“Elders of the tribe,” Benji was appealing. “We need you. Come back to us. Come back to your lost children. Hear my cry on high, a mourning and a bitter weeping, I am Benji weeping for my lost brothers and sisters because they are no more.”
11
Gremt Stryker Knollys
IT WAS an old colonial mansion, red with white trim, a sprawling building with deep verandas and peaked roofs, covered with soft fluttering green vines and invisible from the winding road on account of the massive bamboo and mango trees surrounding it. A lovely place with palms swaying ever so gracefully in the breeze. It appeared abandoned but it had never been. Mortal servants maintained it by day.
And this vampire Arjun had been sleeping beneath it for centuries.
Now he was weeping. He sat at the table, his face in his hands.
“In my time I was a prince,” he said. He wasn’t boasting. He was merely reflecting. “And among the Undead I was a prince for so long. I do not know how I came to this.”
“I know all this is true,” Gremt said.
The blood drinker was undeniably beautiful, with light golden-brown skin so flawless it appeared unreal now, and large fierce black eyes. He had a wealth of jet-black hair worthy of a lion. Made by the wandering blood drinker Pandora in the days of the Chola dynasty of southern India, he had indeed been a prince, and much darker of skin than he was now and just as comely. The Blood had lightened his skin, but not his hair, which was sometimes the case, though no one knew why.
“I have always known who you were,” said Gremt. “I knew you when you traveled Europe with Pandora. I beg you, for both of us, tell me simply in your own words what happened.”
He withdrew a small white visiting card from his pocket, on which was written his full name in golden script: GREMT STRYKER KNOLLYS. Beneath it was his e-mail address and the numbers of his mobile phone.
But this blood drinker didn’t even acknowledge this human gesture. He could not. And Gremt moved the card discreetly to the center of the teak table and put it halfway under the brass base of the small shaded candle that was flickering there, giving a little bit of light to their faces. A soft golden light also came from the open doors along this deep porch.
This was a beautiful place.
It touched Gremt that this battered soul, this creature in such distress, had taken such time to wash the dirt from his shining hair, and that he was clothed now in a long well-fitted and richly jeweled sherwani, and black silk pants, and that his hands were clean and scented with true sandalwood.
“But how could you have known me then?” asked the blood drinker in a plaintive voice. “What are you? You’re not human, I know this. You are not human. And you are not what I am. What are you?”
“I am your friend now,” said Gremt. “I’ve always been your friend. I’ve been watching you for centuries, not just you, but all of you.”
Arjun was suspicious, of course, but more than anything he was horrified by what he’d done and he was warming piteously to Gremt’s persuasive tone, to the warmth of Gremt’s hand on his.
“All I wanted was to sleep,” Arjun said. He spoke with the same accent that was familiar in Goa and India to this day, though his command of English was perfect. “I knew I would return. My beloved, Pandora, she knows that I am here. She’s always known. I was safe here when the queen Akasha went on her rampage. She didn’t find me beneath this house.”
“I understand,” said Gremt. “Pandora is coming to you.”
“How can you know this?” Arjun asked. “Oh, truly I want to believe it. I need her so very much. But how do you know?”
Gremt hesitated. He gestured for Arjun to speak. “Tell me everything.”
“Ten years ago, I sat on this veranda with Pandora, and we spoke,” said Arjun. “I was still tired. I was not ready to join with her and her beloved friends. I told her I needed the sanctuary of the Earth and what we learn in the Earth, for we do learn when we sleep as if an umbilical cord connects us to the living world above.”
“That’s true,” said Gremt.
“It was never my intention to wake now.”
“Yes.”
“But this Voice. It spoke to me. I mean it was in my mind at first and it seemed these were my own thoughts, but in my sleep I did not embrace these thoughts.”
“Yes.”
“And then it had a tone and a vocabulary all its own, this Voice, speaking to me in English sharply, telling me that I wanted to rise, I, Arjun, wanted to rise, to go into Mumbai and wipe them out, the young ones. It seemed so true to me, true! Why did I listen to this? I, who have never wanted trouble with my own kind, who stood my ground patiently centuries ago with Marius, telling him from my soul I would give up my maker to him if that’s what he wanted, what she wanted. You understand? I fought my last battles when I was a mortal prince. What is this to me, murdering, massacring, burning young ones?” He hastened to answer his own question. “Is there something in the gentlest of us that longs to destroy? Something that dreams of annihilating other sentient beings?”
“Perhaps there is,” said Gremt. “When did you realize that this was not what you wanted?”
“When it was happening!” confessed Arjun. “The buildings were in flames. They were screaming, pleading with me, going down on their knees. And these were not all fledglings, you understand. Some of them had been in the Blood hundreds of years. ‘We survived the Queen to perish like this?’ That’s what they screamed as they put out their arms to me. ‘What have we done to you?’ But it was only slowly coming clear to me what I had started. It became a battle, their fighting me with the Fire Gift and I overriding their weaker power. It was … it was …”
“Pleasurable.”
Tears of shame rose in Arjun’s eyes. He nodded.
“Ah, you murder a human being,” Arjun said, “and you steal a life, yes, and that is unspeakable. You murder a blood drinker and you steal eternity! You steal immortality!”
He laid his head down on his arm.
“What happened in Kolkata?”
“That was not me,” he said at once. He sat back in the old rattan peacock chair, the broad woven back creaking against his weight. “I did not do it.”
“I believe you,” said Gremt.
“But why did I kill these children in Mumbai?”
“The Voice roused you for the purpose. It’s done this in other places. It’s done it in the Orient. It’s doing it in South America. I’ve suspected from the beginning there was no one blood drinker enacting the Burning.”