Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [44]
And so with this mortal comfort, the years passed, whilst I kept myself busy with the energy of a madman, either writing in my journals and subsequently burning them, or painting on the walls of the shrine.
Meantime, the wretched serpent worshiping blood drinkers came again, attempting to establish their absurd temple within one of the neglected catacombs where mortal Christians no longer gathered, and once again, Avicus and Mael drove them away.
I observed all this, immensely relieved that I had not been called upon to do anything, and painfully remembering when I had slaughtered such a band in Antioch and subsequently fallen into the piteous madness that had cost me the love of Pandora apparently for all time.
But no, not for all time; surely she would come to me, I thought. I wrote about it in my journals.
I put down my pen; I closed my eyes. I longed for her. I prayed that she would come to me. I envisioned her with her rippling brown hair and melancholy oval face. I tried to remember with exactitude the shape and the fine color of her dark eyes.
How she had argued with me. How she had known the poets and philosophers. How she had been able to reason. And I, I had mocked her all too much.
I cannot tell you how many years passed in this fashion.
I was aware that even though we did not speak to one another, or even face each other in the street, Avicus and Mael had become companions to me by their very presence. And as for their keeping Rome clean of other blood drinkers, I was in their debt.
Now, I didn’t pay much attention to what was happening with the government of the Empire as I think you can ascertain from all I’ve said.
But in truth I cared passionately about the fate of the Empire. For the Empire to me was the civilized world. And though I was a secret hunter by night, a filthy killer of humans, nevertheless I was a Roman, and I lived in all other ways a civilized life.
I suppose that I assumed, much like many an old Senator of the time, that sooner or later the endless battles of the Emperors would sort themselves out. A great man, with the strength of Octavian, would rise to unite the entire world once again.
Meantime the armies would patrol the borders, endlessly driving back the barbarian menace, and if the responsibility fell, over and over again to the armies to choose an Emperor, so be it, as long as the Empire remained intact.
As for the Christians who existed everywhere, I did not know what to make of them at all. It was a great mystery to me that this little cult, which had begun in Jerusalem of all places, could have grown to such tremendous size.
Before I’d left Antioch, I’d been amazed by the success of Christianity, of how it was becoming organized, and how it seemed to thrive on division and dissent.
But Antioch was the East as I have said. That Rome was capitulating to the Christians was beyond my wildest dreams. Slaves had everywhere gone over to the new religion, but so had men and women of high position. And persecutions had no effect at all.
Before I continue, however, allow me to point out what other historians have also pointed out, that before Christianity, the entire ancient world lived in a kind of religious harmony. No one persecuted anyone else for religion.
Even the Jews who would associate with no one else were easily infolded by Greeks and Romans and allowed to practice their extremely anti-social beliefs. It was they who rebelled against Rome, not Rome which sought to enslave them. And so this harmony was worldwide.
Of course all of this led me to believe, when I first heard Christians preaching, that there was no chance of this religion gaining ground. It placed far too much responsibility upon the new members to avoid all contact with the revered gods of Greece and Rome, and so I thought the sect would soon die out.
Also there was the constant strife among the Christians as to what they really believed. Surely they would destroy