Blood and Gold - Anne Rice [98]
It pained me now that Eudoxia was the teacher, and Eudoxia was dead.
This one was studying me, and then she asked in the simplest voice:
“Why don’t you want me? What can I do to make you want me?” She went on speaking tenderly. “You’re very beautiful,” she said, “with your light yellow hair. You look like a god, really, tall as you are and with your blue eyes. Even she thought you were beautiful. She told me you were. I was never allowed to see you. But she told me that you were like the North men. She described you as you walked about in your red robes—.”
“Don’t say any more, please,” I said. “You don’t have to flatter me. It won’t matter. I can’t take you with me.”
“Why?” she asked. “Because I know about the Mother and the Father?”
I was shocked.
I should read her thoughts, all her thoughts, ransack her soul for everything she knew, I thought, but I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want that feeling of intimacy with her. Her beauty was too much, there was no denying it.
Unlike my paragon, Pandora, this lovely creature had the promise of a virgin—that one could make of her what one wanted while losing nothing—and I believed that promise to contain a lie.
I answered her in a warm whisper trying not to hurt her.
“That’s precisely the reason I can’t take you, that, and because I must be alone.”
She bowed her head. “What am I to do?” she asked. “Tell me. Men will come here, mortal men,” she said, “wanting the taxes on this house or some other triviality and I shall be discovered and called a witch or a heretic and dragged into the streets. Or during the day they will come and find me sleeping like the dead beneath the floor, and lift me, hoping to revive me, into the certain death of the sun’s light.”
“Stop, I know it all,” I said. “Don’t you see, I’m trying to reason! Leave me alone for now.”
“If I leave you alone,” she said, “I’ll start weeping or screaming in my grief, and you won’t be able to bear it. You’ll desert me.”
“No, I won’t,” I said. “Be quiet.”
I paced the floor, my heart aching for her, and my soul hurting for myself that this had fallen to me. It seemed a terrible justice for my slaughter of Eudoxia. Indeed this child seemed some phantom risen from Eudoxia’s ashes to haunt me as I tried to plan my escape from what I’d done.
Finally, I quietly sent out my call to Avicus and Mael. Using my strongest Mind Gift, I urged them, no, commanded them, to come to me at Eudoxia’s house and to let nothing keep them from it. I told them I needed them and I would wait until they arrived.
Then I sat down beside my young captive and I did what I had been wanting to do all along: I moved her heavy black hair back behind her shoulders and I kissed her soft cheeks. These were rapacious kisses and I knew it. But the texture of her baby soft skin and of her thick wavy hair drove me to quiet madness, and I wouldn’t stop.
This intimacy startled her but she did nothing to drive me away.
“Did Eudoxia suffer?” she asked me.
“Very little, if at all,” I said. I drew back from kissing her. “But tell me why she didn’t simply try to destroy me,” I said. “Why did she invite me here? Why did she talk with me? Why did she give me some hope that we could come to an understanding of the mind?”
She pondered this before she answered.
“You held a fascination for her,” said Zenobia, “which others had not. It wasn’t only your beauty though that was a large part of it. Always for her a large part of it. She said to me that she had heard tell of you from a woman blood drinker in Crete long ago.”
I dared not interrupt her! I stared with wide eyes.
“Many years ago,” she said, “this Roman blood drinker had come to the isle of Crete, wandering, looking for you, and speaking of you—Marius, the Roman, Patrician by birth, scholar by choice. The woman blood drinker loved you. She didn’t challenge the claim of Eudoxia