"I knew I could not be Marius, the Roman, any longer. But I would take from him what I could. I sent my beloved slaves back home. I wrote my father to say that a serious illness compelled me to live out my remaining days in the heat and dryness of Egypt. I packed off the rest of my history to those in Rome who would read it and publish it, and then I set out for Alexandria with gold in my pockets, with my old travel documents, and with two dull-witted slaves who never questioned that I traveled by night.
"And within a month of the great Samhain Feast in Gaul, I was roaming the black crooked nighttime streets of Alexandria, searching for the old gods with my silent voice.
"I was mad, but I knew the madness would pass. I had to find the old gods. And you know why I had to find them. It was not only the threat of the calamity again, the sun god seeking me out in the darkness of my daytime slumber, or visiting me with obliterating fire in the full darkness of the night.
"I had to find the old gods because I could not bear to be alone among men. The full horror of it was upon me, and though I killed only the murderer, the evildoer, my conscience was too finely tuned for self-deception. I could not bear the realization that I, Marius, who had known and enjoyed such love in his life, was the relentless bringer of death. "
9
"Alexandria was not an old city. It had existed for just a little over three hundred years. But it was a great port and the home of the largest libraries in the Roman world. Scholars from all over the Empire came to study there, and I had been one of them in another lifetime, and now I found myself there again.
"Had not the god told me to come, I would have gone deeper into Egypt, 'to the bottom,' to use Mael's phrase, suspecting that the answers to all riddles lay in the older shrines.
"But a curious feeling came on me in Alexandria. I knew the gods were there. I knew they were guiding my feet when I sought the streets of the whorehouses and the thieves' dens, the places where men went to lose their souls.
"At night I lay on my bed in my little Roman house and I called to the gods. I grappled with my madness. I puzzled just as you have puzzled over the power and strength and crippling emotions which I now possessed. And one night just before morning, when the light of only one lamp shone through the sheer veils of the bed where I lay, I turned my eyes towards the distant garden doorway and saw a still black figure standing there.
"For one moment it seemed a dream, this figure, because it carried no scent, did not seem to breathe, did not make a sound. Then I knew it was one of the gods, but it was gone and I was left sitting up and staring after it, trying to remember what I had seen: a black naked thing with a bald head and red piercing eyes, a thing that seemed lost in its own stillness, strangely diffident, only marshaling its strength to move at the last moment before complete discovery.
"The next night in the back streets I heard a voice telling me to come. But it was a less articulate voice than that which had come from the tree. It made known to me only that the door was near. And finally there came the still and silent moment when I stood before the door.
"It was a god who opened it for me. It was a god who said Come.
"I was frightened as I descended the inevitable stairway, as I followed a steeply sloping tunnel. I lighted the candle I had brought with me,
and I saw that I was entering an underground temple, a place older than the city of Alexandria, a sanctuary built perhaps under the ancient pharaohs, its walls covered with tiny colored pictures depicting the life of old Egypt.
"And then there was the writing, the magnificent picture writing with its tiny mummies and birds and embracing arms without bodies, and coiling snakes.
"I moved on, coming into a vast place of square pillars and a soaring ceiling. The same paintings decorated every inch of stone here.
"And then I saw in the comer of my eye what seemed at first a statue, a black figure standing near a pillar with one hand raised to rest against the stone. But I knew it was no statue. No Egyptian god made out of diorite ever stood in this attitude nor wore a real linen skirt about its loins.
"I turned slowly, bracing myself against the full sight of it, and saw the same burnt flesh, the same streaming hair, though it was black, the same yellow eyes. The lips were shriveled around the teeth and the gums, and the breath came out of its throat full of pain.
" 'How and whence did you come?' he asked in Greek.
"I saw myself as he saw me, luminous and strong, even my blue eyes something of an incidental mystery, and I saw my Roman garments, my linen tunic gathered in gold buckles on my shoulders, my red cloak. With my long yellow hair, I must have looked like a wanderer from the north woods, 'civilized' only on the surface, and perhaps this was now true.
"But he was the one who concerned me. And I saw him more fully, the seamed flesh burnt to his ribs and molded to his collarbone and the jutting bones of his hips. He was not starved, this thing. He had recently drunk human blood. But his agony was like heat coming from him, as though the fire still cooked him from within, as though he were a self-contained hell.
"'How have you escaped the burning?' he asked. 'What saved you? Answer!'
"'Nothing saved me,' I said, speaking Greek as he did.
"I approached him holding the candle to the side when he shied from it. He had been thin in life, broad-shouldered like the old pharaohs, and his long black hair was cropped straight across the forehead in that old style.
" 'I wasn't made when it happened,' I said, 'but afterwards, by the god of the sacred grove in Gaul.'
" 'Ah, then he was unharmed, this one who made you.'
" 'No, burned as you are, but he had enough strength to do it. He gave and took the blood over and over again. He said, "Go into Egypt and find why this has happened. " He said the gods of the wood had burst into flames, some in their sleep and some awake. He said this had happened all over the north.'
"'Yes.' He nodded, and he gave a dry rasping laugh that shook his entire form. 'And only the ancient had the strength to survive, to inherit the agony which only immortality can sustain. And so we suffer. But you have been made. You have come. You will make more. But is it justice to make more? Would the Father and the Mother have allowed this to happen to us if the time had not come?'
" 'But who are the Father and the Mother?' I asked. I knew he did not mean the earth when he said Mother.
" 'The first of us,' he answered, 'those from whom all of us descend.'
"I tried to penetrate his thoughts, feel the truth of them, but he knew what I was doing, and his mind folded up like a flower at dusk.
" 'Come with me,' he said. And he commenced to walk with a shuffling step out of the large room and down a long corridor, decorated as the chamber had been.
"I sensed we were in an even older place, something built before the temple from which we'd just come. I do not know how I knew it. The chill you felt on the steps here on the island was not there. You don't feel such things in Egypt. You feel something else. You feel the presence of something living in the air itself.
"But there was more palpable evidence of antiquity as we walked on. The paintings on these walls were older, the colors fainter, and here and there was damage where the colored plaster had flaked and fallen away. The style had changed. The black hair of the little figures was longer and fuller, and it seemed the whole was more lovely, more full of light and intricate design.
"Somewhere far off water dripped on stone. The sound gave a songlike echo through the passage. It seemed the walls had captured life in these delicate and tenderly painted figures, it seemed that the magic attempted again and again by the ancient religious artists had its tiny glowing kernel of power. I could hear whispers of life where there were no whispers. I could feel the great continuity of history even if there was no one who was aware.