The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [364]
“My idea of who or what it was, was vague. But I was comforted by the notion that nothing spiritual—and knowing was spiritual—was lost to us. That there was this continuous knowing …
“And as I drank a little more wine, and thought about it, and wrote about it, I realized it wasn’t so much a belief of mine as it was a prejudice. I just felt that there was a continual awareness.
“And the history that I was writing was an imitation of it. I tried to unite all things I had seen in my history, linking my observations of lands and people with all the written observations that had come down to me from the Greeks—from Xenophon and Herodotus, and Poseidonius—to make one continuous awareness of the world in my lifetime. It was a pale thing, a limited thing, compared to the true awareness. Yet I felt good as I continued writing.
“But around midnight, I was getting a little tired, and when I happened to look up after a particularly long period of unbroken concentration, I realized something had changed in the tavern.
“It was unaccountably quieter. In fact, it was almost empty. And across from me, barely illuminated by the sputtering light of my candle, there sat a tall fair-haired man with his back to the room who was watching me in silence. I was startled, not so much by the way he looked—though this was startling in itself—but by the realization that he had been there for some time, close to me, observing me, and I hadn’t noticed him.
“He was a giant of a Gaul as they all were, even taller than I was, and he had a long narrow face with an extremely strong jaw and hawklike nose, and eyes that gleamed beneath their bushy blond brows with a childlike intelligence. What I mean to say is he looked very very clever, but very young and innocent also. And he wasn’t young. The effect was perplexing.
“And it was made all the more so by the fact that his thick and coarse yellow hair wasn’t clipped short in the popular Roman style, but was streaming down to his shoulders. And instead of the usual tunic and cloak which you saw everywhere in those times, he wore the old belted leather jerkin that had been the barbarian dress before Caesar.
“Right out of the woods this character looked, with his gray eyes burning through me, and I was vaguely delighted with him. I wrote down hurriedly the details of his dress, confident he couldn’t read the Latin.
“But the stillness in which he sat unnerved me a little. His eyes were unnaturally wide, and his lips quivered slightly as if the mere sight of me excited him. His clean and delicate white hand, which casually rested on the table before him, seemed out of keeping with the rest of him.
“A quick glance about told me my slaves weren’t in the tavern. Well, they’re probably next door playing cards, I thought, or upstairs with a couple of women. They’ll stop in any minute.
“I forced a little smile at my strange and silent friend, and went back to writing. But directly he started talking.
“ ‘You are an educated man, aren’t you?’ he asked. He spoke the universal Latin of the Empire, but with a thick accent, pronouncing each word with a care that was almost musical.
“I told him, yes, I was fortunate enough to be educated, and I started to write again, thinking this would surely discourage him. After all, he was fine to look at, but I didn’t really want to talk to him.
“ ‘And you write both in Greek and in Latin, don’t you?’ he asked, glancing at the finished work that lay before me.
“I explained politely that the Greek I had written on the parchment was a quotation from another text. My text was in Latin. And again I started scribbling.
“ ‘But you are a Keltoi, are you not?’ he asked this time. It was the old Greek word for the Gauls.
“ ‘Not really, no. I am a Roman,’ I answered.
“ ‘You look like one of us, the Keltoi,’ he said. ‘You are tall like us, and you