The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle (The Vampire Chronicles) (6 page)

The whole scandal had something to do with Augustus’s daughter, Julia, who was a notorious slut by anyone’s standards. How Ovid became involved in Julia’s love affairs I don’t know. Perhaps his sensuous early poetry, the
Amores
, was considered to be a bad influence. There was also a lot of “reform” in the air during the reign of Augustus, a lot of talk of old values.

I don’t think anyone knows what really happened between Caesar Augustus and Ovid, but Ovid was banished for the rest of his life from Imperial Rome.

But I had read the
Amores
and the
Metamorphoses
in well-worn copies by the time of this incident which I want to recount. And many of my Father’s friends were always worried about Ovid.

Now to the specific recollection. I was ten years old, I came in from playing covered with dust from
head to foot, my hair loose, my dress torn, and breezed into my Father’s large receiving room—and I plopped down at the foot of his couch to listen to what was being said, as he lounged there with all appropriate Roman dignity, chatting with several other lounging men who had come to visit.

I knew all of the men but one, and this one was fair-haired and blue-eyed, and very tall, and he turned, during the conversation—which was all whispers and nods—and winked at me.

This was Marius, with skin slightly tanned from his travels and a flashing beauty in his eyes. He had three names like everyone else. But again, I will not disclose the name of his family. But I knew it. I knew he was sort of the “bad boy” in an intellectual way, the “poet” and the “loafer.” What nobody had told me was that he was beautiful.

Now, on this day, this was Marius when he was alive, about fifteen years before he was to be made a vampire. I can calculate that he was only twenty-five. But I’m not certain.

To continue, the men paid no attention to me, and it became plain to my ever curious little mind that they were giving my Father news of Ovid, that the tall blond one with the remarkable blue eyes, the one called Marius, had just returned from the Baltic Coast, and he had given my Father several presents, which were in fact good copies of Ovid’s work, both past and current.

The men assured my Father that it was still far too
dangerous to go crying to Caesar Augustus over Ovid, and my Father accepted this. But if I’m not mistaken, he entrusted some money for Ovid to Marius, the blond one.

When the gentlemen were all leaving, I saw Marius in the atrium, got a measure of his full height, which was quite unusual for a Roman, and let out a girlish gasp and then a streak of laughter. He winked at me again.

Marius had his hair short then, clipped military-Roman-style with a few modest curls on his forehead; his hair was long when he was later made a vampire, and he wears it long now, but then it was the typical boring Roman military cut. But it was blond and full of sunlight in the atrium, and he seemed the brightest and most impressive man I’d ever laid eyes upon. He was full of kindness when he looked at me.

“Why are you so tall?” I asked him. My Father thought this was amusing, of course, and he did not care what anyone else thought of his dusty little daughter, hanging onto his arms and speaking to his honored company.

“My precious one,” Marius said, “I’m tall because I’m a barbarian!” He laughed and was flirtatious when he laughed, with a deference to me as a little lady, which was rather rare.

Suddenly he made his hands into claws and ran at me like a bear.

I loved him instantly!

“No, truly!” I said. “You can’t be a barbarian. I know your Father and all your sisters; they live just
down the hill. The family is always talking about you at the table, saying only nice things, of course.”

“Of that I’m sure,” he said, breaking into laughter.

I knew my Father was getting anxious.

What I didn’t know was that a ten-year-old girl could be betrothed.

Marius drew himself up and said in his gentle very fine voice, trained for public rhetoric as well as words of love, “I am descended through my mother from the Keltoi, little beauty, little muse. I come from the tall blond people of the North, the people of Gaul. My mother was a princess there, or so I am told. Do you know who they are?”

I said of course I knew and began to recite verbatim from Julius Caesar’s account of conquering Gaul, or the land of the Keltoi: “All Gaul is made up of three parts …”

Marius was quite genuinely impressed. So was everybody. So I went on and on, “The Keltoi are separated from the Aquitani by the river Garonne, and the tribe of the Belgae by the rivers Marne and Seine—”

My Father, being slightly embarrassed by this time, with his daughter glorying in attention, spoke up to gently assure everyone that I was his precious joy, and I was let to run wild, and please make nothing of it.

And I said, being bold, and a born troublemaker, “Give my love to the great Ovid! Because I too wish he would come home to Rome.”

I then rattled off several steamy lines of the
Amores:

All laughed, except my Father, and Marius went wild with delight, clapping his hands. That was all the encouragement I needed to rush at him now like a bear, as he had rushed at me, and to continue singing out Ovid’s hot words:

My Father grabbed me by the small of my upper arm, and said, “That’s it, Lydia, wrap it up!” And the men laughed all the harder, commiserating with him, and embracing him, and then laughing again.

But I had to have one final victory over this team of adults.

“Pray, Father,” I said, “let me finish with some wise and patriotic words which Ovid said:

“ ‘I congratulate myself on not having arrived into the world until the present time. This age suits my taste.’ ”

This seemed to astonish Marius more than to amuse him. But my Father gathered me close and said very clearly:

“Lydia, Ovid wouldn’t say that now, and now you, for being such a … a scholar and philosopher in one, should assure your Father’s dearest friends that you know full well Ovid was banished from Rome by Augustus for good reason and that he can never return home.”

In other words, he was saying “Shut up about Ovid.”

But Marius, undeterred, dropped on his knees before me, lean and handsome with mesmeric blue eyes, and he took my hand and kissed it and said, “I will give Ovid your love, little Lydia. But your Father is right. We must all agree with the Emperor’s censure. After all, we are Romans.” He then did the very strange thing of speaking to me purely as if I were an adult. “Augustus Caesar has given far more to Rome, I think, than anyone ever hoped. And he too is a poet. He wrote a poem called ‘Ajax’ and burnt it up himself because he said it wasn’t good.”

I was having the time of my life. I would have run off with Marius then and there!

But all I could do was dance around him as he went out of the vestibule and out the gate.

I waved to him.

He lingered. “Goodbye, little Lydia,” he said. He then spoke under his breath to my Father, and I heard my Father say:

“You are out of your mind!”

My Father turned his back on Marius, who gave me a sad smile and disappeared.

“What did he mean? What happened?” I asked my Father. “What’s the matter?”

“Listen, Lydia,” said my Father. “Have you in all your readings come across the word ‘betrothed’?”

“Yes, Father, of course.”

“Well, that sort of wanderer and dreamer likes nothing better than to betroth himself to a young girl of ten because it means she is not old enough to marry and he has years of freedom, without the censure of the Emperor. They do it all the time.”

“No, no, Father,” I said. “I shall never forget him.”

I think I forgot him the next day.

I didn’t see Marius again for five years.

I remember because I was fifteen, and should have been married and didn’t want to be married at all. I had wriggled out of it year after year, feigning illness, madness, total uncontrollable fits. But time was running out on me. In fact I’d been eligible for marriage since I was twelve.

At this time, we were all standing together at the foot of the Palatine Hill, watching a most sacrosanct ceremony—the Lupercalia—just one of so many festivals that were integral in Roman life.

Now the Lupercalia was very important to us, though there’s no way to relate its significance to a Christian’s concept of religion. It was pious to enjoy such a festival, to participate as a citizen and as a virtuous Roman.

And besides it was a great pleasure.

So I was there, not so far from the cave of the Lupercal, watching with other young women, as the
two chosen men of that year were smeared with blood from a sacrifice of goats and then draped in the bleeding skins of the sacrificed animals. I couldn’t see all of this very well, but I had seen it many times, and when years before two of my brothers had run in this festival, I had pushed to the front to get a good look at it.

On this occasion, I did have a fairly good view when each of the two young men took his own company and began his run around the base of the Palatine Hill. I moved forward because I was supposed to do it. The young men were hitting lightly on the arm of every young woman with a strip of goatskin, which was supposed to purify us. Render us fertile.

I stepped forward and received the ceremonial blow, and then stepped back again, wishing I was a man and could run around the hill with the other men, not an unusual thought for me at any time in my mortal life.

I had some sarcastic inner thoughts about “being purified,” but by this age I behaved in public and would not on any account have humiliated my Father or my brothers.

These strips of goatskin, as you know, David, are called
Februa
, and February comes from that word. So much for language and all the magic it unwittingly carries with it. Surely the Lupercalia had something to do with Romulus and Remus; perhaps it even echoed some ancient human sacrifice. After all, the young men’s heads were smeared with goat blood. It gives me shivers, because in Etruscan times,
long before I was born, this might have been a far more cruel ceremony.

Perhaps this was the occasion that Marius saw my arms. Because I was exposing them to this ceremonial lash, and was already, as you can see, much of a show-off in general, laughing with the others as the company of men continued their run.

In the crowd, I saw Marius. He looked at me, then back to his book. So strange. I saw him standing against a tree trunk and writing. No one did this—stand against a tree, hold a book in one hand and write with the other. The slave stood beside him with a bottle of ink.

Marius’s hair was long and most beautiful. Quite wild.

I said to my Father, “Look, there’s our barbarian friend Marius, the tall one, and he’s writing.”

My Father smiled and said, “Marius is always writing. Marius is good for writing, if for nothing else. Turn around, Lydia. Be still.”

“But he looked at me, Father. I want to talk to him.”

“You will not, Lydia! You will not grace him with one small smile!”

On the way home, I asked my Father, “If you’re going to marry me to someone—if there’s no way short of suicide that I can avoid this disgusting development—why don’t you marry me to Marius? I don’t understand it. I’m rich. He’s rich. I know his Mother was a wild Keltoi princess, but his Father has adopted him.”

My Father said witheringly, “Where have you learned all this?” He stopped in his tracks, always an ominous sign. The crowd broke and streamed around.

“I don’t know; it’s common knowledge.” I turned. There was Marius hovering about, glancing at me. “Father,” I said, “please let me speak to him!”

My Father knelt down. Most of the crowd had gone on. “Lydia, I know this is dreadful for you. I have caved to every objection you have raised to your suitors. But believe you me, the Emperor himself would not approve of you marrying such a mad wandering historian as Marius! He has never served in the military, he cannot enter the Senate, it is quite impossible. When you marry, you will marry well.”

As we walked away, I turned again, thinking only to pick Marius out from the others, but to my surprise he was stark still, looking at me. With his flowing hair, he much resembled the Vampire Lestat. He is taller than Lestat, but he has the same lithe build, the same very blue eyes and a muscular strength to him, and a squareness of face which is almost pretty.

I pulled away from my Father and ran up to him.

“Well, I wanted to marry you,” I said, “but my Father has said no.”

I’ll never forget the expression on his face. But before he could speak, my Father had gathered me up and gone into obliterating respectable conversation:

“How now, Marius, how goes it with your brother
in the Army. And how is it with your history. I hear you have written thirteen volumes.”

My Father backed up, virtually carrying me away.

Marius did not move or answer. Soon we were with others hurrying up the hill.

All the course of our lives was changed at that moment. But there was no conceivable way Marius or I could have known it.

Twenty years would pass before we would meet again.

I was thirty-five, then. I can say that we met in a realm of darkness in more respects than one.

For now, let me fill up the gap.

I was married twice, due to pressure from the Imperial House. Augustus wanted us all to have children. I had none. My husbands seeded plenty, however, with slave girls. So I was legally divorced and freed twice over, and determined then to retire from social life, just so the Emperor Tiberius, who had come to the Imperial throne at the age of fifty, would not meddle with me, for he was more a public puritan and domestic dictator than Augustus. If I kept to the house, if I didn’t go abroad to banquets and parties and hang around with the Empress Livia, Augustus’s wife and mother of Tiberius, perhaps I wouldn’t be pushed into becoming a stepmother! I’d stay home. I had to care for my Father. He deserved it. Even though he was perfectly healthy, he was still old!