Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [74]
There was something else here.
These boys seemed infinitely more interesting by virtue of their dignity and their adornments, and the courage with which they looked at me. As for the name Eudoxia, I was ultimately more curious than afraid.
“Let me go with you,” I said immediately. But the boys gestured that Avicus and Mael should come as well.
“Why is this?” I asked protectively. But at once my companions let me know that they wanted to go too.
“How many are you?” I asked the boys.
“Eudoxia will answer your questions,” said the boy who had given me the scroll. “Please do come with us without further conversation. Eudoxia has been hearing of you for some time.”
We were escorted a long way through the streets, until finally we came to a quarter of the city even richer than that in which we lived, and to a house much larger even than our own. It had the usual harsh stone facade, enclosing no doubt an inner garden and rich rooms.
During this time, the boy blood drinkers cloaked their thoughts very well, but I was able to divine, perhaps because they wanted me to do, that their names were Asphar and Rashid.
We were admitted to the house by another pair of mortal slaves who guided us into a large chamber completely decorated with gold.
Torches burned all about us, and in the center of the room, on a gilded couch with purple silk pillows there reclined a gorgeous blood drinker woman, with thick black curls not unlike those of the boys who had come to us, though she wore them long and fretted with pearls, her damask robe and under dress of silk as fine as anything I’d seen in Constantinople so far.
Her face was small, oval, and as close to perfection as anything I’ve ever beheld, even though she bore no resemblance to Pandora who was for me perfection itself.
Her eyes were round and extremely large. Her lips were perfectly rouged, and there came a perfume from her that was no doubt made by a Persian magician to drive us out of our wits.
There were numerous chairs and couches scattered about on the mosaic floor where rampant Grecian goddesses and gods were as tastefully represented as they might have been some five hundred years before. I saw similar images on the walls surrounding us, though the slightly crude but ornate columns seemed of later design.
As for the vampire woman’s skin it was perfectly white, and so totally without a touch of humanity that it sent a chill through me. But her expression, which manifested itself almost entirely by a smile, was cordial and curious in the extreme.
Still leaning on her elbow, her arm covered in bracelets, she looked up at me.
“Marius,” she said in cultured and perfect Latin, her voice as lovely as her face, “you read my walls and floor as though they were a book.”
“Forgive me,” I said. “But when a room is so exquisitely decorated, it seems the polite thing to do.”
“And you long for old Rome,” she said, “or for Athens, or even for Antioch where you once lived.”
This was a formidable blood drinker. She’d plucked this knowledge of me from the deepest of my memories. I closed my mind. But I didn’t close my heart.
“My name is Eudoxia,” she said. “I wish I could say that I bid you welcome to Constantinople, but it is my city and I am not altogether pleased that you are here.”
“Can we not come to some understanding with you?” I asked. “We’ve made a long and arduous journey. The city is vast.”
She made some small gesture, and the mortal slaves withdrew. Only Asphar and Rashid remained, as if waiting for her command.
I tried to tell if there were other blood drinkers in this house, but I couldn’t do this without her knowing I was doing it, and so my attempt was rather weak.
“Sit down, all of you, please,” she said. And at that invitation, the two beautiful boys, Asphar and Rashid, made to bring the couches in closer so that we might gather in a natural way.
At once I asked if I might have a chair. And Avicus and Mael in an uncertain whisper echoed the same request. It was done. We were seated.
“An old Roman,” she said with a sudden luminous smile. “You disdain