The Vampire Armand - Anne Rice [70]
“No, this is always the way with you,” he said. “Ask.”
He didn’t move his lips when he spoke, but it wasn’t necessary. I heard him very clearly, and I knew that he meant no personal malice to me. He was incapable of such a thing.
“Why, then,” I asked, “can’t I stay? Why can’t you let me stay when I want to, and when I’ve come this far.”
“Think on all you’ve seen. You know the answer.”
And I had to admit that in an instant I did know the answer. It was complex and yet profoundly simple, and it had to do with all the knowledge I had gained.
“You can’t take this back with you,” said the priest. “You’ll forget all the particular things you learned here. But remember the overall lesson, that your love for others, and their love for you, that the increase of love in life itself around you, is what matters.”
It seemed a marvelous and comprehensive thing! It seemed no simple small cliché. It seemed so immense, so subtle, yet so total that all mortal difficulties would collapse in the face of its truth.
I was at once returned to my body. I was at once the auburn-haired boy dying in the bed. I felt a tingling in my hands and feet. I twisted, and a wretched pain flamed down my back. I was all afire, sweating and writhing as before, only now my lips were badly cracked and my tongue was cut and blistered against my teeth.
“Water,” I said, “please, water.”
A soft sobbing came from those around me. It was mingled with laughter and expressions of awe.
I was alive, and they had thought me dead. I opened my eyes, and I looked at Bianca.
“I won’t die now,” I said.
“What is it, Amadeo?” she asked. She bent down and put her ear to my lips.
“It isn’t time,” I said.
They brought me cool white wine. It was mixed with honey and lemon. I sat up and I drank gulp after gulp of it. “It’s not enough,” I said softly, weakly, but I was falling asleep.
I went down into the pillows, and I felt Bianca’s cloth wipe my forehead and my eyes. What a sweet mercy it was, and how very grand to give that small comfort, which was all the world to me. All the world. All the world.
I had forgotten what I had seen on the other side! My eyes snapped open. Recover it, I thought desperately. But I remembered the priest, vividly as though I had just talked to him in another room. He had said I couldn’t remember. And there was so much more to it, infinitely more, such things as only my Master might understand.
I closed my eyes. I slept. Dreams couldn’t come to me. I was too ill, too feverish, but in my own way, stretched thin upon a consciousness of the moist hot bed and the sluggish air beneath the baldaquin, upon the blurred words of the boys and Bianca’s sweet insistence, I did sleep. The hours ticked. I knew them, and gradually some comfort came to me in that I got used to the sweat that smothered my skin, and the thirst that hurt my throat, and I lay without protest, drifting, waiting for my Master to come.
I have so many things to tell you, I thought. You will know about the glass city! I must explain that I was once … but I couldn’t quite remember. A painter, yes, but what sort of painter, and how, and my name? Andrei? When had I been so called?
7
SLOWLY over my consciousness of the sickbed and the humid room there dropped the dark veil of Heaven. Spread out in all directions were the sentinel stars, splendid as they shone above the glinting towers of the glass city, and in this half-sleep, now aided by the most tranquil and blissful of illusions, the stars sang to me.
Each from its fixed position in constellation and in void gave forth a precious glimmering sound, as if great chords were struck inside each flaming orb and by means of its brilliant gyrations broadcast through all the universal world.
Such sounds I had never heard with my earthly ears. But no disclaimer can approximate this airy and translucent music, this harmony and symphony of celebration.
Oh, Lord, if Thou wert music, this then would be Thy