Of Love and Evil - By Anne Rice Page 0,55

tankards of ale were set down before me.

“Play, play, play,” came the cries from all sides.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. How sweet the wine smelled, how delicious the malt. And how warm was the air, filled with the sounds of talk and laughter. I opened my eyes. Far on the other side of the tavern sat Ankanoc, looking exactly as he had at the Cardinal’s banquet, peering at me, his eyes filled with tears.

I shook my head as if to say no to all he meant to offer, and now to answer him the best way I knew how—with song.

I began to strum and then to play, and within a moment had the place singing with me, though what the song was and how they knew it I could not guess. All the melodies I’d ever heard from this time I could easily now run through and it seemed to me I was happier here in these moments, surrounded by these crude and bold singers, than ever I’d been in all my strange life in this time, and maybe in any other. Ah, what broken creatures we are, and how we endure.

Indeed, deep dark memories came back to me, not of this world, but of the world I’d long ago left as a boy, when I’d stood on the street corner and strummed these old Renaissance songs for the bills people threw at my feet. I felt so sad for that boy, sad for his bitterness, sad for the mistakes he was going to make. I felt sad that he had lived so long with a locked heart and a ruptured conscience, sharpening the bitterness of his life on every cherished memory of pain that he carried in him day in and day out. And then I felt wonder that the seeds of goodness had lain dormant so long in him, waiting for the breath from an angel’s lips.

Ankanoc was gone, though where or how I didn’t know. All around me were convivial faces. People brought down their cups and tankards in time with my playing. I sang some of the old phrases I remembered, but mostly I played to their singing as melodies I’d never heard before came from the lute in my hands.

On and on I played until my soul was full of the warmth and the love around me, full of the light of the fire, and the light of so many faces, full with the sound of the strings of the lute, and the words becoming music, and then it seemed—right in the very middle of my boldest song, my sweetest, boldest most thumping and melodic song, I felt the air change, and the light brighten and I knew, I knew all these greasy shining faces that surrounded me were being transformed into something that was not corporeal at all, but rather notes of music, and it was a music of which I was only the barest part, and the music was rising higher and higher.

“Malchiah, I’m weeping,” I whispered. “I don’t want to leave them.”

A long ribbon of laughter softly broke the darkness that surrounded me, and every syllable of it was picked up as if it were the kernel of a melody, full and entire, and destined now to mingle with another.

“Malchiah,” I whispered.

And I felt his arms around me. I felt him cradling me as he lifted me. The music was made up of space as well as time and it seemed each note was a mouth from which another mouth sprang and then another and another.

He was cradling me as he carried me upward.

“Will I always love them so much? Will I always hate to leave them? Is that part of it, part of what I have to suffer?”

But the word “suffer” was the wrong word because it had all been too grand, too splendid, too golden. And I could hear his lips against my ear reminding me of that, and saying in the softest tones,

“You’ve done well, and now you know there are others waiting for you.”

“This is the school of love,” I said, “and every lesson is deeper, richer, finer.”

I saw a vision of love; I saw that it was no one thing, but a great commingling of things both light and dark and fierce and tender, and my heart broke as the questions broke from my lips.

But no answer came except the anthems of Heaven.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

SOMEONE WAS SHAKING ME. I WOKE UP, OUT OF A