Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [250]
“ ‘This one, this one who has the nucleus or the root, is he very old?’
“ ‘It’s a woman,’ he replied, ‘and she is ancient, as old as the Mother was, and she has no desire to rule, only to keep the root safe and to live as a witness to time, in a place apart from the world and its worries. With that kind of age comes a peace from the blood. She no longer needs to drink it.’
“ ‘When will that peace come for me?’ I asked.
“He laughed softly, gently. ‘Not for thousands of years,’ he said. ‘Though with the blood I gave you, you can go many nights with just the Little Drink or even nothing. You’ll suffer but you won’t become weak unto dying. That’s the trick, remember. Don’t become so weak that you can’t hunt. That you must never do. Promise me.’
“ ‘It matters to you what happens to me?’
“ ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be with you here if it didn’t. I gave you my blood, did I not?’ He laughed but it was kindly. ‘You don’t know what a gift it was, my blood. I’ve lived for so long. In the parlance of our kind, I’m a Child of the Millennia, and my blood is considered too strong for the young and unwise, but I hold you to be wise and so I gave it. Live up to it.’
“ ‘What do you expect of me now? I know that I’m to kill those who are evil and no others, yes, and the Little Drink must be done with stealth and grace, but what else do you expect?’
“ ‘Nothing, really,’ he said. ‘You go where you wish to go and do what you wish to do. What will sustain you, how you will live, these are things you must figure out for yourself.’
“ ‘How did you do it?’ I asked.
“ ‘Oh, you ask me to go back so many years,’ he said. ‘My Master and my Maker were one, a great writer of the Greek tragedy just before and during the time of Aeschylus. He had been something of a roamer before he set to work in Athens writing for the theater, and he had traveled into India, where he bought me from a man I scarcely remember who kept me for his bed, and had educated me for his library, and who sold me for a dear price to the Athenian who brought me home to Athens to copy for him and be his bed slave. I loved it. The world of the stage delighted me. We worked hard on the scenery, the training of the chorus and of the solitary actor whom Thespis had introduced into the mix of the early theater as it was then.
“ ‘My Master wrote scores of plays—satires, comedies, tragedies. He wrote odes to celebrate victorious athletes. He wrote long epic poems. He wrote lyrics for his own pleasure. He was always waking me in the middle of the night to copy or merely to listen. “Wake up, Arion, wake up, you won’t believe what I’ve done here!” he would say, shaking me and shoving a cup of water into my hands. You know that meter and rhythm were much more important to the Greeks back then. He was the past master of it all. He made me laugh with his pure cleverness.
“ ‘He wrote for every festival, every contest, every conceivable excuse, and was ever busy on every detail of the performance down to the procession that might precede it or the painting of the masks to be used. It was his life. That is, when we weren’t traveling.
“ ‘It was his joy to go to other Greek colonies and there participate in the theater as well, and it was here in Italy that he encountered the sorceress who gave him the Power. We were living then in the Etruscan city that would later become Pompeii, and he had been involved in putting on a theatrical in the festival of Dionysus for the Greeks.
“ ‘I can still remember the night he came back to me, and how at first he would have nothing to do with me, and then he brought me into his presence and clumsily he drank from me, and when it seemed that I would die, when I was sure of it, he gave me the Blood in a blundering terrible moment, weeping and desperate and pleading with me to understand that he didn’t know what had happened to him.
“ ‘We were neophytes together. We were Children in the Blood together. He burnt his plays, all of them. He said that all he had written was worthless. He was no more among