Prince Lestat (39 page)

“I knew it,” said Daniel softly. “Of course. You would have gathered other ghosts like Hesketh over the years.”

Marius was astonished. He was almost moved to tears.

“Oh, yes, Marius, you will see your beloved Raymond again, I assure you,” said Teskhamen. “You will see all of us—and there are indeed many others—and it is not our wish that the blood drinkers of this world be extinguished. It’s never been. But allow us our old caution, our old passivity, even now.”

“I understand,” said Marius. “You want us to come together as a tribe, the very same thing that Benji wants. You want us to do the very best that we can in the face of this challenge—without your intervention.”

“You’re a splendid being, Marius,” said Teskhamen. “Never have you ever bowed the knee to any fancy, fantasy, or superstition. The others need you now. And this Amel, he knows you, and you know him perhaps better than you think. I was made by the Mother. I have that direct and pure primal blood. But you have even more of it than I was ever given. And this Voice, if he is to be understood, controlled, educated, whatever is to happen, you must surely play a role.”

Teskhamen started to rise, but Marius still held his hand.

“And where will you go now, Teskhamen?” he asked.

“We must come together ourselves before we meet with you and
your kindred,” Teskhamen answered. “Believe me, we will eventually come to you. I’m certain of it. Gremt wants to help. I am certain that this is what Gremt wants. I will see you very soon again.”

“You give my love to my precious Raymond,” Marius said.

“He knows you love him, Marius,” said Teskhamen. “Many times he’s watched over you, been near you, seen your pain, and wanted to intervene. But he is loyal to us and our slow and wary ways. He is Talamasca as he was when he was living. You know our old motto: ‘We watch and we are always here.’ ”

It was now an hour before sunrise.

Teskhamen embraced them both. And then he was gone. Simply gone. And they stood alone together on the sand as the wind swept in from the endless sparkling surf, and the vast sprawling city behind them slowly came to morning life.

The next night, Marius needed less than an hour to make all arrangements by phone with his mortal agents, and to ship their possessions and clothes, such as they were, to New York. They’d lodge at a small hotel uptown as they’d always done, where a suite of rooms had always been kept in readiness for them. And they would talk then, once they’d reached New York, about when to go to Benji and Armand and Louis and blessed Sybelle.

Daniel was powerfully excited that they were going. Daniel wanted to be with the others, Marius knew this, and he was happy for Daniel, but he himself was full of foreboding.

The encounter with Teskhamen had stimulated him, there was no doubt of that; he was in fact reeling from the shock.

Daniel could not grasp the extent of it. Yes, Daniel had been Born to Darkness in a time of myriad shocks. But, before that, Daniel had been born into a physical world of myriad changes and shocks. He had never known the dreary and weary mind-set of times past. He had never understood the inveterate pessimism and resignation into which most of the world’s teeming millions had been born and lived and died.

But Marius had known the millennia, and they had been millennia of suffering as well as joy, of darkness as well as light, in which radical change of any kind too often culminated in disappointment and defeat.

Teskhamen. Marius could scarce believe that he had seen him, spoken to him, that such a momentous thing had taken place—that
old god of the grove alive now, articulate and eloquent, and pointing the way to the past and the future in the same breath. A great dark portion of Marius’s early history flamed into living color for him, and prompted him to search for a coherent thread to all of his life.

But there was the foreboding.

He could not stop thinking of all those long-ago interludes, when he had lain against the breast of Akasha—her caretaker, her keeper—listening to her heart and trying to fathom her thoughts.
He
had been inside her, this alien creature Amel. And Amel was inside of Marius now.

“Yes, I’m inside of you,” said the Voice to him. “I am you and you are me.”

There followed silence. Emptiness. And the lingering echo of a threat.

“B
E CALM
,” he said. “Whatever you saw, whatever almost happened to you, you’re safe now. Be calm and talk to me. Tell me precisely what you saw.”

“Rhosh, it was unspeakable!” said Benedict.

Benedict sat at the desk with his head down on his folded arms, sobbing.

Rhosh, known to so many others through the ages as Rhoshamandes, sat by the cavernous hearth in the old stone room looking at his fledgling with a mixture of impatience and irresistible sympathy. He had never been able to divorce himself entirely from Benedict’s boiling emotions, and maybe he had never really wanted to do that. Of all his companions and fledglings through the centuries, he loved Benedict the most—this child of Merovingian royalty who had been such a dreamy Latin scholar in his time, so eager to understand those years which the world now called the Dark Ages. How he’d cried when brought into the Blood, sure of his ultimate damnation, and only come round to worship Rhoshamandes instead of his Christian god—never believing in a world untainted by fear of perdition. But this great superstitious fear was, however, part of Benedict’s eternal charm.

And this hapless child had had a gift for making other blood drinkers better than himself as time passed. Now that was quite a mystery to Rhosh, but it was fact.

It was Benedict who had made the young Notker the Wise of Prüm, who likely survived to this day, a mad genius sustained on music as much as human blood.

Pretty Benedict, always a joy to look at, if not to listen to, whose tears could be as beguiling as his smiles.

Rhoshamandes was dressed in what might have passed for a monk’s long hooded robe of heavy gray wool with a thick black leather belt around the waist, and big deep sleeves. But the robe was in fact made from fine cashmere, and the buckle on his belt was pewter and revealed a delicately modeled face of Medusa with writhing snakes for hair and a howling mouth. He wore exquisitely crafted brown leather sandals because he didn’t feel the cold here on this craggy green island in the Outer Hebrides.

He had short and very soft golden-brown hair and large blue eyes. He’d been born thousands of years ago on the island of Crete to parents of Indo-European descent, and gone down into Egypt when he was twenty. His skin was the smooth creamy tan of immortals who go into the sun often in order to pass for human, and it made his eyes appear wondrously bright and beautiful.

He and Benedict were speaking English now, the language they’d shared for the last seven hundred years, more or less, the Old French and the Latin having passed from their daily speech but not their libraries. Rhosh knew ancient tongues, tongues never known to Benedict.

“It burnt them all,” Benedict sobbed. “It destroyed them completely,” he said in his muffled, hopeless voice.

“Sit up and look at me,” said Rhoshamandes. “I am talking to you, Benedict. Now look at me and tell me precisely what happened.”

Benedict sat back in the chair, his long brown curly hair mussed and falling into his eyes, his boyish mouth quivering. Of course his face was smeared with blood and so were his clothes, his wool sweater and his tweed jacket. Disgusting. Absolutely disgusting. Vampires who spilt blood on their garments either from victims or tears were anathema! Nothing so revolted Rhoshamandes about modern fictive and film vampires as their utter unrealistic sloppiness.

And Benedict looked perfectly like a cheap television vampire with that blood all over him.

He’d be the image of an eighteen-year-old youth forever because that is what he was when he’d been made a blood drinker, just as Rhoshamandes would always look like a man a few years older than that with a fuller chest and heavier arms. But Benedict had always had a childlike personality. No guile, no cunning. He might never have outgrown it in mortal life. Something to do with Christ’s command,
“Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” Benedict had not only been a monk in his youth, he’d been a mystic.

Who could know?

Rhoshamandes, on the other hand, if it mattered, had been the eldest of ten mortal children and a man at the age of twelve, protecting his mother. Palace intrigue. The day she’d been murdered, he’d run away to sea and survived by his wits, amassing a fortune before he journeyed up the Nile to trade with the Egyptians. He had fought many a battle, survived unscarred, but made his wealth by instinct rather than violence—until the Queen’s blood drinker slaves captured him and dragged him from his boat.

Rhoshamandes and Benedict were both comely and fine boned, chosen for the Blood on account of their seeming physical perfection. Rhoshamandes had brought over dozens of such beauties as Benedict into the Blood, but none had survived with him, stayed with him, loved him as had Benedict, and when he thought of the times he’d driven Benedict away, he shuddered inwardly and thanked some dark god of the blood-drinking world that he’d always been able to find Benedict and bring him back.

Benedict was sniffling and now and then moaning in his inimitable charming fashion, trying to regain possession of himself. Benedict’s mortal soul had been formed in kindness and gentleness and true faith in goodness, and these traits he’d never lost.

“All right, that’s better,” said Rhoshamandes. “Now recall it all for me.”

“Surely you saw it, Rhosh, you saw the images. All those blood drinkers couldn’t have perished without your catching images.”

“Yes, I did, of course,” said the other, “but I want to know just how it got the jump on them when they’d been warned. They had all been warned.”

“But that’s just it, we didn’t know where to go or what to do. And the young ones, they have to hunt. You don’t remember what an agony it is for them. I don’t know if it was ever an agony for you.”

“Oh, stop with all that,” said Rhosh. “They were told to get out of London, to get away from that hotel, to move into the countryside. Benji Mahmoud had been warning them for nights on end. You warned them.”

“Well, a lot of them did,” said Benedict sadly. “Plenty of them did.
But then we got the word. They were being spotted and burned out there—in the Cotswolds and in Bath—and all over!”

“I see.”

“Do you? Do you care?” Benedict wiped furiously at his eyes. “I don’t think you care. You’re exactly as Benji Mahmoud describes. You’re an elder of the tribe who doesn’t care. You never did.”

Rhoshamandes was looking away, out of the arched window, at the darkened land below, and the thick jagged forest that clung to the bluff over the ocean. There was no way in the world he was going to disclose his true thoughts to his beloved Benedict. Elder of the tribe, indeed.

Benedict went on talking.

Old ones had perished the night before. On waking Benedict had discovered the burnt remains of two of them right there in the house. He’d run to alert the others. Get out.

“That’s when the walls caught fire,” he said. “I wanted to save them, save one of them, anything, anything that I could. But the roof exploded and I saw them in flames all around me. And I saw this thing, this thing standing there, and it looked ragged and grotesque and it was on fire too. Is that possible? I swear it was burning. I went up. I did what I had to do.”

He broke into sobs again and buried his face in his crooked arm on the desktop.

“You did right,” said Rhoshamandes. “But are you sure this one was making the fire?”

“I don’t know,” said Benedict. “I think it was. It was a wraith. It was bones and rags, but I think … I don’t know.”

Rhoshamandes was reflecting. Bones and rags on fire. He was in fact nothing as calm inside as he pretended now. He was in fact furious, furious that Benedict had almost been harmed, furious about all aspects of this. But he went on listening in silence.

“The Voice,” Benedict stammered. “The Voice, it said such strange things. I heard it myself two nights ago, urging me to do it. I told you. It wanted me and I laughed at it. I told them then it was going to find someone to do its dirty work. I warned everyone. A lot of them left then, but I think they’re dead, all those who left. I think it found someone else and that someone else was out there waiting. It’s not true about Paris, is it? They were all talking about Paris before this happened—.”

“Yes, it’s true about Paris,” Rhoshamandes replied. “But the massacre was interrupted. Someone or something intervened, stopped it. Blood drinkers did escape. I have a feeling I know what happened there.” But he fell silent again. There was no point in disclosing all this to Benedict. There never had been.

Rhoshamandes rose to his feet. He began to pace, his narrow hands together as if in prayer, making a slow leisurely circle in the old stone room, gradually coming up behind Benedict and putting a reassuring hand on his head. He bent and kissed Benedict’s head. He stroked his cheek with his thumb.

“There, there now, you are here,” he murmured. He drew away and stood before the twin arches of the windows.

Rhoshamandes had built this castle in the French Gothic style when he had first come north to England, and he still loved these narrow pointed arches. The dawn of the truly delicate and ornate Gothic style had thrilled him to his heart. Even now he could be reduced to weeping when he wandered the great cathedrals.

Benedict had no idea how often Rhoshamandes went on his own to walk in the cathedrals of Rheims or Autun or Chartres. Some things could be shared with Benedict and some could not. Benedict never stepped inside a great cathedral without experiencing a crisis of cosmic proportions and weeping in grief for his lost faith.

It occurred to Rhosh idly that the notorious Vampire Lestat would understand, Lestat who worshipped nothing and no one but beauty—but then it was easy to love celebrities like Lestat, wasn’t it, to imagine them perfect companions.