Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,62

Caesar and the Guard. Watch what happens to that damned Sejanus. You can sow the seeds of distrust everywhere, and lose yourself in an overgrown field.”

“We are home, Madam,” he said.

“Oh, thank God, you know it. I could never have told you this was the house.”

Within moments, he stopped and turned the key in a lock. The smell of urine was everywhere overpowering, as it always was in the back streets of ancient cities. A lantern threw a dim light on our wooden door. The light danced in the jet of water which fell from the lion’s mouth in the fountain.

Flavius gave a series of knocks. It sounded to me as if the women answering the inner door were crying.

“Oh, Lord, now what?” I said. “I am too sleepy. Whatever it is, tend to it.” I went inside.

“Madam,” squealed one of the girls. I couldn’t remember her name. “I didn’t let him in. I swear I never unbolted the door. I have no key to the gate. We had this house, all this, ready for you!” She sobbed.

“What on Earth are you talking about?” I asked.

But I knew. I’d seen in the corner of my eye. I knew. I turned and saw a very tall Roman sitting in my newly refurbished living room. He sat relaxed with ankle on knee in a gilded wooden chair.

“It’s all right, Flavius,” I said. “I know him.”

And I did. Because it was Marius. Marius the tall Keltoi. Marius, who had charmed me in childhood Marius, whom I had almost identified in the shadows of the Temple.

He rose at once.

He came towards me, where I stood in the darkness on the edges of the atrium, and he whispered, “My beautiful Pandora!”

7

E STOPPED just short of touching me. “Oh, do, please,” I said. I moved to kiss him, but he moved away. The room had scattered lamps. He played the shadows.

“Marius, of course, Marius! And you look not one day older than when I saw you in my girlhood. Your face is radiant, and your eyes, how beautiful are your eyes. I would sing these praises to the accompaniment of a lyre if I could.”

Flavius had slowly withdrawn, taking the distressed girls with him. He made not a sound.

“Pandora,” Marius said, “I wish I could take you in my arms, but there are reasons why I cannot, and you mustn’t touch me, not because I want it so much, but because I’m not what you think. You don’t see the evidence of youth in me; it is something so far afield of the promises of youth that I’ve only just begun to understand its agonies.”

Suddenly he looked off. He raised his hand for my silence and patience.

“That thing is abroad,” I said. “The burnt blood drinker.”

“Don’t think on your dreams just now,” he said to me directly. “Think on our youth. I loved you when you were a girl of ten. When you were fifteen I begged your Father for your hand.”

“You did? He never told me this.”

He looked away again. Then he shook his head.

“The burnt one,” I said.

“I feared this,” he cursed himself. “He followed you from the Temple! Oh, Marius! You are a fool. You have played into his hands. But he is not as clever as he thinks.”

“Marius, was it you who sent me the dreams!”

“No, never! I would do anything in my power to protect you from myself.”

“And from the old legends?”

“Don’t be quick of wit, Pandora. I know your immense cleverness served you well back there with your loathsome brother Lucius and the gentleman Legate. But don’t think too much about . . . dreams. Dreams are nothing, and dreams will pass.”

“Then the dreams came from him, this hideous burnt killer?”

“I can’t figure it!” he said. “But don’t think on the images. Don’t feed him now with your mind.”

“He reads minds,” I said, “just as you do.”

“Yes. But you can cloak your thoughts. It’s a mental trick. You can learn it. You can walk with your soul locked up in a little metal box in your head.”

I realized he was in much pain. An immense sadness came from him. “This cannot be allowed to happen!” he insisted.

“What is that, Marius? You speak about the woman’s voice, you—”

“No, be quiet.”

“I will not! I will get to the bottom of this!”

“You must take my instructions!” He stepped forward and again he reached to touch me, to take me by the arms, as my Father might have done, but then he did not.

“No, it is you who