Prince Lestat (25 page)

Why others did not see this, Gregory could not quite grasp.

He had seen the growth of affluence since the dawn of the Christian era. Even coming out of the Egyptian desert, a ragged half-crazed
remnant, he’d been astonished at the abundance of the people of the Roman Empire—that common soldiers rode horses in battle (an unthinkable advantage for a being of Gregory’s time), that Indian and Egyptian fabrics were sold over the whole known world, that female peasants had their own great looms, and that solid Roman roads bound together the empire, replete with caravansaries for travelers every few miles, and plenty to eat for everyone. Why, these enterprising Romans had actually invented a liquid stone with which they built not only roads but aqueducts to carry water over miles to their ever-growing cities. Exquisitely made pots, jugs, amphora were imported to the remotest towns for sale to the common people. In fact all manner of practical and fancy goods traveled Roman roads and waterways from roof tiles to popular books.

Yes, there had been great setbacks. But despite the wholesale collapse of the Roman Empire, Gregory had seen nothing but “progress” ever since with the early inventions of the Middle Ages—the barrel, the mill wheel, the stirrup, the new harnesses that did not choke the oxen in the fields, the ever-spreading taste for ornate and beautiful clothes, and the building of soaring cathedrals in which the common people could worship right along with the richest and most privileged among them.

What a far cry from the great churches of Rheims or Amiens were the crude temples of ancient Egypt reserved entirely for their gods and a handful of priests and rulers.

Yet it fascinated him and intrigued him that it had taken the romantic era to produce vampires bound and determined to make themselves known to history and in such melancholy and philosophical literature as those books.

There was another key aspect to this that greatly puzzled Gregory as well. He felt with all his soul that this was the greatest age for the Undead that he had ever known. And he did not understand why the poetic authors of the Vampire Chronicles never addressed this obvious fact.

Ever since public lighting had been introduced into the cities of Europe and America, the world had gotten better and better for the Undead. Did they not grasp the miracle of the gas lamps of Paris, the arc lighting that could bring virtual daylight to a park or plaza anywhere in the world, the miracle of electricity that penetrated homes as well as public places bringing the brilliance of the sun into cottages
and palaces alike? Did they have no inkling of how the advances in lighting had affected the behavior and the minds of people, what it meant for the tiniest hamlet to have its brilliantly lighted drugstores and supermarkets, and for people to wander at eight o’clock of an evening with the same energetic curiosity and eagerness for work and experience that they enjoyed during the sunlight hours?

The planet had been transformed by lighting and by the sheer magic of television and computers, leveling the playing field for blood drinkers as never before.

Well, he could understand if Lestat and Louis took such things for granted; they’d been born during the Industrial Revolution whether they knew it or not. But what about the great Marius? Why didn’t he go into raptures about the brightly lighted modern world? Why didn’t he cherish the huge upsurge in human freedom and physical and social mobility in modern times?

Why, these times were perfect for the Undead. Nothing was denied to them. They could be privy to every aspect of daylight and daylight activity through television and film. They were no longer really Children of Darkness at all. Darkness had been essentially banished from the Earth.
It had become a choice
.

Oh, how much he wanted to discuss his views of things with Lestat. How must this be affecting the destiny of the world’s blood drinkers? And now that the internet had embraced the planet, wasn’t Benji Mahmoud’s radio broadcast out of his very own house just the beginning?

When would we see the data banks enabling blood drinkers everywhere, regardless of age and isolation, to find their lost ones, their loved ones, immortals who had been mere legend to them for too long?

And what about glass? Look at what had happened to the world through the invention, evolution, and perfection of glass? Spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, plate glass, walls of glass, palaces of glass, towers of glass! Why, the architecture of the modern world had been transformed by the use of glass. Science had advanced in dramatic and mysterious ways due to the availability and use of glass!

(It struck him as highly ironic and perhaps meaningful that the great Akasha had been decapitated because of a great sheet of broken glass. After all, a six-thousand-year-old immortal is a very strong and resilient creature, and Gregory was not sure that a simple ax could have decapitated the Queen, or that a simple ax could decapitate him.
But an enormous shard of plate glass had been sharp enough and heavy enough to separate head from body so that Akasha’s death was in fact accomplished. An accident yes, but a very strange one, indeed.)

All right, so the “Coven of the Articulate” as they were called had not been made up of social or economic historians. But surely romantics as sensitive as Marius and Lestat would be interested in Gregory’s notions of progress, and particularly his theory that this was the Age of the Vampire, so to speak. This ought to be a Golden Time, to use Marius’s phrase, for all the Undead.

Oh, the time must come when he would meet them.

But even as he told himself that some of this longing and enthusiasm was childish and naïve and even ridiculous, Gregory was drawn almost obsessively to Louis and Lestat. Particularly Lestat.

Louis was a damaged pilgrim, and though he’d been recovering now for the last decade or so, Lestat was indeed the “lion heart” that Gregory wanted to know with his whole soul.

It seemed at times that Lestat was the immortal for whom Gregory had been waiting all this time, the one with whom he could discuss his myriad observations of the Undead and the human stream of history they had followed through six thousand years. Gregory actually fell in love with Lestat.

He knew that he had, and when Zenobia and Avicus teased him about this, or Flavius said it “worried” him, Gregory did not deny it. Nor did he seek to defend it. Chrysanthe understood. Chrysanthe always understood his obsessions. And Davis understood, Davis, his gentle black companion, rescued from the massacre following Lestat’s concert, Davis understood too.

“He was like a god on that stage,” said Davis of Lestat at the concert. “He was the one vampire we all loved! It was as if nothing could stop him, and nothing ever would.”

But something had stopped Lestat most definitely or certainly slowed him down. Demons of his own making perhaps or spiritual exhaustion. Gregory longed to know, longed to sympathize, longed to lend support.

Secretly, Gregory had searched the world for Lestat, and come very close to him many times, spying on him, and divining Lestat’s immense anger and great need to be alone. Always, Gregory had backed off, unable to force himself on the object of his obsession, retreating silently in disappointment and a kind of shame.

Two years ago in Paris, he had drawn close enough to see Lestat
in the flesh, rushing there from Geneva at the first word of Lestat’s appearance, yet he had not dared to reveal himself. Only love could create such conflict, such longing, such fear.

Now Gregory felt the very same reluctance to make himself known to the New York coven of Trinity Gate. He could not make an overture. He could not yet extend himself and risk rebuff. No. These creatures meant too much to him. The time was not yet right, no.

Indeed, only one blood drinker in recent years had brought him out of anonymity and that had been Fareed Bhansali, the physician vampire in Los Angeles, who had sufficiently fascinated him to cause him to reveal himself, and this for very specific reasons. For this Fareed was as unique in his own way—if unique can be compared—as the romantic poet vampires Louis and Lestat, in that Fareed was the only modern blood drinker physician known to Gregory.

Oh, in the distant past there had been some, surely, but they were rudimentary healers and alchemists who when they came into the Blood lost all interest in their scientific explorations, and with reason, for there had been a limit for thousands of years to what could be known scientifically.

Magnus, the great Parisian alchemist, had been a perfect example. In his old age, stooped and deformed by the natural wasting of his bones, Magnus had been denied the Blood by the vain Rhoshamandes, who at that time quietly ruled the Undead of France, never allowing their numbers to become unmanageable. Bitter, angry, and not to be outdone, Magnus had managed to steal the Blood from a young acolyte of Rhoshamandes known as Benedict. Binding Benedict and draining his body of blood right at sunset, Magnus had become a full-fledged blood drinker lying stunned on the comatose body of his maker, who found himself upon waking too weak to break his bonds, too weak even to call for help. What shocks this clever theft of the Blood had sent through the entire Undead world. How many would dare to imitate the bold Magnus? Well, precious few ever did. Precious few blood drinkers were ever as careless or stupid as gentle Benedict had been, entrusting the location of his resting place to a mortal “friend.”

And then Magnus, this truly revolutionary thinker, had turned his back entirely on the medical and alchemical knowledge of his human life, holed himself up in a tower near Paris, and devoted himself to the most bitter reflections until he went mad in the end, his only real
achievement being the capture and making of the Vampire Lestat. To Lestat, he bequeathed his blood, his property, and his wealth.

Ah, such dreadful failures.

And where was Rhoshamandes now? Where were his fine progeny—the beautiful Merovingian Allesandra, daughter of Dagobert the First, or the disgraced and ever contrite Benedict? Had Allesandra really immolated herself on a pyre in the catacombs under Les Innocents, only because the Vampire Lestat had come marching through her world and destroyed the old Children of Satan who had long kept her mind and her soul and her body prisoner? A pyre might have been enough to destroy the body of Magnus, yes; but Allesandra had been old before Magnus came into existence, though her own age and experience had been lost to her in madness more than once.

Gregory had known little of Rhoshamandes during those centuries but he’d observed much from afar. And why not? Hadn’t Rhoshamandes been his own fledgling? Well, no. The Mother had made Rhoshamandes for the Queens Blood, then given him to Gregory (her devoted Nebamun) to instruct and train.

There were many he hoped to find in the future, including his long-lost Blood Wife, Sevraine. She’d come as a slave into Egypt thousands of years ago, her hair and eyes as fair as those of the red-haired witches, and he, Gregory or Nebamun, Captain of the Queens Blood, had so loved her that he’d brought her over without the Queen’s blessing and almost paid for this the ultimate price. Somewhere out there in the great bright world, Sevraine lived. Gregory was sure of it. And perhaps one dark side of all this misery of late was that the old ones would come together. Even Rhoshamandes would surface, and some of his strong progeny like Eleni and Eugénie, once captives of the Paris Children of Satan. And where was Hesketh? Gregory could not forget about her.

The tragic Hesketh had been the most malformed blood drinker that Gregory had ever encountered, made and loved by the old renegade blood god Teskhamen, who had escaped the Druids who’d worshipped him and sought to put an end to him on their pyre. Gregory had encountered Hesketh and Teskhamen in the wilds of France in the 700s of the Common Era when Rhoshamandes had still ruled in those parts, and later in the far north. Teskhamen had tales to tell, but didn’t they all? Surely those as wise and hearty as Hesketh and Teskhamen still survived.

But the point was, this Fareed Bhansali, a physician vampire, had fascinated Gregory enough to cause him to reveal himself. This Fareed Bhansali appeared unique.

And as word had spread through the world that a blood drinker doctor had indeed appeared “on the scene” in Los Angeles and in fact set up an entire clinic in a medical office tower for the study of the Undead, and that this doctor was powerful and brilliant and had been an accomplished Mumbai surgeon and researcher before being Born to Darkness, Gregory set out to observe this man at close hand.

Indeed, he hurried. He feared that the awful twins—Mekare and Maharet—who now had control of the spirit Amel and the primal fount of the Blood, might burn to ashes this upstart, and Gregory wanted to be there to stop it and whisk away the bold Fareed Bhansali to safety in his own house in Geneva.

Why this doctor did not do anything to hide himself, Gregory couldn’t understand. But Fareed didn’t. Indeed there were times when he seemed positively eager to advertise his presence, seeking mavericks and riffraff everywhere for his research.

But Gregory had another motive for finding Fareed.

For the first time in seventeen hundred years, Gregory was wondering: could Flavius’s missing leg be somehow replaced by some clever device of plastic and steel such as the humans of this age had perfected? Now there was a vampire doctor to provide the answer.

It took some persuading to get Flavius to agree to this experiment, or even to the idea of making the crossing from Europe to America, but when that was finished, Gregory found Fareed at once.

As soon as Gregory came upon Fareed walking in the tree-darkened streets of West Hollywood on a radiant summer evening, Gregory realized his worries for Fareed’s safety had been in vain. Beside him walked a vampire nearly as old as Gregory, and indeed this one was none other than Seth, the son of the ancient Mother.

How strange to see him here, removed by aeons from that long-ago time, this one, standing on the pavements of this modern city, lean and tall as he had always been with powerful shoulders and slender fingers, and a large well-shaped head and those dark almond-shaped eyes. His dark skin had faded over the aeons and he had a pale Oriental cast to him with short black hair and the courtly demeanor of olden times.