Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,84

encrusted with vine. I walked along the wall towards the gate.

There he stood, his forehead pressed to the bars, both hands clutching at the iron. He bled from several slash marks on his cheek. He gnashed his teeth.

“Flavius!” I said.

He looked up with a start. “Lady Pandora!”

Surely by the light of the moon, he saw the miracle wrought in me, whatever its cause. For I saw the mortality in him, the deep wrinkles of his skin, the painful flutter of his gaze, a thin layer of soil clinging to him all over in the natural moisture of his mortal skin.

“You must go home,” I said, climbing to sit on the wall, with legs on the outside. I bent down so he could hear me. He didn’t back away but his eyes were huge with fascination. “Go see to the girls, and sleep, and get those marks attended to. The demon’s dead, you needn’t worry anymore about him. Come back here tomorrow night at sundown.”

He shook his head. He tried to speak but he couldn’t. He tried to gesture but he couldn’t. His heart thundered in his chest. He glanced back down the road to the small far-flung lights of Antioch. He looked at me. I heard his heart galloping. I felt his shock, and his fear, and it was fear for me, not him. Fear that some awful fate had befallen me. He reached for the gate and clung to the bars, right arm hooked around and left hand clasping it as if he wouldn’t be moved.

I saw myself as he saw me in his mind—in a boy’s sashed tunic, my hair wildly free, sitting atop the wall, as if my body were young and pliant. All lines of age had gone from me. He saw a face on me no one could have ever painted.

But the point was this. The man had reached his limit. He could go no further. And I knew most fully how I loved him.

“All right,” I said. I stood up and leaned over with both my hands. “Come on, I’ll lift you over the wall if I can.”

He raised his arms, doubtful, eyes still drinking up every detail of my transformation.

He weighed nothing. I lifted him up and deposited him on his feet within the gate. I dropped down on the grass beside him and put my arm around him. How hot was his alarm. How strong his courage.

“Still your heart,” I said. I led him towards the house, as he looked down at me, his chest heaving as though he were out of breath, but it was mere shock. “I’ll take care of you.”

“I had the thing,” he said, “I had it by its arm!” How opaque his voice sounded, how filled with Irving fluid and effort. “I sank my dagger into it over and over, but it just slashed at my face and it was gone over the wall like a swarm of gnats, just darkness, immaterial darkness!”

“Flavius, it’s dead, burnt to cinders!”

“Had I not heard your voice, oh, I was going mad! I heard the boys crying. I couldn’t climb the wall with this damned leg. Then I heard your voice, and I knew, knew you were alive!” He was filled with happiness. “You were with your Marius.” The ease with which I could feel his love was sweet, and awe inspiring.

A sudden sense of the Shrine came back to me, of the Queen’s nectar and the shower of flower petals. But I had to maintain my equilibrium in this new state. Flavius was also profoundly baffled.

I kissed him on the lips, warm, mortal lips, and then quickly like an artful cat I licked all the blood from the slash marks on his cheeks, feeling a shiver run through me.

I took him into the library, which in this house was the main room. The boys hovered somewhere about. They had been lighting lamps everywhere, and now they cowered. I could smell their blood and their young human flesh.

“You’ll stay with me, Flavius. Boys, can you make a bedroom for my steward on this floor? You have fruit and bread, don’t you? I can smell it. Have you enough furniture to make him a comfortable place to the far right, where he is out of the way?”

They came rushing out of their respective hiding places, and they too struck me as vividly human. I was distracted. The smallest natural things about them seemed precious, their thick black eyebrows, their round little mouths,