I found myself rising and dancing wildly to these exotic sounds, imitating the undulations of those who urged me on, as I lost all sense of time or reason in the wail of the horns, the strumming of the lutes.
Gabrielle sat still, smiling, with the brim of her soiled white straw hat over her eyes. We did not talk to each other anymore. She was just some pale and feline beauty, cheek smudged with dirt, who drifted through the endless night at my side. Her coat cinched by a thick leather belt, her hair in a braid down her back, she walked with a queen's posture and a vampire's languor, the curve of her cheek luminous in the darkness, her small mouth a blur of rose red. Lovely and soon to be gone again, no doubt.
Yet she remained with me even when I leased a lavish little dwelling, once the house of a Mameluke lord, with gorgeously tiled floors and elaborate tentwork hanging from its ceilings. She even helped me fill the courtyard with bougainvillea and palms and every kind of tropical plant until it was a verdant little jungle. She brought in the caged parrots and finches and brilliant canaries herself.
She even nodded now and then sympathetically when I murmured there were no letters from Paris, and I was frantic for news.
Why hadn't Roget written to me? Had Paris erupted into riots and mayhem? Well, it would never touch my distant provincial family, would it? But had something happened to Roget? Why didn't he write?
She asked me to go upriver with her. I wanted to wait for letters, to question the English travelers. But I agreed. After all, it was rather remarkable really that she wanted me to come with her. She was caring for me in her own way.
I knew she'd taken to dressing in fresh white linen frock coats and breeches only to please me. For me, she brushed out her long hair.
But it did not matter at all. I was sinking. I could feel it. I was drifting through the world as if it were a dream.
It seemed very natural and reasonable that around me I should see a landscape that looked exactly as it had thousands of years ago when artists painted it on the walls of royal tombs. Natural that the palm trees in the moonlight should look exactly as they looked then. Natural that the peasant should draw his water from the river in the same manner as he had done then. And the cows he watered were the same too.
Visions of the world when the world had been new.
Had Marius ever stood in these sands?
We wandered through the giant temple of Ramses, enchanted by the millions upon millions of tiny pictures cut into the walls. I kept thinking of Osiris, but the little figures were strangers. We prowled the ruins of Luxor. We lay in the riverboat together under the stars.
On our way back to Cairo when we came to the great Colossi of Memnon, she told me in a passionate whisper how Roman emperors had journeyed to marvel at these statues just as we did now.
"They were ancient in the times of the Caesars," she said, as we rode our camels through the cool sands.
The wind was not so bad as it could have been on this night. We could see the immense stone figures clearly against the deep blue sky. Faces blasted away, they seemed nevertheless to stare forward, mute witnesses to the passage of time, whose stillness made me sad and afraid.
I felt the same wonder I had known before the pyramids. Ancient gods, ancient mysteries. It made the chills rise. And yet what were these figures now but faceless sentinels, rulers of an endless waste?
"Marius," I whispered to myself. "Have you seen these? Will any one of us endure so long?"
But my reverie was broken by Gabrielle. She wanted to dismount and walk the rest of the way to the statues. I was game for it, though I didn't really know what to do with the big smelly stubborn camels, how to make them kneel down and all that.
She did it. And she left them waiting for us, and we walked through the sand.
"Come with me into Africa, into the jungles," she said. Her face was grave, her voice unusually soft.
I didn't answer for a moment. Something in her manner alarmed me. Or at least it seemed I should have been alarmed.
I should have heard a sound as sharp as the morning chime of Hell's Bells.
I didn't want to go into the jungles of Africa. And she knew I didn't. I was anxiously awaiting news of my family from Roget, and I had it in my mind to seek the cities of the Orient, to wander through India into China and on to Japan.
"I understand the existence you've chosen," she said. "And I've come to admire the perseverance with which you pursue it, you must know that."
"I might say the same of you," I said a little bitterly.
She stopped.
We were as near to the colossal statues as one should get, I suppose. And the only thing that saved them from overwhelming me was that there was nothing near at hand to put them in scale. The sky overhead was as immense as they were, and the sands endless, and the stars countless and brilliant and rising forever overhead.
"Lestat," she said slowly, measuring her words, "I am asking you to try, only once, to move through the world as I do."
The moon shone full on her, but the hat shadowed her small angular white face.
"Forget the house in Cairo," she said suddenly, dropping her voice as if in respect for the importance of what she said.
"Abandon all your valuables, your clothes, the things that link you with civilization. Come south with me, up the river into Africa. Travel with me as I travel."
Still I didn't answer. My heart was pounding.
She murmured softly under her breath that we would see the secret tribes of Africa unknown to the world. We would fight the crocodile and the lion with our bare hands. We might find the source of the Nile itself.
I began to tremble all over. It was as if the night were full of howling winds. And there was no place to go.
You are saying you will leave me forever if I don't come. Isn't that it?
I looked up at these horrific statues. I think I said:
"So it comes to this."
And this was why she had stayed close to me, this was why she had done so many little things to please, this was why we were together now. It had nothing to do with Nicki gone into eternity. It was another parting that concerned her now.
She shook her head as if communing with herself, debating on how to go on. In a hushed voice she described to me the heat of tropical nights, wetter, sweeter than this heat.
"Come with me, Lestat," she said. "By day I sleep in the sand. By night I am on the wing as if I could truly fly. I need no name. I leave no footprints. I want to go down to the very tip of Africa. I will be a goddess to those I slay."
She approached and slipped her arm about my shoulder and pressed her lips to my cheek, and I saw the deep glitter of her eyes beneath the brim of her hat. And the moonlight icing her mouth.
I heard myself sigh. I shook my head.
"I can't and you know it," I said. "I can't do it any more than you can stay with me."
All the way back to Cairo, I thought on it, what had come to me in those painful moments. What I had known but not said as we stood before the Colossi of Memnon in the sand.
She was already lost to me! She had been for years. I had known it when I came down the stairs from the room in which I grieved for Nicki and I had seen her waiting for me.
It had all been said in one form or another in the crypt beneath the tower years ago. She could not give me what I wanted of her. There was nothing I could do to make her what she would not be. And the truly terrible part was this: she really didn't want anything of me!
She was asking me to come because she felt the obligation to do so. Pity, sadness-maybe those were also reasons. But what she really wanted was to be free.
She stayed with me as we returned to the city. She did and said nothing.
And I was sinking even lower, silent, stunned, knowing that another dreadful blow would soon fall. There was the clarity and the horror. She will say her farewell, and I can't prevent it. When do I start to lose my senses? When do I begin to cry uncontrollably?
Not now.
&nb
sp; As we lighted the lamps of the little house, the colors assaulted me-Persian carpets covered with delicate flowers, the tentwork woven with a million tiny mirrors, the brilliant plumage of the fluttering birds.
I looked for a packet from Roget but there was none, and I became angry suddenly. Surely he would have written by now. I had to know what was going on in Paris! Then I became afraid.
"What the hell is happening in France?" I murmured. "I'll have to go and find other Europeans. The British, they always have information. They drag their damned Indian tea and their London Times with them wherever they go."
I was infuriated to see her standing there so still. It was as if something were happening in the room-that awful sense of tension and anticipation that I'd known in the crypt before .Armand told us his long tale.
But nothing was happening, only that she was about to leave me forever. She was about to slip into time forever. And how would we ever find each other again!
"Damn it," I said. "I expected a letter." No servants. They hadn't known when we would be back. I wanted to send someone to hire musicians. I had just fed, and I was warm and I told myself that I wanted to dance.
She broke her stillness suddenly. She started to move in a rather deliberate way. With uncommon directness she went into the courtyard.
I watched her kneel down by the pond. There she lifted two blocks of paving, and she took out a packet and brushed the sandy earth off it, and she brought it to me.
Even before she brought it into the light I saw it was from Roget. This had come before we had ever gone up the Nile, and she had hidden it!
"But why did you do this!" I said. I was in a fury. I snatched the package from her and put it down on the desk.
I was staring at her and hating her, hating her as never before. Not even in the egotism of childhood had I hated her as I did now!
"Why did you hide this from me!" I said.
"Because I wanted one chance!" she whispered. Her chin was trembling. Her lower lip quivered and I saw the blood tears. "But without this even," she said, "you have made your choice."
I reached down and tore the packet apart. The letter slipped out of it, along with folded clippings from an English paper. I unraveled the letter, my hands shaking, and I started to read:
Monsieur, As you must know by now, on July 14, the mobs of Paris attacked the Bastille. The city is in chaos. There have been riots all over France. For months I have sought in vain to reach your people, to get them out of the country safely if I could.
But on Monday last I received the word that the peasants and tenant farmers had risen against your father's house. Your brothers, their wives and children, and all who tried to defend the castle were slain before it was looted. Only your father escaped.
Loyal servants managed to conceal him during the siege and later to get him to the coast. He is, on this very day, in the city of New Orleans in the former French colony of Louisiana. And he begs you to come to his aid. He is grief-stricken and among strangers. He begs for you to come.
There was more. Apologies, assurances, particulars . . . it ceased to make sense.
I put the letter down on the desk. I stared at the wood and the pool of light made by the lamp.
"Don't go to him," she said.
Her voice was small and insignificant in the silence. But the silence was like an immense scream.
"Don't go to him," she said again. The tears streaked her face like clown paint, two long streams of red coming from her eyes.
"Get out," I whispered. The word trailed off and suddenly my voice swelled again. "Get out," I said. And again my voice didn't stop. It merely went on until I said the words again with shattering violence: "GET OUT!"
4
I dreamed a dream of family. We were all embracing one another. Even Gabrielle in a velvet gown was there. The castle was blackened, all burnt up. The treasures I had deposited were melted or turned into ashes. It always comes back to ashes. But is the old quote actually ashes to ashes or dust to dust?
Didn't matter. I had gone back and made them all into vampires, and there we were, the House de Lioncourt, whitefaced beauties even to the bloodsucking baby that lay in the cradle and the mother who bent to give it the wriggling longtailed gray rat upon which it was to feed.
We laughed and we kissed one another as we walked through the ashes, my white brothers, their white wives, the ghostly children chattering together about victims, my blind father, who like a biblical figure had risen, crying:
"I CAN SEE!"
My oldest brother put his arm around me. He looked marvelous in decent clothes. I'd never seen him look so good, and the vampiric blood had made him so spare and so spiritual in expression.
"You know it's a damn good thing you came when you did with all the Dark Gifts." He laughed cheerfully.
"The Dark Tricks, dear, the Dark Tricks," said his wife.
"Because if you hadn't," he continued, "why, we'd all be dead!"
5
The house was empty. The trunks had been sent on. The ship would leave Alexandria in two nights. Only a small valise remained with me. On shipboard the son of the Marquis must now and then change his clothes. And, of course, the violin.
Gabrielle stood by the archway to the garden, slender, longlegged, beautifully angular in her white cotton garments, the hat on as always, her hair loose.
Was that for me, the long loose hair?
My grief was rising, a tide that included all the losses, the dead and the undead.
But it went away and the sense of sinking returned, the sense of the dream in which we navigate with or without will.
It struck me that her hair might have been described as a shower of gold, that all the old poetry makes sense when you look at one whom you have loved. Lovely the angles of her face, her implacable little mouth.
"Tell me what you need of me, Mother," I said quietly. Civilized this room. Desk. Lamp. Chair. All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old as men. Nicki had lived to be thirty.
"Do you require money from me?"
Great beautiful flush to her face, eyes a flash of moving light-blue and violet. For a moment she looked human. We might as well have been standing in her room at home. Books, the damp walls, the fire. Was she human then?
The brim of the hat covered her face completely for an instant as she bowed her head. Inexplicably she asked:
"But where will you go?"
"To a little house in the race Dumaine in the old French city of New Orleans," I answered coldly, precisely. "And after he has died and is at rest, I haven't the slightest idea."
"You can't mean this," she said.
"I am booked on the next ship out of Alexandria," I said.
"I will go to Naples, then on to Barcelona. I will leave from Lisbon for the New World."
Her face seemed to narrow, her features to sharpen. Her lips moved just a little but she didn't say anything. And then I saw the tears rising in her eyes, and I felt her emotion as if it were reaching out to touch me. I looked away, busied myself with something on the desk, then simply held my hands very still so they wouldn't tremble. I thought, I am glad Nicki took his hands with him into the fire, because if he had not, I would have to go back to Paris and get them before I could go on.
"But you can't be going to him!" she whispered.
Him? Oh. My father.
"What does it matter? I am going!" I said.
She moved her head just a little in a negative gesture. She came near to the desk. Her step was lighter than Armand's.
"Has any of our kind ever made such a crossing?" she asked under her breath.
"Not that I know of. In Rome they said no."
"Perhaps it can't be done, this crossing."
"It can be done. You know it can." We had sailed the seas before in our cork-lined coffins. Pity the leviathan who troubles me.
She came even nearer and looked down at me. And the pain in her f
ace couldn't be concealed anymore. Ravishing she was. Why had I ever dressed her in ball gowns or plumed hats or pearls?
"You know where to reach me," I said, but the bitterness of my tone had no conviction to it. "The addresses of my banks in London and Rome. Those banks have lived as long as vampires already. They will always be there. You know all this, you've always known..."
"Stop," she said under her breath. "Don't say these things to me."
Anne Rice - Vampire Chronicles 2 - The Vampire Lestat (1985) Page 41
