.”
“Lucius, that’s how she knew. She hears voices from many lands. She sees what she wants to see. One night here I badly startled a Roman, who appeared to recognize me and then slunk away as if I were a danger to him. I went after him, thinking vaguely that there was something to this, his excessive fear.
“I soon realized a great weight distorted his conscience and twisted his every thought and movement. He was terrified to be recognized by someone from the capital. He wanted to leave.
“He went to the house of a Greek merchant, pounding on the door late, by torchlight, and demanded the payment of a debt owed to your Father. The Greek told him what he had told him before, that the money would be repaid only to your Father himself.
“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!”
“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.”
“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 that 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.