Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,85

their smooth cheeks.

“Yes, Madam, yes!” they said almost in one voice. They hurried forward.

“This is Flavius, my steward. He will stay with us. For now, take him to the bath, heat the water and attend to him. Get him some wine.”

They took Flavius in hand at once. But he paused.

“Don’t abandon me, Madam,” he said suddenly with the most serious and thoughtful expression. “I am loyal in all respects.”

“I know,” I said. “Oh, how clearly I understand. You cannot imagine.”

Then it was off to the bath with the Babylonian boys, who seemed delighted to have something to do.

I found Marius’s huge closets. He had enough clothes for the Kings of Parthia, Armenia, the Emperor’s Mother, Livia, the dead Cleopatra, and an ostentatious patrician who paid no attention to Tiberius’s stupid sumptuary laws.

I put on a much finer, long tunic, woven of silk and linen, and I chose a gold girdle. And with Marius’s combs and brushes, I made a clean free mantle of my hair, free of all tangles, rippled and soft as it had been when I was a girl.

He had many mirrors, which, as you know, in those days were only polished metal. And I was rendered somber and mystified by the single fact that I was young again; my nipples were pink, as I had said; the lines of age no longer interrupted the intended endowments of my face or arms. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that I was timeless. Timeless in adulthood. And every solid object seemed there to serve in me my new strength.

I looked down at the blocks of marble tile which made up the floor and saw in them a depth, a proof of process wondrous and barely understood.

I wanted to go out again, speak to the flowers, pick them up in handfuls. I wanted to talk urgently with the stars. I dared not seek the Shrine for fear of Marius, but if he had not been around I would have gone there and knelt at the Mother and merely looked at her, looked at her in silent contemplation, listening for the slightest articulation, though I knew, quite certainly after watching Marius’s behavior, that there would be none.

She had moved her right arm without the seeming knowledge of the rest of her body. She had moved it to kill, and then to invite.

I went into the library, sat down at the desk, where lay all my pages, and I waited.

Finally, when Marius came, he too was freshly dressed, his hair parted in the middle and combed to his shoulders. He took a chair near me. It was ebony and curved and inlaid with gold, and I looked at him, realizing how very like the chair he was—a great preserved extension of all the raw materials which had gone into it. Nature did the carving and inlay, and then the whole had been lacquered.

I wanted to cry in his arms, but I swallowed my loneliness. The night would never desert me, and it was faithful in every open door with its intruding grass, and the veined olive branches rising to catch the light of the moon.

“Blessed is she who is made a blood drinker,” I said, “when the moon is full, and the clouds are rising like mountains in the transparent night.”

“Probably so,” he said.

He moved the lamp that stood on the desk between us, so that it didn’t flicker in my eyes.

“I made my steward at home here,” I said. “I offered him bath, bed and clothes. Do you forgive me? I love him and will not lose him. It’s too late now for him to go back into the world.”

“He’s an extraordinary man,” Marius said, “and most welcome here. Tomorrow perhaps he can bring your girls. Then the boys will have company and there will be some discipline by day. Flavius knows books, among other things.”

“You’re most gracious. I was afraid you would be angry. Why do you suffer so? I cannot read your mind; I did not obtain that gift.” No, this wasn’t correct. I could read Flavius’s mind. I knew the boys at this very moment were very relieved by Flavius’s presence as they helped him dress for bed.

“We are too closely linked by blood,” he said. “I can never read your thoughts again either. We are thrown back on words like mortals, only our senses are infinitely keener, and the detachment we know at some times will be as cold as the ice in the North; and