Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [102]
“I’m going to give you something before I leave you,” I said.
“What is that? What can it be?” She sat up, pushing herself back against the pillows. “What can you give me that will help me?”
“What do you think?” I asked gently. “My blood.”
I heard Avicus gasp at the doorway, but I paid no attention to it. Indeed, I paid no attention to anything but her.
“I’m strong, little one,” I said, “very strong. And after you’ve drunk from me, as long as you wish and however much you wish, you’ll be a different creature from the one you are now.”
She was mystified and drawn by the notion. Timidly she lifted her hands and placed them on my shoulders.
“And this I should do now?”
“Yes,” I said. I was seated firmly there, and I let her take hold of me, and as I felt her teeth go into my neck, I gave out a long sigh. “Drink, precious one,” I said. “Pull hard to take as much blood from me as you can.”
My mind was flooded with a thousand tripping visions of the Imperial palace, of golden rooms, and banquets, of music and magicians, of the daylight city with its wild chariot races crashing through the Hippodrome, of the crowd screaming with applause, of the Emperor rising in his Imperial box to wave to those who worshiped him, of the huge processions passing into Hagia Sophia, of candles and incense, and once again of palatial splendor, this time beneath this roof.
I grew weak. I grew sick. But it didn’t matter. What mattered was she must take all that she could.
And at last, she fell back on the pillows, and I looked down at her, and I saw her cheeks stark white with the Blood.
Scrambling to sit up, to look at me, she stared like a newborn blood drinker as if she’d never had the true vision of the Blood before.
She climbed off the bed and walked about the room. She made a huge circle, her right hand clenching the fabric of her tunic, her face shining with its new whiteness, her eyes wide and swimming and bright.
She stared at me as if she’d never seen me before. Then she stopped, obviously hearing distant sounds to which she’d been deaf. She put her hands to her ears. Her face was full of quiet awe and sweetness, yes, sweetness, and then her eyes played over me.
I tried to climb to my feet but I was too weak for it. Avicus came to help me but I waved him away.
“What have you done to her!” he said.
“You see what I’ve done,” I answered. “Both of you, you who wouldn’t take her. I’ve given her my blood. I’ve given her a chance.”
I went to Zenobia and made her look at me.
“Pay attention to me,” I said. “Did Eudoxia tell you of her early life?” I asked. “Do you know that you can hunt the streets as a man?”
She stared at me with her new eyes, too dazzled, uncomprehending.
“Do you know that your hair, if cut, will grow back in the space of one day, and be as long and full as before?”
She shook her head, her eyes passing over me and over the myriad bronze lamps of the room, and over the mosaics of the walls and the floor.
“Listen to me, lovely creature, I don’t have that much time to teach you,” I said. “I mean to leave you armed with knowledge as well as strength.”
Assuring her again that her hair would grow back, I cut it off for her, watching as it fell to the floor, and then taking her to the rooms of the male blood drinkers, I dressed her in male clothes.
Then ordering Mael and Avicus sternly to leave us, I took her out with me into the city, and tried to show her the manner in which a man would walk, and how fearless he might be, and what was the life of the taverns, which she’d never even dreamt of, and how to hunt on her own.
All the while I found her enchanting as I had before. She seemed now to be her own older, wiser sister. And as she laughed over the usual wasted cup of wine at the table in the tavern, I found myself half resolving that I would urge her to come with me, but then I knew I could not.
“You don’t really look like a man, you know,” I said to her, smiling, “hair or no hair.”
She laughed. “Of course, I don’t. I know it. But to be in such a place as this, a