Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,86

at other times feelings will enflame us, carry us on waves of burning sea.”

“Hmmm,” I said.

“You despise me,” he said softly, contritely, “because I quenched your ecstasy, I took from you your joy, your convictions.” He looked quite genuinely miserable. “I did this to you right at the happiest moment of your conversion.”

“Don’t be so sure you quenched it. I might still make her Temples, preach her worship. I’m an initiate. I have only begun.”

“You will not revive her worship!” he said. “Of that I assure you! You will tell no one about her or what she is or where she is kept, and you will never make another blood drinker.”

“My, if only Tiberius had such authority when he addressed the Senate!” I said.

“All Tiberius ever wanted was to study at the gymnasium at Rhodes, to go every day in a Greek cloak and sandals and talk philosophy. And so the propensity for action flowers in men of lesser mettle, who use him in his loveless loneliness.”

“Is this a lecture for my improvement? Do you think I don’t know this? What you don’t know is that the Senate won’t help Tiberius govern. Rome wants an Emperor now, to worship and to like. It was your generation, under Augustus, which accustomed us to forty years of autocratic rule. Don’t talk to me of politics as though I were a fool.”

“I should have realized that you understood it all,” he said. “I remember you in your girlhood. Nobody could match your brilliance. Your fidelity to Ovid and his erotic writings was a rare sophistication, an understanding of satire and irony. A well-nourished Roman frame of mind.”

I looked at him. His face too had been wiped clean of discernible age. I had time now to relish it, the squareness of his shoulders, the straightness and firmness of his neck, the distinct expression of his eyes and well-placed eyebrows. We had been made over into portraits of ourselves in marble by a master sculptor.

“You know,” I said, “even under this crushing and annoying barrage of definition and declaration which you make to me, as if I were weeping for your ratification, I feel love for you, and know full well that we are alone in this, and married to one another, and I am not unhappy.”

He appeared surprised, but said nothing.

“I am exalted, bruised in the heart,” I said, “a hardened pilgrim. But I do wish you would not speak to me as if my full indoctrination and education were your primary concern!”

“I have to speak this way!” he said gently. His voice was all kindness in its heat. “It is my primary concern,” he said. “If you can understand what happened with the end of the Roman Republic, if you can understand Lucretius and the Stoics, whole, then you can understand what we are. You have to do this!”

“I’ll let that insult pass,” I answered. “I’m not in the mood for listing for you every philosopher or poet I have read. Nor for recounting the level of talk around our nighttime table.”

“Pandora, I don’t mean any offense! But Akasha is not a goddess! Remember your dreams. She is a vial of precious strength. Your dreams told you she could be used, that any unscrupulous blood drinker could pass on the blood to another, that she is a form of demon, host to the power we share.”

“She can hear you!” I whispered, outraged.

“Of course, she can. For fifteen years I’ve been her guardian. I’ve fought off those renegades from the East. And other connivers from the African hinterlands. She knows what she is.”

No one could have guessed his age, save from the seriousness of his expression. A man in perfect form, that was what he seemed. I tried not to be dazzled by him, by the pulsing night behind him, and yet I wanted so to drift. “Some wedding feast,” I said. “I have things to say to the trees.”

“They will be there tomorrow night,” he said.

The last image I had of her passed before my eyes, colored in ecstasy; she took the young Pharaoh from his chair and broke him into sticks. I saw her before that revelation, at the beginning of the swoon, running down the corridor laughing.

A slow fear crept over me.

“What is it?” Marius asked. “Confide in me.”

“When I drank from her, I saw her like a girl, laughing.” I recounted then the marriage, the flood of rose petals, and then her strange Egyptian Temple full of frenzied worshipers. At