Pandora Page 21

  They came rushing out of their respective hiding places, and they too struck me as vividly human. I was distracted. The smallest natural things about them seemed precious, their thick black eyebrows, their round little mouths, their smooth cheeks.

  “Yes, Madam, yes!” they said almost in one voice. They hurried forward.

  “This is Flavius, my steward. He will stay with us. For now, take him to the bath, heat the water and attend to him. Get him some wine.”

  They took Flavius in hand at once. But he paused.

  “Don’t abandon me, Madam,” he said suddenly with the most serious and thoughtful expression. “I am loyal in all respects.”

  “I know,” I said. “Oh, how clearly I understand. You cannot imagine.”

  Then it was off to the bath with the Babylonian boys, who seemed delighted to have something to do.

  I found Marius’s huge closets. He had enough clothes for the Kings of Parthia, Armenia, the Emperor’s Mother, Livia, the dead Cleopatra, and an ostentatious patrician who paid no attention to Tiberius’s stupid sumptuary laws.

  I put on a much finer, long tunic, woven of silk and linen, and I chose a gold girdle. And with Marius’s combs and brushes, I made a clean free mantle of my hair, free of all tangles, rippled and soft as it had been when I was a girl.

  He had many mirrors, which, as you know, in those days were only polished metal. And I was rendered somber and mystified by the single fact that I was young again; my nipples were pink, as I had said; the lines of age no longer interrupted the intended endowments of my face or arms. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that I was timeless. Timeless in adulthood. And every solid object seemed there to serve in me my new strength.

  I looked down at the blocks of marble tile which made up the floor and saw in them a depth, a proof of process wondrous and barely understood.

  I wanted to go out again, speak to the flowers, pick them up in handfuls. I wanted to talk urgently with the stars. I dared not seek the Shrine for fear of Marius, but if he had not been around I would have gone there and knelt at the Mother and merely looked at her, looked at her in silent contemplation, listening for the slightest articulation, though I knew, quite certainly after watching Marius’s behavior, that there would be none.

  She had moved her right arm without the seeming knowledge of the rest of her body. She had moved it to kill, and then to invite.

  I went into the library, sat down at the desk, where lay all my pages, and I waited.

  Finally, when Marius came, he too was freshly dressed, his hair parted in the middle and combed to his shoulders. He took a chair near me. It was ebony and curved and inlaid with gold, and I looked at him, realizing how very like the chair he was—a great preserved extension of all the raw materials which had gone into it. Nature did the carving and inlay, and then the whole had been lacquered.

  I wanted to cry in his arms, but I swallowed my loneliness. The night would never desert me, and it was faithful in every open door with its intruding grass, and the veined olive branches rising to catch the light of the moon.

  “Blessed is she who is made a blood drinker,” I said, “when the moon is full, and the clouds are rising like mountains in the transparent night.”

  “Probably so,” he said.

  He moved the lamp that stood on the desk between us, so that it didn’t flicker in my eyes.

  “I made my steward at home here,” I said. “I offered him bath, bed and clothes. Do you forgive me? I love him and will not lose him. It’s too late now for him to go back into the world.”

  “He’s an extraordinary man,” Marius said, “and most welcome here. Tomorrow perhaps he can bring your girls. Then the boys will have company and there will be some discipline by day. Flavius knows books, among other things.”

  “You’re most gracious. I was afraid you would be angry. Why do you suffer so? I cannot read your mind; I did not obtain that gift.” No, this wasn’t correct. I could read Flavius’s mind. I knew the boys at this very moment were very relieved by Flavius’s presence as they helped him dress for bed.

  “We are too closely linked by blood,” he said. “I can never read your thoughts again either. We are thrown back on words like mortals, only our senses are infinitely keener, and the detachment we know at some times will be as cold as the ice in the North; and at other times feelings will enflame us, carry us on waves of burning sea.”

  “Hmmm,” I said.

  “You despise me,” he said softly, contritely, “because I quenched your ecstasy, I took from you your joy, your convictions.” He looked quite genuinely miserable. “I did this to you right at the happiest moment of your conversion.”

  “Don’t be so sure you quenched it. I might still make her Temples, preach her worship. I’m an initiate. I have only begun.”

  “You will not revive her worship!” he said. “Of that I assure you! You will tell no one about her or what she is or where she is kept, and you will never make another blood drinker.”

  “My, if only Tiberius had such authority when he addressed the Senate!” I said.

  “All Tiberius ever wanted was to study at the gymnasium at Rhodes, to go every day in a Greek cloak and sandals and talk philosophy. And so the propensity for action flowers in men of lesser mettle, who use him in his loveless loneliness.”

  “Is this a lecture for my improvement? Do you think I don’t know this? What you don’t know is that the Senate won’t help Tiberius govern. Rome wants an Emperor now, to worship and to like. It was your generation, under Augustus, which accustomed us to forty years of autocratic rule. Don’t talk to me of politics as though I were a fool.”

  “I should have realized that you understood it all,” he said. “I remember you in your girlhood. Nobody could match your brilliance. Your fidelity to Ovid and his erotic writings was a rare sophistication, an understanding of satire and irony. A well-nourished Roman frame of mind.”

  I looked at him. His face too had been wiped clean of discernible age. I had time now to relish it, the squareness of his shoulders, the straightness and firmness of his neck, the distinct expression of his eyes and well-placed eyebrows. We had been made over into portraits of ourselves in marble by a master sculptor.

  “You know,” I said, “even under this crushing and annoying barrage of definition and declaration which you make to me, as if I were weeping for your ratification, I feel love for you, and know full well that we are alone in this, and married to one another, and I am not unhappy.”

  He appeared surprised, but said nothing.

  “I am exalted, bruised in the heart,” I said, “a hardened pilgrim. But I do wish you would not speak to me as if my full indoctrination and education were your primary concern!”

  “I have to speak this way!” he said gently. His voice was all kindness in its heat. “It is my primary concern,” he said. “If you can understand what happened with the end of the Roman Republic, if you can understand Lucretius and the Stoics, whole, then you can understand what we are. You have to do this!”

  “I’ll let that insult pass,” I answered. “I’m not in the mood for listing for you every philosopher or poet I have read. Nor for recounting the level of talk around our nighttime table.”

  “Pandora, I don’t mean any offense! But Akasha is not a goddess! Remember your dreams. She is a vial of precious strength. Your dreams told you she could be used, that any unscrupulous blood drinker could pass on the blood to another, that she is a form of demon, host to the power we share.”

  “She can hear you!” I whispered, outraged.

  “Of course, she can. For fifteen years I’ve been her guardian. I’ve fought off those renegades from the East. And other connivers from the African hinterlands. She knows what she is.”

  No one could have guessed his age, save from the seriousness of his expression. A man in perfect form, that was what he seemed. I tried not to be dazzled by him, by the pulsing night behind him, and yet I wanted so to drift. “Some wedding feast,” I said. “
I have things to say to the trees.”

  “They will be there tomorrow night,” he said.

  The last image I had of her passed before my eyes, colored in ecstasy; she took the young Pharaoh from his chair and broke him into sticks. I saw her before that revelation, at the beginning of the swoon, running down the corridor laughing.

  A slow fear crept over me.

  “What is it?” Marius asked. “Confide in me.”

  “When I drank from her, I saw her like a girl, laughing.” I recounted then the marriage, the flood of rose petals, and then her strange Egyptian Temple full of frenzied worshipers. At last I told him how she had entered the chamber of the little King, whose advisors warned him of her gods.

  “She broke him up as if he were a boy of wood. She said, ‘Little King, little Kingdom.’ ”

  I picked up my pages, which earlier I had placed on this desk. I described the last dream I had had of her, when she threatened, screaming, to walk into the sun and destroy her disobedient children. I described all the things I had seen—the many migrations of my soul.

  My heart hurt so much. Even as I explained, I saw her vulnerability, the danger that was embodied in her. I explained finally how I had written all this in Egyptian.

  I was weary and wished truly that I had never opened eyes on this life! I felt the keen and total despair again of those nights of weeping in my little house in Antioch when I had pounded on walls, and driven my dagger into the dirt. If she had not run, laughing down that corridor! What did the image mean? And the little boy King, broken so helplessly?

  I made a sum of it easily enough. I waited for Marius’s belittling remarks. I hadn’t much patience for him now.

  “How do you interpret it?” he asked gently. He tried to take my hand but I withdrew it.

  “It’s bits and pieces of her recollection,” I said. I was heartbroken. “It’s what she remembers. There is but one suggestion of a future in it all,” I said “There is only one comprehensible image of a wish: our wedding, that we be together.” My voice was full of sadness, yet I asked him.

  “Why do you weep again, Marius?” I asked. “She must gather recollections like flowers picked at random from the garden of the world like leaves falling into her hands, and from these recollections she fastened for me a garland! A wedding garland! A trap. I have no migrant soul. I think not. If I did have a migrant soul, then why would she alone, one so archaic, helpless, irrelevant to the world itself, so out of fashion and out of power, be the one to know this? To make it known to me? The only one to know?”

  I looked at him. He was engaged yet crying. He showed no shame in it, and would obviously render no apology.

  “What was it you said before?” I asked. “ ‘That I can read minds makes me no wiser than the next man’?” I smiled. “That is the key. How she laughed as she led me to you. How she wanted me to behold you in your loneliness.”

  He only nodded.

  “I wonder how she knew to cast her net so far,” I said, “to find me across the rolling sea.”

  “Lucius, that’s how she knew. She hears voices from many lands. She sees what she wants to see. One night here I badly startled a Roman, who appeared to recognize me and then slunk away as if I were a danger to him. I went after him, thinking vaguely that there was something to this, his excessive fear.

  “I soon realized a great weight distorted his conscience and twisted his every thought and movement. He was terrified to be recognized by someone from the capital. He wanted to leave.

  “He went to the house of a Greek merchant, pounding on the door late, by torchlight, and demanded the payment of a debt owed to your Father. The Greek told him what he had told him before, that the money would be repaid only to your Father himself.

  “The next night I sought Lucius out again. This time the Greek had a surprise for him. A letter had just come from your Father by military ship. This was perhaps four days before your own arrival. The letter plainly stated that a favor was being asked of the Greek by your Father in the name of Hospitality and Honor. If the favor was granted, all debts were canceled. Everything would be explained by a letter accompanying a cargo destined for Antioch. The cargo would take some time, as the ship had many stops to make. The favor was of crucial importance.

  “When your brother saw the date of this letter, he was stricken. The Greek, who was thoroughly sick of Lucius by this time, slammed the door in his face.

  “I accosted Lucius only steps away. Of course he remembered me, the eccentric Marius of long ago. I pretended surprise to see him here and asked after you. He was in a panic and made up some story about your being married and living in Tuscany, and said that he was on his way out of town. He hurried off. But the moment’s contact had been enough to see the testimony he’d given the Praetorian Guard against his family—all lies—and to imagine the deeds that had resulted from it.

  “The next time, on waking, I couldn’t find him. I kept watch on the house of the Greeks. I weighed in my mind a visit to the old man, the Greek merchant, some way to lay down a friendship with him. I thought of you. I pictured you. I remembered you. I made up poems in my head about you. I didn’t hear or see anything of your brother. I presumed he’d left Antioch.

  “Then one night I awoke and came upstairs and looked out to see the city full of random fires.

  “Germanicus had died, never retracting his accusations that Piso had poisoned him.

  “When I reached the house of the Greek merchant, it was nothing but burnt timbers. I caught no sight or sound of your brother anywhere. For all I knew they were all dead, your brother, and the Greek merchant family.

  “All through the nights after, I searched for sight or sound of Lucius. I had no idea you were here, only an obsessive longing for you. I tried to remind myself that if I mourned for every mortal tie I had had when alive, I would go mad long before I had learnt anything about my gifts from our King and Queen.

  “Then, I was in the bookseller’s and it was early evening and the Priest slipped up to me. He pointed to you. There you stood in the Forum, and the philosopher and students were bidding you farewell. I was so close!

  “I was so overcome with love I didn’t even listen to the Priest until I realized he was speaking of strange dreams as he pointed to you. He was saying that only I could put it all together. It had to do with the blood drinker who had recently been in Antioch, not an uncommon occurrence. I have slain other blood drinkers before. I’ve vowed to catch this one.

  “Then I saw Lucius. I saw you come together. His anger and guilt were nearly blinding to me with this blood drinker’s vision. I heard your words effortlessly from a great distance, but would not move until you were safely away from him.

  “I wanted to kill him then, but the wiser course seemed to stay right with you, to enter the Temple and stay by your side. I was not certain of my right to kill your brother for you, that it was what you wanted. I didn’t know that until I’d told you of his guilt. Then I knew how much you wanted it done.

  “Of course I had no idea how clever you had become, that all the talent for reason and words I’d loved in you when you were a girl was still there. Suddenly you were in the Temple, thinking three times faster than the other mortals present, weighing every aspect of what faced you, outwitting everyone. And then came the spectacular confrontation with your brother in which you caught him in the most clever net of truths, and thereby dispatched him, without ever touching him, but instead drawing three military witnesses into complicity with his death.”

  He broke off, then said, “In Rome, years ago, I followed you. You were sixteen. I remember your first marriage. Your Father took me aside, he was so gentle. ‘Marius, you’re destined to be a roaming historian,’ he said. I didn’t dare tell him my true estimation of your husband.

  “And now you come to Antioch, and I think, in my self-centered manner, as you will promptly note—if ever a woman was created for me, it is this woman. And I know as soon as I leave you in the morning, that
I must somehow get the Mother and Father out of Antioch, get them away, but then this blood drinker has to be destroyed, and then and only then can you be safely left.”

  “Safely abandoned,” I said.

  “Do you blame me?” he asked.

  The question caught me off guard. I looked at him for a seemingly endless moment, allowing his beauty to fill my eyes, and sensing with intolerable keenness his sadness and desperation. Oh, how he needed me! How desperately he needed not just any mortal soul in which to confide, but me.

  “You really did want to protect me, didn’t you?” I asked. “And your explanation of all points is so completely rational; it has the elegance of mathematics. There is no need for reincarnation, or destiny, or any miraculous allowance for any part of what’s happened.”

  “It’s what I believe,” he said sharply. His face grew blank, then stern. “I would never give you anything short of truth. Are you a woman who wants to be humored?”

  “Don’t be fanatical in your dedication to reason,” I said.

  These words both shocked and offended him. “Don’t cling to reason so desperately in a world of so many horrid contradictions!”

  He was silenced.

  “If you so cling to reason,” I said, “then in the passage of time reason may fail you, and when it does you may find yourself taking refuge in madness.”

  “What on Earth do you mean?”

  “You’ve made of reason and logic religion. It’s obviously the only way you can endure what’s happened to you, that you’re a blood drinker and custodian, apparently, of these displaced and forgotten deities.”

  “They aren’t deities!” He grew angry. “Thousands of years ago, they were made, through some mingling of spirit and flesh that rendered them immortal. They find their refuge obviously in oblivion. In your kindness you characterize it as a garden from which the Mother gathered flowers and leaves to make a garland for you, a trap, as you said. But this is your sweet girlish poetry. We do not know that they string very many words together.”