Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [107]
This was the end of the dream of the great Empire that included both East and West. It was the end of my dream that Byzantium would somehow preserve the civilization which Rome had once preserved.
But it did not mean the end of the civilized world. Even I, the bitter Roman Patrician, had to admit to that.
There soon rose among the Franks a great leader, eventually to be called Charlemagne, and his victories were many in maintaining some sort of peace in the West. Meantime there gathered around him a court where some of the old Latin literature was encouraged like a fragile flame.
But in the main it was the church which now kept alive the aspects of culture which had been part of the Roman world to which I’d been born. Ah, such an irony, that Christianity, this rebel religion, born of martyrdom during the Pax Romana, now preserved the old writings, the old language, the old poetry, and the old speech.
As the centuries passed, I grew stronger; every gift I possessed was enhanced. While lying in the vault with the Mother and the Father, I could hear the voices of people in towns far away. I could hear an occasional blood drinker pass close to me. I could hear thoughts or prayers.
At last the Cloud Gift came to me. I needn’t climb the slope to the vault any longer. I had only to will myself to rise from the road and I stood before the hidden doors to the passage. It was frightening, yet I loved it for I could travel even greater distances when I had the strength for it, which was less often as time went on.
Meantime castles and monasteries had come to appear in this land which had once been the territory of warring barbarian tribes. With the Cloud Gift I could visit the high peaks upon which these marvelous structures were created and sometimes slip into their very rooms.
I was a drifter through eternity, a spy among other hearts. I was a blood thing who knew nothing about death and finally nothing about time.
Sometimes on the winds I drifted. Always through the lives of others I drifted. And in the mountain vault I did my usual painting for Those Who Must Be Kept, covering their walls this time with old Egyptians come to make sacrifice, and I kept my few books there that comforted my soul.
In the monasteries I often spied upon the monks. I loved to watch them writing in their scriptoriums, and it was a comfort to me to see that they kept the old Greek and Roman poetry safe. In the small hours, I went into the libraries, and there, a hooded figure, hunched over the lectern, I read the old poetry and history from my time.
Never was I discovered. I was far too clever. And often I lingered outside the chapel in the evening, listening to the plainsong of the monks, which created a peace inside of me, rather like walking the cloisters, or listening to the steeple bells.
Meantime the art of Greece and Rome which I had loved so much completely died away. A dour religious art took its place. Proportion and naturalism were no longer important. What mattered was that those images which were rendered be evocative of devotion to God.
Human figures in paintings or in stone were often impossibly gaunt, with bold staring eyes. A dreadful grotesquery reigned. It was not for want of knowledge, or skill, for manuscripts were decorated with tremendous patience, and monasteries and churches were built at great cost. Those who made this art could have made anything. It was a choice. Art was not to be sensual. Art was to be pious. Art was to be grim. And so the classical world was lost.
Of course I found wonders in this new world, I cannot deny it. Using the Cloud Gift, I traveled to the great Gothic cathedrals, whose high arches surpassed anything I’d ever beheld. I was stunned by the beauty of these cathedrals. I marveled at the market towns which were growing up all over Europe. It seemed that commerce and crafts had settled the land which war could not settle alone.
New languages were spoken everywhere. French was the language of the elite. But there was English and German