Christ the Lord - Anne Rice [33]
The warmth beat in my face; it beat in my chest. I could feel it in the palms of my hands.
“You press me like a grape, my lord,” I said, “between your thumb and forefinger.” And I know that when pressed in this manner, I may say strange things, things I don't even think in the course of my day-to-day work, things I don't even think when I'm alone . . . or dreaming.
“So I do,” he said. “Because I despise you.”
“So it seems, my lord.”
“Why don't you jump to your feet again?”
“I stay because I'm on an errand.”
He laughed with immense satisfaction. He curled his fingers under his chin and looked around him, but not at the heaps of books, or the lattices with their flashes of light and green, or at the pools of light on the marble floor, or the thin sweet smoke rising from the bronze brazier.
What does it take to ransom Avigail?
“Well, you certainly do love this child, don't you?” he asked. “Either that or you are a fool, as people say, but only some people, I should add.”
“What must we do to help her?”
“Don't you want to know why I despise you?” he asked.
“Is it your wish that I should know?”
“I know all the stories about you.”
“So it seems.”
“About the strange doings when you were born, how your family fled to Egypt, about the miserable massacre of those babies in Bethlehem by that madman who called himself our King, about the things you can do.”
“Things I can do? I laid this marble floor,” I said. “I'm a carpenter. That's the sort of thing I can do.”
“Precisely,” he said. “And that's why I despise you. And anyone else would too if they had the memory that I have!” He lifted his finger as though instructing a child. “Samson's birth was foretold, not by the angel Gabriel, but by an angel for certain. And Samson was a man. And we know his mighty deeds and repeat them generation after generation. Where are your mighty deeds? Where are your defeated enemies lying dead in heaps, or where are the ruins of the heathen temples that you've brought down with the strength of your arm?”
The heat in me burnt blindingly fierce. I had risen to my feet, and knocked the stool aside without meaning to do it. I stood there before him but I didn't see him and I didn't see the room.
It was as if I was remembering something, something forgotten all my life. But this wasn't a memory. No, it was something altogether different.
Heathen temples, where are your heathen temples. In no set place or time, I saw temples, and I saw them falling, I heard them falling, collapsing, as air and form and light shifted, as clouds of dust rose like the boiling sky of a tempest, a sky that went on forever—and this shifting, this breaking, this fierce and deafening ruin, moved on like the ever-changing and ceaseless sea.
I closed my eyes. Memories threatened the purity of this inner vision. Memories of my boyhood in Alexandria, of the Roman processions weaving their way towards their shrines with clouds of rose petals swirling in the air and the steady beat of drums, the shiver of sistrums. I heard the singing of the women, and I saw a golden god drifting forward beneath a wavering canopy—and then the vision returned, sweeping up the memory in its mighty current, the vision so huge and vague that it was shaking the whole world as if the mountains around all the great sea were rumbling and spewing fire, and the altars were falling. The altars were crashing down into pieces.
All of this dissolved. The room came back.
I turned and looked at the old man. He looked like leather and bone. No meanness in him. He seemed frail and like a lily held too close to the brazier, like something withering, burning up.
A deep piercing sense of his misery came to me, his years alone in grief for those he'd lost, his fear of failing eyes and failing fingers and failing reason and failing hope.
Unbearable.
A humming came to my ears, a humming from every room of the house, a humming from beyond the house, from all the rooms of all the houses—the frail, the sick, the weary, the suffering, the bitter.
Unbearable. But I