The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [209]
The sunlight was blinding on the green fields. It shone on Nicolas’s brown hair, and on the deep lacquer of the violin. The music climbed up to the soft, rolling clouds. And against the sky I saw the battlements of my father’s house.
Battlements.
I opened my eyes again.
And I knew I was lying in a high tower room several miles from Paris.
And just in front of me, on a crude little wooden table, was a bottle of cold white wine, precisely as I had dreamed it.
For a long time I looked at it, looked at the frost of droplets covering it, and I could not believe it possible to reach for it and drink.
Never had I known the thirst I was suffering now. My whole body thirsted. And I was so weak. And I was getting a little cold.
The room moved when I moved. The sky gleamed in the window.
And when at last I did reach for the bottle and pull the cork from it and smell the tart, delicious aroma, I drank and drank without stopping, not caring what would happen to me, or where I was, or why the bottle had been set here.
My head swung forward. The bottle was almost empty and the faraway city was vanishing in the black sky, leaving a little sea of lights behind it.
I put my hands to my head.
The bed on which I’d been sleeping was no more than stone with straw strewn upon it, and it was coming to me slowly that I might be in some sort of jail.
But the wine. It had been too good for a jail. Who would give a prisoner wine like that, unless of course the prisoner was to be executed.
And another aroma came to me, rich and overpowering and so delicious that it made me moan. I looked about, or I should say, I tried to look about because I was almost too weak to move. But the source of this aroma was near to me, and it was a large bowl of beef broth. The broth was thick with bits of meat, and I could see the steam rising from it. It was still hot.
I grabbed it in both hands immediately and I drank it as thoughtlessly and greedily as I’d drunk the wine.
It was so satisfying it was as if I’d never known any food like it, that rich boiled-down essence of the meat, and when the bowl was empty I fell back, full, almost sick, on the straw.
It seemed something moved in the darkness near me. But I was not sure. I heard the chink of glass.
“More wine,” said a voice to me, and I knew the voice.
Gradually, I began remembering everything. Scaling the walls, the small square rooftop, that smiling white face.
For one moment, I thought, No, quite impossible, it must have been a nightmare. But this just wasn’t so. It had happened, and I remembered the rapture suddenly, the sound of the gong, and I felt myself grow dizzy as though I were losing consciousness again.
I stopped it. I wouldn’t let it happen. And fear crept over me so that I didn’t dare to move.
“More wine,” said the voice again.
Turning my head slightly I saw a new bottle, corked, but ready for me, outlined against the window’s luminous glow.
I felt the thirst again, and this time it was heightened by the salt of the broth. I wiped my lips and then I reached for the bottle and again I drank.
I fell back against the stone wall, and I struggled to look clearly through the darkness, half afraid of what I knew I would see. Of course I was very drunk now.
I saw the window, the city. I saw the little table. And as my eyes moved slowly over the dusky corners of the room, I saw him there.
He no longer wore his black hooded cape, and he didn’t sit or stand as a man might.
Rather he leaned to rest, it seemed, upon the thick stone frame of the window, one knee bent a little towards it, the other long spindly leg sprawled out to the other side. His arms appeared to hang at his sides.
And the whole impression was of something limp and lifeless, and yet his face was as animated as it had been the night before. Huge black eyes seeming to stretch the white flesh in deep folds, the nose long and thin, and the mouth the