Well, 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.
Why, I demanded, must his domination extend to every corner of our entire house and garden? And how was it that I was his match in strength when an old burnt blood drinker found his way to Antioch and we picked up the word of his killing and had to do away with him?
“We are not matched in minds?” I demanded.
“Only you could ask that question!” came his reply.
Of course the Mother and Father never moved or spoke again. No blood dreams, no divine directive ever reached me. Only now and then did Marius remind me of this. And after a long while, he allowed me to tend the Shrine with him, to see full well the extent of their silent and seemingly mindless compliance. They appeared utterly beyond reach; their cooperation was sluggish and frightening to witness.
When Flavius fell ill in his fortieth year, Marius and I had the first of our truly terrible battles. This came early on, well before the earthquake.
It was, by the way, a wondrous time because the wicked old Tiberius was filling Antioch with new and wonderful buildings. She was the rival of Rome. But Flavius was ill.
Marius could scarce bear it. He had become more than fond of Flavius—they talked about Aristotle all the time, and Flavius proved one of those men who can do anything for you, from managing a household to copying the most esoteric and crumbling text with complete accuracy.
Flavius had never put a single question to us as to what we were. In his mind, I found, devotion and acceptance far superseded curiosity or fear.
We hoped Flavius had only a minor illness. But finally, as Flavius’s fever grew worse, Flavius turned his head away from Marius whenever Marius came to him. But he held on to my hand always when I offered it. Frequently I lay beside him for hours, as he had once lain beside me.
Then one night Marius took me to the gate and said, “He’ll be dead by the time I come back. Can you bear this alone?”
“Do you run from it?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “But he doesn’t want me to see him die; he doesn’t want me to see him groan in pain.”
I nodded.
Marius left.
Marius had long ago laid down the rule that no other blood drinker was ever to be made. I didn’t bother to question him on this.
As soon as he was gone, I made Flavius into a vampire. I did it just the way the burnt one, Marius and Akasha had done it to me, for Marius and I had long discussed the methods—withdraw as much blood as you can, then give it back until you are near to fainting.
I did faint and wake to see this splendid Greek standing over me, smiling faintly, all disease gone from him. He reached down to take my hand and help me to my feet.
Marius walked in, stared at the reborn Flavius in amazement and said, “Get out, out of this house, out of this city, out of this province, out of this Empire.”
Flavius’s last words to me were:
“Thank you for this Dark Gift.” That is the first I ever heard that particular phrase, which appears so often in Lestat’s writings. How well this learned Athenian understood it.
For hours I avoided Marius. I would never be forgiven! Then I went out into the garden. I discovered Marius was grieving, and when he looked up, I realized that he had been utterly convinced that I meant to go off with Flavius. When I saw this, I took him in my arms. He was full of quiet relief and love; he forgave me at once for my “absolute rashness.”
“Don’t you see,” I said, taking him in hand, “that I adore you? But you cannot rule over me! Can you not consider in your reasonable fashion that the greatest part of our gift eludes you—it’s the freedom from the confines of male, female!”
“You can’t convince me,” he said, “for one moment that you don’t feel, reason and act in the manner of a woman. We both loved Flavius. But why another blood drinker?”
“I don’t know except that Flavius wanted it, Flavius knew all about our secrets, there was a … an understanding between me and Flavius! He had been loyal in the darkest hours of my mortal life. Oh, I can’t explain it.”
“A woman’s sentiments, exactly. And you have launched this creature into eternity.”
“He joins our search,” I replied.
About the middle of the century, when the city was very rich and the Empire was about as peaceful as it was ever going to be for the next two hundred years, the Christian Paul came to Antioch.
I went to hear him speak one night and came home, saying casually that the man could convert the very stones to this faith, such was his personal power.
“How can you spend your time on such things!” Marius demanded. “Christians. They aren’t even a cult! Some worship John, some worship Jesus. They fight amongst one another! Don’t you see what this man Paul has done?”
“No, what?” I said. “I didn’t say I was going to join the sect. I only said I stopped to hear him. Who is hurt by that?”
“You, your mind, your equilibrium, your common sense. It’s compromised by the foolish things in which you take an interest, and frankly the principle of truth is hurt!” He had only just begun.
“Let me tell you about this man Paul,” Marius said. “He never knew either the Baptizer John or the Galilean Jesus. The Hebrews have thrown him out of the group. Jesus and John were both Hebrews! And so Paul has now turned to everyone. Jew and Christian alike, and Roman and Greek, and said, ‘You needn’t follow the Hebrew observance. Forget the Feasts in Jerusalem. Forget Circumcision. Become a Christian.’ ”
“Yes, that is true,” I said with a sigh.
“It’s a very easy religion to take up,” he said. “It’s nothing. You have to believe that this man rose from the Dead. And by the way, I’ve combed the available texts which are floating all over the marketplaces. Have you?”
“No. I’m surprised you’ve found this search worthy of your time.”
“I don’t see anywhere in the writings of those who knew John and Jesus where these two are quoted as saying either one of them will rise from the Dead, or that all who believe in them will have life after death. Paul added all that. What an enticing promise! And you should hear your friend, Paul, on the subject of Hell! What a cruel vision—that flawed mortals could sin in this life so grievously that they would burn for all eternity.”
“He’s not my friend. You make so much of my passing remarks. Why do you feel so strongly?”
“I told you, I care about what is true, what is reasonable!”
“Well, there’s something you’re missing about this group of Christians, some way in which when they come together they share a euphoric love and and they believe in great generosity—”
“Oh, not again! And are you to tell me this is good?”
I didn’t answer.
He was returning to his work when I spoke.
“You fear me,” I said to him. “You fear that I’ll be swept off my feet by somebody of belief and abandon you. No. No, that’s not right. You fear that you will be swept up. That the world will somehow entice you back into it, so that you won’t live here with me, the superior Roman observer recluse, anymore, but go back, seeking mortal comforts of companionship and proximity to others, friendship with mortals, their recognition of you as one of them when you are not one of them!”
“Pandora, you talk gibberish.”
“Keep your proud secrets,” I said. “But I do fear for you, that I will admit.”
“Fear for me? And why?” he demanded.
“Because you don’t realize everything perishes, everything is artifice! That even logic and mathematics and justice have no ultimate meaning!”
“That’s not true,” he said.
“Oh, yes it is. Some night will come when you will see what I saw, when I first came to Antioch, before you’d found me, before this transformation which should have swept away everything in its path.
“You will see a darkness,” I went on, “a darkness so total that Nature never knows it anywhere on Earth at any time, in any place! Only the human soul can know it. And it goes on forever. And I pray that when you finally can no longer escape from it, when you realize it is all around you, that your logic and your reason give you some strength against it.”
He gave me the most respectful look. But he didn’t speak. I continued:
“Resignation will do you no good,” I said, “when such a time comes. Resignation requires will, and will requires decision, and decision requires belief, and belief requires that there is something to believe in! And all action or acceptance requires a concept of a witness! Well, there is nothing, and there are no witnesses! You don’t know that yet, but I do. I hope, when you find it out, someone can comfort you as you dress and groom those monstrous relics below the stairs! As you bring their flowers!” I was so angry. I went on:
“Look back on me when this moment comes—if not for forgiveness, look back on me as a model. For I have seen this, and I have survived. And it matters not that I stopped to listen to Paul preach of Christ, or that I weave flowers into crowns for the Queen, or that I dance like a fool under the moon in the garden before dawn, or that I … that I love you. It matters not. Because there is nothing. And no one to see. No one!” I sighed. It was time to finish.
“Go back to your history, this stack of lies that tries to link event to event with cause and effect, this preposterous faith that postulates that one thing follows from another. I tell you, it’s not so. But it is very Roman of you to think so.”
He sat silent looking up at me. I couldn’t tell what his thoughts were or what his heart felt. Then he asked:
“What would you have me do?” He had never looked more innocent.
Bitterly, I laughed. Did we not speak the same language? He heard not one word I had uttered. Yet he presented me not with a reply, but only with this simple question.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you what I want. Love me, Marius, love me, but leave me alone!” I cried out. I had not even thought. The words just came. “Leave me alone, so that I may seek my own comforts, my own means to remain alive, no matter how foolish or pointless these comforts appear to you. Leave me alone!”
He was wounded, so uncomprehending, looking so innocent still.
We had many similar arguments as the decades passed.
Sometimes he would come to me after; he would fall into long thoughtful talks about what he felt was happening with the Empire, how the Emperors were going mad and the Senate had no power, how the very progress of man was unique in Nature and something to be watched. How he would crave life, he thought, until there was no more life.
“Even if there is nothing left but desert waste,” he said, “I should want to be there, to see dune folding upon dune,” he went on. “If there was but one lamp left in all the world, I’d want to watch its flame. And so would you.”
But the terms of the battle, and its heat, never really changed.
At heart he thought I hated him for having been so unkind on the night I was given the Dark Blood. I told him this was childish. I could not convince him that my soul and my intelligence were infinitely too large for such a simple grudge, and that I owed him no explanation for my thoughts, words and deeds.
For two hundred years, we lived and loved together. He became ever more beautiful to me.
As more and more barbarians from the North and from the East poured into the city, he felt no necessity to dress like a Roman anymore, and frequently wore the jeweled clothes of the Easterners. His hair seemed to be growing finer, lighter. He seldom cut it, which of course he would have had to do every night had he wanted it short. It was a splendor on his shoulders.
As his face grew ever more smooth, away went the few lines that could so easily design anger in his expression. As I’ve told you before, he greatly resembles Lestat. Only he is more compact of build, and jaw and chin had hardened just a little more with age before the Dark Gift. But the unwanted folds were receding from his eyes.
Sometimes for nights on end, in fear of a fight, we didn’t speak. There was between us always a continuous physical affection—embraces, kisses, sometimes the mere silent lock of our hands.
But we knew we had now lived far beyond a normal human life span.
You need from me no detailed history of that remarkable time. It is too well known. Only let me place here a few reminders. Only let me describe for you my perspective on the changes happening all over the Empire.
Antioch as a thriving city proved indestructible. The Emperors began to favor it and visit it. More Temples went up to the Eastern cults. And then Christians of all kinds poured into Antioch.
Indeed, the Christians of Antioch comprised at last an immense and fascinating bunch of people arguing with each other.
Rome went to war on the Jews, crushing Jerusalem completely and destroying the sacred Hebrew Temple. Many brilliant Jewish thinkers came to Antioch as well as Alexandria.
Twice or perhaps even three times, Roman legions pushed past us, North of us, into Parthia; once we even had a little rebellion of our own, but Rome always resecured the city of Antioch. So the market closed for a day! On went the trade, the great lust of the caravans for the ships, and of the ships for the caravans, and Antioch was the bed in which they must wed each other.
There was little new poetry. Satire. Satire seemed the only safe or honest expression of the Roman mind now, and so we had the riotously funny story The Golden Ass, by Apuleius, which seemed to make fun of every religion. But there was a bitterness to the poet Martial. And those letters of Pliny which reached me were full of dire judgments on the moral chaos of Rome.
I began as a vampire to feed exclusively on soldiers. I liked them, their look, their strength. I fed so much so on them, that in my carelessness, I became a legend amongst them, “The Greek Lady Death,” this on account of my clothes which to them appeared archaic. I struck at random in the dark streets. There wasn’t a chance of their ever surrounding me or stopping me, so great was my skill, my strength and my thirst.
But I saw things in their rebellious deaths, the blaze of a pitched battle in a march, a hand-to-hand struggle on a steep mountain. I took them down gently into the finish, filling myself to the brim with their blood, and sometimes, through a veil it seemed, I saw the souls of those whom they themselves had slain.
When I told Marius this, he said it was just the kind of mystical nonsense he would expect of me.
I didn’t press the point.
He watched with keen interest the developments of Rome. To me they seemed merely surprising.
He pored over the histories of Dio Cassius and Plutarch and Tacitus, and pounded his fist when he heard of the endless skirmishes on the Rhine River, and the push Northward into Britannia and the building of Hadrian’s wall to forever keep away the Scots, who like the Germans would yield to no one.
“They are not patrolling, preserving, containing an Empire any longer,” he said. “Conserving a way of life! It’s just war, and trade!”
I couldn’t disagree.
It was really even worse than he knew. If he had gone as often as I did to listen to the philosophers he would have been appalled.
Magicians were appearing everywhere, claiming to be able to fly, to see visions, to heal with the laying on of hands! They got into battles with the Christians and the Jews. I don’t think the Roman army paid them any attention.
Medicine as I had known it in my mortal life had been flooded with a river of Eastern secret formulae, amulets, rituals, and little statues to clutch.
Well over half the Senate was no longer Italian by birth. This meant that our Rome was no longer our Rome. And the tide of Emperor had become a joke. There were so many assassinations, plots, squabbles, false emperors and palace coups that it soon became perfectly clear that the Army ruled. The Army chose the Emperor. The Army sustained him.
The Christians were divided into warring sects. It was positively astonishing. The religion didn’t burn itself out in dispute. It gained strength in division. Occasional furious persecutions—in which people were executed for not worshiping at Roman altars—only seemed to deepen the sympathy of the populace with this new cult.
And the new cult was rampant with debate on every principle with regard to the Jews, God and Jesus.
The most amazing thing had happened to this religion. Spreading wildly on fast ships, good roads and well-maintained trade routes, it suddenly found itself in a peculiar position. The world had not come to an end, as Jesus and Paul had predicted.
And everybody who had ever known or seen Jesus was dead. Finally everyone who had ever known Paul was dead.
Christian philosophers arose, picking and choosing from old Greek ideas and old Hebrew traditions.
Justin of Athens wrote that Christ was the Logos; you could be an atheist and still be saved in Christ if you upheld reason.
I had to tell this to Marius.
I thought sure it would set him off, and the night was dull, but he merely countered with more outlandish talk of the Gnostics.
“A man named Saturninus popped up in the Forum today,” he said. “Perhaps you heard talk of him. He preaches a wild variant of this Christian creed you find so amusing, in which the God of the Hebrews is actually the Devil and Jesus the new God. This was not the man’s first appearance. He and his followers, thanks to the local Christian Bishop Ignatius, are headed for Alexandria.”
“There are books with those ideas already here,” I said, “having come from Alexandria. They are impenetrable to me. Perhaps not to you. They speak of Sophia, a female principle of Wisdom, which preceded the Creation. Jews and Christians alike want somehow to include this concept of Sophia in their faith. It so reminds me of our beloved Isis.”
“Your beloved Isis!” he said.
“It seems that there are minds who would weave it all together, every myth, or its essence, to make a glorious tapestry.”
“Pandora, you are making me ill again,” he warned. “Let me tell you what your Christians are doing. They are tightly organizing. This Bishop Ignatius will be followed by another, and the Bishops want to lay down now that the age of private revelation had ended; they want to weed through all the mad scrolls on the market and make a canon which all Christians believe.”
“I never thought such could happen,” I said. “I agreed with you more than you knew when you condemned them.”
“They are succeeding because they are moving away from emotional morality,” he said. “They are organizing like Romans. This Bishop Ignatius is very strict. He delegates power. He pronounced on the accuracy of manuscripts. Notice the prophets are getting thrown out of Antioch.”
“Yes, you’re right,” I said. “What do you think? Is it good or bad?”
“I want the world to be better,” he said. “Better for men and women. Better. Only one thing is clear: the old blood drinkers have by now died out, and there is nothing you or I, or the Queen and the King can do to interfere in the flow of human events. I believe men and women must try harder. I try to understand evil ever more deeply with any victim I take.
“Any religion that makes fanatical claims and demands on the basis of a god’s will frightens me.”
“You are a true Augustan,” I said. “I agree with you, but it is fun to read these mad Gnostics. This Marcion and this Valentinus.”
“Fun for you perhaps. I see danger everywhere. This new Christianity, it isn’t merely spreading, it’s changing in each place as it spreads; it’s like an animal which devours the local flora and fauna and then takes on some specific power from the food.”
I didn’t argue with him.
By the end of the second century, Antioch was a heavily Christian city. And it seemed to me as I read the works of new Bishops and philosophers that worse things than Christianity could come upon us.
Realize, however, David, that Antioch did not lie under a cloud of decay; there was no sense in the air of the end of the Empire. If anything there was bustling energy everywhere. Commerce gives one this feel, that false sense that there is growth and creativity, perhaps, when there is none. Things are exchanged, not necessarily improved.
Then came the dark time for us. Two forces came together which bore down on Marius, straining all his courage. Antioch was more interesting than it had ever been.
The Mother and the Father had never stirred since the first night of my coming!
Let me describe the first disaster, because for me it was not so hard to bear, and I had only sympathy for Marius.
As I’ve told you, the question of who was Emperor had become a joke. But it really became a howl with the events of the early 200s.
The Emperor of the moment was Caracalla, a regular murderer. On a pilgrimage to Alexandria to see the remains of Alexander the Great, he had—for reasons no one knows even now—rounded up thousands of young Alexandrians and slaughtered them. Alexandria had never seen such a massacre.
Marius was distraught. All the world was distraught.
Marius spoke of leaving Antioch, of getting far far away from the ruin of the Empire. I began to agree with him.
Then this revolting Emperor Caracalla marched in our direction, intending to make a war on the Parthians North of us and to the East of us. Nothing out of the ordinary for Antioch!
His Mother—and you need not remember these names—Julia Domna, took up residence in Antioch. She was dying from cancer of her breast. And let me add here that this woman had, with her son Caracalla, helped murder her other son, Geta, because the two brothers had been sharing Imperial power and threatening to make a Civil War.
Let me continue, and again you need not remember the names.
Troops were massed for this Eastern war against two Kings to the East, Vologases the Fifth and Artabanus the Fifth. Caracalla did make war, achieve victory and return in triumph. Then, only miles from Antioch, he was assassinated by his own soldiers while trying to relieve himself!
All this cast Marius in a hopeless frame of mind. For hours he sat in the Shrine staring at the Mother and the Father. I felt I knew what he was thinking, that we should immolate ourselves and them, but I couldn’t bear the thought of it. I didn’t want to die. I didn’t want to lose life. I didn’t want to lose Marius.
I did not care so much about the fate of Rome. Life still stretched before me, extending the promise of wonders.
Back to the Comedy. The Army promptly made an Emperor out of a man from the Provinces named Macrinus, who was a Moor and wore an earring in his ear.
He at once had a fight with the dead Emperor’s Mother, Julia Domna, because he wouldn’t allow her to leave Antioch to die elsewhere. She starved herself to death.
This was all too close to home! These lunatics were in our dry, not far away in a capital which we mourned.
Then war broke out again, because the Eastern Kings, who were caught off guard before by Caracalla, were now ready, and Macrinus had to lead the Legions into battle.
As I told you, the Legions now controlled everything. Somebody should have told Macrinus. Instead of fighting he bought off the enemy. The troops were hardly proud of this. And then he cracked down on them, taking away some of their benefits.
He didn’t seem to grasp that he had to maintain their approval to survive. Though of course what good had this done for Caracalla, whom they loved?
Whatever, the sister of Julia Domna, named Julia Maesa, who was a Syrian and of a family dedicated to the Syrian sun god, seized this dreary moment in the life of the lusty legions to put her grandson, born of Julia Soemis, in power as Emperor! It was an outrageous plan actually, for any number of reasons. First and foremost, all three Julias were Syrian. The boy himself was fourteen years old, and also he was a hereditary Priest of the Syrian sun god.
But somehow or other Julia Maesa and her daughter’s lover, Gannys, managed to convince a bunch of soldiers in a tent that this fourteen-year-old Syrian boy should become the Emperor of Rome.
The Army deserted the Imperial Macrinus, and he and his son were hunted down and murdered.
So, high on the shoulders of proud soldiers rode this fourteen-year-old boy! But he didn’t want to be called by his Roman name. He wanted to be called by the name of the god he worshiped in Syria, Elagabalus. The very presence of him in Antioch shook the nerves of all citizens. At last, he and three remaining Julias—his aunt, his Mother and his grandmother, all of them Syrian Priestesses—left Antioch.
In Nicomedia, which was very near to us, Elagabalus murdered his Mother’s lover. So who was left? He also picked up an enormous sacred black stone and brought it back to Rome, saying that this stone was sacred to the Syrian sun god, whom all must now worship.
He was gone, across the sea, but it took sometimes no more than eleven days for a letter to reach Antioch from Rome, and soon there were rampant rumors. Who will ever know the truth about him?
Elagabalus. He built a Temple for the stone on the Palatine Hill. He made Romans stand around in Phoenician gowns while he slaughtered cattle and sheep in sacrifice.
He begged the physicians to try to transform him into a woman by creating a proper opening between his legs. Romans were horrified by this. At night he dressed as a woman, complete with a wig, and went prowling taverns.
All over the Empire the soldiers started to riot.
Even the three Julias, grandmother Julia Maesa, his aunt Julia Domna, and his own Mother, Julia Soemis, started to get sick of him. After four years, four years, mind you, of this maniac’s rule, the soldiers killed him and threw his body in the Tiber.
It did not seem to Marius that there was anything left of the world we had once called Rome. And he was thoroughly sick of all the Christians in Antioch, their fights over doctrine. He found all mystery religions dangerous now. He served up this lunatic Emperor as a perfect example of the fanaticism gaining ground in the times.
And he was right. He was right.
It was all I could do to keep him from despair. In truth he had not yet confronted that terrible darkness I had once spoken of; he was far too agitated, far too irritated and quarrelsome. But I was very frightened for him, and hurt for him, and didn’t want him to see more darkly, as I did, to be more aloof, expecting nothing and almost smiling at the collapse of our Empire.
Then the very worst thing happened, something we had both feared in one form or another. But it came upon us in the worst possible form.
One night there appeared at our eternally open doors five blood drinkers.
Neither of us had caught the sound of their approach. Lounging about with our books, we looked up to see these five, three women and a man and a boy, and to realize that all wore black garments. They were dressed like Christian hermits and ascetics who deny the flesh and starve themselves. Antioch had a whole passel of these men in the desert roundabouts.
But these were blood drinkers.
Dark of hair and eye, and dark of skin, they stood before us, their arms folded.
Dark of skin, I thought quickly. They are young. They were made after the great burning. So what if there are five?
They had in general rather attractive faces, well-shaped features and groomed eyebrows, and deep dark eyes, and all over them I saw the marks of their Irving bodies—tiny wrinkles next to their eyes, wrinkled around their knuckles.
They seemed as shocked to see us as we were to see them. They stared at the brightly lighted library; they stared at our finery, which was in such contrast to their ascetic robes.
“Well,” said Marius, “who are you?”
Cloaking my thoughts, I tried to probe theirs. Their minds were locked. They were dedicated to something. It had the very scent of fanaticism. I felt a horrid foreboding.
They started timidly to enter the open door.
“No, stop, please,” said Marius in Greek. “This is my house. Tell me who you are, and then I perhaps shall invite you over my threshold.”
“You’re Christians, aren’t you?” I said. “You have the zeal.”
“We are!” said one in Greek. It was the man. “We are the scourge of humanity in the name of God and his son, Christ. We are the Children of Darkness.”
“Who made you?” asked Marius.
“We were made in a sacred cave and in our Temple,” said another, a woman, speaking in Greek also. “We know the truth of the Serpent, and his fangs are our fangs.”
I climbed to my feet and moved towards Marius.
“We thought you would be in Rome,” said the young man. He had short black hair, and very round innocent eyes. “Because the Christian Bishop of Rome is now supreme among Christians and the theology of Antioch is no longer of great matter.”
“Why would we be in Rome?” asked Marius. “What is the Roman Bishop to us?”
The woman took the fore. Her hair was severely parted in the middle but her face was very regal and regular. She had in particular beautifully defined lips.
“Why do you hide from us? We have heard of you for years! We know that you know things—about us and where the Dark Gift came from, that you know how God put it into the world, and that you saved our kind from extinction.”
Marius was plainly horrified, but gave little sign of it.
“I have nothing to tell you,” he said, perhaps too hastily. “Except I do not believe in your God or your Christ and I do not believe God put the Dark Gift, as you call it, into the world. You have made a terrible mistake.”
They were highly skeptical and utterly dedicated.
“You have almost reached salvation,” said another, the boy at the far end of the line, whose hair was unshorn and hung to his shoulders. He had a manly voice, but his limbs were small. “You have almost reached the point where you are so strong and white and pure that you need not drink!”
“Would that that were true, it’s not,” said Marius.
“Why don’t you welcome us?” asked the boy. “Why don’t you guide us and teach us that we may better spread the Dark Blood, and punish mortals for their sins! We are pure of heart. We were chosen. Each of us went into the cave bravely and there the dying devil, a crushed creature of blood and bone, cast out of Heaven in a blaze of fire, passed on to us his teachings.”
“Which were what?” asked Marius.
“Make them suffer,” the woman said. “Bring death. Eschew all things of the world, as do the Stoics and the hermits of Egypt, but bring death. Punish them.”
The woman had become hostile. “This man won’t help us,” she said under her breath. “This man is profane. This man is a heretic.”
“But you must receive us,” said the young man who had spoken first. “We have searched so long and so far, and we come to you in humility. If you wish to live in a palace, then perhaps that is your right, you have earned it, but we have not. We live in darkness, we enjoy no pleasure but the blood, we feast on the weak and the diseased and the innocent alike. We do the will of Christ as the Serpent did the will of God in Eden when he tempted Eve.”
“Come to our Temple,” said one of the others, “and see the tree of life with the sacred Serpent wound around it. We have his fangs. We have his power. God made him, just as God made Judas Iscariot, or Cain, or the evil Emperors of Rome.”
“Ah,” I said, “I see. Before you happened on the god in the cave, you were worshipers of the snake. You’re Ophites, Sethians, Nassenians.”
“That was our first calling,” said the boy. “But now we are of the Children of Darkness, committed to sacrifice and killing, dedicated to inflicting suffering.”
“Oh, Marcion and Valentinus,” Marius whispered. “You don’t know the names, do you? They’re the poetic Gnostics who invented the morass of your philosophy a hundred years ago. Duality—that, in a Christian world, evil could be as powerful as good.”
“Yes, we know this.” Several spoke at once. “We don’t know those profane names. But we know the Serpent and what God wants of us.”
“Moses lifted the Serpent in the desert, up over his head,” said the boy. “Even the Queen of Egypt knew the Serpent and wore him in her crown.”
“The story of the great Leviathan has been eradicated in Rome,” said the woman. “They took it out of the sacred books. But we know it!”
“So you learned all this from Armenian Christians,” said Marius. “Or was it Syrians.”
A man, short of stature, with gray eyes, had not spoken all this while, but he stepped forward now and addressed Marius with considerable authority.
“You hold ancient truths,” he said, “and you use them profanely. All know of you. The blond Children of Darkness in the Northern woods know of you, and that you stole some important secret out of Egypt before the Birth of Christ. Many have come here, glimpsed you and the woman, and gone away in fear.”
“Very wise,” said Marius.
“What did you find in Egypt?” asked the woman. “Christian monks live now in those old rooms that once belonged to a race of blood drinkers. The monks don’t know about us, but we know all about them and you. There was writing there, there were secrets, there was something that by Divine Will belongs now in our hands.”
“No, there was nothing,” said Marius.
The woman spoke up again, “When the Hebrews left Egypt, when Moses parted the Red Sea, did the Hebrews leave something behind? Why did Moses raise the snake in the desert? Do you know how many we are? Nearly a hundred. We travel to the far North, to the South, and even to the East to lands you would not believe.”
I could see Marius was distraught.
“Very well,” I said, “we understand what you want and why you have been led to believe that we can satisfy you. I ask you, please, to go out in the Garden and let us speak. Respect our house. Don’t harm our slaves.”
“And we’ll be back shortly.”
I snatched Marius’s hand and pulled him down the stairs.
“Where are you going?” he whispered. “Block all images from your mind! They must glimpse nothing.”
“They won’t glimpse,” I said, “and from where I will stand as I talk to you, they won’t hear either.”
He seemed to catch my meaning. I led him into the sanctuary of the unchanged Mother and Father, dosing the stone doors behind me.
I drew Marius behind the seated King and Queen.
“They can probably hear the hearts of the Pair,” I whispered in the softest manner audible. “But maybe they won’t hear us over that sound. Now, we have to kill them, destroy them completely.”
Marius was amazed.
“Look, you know we have to do this!” I said. “You have to kill them and anybody like them who ever comes near us. Why are you so shocked? Get ready. The simplest way is cut them to pieces first, and then burn them.”
“Oh, Pandora,” he sighed.
“Marius, why do you cringe?”
“I don’t cringe, Pandora,” he said. “I see myself irrevocably changed by such an act. To kill when I thirst, to keep to myself and keep these here who must be kept by somebody, that I have done for so long. But to become an executioner? To become like the Emperors burning Christians! To commence a war against this race, this order, this cult, whatever it is, to take such a stand.”
“No choice, come on. There are many decorative swords in the room where we sleep. We should take the big curved swords. And the torch. We should go to them and tell them how sorry we are for what we must impart to them, then do it!”
He didn’t answer.
“Marius, are you going to let them go so that others will come after us? The only security lies in destroying every blood drinker who ever discovers us and the King and Queen.”
He walked away from me and stood before the Mother. He looked into her eyes. I knew that he was silently talking to her. And I knew that she was not answering.
“There is one other possibility,” I said, “and it’s quite real.” I beckoned for him to come back, behind them, where I felt safest to plot.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Give the King and the Queen over to them. And you and I are free. They will care for the King and Queen with religious fervor! Maybe the King and Queen will even allow them to drink—”
“That’s unspeakable!” he said.
“Exactly my feelings. We shall never know if we are safe. And they shall run rampant through the world like supernatural rodents. So do you have a third plan?”
“No, but I’m ready. We use the fire and the swords together. Can you tell the lies that will charm them as we approach, armed and carrying torches?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” I said.
We went into the chamber and took up the big curved swords that were keenly sharp and came from the desert world of the Arabs. We lighted another torch from that at the foot of the stairs and we went up together.
“Come to me, Children,” I said as I entered the room, loudly, “come, for what I have to reveal requires the light of this torch, and you will soon know the sacred purpose of this sword. How devout you are.”
We stood before them.
“How young you are!” I said.
Suddenly, the panic swept them together. They made it so simple for us by clustering in this manner that we had the task done in moments, lighting their garments, hacking their limbs, ignoring their piteous cries.
Never had I used my full strength and speed, never my full will, as I did against them. It was exhilarating to slash them, to force the torch upon them, to slash them until they fell, until they lost all life. Also, I did not want them to suffer.
Because they were so young, so very young as blood drinkers, it took quite some time to burn the bones, to see that all was ashes.
But it was finally done, and we stood together—Marius and I—in the garden, our garments smeared with soot, staring down at blowing grass, making certain with our eyes that the ashes were blown in all directions.
Marius turned suddenly and walked fast away from me, and down the stairs and into the Mother’s Sanctuary.
I rushed after him in panic. He stood holding the torch and the bloody sword—oh, how they had bled—and he looked into Akasha’s eyes.
“Oh, loveless Mother!” he whispered. His face was soiled with blood and grime. He looked at the flaming torch and looked up at the Queen.
Akasha and Enkil showed no sign of any knowledge of the massacre above. They showed neither approval, nor gratitude, nor any form of consciousness. They showed no awareness of the torch in his hand, or his thoughts, whatever they might be.
It was a finish for Marius, a finish to the Marius I had known and loved at that time.
He chose not to leave Antioch. I was for getting away and taking them away, for wild adventures, and seeing the wonders of the world.
But he said no. He had but one obligation. And that was to lay in wait for others until he had killed every one of them.
For weeks he wouldn’t speak or move, unless I shook him and then he pleaded with me to leave him alone. He rose from the grave only to sit with the sword and the torch waiting.
It became unbearable to me. Months passed. I said, “You are going mad. We should take them away!”
Then one night, very angry and alone, I cried out foolishly, “I would I were free of them and you!” And leaving the house, I did not return for three nights.
I slept in dark safe places I made for myself with ease. Every time I thought of him, I thought of his sitting motionless there, so very like them, and I was afraid.
If only he did know true despair; if only he had confronted what we now call “the absurd.” If only he had faced the nothingness! Then this massacre would not have demoralized him.
Finally one morning just before sunrise, when I was safely hidden, a strange silence fell over Antioch. A rhythm I had heard there all my days was gone. I was trying to think, What could this mean? But there was time to find out.
I had made a fatal miscalculation. The villa was empty. He had arranged for the transport by day. I had no clue as to where he had gone! Everything belonging to him had been taken, and all that I possessed scrupulously left behind.
I had failed him when he most needed me. I walked in circles around the empty Shrine. I screamed and let the cry echo off the walls.
He never returned to Antioch. No letter ever came.
After six months or more, I gave up and left.
Of course you know the dedicated, religious Christian vampires never died out, not until Lestat came dressed in red velvet and fur to dazzle them and make a mockery of their beliefs. That was in the Age of Reason. That is when Marius received Lestat. Who knows what other vampire cults exist?
As for me, I had lost Marius again by then.
I had seen him for only a single precious night one hundred years earlier, and of course thousands of years after the collapse of what we call “the ancient world.”
I saw him! It was in the fancy fragile times of Louis XIV, the Sun King. We were at a court ball in Dresden. Music played—the tentative blend of clavichord, lute, violin—making the artful dances which seemed no more than bows and circles.
Across a room, I suddenly saw Marius!
He had been looking at me for a great while, and gave me now the most tragic and loving smile. He wore a big full-bottomed curly wig, dyed to the very color of his true hair, and a flared velvet coat, and layers of lace, so favored by the French. His skin was golden. That meant fire. I knew suddenly he had suffered something terrible. A jubilant love filled his blue eyes, and without forsaking his casual posture—he was leaning his elbow on the edge of the clavichord—he blew a kiss to me with his fingers.
I truly could not trust my eyes. Was he really there? Was I, myself, sitting here, in boned and low-necked bodice, and these huge skirts, one pulled back in artful folds to reveal the other? My skin in this age seemed an artificial contrivance. My hair had been professionally gathered and lifted into an ornate shape.
I had paid no mind to the mortal hands which had so bound me. During this age I let myself be led through the world by a fierce Asian vampire, about whom I cared nothing. I had fallen into an ever existing trap for a woman: I had become the noncommittal and ostentatious ornament of a male personality who for all his tiresome verbal cruelty possessed sufficient force to carry us both through time.
The Asian was off slowly taking his carefully chosen victim in a bedroom above.
Marius came towards me and kissed me and took me in his arms. I shut my eyes. “This is Marius!” I whispered “Truly Marius.”
“Pandora!” he said drawing back to look at me. “My Pandora!”
His skin had been burned. Faint scars. But it was almost healed.
He led me out on the dance floor! He was the perfect impersonation of a human being. He guided me in the steps of the dance. I could scarce breathe. Following his lead shocked at each new artful turn by the rapture of his face, I could not measure centuries or even millennia. I wanted suddenly to know everything—where he had been, what had befallen him. Pride and shame in me held no sway. Could he see that I was no more than a ghost of the woman he’d known? “You are the hope of my soul!” I whispered.
Quickly he took me away. We went in a carriage to his palace. He deluged me with kisses. I clung to him.
“You,” he said, “my dream, a treasure so foolishly thrown away, you are here, you have persevered.”
“Because you see me, I am here,” I said bitterly. “Because you lift the candle, I can almost see my strength in the looking glass.”
Suddenly I heard a sound, an ancient and terrible sound. It was the heartbeat of Akasha, the heartbeat of Enkil.
The carriage had come to a halt. Iron gates. Servants.
The palace was spacious, fancy, the ostentatious residence of a rich noble.
“They are in there, the Mother and the Father?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, unchanged. Utterly reliable in their eternal silence.” His voice seemed to defy the horror of it.
I couldn’t bear it. I had to escape the sound of her heart. An image of the petrified King and Queen rose before my eyes.
“No! Get me away from here. I can’t go in. Marius, I cannot look on them!”
“Pandora, they are hidden below the palace. There is no need to look on them. They won’t know. Pandora, they are the same.”
Ah! The same! My mind sped back, over perilous terrain, to my very first nights, alone and mortal, in Antioch, to the later victories and defeats of that time. Ah! Akasha was the same! I feared I would begin to scream and be unable to control it.
“Very well,” said Marius, “we’ll go where you want.”
I gave the coachman the location of my hiding place.
I couldn’t look at Marius. Valiantly, he kept the pretense of happy reunion. He talked of science and literature, Shakespeare, Dryden, the New World full of jungles and rivers. But behind his voice I heard the joy drained from him.
I buried my face against him. When the carriage stopped I leapt out and fled to the door of my little house. I looked back. He stood in the street.
He was sad and weary, and slowly he nodded and made a gesture of acceptance. “May I wait it out?” he asked. “Is there hope you’ll change your mind? I’ll wait here forever!”
“It’s not my mind!” I said. “I leave this city tonight. Forget me. Forget you ever saw me!”
“My love,” he said softly. “My only love.”
I ran inside, shutting the door. I heard the carriage pull away. I went wild, as I had not since mortal life, beating the walls with my fists, trying to restrain my immense strength and trying not to let loose the howls and cries that wanted to break from me.
Finally I looked at the clock. Three hours left until dawn.
I sat down at the desk and wrote to him:
At dawn we will be taken to Moscow. The very coffin in which I rest is to carry me many miles the first day. Marius, I am dazed. I can’t seek shelter in your house, beneath the same roof as the ancient ones. Please, Marius, come to Moscow. Help me to free myself of this predicament. Later you can judge me and condemn me. I need you. Marius, I shall haunt the vicinity of the Czar’s palace and the Great Cathedral until you come. Marius, I know I ask of you that you make a great journey, but please come. I am a slave to this blood drinker’s will.
I love you,
Pandora
Running back out in the street, I hurried in the direction of his house, trying to retrace the path which I had so stupidly ignored.
But what about the heartbeat? I would hear it, that ghastly sound! I had to run past it, run through it, long enough to give Marius this letter, perhaps to let him grasp me by the wrist and force me to some safe place, and drive away before dawn the Asian vampire who kept me.
Then the very carriage appeared, carrying in it my fellow blood drinker from the ball.
He stopped for me at once.
I took the driver aside. “The man who brought me home,” I said. “We went to his house, a huge palace.”
“Yes, Count Marius,” said the driver. “I just took him back to his own home.”
“You must take this letter to him. Hurry! You must go to his house and put it in his hands! Tell him I had no money to give you, that he must pay you, I demand that you tell him. He will pay you. Tell him the letter is from Pandora. You must find him!”
“Who are you speaking of?” demanded my Asian companion.
I motioned to the driver to leave! “Go!” Of course my consort was outraged. But the carriage was already on its way.
Two hundred years passed before I learned the very simple truth: Marius never received that letter!
He had gone back to his house, packed up his belongings and, the following night, left Dresden in sorrow, only finding the letter long after, as he related it to the Vampire Lestat, “a fragile piece of writing,” as he called it, “that had fallen to the bottom of a cluttered traveling case.”
When did I see him again?
In this modern world. When the ancient Queen rose from her throne and demonstrated the limits of her wisdom, her will and her power.
Two thousand years after, in our Twentieth Century still full of Roman columns and statues and pediments and peristyles, buzzing with computers and warmth-giving television, with Cicero and Ovid in every public library, our Queen, Akasha, was wakened by the image of Lestat on a television screen, in the most modern and secure of shrines, and sought to reign as a goddess, not only over us, but over humankind.
In the most dangerous hour, when she threatened to destroy us all if we did not follow her lead—and she had already slaughtered many—it was Marius with his reasoning, his optimism, his philosophy who talked to her, tried to calm her and divert her, who stalled her destructive intent until an ancient enemy came to fulfill an ancient curse, and struck her down with ancient simplicity.
David, what have you done to me in prodding me to write this narrative?
You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has been ever deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love, love from mortals who brought me into the world, love for goddesses of stone, love for Marius.
Above all, I cannot deny the resurgence of this love for Marius.
And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. Behind the image of the Blessed Virgin and her Infant Jesus, behind the image of the Crucified Christ, behind the remembered basalt image of Isis. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot.
Above all, however, I see it in the very fashioning of the world which outshines all art, and cannot by sheer randomness have accumulated such beauty.
Love. But whence comes this love? Why is it so secretive about its source, this love that makes rain and trees and has scattered the stars over us as the gods and goddesses once claimed to do?
So Lestat, the brat Prince, woke the Queen; and we survived her destruction. So Lestat, the brat Prince, had gone to Heaven and Hell and brought back disbelief, horror and the Veil of Veronica! Veronica, an invented Christian name which means vera ikon, or true icon. He found himself plunged into Palestine during the very years that I lived, and there saw something that has shattered the faculties in humans which we cherish so much: faith, reason.
I have to go to Lestat, look into his eyes. I have to see what he saw!
Let the young sing songs of death. They are stupid.
The finest thing under the sun and the moon is the human soul. I marvel at the small miracles of kindness that pass between humans, I marvel at the growth of conscience, at the persistence of reason in the face of all superstition or despair. I marvel at human endurance.
I have one more story to tell you. I don’t know why I want to record it here. But I do. Perhaps it’s because I feel you—a vampire who sees spirits—will understand this, and understand perhaps why I remained so unmoved by it.
Once in the Sixth Century—that is, five hundred years after the birth of Christ and three hundred years since I had left Marius—I went wandering in barbarian Italy. The Ostrogoths had long ago overrun the peninsula.
Then other tribes swept down on them, looting, burning, carrying off stones from old Temples.
It was like walking on burning coals for me to go there.
But Rome did struggle with some conception of itself, its principles, trying to blend the pagan with the Christian, and find some respite from the barbarian raids.
The Roman Senate still existed. Of all institutions it had survived.
And a scholar, sprung from the same stock as myself, Boethius, a very learned man who studied the ancients and the saints, had recently been put to death, but not before he had given us a great book. You can find it in any library today. It is, of course, The Consolation of Philosophy.
I had to see the ruined Forum for myself, the burnt and barren hills of Rome, the pigs and goats roaming where once Cicero had spoken to the crowds. I had to see the forsaken poor living desperately along the banks of the Tiber.
I had to see the fallen classical world. I had to see the Christian churches and shrines.
I had to see one scholar in particular. Like Boethius he had come from old Roman stock, and like Boethius he had read the classics and the saints. He was a man who wrote letters that went all over the world, even as far as to the scholar Bede in England.
And he had built a monastery there, some great flare of creativity and optimism, in spite of ruin and war.
This man was of course the scholar Cassiodorus, and his monastery lay at the very tip of the boot of Italy, in the paradisal land of green Calabria.
I came upon it in early evening, as I planned, when it looked like a great and splendid lighted little city.
Its monks were copying away ferociously in the Scriptorium.
And there in his cell, wide open to the night, sat Cassiodorus himself, at his writing, a man past ninety years of age.
He had survived the barbarian politics that doomed his friend Boethius, having served the Aryan Ostrogoth Emperor Theodoric, having lived to retire from Civil Service—he had survived to build this monastery, his dream, and to write to monks all over the world, to share what he knew with them of the ancients, to conserve the wisdom of the Greeks and the Romans.
Was he truly the last man of the ancient world, as some have said? The last man who could read both Latin and Greek? The last man who could treasure both Aristotle and the dogma of the Roman Pope? Plato and Saint Paul?
I didn’t know then that he would be so well remembered. And I didn’t know how soon he’d be forgotten!
Vivarium, on its mountain slopes, was an architectural triumph. It had its sparkling ponds to catch and hold fish—the characteristic which gave it its name. It had its Christian church with the inevitable cross, its dormitories, its rooms for the weary guest traveler. Its library was rich in the classics of my time, as well as gospels which have now been lost. The monastery was rich in all the fruits of the field, all crops needed for food, trees laden with fruit, fields of wheat.
The monks cared for all of this, and they dedicated themselves to copying books day and night in their long Scriptorium.
There were beehives there, on this gentle moonlighted coast, hundreds of beehives from which the monks harvested honey to eat, and wax for sacred candles, and royal jelly for an ointment. The beehives covered a hill as big as the orchard or the farmland of Vivarium.
I spied on Cassiodorus. I walked among the beehives, and marveled as I always do at the inexplicable organization of bees, for the mysteries of the bees and their dance and their hunting for pollen and their breeding was all known to my eye long before it was understood by the human world.
As I left the hives, as I moved away towards the distant beacon of Cassiodorus’s lamp, I looked back. I beheld something.
Something collected itself from the hives, something immense and invisible and forceful that I could both feel and hear. I was not gripped by fear, merely sparked by a temporary hope that some New Thing had come into the world. For I am not a seer of ghosts and never was.
This force rose out of the very bees themselves, out of their intricate knowledge and their countless sublime patterns, as though they had somehow accidentally evolved it, or empowered it with consciousness through the means of their endless creativity, meticulousness and endurance.
It was like an old Roman woodland spirit of the forest.
I saw this force fly loosely over the fields. I saw it enter the body of a straw man who stood in the fields, a scarecrow which the monks had made with a fine round wooden head, painted eyes, crude nose and smiling mouth—a creature whole and entire who could be moved from time to time, intact in his monk’s hood and robe.
I saw this scarecrow, this man of straw and wood hurry whirling and dancing through the fields and the vineyards until he had reached Cassiodorus’s cell.
I followed!
Then I heard a silent wail rise from the being. I heard it and I saw the scarecrow in a bending, bowing dance of sorrow, its bundled straw hands over ears it didn’t have. It writhed with grief.
Cassiodorus was dead. He had died quietly within his lamp-lighted cell, his door open, at his writing table. He lay, gray-haired, ancient, quiet against his manuscript. He had lived over ninety years. And he was dead.
This creature, this scarecrow, was wild with suffering and grief, rocking and moaning, though it was a sound no human could have heard.
I who have never seen spirits stared at it in wonder. Then it perceived that I was there. It turned. He—for so it seemed in this ragged attire and body of straw—reached out to me. He flung out his straw arms. The straw fell from his sleeves. His wooden head wobbled on the pole that was his spine. He—It—implored me: he begged me for the answer to the greatest questions humans and immortal have ever posed. He looked to me for answers!
Then glancing back again at the dead Cassiodorus, he ran to me, across the sloping grass, and the need came out of him, poured from him, his arms out as it beheld me. Could I not explain? Could I not contain in some Divine Design the mystery of the loss of Cassiodorus! Cassiodorus who had with his Vivarium rivaled the hive of bees in elegance and glory! It was Vivarium which had drawn this consciousness together from the hives! Could I not ease this creature’s pain!
“There are horrors in this world,” I whispered. “It is made up of mystery and dependent upon mystery. If you would have peace, go back to the hives; lose your human shape, and descend again, fragmented into the mindless life of the contented bees from which you rose.”
He was fixed, and he listened to me.
“If you would have fleshly life, human life, hard life which can move through time and space, then fight for it. If you would have human philosophy then struggle and make yourself wise, so that nothing can hurt you ever. Wisdom is strength. Collect yourself, whatever you are, into something with a purpose.
“But know this. All is speculation under the sky. All myth, all religion, all philosophy, all history—is lies.”
The thing, whether it be male or female, drew up its bundled straw hands, as if to cover its mouth. I turned my back on it.
I walked away silently through the vineyards. In a little while the monks would discover that their Father Superior, their genius, their saint, had died at his work.
I looked back in amazement to discover that the figure of straw remained, organized, assuming the posture of an upright being, watching me.
“I will not believe in you!” I shouted back to this man of straw. “I will not search with you for any answer! But know this: if you would become an organized being as you see in me, love all mankind and womankind and all their children. Do not take your strength from blood! Do not feed on suffering. Do not rise like a god above crowds chanting in adoration. Do not lie!”
It listened. It heard. It remained still.
I ran. I ran and ran up the rocky slopes and through the forests of Calabria until I was far far away from it. Under the moon, I saw the sprawling majesty of Vivarium with its cloisters and sloped roofs as it surrounded the shores of its shimmering inlet from the sea.
I never saw the straw creature again. I don’t know what it was. I don’t want you to ask me any question about it.
You tell me spirits and ghosts walk. We know such beings exist. But that was the last I saw of that being.
And when next I drifted through Italy, Vivarium had been long destroyed. The earthquakes had shaken loose the last of its walls. Had it been sacked first by the next wave of ignorant tall men of Northern Europe, the Vandals? Was it an earthquake that brought about its ruin?
No one knows. What survives of it are the letters that Cassiodorus sent to others.
Soon the classics were declared profane. Pope Gregory wrote tales of magic and miracles, because it was the only way to convert thousands of superstitious uncatechized Northern tribes to Christianity in great en masse baptisms.
He conquered the warriors Rome could never conquer.
The history of Italy for one hundred years falls into absolute darkness after Cassiodorus. How do the books put it? For a century, nothing is heard from Italy.
Ah, what a silence!
Now David, as you come to these final pages, I must confess, I have left you. The smiles with which I gave you these notebooks were deceptive. Feminine wiles, Marius would call them. My promise to meet with you tomorrow night here in Paris was a lie. I will have left Paris by the time you come to these lines. I go to New Orleans.
It’s your doing, David. You have transformed me. You have given me a desperate faith that in narrative there is a shadow of meaning. I now know a new strident energy. You have trained me through your demand upon my language and my memory to live again, to believe again that some good exists in this world.
I want to find Marius. Thoughts of other immortals fill the air. Cries, pleas, strange messages …
One who was believed gone from us is now apparently known to have survived.
I have strong reason to believe that Marius has gone to New Orleans, and I must be reunited with him. I must seek out Lestat, to see this fallen brat Prince lying on the chapel floor unable to speak or move.
Come join me, David. Don’t fear Marius! I know he will come to help Lestat. I do the same.
Come back to New Orleans.
Even if Marius is not there, I want to see Lestat. I want to see the others again. What have you done, David? I now contain—with this new curiosity, with this flaming capacity to care once more, with reborn capacity to sing—I now contain the awful capacity to want and to love.
For that, if for nothing else, and there is indeed much more, I shall always thank you. No matter what suffering is to come, you have quickened me. And nothing you do or say will ever cause the death of my love for you.
THE END