The Vampire Chronicles Collection - Anne Rice [578]
“But how? By whom?”
“Whom?” She smiled again. “Don’t you understand? You need look no further for the cause of anything. I am the fulfillment and I shall from this moment on be the cause. There is nothing and no one now who can stop me.” Her face hardened for a second. That wavering again. “Old curses mean nothing. In silence I have attained such power that no force in nature could harm me. Even my first brood cannot harm me though they plot against me. It was meant that those years should pass before you came.”
“How did I change it?”
She came a step closer. She put her arm around me and it felt soft for the moment, not like the hard thing it truly was. We were just two beings standing near to each other, and she looked indescribably lovely to me, so pure and otherworldly. I felt the awful desire for the blood again. To bend down, to kiss her throat, to have her as I had had a thousand mortal women, yet she the goddess, she with the immeasurable power. I felt the desire rising, cresting.
Again, she put her finger on my lips, as if to say be still.
“Do you remember when you were a boy here?” she asked. “Think back now on the time when you begged them to send you to the monastery school. Do you remember the things the brothers taught you? The prayers, the hymns, the hours you worked in the library, the hours in the chapel when you prayed alone?”
“I remember, of course.” I felt the tears coming again. I could see it so vividly, the monastery library, and the monks who had taught me and believed I could be a priest. I saw the cold little cell with its bed of boards; I saw the cloister and the garden veiled in rosy shadow; God, I didn’t want to think now of those times. But some things can never be forgotten.
“Do you remember the morning that you went into the chapel,” she continued, “and you knelt on the bare marble floor, with your arms out in the form of the cross, and you told God you would do anything if only he would make you good?”
“Yes, good.…” Now it was my voice that was tinged with bitterness.
“You said you would suffer martyrdom; torments unspeakable; it did not matter; if only you were to be someone who was good.”
“Yes, I remember.” I saw the old saints; I heard the hymns that had broken my heart. I remembered the morning my brothers had come to take me home, and I had begged them on my knees to let me stay there.
“And later, when your innocence was gone, and you took the high road to Paris, it was the same thing you wanted; when you danced and sang for the boulevard crowds, you wanted to be good.”
“I was,” I said haltingly. “It was a good thing to make them happy and for a little while I did.”
“Yes, happy,” she whispered.
“I could never explain to Nicolas, my friend, you know, that it was so important to … believe in a concept of goodness, even if we make it up ourselves. We don’t really make it up. It’s there, isn’t it?”
“Oh, yes, it’s there,” she said. “It’s there because we put it there.”
Such sadness. I couldn’t speak. I watched the falling snow. I clasped her hand and felt her lips against my cheek.
“You were born for me, my prince,” she said. “You were tried and perfected. And in those first years, when you went into your mother’s bedchamber and brought her into the world of the undead with you, it was but a prefigurement of your waking me. I am your true Mother, the Mother who will never abandon you, and I have died and been reborn, too. All the religions of the world, my