by Anne Rice
“She was just finishing these instructions, and I had the pillowcase sack in my hands, when in came Arjun, quiet and as huge as a tiger, I would imagine, but then I’ve never been surprised by an actual tiger, and there he was, flashing with menace. He terrified me.”
I saw Arjun as Fontayne had seen him.
Arjun was a big man, dark of skin, with remarkable black eyes that made me think of opals. He had ink-black hair that was mostly a knotted and tangled mass these days and he roamed about the Château in a long ornamented gown called a kurta with silken pajamas under it, his feet bare.
In Fontayne’s story, Arjun was splendidly dressed as an eighteenth-century gentleman in shimmering gold brocade and lace with breeches and white stockings and shoes with bejeweled buckles, his hair hidden by a crimson turban. His face was hideous, deformed by rage and hatred.
“ ‘I’ll let you live,’ Arjun said, ‘for one good reason, that she will make my existence Hell if I do to you what I want. But if I ever lay eyes on you again, Mitka, I will burn you alive.’
“And having said this in his soft dark voice, he turned this power of his, this evil power to immolate living creatures with his mind, he turned this power on a great painting on the wall and I saw it turn black and wither, and then burst into tiny flames as it fell in smoking fragments to the floor. ‘You will die like that,’ he said to me, ‘and slowly, and you will be crying for me to end it before I do. Now go, get out of here.’
“The Countess nodded to me, and told me firmly not even to look at her, but to do what Arjun told me.
“And this is why I cannot come to Court, Lestat, because if he is there, he will do what he promised to do on that night.”
I reflected on this for a long moment I was about to respond when he spoke again.
“I swear to you,” he said. “I have never done anything to offend him. Yes, I did love her, and I did covet her, but I swear to you that I did nothing to invite his enmity. He was offended at my very existence and simply maddened to learn that she had given me the Blood.”
“I understand,” I said. Again I reflected, and then after a long time I said this:
“He is at Court and he is difficult and cantankerous. He is a thorn in the side of Marius. I will go to the council and tell them this story and then I will ask for him to come in and tell us if he has any objections to your coming to Court. I will let him make the choice, either to accept your coming, or to insist that you don’t. And if he does insist that you cannot come, that he will destroy you if he sees you, well, I will demand to know why. If you’ve told me the truth, he will have no good reason. And it was for disputes like this that my authority, whatever its source, was made. I’ll do my best for you. I will insist that he agree to forgive whatever injured him in the past.”
I could see that he was anxious and filled with misgiving. In a low voice he began to say that perhaps this was too much to ask of me.
“No,” I said. “This is why I am the Prince, so that all disputes of this kind can be settled, and so that all can come to Court and in peace. You let me do what I must do. And I am confident that I’ll be sending for you very soon.”
He shuddered all over as if he were about to cry and then he rose to his feet, came towards me, and lifted my right hand and kissed it.
I stood and we walked out of the parlor together. I suppose I had some vague idea of going back to New Orleans now, but really I didn’t want to leave Fontayne.
It was far too late of course to return tonight to France.
“But you trust in me,” I told him.
“There is one thing more,” he said in a whisper.
“What is it?”
“I’ve never . . . I don’t know how . . . I cannot make the crossing of the sea as you do.”
“Oh, yes, you can,” I said. “Don’t worry about this. I’ll come back for you and I’ll show you how to do it. You’re older than I am. You’ll learn quite fast.”
I did not want to go. He sensed it.
An absurd thought came to me, that being here with him, being in his house, simply sitting at a table in his parlor and talking to him, it had all felt natural and good, as if in spite of the topic of our conversation we were simply human beings and all the dark world didn’t exist. I was ashamed of this. Why did we have to be “like human beings”? I demanded of myself. Why could we not simply be blood drinkers together? And there came over me again the realization of how new it was to me to love others of the tribe and accept them as beings that had a right to be alive as I was alive.
I looked at him, at his shining eyes, and his congenial smile, and he took my hand and said he wanted to show the house to me.
We remained together for several hours after that, during which we walked through many rooms and I admired not only the endless book collection that flowed from room to room, but many of his paintings, including a few Russian painters of the nineteenth century I’d never heard of before. Fontayne told me that his most valuable paintings were not here in this house, that after the attack of the mavericks, he’d put them in a vault in a New Orleans bank, but that he might bring them to Court if I would accept them. I was delighted.
For me, this was a lovely time. I was overflowing with affection for him, called him Mitka easily, and finally did ask the inevitable simpleton questions, “Did you really know Catherine the Great herself?” and “Did you in fact speak to her?”
“Yes” was the answer to both, and the questions sparked a long reverie about what it had been like in Saint Petersburg in those times, and how much he’d enjoyed the balls at Court, and the passion of the Russians for all things French. Of course the Revolution in France had had a mighty impact, yet life in Russia had remained stable and it had been unthinkable that revolution would occur there.
We might have continued that conversation for a year.
We walked about outside the house, through the gardens which were crowded with flowers and vines that blossom at night, and I saw Fontayne’s stables, including the wreckage of the one which had been burned, and only towards the end of the night did he confide to me that the mavericks had destroyed a young woman whom he wanted to bring into the Blood.
I felt this like a sword to my heart. I was furious.
“And why they did this I have no idea,” he said. “Why come after me? Why trouble me? I never hunt in New Orleans. Why destroy those mortals who were attached to my house?”
I wished the little beasts could have been brought back to life so that I might kill them all over again. I told him so.
“And I was only waiting for your approval to bring her into the Blood,” he added. “You know, I wanted to meet you, to get your permission.”
This silenced me, but it was not the first time a blood drinker had volunteered this complete acceptance of the Court and my position as the sovereign.
“Surely you will be making rules as to who might be brought into the Blood,” he said as we kept walking. “Surely you will set some standards.”
I didn’t answer. I knew that the council was considering this very thing. Yet all of us agreed that the right to make another blood drinker, to transform another human with our own blood, was such an intensely personal and intimate and emotional act that we did not know how to go about imposing a law on it. I tried to say something to that effect.
“It’s rather like telling humans that they cannot have children.”
I could see that he was now in such deep pain he couldn’t talk. We continued down a long garden path and made a round of a large pond filled with monstrous goldfish, flashing under the light of many Japanese lanterns along the shore. Finally he said, “Well, what’s the use of speaking of it now? They destroyed her. There was nothing left of her when they had done their work. I cannot, I will not, dwell on it, wondering what were her last moments.”
I wanted to ask if the girl had known what he
had planned, but why cause him more misery? I thought of my own architect back in the village on the mountain below the Château, and my own plan to bring him over, and I thought I should act on that immediately.
Since time immemorial, immortals had tormented other immortals by destroying human beings under their protection.
Finally, I asked him about this Baudwin, whom he’d characterized as my enemy. I asked if Baudwin had had any connection to the mavericks whom I’d just wiped out.
“No,” he said. “Baudwin is ancient, and I don’t know him. He came to me with one purpose. He had heard about the books you’ve written and the Court and wanted to know what I thought of all this. When I didn’t respond to his outrage at the idea of a monarchy or a Court, he appeared to lose interest in me. I didn’t have an easy moment in his presence. He was too old, too powerful.” He paused, looking at me, and then he said, “It’s hard for me to believe that young and old can congregate at the Court.”
“Well, they do,” I said. “The lion and the lamb lie down together there.” I shrugged. “This is the spirit of the Court. The old rule of hospitality prevails: all blood drinkers are welcome. All immortals are welcome.”
He nodded.
“Someone has to break that peace to be cast out,” I said. “And if Arjun cannot accept your coming, then he will have to leave.”
“I’ve encountered so few blood drinkers over the years,” said Fontayne, “and always with discomfort and suspicion. My existence has been lonely almost beyond endurance. But this Baudwin troubled me. There was something childish and foolish about him. He claimed descent from a legend. Perhaps he left because I didn’t find him all that interesting myself and he sensed it.”
Descent from a legend?
But it was time, finally, to return to New Orleans. Cyril and Thorne suddenly appeared at a polite remove, and I knew of course by the lightening sky and the song of the morning birds.
I kissed Fontayne on both sides of his face, and promised him I’d resolve the issue with Arjun as soon as I could.
It wasn’t until I was alone with Cyril that he confided to me in a whisper that Arjun was no more and that was all he knew about it.
When we reached the flat in New Orleans, there was a voice message for me on my landline phone. It was from Eleni in New York.
“Lestat, you’re needed now at Court. Armand has already gone ahead. Seems Arjun has been destroyed by Marius.”
Chapter 4
The following evening, I crossed the Atlantic in record time, entering the Château by means of the old tower—the only one of the four towers that had been still standing from my time before the restoration of the entire castle.
The house was eerily quiet—the orchestra was not gathered, the ballroom empty—and I was told immediately by Louis that Marius had not spoken a word since the “catastrophe” happened, and that he and all the council were waiting for me.
But before I continue with the story of Arjun’s death, or any story for that matter, I want to bring you up to date on the state of the Court and the village and what had been happening there.
As many of you know, I began years ago to restore the Château in which I had been born, and the deserted village that lay on the mountainside just below it. These ruins were in a very remote part of the mountains of France, and I had paid immense sums to the architects and workmen whom I lured to this neglected spot and challenged them to re-create the Château not as it had been in my childhood, with one of its four towers left standing and only a few habitable rooms in its central portion, but to rebuild the Château as it had originally been after the Crusades, when my ancestors were at the peak of their wealth and power. And on top of this I wanted modernization with electricity throughout, and the entire structure plastered inside by master craftsmen, and floored with the finest hardwood parquet, creating what might have been an eighteenth-century gentleman’s restoration of the place.
For years I did not visit myself, but made decisions from heaps of photographs sent to me wherever I was in the world, and I opened the coffers for the complete furnishing of the place in the most expensive and beautiful reproductions of eighteenth-century chairs, tables, beds, et cetera. To all this I added an immense collection of Persian and Aubusson rugs and tapestries. Windows were fitted with double sashes and heavy glass to insulate them from the cold, and even the old crypts beneath the place were refurbished and divided into proper rooms paneled in marble.
When I first set eyes upon the place after so many years, it was as if I were dreaming. All four towers had been fully rebuilt, and the village itself, little more than a steep winding high street, was walled in eighteenth-century-style shops and townhouses, and even a few manor houses had been redone in the countryside.
Surely I’d given permission for all of this, but I had paid little attention to the master plan or the requests over the years. And I fell in love with what I saw before me.
A small population of craftsmen and artists lodged in the village, and regarded my coming as an event, and I struggled not to disappoint them, clothed as I was in a long fur-lined cloak, with pale lavender glasses over my eyes, and my hands sheathed in gloves.
Complaining of the bright light everywhere they went, I soon seduced them with the notion that the village would best be understood and appreciated by candlelight, and they must forgive me for wanting to see it that way.
Through some fifteen little structures we went—by candlelight—as I admired the meticulous re-creations of the tailor’s shop, the butcher, the baker, the cheese maker, the drapers, and all the other buildings which had once made up the small community, but the great prizes were really the inn, of which I had the most painful and joyful memories, and the church, which was so magnificently restored that a Mass might have been said at the altar, without anyone realizing that the place was not consecrated.
The craftsmen lived comfortably in the flats above all these various museumlike shops, and worked together in large studios in the manor house just beyond the boundaries of the village—and a great map was shown to me of all the land I owned and how much work there was to do to create the old fairground where the yearly markets had been held, and perhaps erect another inn, a much-larger inn for the inevitable public who would flock to this spot to view the entire re-creation.
Of course, I had to disappoint them. I had to tell them that the Château would be inhabited by a secret Order of Men and Women who met to discuss philosophy and music and escape the modern world, and that there never would be a time when the public would be invited here. I could feel their disappointment when I explained all this. Indeed it was almost anguish. Some of these people had devoted their entire careers to this one project, and there was nothing now to be done but to give them more work to do, to let the village develop to serve their community as well as ours, and to pay them handsomely for it so that they would go on working in obscurity in this strange realm beyond time and the modern world.
Gold was the secret. Salaries became bribes. A physician was sent for and maintained to serve the local needs. Food and drink were supplied at no cost; and the inn at night was a place where all could eat and drink without very often receiving an actual guest, but of course some guests, some very unusual guests, the Children of Atlantis, did come later.
There was a great deal more work to be done—stables to be built, horses to be bought, an immense network of greenhouses to be erected for the growth of flowers for the Château and fruit and vegetables for the village.
And there were egregious lies to be told, but without any sort of boast—that is, told grudgingly—that we as a secret order imported all our own food, and those visiting the Château would bring their special dietary needs with them.
To my surprise, the head architect of the group, Alain Abelard, with whom I soon fell in love, and with whom I am still in love, was familiar with my books, and had a collection of my old rock vide
os, and completely respected my persona as a vampire, and thought the whole thing charming, marveling at the wealth American and British rock stars make that could support such a magnificent enterprise.
In his quiet and generous soul, I could see that he was convinced I’d someday open all this to the public. My hope was that I could bring him over into the Blood. But not right away. There was still too much work to be done.
When I first walked through the restored Château, I experienced emotions I couldn’t contain. I dismissed the mortal guides and went from room to room on my own, remembering far too much of what all this had been like in the time of my mortal life.
Gorgeous salons with silken-paneled walls and plaster curlicues and Savonnerie carpets on the floor now replaced the miserable bedchambers we’d occupied in those days.
A lovely banquet room lent itself to being the Council Chamber of the Court, and the architects were still working upon the many apartments throughout the structure, and their modern marble bathrooms, replete with sunken tubs and spacious showers.
Vampires adore modern baths; they love standing in a flood of heated water, thoroughly cleansing the dust from themselves, and then shaking the water out of their hair, and drying their preternatural skin with luxuriant towels before warm little fires. Well, the Château had such a bath for every apartment or suite or bedchamber. We give off no scent, absorb no precious oils, and often take up the clothes of our victims precisely because they do carry a human scent and this disguises us as we drift through the crowded taverns, bars, and dancing clubs, but there is no one on the alert for us anyway.
