Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,87
last I told him how she had entered the chamber of the little King, whose advisors warned him of her gods.
“She broke him up as if he were a boy of wood. She said, ‘Little King, little Kingdom.’ ”
I picked up my pages, which earlier I had placed on this desk. I described the last dream I had had of her, when she threatened, screaming, to walk into the sun and destroy her disobedient children. I described all the things I had seen—the many migrations of my soul.
My heart hurt so much. Even as I explained, I saw her vulnerability, the danger that was embodied in her. I explained finally how I had written all this in Egyptian.
I was weary and wished truly that I had never opened eyes on this life! I felt the keen and total despair again of those nights of weeping in my little house in Antioch when I had pounded on walls, and driven my dagger into the dirt. If she had not run, laughing down that corridor! What did the image mean? And the little boy King, broken so helplessly?
I made a sum of it easily enough. I waited for Marius’s belittling remarks. I hadn’t much patience for him now.
“How do you interpret it?” he asked gently. He tried to take my hand but I withdrew it.
“It’s bits and pieces of her recollection,” I said. I was heartbroken. “It’s what she remembers. There is but one suggestion of a future in it all,” I said “There is only one comprehensible image of a wish: our wedding, that we be together.” My voice was full of sadness, yet I asked him.
“Why do you weep again, Marius?” I asked. “She must gather recollections like flowers picked at random from the garden of the world like leaves falling into her hands, and from these recollections she fastened for me a garland! A wedding garland! A trap. I have no migrant soul. I think not. If I did have a migrant soul, then why would she alone, one so archaic, helpless, irrelevant to the world itself, so out of fashion and out of power, be the one to know this? To make it known to me? The only one to know?”
I looked at him. He was engaged yet crying. He showed no shame in it, and would obviously render no apology.
“What was it you said before?” I asked. “ ‘That I can read minds makes me no wiser than the next man’?” I smiled. “That is the key. How she laughed as she led me to you. How she wanted me to behold you in your loneliness.”
He only nodded.
“I wonder how she knew to cast her net so far,” I said, “to find me across the rolling sea.”
“Lucius, that’s how she knew. She hears voices from many lands. She sees what she wants to see. One night here I badly startled a Roman, who appeared to recognize me and then slunk away as if I were a danger to him. I went after him, thinking vaguely that there was something to this, his excessive fear.
“I soon realized a great weight distorted his conscience and twisted his every thought and movement. He was terrified to be recognized by someone from the capital. He wanted to leave.
“He went to the house of a Greek merchant, pounding on the door late, by torchlight, and demanded the payment of a debt owed to your Father. The Greek told him what he had told him before, that the money would be repaid only to your Father himself.
“The next night I sought Lucius out again. This time the Greek had a surprise for him. A letter had just come from your Father by military ship. This was perhaps four days before your own arrival. The letter plainly stated that a favor was being asked of the Greek by your Father in the name of Hospitality and Honor. If the favor was granted, all debts were canceled. Everything would be explained by a letter accompanying a cargo destined for Antioch. The cargo would take some time, as the ship had many stops to make. The favor was of crucial importance.
“When your brother saw the date of this letter, he was stricken. The Greek, who was thoroughly sick of Lucius by this time, slammed the door in his face.
“I accosted Lucius only steps away. Of course he remembered me, the eccentric Marius of long ago. I pretended surprise to see him here and asked after you. He was