Free Blood and Gold by Anne Rice Page A

he did to you? Or is it your distaste for anger which makes you turn away from this thing?”
    “I don’t know. There are times when I can’t look on Mael’s face. There are times when I want to be in his company. There are times when I can’t seek out any of them. I’ve come here with Daniel alone. Daniel always needs someone to look after him. It suits me to be near Daniel. Daniel doesn’t have to speak. That he is here is sufficient.”
    “I understand you,” said Thorne.
    “Understand this as well,” said Marius. “I want to continue. I am not one who wishes to go into the sun or seek some other form of obliteration. If you have truly come out of the ice to destroy Maharet, to anger her twin—.”
    Thorne lifted his right hand, gesturing for patience and silence.
    Then he spoke:
    “I have not,” he said. “Those were dreams. They’ve died in this very place. It will take longer for memory to die—.”
    “Then remember her beauty and her power,” Marius said. “I asked her once why she had never taken a blood drinker’s eyes for her own. Why always the weak and bleeding eyes of a mortal victim? She told me she had never come upon a blood drinker whom she would destroy or even hurt, save for the Evil Queen herself and the Queen’s eyes she couldn’t take. Pure hatred prevented it.”
    Thorne thought on this for a long time without replying.
    “Always mortal eyes,” he whispered.
    “And with each pair, as they endure, she sees more than you and I can see,” said Marius.
    “Yes,” said Thorne, “I understand you.”
    “I want the strength to grow older,” Marius said. “I want to find wonders around me as I always have. If I don’t, I’ll lose the strength to continue and that is what bites into me now. Death has put its hand on my shoulder. Death has come in the form of disappointment and fear of scorn.”
    “Ah, these things I understand, almost perfectly,” said Thorne. “When I went up into the snow, I wanted to flee from these things. I wanted to die and not die, as so many mortals do. I don’t think I thought I would endure in the ice or snow. I thought it would devour me, freeze me solid as it would a mortal man. But no such thing ever happened. And as for the pain of the cold I grew used to it, as if it were my daily portion, as if I had no right to anything else. But it was pain that drove me there, and so I understand you. You would fight pain now rather than retreat.”
    “Yes, I would,” said Marius. “When the Queen rose from her underground shrine, she left me buried in ice and indifference. Others came to rescue me and bring me to the council table where we sought to reason with her. Before this happened, I could not have imagined such contempt from the Queen or such injury. I could not have imagined my own patience and seeming forgiveness.
    “But at that council table, Akasha met her destruction. The insult to me was avenged with utter finality. This creature whom I had guarded for two thousand years was gone from me. My Queen, gone from me . . .
    “And so I can see now the larger story of my own life, of which my beautiful Queen was only a part, even in her cruelty to me. I can see all the stories of my life. I can pick and choose from among them.”
    “Let me hear these stories,” said Thorne. “Your words flow over me like warm water. They bring me comfort. I hunger for your images. I hunger for all you might say.”
    Marius pondered this.
    “Let me try to tell my stories,” Marius said. “Let my stories do what stories always do. Let them keep you from your darker dreams and from your darker journey. Let them keep you here.”
    Thorne smiled.
    “Yes,” he said, “I trust in you. Go on.”

THE STORY

5
    A s I have told you, I was born in the Roman times, in the age of Augustus when the Roman Empire was immense and powerful, though the Northern tribes of barbarians who would eventually overrun it had long been fighting on its Northern frontiers.
    Europe