Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [27]
This was the single worst mistake of all my long years.
But let me tell quickly the little tale of how we came to be divided by my bitterness and pride.
Now as we kept the Mother and the Father, the old gods of the dark groves of the North woods died out. Nevertheless an occasional blood drinker would discover us and come to press his suit for the blood of Those Who Must Be Kept.
Most often such a monster was violent and easily dispatched in the heat of anger, and we would return to our civilized life.
One evening, however, there appeared in our villa outside Antioch a band of newly made blood drinkers, some five in number, all dressed in simple robes.
I was soon amazed to discover that they perceived themselves as serving Satan within a Divine Plan that held the Devil to be equal in power to the Christian God.
They did not know of the Mother and the Father, and understand, the shrine was in that very house, down, beneath the floor. Yet they could hear no inkling of the Divine Parents. They were far too young and too innocent. Indeed, their zeal and sincerity was enough to break one’s heart.
But though deeply touched by their mishmash of Christian and Persian ideas, of their wild notions, and by their curious appearance of innocence, I was also horrified by the fact that this was a new religion among the blood drinkers, and they spoke of other adherents. They spoke of a cult.
The human in me was revolted; and the rational Roman was more confused and alarmed than I can express.
It was Pandora who quickly brought me to my senses and gave me to know that we must slaughter the whole band. Were we to let them go, others would come to us, and soon the Mother and Father might fall into their hands.
I, who had slain old pagan blood drinkers with ease, seemed somehow unable to obey her, perhaps because I realized for the first time that if we remained in Antioch, if we maintained our household and our lives, more and more blood drinkers would come and there would be no end to killing them in order to protect our fine secret. And my soul suddenly could not endure this possibility. Indeed I thought once more of death for myself and even for Those Who Must Be Kept.
We slaughtered the zealots. It was a simple thing to do for they were so young. It took only moments with torches and with our swords. We burnt them to ashes and then scattered those ashes as, I’m sure you know, must be done.
But after it was over, I lapsed into a terrible silence and for months would not leave the shrine. I abandoned Pandora for my own suffering. I couldn’t explain to her that I had foreseen a grim future, and when she had gone out to hunt the city or to do whatever amused her, I went to Akasha.
I went to my Queen. I knelt before her and I asked her what she meant for me to do.
“After all,” I said, “these are your children, are they not? They come in new battalions and they don’t know your name. They likened their fangs to those of serpents. They spoke of the Hebrew prophet Moses, holding up the serpent staff in the desert. They spoke of others who might come.”
No answer came from Akasha. No real answer was to come from Akasha for two thousand years.
But I was only beginning my awful journey then. And all I knew in those anxious moments was that I had to conceal my prayers from Pandora, that I couldn’t let her see me—Marius, the philosopher—on bended knee. I went on with my praying, I went on with my feverish worship. And as always happens when one prays to an immobile thing, the light played upon the face of Akasha; the light gave some semblance of life.
Meantime, Pandora, as embittered by my silence as I was by Akasha’s silence, became utterly distraught.
And one night she hurled at me a simple household insult, “Would that I were rid of them and rid of you.”
She left the house and she did not return the next night