"Osiris was the god of the corn, " she said. "He was a good god to the Egyptians. What could this have to do with us? " She glanced at the books I was studying. "You have a great deal to learn, my son. Many an ancient god was dismembered and mourned by his goddess. Read of Actaeon and Adonis. The ancients loved those stories. " And she was gone. And I was alone in the candlelighted library, leaning on my elbows amid all these books. I brooded on Armand's dream of the sanctuary of Those Who Must Be Kept in the mountains. Was it a magic that went back to the Egyptian times? How had the Children of Darkness forgotten such things? Maybe it had all been poetry to the Venetian master, the mention of Typhon, the slayer of his brother, nothing more than that. I went out into the night with my chisel. I wrote my questions to Marius on stones that were older than us both. Marius had become so real to me that we were talking together, the way that Nicki and I had once done. He was the confidant who received my excitement, my enthusiasm, my sublime bewilderment at all the wonders and puzzles of the world. But as my studies deepened, as my education broadened, I was getting that first awesome inkling of what eternity might be. I was alone among humans, and my writing to Marius couldn't keep me from knowing my own monstrosity as I had in those first Paris nights so long ago. After all, Marius wasn't really there. And neither was Gabrielle. Almost from the beginning, Armand's predictions had proved true.
2
Before we were even out of France, Gabrielle was breaking the journey to disappear for several nights at a time. In Vienna, she often stayed away for over a fortnight, and by the time I settled in the palazzo in Venice she was going away for months on end. During my first visit to Rome, she vanished for a half year. And after she left me in Naples, I returned to Venice without her, angrily leaving her to find her way back to Veneto on her own, which she did. Of course it was the countryside that drew her, the forest or the mountains, or islands on which no human beings lived. And she would return in such a tattered state-her shoes worn out, her clothes ripped, her hair in hopeless tangles-that she was every bit as frightening to look at as the ragged members of the old Paris coven had been. Then she'd walk about my rooms in her dirty neglected garments staring at the cracks in the plaster or the light caught in the distortions of the handblown window glass. Why should immortals pore over newspapers, she would ask, or dwell in palaces? Or carry gold in their pockets? Or write letters to a mortal family left behind? In this eerie, rapid undertone she'd speak of cliffs she had climbed, the drifts of snow through which she had tumbled, the caves full of mysterious markings and ancient fossils that she had found. Then she would go as silently as she'd come, and I would be left watching for her and waiting for her-and bitter and angry at her, and resenting her when she finally came back. One night during our first visit to Verona, she startled me in a dark street.
"Is your father still alive? " she asked. Two months she'd been gone that time. I'd missed her bitterly, and there she was asking about them as if they mattered finally. Yet when I answered,
"yes, and very ill," she seemed not to hear. I tried to tell her then that things in France were bleak indeed. There would surely be a revolution. She shook her head and waved it all away.
"Don't think about them anymore, " she said. "Forget them. " And once again, she was gone. The truth was, I didn't want to forget them.
I never stopped writing to Roger for news of my family. I wrote to him more often than I wrote to Eleni at the theater. I'd sent for portraits of my nieces and nephews. I sent presents back to France from every place in which I stopped. And I did worry about the revolution, as any mortal Frenchman might. And finally, as Gabrielle's absences grew longer and our times together more strained and uncertain, I started to argue with her about these things.
"Time will take our family, " I said. "Time will take the France we knew. So why should I give them up now while I can still have them?
I need these things, I tell you. This is what life is to me! " But this was only the half of it. I didn't have her any more than I had the others.
She must have known what I was really saying. She must have heard the recrimination behind it all. Little speeches like this saddened her. They brought out the tenderness in her. She'd let me get clean clothes for her, comb out her hair. And after that we'd hunt together and talk together. Maybe she would even go to the casinos with me, or to the opera. She'd be a great and beautiful lady for a little while. And those moments still held us together. They perpetuated our belief that we were still a little coven, a pair of lovers, prevailing against the mortal world. Gathered by the fire in some country villa, riding together on the driver's seat of the coach as I held the reins, walking together through the midnight forest, we still exchanged our various observations now and then. We even went in search of haunted houses together-a newfound pastime that excited us both. In fact, Gabrielle would sometimes return from one of her journeys precisely because she had heard of a ghostly visitation and she wanted me to go with her to see what we could. Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane. Yet there were times when we saw fleeting apparitions or mayhem that we couldn't explain- objects flung about, voices roaring from the mouths of possessed children, icy currents that blew out the candles in a locked room. But we never learned anything from all this. We saw no more than a hundred mortal scholars had already described. It was just a game to us finally. And when I look back on it now, I know we went on with it because it kept us together gave us convivial moments which otherwise we would not have had. But Gabrielle's absences weren't the only thing destroying our affection for each other as the years passed. It was her manner when she was with me-the ideas she would put forth. She still had that habit of speaking exactly what was on her mind and little more. One night in our little house in the Via Ghibellina in Florence, she appeared after a month's absence and started to expound at once.
"You know the creatures of the night are ripe for a great leader, " she said. "Not some superstitious mumbler of old rites, but a great dark monarch who will galvanize us according to new principles. "