Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,72

for help?” I asked.

The two slaves stared amazed. They were so pretty. One was slightly taller than the other. Both wore exquisite bracelets.

“Just as I thought,” I said. “There’s no one else here but you.” I turned and tested the thick snaggle of vine that rose over the plastered brick. I leapt up and planted my right foot as high as I could in the thick mesh and rose in one leap to throw my arms over the top of the wall.

Flavius had risen from the grass and rushed to me.

“Madam, I beg you not to do this,” said Flavius. “Madam, this is bad, bad, bad! You can’t just climb this man’s wall.”

The servants within were chattering frantically with one another. I think it was in Chaldean.

“Madam, I fear for you!” cried Flavius. “How can I protect you from such a man as this Marius? Madam, the man will be angry with you!”

I lay on the top of the wall, on my stomach, catching my breath. The garden inside was vast and lovely. Ah, what marble fountains. The two slaves had backed up and were staring at me as if I were a powerful monster.

“Please, please!” both boys pleaded with me at once. “He’ll exact a terrible vengeance! You don’t know him. Please, Madam, wait!”

“Hand me the sheets of paper, Flavius, hurry. I have no time for disobedience!”

Flavius complied. “Oh, this is wrong, wrong, wrong!” he said. “Nothing can come of this but the most fearful misunderstandings.”

Then I slid down the inside of the wall, tickled all over by the thick overlay of bristling and brilliant leaves, and I lay my head in the matted tendrils and blossoms. I didn’t fear the bees. I never have. I rested. I held tight to my written pages. Then moved to the gate so I could see Flavius.

“You let me handle Marius,” I said. “Now, you didn’t come out without your dagger.”

“No, I did not,” he said, lifting his cloak to reveal it, “and with your permission I would like to plunge it through my heart now so that I will be most assuredly stone-cold dead before the Master of this house arrives home to find you running rampant in his garden!”

“Permission denied,” I said. “Don’t you dare. Haven’t you heard all that has been said? You are on guard not against Marius but against a shriveled limping demon of burnt flesh. He’ll come at dark! What if he reaches here before Marius?”

“Oh, yea gods, help me!” His hands flew to his face.

“Flavius, straighten up. You are a man! Do I have to remind you of this perpetually? You are watching for this dreaded burnt bag of bones, and he is weak. Remember what Marius said. Go for his head. Stab him in the eyes, just cut him and cut him and shout for me, and I will come. Now go to sleep until dark. He can’t come till then, if he even knows to come here! Besides, I think Marius will arrive first.”

I turned and walked towards the open doors of the villa. The beautiful long-haired boys were in tears.

For a moment the tranquillity and moist cool air of the garden lulled all fear in me, and I seemed safe, among patterns I understood, far far from dark Temples, safe in Tuscany, in our own family gardens there, which had been so rich like this.

“Let me beg you one last time to come back out of this man’s garden!” Flavius shouted. I ignored him.

All the doors of this lovely plastered villa stood open to the porches above or the outdoors below. Listen to the trickling of the fountains. There were lemon trees, and many a marble statue of a lazy, sensuous god or goddess, round which flowers grew in rich purple or blue. Diana, the huntress, rose from a bed of orange blossoms, the marble old and pitted And there, a lazy Ganymede, half-covered in green moss, marked some path that had been overgrown. Far off, I could see the naked bending Venus at her bath on the edge of a pool. Water flowed into the pool. I glimpsed fountains all around me.

The small common white lilies had gone Wild and there stood old olive trees with marvelously twisted trunks, so wondrous to climb in childhood.

A pastoral sweetness hung over all, yet nature had been kept at bay. The stucco of the walls was freshly painted and so were the wooden shutters, opened wide.

The two boys were crying. “Madam, he’ll be so