"And I love you," Viktor answered without hesitation, holding him tightly with both arms. In his ear he whispered, "Father. Maker."
17
Gregory
Trinity Gate
Shall We Dance?
"I KNOW," said Armand. "But why would a creature of your age and power want Lestat to exert some kind of leadership?"
He was talking to Gregory Duff Collingsworth as they sat in the long rear salon of Trinity Gate on the Upper East Side--a glass porch that in fact united all three townhouses along the back like the service galleries of old in southern mansions--the glass wall beside them open to a magically illuminated garden of slender oaks and masses of night-blooming flowers. Paradise in New York if ever Gregory had beheld one.
"If I wanted to lead our tribe, as Benji calls it, I would have done something about it long ago," said Gregory. "I would have come forward, identified myself, involved myself. It's never been my inclination. Look, I've been transformed by the last two millennia. I've chronicled for myself that transformation. But in a very real way, I'm still the young man who once slept in Akasha's bed fully expecting to be murdered at any time to satisfy the fears of her king, Enkil. I commanded blood drinkers later, yes, with the Queens Blood, but under her cruel hand. No, life has me at a fever pitch of involvement after all this time, and I cannot back away from the luxury of studying all this and take up the confines of leadership."
"But you think that Lestat will?" asked Armand.
It was unnerving, Gregory thought--this boyish face confronting him, this near-cherubic face, with its warm brown eyes and the soft waving auburn hair, unnerving that all this belonged to an immortal of five hundred years in the Blood who himself had become a leader twice in his existence because of something iron hard and ruthless of which the face reflected nothing.
"I know that Lestat will and that he can," said Gregory. "Lestat is the only blood drinker truly known, in one way or another, to the entire world of the Undead. The only one. If they haven't read his books, they've seen his little films, or heard his songs. They know him, his face, his voice--they feel they know the charismatic being himself. As soon as the crisis of the Voice is past, he will lead. He must lead. Benjamin has been right since the beginning. Why should we continue leaderless and disunited when so much is to be gained by establishing a hierarchy and pooling our resources?"
Armand shook his head.
They sat at a white-marble-top table in two white-painted Chinese Chippendale chairs in this glass garden room with its fragile white lilies and its exquisite wisteria. Gregory was dressed as always in his immaculate three-piece wool suit, hair very short, and Armand, the long-haired angel, wore a severe but beautifully colored dark burgundy jacket with bright gold buttons, and a white shirt that was almost luminous in its silk, with a thick white silk scarf for a tie wrapped around his neck and folded into the open shirt collar.
"These have been good times for you and Louis, haven't they?" Gregory asked, taking a moment to breathe deeply, to sense the moment, to drink in the perfume of the lilies in their painted pots, to look at the shivering wisteria hanging down from the trellis that ran up the wall behind Armand, with its purple blossoms like an abstract painting of a cluster of grapes. That is what wisteria always made Gregory think of, of grapes....
"Yes, they've been good times," said Armand. He looked down at the marble black-and-white chess set between them. His right hand idly cradled the black queen on his side. "And it was a battle for us to achieve what we've achieved here. It's far easier to wander in despair, isn't it, to drift from place to place, never making a commitment. But I forced it. I brought Louis and Benji and Sybelle here. I insisted on it. And Antoine is now a vital part of us. I love Antoine. Benji and Sybelle love him too."
He gestured with his eyes to the open doors. Antoine and Sybelle had been playing together for over an hour, she at the piano as always and Antoine with his violin. It was a waltz from a twentieth-century musical they played now, something "popular" and not highly regarded perhaps in the world of classical music, but surprisingly dark and evocative.
"But there's no point in glorying in all of this just now, is there?" Armand asked. "Not with what we are facing." He sighed. His square face and rounded cheeks added to his childlike appearance. "The time will come when we can talk about all we've witnessed and what we have to offer to one another. But surely this isn't the time, not with the Voice turning blood drinkers against each other all over the American continent. And you know, of course, the young ones are pouring into New York, in spite of our warnings. Benji's told them over and over not to come, to let the elders gather, yet they come. You must hear them even more sharply than I do. They're out there in the park. They think the trees can hide them. They're hungry. And they know that if they trouble the innocent in my domain I'll destroy them. Yet still they're here, and I can smell their hunger."
Gregory didn't respond. There were perhaps fifty at most out there. That was all. Those were the only survivors who had made it this far in their desperation. Even now stragglers and survivors in various cities were turning on each other, battling as the Voice urged them to do, beheading their own former cohorts, cutting out their hearts, smashing their skulls. The cities of the world were filled with black stains upon the pavements where immortal lives had been snuffed out, and remains had been scorched by the sun.
Surely Armand knew that. Gregory did not conceal his own thoughts.
"I'm not sorry they're dying," Armand confessed.
"But the survivors, the survivors are what matter now," said Gregory, "and finding a leader. And if you won't be that leader, you, after all your experience ..."
"What experience?" asked Armand, his brown eyes brightening angrily. "You know what I was, a pawn, an executioner in the thrall of a cult." He paused, then he uttered the words, "The Children of Satan," with dark smoldering rage. "Well, I'm that no longer. Yes, I've driven them out of this city from time to time, and I once drove them all out of New Orleans when Lestat was suffering there and they were constantly trying to get a glimpse of him. But you'd be surprised if you knew how often I used the Mind Gift to terrify them, force them into retreat. I did that much more than ... than burn them.
" His voice trailed away. A blush appeared in his cheeks. "I never took any pleasure in killing any immortal."
"Well, maybe whoever leads today will not have to be a wanton executioner," said Gregory. "Maybe the old crude ways of the Children of Satan have absolutely nothing to do with this. But you don't want to lead. You know you don't. And Marius does not. Marius can hear us now. He's in there listening to the music. He came in half an hour ago. He has no taste to lead. No. Lestat is the logical one to be the anointed leader."
"Anointed?" Armand repeated the word with a slight raise of his eyebrows.
"A figure of speech, Armand," said Gregory. "Nothing more. We've waked from those nightmares of the Queens Blood cult and the later Children of Satan. We are finished with such things. We are in thrall to no belief now except what we can know from the physical world around us...."
"Lestat's 'Savage Garden,' " said Armand.
"Not so savage really," said Gregory. "There is not a single one of us, no matter how old, that does not have a moral heart, an educated heart, a heart that learned to love while human, and a heart that should have learned ever more deeply to love as preternatural."
Armand looked sad suddenly. "Why has it taken me so long?"
"You're so young yet, you know that," said Gregory. "For a thousand years I served that wretched Queen. I suffered under her mythologies. You haven't even been alive that long in any form. That's what you have to grasp, what all the others have to grasp. You are on the threshold of a great journey, and you must begin to think in terms of what you can do as a powerful spiritual and biological being. Stop with the self-loathing. Stop with imagery of 'the damned' this and 'the damned' that! We are not damned. We never were. Who under the sun has the right to damn any living breathing creature?"