Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,101

name of God and his son, Christ. We are the Children of Darkness.”

“Who made you?” asked Marius.

“We were made in a sacred cave and in our Temple,” said another, a woman, speaking in Greek also. “We know the truth of the Serpent, and his fangs are our fangs.”

I climbed to my feet and moved towards Marius.

“We thought you would be in Rome,” said the young man. He had short black hair, and very round innocent eyes. “Because the Christian Bishop of Rome is now supreme among Christians and the theology of Antioch is no longer of great matter.”

“Why would we be in Rome?” asked Marius. “What is the Roman Bishop to us?”

The woman took the fore. Her hair was severely parted in the middle but her face was very regal and regular. She had in particular beautifully defined lips.

“Why do you hide from us? We have heard of you for years! We know that you know things—about us and where the Dark Gift came from, that you know how God put it into the world, and that you saved our kind from extinction.”

Marius was plainly horrified, but gave little sign of it.

“I have nothing to tell you,” he said, perhaps too hastily. “Except I do not believe in your God or your Christ and I do not believe God put the Dark Gift, as you call it, into the world. You have made a terrible mistake.”

They were highly skeptical and utterly dedicated.

“You have almost reached salvation,” said another, the boy at the far end of the line, whose hair was unshorn and hung to his shoulders. He had a manly voice, but his limbs were small. “You have almost reached the point where you are so strong and white and pure that you need not drink!”

“Would that that were true, it’s not,” said Marius.

“Why don’t you welcome us?” asked the boy. “Why don’t you guide us and teach us that we may better spread the Dark Blood, and punish mortals for their sins! We are pure of heart. We were chosen. Each of us went into the cave bravely and there the dying devil, a crushed creature of blood and bone, cast out of Heaven in a blaze of fire, passed on to us his teachings.”

“Which were what?” asked Marius.

“Make them suffer,” the woman said. “Bring death. Eschew all things of the world, as do the Stoics and the hermits of Egypt, but bring death. Punish them.”

The woman had become hostile. “This man won’t help us,” she said under her breath. “This man is profane. This man is a heretic.”

“But you must receive us,” said the young man who had spoken first. “We have searched so long and so far, and we come to you in humility. If you wish to live in a palace, then perhaps that is your right, you have earned it, but we have not. We live in darkness, we enjoy no pleasure but the blood, we feast on the weak and the diseased and the innocent alike. We do the will of Christ as the Serpent did the will of God in Eden when he tempted Eve.”

“Come to our Temple,” said one of the others, “and see the tree of life with the sacred Serpent wound around it. We have his fangs. We have his power. God made him, just as God made Judas Iscariot, or Cain, or the evil Emperors of Rome.”

“Ah,” I said, “I see. Before you happened on the god in the cave, you were worshipers of the snake. You’re Ophites, Sethians, Nassenians.”

“That was our first calling,” said the boy. “But now we are of the Children of Darkness, committed to sacrifice and killing, dedicated to inflicting suffering.”

“Oh, Marcion and Valentinus,” Marius whispered. “You don’t know the names, do you? They’re the poetic Gnostics who invented the morass of your philosophy a hundred years ago. Duality—that, in a Christian world, evil could be as powerful as good.”

“Yes, we know this.” Several spoke at once. “We don’t know those profane names. But we know the Serpent and what God wants of us.”

“Moses lifted the Serpent in the desert, up over his head,” said the boy. “Even the Queen of Egypt knew the Serpent and wore him in her crown.”

“The story of the great Leviathan has been eradicated in Rome,” said the woman. “They took it out of the sacred books. But we know it!”

“So you learned all this from Armenian Christians,” said Marius. “Or was it Syrians.”

A man, short of stature, with gray