Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis

by Anne Rice

  33

  Lestat

  SPRING CAME TO our mountains with uncommon speed and warmth.

  Soon all the windows of the castle were open to the night breezes, and the forest was green once more, and the lawns were like soft green velvet, and the wild grasses in the mountains were green, and the wildflowers broke out in patches of meadow under the moon, and the Court enjoyed the inevitable rejuvenation in countless ways.

  No one had heard a word from the Replimoids. And no one was looking for them either. We were agreed on that, that we would not look for them, but I was in agony not knowing whether or not Amel had survived.

  I figured, given their warm-blooded nature, their need for a warm climate, they had likely gone to establish themselves in some South American land where there were mountains and forest in which they could get lost. But then given their peaceful nature, and their desire to remain the People of the Purpose, dedicated to serving life in all forms--well, I figured they might be in safer places, like the United States.

  The truth was, no one knew.

  Now others were curious about the fate of Amel, obviously, but I don't think anyone felt the pain I felt. Louis knew what I couldn't confide, and he was respectful of it, and comforting and patient. Louis never failed me. But others spoke carelessly of Amel, of the Amel Factor, of the Amel Core, and of the Burnings instigated by Amel, and of how Amel might have been the ruin of all that he had brought into being when he plunged into Akasha thousands of years ago. The young ones wanted to hear again and again the story of our origins; but the heroes and heroines of the oft-told tales did not include the faceless, voiceless spirit who had only come to himself in the late twentieth century. And by the end of May, it was not uncommon to hear young blood drinkers in the ballroom saying casually that they found it hard to believe "all that old mythology" about Amel.

  We were now what we had always been--a tribe of the shadows, hunting humans on the margins, drifting through the mortal crowds of the world wrapped in Gothic splendor and self-sustained romance. But we were united and we were strong. We had one another. And we had the Council, and we had the castle, and we had the Court.

  I was intoxicated with the Court by the time summer came. I was spending part of every evening working with Marius on a constitution that he was writing in Latin, that reflected far too much of his Roman principles, and strange Hellenistic disdain for the material and the biological, and then I spent time talking with the young ones about how they must and could protect themselves from discovery, while working with all the relentless digital surveillance of the mortal world. The spiritual, the practical, the timeless challenges, the challenges of the moment.

  Renovations were complete on the Chateau and on the village, and on three manor houses that had been reconstructed from old paintings and molding drawings and historical maps.

  I had let most of the mortal architects, designers, and construction laborers go; only a small community of retirees remained. And I faced the question now of whether I wanted to bring my beloved chief architect, Alain Abelard, over into our world.

  Meanwhile, Abelard didn't want to leave the village. He didn't want to leave me. He told me he had new projects to suggest to me, and would soon be presenting me with various plans. Abelard had no real life apart from me.

  When all this became too much for me, I'd break off and go to Paris just to wander places old and new, and breathe in the city's endless vitality.

  By mid-June, I was walking about Paris all the time and Louis invariably accompanied me. Soon we had our favorite streets, and our favorite bookshops, and our favorite cafes. We saw films together, and occasional plays. We haunted the Louvre and the Centre Georges Pompidou. But mostly we roamed.

  So it was that on a particularly beautiful and warm Saturday night we found ourselves in Paris, talking softly about how miraculously changed our world was from the times in which vampires believed themselves to be sinister supernatural beings endowed with myriad mysterious characteristics by someone's deliberate design.

  Louis spoke of having recovered Paris from the pain of the loss of Claudia, and of loving the modern city more than he had ever thought he could.

  Well before midnight, we came to the Quartier Latin and settled in a spacious outdoor cafe, one of our favorites, a tourist mecca now, but as genuine and vital a place as one could desire.

  We took a table on the very outside of the flagstone sidewalk to sit and talk some more and watch the passersby. I was thirsting. And once again, I kept thinking of innocent blood.

  But there is a lot to be said about spending most of the night thirsting, when one's senses are sharpened by the thirst and colors are more vivid and sounds more piercing and sweet. So I ignored the thirst, and certainly I ignored the temptation to seek innocent blood.

  We ordered enough of everything--wine, sandwiches, coffee, pastries--so that the waiter, to whom we slipped a large bill, would leave us alone for a long time.

  Louis went off at one point to find a newspaper, and I was sitting there alone, hoping that no wandering members of the Undead would recognize me or seize on this moment to "talk."

  The world seemed splendid and I was as in love with Paris as I'd ever been.

  But I soon realized that someone was watching me. A still figure at the next table, practically opposite me, had fixed its gaze on me with a little too much concentration to be welcome. I didn't look at the figure. I scanned the crowds for images of him in the eyes of others and when I realized what I was seeing, I turned and confronted him at once.

  He was a young male, perhaps in his twenties, and he had handsomely suntanned skin and long deep-red hair to his shoulders and bright green eyes. When he smiled at me, my heart stopped.

  He got up from the table and came over to me. He looked fine in his jeans and blue-and-white seersucker jacket and stiff white shirt open at the neck. He sat down opposite and leaned in close, forearms on the table, long slender fingers reaching out and covering my right hand.

  "Lestat," he whispered.

  I didn't dare to say his name. I was racking this up as a hallucination because how under Heaven could anyone have so perfectly re-created the boy-man I'd been with in Atalantaya during the time when my heart had been stopped. The dimples, the cleft in the chin, but more than anything the large vibrant eyes and the intense feeling that appeared to heat him all over from within.

  "It's me," he said, his warm fingers squeezing my hand tight enough to hurt a mortal hand. "It's Amel."

  "I'm going to lose it," I said quietly. I could hardly speak. Beyond him I saw Louis approaching with his newspaper, but when Louis saw what was happening at the table, he nodded, folded the paper, and moved out of sight.

  There was no way to put into words what I felt. This was Amel. Amel, alive; Amel as fully realized and present in this body and this body was a living breathing replica of the body he'd lost when Atalantaya had fallen into the sea.

  He couldn't read these thoughts from me, apparently, and finally I said the only thing I could say. "Thank Heaven!" I put my hand up to shield my eyes and I cried. I sat there crying for a long time, and finally, I managed to find my handkerchief, and I blotted my eyes, and folded the linen to hide the blood.

  "How many times have you been here?" he asked. He imprisoned my right hand again and I saw that he'd been crying too. The cadence of his voice, the pitch, the timbre--it was all the same as the voice he'd shaped in my head.

  When I didn't answer, he started up again as if he couldn't contain himself.

  "This is the first week," he said, "that I've been allowed out by myself, the first week I've been permitted to walk the streets unattended, the first week I've been allowed to be nearly run over by traffic, or to get lost, or to be mugged and robbed of my papers, or to get sick after overeating and gag in an alleyway on my own." He stopped only to laugh and then went right on, his white teeth sparkling and his eyes coloring beautifully in the lights. "I told them if they didn't let me out, I was going
to run away. I swore that if they didn't let me make a few blunders on my own, I was going to go on a hunger strike. Of course they reminded me that we don't need food, and nothing much would happen except that I'd be miserable, but finally Kapetria drove me into the Boulevard Saint-Michel and I jumped out of the car and walked off."

  So they had been in France all the time--in Paris all the time more than likely. I didn't care. I didn't care about anything but him.

  "And none of that happened to you, did it?" I asked.

  "No, nothing bad at all," he announced proudly with the most incandescent smile. His eyes were moist. "I've been roaming since morning. And I knew that you had been walking in these very streets. I knew you frequented this cafe. I overheard them say it. I knew. I dreamed of seeing you! I wanted to see you. I would have kept coming back until I ran into you." He stopped and looked over the table of sandwiches and pastries. I could see that he was hungry.

  "Please, eat," I said. I moved a glass of wine towards him. And I uncorked the bottle. "Are they trying to keep you and me apart?"

  He took a long deep drink, and I refilled the glass.

  "They know they can't, really," said Amel. "That I want to see you and talk to you and inevitably they will have to allow it. But they keep saying I'm not ready. Well, I am ready. I need to see you like this."

  He began to eat slowly, savoring every bite of the bread and meat, but his eyes kept returning to me.

  "Ah, such pleasure," he said under his breath. "Every cell in my body is learning to enjoy this more and more each day."

  "What else can I get for you?" I asked.

  I signaled the waiter.

  "What about an ice-cold beer?" I asked. "Would you like that?"

  He nodded. "Hot, cold, sweetness," he murmured. He took a bite from the sugar pastry right before him, closing his eyes, shuddering as he held it in his mouth. Then he looked at me, took me in again as if he were feasting on the sight of me. Tears hovered in his eyes.

  Scent of blood, delicious blood inside him.

  There was so much I wanted to say that I said nothing.

  "I am famished for the whole world," he said. "I'm famished for wine, for beer, for food, for life, for you! Take off your glasses, will you, I have to see your eyes, oh, yes, thank you, thank you. Those are your eyes."

  "Don't cry anymore," I said. "If you don't cry anymore, I won't cry."

  "Deal," he said. The waiter set the beer before him. He drank half the glass and sighed and said that that was so good. "You wouldn't believe how long it took me to learn to eat, to sit and stand upright, and to walk, to see. I had to learn how to see all over again. My brain didn't come equipped with any knowledge. We don't know how the Bravennans equipped minds with knowledge. My brain is just a made-up thing, made from cells taken from Kapetria's hands. She figured it out, if she never severed the hand, but took the biopsies from it while it was still connected to her, then no new life would be created that would have to be killed. And she built my brain from the cells in her hands, and some from the cells in Derek's hands, too." He shrugged. "I could explain it to you, but it would take years. Anyway, I had to learn how to see, to walk, to talk!"

  "It's only been four months," I said. But I was shocked by the implications of what he was telling me, shocked by the genius of Kapetria and the living proof of that genius in him.

  "Seems like forever." He sat back in the little woven tub chair and gazed up at the awning. His wavy red hair fell down in his eyes but he didn't seem to care. Dark eyebrows, precise eyebrows, and lashes. She had constructed all of this.

  Horrible possibilities occurred to me as they had before--of beings grown or manufactured and gaining ascendency on an unsuspecting planet if Kapetria and her tribe could do this. And what of the dead, the earthbound dead who might come back through such marvelous bodies? What could they do for Magnus, and for Memnoch?

  "What are you going to do?" I asked. "Have you any great plan?"

  "I don't know." He shrugged. He picked up another small jelly pastry and swallowed it, and then broke off a bit of the lemon tart. "I have no idea," he said. "There's so much I have to learn. I thought I knew everything, that inside you, I'd grasped the entire tenor of the age!" He laughed at himself and shook his head. "So stupid, so blind. Every day now I'm shocked by some new discovery. I read of the things human beings have done to one another in war. I read of carnage on the planet now. I'm paralyzed by much of what I read, what I see in television news, in films. Yet I must continue to study, that before anything, study and travel. And I want to figure where Atalantaya was, where she sank. I need to know that, I need to know where my city died. I need to know where everything I'd created and envisioned and planned for this mighty world died!"

  "I don't blame you. You must know infinitely more than the legends."

  "No, I don't," he said. "In those long-ago days, I was too preoccupied with the projects right before me to pay that much attention to the whole scheme of the planet. I thought I knew its geography, but what I knew was distorted, limited, primitive. Anyway, now I must go everywhere. I must roam jungles, deserts, mountain ranges. I must see the ice melting rapidly at the poles, see that for myself, the ice melting and breaking off and falling into the rising seas. And I have this dream that maybe one of my little satellite cities sank somewhere with the dome intact." He paused, looking around him, and then back at me. "And then there is the work in our laboratories."

  "Can you fully duplicate the luracastria of the old days?" I asked.

  "Oh, of course, Kapetria had to complete that before she could put me into a working body," he said. "But luracastria begets other materials. That has always been the power of luracastria, it's like a virus, mutating other chemicals in wholly unforeseen ways. I'm working on it constantly in here." He tapped his right temple. "This ghost brain is organizing this biological brain and I'm recovering old knowledge and acquiring new knowledge all the time! But tell me, what is Fareed doing? What has he discovered? What is Seth up to? I want to know them. I must know them. And Louis, I must come to know Louis. Louis is over there watching us. Louis is making you happy? Before we were separated, I knew Louis through you and--."

  He broke off.

  He wanted to say something, but he couldn't. "I lost all of you," he whispered, "and I grieve for that loss." The tears rose again.

  "Yes," I said. "I know that. And I lost you." I fought my own tears. "You brought me together with Louis, you did that, and you gave Louis back to me. I have Louis now because of you."

  Ah, this was agony, and yet I treasured every second of it.

  He reached inside his seersucker jacket and took out a white card and a pen. The pen was a very-fine-point gel-ink pen, and in a scrawling spidery hand he wrote numbers for me. This was for his phone. He gave the card to me and I put it in my pocket.

  "Now give me your phone," I said, "and I'll tap in my numbers for you after I tap in yours."

  "Oh, right, of course," he said. He blushed. He should have known it was that simple, and he was suddenly ashamed. But I fully understand such gaps, such random and sudden inabilities to grasp the simple or the sublime in the midst of the flow of so much powerful knowledge. He watched me manage these small tasks. "You're as beautiful to me now as you were in the mirror," he said. "You're as beautiful to me as you were the first night at Trinity Gate when I saw you in the mirror through your eyes."

  He was startled. He looked around anxiously. I hadn't heard anything or seen anything. "Just watching for them," he said. "They're going to be coming for me because I won't call for them to come. Ah. I knew it. I always experience this frisson...that's one of your words...this frisson when I'm being watched. There they are now. I love you. I'll see you again. Vow to me, we'll meet again here as soon as we can."

  I held his hand. I wouldn't let him go.

  I had no idea of the names of the four women who came towards us, except that they were clones of Kapetria, or of Kapetria's clones. They were magnificent with the same d
eep shade of bronze to their skin and the same large black eyes with flecks of gold in them, and lots of gold in their long hair. They wore rouge on their lips and they had on sundresses of light cotton with only straps over their beautifully molded shoulders, and bright gold bracelets on their naked arms.

  "Good evening, Prince."

  "Good evening, ladies." I pushed the chair back and rose to my feet. "Can't you give us just a few minutes longer?"

  "Amel gets overexcited, Prince," said the one who had spoken, while the other ones nodded. "Tell you what...we're double-parked. We'll go around a couple of blocks and come back. With this traffic, it will take us a little while. But only if you promise you'll both be right here when we return."

  "Promise, cross my heart, hope to die!" said Amel. His face was wet with tears. "If you take me right now, I'll never forgive you."

  Off they went, piling back into their large black Land Rover and steering the car into the sluggish stream that was moving on the boulevard.

  He shuddered, and tried to swallow his tears. "I love them," he said. "They are my people now, and I am of them. But I--. I can't endure their relentless control."

  "There's so much I want to ask you," I said. "So much I want to know. They won't prevent us from knowing and loving one another."

  He appeared doubtful, sad. A dark fear gripped me.

  "Know this," he said taking my hands in his hands. "I will love you forever! Were it not for you, I would never have survived."

  "Nonsense, you would have gone into one of the others sooner or later."

  "No," he said. "Wasn't working. It was your courage the first time and the last time. It was always your courage, and your patience and your insistence that solutions could be found, that great conflicting forces could somehow be reconciled."

  "You're giving me way too much credit," I said. "But we have a destiny, you and I!" I started to weep again. I wiped angrily at my eyes and put the violet sunglasses back on. "I can't think of anything else right now but you and what you're experiencing, what the future holds for you."

  He sat silent, gazing at me.

  "Give my love to them, even the ones that hate me," he said. "What did you do to Rhoshamandes for what he did in helping Kapetria?"