a magic that went back to the Egyptian times? How had the Children of Darkness forgotten such things? Maybe it had all been poetry to the Venetian master, the mention of Typhon, the slayer of his brother, nothing more than that.
I went out into the night with my chisel. I wrote my questions to Marius on stones that were older than us both. Marius had become so real to me that we were talking together, the way that Nicki and I had once done. He was the confidant who received my excitement, my enthusiasm, my sublime bewilderment at all the wonders and puzzles of the world.
But as my studies deepened, as my education broadened, I was getting that first awesome inkling of what eternity might be. I was alone among humans, and my writing to Marius couldn't keep me from knowing my own monstrosity as I had in those first Paris nights so long ago. After all, Marius wasn't really there.
And neither was Gabrielle.
Almost from the beginning, Armand's predictions had proved true.
Part VI On The Devils Road From Paris To Cairo Chapter 2
2
Before we were even out of France, Gabrielle was breaking the journey to disappear for several nights at a time. In Vienna, she often stayed away for over a fortnight, and by the time I settled in the palazzo in Venice she was going away for months on end. During my first visit to Rome, she vanished for a half year. And after she left me in Naples, I returned to Venice without her, angrily leaving her to find her way back to Veneto on her own, which she did.
Of course it was the countryside that drew her, the forest or the mountains, or islands on which no human beings lived.
And she would return in such a tattered state -- her shoes worn out, her clothes ripped, her hair in hopeless tangles -- that she was every bit as frightening to look at as the ragged members of the old Paris coven had been. Then she'd walk about my rooms in her dirty neglected garments staring at the cracks in the plaster or the light caught in the distortions of the handblown window glass.
Why should immortals pore over newspapers, she would ask, or dwell in palaces? Or carry gold in their pockets? Or write letters to a mortal family left behind?
In this eerie, rapid undertone she'd speak of cliffs she had climbed, the drifts of snow through which she had tumbled, the caves full of mysterious markings and ancient fossils that she had found.
Then she would go as silently as she'd come, and I would be left watching for her and waiting for her -- and bitter and angry at her, and resenting her when she finally came back.
One night during our first visit to Verona, she startled me in a dark street.
"Is your father still alive?" she asked. Two months she'd been gone that time. I'd missed her bitterly, and there she was asking about them as if they mattered finally. Yet when I answered, "yes, and very ill," she seemed not to hear. I tried to tell her then that things in France were bleak indeed. There would surely be a revolution. She shook her head and waved it all away.
"Don't think about them anymore," she said. "Forget them." And once again, she was gone.
The truth was, I didn't want to forget them. I never stopped writing to Roger for news of my family. I wrote to him more often than I wrote to Eleni at the theater. I'd sent for portraits of my nieces and nephews. I sent presents back to France from every place in which I stopped. And I did worry about the revolution, as any mortal Frenchman might.
And finally, as Gabrielle's absences grew longer and our times together more strained and uncertain, I started to argue with her about these things.
"Time will take our family," I said. "Time will take the France we knew. So why should I give them up now while I can still have them? I need these things, I tell you. This is what life is to me!"
But this was only the half of it. I didn't have her any more than I had the others. She must have known what I was really saying. She must have heard the recrimination behind it all.
Little speeches like this saddened her. They brought out the tenderness in her. She'd let me get clean clothes for her, comb out her hair.