Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [56]
Once again I saw the weakness of anger. I had to put aside anger and contempt and plead with him to understand.
“This is so,” I said. “In Egypt, I did find things. But you must believe me that nothing I found matters. If there is a Queen, a Mother as you call her, and mind you, I don’t say she exists, imagine for the moment that she is ancient and unresponsive and can give nothing to her children any longer, that so many centuries have passed since our dim beginnings that no one with any reason understands them, and the matter is left quite literally buried for it matters not one jot.”
I had admitted far more than I intended, and I looked from one to the other of them for understanding and acceptance of what I’d said.
Mael wore the astonished expression of an innocent. But the look on the face of Avicus was something else.
He studied me as if he wanted desperately to tell me many things. Indeed his eyes spoke in silence though his mind gave me nothing and then he said,
“Long centuries ago, before I was sent to Britain to take up my time in the oak as the god, I was brought before her. You remember I told you this.”
“Yes,” I said.
“I saw her!” He paused. It seemed quite painful for him to relive this moment. “I was humiliated before her, made to kneel, made to recite my vows. I remember hating those around me. As for her, I thought she was a statue, but now I understand the strange words that they spoke. And then when the Magic Blood was given me, I surrendered to the miracle. I kissed her feet.”
“Why have you never told me this!” begged Mael. He seemed more injured and confounded than angry or outraged.
“I told you part of it,” said Avicus. “It’s only now that I see it all. My existence was wretched, don’t you understand?” He looked to me and then to Mael, and his tone became a little more reasonable and soft. “Mael, don’t you see?” he asked. “Marius is trying to tell you. This path in the past is a path of pain!”
“But who is she and what is she?” Mael demanded.
In that fatal instant my mind was decided. Anger did move me and perhaps in the wrong way.
“She is the first of us,” I said in quiet fury. “That is the old tale. She and her consort or King, they are the Divine Parents. There’s no more to it than that.”
“And you saw them,” Mael said, as if nothing could make him pause in his relentless questioning.
“They exist; they are safe,” I said. “Listen to what Avicus tells you. What was Avicus told?”
Avicus was desperately trying to remember. He was searching so far back that he was discovering his own age. At last he spoke in the same respectful and polite voice as before.
“Both of them contain the seed from which we all spring!” he answered. “They cannot be destroyed on that account for if they were, we would die with them. Ah, don’t you see?” He looked at Mael. “I know now the cause of the Terrible Fire. Someone seeking to destroy us burnt them or placed them in the sun.”
I was utterly defeated. He had revealed one of the most precious secrets. Would he know the other? I sat in sullen silence.
He rose from the chair and began to walk about the room, incensed by his memories.
“How long did they remain in the fire? Or was it only one day’s passage in the desert sand?” He turned to me. “They were white as marble when I saw them. “This is the Divine Mother,’ they said to me. My lips touched her foot. The priest pressed his heel to the back of my neck. When the Terrible Fire came I had been so long in the oak I remembered nothing. I had deliberately slain my memory. I had slain all sense of time. I lived for the monthly blood sacrifice and the yearly Sanhaim. I starved and dreamed as I’d been commanded to do. My life was in rising at Sanhaim to judge the wicked, to look into the hearts of those who were accused and pronounce on their guilt or innocence.
“But now I remember. I remember the sight of them—the Mother and the Father—for I saw both of them before they pressed my lips to her feet. How cold she was. How awful it was. And I was unwilling. I was so filled with anger and