The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [135]
“But how could that possibly be?” I asked. Did she know how afraid I was? That her words moved me from simple fear into terror? Surely she did.
“Ah, you are so strong, princeling,” she said. “But you were destined for me, surely. Nothing defeats you. You fear and you don’t fear. For a century I watched you suffer, watched you grow weak and finally go down in the earth to sleep, and I then saw you rise, the very image of my own resurrection.”
She bowed her head now as if she were listening to sounds from far away. The voices rising. I heard them too, perhaps because she did. I heard the ringing din. And then, annoyed, I pushed them away.
“So strong,” she said. “They cannot drag you down into them, the voices, but do not ignore this power; it’s as important as any other you possess. They are praying to you just as they have always prayed to me.”
I understood her meaning. But I didn’t want to hear their prayers; what could I do for them? What had prayers to do with the thing that I was?
“For centuries they were my only comfort,” she continued. “By the hour, by the week, by the year I listened; it seemed in early times that the voices I heard had woven a shroud to make of me a dead and buried thing. Then I learned to listen more carefully. I learned to select one voice from the many as if picking a thread from the whole. To that voice alone I would listen and through it I knew the triumph and ruin of a single soul.”
I watched her in silence.
“Then as the years passed, I acquired a greater power—to leave my body invisibly and to go to the single mortal whose voice I listened to, to see then through that mortal’s eyes. I would walk in the body of this one, or that one. I would walk in sunshine and in darkness; I would suffer; I would hunger; I would know pain. Sometimes I walked in the bodies of immortals as I walked in the body of Baby Jenks. Often, I walked with Marius. Selfish, vain Marius, Marius who confuses greed with respect, who is ever dazzled by the decadent creations of a way of life as selfish as he is. Oh, don’t suffer so. I loved him. I love him now; he cared for me. My keeper.” Her voice was bitter but only for that instant. “But more often I walked with one among the poor and the sorrowful. It was the rawness of true life I craved.”
She stopped; her eyes clouded; her brows came together and the tears rose in her eyes. I knew the power of which she spoke, but only slightly. I wanted so to comfort her but when I reached out to embrace her she motioned for me to be still.
“I would forget who I was, where I was,” she continued. “I would be that creature, the one whose voice I had chosen. Sometimes for years. Then the horror would return, the realization that I was a motionless, purposeless thing condemned to sit forever in a golden shrine! Can you imagine the horror of waking suddenly to that realization? That all you have seen and heard and been is nothing but illusion, the observation of another’s life? I would return to myself. I would become again what you see before you. This idol with a heart and brain.”
I nodded. Centuries ago when I had first laid eyes upon her, I had imagined unspeakable suffering locked within her. I had imagined agonies without expression. And I had been right.
“I knew he kept you there,” I said. I spoke of Enkil. Enkil who was now gone, destroyed. A fallen idol. I was remembering the moment in the shrine when I’d drunk from her and he’d come to claim her and almost finished me then and there. Had he known what he meant to do? Was all reason gone even then?
She only smiled in answer. Her eyes were dancing as she looked out into the dark. The snow had begun again, swirling almost magically, catching the light of the stars and the moon and diffusing it through all the world, it seemed.
“It was meant, what happened,” she answered finally. “That I should pass those years growing ever more strong. Growing so strong finally that no one . . . no one can be my equal.” She stopped. Just for a moment her