12. Knowledge is a Curse
Knowledge is a Curse
Elder.
That is the word that spurred my obsession with this library. It was the word whispered by the vampires in Rome. It was letters you danced between and refused to face. I had my answer at last, though it invited more questions.
You were an Elder, just as Gaius and Livia said.
There are no Elders. A lie. I’d always suspected this was the case—your retreat from the word was proof enough.
But—no, perhaps it wasn’t a lie. You wouldn’t lie to me, would you? You warned me not to dig or ask. You didn’t entertain questions that were too painful to answer. But lie? Never.
Not to me.
“You’re mistaken,” I tell Theon. “There are no Elders.”
He scrubs his face with one large, sprawling hand. “Then she is dead? And you live?”
“No, she is not dead,” I recoil. The thought of you being dead burns me from the inside. I dig the heels of my palms into my thighs to keep from shaking. My evening meal sloshes in my stomach, threatening to be upended on the table.
I close my eyes and try to steady myself. Dead. How did I even form the word?
“Then there are Elders,” Theon says. When I open my eyes, it’s to his critical face, his gaze tracking over mine warily. I bare my teeth and he flinches.
“You’re a feral thing,” he remarks. “Your turn to ask a question.”
“What is an Elder?”
“I thought there are no Elders,” he says. I hate the smirk that slides across his face, as though he’s caught me in a lie.
“There are none, but once there were, yes?”
“Is that your question? ‘Were there once Elders?’”
“No. My question is what is an Elder.”
He drums his fingers along the top of the table, considering.
“I don’t know much about them.” I wait, staring at him.
Willing him to answer, to give me something.
If this is how it will be, prying information from him like picking thorns from the hem of a dress…
I’d rather kill him and explore the library myself.
Does compulsion work on others like us? I should try.
“The Elders are the originals, the first to die and rise again. Their numbers are unconfirmed, though it stands to reason that there was a first, does it not? But who? No one knows, because the Elders haven’t been seen in centuries.”
“You don’t know the number, yet you recognize her name?” I ask.
“Some are more known than others. Your maker is…infamous,” Theon says.
Infamous. “How so?”
“My turn,” he says, wagging a finger at me. I must suppress the urge to break it off once more. “How old is she?”
“I don’t know. Why is she infamous?”
“You don’t know?” Theon furrows his brow.
“No. Do you know how old your maker is?”
“Yes, and that counts as a question.”
My lip curls in disgust. I hate this game. Why did I want so deeply to meet another of my kind, if this is how they are? Perhaps it is because he is a man and a scholar and thinks himself more important than he is. Perhaps I should show him how insignificant he really is.
“Where did she find you?”
“Delphi.”
“At the temple?”
It’s my turn to be cruel about the rules of the game. “Why is she infamous?”
Theon pretends to sigh again. I roll my eyes.
“She is infamous because she was there at the beginning. Not the first, but perhaps the third. There’s nothing written, just stories told from maker to fledgling. Our ancestors predate written word. She’s in every story.” He pauses, weighing his next question. “You were at the temple in Delphi?”
“I was.”
“Were you an oracle? A priestess? A royal woman?”
“No, no, and no—I was a servant. A temple rat. And that’s three questions. Is your maker here in Alexandria?”
“No. He is likely in Athens.” Theon frowns. He opens his mouth to ask a question, but I hold up my finger in the same mocking way he did. His glower is delicious.
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why is he not here with you?”
“He doesn’t want to be,” Theon says, irritated. “He is his own creature, he can do as he pleases without me.”
“Are there no scrolls in Alexandria with knowledge of our kind?”
“None that I have found, and I have been here for decades.”
Perhaps this meeting wasn’t useless. It saved me sneaking through these shelves, constantly worried I’d be caught.
“So your maker…she is here, then? In Alexandria?”
“Stop calling her that. Her name is Aletheia.” Though should he call her by her title? Mother of Silence. What does that even mean?
“Is Elder Aletheia here in Alexandria?”
“Yes. What does Mother of Silence mean?”
“I suppose you should ask her.”
“Because you do not know?”
“Yes. Because I do not know.” He drums his fingers on the table once more, his jaw working.
I am done with my questions. Theon’s answers breed more questions, because he knows nothing. He acts like a scholar, like a learned man that can hold his knowledge over me like an axe waiting to drop. In truth, he knows nothing more than what someone else has written.
The answers of our kind predate the written word. He cannot help me, neither can this library.
But I am not ready to leave Alexandria.
“I’ve one last question,” he says, sitting up in his chair. “What is it like to be so close to a goddess?”
Your new truth sits heavy on my chest.
I don’t return to you until the sun has almost risen. I walk the streets of our Royal Quarter, listening through the walls as the humans breathe and sleep. They don’t know our kind exists, that a predator lurks just outside their gates.
Is that how you feel? About me?
Ancient, elder creature…and me. A temple rat, saved by you, drowned by my own impulsiveness.
Why do you tolerate me? Love me, even?
If my heart still beat, it would ache with this knowledge. I did not imagine that you were a goddess in the temple, it is a truth I knew the moment I saw you. Such a divine, exquisite thing could not be of this world.
Such a divine, exquisite thing gave me new life.
Am I your first, your only? Why me? What drew you to someone as inconsequential as I?
We do not befriend humans, and yet you visited me. Loved me. Turned me. And now, two hundred years later, you allow me at your side still.
I am once more unworthy of you. More so than when I drowned us. A thousand years of worship would not be enough to make me worthy of you.
So I hold your secret close to my dead heart. An Elder. One of the first of our kind. I will tuck this away and take it out when I need to remind myself of your splendor. When I think we need to leave again, or when comfort becomes tedium—I will remember this truth about you.
I settle into our grave and press a kiss to your collarbone.
I think it will be left at that, but…I am a creature of flaws. For those first few weeks, I am content with these bits of facts. I don’t visit the library anymore, what is the use? There is nothing in there for me, and I don’t wish to see that ridiculous Theon again. You are all I need.
But when we walk the streets, my ears strain for others hunting. When the moon dips in the sky, I follow the shadows in the street. There are at least ten others like us in Alexandria.
You should be enough—you are enough—but somehow, I want more.
Elder itches under my skin. It crawls along my tongue when we lounge in the garden, or when we fall into our grave in the morning. Elder Elder Elder. Every time there is a lull in conversation or we speak of the past, it hangs there.
This is why I thought I don’t deserve you. You should be enough for me. You are celestial, and I am ordinary. To want for more was hubris. We Greeks have so many stories about the price of hubris. I did not want to be one of them.
But your truth grew thorns and dug into my sternum. It rotted away at me, baring my imperfections to myself. All I had to do was look down and see the aching want for companionship, for answers, for more.
And I hate myself for it.
You knew something was wrong. How couldn’t you? I was never good at hiding how I felt from you. You were the first and only to listen to me. The fact I couldn’t talk to you about this drove cracks through my foundation.
“Stop asking questions, Melinoe. I won’t warn you a second time.”
Is it a question if I already know the answer?
I am dangerously close to cracking when one of the others finds us.
We spent the evening at the theatre, watching some new tragedy by a minor Alexandrian poet. I hated the tragedies, but you loved them. From the corner of my eye, I’d watch you wring your hands and press them to your heart. It was the only way I could get through them.
We leave the theatre and slip down a side street, on the hunt for a meal, when a figure steps in our path. He is short, with his hair held loose and curly like many Egyptian men did at that time. His eyes are an ice-blue, so light they’re almost silver, and they glow in the evening light.
“Excuse us,” you say, shooting him an offended glare.
“Forgive me, Mother of Silence,” he says.
You stiffen, your red eyes liquid with anger. I think for a moment you mean to rip his head off right there in the street. Or perhaps you will punch through his chest and take out his heart? I wait on bated breath for what you will do.
“You must have the wrong person,” I say.
“She is no person,” he says, his smile revealing his white, pointed teeth. “Just as I am not.”
“Κατ?ρατο?,” you growl at him. Accursed one. I flinch at the heavy insult. I’d never heard you say anything so angry before, even when we drowned. Even when you nursed me back to health, you never said one ill word.
He just smiles broader. “There were tales of two red-eyed women in Alexandria. It is my luck I found you both, and at the same time.”
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Essemteu,” he says, pleased by my question.
“You are Aletheia, Elder, Mother of Silence. But who are you?” He directs the last part to me.
I am able to feign my surprise at the last moment.
I’d lived with your secret for long enough that it had become a steady fact to me.
Of course you were an Elder, the Mother of Silence.
“You do not know who I am,” you say. You grab my wrist and begin to pull, your grip strong enough to crush my bones. I wince and allow myself to be dragged. When I look over my shoulder, Essemteu stands where we left him, his head tilted, his smile still pleasant.
We don’t stop until we reach our home.
“It’s been weeks since you last went to the library. I trust you’ve grown bored of this city?” You move about our home, pressing your fingers against things, opening cabinets and drawers.
You’re packing.
You mean for us to leave. I will go with you anywhere. I should pack and not question your direction. This is where I should show my loyalty to you. You asked me not to question. If I swallowed this, would it die? Or would it fester even more, now that I am just out of reach of answers?
“Aletheia,” I say softly. “What did he mean?”
You pause, your back to me. Your fingers are curled around the edges of the cabinet, your nails digging into the wood surface. It splinters slowly as your grip grows tighter and tighter.
“Please. I just want to know you as you know me.” It is my most selfish truth. You know everything of me—every intimate ravine of my life. I remember little about my life before you. Every first experience, every new pleasure I’ve learned with you.
But you remain a mystery to me, even after all these centuries.
“You know what is important,” you say, and I know I’ve lost. It is time to admit defeat, to cede to the inevitable. I will never know these parts of you because I am still not worthy. I must work harder in my love for you, and that includes letting these questions die.
So I begin to pack.
“I am an Elder, one of the first of our kind,” you say.
I didn’t hear you enter our room, I was too consumed with sorting through our things.
I turn to you. You stand in the doorway, your bottom lip red and swollen from gnawing on it.
I’d only seen it like that twice before—once when you made me, and again when I’d burned in the sun.
I don’t speak. If I do, I will give away that I knew this. So I will myself to stand still and not speak unless asked to.
“I was called Mother of Silence. Our red eyes make us recognizable, we are the only two with them.”
Only me. I am the only one you have made. I am the only one you have gifted life to. I try not to smile, but the corner of my mouth twitches.
“This amuses you?” you ask, angry.
“I am happy you are telling me this,” I say, because I know how the truth sounds. I will not continue to be worthy of you by being jealous and petty. If you don’t believe me, you say nothing.
“It is a long story, most of which is not worth retelling. As such, I do not wish to be confronted with the truths of it.”
She was infamous.
“You are one of the oldest of our kind, older than the false gods and goddesses the humans erect temples for. If they seek you out, is it not for knowledge?” My unasked question—what did you do to fear them?
“Knowledge?” You scoff, but you linger in the doorway.
“Are the truths such that they would not?” I ask. “This is the city of knowledge, after all.”
“It is,” you agree, and your gaze slides to the window behind me. You stare for a long moment before shaking your head and turning to me once more. “I do not wish to relive the past.”
“Then we leave,” I agree.
“We must plan first. It is winter, and the seas too rough to return to Rome. Let us think for a few days on what the future holds.”
I don’t smile until your back is to me, because I know we will not leave. As much as I don’t wish to share you with the man in the street, I will if it means I get my answers.
I will not leave. I will not lose you to your past. I will learn it, wear it, and make it mine.