Pandora by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online

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 fromhead 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 toodangerous 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 justdown 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