Pandora - By Anne Rice Page 0,89

did want to protect me, didn’t you?” I asked. “And your explanation of all points is so completely rational; it has the elegance of mathematics. There is no need for reincarnation, or destiny, or any miraculous allowance for any part of what’s happened.”

“It’s what I believe,” he said sharply. His face grew blank, then stern. “I would never give you anything short of truth. Are you a woman who wants to be humored?”

“Don’t be fanatical in your dedication to reason,” I said.

These words both shocked and offended him. “Don’t cling to reason so desperately in a world of so many horrid contradictions!”

He was silenced.

“If you so cling to reason,” I said, “then in the passage of time reason may fail you, and when it does you may find yourself taking refuge in madness.”

“What on Earth do you mean?”

“You’ve made of reason and logic religion. It’s obviously the only way you can endure what’s happened to you, that you’re a blood drinker and custodian, apparently, of these displaced and forgotten deities.”

“They aren’t deities!” He grew angry. “Thousands of years ago, they were made, through some mingling of spirit and flesh that rendered them immortal. They find their refuge obviously in oblivion. In your kindness you characterize it as a garden from which the Mother gathered flowers and leaves to make a garland for you, a trap, as you said. But this is your sweet girlish poetry. We do not know that they string very many words together.”

“I am no sweet girl,” I said. “Poetry belongs to everyone. Speak to me!” I said. “And put aside these words, ‘girl’ and ‘woman.’ Don’t be so frightened of me.”

“I am not,” he said angrily.

“You are! Even as this new blood races through me still, eats at me and transforms me, I cling to neither reason nor superstition for my safety. I can walk through a myth and out of it! You fear me, because you don’t know what I am. I look like a woman, I sound like a man, and your reason tells you the sum total is impossible!”

He rose from the table. His face took on a sheen like sweat but far more radiant.

“Let me tell you what happened to me!” he said resolutely.

“Good, do tell me,” I said. “In straightforward manner.”

He let this go by. I spoke against my heart. I wanted only to love him. I knew his cautions. But for all his wisdom, he displayed an enormous will, a man’s will, and I had to know the source of it. I concealed my love.

“How did they lure you?”

“They didn’t,” he said calmly. “I was captured by the Keltoi in Gaul, in the city of Massilia. I was brought North, my hair allowed to grow long, then shut up amid barbarians in a great hollow tree in Gaul. A burnt blood drinker made me into a ‘new god’ and told me to escape the local Priests, go South to Egypt and find out why all the blood drinkers had been burnt, the young ones dying, the old one suffering. I went for my own reasons! I wanted to know what I was!”

“I can well understand,” I said.

“But not before I saw blood worship at its most grisly and unspeakable—I was the god, mind you, Marius, who followed you adoringly all over Rome—and it was to me that these men were offered.”

“I’ve read it in Caesar’s history.”

“You’ve read it but you haven’t seen it. How dare you throw at me such a trivial boast!”

“Forgive me, I forgot your childish temper.”

He sighed. “Forgive me, I forgot your practical and naturally impatient intellect.”

“I’m sorry. I regret my words. I had to witness executions of Rome. It was my duty. And that was in the name of law. Who suffers more or less? Victims of sacrifice or the law?”

“Very well. I escaped these Keltoi and went to Egypt, and there I found the Elder, who was the keeper of the Mother and the Father, the Queen and the King, the first blood drinkers of all time, from which this enhancement of our blood flows. This Elder told me stories that were vague but compelling. The Royal Pair had once been human, no more. A spirit or demon had possessed one or both, lodging itself so firmly that no exorcism could oust it. The Royal Pair could transform others by giving the blood. They sought to make a religion. It was overthrown. Again and again it was overthrown. Anyone who possesses the blood can make