Anne Rice - Servant of the Bones

“Stupid!

“Let me return to the background. The foreground is suddenly too hot for me and it hurts me and stings my eyes.

“The family. I was telling you what we were. We were rich merchants and we were scribes of our Sacred Books. All of the Hebrew tribes in Babylon were in one way or another scribes of the Sacred Books and busy making copies for their own families at all times, but with us it was a very large business because we were known for the rapid and accurate copy. And we had a huge library of old texts. I think I told you, we had maybe, I don’t know, twenty-five different stories about Joseph and Egypt and Moses and so forth, and it was always a matter of dispute what to include and what not to. We had so many stories of Joseph in Egypt that we decided not to give all of them credit. I wonder what became of all those tablets, all those scrolls. We just didn’t think all those stories were true. But maybe we were wrong. Oh, who knows?

“But to return to the fabric of my life. Whenever I left the court of the palace, or the tablet house, or the marketplace, I came right home to work all evening on the Holy Scriptures, with my sisters and my cousins and uncles in the scriptoria of our houses, which were big rooms.

“As I told you, I was never very quiet, and I would sing the psalms out loud as I wrote them, and this irritated my deaf uncle more than anyone. I don’t know why. He was deaf! And besides, I have a good voice.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Why should a deaf uncle get so upset? But he knew I was singing the psalms not as I just sang that one for you, but as one would sing, with cymbals, dancing, you know, with a little bit of added dash, shall we say, and he wasn’t so happy about it.

“He said that we were to write when we were to write and to sing the Lord’s songs at the appropriate time. I shrugged and gave in but I was one for cutting up all the time. But I’m giving the wrong impression. I wasn’t really bad…”

“I know what kind of man you are, and were then…”

“Yes, I think by now you do, and maybe if you thought me bad you would have thrown me out in the snow.”

He looked at me. His eyes weren’t ferocious. The brows were low and thick, but the eyes were plenty big enough beneath them to give him a pretty look. And, it seemed to me that he was warmer and more relaxed now than earlier, and I felt drawn to him and wanting to hear everything he said.

But I wondered: Could I throw him out in the snow?

“I’ve taken many lives,” he said, plucking the thought right from me, “but I would not hurt you, Jonathan Ben Isaac, you know that. I wouldn’t hurt such a man as you. I killed assassins. At least when I came to myself that was my code of honor. That is my code now.

“In my early days as the Servant of the Bones, as the bitter, angry ghost for the powerful sorcerer, I killed the innocent because it was my Master’s will and I thought I had to do it, I thought that the man who had called me up could control me, and I did his bidding, until the moment came when I suddenly realized that I did not have to be a slave forever, that maybe though my soul had been taken from my spirit, and my spirit and soul from my flesh, that perhaps I could still be pleasing to God. That somehow all could come and be united once more in one figure! Ah!”

He shook his head.

“But Azriel, maybe it’s happened!”

“Oh, Lord God, Jonathan, don’t give me consolation. I cannot bear it. Just hear me out. Make sure your tapes record my words. Remember me. Remember what I say…”

His confidence broke suddenly. He looked at the fire again.

“My family, my father,” he said. “My father! How it hurt him what he finally did, and how he looked at me. Do you know what he said about hurting me? He said, ‘Azriel, who of all my sons loves me as you do? No one else could ever forgive me for this but you!’ And he meant it. He meant it, my father, my little brother, looking at me full of tears and sincerity and absolute conviction!

“I’m sorry. I jump ahead. I’ll die soon enough. It won’t take too many more pages, I don’t think.” He shuddered all over. And again the tears stood in his eyes. “Forgive me, and recall again that for those thousands of years, I didn’t remember these things. I was the bitter ghost without memory. And now it has all come back to me and I pour it out to you. I pour it out to you in tears.”

“Continue. Give me your tears, your trust, and your hurt. I won’t fail you.”

“Ah, you are the rare thing, Jonathan Ben Isaac,” he said.

“Not really, I’m a teacher and a happy man myself. I have a wife and children who love me. I’m not very special.”

“Ah, but you are a good man who will talk to someone who is evil! That is what is rare. The Rebbe of the Hasidim, he turned his back on me!” He laughed suddenly, a deep bitter laugh. “He was too good to talk to the Servant of the Bones.”

I smiled. “We are all Jews, and there are Jews, and there are Jews.”

“Yes, and now Israelis, who would be Maccabees! And there are Hasidim.”

“And other Orthodox, and some ‘reformed,’ and so on it goes. Let’s go back to your time. You were a big and happy family.”

“Yes, true, and it was regular—I was explaining—it was regular for the rich Hebrews to work at the palace as I said, my father worked there too, and many of my cousins. We were scribes, but also merchants, merchants of jewels, silks, silver, and books. My father’s gift in trade was choosing the very finest vessels for the King’s table and for the Table of the Gods in Marduk’s temple and for Marduk himself.

“Now at the time, the temple was full of chapels, and every day a meal was set out for each deity, including Marduk, so the temple had a huge stock of gold and silver vessels for this. And my father was the one who put aside those vessels not fit.

“I went down with him to the docks all the time to meet the ships coming in from the sea, with the finest new work from Greece or Egypt, and I learned from him how to judge the carving on a goblet, and how to know the heaviest and finest mixture of gold. I learned to know a true ruby or diamond and pearls—pearls, I loved the pearls, we dealt in pearls of all kinds, we didn’t call them pearls, you know, we called them eyes of the sea.

“This is how we made our living—in the marketplace and in the temple and in the palace.

“My family had stalls all through the marketplace where they dealt in gems of all kinds, in honey, and in cloth dyed purple and blue, the finest of all silk and linen, and they sold the incense too, though they sold it to idolaters who would burn this incense for Nabu and Ishtar, and for Marduk, of course.

“But it was our living, it was our source of power, it was our way of staying together, of being strong so that one day we could go home. It was as important as the copying of the Sacred Books.”

“It’s an old tale,” I said.

“This whole trade, by the way, gave to my own house a sumptuous quality that it might not have had, had we been camel breeders. And that you must understand because the richness around us colored my father’s values as much as mine.

“What I mean is, not only did we make money, but the house was always full of merchandise passing through. You know. Here would be a magnificent cedar statue of the goddess Ishtar just come from Dilmun, and my uncle would keep it at home for a week or two, gracing the living room, before the sale was made. The place was full of beautiful footstools, delicate furniture from Egypt, the fine black and red urns and pots of the Greeks, and just about anything portable and ornamental and lovely to behold.”

“You grew up on beauty, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Azriel said. “I did. I really did. And I grew up, for all my smart talking and carrying on and flirting with Marduk, I grew up with love. My father’s love. The love of my brothers. My sisters. The love of my uncles even. Even my deaf uncle. Even once the prophet Azarel said to me, ‘Yahweh looks at you with love.’ So did the old witch Asenath. Ah, such love.”