Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [203]
I remembered only too well the death of Eudoxia, and I also remembered the moment when Enkil had lifted his arm against Mael. I could not subject Bianca to possible injury.
Within a short time, I was easily able to take Bianca with me through the night to the nearby cities of Prague and Geneva, and there we indulged ourselves with some vision of the civilization we had once known in Venice.
As for that beautiful capital, I would not return to it, no matter how much Bianca implored me. Of course she possessed nothing of the Cloud Gift herself, and was dependent upon me in a manner which neither Amadeo nor Pandora had ever been.
“It is too painful to me,” I declared. “I will not go there. You’ve lived here so long as my beautiful nun. What is it you want?”
“I want Italy,” she said in a soft crestfallen voice. And I knew only too well what she meant, but I didn’t answer her.
“If I cannot have Italy, Marius,” she said at last, “I must have somewhere.”
She was in the front corner of the shrine when she spoke these all too significant words, and they were in a hushed voice, as if she sensed a danger.
We were always reverent in the shrine. But we did not whisper behind the Divine Parents. We considered it ill-mannered if not downright disrespectful.
It’s a strange thing when I think of it. But we could not presume that Akasha and Enkil did not hear us. And therefore we often spoke in the front corner, especially the one to the left, which Bianca favored, often sitting there with her warmest cloak about her.
When she said these words to me, she looked up at the Queen as though acknowledging the interpretation.
“Let it be her wish,” she said, “that we not pollute her shrine with our idleness.”
I nodded. What else could I do? Yet so many years had passed in this fashion that I had grown accustomed to this place over any other. And Bianca’s quiet loyalty to me was something I took for granted.
I sat down beside her now.
I took her hand in mine, and noticed perhaps for the first time in some while that my skin was now darkly bronzed rather than black, and most of the wrinkles had faded.
“Let me make a confession to you,” I said. “We cannot live in some simple house as we did in Venice.”
She listened to me with quiet eyes.
I went on.
“I fear those creatures, Santino and his demon spawn. Decades have passed since the fire, but they still threaten from their hiding places.”
“How do you know this?” she said. It seemed she had a great deal more to say to me. But I asked for her patience.
I went to my belongings and took from them the letter from Raymond Gallant.
“Read this,” I said. “It will tell you, among other things, that they have spread their abominable ways as far as the city of Paris.”
For a long time I remained silent as she read, and then her immediate sobs startled me. How many times had I seen Bianca cry? Why was I so unprepared for it? She whispered Amadeo’s name. She couldn’t quite bring herself to speak of it.
“What does this mean?” she said. “How do they live? Explain these words. What did they do to him?”
I sat beside her, begging her to be calm, and then I told her how they lived, these Satan worshiping fiends, as monks or hermits, tasting the earth and death, and how they imagined that the Christian God had made some place for them in his Kingdom.
“They starved our Amadeo,” I said, “they tortured him. This is plain here. And when he had given up all hope, believing me to be dead, and believing their piety to be just, he became one of them.”
She looked at me solemnly, the tears standing in her eyes.
“Oh, how often I’ve seen you cry,” I said. “But not of late, and not so bitterly as you cry for him. Be assured I have not forgotten him either.”
She shook her head as if her thoughts were not in accord with mine but she was not able to reveal them.
“We must be clever, my precious one,” I said. “Whatever abode we choose for ourselves, we must be safe from them, always.”
Almost