The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [126]
“Jesse!”
He shook her with both his hands, and the pain was like lightning shattering the dark. She screamed through her clenched teeth. Miriam, stony-eyed and silent, glared from the window.
“Mael, do it!” she cried.
With all her strength, she sat up on the bed. The pain was without shape or limit; the scream strangled inside her. But then she opened her eyes, truly opened them. In the hazy light, she saw Miriam’s cold unmerciful expression. She saw the tall bent figure of Mael towering over the bed. And then she turned to the open door. Maharet was coming.
Mael didn’t know, didn’t realize, till she did. With soft silky steps, Maharet came up the stairs, her long skirts moving with a dark rustling sound; she came down the corridor.
Oh, after all these years, these long years! Through her tears, Jesse watched Maharet move into the light of the lamps; she saw her shimmering face, and the burning radiance of her hair. Maharet gestured for Mael to leave them.
Then Maharet approached the bed. She lifted her hands, palms open, as if in invitation; she raised her hands as if to receive a baby.
“Yes, do it.”
“Say farewell then, my darling, to Miriam.”
IN OLDEN times there was a terrible worship in the city of Carthage. To the great bronze god Baal, the populace offered in sacrifice their little children. The small bodies were laid on the statue’s outstretched arms, and then by means of a spring, the arms would rise and the children would fall into the roaring furnace of the god’s belly.
After Carthage was destroyed, only the Romans carried the old tale, and as the centuries passed wise men came not to believe it. Too terrible, it seemed, the immolation of these children. But as the archaeologists brought their shovels and began to dig, they found the bones of the small victims in profusion. Whole necropolises they unearthed of nothing but little skeletons.
And the world knew the old legend was true; that the men and women of Carthage had brought their offspring to the god and stood in obeisance as their children tumbled screaming into the fire. It was religion.
Now as Maharet lifted Jesse, as Maharet’s lips touched her throat, Jesse thought of the old legend. Maharet’s arms were like the hard metal arms of the god Baal, and in one fiery instant Jesse knew unspeakable torment.
But it was not her own death that Jesse saw; it was the deaths of others—the souls of the immolated undead, rising upwards away from terror and the physical pain of the flames that consumed their preternatural bodies. She heard their cries; she heard their warnings; she saw their faces as they left the earth, dazzling as they carried with them still the stamp of human form without its substance; she felt them passing from misery into the unknown; she heard their song just beginning.
And then the vision paled, and died away, like music half heard and half remembered. She was near to death; her body gone, all pain gone, all sense of permanence or anguish.
She stood in the clearing in the sunshine looking down at the mother on the altar. “In the flesh,” Maharet said. “In the flesh all wisdom begins. Beware the thing that has no flesh. Beware the gods, beware the idea, beware the devil.”
Then the blood came; it poured through every fiber of her body; she was legs and arms again as it electrified her limbs, her skin stinging with the heat; and the hunger making her body writhe as the blood sought to anchor her soul to substance forever.
They lay in each other’s arms, she and Maharet, and Maharet’s hard skin warmed and softened so that they became one wet and tangled thing, hair enmeshed, Jesse’s face buried in Maharet’s neck as she gnawed at the fount, as one shock of ecstasy passed through her after another.
Suddenly Maharet drew away and turned Jesse’s face against the pillow. Maharet’s hand covered Jesse’s eyes, and Jesse felt the tiny razor-sharp teeth pierce her skin; she felt it all being taken back, drawn