of the locust and the death of the crops. I was made what I am by these men in the name of good.”
This was too enticing, too enthralling.
All the old myths came to my mind, in a chorus of dazzling poetry. Osiris was a good god to the Egyptians, a god of the corn. What has this to do with us? My thoughts were spinning. In a flash of mute pictures, I recalled the night I left my father’s house in the Auvergne when the villagers had been dancing round the Lenten fire, and making their chants for the increase of the crops. Pagan, my mother had said. Pagan, had declared the angry priest they had long ago sent away.
And it all seemed more than ever the story of the Savage Garden, dancers in the Savage Garden, where no law prevailed except the law of the garden, which was the aesthetic law. That the crops shall grow high, that the wheat shall be green and then yellow, that the sun shall shine. Look at the perfectly shaped apple that the tree has made, fancy that! The villagers would run through the orchards with their burning brands from the Lenten bonfire, to make the apples grow.
“Yes, the Savage Garden,” Marius said with a spark of light in his eyes. “And I had to go out of the civilized cities of the Empire to find it. I had to go into the deep woods of the northern provinces, where the garden still grew at its lushest, the very land of Southern Gaul in which you were born. I had to fall into the hands of the barbarians who gave us both our stature, our blue eyes, our fair hair. I had it through the blood of my mother, who had come from those people, the daughter of a Keltic chieftain married to a Roman patrician. And you have it through the blood of your fathers directly from those days. And by a strange coincidence, we were both chosen for immortality for the very same reason—you by Magnus and I by my captors—that we were the nonpareils of our blond and blue-eyed race, that we were taller and more finely made than other men.”
“Ooooh, you have to tell me all of it! You have to explain everything!” I said.
“I am explaining everything,” he said. “But first, I think it is time for you to see something that will be very important as we go on.”
He waited a moment for the words to sink in.
Then he rose slowly in human fashion, assisting himself easily with his hands on the arms of the chair. He stood looking down at me and waiting.
“Those Who Must Be Kept?” I asked. My voice had gotten terribly small, terribly unsure of itself.
And I could see a little mischief again in his face, or rather a touch of the amusement that was never far away.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said soberly, trying to conceal the amusement. “It’s very unlike you, you know.”
I was burning to see them, to know what they were, and yet I didn’t move. I’d never really thought that I would see them. I’d never really thought what it would mean . . .
“Is it . . . is it something terrible to see?” I asked. He smiled slowly and affectionately and placed his hand on my shoulder.
“Would it stop you if I said yes?”
“No,” I said. But I was afraid.
“It’s only terrible as time goes on,” he said. “In the beginning, it’s beautiful.”
He waited, watching me, trying to be patient. Then he said softly:
“Come, let’s go.”
4
A STAIRWAY into the earth.
It was much older than the house, this stairway, though how I knew I couldn’t say. Steps worn concave in the middle from the feet that have followed them. Winding deeper and deeper down into the rock.
Now and then a rough-cut portal to the sea, an opening too small for a man to climb through, and a shelf upon which birds have nested, or where the wild grass grew out of the cracks.
And then the chill, the inexplicable chill that you find sometimes in old monasteries, ruined churches, haunted rooms.
I stopped and rubbed the backs of my arms with my hands. The chill was rising through the steps.
“They don’t cause it,” he said gently. He was waiting for me on the steps just below.
The semidarkness broke his face into kindly patterns of light and shadow, gave the illusion of mortal age that wasn’t there.
“It was here long before