Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [18]
Marius smiled a truly kind and trusting smile. He nodded. “Italy, my Italy,” he said softly.
Thorne thought the expression on his face was truly wondrous, and he wanted Marius to keep the smile but very quickly it was gone.
Marius had become sober and was looking into the flames again as though lost in his own sadness. In the light of the fire, his hair was almost entirely white.
“Talk to me, Marius,” said Thorne. “My questions can wait. I want the sound of your voice. I want your words.” He hesitated. “I know you have much to tell.”
Marius looked at him as if startled, and warmed somewhat by this. Then he spoke.
“I’m old, my friend,” he said. “I’m a true Child of the Millennia. It was in the years of Caesar Augustus that I became a blood drinker. It was a Druid priest who brought me to this peculiar death, a creature named Mael, mortal when he wronged me, but a blood drinker soon after, and one who still lives though he tried not long ago to sacrifice his life in a new religious fervor. What a fool.
“Time has made us companions more than once. How perfectly odd. It’s a lie that I hold him high in my affections. My life is full of such lies. I don’t know that I’ve ever forgiven him for what he did—taking me prisoner, dragging me out of my mortal life to a distant grove in Gaul, where an ancient blood drinker, badly burnt, yet still imagining himself to be a god of the Sacred Grove, gave me the Dark Blood.”
Marius stopped. “Do you follow my meaning?”
“Yes,” said Thorne. “I remember those groves and the whispers among us of gods who had lived in them. You are saying that a blood drinker lived within the Sacred Oak.”
Marius nodded. He went on.
“ ‘Go to Egypt,’ he charged me, this badly burnt god, this wounded god, “and find the Mother. Find the reason for the terrible fire that has come from her, burning us far and wide.’ “
“And this Mother,” said Thorne. “She was the Evil Queen who carried within her the Sacred Core.”
“Yes,” said Marius, his steady blue eyes passing over Thorne gently. “She was the Evil Queen, friend, no doubt of it . . .
“. . . But in that time, two thousand years ago, she was silent and still and seemed the most desperate of victims. Four thousand years old they were, the pair of them—she and her consort Enkil. And she did possess the Sacred Core, there was no doubt of it, for the terrible fire had come to all blood drinkers on the morning when an exhausted elder blood drinker had abandoned the King and Queen to the bright desert sun.
“Blood drinkers all over the world—gods, creatures of the night, lamias, whatever they called themselves—had suffered agony, some obliterated by terrible flames, others merely darkened and left with a meager pain. The very oldest suffered little, the youngest were ashes.
“As for the Sacred Parents—that is the kind thing to call them, I suppose—what had they done when the sun rose? Nothing. The Elder, severely burnt for all his efforts to make them wake or speak or run for shelter, found them as he had left them, unmovable, heedless, and so, fearing more suffering for himself he had returned them to a darkened chamber, which was no more than a miserable underground prison cell.”
Marius stopped. He paused so completely it seemed that the memories were too hurtful to him. He was watching the flames as men do, and the flames did their reliable and eternal dance.
“Please tell me,” said Thorne. “You found her, this Queen, you looked upon her with your own eyes that long ago?”
“Yes, I found her,” Marius said softly. His voice was serious but not bitter. “I became her keeper. “Take us out of Egypt, Marius,’ that is what she said to me with the silent voice—what you call the Mind Gift, Thorne—never moving her lips.
“And I took her and her lover Enkil, and sheltered them for two