Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles 5)

"I intend to. '

"No, you'll know the whole time you're God. I'm saying Forget that you are God! Bury your divinity in the flesh the way it's been buried intermittently. Bury it, Lord, leaving yourself only your faith and your belief in Heaven, as if it had come to you through Revelation immense and undeniable.

"But bury in this desert the true certainty that you are God. Then, you'll suffer it all as a man suffers it. Then you'll know what this suffering is at its heart. Then will all the glory be stripped from agony! And you will see what men see when flesh is ripped, and torn, and blood flows, and it is your own. It's filth!'

"Me

mnoch, men die on Golgotha every day. What is important is that the Son of God knowingly dies on Golgotha in the body of a man. '

"Oh, no, no!' I cried out. 'This is disaster. '

"He seemed so sad suddenly that I thought he might weep for me. His lips were parched and cracked from the desert. His hands were so thin I could see the veins. He was not even a great specimen of a man, only an ordinary one, worn down by years of toil.

"Look at you,' I said, 'starving, thirsting, suffering, tired, lost in all the darknesses of life, the true spontaneous evils of nature, and dreaming of glory when you exit this body! What kind of lesson can such suffering be? And who will you leave with the guilt for your murder? What will become of all those mere mortals who denied you? No, please, Lord, listen to me. If you won't leave your Divinity, then don't do it. Change this plan.

"Don't die. Above all, don't be murdered! Don't hang from a tree like the God of the Wood in the Greek stories. Come with me into Jerusalem; and know women and wine and singing and dancing and the birth of little ones, and all the joy the human heart can contain and express!

"Lord, there are times when the hardest men hold infants in their arms, their own children, and the happiness and satisfaction of those moments is so sublime that there is no horror on earth that can destroy the peace they feel! That is the human capacity for love and understanding! When one can achieve harmony in spite of everything, and men and women do this, Lord. They do. Come, dance with your people. Sing with them. Feast with them. Throw your arms around the women and the men and know them in the flesh!'

"I feel pity for you, Memnoch,' He said. 'I pity you as I pity the mortals who will kill me, and those who will inevitably misunderstand my laws. But I dream of those who will be touched to the core by my suffering, and who will never forget it, and will know what love I felt for mortals that I would let myself die among them before opening the gates of Sheol. I pity you. Feeling as you do, your guilt will become too terrible to bear. '

"My guilt? What guilt?'

"You're the cause of all this, Memnoch. You're the one who said I should come down in the flesh. You're the one who urged me on to do it, who challenged me, and now you fail to see the miracle of my sacrifice.

"And when you do see it, when you do see souls perfected by suffering ascending to Heaven, what will you think then of your paltry little discoveries made in the arms of the Daughters of Men? What will you think? Don't you see? I will redeem suffering, Memnoch! I will give it its greatest and fullest potential within the cycle! I will bring it to fruition. I will allow it to sing its own magnificent song!'

"No, no, no!' I stood up and railed at Him. 'Lord, just do as I ask. Go through with it, yes, if you must, found this miracle upon a murder, do it that way, if that is your will, but bury your certainty of Divinity, so that you really, really do die, Lord, so that when they drive the nails through your hands and feet you know what a man feels and no more, and when you enter the gloom of Sheol yours is a human soul! Please, Lord, please, I'm begging you. For all humanity, I'm begging you. I can't see the future but I have never been more frightened of it than I am now. ' "

Memnoch broke off.

We stood alone in the sands, Memnoch looking into the distance and me beside him, shaken.

"He didn't do it, did he?" I asked. "Memnoch, God died knowing He was God. He died and rose knowing the whole time. The world argues over it and debates and wonders, but He knew. When they drove the nails, He knew He was God. "

"Yes," said Memnoch. "He was man, but that man was never without the power of God. "

Suddenly I was distracted.

Memnoch seemed too shaken to say any more just yet.

Something changed in the landscape. I looked towards the circle of stones, and realized a figure was sitting there, the figure of a dark-skinned, dark-eyed man, emaciated and covered with the sand of the desert, and he was looking at us. And without one fiber of his flesh being other than human, He was obviously God.

I was petrified.

I had lost the map. I didn't know the way back or the way forward, or what lay to left or to right.

I was petrified, yet I wasn't frightened, and this man, this dark-eyed one, was merely looking at us with the softest sympathy in his face, and the same unbounded acceptance of us that I had seen in Him in Heaven when He'd turned and taken me by the arms.

The Son of God.

"Come here, Lestat," he called now softly, over the desert wind, in a human voice. "Come closer. "

I looked at Memnoch. Memnoch was looking at him, too, now and he gave a bitter smile. "Lestat, it is always a good idea, no matter how He is behaving, to do exactly what He says. "

Blasphemy. I turned, shivering.

I went directly towards the figure, conscious of each shuffling step through the boiling sand, the dark thin form coming ever more clear to me, a tired and suffering man. I sank down on my knees in front of Him, looking up into His face.