Anne Rice - Servant of the Bones

He had come to a natural pause. He sat there, resplendent in the red velvet, hair glossy and natural, and the pure skin of his young man’s cheeks as soft as a girl’s I suppose. I must be getting old. Because young men look to me now as beautiful as girls. Not that I desire them. It’s only that life itself is lush.

He was confused. In pain. I hesitated to press him. Then he parted his lips, only to be quiet.

3

What was it like, roaming in the temple? The palace?” I asked. “The beautiful house, I can envision. But the palace, was the palace plated in gold? Was the temple?”

He didn’t respond.

“Give me pictures, Azriel. Take your time by means of images. The temple, will you tell me what that was like?”

“Yes,” he said. “It was a house of gems and gold. It was a world of the deep vibrant gleam of the precious, of lovely scents and the sounds of harps, and pipes playing; it was a world for the bare feet to walk on smooth tiles that were themselves cut in the shapes of flowers.” He smiled.

“And,” he said, “it was a hell of a lot more fun than you might think. Not all that solemn. The two buildings were huge, of course, you know Nebuchadnezzar built the palace to the full glory of the past, or so he thought, and greatly expanded the private gardens; and the temple was the great building known as Esagila, and behind the building itself stood the big ziggurat, Etemenanki, with its stairway to heaven, and then its ramps going up to the very topmost temple of my great and favorite smiling god.

“The temple and the palace were full of locked and sealed doors. Some of these seals had not been broken in a hundred years. And of course, as you probably know, we had contracts made in this way too…in that a contract would be written out on a clay tablet, dried, and then enclosed in a clay envelope with the same words on it, which was then dried, so that one could not get to the original tablet inside without breaking the envelope. So if some corrupt individual had made a change on the outer envelope, the sealed inside tablet would tell the truth.

“There was a lot of that at court, people bringing in contracts, breaking open the envelopes, discovering some wily bastard had made a change in the contract, and the King and his advisors and wise men passing judgment. I never followed out any condemned man to see him executed. As you said, I grew up on beauty.

“In the streets of Babylon I never saw the hungry. I never saw a wretched slave. Babylon was the city people dreamed of living in; everyone was happy in Babylon and under the protection of the King.

“But to return to your question. One could roam in the temple. One could just roam. I could creep in my fine jeweled slippers into the chapels where the other gods were—Nabu and Ishtar and any god or goddess who had been brought from another city for sanctuary.

“You know, that was happening. Cyrus the Persian was on the march most definitely, taking the Greek cities along the coast one after another. And so from all over Babylonia, frightened priests were sending their gods to us for protection, to the great gateway, and we had set up these visiting deities in chapels and these chapels were full of twinkling light.

“This fear for the god, that the enemy would get him, it was very real. Marduk himself had for two hundred years been a prisoner in another city, stolen and taken there, and it had been a great day for Babylon, long before my birth, when Marduk had been recovered and had been brought home.”

“Did he ever tell you about it?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But I didn’t ask him. We’ll come to such things…

“As I was saying, I liked roaming about the temple. I took messages to the priests; I waited at table when Belshazzar dined, and I made friends of all the palace crowd, you might say, the eunuchs, the temple slaves, the other pages, and some of the temple prostitutes who were, of course, beautiful women.

“Now all of this work I did in the temple and the palace, there was a Babylonian point to it. The government had a sensible policy. When rich hostages like us, rich deportees, were brought in not only to enhance the culture, young men like me were always, picked out to be trained in Babylonian ways. That was so that if or when we were sent back to our own city or some distant province we would be good Babylonians, that is, skilled members of the King’s loyal service.

“There were scores of Hebrews at court.

“Nevertheless, I had uncles who went into a fury that my father and I worked at the temple, but my father and I, we would shrug our shoulders and say, ‘We don’t worship Marduk! We don’t eat with the Babylonians. We don’t eat the food that the gods have eaten.’ And a good deal of the community felt the same way as we did.

“Let me note here, this eating of food. It’s still important for the Hebrews. No? You don’t eat with heathens. You didn’t then. And you didn’t eat anything ever that had once been put before an idol. It was a big thing.

“As good Hebrews, we broke bread only with one another, and our hands were always washed carefully with ritual prayer before we took the food, and afterwards there was not one thing in our lives that was not permeated by our desire to praise Yahweh, our Lord God of Hosts.

“But we had to survive in Babylon. We had every intention of returning rich to our homeland. We had to be strong. And that meant what it has always meant to the Hebrews. You must be powerful enough to disperse without being destroyed.”

Again came one of the inevitable pauses. He leant forward and stirred the fire, as people do when they want to think, and want to have the feeling of doing something. Stirring fires can give you that feeling, especially if you aren’t drinking anything, clutching your coffee as if that were a full-time job, the way I was doing.

“You looked then exactly as you look now, didn’t you?” I said, though this was a repeat question. It was one of those soft verbal signals: God gave you all the right gifts, young man.

“Yes,” he said. “I wanted now to be smooth-faced. I think I told you. But it doesn’t seem to be in my luck.

“I came as myself this time, and I don’t know even to this moment who called me. Why now? Why has my body come back around me? Why? I don’t know.

“In the past when I was called forth by sorcerers, they made me look the way they wanted, and that could be quite horrible. Seldom if ever did they wait, or take a deep breath, to see what I might look like on my own. I would be summoned in a specific form: ‘Azriel, Servant of the Golden Bones which I hold in my hand, come forth in a blaze of fire and consume my enemies. Make of them cinders.’ That sort of chant.

“Whatever the case, in answer to your question I looked exactly the same when I died as I do now except for one salient characteristic which had been added to me before my murder, which I will recount later. I am as I died.”

“Your father, why was it a mistake to tell him about Marduk? Why? What did all that mean? What did he do to you, Azriel?”

He shook his head. “This is the hardest part for me to tell you, Jonathan Ben Isaac, but I have never told anyone, you know. I never told any master. Does God never forget? Will God deny me forever the Stairway to Heaven?”

“Azriel, let me caution you, simply as an older human being, though my soul may be newborn. Don’t be so sure of Heaven. Don’t be any more sure of the face of our god than Marduk was sure.”

“This means you believe in one and not the other?”

“This means I want to blunt your pain in the telling of what happened. I want to blunt your sense of fatality, and that you are destined for something terrible because of what others have done.”