Blood and Gold (21 page)

She shook her head and put her hands to the side of her face as though she could not bear this.

I went down on my knees beside her and I tried to turn her to me, but she would have none of it. Her tears were shed quietly.

“I’ll write it all out, all that I remember, and there is so much that I remember,” I said. “Or shall I tell it aloud for our scribes? You decide how you will receive it, and I’ll give it to you, lovingly. I understand what you desire.”

This was not the time to tell her that much of what she sought came to nothing, that the old tales had been full of superstition and nonsense and even incantations that meant nothing at all.

Even the wicked Elder had said so. But I had read these scrolls during my years in Antioch. I remembered them. They were inside my heart and soul.

She turned to me slowly. And lifting her left hand, she stroked my hair.

“Why did you steal those books!” she whispered desperately, her tears still flowing. “Why did you take them from a sanctum where they had been safe for so long!”

“I wanted to know what they said,” I answered candidly. “Why didn’t you read them when you had a lifetime to do it?” I asked gently. “Why didn’t you copy them when you copied for the Greeks and the Romans? How can you blame me now for what I did?”

“Blame you?” she said earnestly. “I hate you for it.”

“The Elder was dead, Eudoxia,” I said quietly. “It was the Mother who slew the Elder.”

Her eyes suddenly, for all their tears, grew wide.

“You want me to believe this? That you didn’t do it?”

“I? Slay a blood drinker who was a thousand years old, when I was just born?” I gave a short laugh. “No. It was the Mother who did it. And it was the Mother who asked me to take her out of Egypt. I did only what she asked me to do.”

I stared into her eyes, determined that she must believe me, that she must weigh this final and all-important piece of evidence before she proceeded in her case of hatred against me.

“Look into my mind, Eudoxia,” I said. “See the pictures of this for yourself.”

I myself relived the grim moments when Akasha had crushed the evil Elder underfoot. I myself remembered the lamp, brought magically from its stand, to pour its flaming oil upon his remains. How the mysterious blood had burnt.

“Yes,” Eudoxia whispered. “Fire is our enemy, always our enemy. You are speaking the truth.”

“With my heart and soul,” I said. “It’s true. And having been charged with this duty, and having seen the death of the Elder, how could I leave the books behind? I wanted them as you wanted them. I read them when I was in Antioch. I will tell you all they contained.”

She thought on this for a long time and then nodded.

I rose to my feet. I looked down at her. She sat still, her head bowed, and then she drew a fine napkin from inside her robes, and she wiped at her blood tears.

Once again, I pressed my promises.

“I’ll write down all I remember,” I said. “I’ll write down all that the Elder told me when first I came to the temple. I’ll spend my nights in this labor until everything is told.”

She didn’t answer me, and I couldn’t see her face unless I knelt down again.

“Eudoxia,” I said. “We know much that we can give to each other. In Rome, I grew so weary that I lost the thread of life for a century. I am eager to hear all you know.”

Was she weighing this? I couldn’t tell.

Then she spoke, without raising her face to me.

“My sleep this last day was feverish,” she said. “I dreamed of Rashid crying out to me.”

What could I say? I felt desperate.

“No, I don’t ask for placating words from you,” she said. “I only mean to say, my sleep was miserable. And then I was in the temple and the priests were all around me. And I had an awful sense, the purest sense, of death and time.”

I went down on one knee before her. “We can conquer this,” I said.

She looked into my eyes as though she were suspicious of me and I were trying to trick her.

“No,” she said softly. “We die too. We die when it is right for us to die.”

“I don’t want to die,” I said. “To sleep, yes, and sometimes to sleep almost forever, yes, but not to die.”

She smiled.

“What would you write for me?” she asked, “if you could write anything at all? What would you choose to put down on parchment for me to read and know?”

“Not what was in those old Egyptian texts,” I said forcefully, “but something finer, more truly universal, something full of hope and vitality that speaks of growth and triumph, that speaks—how shall I put it any other way?—of life.”

She nodded gravely, and once again she smiled.

She looked at me for a long and seemingly affectionate moment.

“Take me down into the shrine,” she said. She reached out and clasped my hand.

“Very well,” I said.

As I rose, so did she, and then she went past me to lead the way. This might have been to show me that she knew it, and, thank the gods, her retinue stayed behind so that I did not have to tell them to do so.

I went down with her, and with the Mind Gift I opened the many doors without touching them.

If this made an impression upon her she didn’t acknowledge it. But I didn’t know if we were at war with each other any longer. I couldn’t gauge her frame of mind.

When she saw the Mother and the Father in their fine linen and exquisite jewelry she let out a gasp.

“Oh, Blessed Parents,” she whispered. “I have come such a long way to this.”

I was moved by her voice. Her tears were flowing again.

“Would that I had something to offer you,” she said, gazing up at the Queen. She was trembling. “Would that I had some sacrifice, some gift.”

I didn’t know why but something quickened in me when she said those words. I looked at the Mother first and then at the Father, and I detected nothing, yet something had changed within the chapel, something which Eudoxia perhaps felt.

I breathed in the heavy fragrance rising from the censers. I looked at the shivering flowers in their vases. I looked at the glistening eyes of my Queen.

“What gift can I give you?” Eudoxia pressed as she stepped forward. “What would you take from me that I could give with my whole soul?” She walked closer and closer to the steps, her arms out. “I am your slave. I was your slave in Alexandria when first you gave me your blood, and I am your slave now.”

“Step back,” I said suddenly, though why I didn’t know. “Step back and be quiet,” I said quickly.

But Eudoxia only moved forward, mounting the first step of the dais.

“Don’t you see I mean what I say?” she said to me without turning her head away from the King and Queen. “Let me be your victim, most holy Akasha, let me be your blood sacrifice, most holy Queen.”

In a flash Akasha’s right arm rose and pulled Eudoxia forward in a brutal and tight embrace.

An awful groan rose from Eudoxia.

Down came the reddened mouth of the Queen, with only the slightest move of her head, and I saw the sharp teeth only for an instant before they penetrated Eudoxia’s neck. Eudoxia was helpless, head wrenched to one side, as Akasha drank from her, Eudoxia’s arms hanging limp as her legs, Akasha’s face as blank as ever, as the grip tightened and the drinking went on.

I stood horrified, not daring to challenge anything that I beheld.

No more than a few seconds passed, perhaps half a minute before Eudoxia gave a raw and terrible scream. She tried desperately to raise her arms.

“Stop, Mother, I beg you!” I cried out and with all my might I took hold of the body of Eudoxia. “Stop, I beg you, don’t take her life! Spare her!” I pulled on the body. “Spare her, Mother!” I cried. I felt the body shift in my grasp and quickly I drew it back from the curved arm which remained poised in space.

Eudoxia still breathed, though she was livid, and groaning miserably, and we both fell back off the dais, as the arm of Akasha returned to its age-old position, at her side, fingers laid on her thigh as though nothing had occurred.

Sprawled on the floor I lay with the gasping Eudoxia.

“Did you want to die!” I demanded.

“No,” she said desperately. She lay there with her breast heaving, her hands shuddering, seemingly unable to rise to her feet.

I looked up searchingly into the Queen’s face.

The sacrifice had given no blush to her cheeks. And on her lips there was no red blood.

I was stupefied. I picked up Eudoxia and rushed to get her out of the shrine, up the steps, through the various tunnels, and finally into the house above ground.

I ordered all the others out of the library, slamming tight the doors with the Mind Gift, and there I laid her down on my couch so that she might at least catch her breath.

“But how?” she asked me, “did you ever have the courage to take me from her?” She clung to my neck. “Hold tight to me, Marius, don’t let me go just yet. I cannot. . . . I do not. . . . Hold tight to me. Where did you get the courage to move against our own Queen?”

“She was about to destroy you,” I said. “She was about to answer my prayer.”

“And what prayer was that?” she asked.

She let me go. I brought up a chair to sit beside her.

Her face was drawn and tragic, her eyes brilliant. She reached out and clung to my sleeve.

“I asked for a sign of her pleasure,” I said. “Would she be given over to you or remain with me? She’s spoken. And you see how it is.”

She shook her head, but it was not a negation to anything that I’d said. She was trying to recover her clarity of mind. She tried to rise from the couch and then fell backwards.

For a long time, she merely lay there, staring at the ceiling and I couldn’t know her thoughts. I tried to take her hand, but she withdrew it from me.

Then in a low voice, she said:

“You’ve drunk her blood. You have the Fire Gift, and you’ve drunk her blood. And this she has done in answer to your prayer.”

“Tell me,” I said. “What prompted you to offer yourself to her? Why did you say such words? Had you ever spoken them in Egypt?”

“Never,” she said in a heated murmur. “I had forgotten the beauty.” She looked confused, weak. “I had forgotten the timelessness,” she whispered. “I had forgotten the silence gathered around them—as if it were so many veils.”

She turned and looked at me languidly. She looked about her. I sensed her hunger, her weakness.

“Yes,” she sighed. “Bring my slaves to me,” she said. “Let them go out and obtain for me a sacrifice, for I’m too weak from having been the sacrifice myself.”

I went into the courtyard garden and told her little gang of exquisite blood drinkers to go to her. She could give them this disagreeable order on her own.

When they had gone on their dismal errand, I returned to her. She was sitting up, her face still drawn and her white hands trembling.

“Perhaps I should have died,” she said to me. “Perhaps it was meant to be.”

“What’s meant?” I asked scornfully. “What’s meant is that we must both live in Constantinople, you in your house with your little companions and I here with mine. And we must have a commingling of households from time to time that is agreeable. I say that is what is meant.”

She looked at me thoughtfully as if she were pondering this as much as she could ponder anything after what had befallen her in the shrine.

“Trust in me,” I said desperately in a low voice. “Trust in me for some little while. And then if we should part, let it be amicable.”

She smiled. “As if we were old Greeks?” she asked.

“Why must we lose our manners?” I said. “Weren’t they nourished in brilliance, like the arts which still surround us, the poetry that still comforts us, and the stirring tales of heroism which distract us from the cruel passage of time?”

“Our manners,” she repeated thoughtfully. “What a strange creature you are.”

Was she my enemy or my friend? I didn’t know.

All too quickly, her blood drinker slaves appeared with a miserable and terrified victim, a rich merchant who glared at all of us with bulbous eyes. Frankly he offered us money for his life.

I wanted to stop this abomination. When had I ever taken a victim under my roof? And this was to happen within my house to one who appealed to me for mercy.

But within seconds, the man was forced down upon his knees and Eudoxia then gave herself over to drinking blood from him with no regard for my standing there and watching this spectacle, and I turned on my heel and went out of the library and remained away, until the man was dead, and his richly dressed body was taken away.

At last I came back into my library, exhausted, horrified and confused.

Eudoxia was much better for having feasted on the poor wretch and she was staring at me intently.

I sat down now, for I saw no reason to stand indignantly with regard to something that was finished, and I felt myself plunged into thought.

“Will we share this city?” I asked calmly. I looked at her. “Can that be done in peace?”

“I don’t know the answer to your questions,” she said. There was something wrong in her voice, wrong in her eyes, wrong in her manner. “I want to leave you now. We will talk again.”

She gathered her band of followers and all of them left quietly, by request, through the rear door of the house.

I sat there very still and weary from what had taken place, and wondering if there would be any change in Akasha who had moved to drink Eudoxia’s blood.

Of course there would be no change. I thought back to my first years with Akasha, when I’d been so certain that I could bring her back to life. And here, she had moved, yes, she had moved, but how ghastly had been the expression on her smooth innocent face, more blank than the faces of mortals after death.

An awful foreboding came over me, in which the subtle force of Eudoxia seemed both a charm and a curse.

And in the midst of this foreboding I came to know a terrible temptation, a terrible rebellious thought. Why hadn’t I given over the Mother and Father to Eudoxia? I would have been rid of them, rid of this burden which I had carried since the earliest nights of my life among the Undead? Why hadn’t I done it?

It would have been so simple. And I would have been free.