Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [224]
“Marius, it was you who left me,” she said, and I heard a tremor in her voice which frightened me. “Marius, that was so long ago,” she said sadly. “Marius, I wandered so far and wide searching for you.”
“Yes, yes, I admit to all,” I said. “I admit to every error. How could I guess what it meant to break the tie? Pandora, I didn’t know! Yea gods, I didn’t know! Believe me, I didn’t know. Tell me you will leave this creature, Arjun, and come back to me. Pandora, I want nothing short of this! I can’t make pretty words. I can’t recite old poems. Pandora, look at me.”
“I am looking at you!” she declared. “Don’t you see, you blind me! Marius, don’t think I too haven’t dreamt of this reunion. And now you see me in this shame, this weakness.”
“What? I don’t care! What shame and weakness?”
“That I’m a slave to my companion, Arjun, that I let him move me through the world, that on my own, I possess no will, no momentum. Marius, I am nothing now.”
“No, that’s not true, and besides it doesn’t matter. I’ll free you from Arjun. I have no fear of him whatsoever, and then you’ll be with me and all your old spirit will come back to you.”
“You dream,” she said and the first coldness came into her face and into her voice. It was in her brown eyes, a coldness that comes from sorrow.
“Are you telling me,” I demanded, “that you mean to leave me again for this creature? You think I will stand for it?”
“And what are you saying to me, Marius, that you will force me?” Her voice was low, distant.
“But you’ve told me you’re weak, you’ve told me you’re a slave. Is this not asking for me to force you?”
She shook her head. She was ready to weep. Again I wanted to pull down her hair, to see it loose, to take the jewels out of it. I wanted to take her face in my hands.
I did it. I held her face too roughly.
“Pandora, listen to me,” I said. “One hundred years ago, I learnt from a strange mortal that in your wanderings with this creature you circled again and again the city of Dresden. And learning this, I moved myself to this city to wait for you. Not a night has passed that I have not awakened to look through Dresden to find you.
“Now that I have you in my arms I have no intention of abandoning you.”
She shook her head. She seemed for a moment incapable of speech. I felt that she was imprisoned in her strange fashionable garments and lost in some painful reverie.
“But what can I give you, Marius, but what you’ve already learnt? The knowledge that I live still, that I endure, that I wander? With or without Arjun, what does it matter?”
She turned her eyes to me, wondering.
“And what do I learn from you except that you go on, and that you endure—that those demons in Rome did not destroy you as they claimed, that you were burnt, yes, I can see that in the color of your skin, but you survive. Marius, what more is there?”
“What on Earth are you saying!” I demanded. I was suddenly furious. “Pandora, we have each other! Good Lord. We have time. As we come together now, time begins for us all over again!”
“Does it, Marius? I don’t know,” she replied. “Marius, I’m not strong enough.”
“Pandora, that’s mad!” I said.
“Oh, you are so angry and it is so like our quarrels of old.”
“No, it’s not!” I declared. “It’s nothing like our quarrels of old because it’s about nothing. Now I’m taking you from here. I’m taking you to my palace, and I shall deal with Arjun as best as I can afterwards.”
“You can’t do such a thing,” she said sharply. “Marius, I’ve been with him for hundreds of years. You think you can simply come between us?”
“I want you, Pandora. I shall settle for nothing else. And if such a time comes that you want to leave me—.”
“Yes, and what if it does come,” she said angrily, “then what shall I do when there is no Arjun on account of you!”
I fell silent. I was in a rage. She was staring at me intently. Her face was full of feeling. Her breast heaved under the tight satin.
“Do you love me?” I demanded.
“Completely,” she said in her angry voice.
“Then you are coming with me!”
I took her by the hand.
No one moved to stop us as we left