by Rice, Anne
Their thunderous roots rose up out of the ground, forming hillocks of hard dark blistering wood. I rested my feet in this rocky place and my head against the nearer of the two trees.
The branches came down and made a veil for me, as I had wanted the hair of my own head to do. I felt shielded and safe in the shadows. I was quiet in my heart, but my heart was broken and my mind was shattered, and I had only to look through the open doorway into the brilliant glory of the light at my two white vampire angels for me to start crying again.
Marius stood for a long time in a distant door. He didn’t look at me. And when I looked to Pandora, I saw her coiled up as if to defend herself from some terrible pain—possibly only our quarrel—in another large old velvet chair.
Finally Marius drew himself up and came towards me, and I think it took a force of will for him to do it. He seemed suddenly just a little angry and even proud.
I didn’t give a damn.
He stood before me but he said nothing, and it seemed he was there to face whatever I had yet to say.
“Why didn’t you let them have their lives!” I said. “You, of all people, whatever you felt for me and my follies, why didn’t you let them have what nature gave them? Why did you interfere?”
He didn’t answer, but I didn’t allow for it. Softening my tone so as not to alarm them, I went on.
“In my darkest times,” I said, “it was always your words that upheld me. Oh, I don’t mean during those centuries when I was in bondage to a warped creed and morbid delusion. I mean long afterwards, after I had come out of the cellar, at Lestat’s challenge, and I read what Lestat wrote of you, and then heard you for myself. It was you, Master, who let me see what little I could of the marvelous bright world unfolding around me in ways I couldn’t have imagined in the land or time in which I was born.”
I couldn’t contain myself. I stopped for breath and to listen to her music, and realizing how lovely it was, how plaintive and expressive and newly mysterious, I almost cried again. But I couldn’t allow such to happen. I had a great deal more to say, or so I thought.
“Master, it was you who said we were moving in a world where the old religions of superstition and violence were dying away. It was you who said we lived in a time when evil no longer aspired to any necessary place. Remember it, Master, you told Lestat that there was no creed or code that could justify our existence, for men knew now what was real evil, and real evil was hunger, and want, and ignorance and war, and cold. You said those things, Master, far more elegantly and fully than I could ever say them, but it was on this great rational basis that you argued, you, with the worst of us, for the sanctity and the precious glory of this natural and human world. It was you who championed the human soul, saying it had grown in depth and feeling, that men no longer lived for the glamour of war but knew the finer things which had once been the forte only of the richest, and could now be had by all. It was you who said that a new illumination, one of reason and ethics and genuine compassion, had come again, after dark centuries of bloody religion, to give forth not only its light but its warmth.”
“Stop, Armand, don’t say any more,” he said. He was gentle but very stern. “I remember those words. I remember all of them. But I don’t believe those things anymore.”
I was stunned. I was stunned by the awesome simplicity of this disavowal. It was sweeping beyond my imagination, and yet I knew him well enough to know that he meant every word. He looked at me steadily.
“I believed it once, yes. But you see, it was not a belief based on reason and on observation of mankind as I told myself it was. It was never that, and I came to realize it and when I did, when I saw it for what it was—a blind desperate irrational prejudice—I felt it suddenly and completely collapse.
“Armand, I said those things because I had to hold them to be true. They were their own creed, the creed of the rational, the creed of the atheistic, the creed of the logical, the creed of the sophisticated Roman Senator who must turn a blind eye to the nauseating realities of the world around him, because if he were to admit what he saw in the wretchedness of his brothers and sisters, he would go mad.”
He drew in his breath and continued, turning his back to the bright room as if to shield the fledglings from the heat of his words, as surely as I wanted him to do it.
“I know history, I read it as others read their Bibles, and I will not be satisfied until I have unearthed all stories that are written and know-able, and cracked the codes of all cultures that have left me any tantalizing evidence that I might pry loose from earth or stone or papyrus or clay.
“But I was wrong in my optimism, I was ignorant, as ignorant as I accused others of being, and refusing to see the very horrors that surrounded me, all the worse in this century, this reasonable century, than ever before in the world.
“Look back, child, if you care to, if you would argue the point. Look back to golden Kiev, which you knew only in songs after the raging Mongols had burnt its Cathedrals and slaughtered its population like so much cattle, as they did all through the Kiev Rus for two hundred years. Look back to the chronicles of all Europe and see the wars waged everywhere, in the Holy Land, in the forests of France or Germany, up and down the fertile soil of England, yes, blessed England, and in every Asian corner of the globe.
“Oh, why did I deceive myself for so long? Did I not see those Russian grasslands, those burnt cities. Why, all of Europe might have fallen to Ghenghis Khan. Think of the great English Cathedrals torn down to rubble by the arrogant King Henry.
“Think of the books of the Mayas heaved into the flames by Spanish priests. Incas, Aztecs, Olmec—peoples of all nations ground to oblivion—.
“It’s horrors, horrors upon horrors, and it always was, and I can pretend no longer. When I see millions gassed to death for the whims of an Austrian madman, when I see whole African tribes massacred till the rivers are stuffed with their bloated bodies, when I see rank starvation claim whole countries in an age of gluttonous plenty, I can believe all these platitudes no more.
“I don’t know what single event it was that destroyed my self-deception. I don’t know what horror it was that ripped the mask from my lies. Was it the millions who starved in the Ukraine, imprisoned in it by their own dictator, or the thousands after who died from the nuclear poisoning spewing into the skies over the grasslands, unprotected by the same governing powers who had starved them before? Was it the monasteries of noble Nepal, citadels of meditation and grace that had stood for thousands of years, older even than myself and all my philosophy, destroyed by an army of greedy grasping militarists who waged war without quarter upon monks in their saffron robes, and priceless books which they heaved into the fire, and ancient bells which they melted down no more to call the gentle to prayer? And this, this within two decades of this very hour, while the nations of the West danced in their discos and swilled their liquor, lamenting in casual tones for the poor sad fate of the distant Dalai Lama, and turning the television dial.
“I don’t know what it was. Perhaps it was all the millions—Chinese, Japanese, Cambodian, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Kurdish, oh, God, the litany goes on without end. I have no faith, I have no optimism, I have no firm conviction in the ways of reason or ethics. I have no reproof for you as you stand on the Cathedral steps with your arms out to your all-knowing and all-perfect God.
“I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will. But this you taught me as much as any other I’ve ever known, that love is necessary, as much as rain to the flowers and the trees, and food to the hungry child, and blood to the starving thirsting predators and scavengers that we are. Love we need, and love can make us forget and forgive all savagery, as perhaps nothing else can.
“And so I took them out of their fabulous promising modern world with its diseased and desperate masses. I took them out and gave them the only might I possess, and I did it for you. I gave them time, time perhaps to find an answer which those mortals
living now may never know.
“That was it, all of it. And I knew you would cry, and I knew you would suffer, but I knew you would have them and love them when it was finished, and I knew that you needed them desperately. So there you are … joined now with the serpent and the lion and the wolf, and far superior to the worst of men who have proved themselves in this time to be colossal monsters, and free to feed with care upon a world of evil that can swallow every bit of pruning they care to do.”
A silence fell between us.
I thought for a long while, rather than plunge into my words.
Sybelle had stopped her playing, and I knew that she was concerned for me and needed me, I could feel it, feel the strong thrust of her vampire soul. I would have to go to her and soon.
But I took my time to say a few more words:
“You should have trusted them, Master, you should have let them have their chance. Whatever you thought of the world, you should have let them have their time with it. It was their world and their time.”
He shook his head as though he was disappointed in me, and a little weary, and as he had resolved all these matters long ago in his mind, perhaps before I had even appeared last night, he seemed willing to let it all go.
“Armand, you are my child forever,” he said with great dignity. “All that is magical and divine in me is bounded by the human and always was.”
“You should have let them have their hour. No love of me should have written their death warrant, or their admission to our strange and inexplicable world. We may be no worse than humans in your estimation, but you could have kept your counsel. You could have let them alone.”
It was enough.
Besides, David had appeared. He had a copy already of the transcript we’d labored on, but this was not his concern. He approached us slowly, announcing his presence obviously to give us the chance to become silent, which we did.
I turned to him, unable to restrain myself. “Did you know this was to happen? Did you know when it did?”
“No, I did not,” he said solemnly.
“Thank you,” I said.
“They need you, your young ones,” David said. “Marius may be the Maker but they are utterly yours.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m going. I’ll do what I’m bound to do.”
Marius put his hand out and touched my shoulder. I realized suddenly that he was truly on the verge of losing his self-control.
When he spoke his voice was tremulous and lustrous with feeling. He hated the storm inside himself and he was overcome by my sorrow. I knew this plainly enough. It gave me no satisfaction at all.
“You despise me now, and perhaps you’re right. I knew you would weep, but in a very profound way, I misjudged you. I didn’t realize something about you. Perhaps I never have.”
“What’s that, Master,” I said with acidic drama.
“You loved them selflessly,” he whispered. “For all their strange faults, and wild evil, they were not compromised for you. You loved them perhaps more respectfully than I … than I ever loved you.”
He seemed so amazed.
I could only nod. I wasn’t so sure he was right. My need for them had never been tested, but I didn’t want to tell him so.
“Armand,” he said. “You know you can stay here as long as you like.”
“Good, because I just might,” I said. “They love it, and I’m weary. So thank you very much for that.”
“But one thing more,” he went on, “and I mean this with all my heart.”
“What is it, Master?” I said.
David stood by, and I was happy for that, for it seemed to act as a certain curb upon my tears.
“I honestly don’t know the answer to this, and I ask you in humility,” Marius said. “When you saw the Veil, what was it you really saw? Oh, I don’t mean was it Christ, or was it God, or was it a miracle. What I mean is this. There was the face of a being, drenched in blood, who had given birth to a religion guilty of more wars and more cruelty than any creed the world has ever known. Don’t be angry with me, please, just explain to me. What was it you saw? Was it only a magnificent reminder of the ikons you once painted? Or was it truly something drenched in love and not in blood? Tell me. If it was love and not blood, I would honestly like to know.”
“You ask an old and simple question,” I said, “and from where I stand you don’t really know a thing. You wonder how He could have been my Lord, given this world as you describe it, and knowing what you know of the Gospels and the Testaments printed in His name. You wonder how I could have believed all that because you don’t believe it, isn’t that so?”
He nodded. “Yes, I do wonder. Because I know you. And I know that faith is something which you simply do not have.”
I was startled. But instantly I knew he was right.
I smiled. I felt a sort of tragic thrilling happiness suddenly.
“Well, I see what you mean,” I said. “And I’ll tell you my answer. I saw Christ. A kind of bloody light. A personality, a human, a presence that I felt I knew. And He wasn’t the Lord God Father Almighty and He wasn’t the maker of the universe and the whole world. And He wasn’t the Savior or the Redeemer for sins inscribed on my soul before I was born. He wasn’t the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and He wasn’t the Theologian expounding from the Holy Mount. He wasn’t those things for me. Maybe for others, but not for me.”
“But who was He, then, Armand?” David asked. “I have your story, full of marvels and suffering, yet I don’t know. What was the concept of the Lord when you spoke the word?”
“Lord,” I repeated it. “It doesn’t mean what you think. It’s spoken with too much intimacy and too much warmth. It’s like a secret and sacred name. Lord.” I paused, and then continued:
“He is the Lord, yes, but only because He is the symbol of something infinitely more accessible, something infinitely more meaningful than a ruler or king or lord can ever be.”
Again, I hesitated, wanting to find the right words since they were so sincere.
“He was … my brother.” I said. “Yes. That is what He was, my brother, and the symbol of all brothers, and that is why He was the Lord, and that is why His core is simply love. You scorn it. You look askance at what I say. But you don’t grasp the complexity of what He was. It’s easy to feel, perhaps, but not so easy to really see. He was another man like me. And maybe for many of us, millions upon millions, that’s all He’s ever been! We’re all somebody’s sons and daughters and He was somebody’s son. He was human, whether He was God or not, and He was suffering and He was doing it for things He thought were purely and universally good. And that meant that His blood might as well have been my blood too. Why, it had to be. And maybe that is the very source of His magnificence for thinkers such as me. You said I had no faith. I don’t. Not in tides or in legends or in hierarchies made by other beings like ourselves. He didn’t make a hierarchy, not really. He was the very thing. I saw in Him magnificence for simple reasons. There was flesh and blood to what He was! And it could be bread and wine to feed the whole Earth. You don’t get it. You can’t. Too many lies about Him swim in your ken. I saw Him before I heard so much about Him. I saw Him when I looked at the ikons in my house, and when I painted Him long before I even knew all His names. I can’t get Him out of my head. I never have. I never will.”
I had no more to say.
They were very amazed but not particularly respecting, pondering the words in all the wrong ways, perhaps, I couldn’t absolutely know. It didn’t matter what they felt anyway. It wasn’t really so good that they had asked me or that I had tried so hard to tell them my truth. I saw the old ikon in my mind, the one my Mother had brought to me in the snow. Incarnation. Impossible to explain in their philosophy. I wondered. Perhaps the horror of my own life was that, no matter what I did or where I went, I always understood. Incarnation. A kind of bloody light.
I wanted to be left alone by them now.
Sybelle was waiting, which
was of far greater importance, and I went to take her in my arms.
For many hours we talked together, Sybelle and Benji and me, and finally Pandora, who was very distraught but would say nothing of it, came to talk casually and gaily with us too. Marius joined us and also David.
We were gathered in a circle on the grass under the stars. For the young ones, I put on the bravest of faces and we spoke of beautiful things, and places we would wander, and wonders which Marius and Pandora had seen, and we argued now and then amiably about trivial things.
About two hours before dawn, we had broken up, with Sybelle sitting by herself deep in the garden, looking at one flower after another with great care. Benji had discovered that he could read at preternatural speed and was tearing through the library, which was very impressive indeed.
David, seated at Marius’s desk, corrected his misspellings and abbreviations in the typescript, painstakingly correcting the copy he had made for me in haste.
Marius and I sat very close together against the same oak tree, my shoulder against his. We didn’t talk. We were watching things, and listening perhaps to the same songs of the night.
I wanted Sybelle to play again. I had never known her to go so long without playing, and I wanted badly to hear her play the Sonata again.
It was Marius who first heard an unusual sound, and stiffened with alarm, only to give it up and rest back beside me again.
“What was it?” I asked.
“Only a little noise. I couldn’t … I couldn’t read it,” he said. He rested his shoulder against me as he had before.
Almost immediately I saw David look up from his work. And then Pandora appeared, walking slowly but warily towards one of the lighted doors.
Now I heard the sound. And so did Sybelle, for she too looked in the direction of the garden gate. Even Benji had finally deigned to notice it, and he dropped his book in mid-sentence and came marching with a very stern little scowl to the door to take stock of this new situation and get it firmly under control.
