The Queen of the Damned(62)

"I never found my sister. I never found a mortal or immortal who had set eyes upon her or heard her name. Then in this century, in the years after the second great war, in the high mountain jungles of Peru, the indisputable evidence of my sister's presence was discovered by a lone archaeologist on the walls of a shallow cave-pictures my sister had created-of stick figures and crude pigment which told the tale of our lives together, the sufferings you all know.



"But six thousand years ago these drawings had been carved into the stone. And six thousand years ago my sister had been taken from me. No other evidence of her existence was ever found.



"Yet I have never abandoned the hope of finding my sister. I have always known, as only a twin might, that she walks this earth still, that I am not here alone.



"And now, within these last ten nights, I have, for the first time, proof that my sister is still with me. It has come to me through the dreams.



"These are Mekare's thoughts; Mekare's images; Mekare's rancor and pain."



Silence. All eyes were fixed on her. Marius was quietly stunned. He feared to be the one to speak again, but this was worse than he had imagined and the implications were now entirely clear. The origin of these dreams was almost certainly not a conscious survivor of the millennia; rather the visions had-very possibly- come from one who had no more mind now than an animal in whom memory is a spur to action which the animal does not question or understand. It would explain their clarity; it would explain their repetition.



And the flashes he had seen of something moving through the jungles, this was Mekare herself.



"Yes," Maharet said immediately. " 'In the jungles. Walking,' " she whispered. "The words of the dying archaeologist, scribbled on a piece of paper and left for me to find when I came. 'In the jungles. Walking.' But where?"



It was Louis who broke the silence.



"Then the dreams may not be a deliberate message," he said, his words marked by a slight French accent. "They may simply be the outpouring of a tortured soul."



"No. They are a message," Khayman said. "They are a warning. They are meant for all of us, and for the Mother as well."



"But how can you say this?" Gabrielle asked him. "We don't know what her mind is now, or that she even knows that we are here."



"You don't know the whole story," Khayman said. "I know it. Maharet will tell it." He looked to Maharet.



"I saw her," Jesse said unobtrusively, her voice tentative as she looked at Maharet. "She's crossed a great river; she's coming. I saw her! No, that's not right. I saw as if I were she."



"Yes," Marius answered. "Through her eyes!"



"I saw her red hair when I looked down," Jesse said. "I saw the jungle giving way with each step."



"The dreams must be a communication," Mael said with sudden impatience. "For why else would the message be so strong? Our private thoughts don't carry such power. She raises her voice; she wants someone or something to know what she is thinking. . . ."



"Or she is obsessed and acting upon that obsession," Marius answered. "And moving towards a certain goal." He paused. "To be united with you, her sister! What else could she possibly want?"



"No," Khayman said. "That is not her goal." Again he looked at Maharet. "She has a promise to keep to the Mother, and that is what the dreams mean."



Maharet studied him for a moment in silence; it seemed this was almost beyond her endurance, this discussion of her sister, yet she fortified herself silently for the ordeal that lay ahead.



"We were there in the beginning," Khayman said. "We were the first children of the Mother; and in these dreams lies the story of how it began." "Then you must tell us ... all of it, Manus said as gently as he could.



"Yes." Maharet sighed. "And I will." She looked at each of them in turn and then back to Jesse. "I must tell you the whole story," she said, "so that you can understand what we may be powerless to avert. You see, this is not merely the story of the beginning. It may be the story of the end as well." She sighed suddenly as if the prospect were too much for her. "Our world has never seen such upheaval," she said, looking at Marius. "Le-stat's music, the rising of the Mother, so much death."



She looked down for a moment, as if collecting herself again for the effort. And then she glanced at Khayman and at Jesse, who were the ones she most loved.



"I have never told it before," she said as if pleading for indulgence. "It has for me now the hard purity of mythology-those times when I was alive. When I could still see the sun. But in this mythology is rooted all the truths that I know. And if we go back, we may find the future, and the means to change it. The very least that we can do is seek to understand."



A hush fell. All waited with respectful patience for her to begin.



"In the beginning," she said, "we were witches, my sister and I. We talked to the spirits and the spirits loved us. Until she sent her soldiers into our land."



LESTAT -THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN



SHE LET ME GO. INSTANTLY I BEGAN TO PLUMMET; the wind was a roar in my ears. But the worst part was that I couldn't see! I heard her say Rise.



There was a moment of exquisite helplessness. I was plunging towards the earth and nothing was going to stop it; then I looked up, my eyes stinging, the clouds closing over me, and I remembered the tower, and the feeling of rising. I made the decision. Go up! And my descent stopped at once.



It was as if a current of air had caught me. I went up hundreds of feet in one instant, and then the clouds were below me-a white light that I could scarcely see. I decided to drift. Why did I have to go anywhere for the moment? Maybe I could open my eyes fully, and see through the wind, if I wasn't afraid of the pain.



She was laughing somewhere-in my head or over it, I didn't know which. Come on, prince, come higher.



I spun around and shot upwards again, until I saw her coming towards me, her garments swirling about her, her heavy plaits lifted more gently by the wind.



She caught me and kissed me. I tried to steady myself, holding onto her, to look down and really see something through the breaks in the clouds. Mountains, snow-covered and dazzling in the moonlight, with great bluish flanks that disappeared into deep valleys of fathomless snow.



"Lift me now," she whispered in my ear. "Carry me to the northwest."



"I don't know the direction."



"Yes, you do. The body knows it. Your mind knows it. Don't ask them which way it is. Tell them that is the way you wish to go. You know the principles. When you lifted your rifle, you looked at the wolf running; you didn't calculate the distance or the speed of the bullet; you fired; the wolf went down."



I rose again with that same incredible buoyancy; and then I realized she had become a great weight in my arm. Her eyes were fixed on me; she was making me carry her. I smiled, I think I laughed aloud. I lifted her and kissed her again, and continued the ascent without interruption. To the northwest. That is to the right and to the right again and higher. My mind did know it; it knew the terrain over which we'd come. I made a little artful turn and then another; I was spinning, clutching her close to me, rather loving the weight of her body, the press of her breasts against me, and her lips again closing delicately on mine.



She drew close to my ear. "Do you hear it?" she asked.



I listened; the wind seemed annihilating; yet there came a dull chorus from the earth, human voices chanting; some in time with each other, others at random; voices praying aloud in an Asian tongue. Far far away I could hear them, and then near at hand. Important to distinguish the two sounds. First, there was a long procession of worshipers ascending through the mountain passes and over the cliffs, chanting to keep themselves alive as they trudged on in spite of weariness and cold. And within a building, a loud, ecstatic chorus, chanting fiercely over the clang of cymbals and drums.



1 gathered her head close to mine and looked down, but the clouds had become a solid bed of whiteness. Yet I could see through the minds of the worshipers the brilliant vision of a courtyard and a temple of marble arches and vast painted rooms. The procession wound towards the temple.



"I want to see it!" I said. She didn't answer, but she didn't stop me as I drifted downward, stretching out on the air as if I were a bird flying, yet descending until we were in the very middle of the clouds. She had become light again, as if she were nothing.



And as we left the sea of whiteness, I saw the temple gleaming below, a tiny clay model of itself, it seemed, the terrain buckling here and there beneath its meandering walls. The stench of burning bodies rose from its blazing pyres. And towards this cluster of roofs and towers, men and women wound their way along perilous paths from as far as 1 could see.



"Tell me who is inside, my prince," she said. "Tell me who is the god of this temple."



See it! Draw close to it. The old trick, but all at once I began to fall. I let out a terrible cry. She caught me.



"More care, my prince," she said, steadying me.



I thought my heart was going to burst.