The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [129]
“Cannibal”
Some Lamb (1975)
1
LESTAT:
IN THE ARMS OF THE GODDESS
I CAN’T say when I awoke, when I first came to my senses.
I remember knowing that she and I had been together for a long time, that I’d been feasting on her blood with an animal abandon, that Enkil was destroyed and she alone held the primeval power; and that she was causing me to see things and understand things that made me cry like a child.
Two hundred years ago, when I’d drunk from her in the shrine, the blood had been silent, eerily and magnificently silent. Now it was an utter transport of images—ravishing the brain just as the blood itself ravished the body; I was learning everything that had happened; I was there as the others died one by one in that horrible way.
And then there were the voices: the voices that rose and fell, seemingly without purpose, like a whispering choir in a cave.
It seemed there was a lucid moment in which I connected everything—the rock concert, the house in Carmel Valley, her radiant face before me. And the knowledge that I was here now with her, in this dark snowy place. I’d waked her. Or rather I had given her the reason to rise as she had said it. The reason to turn and stare back at the throne on which she’d sat and take those first faltering steps away from it.
Do you know what it meant to lift my hand and see it move in the light? Do you know what it meant to bear the sudden sound of my own voice echoing in that marble chamber?
Surely we had danced together in the dark snow-covered wood, or was it only that we had embraced over and over again?
Terrible things had happened. Over the whole world, terrible things. The execution of those who should never have been born. Evil spawn. The massacre at the concert had been only the finish.
Yet I was in her arms in this chilling darkness, in the familiar scent of winter, and her blood was mine again, and it was enslaving me. When she drew away, I felt agony. I had to clear my thoughts, had to know whether or not Marius was alive, whether or not Louis and Gabrielle, and Armand, had been spared. I had to find myself again, somehow.
But the voices, the rising tide of voices! Mortals near and far. Distance made no difference. Intensity was the measure. It was a million times my old hearing, when I could pause on a city street and hear the tenants of some dark building, each in his own chamber, talking, thinking, praying, for as long and as closely as I liked.
Sudden silence when she spoke:
“Gabrielle and Louis are safe. I’ve told you this. Do you think I would hurt those you love? Look into my eyes now and listen only to what I say. I have spared many more than are required. And this I did for you as well as for myself, that I may see myself reflected in immortal eyes, and hear the voices of my children speaking to me. But I chose the ones you love, the ones you would see again. I could not take that comfort from you. But how you are with me, and you must see and know what is being revealed to you. You must have courage to match mine.”
I couldn’t endure it, the visions she was giving me—that horrid little Baby Jenks in those last moments; had it been a desperate dream the moment of her death, a string of images flickering within her dying brain? I couldn’t bear it. And Laurent, my old companion Laurent, drying up in the flames on the pavement; and on the other side of the world, Felix, whom I had known also at the Theater of the Vampires, driven, burning, through the alleyways of Naples, and finally into the sea. And the others, so many others, the world over; I wept for them; I wept for all of it. Suffering without meaning.
“A life like that,” I said of Baby Jenks, crying.
“That’s why I showed you all of it,” she answered. “That’s why it is finished. The Children of Darkness are no more. And we shall have only angels now.”
“But the others,” I asked. “What has happened to Armand?” And the voices were starting again, the low humming that could mount to a deafening roar.
“Come now, my prince,” she whispered. Silence again. She reached up and held my face