The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [388]
“ ‘They set into motion the tale of Osiris, composed in part of their own terrible suffering—the attack of the conspirators, the recovery, their need to live in the realm of darkness, the world beyond life, their inability to walk anymore in sun. And they grafted this upon the older stories of the gods who rise and fall in their love of the Good Mother, which were already there in the land from which they came.
“ ‘And so these stories came down to us; these stories spread beyond the secret places in which the Mother and the Father were worshiped, in which those they made with the blood were installed.
“ ‘And they were already old when the first pharaoh built his first pyramid. And the earliest texts record them in broken and strange form.
“ ‘A hundred other gods ruled in Egypt, just as they rule in all lands. But the worship of the Mother and Father and Those Who Drink the Blood remained secret and powerful, a cult to which the devoted went to hear the silent voices of the gods, to dream their dreams.
“ ‘We are not told who were the first fledglings of the Mother and Father. We know only that they spread the religion to the islands of the great sea, and to the lands of the two rivers, and to the north woods. That in shrines everywhere the moon god ruled and drank his blood sacrifices and used his powers to look into the hearts of men. During the periods between sacrifice, in starvation, the god’s mind could leave his body; it could travel the heavens; he could learn a thousand things. And those mortals of the greatest purity of heart could come to the shrine and hear the voice of the god, and he could hear them.
“ ‘But even before my time, a thousand years ago, this was all an old and incoherent story. The gods of the moon had ruled in Egypt for maybe three thousand years. And the religion had been attacked again and again.
“ ‘When the Egyptian priests turned to the sun god Amon Ra, they opened the crypts of the moon god and let the sun burn him to cinders. And many of our kind were destroyed. The same happened when the first rude warriors rode down into Greece and broke open the sanctuaries and killed what they did not understand.
“ ‘Now the babbling oracle of Delphi rules where we once ruled, and statues stand where we once stood. Our last hour is enjoyed in the north woods whence you came, among those who still drench our altars with the blood of the evildoer, and in the small villages of Egypt, where one or two priests tend the god in the crypt and allow the faithful to bring to him the evildoers, for they cannot take the innocent without arousing suspicion, and of evildoers and outsiders there are always some to be had. And down in the jungles of Africa, near the ruins of old cities that no one remembers, there, too, we are still obeyed.
“ ‘But our history is punctuated by tales of rogues—the Drinkers of the Blood who look to no goddess for guidance and have always used their powers as they chose.
“ ‘In Rome they live, in Athens, in all cities of the Empire, these who hearken to no laws of right and wrong and use their powers for their own ends.
“ ‘And they died horribly in the heat and the flame just as did the gods in the groves and the sanctuaries, and if any have survived they probably do not even guess why they were subjected to the killing flame, of how the Mother and the Father were put into the sun.’
“HE had stopped.
“He was studying my reaction. The library was quiet and if the others prowled behind the walls, I couldn’t hear them anymore.
“ ‘I don’t believe a word of it,’ I said.
“He stared at me in stupefied silence for a moment and then he laughed and laughed.
“In a rage, I left the library and went out through the temple rooms and up through the tunnel and out into the street.”
11
HIS was very uncharacteristic of me, to leave in temper, to break off abruptly