"I saw it," said Marius. And indeed he had in images, those battles, images he would like very much to forget. "But please, tell who you are and what you want with me." He had said this politely, but he was a little ashamed of himself. After all, obviously this old one was friendly and knowledgeable as to what was happening. This old one wanted to help.
"There must be a gathering," said Teskhamen, "and the place will be New York." He gave a little laugh. "I think Benji Mahmoud has marked the spot there with his enterprising broadcasts, but then two of the authors of the Vampire Chronicles are there already, and they are known to the entire world of the Undead."
"I have nothing against any particular gathering place," said Marius. "And Benji is no stranger to me." Marius had made Benji a vampire, brought him and his companion Sybelle over, and given them to his fledgling Armand, but he saw no reason to confide this to a stranger, a stranger who likely knew it anyway, especially one whose thoughts he couldn't hear. Not even the faintest shimmer came to him.
But he caught suddenly a very strong emanation from Daniel. He is the one who made you.
Marius was visibly startled, glancing first at Daniel, who sat staring at him, sideways on the bench with one leg up and his arms casually wrapped around his knee. Daniel was plainly fascinated.
Marius looked back to Teskhamen, this smaller blood drinker who gazed at him with steady black eyes.
"The one who made me is dead," he said aloud, again glancing at Daniel and then back to Teskhamen. "He died the very night I was Born to Darkness. That was two thousand years ago in a forest in northern Europe. Those events are engraved on my soul."
"And on mine," said Teskhamen. "But I did not die that night. And I did make you what you are now. I was the blood god imprisoned in that oak to which the Druids brought you. It was I, that blackened and scarred and ruined thing, that gave you the Blood, and told you to escape the Druids--not to remain imprisoned in the oak as a blood god--but to go down to Egypt, no matter what the cost, and see what had happened to the Mother and the Father, to find out why we had, so many of us, been horribly burned in our very shrines."
"Prisons, you mean, not shrines," Marius whispered. He stared forward at the distant horizon where the dark undulating sea met the silver sky.
Could this be possible?
The horrific sights and sounds of that night came back to him, the deep oaken forest, his own helplessness as, a prisoner of the Druids, he'd been dragged towards the shrine of the god within the tree. And then had come those staggering moments when the burnt and white-haired god had spoken to him and explained the powers of the Blood he would share.
"But I saw them throw your body on the pyre afterwards," said Marius. "I tried to save you, but I didn't know my own strength then in the Blood. I saw you burned." He shook his head, peering earnestly into the being's eyes. "Why would one so old and so seemingly wise lie about these things?"
"I am not lying to you," said Teskhamen gently. "You saw them try to immolate me. But I was a thousand years old then, Marius, perhaps older. I didn't know my own strength either. But when you fled as I'd instructed you to do, when all of them to a man ran after you through that forest, I escaped those burning logs."
Marius stared at Teskhamen, stared at the dark eyes looking at him, at the simple but kindly mouth. Out of the gloom of memory emerged that fragile blackened figure clinging to dark unnatural life through will.
Suddenly Marius knew. He knew it now, knew it in countless subtle ways. He knew the being's demeanor, the dark and unwavering gaze. He knew the calm and almost melodious cadence of his speech, and even the contained and almost shrinking posture with which he sat there on the bench.
And he knew why he could hear nothing from this one's mind. This was the maker. The maker had survived.
The older one was smiling at him now as he sat composed with his hands folded in his lap. The soft white thawb, or cassock, hung softly about his dignified frame, and he seemed pleased, very pleased, that Marius knew the truth. He was as splendid an immortal now with his smooth tawny skin and full white hair as any Marius had ever seen.
Something quickened in Marius, something he had not felt in a very long time. There was some certainty of goodness, perhaps, that overcame him, some certainty of happiness, of the true possibility of life containing moments of exultation and joy. He'd never really felt that certainty for very long at any one time, and he hadn't expected to feel it now. Yet he was overcome with the purest goodwill, suddenly, that such a thing could be possible, that this one, known to him in a fatal
intimacy at the very beginning of his dark journey, could in fact be here with him now.
In the past only young ones and strangers had brought such comfort. Nothing good had ever united him with those first years, nothing to warm the heart.
He wanted to speak but he feared to cheapen his feeling in trying to express it. He sat quiet, wondering if his face expressed the gratitude he felt that this being had come to him here.
"I suffered unbearably," said Teskhamen, "but it was all that you'd revealed to me, Marius, that gave me the strength to crawl away from that pyre and reach for hope. You see, I had never known a being like you, Marius. In that awful northern forest, I had never known anything of your Roman world. I'd known the old Blood religion of Queen Akasha. I'd been her faithful blood god. I knew the worship of the Druids echoing the ancient blood drinker cults of Egypt, and that was all I knew. Not until that night when I took you in my arms to make you the new blood god, and your heart and soul poured into mine."
The smile was gone and Teskhamen's face was reflective, his dark brows knitted, his eyes narrow, as he looked out at the foaming sea. He went on speaking.
"For a thousand years, I'd served the Mother, believed in the old religion. Remain imprisoned until the worshippers bring the evildoers; look into their hearts for right and wrong and truth; and then execute them for the Faithful of the Forest and drink their precious blood. A thousand years. And never had I dreamed of the life you lived, Marius. I'd been born a village child, a farmer's boy, and, oh, what an honor, they told me, that as a young man I had become beautiful enough to offer to the Secret Mother, the Queen Who Reigns Forever, and from whom a poor boy, an ignorant boy, could not conceivably escape."
Marius didn't want to say a word. This was the voice that had lulled him into calm compliance all those centuries ago inside that oak tree. This was the voice that had confessed secrets to him which had given him hope that he might survive that night to live in a new way. He only wanted for Teskhamen to go on.
"And then I saw your life," said Teskhamen, "your life, blazing in the images you yielded to me. I saw your glorious house in Rome, the magnificent temples before which you'd worshipped, with all those pure and lofty columns, and brightly painted marble gods and goddesses so splendidly realized, and those colored rooms in which you'd lived and studied and dreamed and laughed and sang and loved. It wasn't the wealth, surely you understand me. Not the gold. Not the glittering mosaics. I saw your libraries, I saw and heard your quick-witted and curious companions, I saw the full blooming power of your experience, the life of a cultured Roman, the life that had made you what you were. I saw the beauty of Italy. I saw the beauty of fleshly love. I saw the beauty of ideas. I saw the beauty of the sea."
A shock passed through Marius but he remained silent.
Teskhamen paused, eyes still fixed on the distant surf. His eyes returned to Marius. He looked past him for a moment and smiled at Daniel, who was listening as if rapt.
"I had never fully understood till that moment," said Teskhamen, "that we are the sum of all we've seen and all we've appreciated and understood. You were the sum of sunshine on marble floors filled with pictures of divine beings who laughed and loved and drank the fruit of the vine as surely as you were the sum of the poets and historians and philosophers you'd read. You were the sum and the fount of what you'd cherished and chosen to abide and all you had loved."
He left off talking.