The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [139]
Pandora stopped at the edge of the steps.
Marius went past her and up onto the porch. He stood before the red-haired woman, marveling at her height—she was as tall as he was—and at the fine symmetry of her masklike face. She wore a flowing gown of black wool with a high neck and full dagged sleeves. In long loose gores the cloth fell from a slender girdle of braided black cord just beneath her small breasts. A lovely garment really. It made her face seem all the more radiant and detached from everything around it, a mask with the light behind it, glowing in a frame of red hair.
But there was a great deal more to marvel at than these simple attributes which she might have possessed in one form or another six thousand years ago. The woman’s vigor astonished him. It gave her an air of infinite flexibility and overwhelming menace. Was she the true immortal?—the one who had never slept, never gone silent, never been released by madness? One who had walked with a rational mind and measured steps through all the millennia since she had been born?
She let him know, for what it was worth, that this was exactly what she was.
He could see her immeasurable strength as if it were incandescent light; yet he could sense an immediate informality, the immediate receptivity of a clever mind.
How to read her expression, however. How to know what she really felt.
A deep, soft femininity emanated from her, no less mysterious than anything else about her, a tender vulnerability that he associated exclusively with women though now and then he found it in a very young man. In the dreams, her face had evinced this tenderness; now it was something invisible but no less real. At another time it would have charmed him; now he only took note of it, as he noted her gilded fingernails, so beautifully tapered, and the jeweled rings she wore.
“All those years you knew of me,” he said politely, speaking in the old Latin. “You knew I kept the Mother and the Father. Why didn’t you come to me? Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
She considered for a long moment before answering, her eyes moving back and forth suddenly over the others who drew close to him now.
Santino was terrified of this woman, though he knew her very well. And Mael was afraid of her too, though perhaps a little less. In fact, it seemed that Mael loved her and was bound to her in some subservient way. As for Pandora, she was merely apprehensive. She drew even closer to Marius as if to stand with him, regardless of what he meant to do.
“Yes, I knew of you,” the woman said suddenly. She spoke English in the modern fashion. But it was the unmistakable voice of the twin in the dream, the blind twin who had cried out the name of her mute sister, Mekare, as both had been shut up in stone coffins by the angry mob.
Our voices never really change, Marius thought. The voice was young, pretty. It had a reticent softness as she spoke again.
“I might have destroyed your shrine if I had come,” she said. “I might have buried the King and the Queen beneath the sea. I might even have destroyed them, and so doing, destroyed all of us. And this I didn’t want to do. And so I did nothing. What would you have had me do? I couldn’t take your burden from you. I couldn’t help you. So I did not come.”
It was a better answer than he had expected. It was not impossible to like this creature. On the other hand, this was merely the beginning. And her answer—it wasn’t the whole truth.
“No?” she asked him. Her face revealed a tracery of subtle lines for an instant, the glimpse of something that had once been human. “What is the whole truth?” she asked. “That I owed you nothing, least of all the knowledge of my existence and that you are impertinent to suggest that I should have made myself known to you? I have seen a thousand like you. I know when you come into being. I know when you perish. What