The Vampire Lestat

5

When I came back down to the crypt I saw her building up the fire again with the last of the wood. In a slow, weary fashion, she stoked the blaze, and the light was red on her profile and in her eyes.

I sat quietly on the bench watching her, watching the explosion of sparks against the blackened bricks.

"Did he give you what you wanted?" I asked.

"In his own way, yes," she said. She put the poker aside and sat down opposite, her hair spilling down over her shoulders as she rested her hands beside her on the bench. "I tell you, I don't care if I never look upon another one of our kind," she said coldly. "I am done with their legends, their curses, their sorrows. And done with their insufferable humanity, which may be the most astonishing thing they've revealed. I'm ready for the world again, Lestat, as I was on the night I died."

"But Marius -- " I said excitedly. "Mother, there are ancient ones -- ones who have used immortality in a wholly different way."

"Are there?" she asked. "Lestat, you're too generous with your imagination. The story of Marius has the quality of a fairy tale."

"No, that's not true."

"So the orphan demon claims descent not from the filthy peasant devils he resembles," she said, "but from a lost lord, almost a god. I tell you any dirty-faced village child dreaming at the kitchen fire can tell you tales like that."

"Mother, he couldn't have invented Marius," I said. "I may have a great deal of imagination, but he has almost none. He couldn't have made up the images. I tell you he saw those things..."

"I hadn't thought of it exactly that way," she admitted with a little smile. "But he could well have borrowed Marius from the legends he heard..."

"No," I said. "There was a Marius and there is a Marius still. And there are others like him. There are Children of the Millennia who have done better than these Children of Darkness with the gifts given them."

"Lestat, what is important is that we do better," she said. "All I learned from Armand, finally, was that immortals find death seductive and ultimately irresistible, that they fail to conquer death or humanity in their minds. Now I want to take that knowledge and wear it like armor as I move through the world. And luckily, I don't mean the world of change which these creatures have found so dangerous. I mean the world that for eons has been the same."

She tossed her hair back as she looked at the fire again. "It's of snow-covered mountains I dream," she said softly, "of desert wastes -- of impenetrable jungles, or the great north woods of America where they say white men have never been." Her face warmed just a little as she looked at me. "Think on it," she said. "There is nowhere that we cannot go. And if the Children of the Millennia do exist, maybe that is where they are -- far from the world of men."

"And how do they live if they are?" I asked. I was picturing my own world and it was full of mortal beings, and the things that mortal beings made. "It's man we feed on," I said.

"There are hearts that beat in those forests," she said dreamily. "There is blood that flows for the one who takes it ... I can do the things now that you used to do. I could fight those wolves on my own..." Her voice trailed off as she was lost in her thoughts. "The important thing," she said after a long moment, "is that we can go wherever we wish now, Lestat. We're free."

"I was free before," I said. "I never cared for what Armand had to tell. But Marius -- I know that Marius is alive. I feel it. I felt it when Armand told the tale. And Marius knows things and I don't mean just about us, or about Those Who Must Be Kept or whatever the old mystery -- he knows things about life itself, about how to move through time."

"So let him be your patron saint if you need it," she said.

This angered me, and I didn't say anything more. The fact was her talk of jungles and forests frightened me. And all the things Armand said to divide us came back to me, just as I'd known they would when he had spoken his well-chosen words. And so we live with our differences, I thought, just as mortals do, and maybe our divisions are exaggerated as are our passions, as is our love.

"There was one inkling..." she said as she watched the fire, "one little indication that the story of Marius had truth."

"There were a thousand indications," I said.

"He said that Marius slew the evildoer," she continued, "and he called the evildoer Typhon, the slayer of his brother. Do you remember this?"

"I thought that he meant Cain who had slain Abel. It was Cain I saw in the images, though I heard the other name."

"That's just it. Armand himself didn't understand the name Typhon. Yet he repeated it. But I know what it means."

"Tell me."

"It's from the Greek and Roman myths -- the old story of the Egyptian god, Osiris, slain by his brother Typhon, so that he became lord of the Underworld. Of course Armand could have read it in Plutarch, but he didn't, that's the strange thing."

"Ah, you see then, Marius did exist. When he said he'd lived for a millennium he was telling the truth."

"Perhaps, Lestat, perhaps," she said.

"Mother, tell me this again, this Egyptian story...

'Lestat, you have years to read all the old tales for yourself." She rose and bent to kiss me, and I sensed the coldness and sluggishness in her that always came before dawn. "As for me, I am done with books. They are what I read when I could do nothing else." She took my two hands in hers. "Tell me that we'll be on the road tomorrow. That we won't see the ramparts of Paris again until we've seen the other side of the world."

"Exactly as you wish," I said.

She started up the stairs.

"But where are you going?" I said as I followed her. She opened the gate and went out towards the trees.

"I want to see if I can sleep in the raw earth itself," she said over her shoulder. "If I don't rise tomorrow you'll know I failed."

"But this is madness," I said, coming after her. I hated the very idea of it. She went ahead into a thicket of old oaks, and kneeling, she dug into the dead leaves and damp soil with her hands. Ghastly she looked, as if she were a beautiful blondhaired witch scratching with the speed of a beast.

Then she rose and waved a farewell kiss to me. And commanding all her strength, she descended as the earth belonged to her. And I was left staring in disbelief at the emptiness where she had been, and the leaves that had settled as if nothing had disturbed the spot.

I was away from the woods. I walked south away from the tower. And as my step quickened, I started singing softly to myself some little song, maybe a bit of melody that the violins had played earlier this night in the Palais Royal.

And the sense of grief came back to me, the realization that we were really going, that it was finished with Nicolas and finished with the Children of Darkness and their leader, and I wouldn't see Paris again, or anything familiar to me, for years and years. And for all my desire to be free, I wanted to weep.

But it seems I had some purpose in my wandering that I hadn't admitted to myself. A half hour or so before the morning light I was on the post road near the ruin of an old inn. Falling down it was, this outpost of an abandoned village, with only the heavily mortared walls left intact.

And taking out my dagger, I began to carve deep in the soft stone:

MARIUS, THE ANCIENT ONE: LESTAT IS SEARCHING FOR YOU.

IT IS THE MONTH OF MAY, IN THE YEAR 1780 AND I GO SOUTH FROM PARIS TOWARDS LYONS. PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF KNOWN TO ME.

What arrogance it seemed when I stepped back from it. And I had already broken the dark commandments, telling the name of an immortal, and putting it into written words. Well, it gave me a wondrous satisfaction to do it. And after all, I had never been very good at obeying rules.