She looked up, wondering where in the sky they might be, for in her heart, she felt that her dream had been enacted somewhere, that the towering anguish of soul that oppressed her now was a wound from a secret life in the eons.
“You have never looked more beautiful,” he said.
She slipped her hand into his and lowered her eyes. She was still a maiden, and this was to be their consummation evening.
“I want to walk,” she said.
Watched by all the village, they went up toward the Wheat Road that led into their fields, where they harvested the grain that was the staple of their lives. The dream—the awful, monstrous dream—was awash in blood. She felt it trickling down her arms, glutting her mouth, roiling in her belly. She pushed away that madness.
But it did not leave her. No, her hour beneath the plum-blossom tree had changed her, just as the boy master had told her it would. “God has chosen you for reasons that are God’s. But a world depends upon it, Lilith. Say yes.”
Was that really just yesterday that the sacred child had come knocking, so terrifying her parents and causing her fiancée to beg her to stay?
“I’m so glad,” she said.
He took her hand, and when he did, she felt how profoundly she was changing. The terrible dream was lifting as a veil lifts, releasing her from a burden that seemed ages long and horrible.
As they passed the briar-rose tower her great-great-grandfather had made, every rose entered her heart. She became roses. As they passed the bakery where the twisted loaves had been put out for taking, she became the fragrance of twisted bread. So also, passing the toy shop with its painted dolls, she became a bright-eyed toy lying in the lap of the lonely child who had made the universe.
When they returned to the fountain, the purple of evening had risen in the east, and the fields were shuddering off the heat of the day.
“In my dream,” she said, “I was a monster.”
He laughed and splashed her with water from the fountain. “You’d never be a monster. You’re remembering somebody else’s dream.”
“I am a monster.”
With all the town come quietly around, the women in their aprons and the men in their harvesting smocks, the children, some naked, some in play clothes or work clothes—with everybody drawing near—they kissed. Softly, softly came the wordless humming of the marriage song, as they drew closer and closer yet. She who had become the rose and the bread became now the pleasure of their love.
Later, when they were eating bread with their candle on the table between them, he asked her, “What was your dream, then? What’s the secret of the plum-blossom tree?”
“It was only a dream.”
“Do you miss it?”
“It’s over and done now. Time for me to forget.”
And so he kissed her again, and she surrendered to his kisses, and they went before the fire and cuddled together in the fleece rug that had come in her dowry. Gently, they came together naked, the innocent girl shown by the innocent boy what he knew of the way of naked pleasure.
Late and very late, while he lay softly sleeping, a shadow stole into the firelight. She sucked a startled breath when she realized that the boy master was there, gazing down at her with grave eyes.
“I come to tell you of the girl-child you are carrying, that she will follow in your path, and sleep beneath the plum-blossom tree.”
“I am not carrying a child.”
The eyes now laughed a little, and she understood, suddenly, that she was. She had been for a few hours already, since the moment her marriage had been consummated.
“It worked the first time?”
He nodded.
Just for an instant, she looked directly and deeply into those impossible eyes of his, and her heart almost cracked to pieces, for she had seen there the name and past of her child. She sobbed aloud, but he took her in his arms and quieted her against his narrow breast.
“I’ll never be able to love her!”
“You will love her. You will serve and protect her.”
“I don’t want her! Not that—creature.”
“Leo has fought hard and suffered much in my behalf. She spent a whole life without love. Lilith, she has so much to offer.”
“Please, give her to somebody else.”
“All the bells of heaven are ringing,” he whispered. “Can you hear them?”
It was true, there were bells greater than the one in their signal tower, ringing somewhere very high.
“Oh, master, master, I did evil. I did horrible, dark things to them. Please, how can I ever forgive myself? And how can I ever love that child?”
“I’m not a master,” he said. “I’m only a weaver’s apprentice. Don’t you remember me, coming with my rugs to your village?”
“You’re a great master, and you can help me. You have to, because I’m in agony, I can’t bear what I remember, I can’t bear what I was!”
“If I told you that you had left behind a couple who will give to earth a whole new evolution of man?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then know this, the secret of the enemy: it’s the pressure of battle that makes us strong, and victory that gives life its sweetness, which is why I always tell my clients to love their enemies. You were their enemy, child. You gave them their strength, you and those creatures you made.”
“I made?”
“In our dream, we made them, you and I. We made them and flooded man’s world with them, and when he found them, he found himself.”
She shook her head. “I just want to forget.”
He kissed her forehead. “Then only remember that you did my work well.”
A great light came splashing like a wave across the raw and jagged wound of her memory, leaving it cleansed as if with sweet sea foam. His kiss also put her to sleep like a rocked baby. He covered her with the fleece blanket, close beside her husband. None saw him go down the Wheat Road, then out beyond the red pyramid to the edge of the world. While they all slept, he crossed the bridge of the rising moons, then went along the star path that carries the eternal children between the worlds, on their dark mission of awakening.
Lilith slept at last, a sleep that had seemed an eternity in coming, the warm and blessed sleep of a girl in her marriage bed. Her dream slipped backward in memory, its voices of Egypt and Rome and America fading, of Ian and Becky and Paul, of the kings and pharaohs and vampires, of the crackle of torches and the hissing of the ocean, of the laughter of the jackal—all those strange, improbable voices—called ever more distantly, echoing and then not, slipping away. They were lifted from her spirit at last, as the veils of night passed swiftly and softly over the land, blessing all who rested therein with healing sleep.
Epilogue
The Kiss
It stood in an ancient part of Cairo, had stood there for perhaps a thousand years. To the street, it offered little promise, but behind its old walls were wonders. In the ancient manner, it was built around courtyards. Perhaps it had started life as a Roman praetoria, an elaborate roadside inn fit for an emperor, when this spot was in the countryside, on the road to Heliopolis. After that, the number of rooms along the west wall suggested that part of it, at least, had become a khan, a caravanserai.
The place had belonged to the family Karas since the days of the Mamelukes, and many a soldier had girded himself in armor here and marched to meet the battles of history. But it was not the history of the family Karas that interested Ian Ward, it was a girl, the third daughter of Adel Karas, Hamida. He had first seen Hamida behind a latticed window, watching as his father was brought back from the hospital, his heart newly catheterized by Dr. Radwan Faraj, a small man with a neat beard and a catalog of ancient jokes delivered in improbable English.
Dad had almost died, but he was getting better fast. If they weren’t careful, he’d soon be back in the vampire ruin beneath the Giza Plateau, before the scientists were let in and it fulfilled its destiny as the archaeological wonder of the
world, the hall where the record of man was stored.
Now he waited for Hamida beside a fountain in the Karases’ first and largest courtyard. He sat on its edge, watching slow carp moving in the clear, cool water that bubbled up from a copper flower in its center. The fountain itself was tiled in an intricate design of lilies.
More flowers festooned a plum tree that stood a short distance away. He was really more interested in the tree than the fountain, and most especially in the cool patch of grass concealed beneath its shade.
He dragged his fingers in the water, letting the carp come up and nibble at them. Far away in the house, his mother was singing. In all of his life, she had never done this, not before now. A great burden had been lifted from her shoulders, he knew, when it had become clear that he was not going to feed. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to, but that he absolutely would not, not ever. The way it had felt within him—as if he had briefly been a god—would haunt him forever, but his reverence for life went deep, arising as it did out of the love that was the truest definition of his soul.
Then the bells jangled that indicated that the outside door was being opened. He raised his eyes. Hamida came down the long colonnade and into the courtyard. He had loved beautiful women, but never one like Hamida. He had not known what innocence was before he met her, or just how pure the eyes of a girl could be. He had been drawn to her by an overwhelming power, greater even than the power that had drawn him to Leo, even than Lilith’s hypnotizing beauty.
Hamida laughed when she saw him. She drew off her dark glasses and came down beside him. She’d been at the hairdresser. As a Copt, she did not seek the mystery of sunna. She would never wear the Muslim veil, nor did this house seek to find itself in the path of the Prophet’s own family. The olive skin of her face and her great, dark eyes were framed by beautiful black hair, now freshly and fetchingly curled.
“Do you know what’s so funny?” she said.
He shook his head.
“I thought you’d end up here. This fountain has a legend attached to it.”
“So does everything in the house.”
“But this one is special.” When she looked up at him out of those wonderful eyes, he saw nothing else, heard nobody else—which was as well, because he probably didn’t need to see the parents assembled along the second-story colonnade, tasting of young love from afar.
“There was a boy living here some time ago—”
“A boy you knew?” She had no brothers.
Again, she laughed. “Ian, this is Egypt. I’m talking about at least a couple of thousand years. Anyway, he was waiting for his lover to return. She had promised him it would only be an hour. One hour went by, and no lover. Two hours, no lover. But he had promised her that he would wait. So he stayed there. He stayed there all night and all day, and then more nights and more days—right where you’re sitting now—and nobody could budge him. The story is, he stayed there not just for weeks or months or years, but for a thousand thousand years, listening to the water and watching the carp, just like you’ve been doing.”
“Except I’ve only been here thirty minutes. Not even an hour.”
“In Egypt, you don’t know. Time is different here, Ian. There are eternities around every corner.”
He gazed at her. How he loved the sound of her voice. He knew that it was the blood, the blood of the Karases and the Wards…Lilith living on within them. But he would never feed, and she was as innocent as he once had been, without the least idea even of what a vampire was. He only knew this: like him, she could speak many languages, like him she knew math and physics and the poets (unlike him, the Egyptian and Arab and Persian poets, also) and hungered and thirsted to understand the wonders of the world.
“So what happened to him?”
“One day, late in the afternoon, there came a tinkle of that bell over there. He looked up—he had no hope by now, he wasn’t crazy—and there, in the doorway, was his lover. She came to him in beauty greater than he had ever remembered, and sat down where I am sitting, and he said, ‘Where have you been so long?’ And she said, ‘Just down to the river to wash my hair.’ He got angry at her and would not believe her. But he loved her so much, he forgave her, and when he would ask her what it was that had taken so long, sometimes she would laugh and sometimes she would cry, but she would never tell him.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole story?”
“Is it too Egyptian? I’m so sorry.” She tossed her head, and in that moment he knew that he must marry her, that he belonged to Hamida already. “Forever after that,” she continued, “people would whisper that these two lovers had been a thousand years apart, and hadn’t died, and maybe they were djin or something. He would laugh when he heard that in the coffeehouse or the market, and say, ‘No, you’re mistaken, it was only an hour that I waited.’ So that’s why we call it the Fountain of the Hours.”
He had long since lost interest in the story. She herself was the story that interested him. He gazed toward the plum tree and the concealing shadows beneath it. “What’s it called? Since everything here has a name.”
“Oh, it keeps its name a secret.”
“How can a tree keep a secret?”
“It’s an Egyptian tree. Want to see if it’ll tell us?”
His arm around her waist, he drew her toward the plum tree…or so it appeared to him. In the colonnade above, of course, her parents both thought, She’s taking him to kiss him. Violet knew that her actions would be seemly. Adel rumbled uneasily in his throat. “Be quiet,” Violet whispered. Becky’s hand touched hers, an intimate gesture of motherly complicity. Both women already knew that Hamida and Ian would marry, as certainly as the two Niles become one.
“What’s going on?” Paul asked.
“There is coffee for us on the veranda,” Violet said.
“You didn’t call for coffee,” Adel said in Egyptian.
“We will go to the veranda, husband.”
The parents went quietly away and watched feluccas and tourist boats going along the Nile, and the pyramids shimmering in the late sun.
“Look at that,” Violet said.
Again it came, a light flickering at the top of the Great Pyramid—nothing much, just a flash in the setting sun.
“It’s a reflection,” Paul said. “A tourist’s sunglasses.”
Violet smiled across her coffee cup. Adel said, “In this country, nothing is quite as certain as that.”
Beneath the old plum tree, Ian and Hamida listened for secrets, but heard only a little breeze whispering in its flowers.
“What’s it saying, Ian?”
“I love you, Hamida.”
They came closer, twining their fingers.
“My father used to get mad if a boy wanted to kiss me. But I’m older now.”
He would have done it into the night and eternity, but she turned her head away after only a moment. “We must go to them now. They’ll be expecting us on the veranda.”
“That wasn’t much of a kiss.”
“Oh, no? It was eternal.”
“Three seconds?”
“All kisses are eternal.”
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Whitley Strieber
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgenments
Epigraph
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Epilogue
pire Life
Lilith’s Dream: A Tale of the Vampire Life Page 36
