But we are blessed to be tiny beings in this universe. We are blessed to feel momentous because we are larger than these grains of sand.
Something intruded suddenly on his thoughts.
Far ahead in the darkness, he spied a lone figure coming towards them. Immortal. Powerful. Child of the Millennia. He drew Daniel close to him, putting his arm around Daniel as if Daniel were his son. Daniel too had sensed the presence perhaps, even heard the subtle heartbeat.
Who are you?
He could pick up no answer. The figure came on steadily, a slim delicate-boned male, in a soft ankle-length white Arabic robe, the robe flapping in the wind. His short white hair was mussed by the wind. The moonlight made an aureole out of it, and the steps came on as the steps of the ancient always do, with measured strength indifferent to the softness of the terrain.
Now is this how it is to happen? Had the Voice roused this rude instrument to smite them with fire?
There was nothing to do but move steadily towards this figure. What good would it do to flee? With one so old, flight might be impossible, for eyes such as these can follow an ascending body everywhere when there is nothing else to distract them.
Again, Marius identified himself silently, but there was no response, not the smallest inkling of a thought, an attitude, an emotion from the other, as he slowly came into full view.
They approached each other in silence, crunch of sand underfoot, sigh of the wind, and then the white-haired one extended his hand. Long almost spidery fingers.
"Marius," he said. "My beloved, my savior of long ago, my friend."
"I know you?" asked Marius politely. Even as he clasped the hand he divined nothing but what the agreeable and open face reflected: friendship. No danger.
But this one was far older than Marius, perhaps as much as a thousand years. His eyes were black and his unblemished skin the color of amber, which made his white hair all the more remarkable, a cloud of white light around his head.
"I'm Teskhamen," said the older one. "And you, you are the one who gave me new life."
"How did I ever do that?" asked Marius. "When and where did we ever meet?"
"Come, let's find a quiet place where we can talk."
"My rooms?" asked Marius.
"If you wish, or the bench up there at the boardwalk. This is a quiet night on the boardwalk. And the sea is like molten silver to my eyes. The breeze is fragrant and comforting. Let's go there."
They climbed the sands together, Daniel hanging slightly behind as if it were the respectful thing to do.
And when Marius and Teskhamen sat down together, Daniel chose another bench nearby. They were all three facing the distant waves, facing that writhing pearly surf. Beyond the mist the stars climbed forever. Great far-off mountains and rocks were purely dark.
Marius looked at Daniel anxiously. He didn't want a divide from Daniel of even a few feet.
"Don't be concerned for him now," said Teskhamen. "We are more than adequate to protect him, and what stalks the young blood drinkers tonight is on the move in other cities. The young of this place have already been exterminated. It turned them against each other. It played on their distrust of one another and their escalating fear. It was not content merely with the burning of the house; it hunted them down one by one."
"So that is how it is being done."
"That is one way. There are others. It becomes more clever with every passing night."
"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.
Nothing had changed in the night.
Behind them the sparse traffic of early morning moved on the Avenida Atlantica. And the voices of the city rose and subsided beneath the hushed voice of the sea.
But Marius was changed. Changed forever.
"Tell me what happened," Marius pressed. The intimacy of that long-ago blood exchange in the oak shimmered in his mind. "Where did you go? How did you survive?"
Teskhamen nodded. He was still looking out to sea. "The woods were thick in those times. You remember them. Moderns have no conception of that old woodland, that savage wilderness of trees ancient and young spreading across Europe--against which each hamlet or village or town must fight for its life. Into that woodland I slithered like a lizard. I fed on the vermin of the forest. I fed on what could not escape me even as I could not walk without pain, even as the sun found me again and again in dank hollows and claimed even more of my skin because I could not dig deep to protect myself from it with these hands."
He looked at his fingers. "In time," he said with a sigh, "I found a woman in a lowly hut, a cunning woman, a healer, such a thing as men call a witch and a hag. Hesketh was her name. She was a prisoner of hideousness as was I.
"But I begged for her patience. She could not destroy me and I fascinated her, and my suffering touched her heart. Oh, this was so remarkable to me. You cannot imagine. What did I know of compassion, of mercy, of love? She had pity on me, and curiosity burned within her. She would not have me suffer. And some bond was forged before language could express it even in the simplest form.
"Even in my weakened state, I worked small miracles for her effortlessly, told her when strangers were approaching, raked their minds for the questions they were coming to ask her, for the curses they wanted her to bring down on their enemies. I warned of anyone who sought to do her harm. An evil lad bent on murdering her, I easily overpowered and from him drank my fill before her unquestioning eyes. I read her thoughts and I found the poetry inside of her, beneath the misfortune of warts and pockmarked skin, of hunched shoulders and deformed limbs. I loved her. Indeed she became, whole and entire, quite beautiful to me--. And she came to love me with her whole heart."
His eyes grew wide as if he were marveling at it all even now. "It was at her hearth I discovered my dormant powers, how with my mind I might kindle the fire when it had gone out, how I might make the water boil. I protected her. She protected me. We had the souls of each other. We loved in some realm where the natural and the preternatural meant nothing. And I brought her into the Blood."
He turned to look at Marius again.
"Now you know what a crime that was against the old religion, to share the Blood with one so malformed. The old religion died for me in that act of defiance and a new religion was born."
Marius nodded.
"I lived with Hesketh for over six hundred years after that, regaining my strength, healing in body and soul. We hunted the villages of the countryside. We fed on the thieves of the roads. But your beautiful Italy, your beautiful Roman world--which has so inspired me--was never to be mine except in the books I read, the manuscripts I stole from monasteries, the poetry I shared for myself with Hesketh by our humble hearth. Nevertheless we were happy, and we were clever. And as our boldness grew, we penetrated the crude castles and fortresses of country lords and even the streets of Paris in our lust to see and to learn. Those were not bad times.
"But you know how it is with the young in the Blood and how foolish they can be. And Hesketh was young and still misshapen, and all the blood in the world could not succor the pain she knew when mortals screamed at the very sight of her."
"What happened?"
"We quarreled. We fought. She struck out on her own. I waited. I felt certain she'd return. But she was caught by mortals, a mob that overwhelmed her, and they burned her alive as the Druids had sought to kill me. I found her remains afterwards. I destroyed the village, down to the last mortal man, woman, and child. But Hesketh was gone from me, or so it seemed."
"You revived her."
"No, that was not possible," he said. "Something infinitely more miraculous happened which was to give my life meaning from that time on. But let me continue: I buried her remains near a vast ruined monastery, deep in the untended forest, a collection of rude buildings made of crudely dressed stones and rough timbers where monks had once studied and worked and lived. There were no longer any fields or vineyards around it, for the woods had reclaimed all. But in the weed-infested cemetery, I found a place for her, thinking, Ah, it is consecrated ground. Maybe he
r soul will rest. Such superstition. Such nonsense. But the time of mourning is always the perfect time for nonsense. And I stayed nearby in the old scriptorium of the monastery, in a filthy corner, beneath a pile of old rotted furniture which no one, for one reason or another, had ever taken away. Each night on rising, I lit once more the small earthen oil lamp I'd placed on her unmarked grave.
"It was a dark and miserable night when she came to me. I had come to the point where death by any means seemed preferable to going on. All those splendid possibilities I'd seen in your blood, they had come to mean nothing--if Hesketh was not with me, if Hesketh was no more.
"And then Hesketh came, my Hesketh. Hesketh came into the old scriptorium. In the light of broken arched windows I saw Hesketh--solid as I am now. And gone was the warty and pockmarked skin that even the Blood had not been able to smooth, and the twisted and deformed limbs. This was the Hesketh I'd always loved, the pure and beautiful damsel inside the wreckage of malnourished and cruelly formed flesh. This was the Hesketh I'd loved with all my heart."
He paused and studied Marius.
"She was a phantom, this Hesketh, but she was alive! Her hair was flaxen and her body tall and straight. Her pale hands and face were shimmering and soft. And another phantom was with her, as physically visible as was she. This phantom went by the name of Gremt. And it was he who had aided her wandering shade and given it solace and taught her how to appear to eyes such as yours and mine. This was Gremt who had taught her how to hold together the airy physical shape in which she sought to appear. It was he who taught her how to make that shape solid and enduring so that I could reach out and touch her with my hands. I could even kiss her lips. I could even take her in my arms."
Marius said nothing, but he had seen ghosts this powerful himself. Not often, but he had seen them. He'd known of them but not known ever who they were.
He waited but Teskhamen had fallen quiet.
"What happened?" Marius whispered. "Why did this change the course of your life?"
"It changed everything because she remained with me," said Teskhamen, looking at Marius again. "It was no fleeting moment. And with each passing night she grew stronger, and more clever at retaining her physical shape, and Gremt, whose powerful solid shape would have fooled any mortal, shared my hearth in the old monastery as she did, and we spoke of things invisible and visible and of blood drinkers and of the spirit that had come into the ancient Queen."