BLOOD AND GOLD EXCERPT
COPYRIGHT ANNE RICE
The Listener
Chapter 1
His name was Thorne. In the ancient language of the runes, it had been
longer - Thornevald. But when he became a blood drinker, his name had
been changed to Thorne. And Thorne he remained now, centuries later, as
he lay in his cave in the ice, dreaming.
When he had first come to the frozen land, he had hoped he would sleep
eternally. But now and then the thirst for blood awakened him, and using
the Cloud Gift, he rose into the air, and went in search of the Snow
Hunters.
He fed off them, careful never to take too much blood from any one so
that none died on account of him. And when he needed furs and boots he
took them as well, and returned to his hiding place.
These Snow Hunters were not his people. They were dark of skin and had
slanted eyes, and they spoke a different tongue, but he had known them
in the olden times when he had travelled with his uncle into the land to
the East for trading. He had not liked trading. He had preferred war.
But he'd learnt many things on those adventures.
In his sleep in the North, he dreamed. He could not help it. The Mind
Gift let him hear the voices of other blood drinkers.
Unwillingly he saw through their eyes, and beheld the world as they
beheld it.
Sometimes he didn't mind. He liked it. Modern things amused him. He
listened to far-away electric songs. With the Mind Gift he understood
such things as steam engines and rail roads; he even understood
computers and automobiles. He felt he knew the cities he had left behind
though it had been centuries since he'd forsaken them.
An awareness had come over him that he wasn't going to die. Loneliness
in itself could not destroy him. Neglect was insufficient. And so he
slept.
Then a strange thing happened. A catastrophe befell the world of the
blood drinkers.
A young singer of sagas had come. His name was Lestat, and in his
electric songs, Lestat broadcast old secrets, secrets which Thorne had
never known.
Then a Queen had risen, an evil and ambitious being. She had claimed to
have within her the Sacred Core of all blood drinkers, so that, should
she die, all the race would perish with her.
Thorne had been amazed.
He had never heard these myths of his own kind. He did not know that he
believed this thing.
But as he slept, as he dreamt, as he watched, this Queen began, with the
Fire Gift, to destroy blood drinkers everywhere throughout the world.
Thorne heard their cries as they tried to escape; he saw their deaths in
so far as others saw such things.
As she roamed the earth, this Queen came close to Thorne but she passed
over him. He was secretive and quiet in his cave. Perhaps she didn't
sense his presence. But he had sensed hers and never had he encountered
such age or strength except from the blood drinker who had given him the
Blood.
And he found himself thinking of that one, the Maker, the red-haired
witch with the bleeding eyes.
The catastrophe among his kind grew worse. More were slain; and out of
hiding there came blood drinkers as old as the Queen herself, and Thorne
saw these beings.
At last there came the red-haired one who had made him. He saw her as
others saw her. And at first he could not believe that she still lived;
it had been so long since he'd left her in the Far South that he hadn't
dared to hope she was still alive. The eyes and ears of other blood
drinkers gave him the infallible proof. And when he looked on her in his
dreams, he was overwhelmed with a tender feeling and a rage.
She thrived, this creature who had given him the Blood, and she despised
the Evil Queen and she wanted to stop her. Theirs was a hatred for each
other which went back thousands of years.
At last there was a coming together of these beings - old ones from the
First Brood of blood drinkers, and others whom the blood drinker Lestat
loved and whom the Evil Queen did not chose to destroy.
Dimly, as he lay still in the ice, Thorne heard their strange talk, as
round a table they sat, like so many powerful Knights, except that in
this council, the women were equal to the men.
With the Queen they sought to reason, struggling to persuade her to end
her reign of violence, to forsake her evil designs.
He listened, but he could not really understand all that was said among
these blood drinkers. He knew only that the Queen must be stopped.
The Queen loved the blood drinker, Lestat. But even he could not turn
her from disasters, so reckless was her vision, so depraved her mind.
Did the Queen truly have the Sacred Core of all blood drinkers within
herself? If so, how could she be destroyed?
Thorne wished the Mind Gift was stronger in him, or that he had used it
more often. During his long centuries of sleep, his strength had grown,
but now he felt his distance and that he was weak.
But as he watched, his eyes open, as though that might help him to see,
there came into his vision another red-haired one, the twin sister of
the woman who had loved him so long ago. It astonished him, as only a
twin can do.
And Thorne came to understand that the Maker he had loved so much had
lost this twin thousands of years ago.
The Evil Queen was the mistress of this disaster. She despised the
red-haired twins. She had divided them. And the lost twin came now to
fulfil an ancient curse she had laid on the Evil Queen.
As she drew closer and closer to the Queen, the lost twin thought only
of destruction. She did not sit at the council table. She did not know
reason or restraint.
"We shall all die," Thorne whispered in his sleep, drowsy in the snow
and ice, the eternal arctic night coldly enclosing him. He did not move
to join his immortal companions. But he watched. He listened. He would
do so until the last moment. He could do no less.
Finally, the lost twin reached her destination. She rose against the
Queen. The other blood drinkers around her looked on in horror. As the
two female beings struggled, as they fought as two warriors upon a
battlefield, a strange vision suddenly filled Thorne's mind utterly, as
though he lay in the snow and he were looking at the heavens.
What he saw was a great intricate web stretching out in all directions,
and caught within it many pulsing points of light. At the very centre of
this web was a single vibrant flame. He knew the flame was the Queen;
and he knew that the other points of light were all the other blood
drinkers. He himself was one of those tiny points of light. The tale of
the Sacred Core was true. He could see it with his own eyes. And now
came the moment for all to surrender to darkness and silence. Now came
the end.
The far-flung complex web grew glistening and bright; the core appeared
to explode; and then all went dim for a long moment, during which he
felt a sweet vibration in his limbs as he often felt in simple sleep,
and he thought to himself, Ah, so, now we are dying. And there is no
pain.
Yet it was like Ragnarok for his old gods, when the great god, Heimdall,
the World Brightener, would blow his horn summoning the gods of Aiser to
their final battle.
"And we end with a war as well," Thorne whispered in his cave. But his
thoughts did not end.
It seemed the best thing that he live no more, until he thought of her,
his red-haired one, his Maker. He wanted so badly to see her again.
Why had she never told him of her lost twin? Why had she never entrusted
to him the myths of which the blood drinker Lestat sang? Surely she had
known the secret of the Evil Queen with her Sacred Core.
He shifted; he stirred in his sleep. The great sprawling web had faded
from his vision. But with uncommon clarity he could see the red-haired
twins, spectacular women.
They stood side by side, these comely creatures, the one in rags, the
other in splendour. And through the eyes of the other blood drinkers he
came to know that the stranger twin had slain the Queen, and had taken
the Sacred Core within herself.
"Behold, the Queen of the Damned," said the Maker twin as she presented
to the others her long-lost sister. Thorne understood her. Thorne saw
the suffering in her face. But the face of the stranger twin, the Queen
of the Damned, was blank.
In the nights that followed the survivors of the catastrophe remained
together. They told their tales to one another. And their stories filled
the air like so many songs from the bards of old, sung in the mead hall.
And Lestat, leaving his electric instruments for music, became once more
the chronicler, making a story of the battle that would pass
effortlessly into the mortal world.
Soon the red-haired sisters moved away, seeking a hiding place where
Thorne's distant eye could not find them.
Be still, he told himself. Forget the things that you have seen. There
is no reason for you to rise from the ice, any more than there ever was.
Sleep is your friend. Dreams are your unwelcome guests.
Lie quiet and you will lapse back into peace again. Be like the god
Heimdall before the battle call, so still that you can hear the wool
grow on the backs of sheep, and the grass grow far away in the land
where the snow melts.
But more visions came to him.
The blood drinker Lestat brought about some new and confusing tumult in
the mortal world. It was a marvellous secret from the Christian past
that he bore, which he entrusted to a mortal girl.
There would never be any peace for this one called Lestat. He was like
one of Thorne's people, like one of the warriors of Thorne's time.
Thorne watched as once again, his red-haired one appeared, his lovely
Maker, her eyes red with mortal blood as always, and finely glad and
full of authority and power, and this time come to bind the unhappy
blood drinker Lestat in chains.
Chains that could bind such a powerful one?
Thorne pondered it. What chains could accomplish this, he wondered. It
seemed that he had to know the answer to this question. And he saw his
red-haired one sitting patiently by while the blood drinker Lestat,
bound and helpless, fought and raved but could not get free.
What were they made of, these seemingly soft shaped links that held such
a being? The question left Thorne no peace. And why did his red-haired
Maker love Lestat and allow him to live? Why was she so quiet as the
young one raved? What was it like to be bound in her chains, and close
to her?
Memories came back to Thorne; troubling visions of his Maker when he, a
mortal warrior, had first come upon her in a cave in the north land that
had been his home. It had been night and he had seen her with her
distaff and her spindle and her bleeding eyes.
From her long red locks she had taken one hair after another and spun it
into thread, working with silent speed as he approached her.
It had been a bitter winter, and the fire behind her seemed magical in
its brightness as he stood in the snow watching her as she spun the
thread as he had seen a hundred mortal women do.
"A witch," he had said aloud.
From his mind he banished this memory.
He saw her now as she guarded Lestat who had become strong like her. He
saw the strange chains that bound Lestat who no longer struggled.
At last Lestat had been released.
Gathering up the magical chains, his red-haired Maker had abandoned him
and his companions.
The others were visible but she had slipped out of their visions, and
slipping out from their visions, she slipped from the visions of Thorne.
Once again, he vowed to continue his slumber. He opened his mind to
sleep. But the nights passed one by one in his icy cave. The noise of
the world was deafening and formless.
And as time passed he could not forget the sight of his long-lost one;
he could not forget that she was as vital beautiful as she had ever
been, and old thoughts came back to him with bitter sharpness.
Why had they quarrelled? Had she really ever turned her back on him? Why
had he hated so much her other companions? Why had he begrudged her the
wanderer blood drinkers who, discovering her and her company, adored her
as all talked together of their journeys in the Blood.
And the myths - of the Queen and the Sacred Core - would they have
mattered to him? He didn't know. He had had no hunger for myths. It
confused him. And he could not banish from his mind the picture of
Lestat bound in those mysterious chains.
Memory wouldn't leave him alone.
It was the middle of winter when the sun doesn't shine at all over the
ice, when he realised that sleep had left him. And he would have no
further peace.
And so he rose from the cave, and began his long walk South through the
snow, taking his time as he listened to the electric voices of the world
below, not certain of where he would enter it again.
The wind blew his long thick red hair; he pulled up his fur-lined collar
over his mouth, and he wiped the ice from his eyebrows. His boots were
soon wet, and so he stretched out his arms, summoning the Cloud Gift
without words, and began his ascent so that he might travel low over the
land, listening for others of his kind, hoping to find an old one like
himself, someone who might welcome him.
Weary of the Mind Gift and its random messages, he wanted to hear spoken
words.
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