The queen of the damned - Anne Rice [239]
“Even women want to live forever,” Maharet said coldly. “Even women would kill for that.”
“Akasha, it’s folly,” said Marius. “It cannot be accomplished. For the Western world, not to resist would be unthinkable.”
“It is a savage and primitive vision,” Maharet said with cold scorn.
Akasha’s face darkened again with anger. Yet even in rage, the prettiness of her expression remained. “You have always opposed me!” she said to Maharet. “I would destroy you if I could. I would hurt those you love.”
There was a stunned silence. I could smell the fear of the others, though no one dared to move or speak.
Maharet nodded. She smiled knowingly.
“It is you who are arrogant,” she answered. “It is you who have learned nothing. It is you who have not changed in six thousand years. It is your soul which remains unperfected, while mortals move to realms you will never grasp. In your isolation you dreamed dreams as thousands of mortals have done, protected from all scrutiny or challenge; and you emerge from your silence, ready to make these dreams real for the world? You bring them here to this table, among a handful of your fellow creatures, and they crumble. You cannot defend them. How could anyone defend them? And you tell us we deny what we see!”
Slowly Maharet rose from the chair. She leant forward slightly, her weight resting on her fingers as they touched the wood.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I see,” she went on. “Six thousand years ago, when men believed in spirits, an ugly and irreversible accident occurred; it was as awful in its own way as the monsters born now and then to mortals which nature does not suffer to live. But you, clinging to life, and clinging to your will, and clinging to your royal prerogative, refused to take that awful mistake with you to an early grave. To sanctify it, that was your purpose. To spin a great and glorious religion; and that is still your purpose now. But it was an accident finally, a distortion, and nothing more.
“And look now at the ages since that dark and evil moment; look at the other religions founded upon magic; founded upon some apparition or voice from the clouds! Founded upon the intervention of the supernatural in one guise or another—miracles, revelations, a mortal man rising from the dead!
“Look on the effect of your religions, those movements that have swept up millions with their fantastical claims. Look at what they have done to human history. Look at the wars fought on account of them; look at the persecutions, the massacres. Look at the pure enslavement of reason; look at the price of faith and zeal.
“And you tell us of children dying in the Eastern countries, in the name of Allah as the guns crackle and the bombs fall!
“And the war of which you speak in which one tiny European nation sought to exterminate a people. . . . In the name of what grand spiritual design for a new world was that done? And what does the world remember of it? The death camps, the ovens in which bodies were burnt by the thousands. The ideas are gone!
“I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil—religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant simple abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees.
“Don’t you see? It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.
“You accuse us of greed. Ah, but our greed is our salvation. Because we know what we are; we know our limits and we know our sins; you have never known yours.
“You would begin it all again, wouldn’t you? You would bring a new religion, a new revelation, a new wave of superstition and sacrifice and death.”
“You lie,” Akasha answered, her voice barely able to contain her fury. “You betray the very beauty I dream of; you betray it because you