by Anne Rice
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 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 title 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 out-landish 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 thinks Is it good or bad'?"
"I want the world to be better," he said. "Better for men and women. Better. Only one thing is dear: 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 dose to home! These lunatics were in our city, 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.
