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"Your eyes are hungry," she said, "though your mind is shut. I know you want to read here. You're welcome. Send your scribes to copy what you will. But I go ahead of myself, don't I? We must talk. We must see if we can achieve an agreement. I don't know that we can. "

She turned her eyes to Avicus.

"And you, you who are old, you who were given the Blood in Egypt, you are only just learning to love the realm of letters. How strange that it would take you so long. "

I could feel his immense excitement and tender confusion.

"I'm learning," he said. "Marius is teaching me. " And then the flame rose in his cheeks.

As for Mael, I couldn't help but note his quiet fury, and it struck me that he had for so long been the author of his own unhappiness, but now something was truly happening which might be a legitimate cause of his pain.

Of course it greatly distressed me that neither of them could keep their minds secret. Long ago in Rome when I had sought to find them they had done a better job of it.

"Let's be seated," said Eudoxia, "and let me tell you who I am. " We took the chairs, which brought us closer together, and she began to tell her story in a quiet tone.

Chapter 10

10

MY MORTAL LIFE isn't very important," she said, "but I'll pass over it quickly. I was from a fine Greek family, one of the first wave of settlers to come from Athens to Alexandria to make it the great city that Alexander wanted when he founded it three hundred years before the birth of the Christ.

"I was brought up like any girl in such a Greek household, extremely protected, and never leaving the house. I did however learn to read and write, because my father wanted me to be able to write letters to him after I was married and he thought that I might read poetry to my children later on.

"I loved him for it, though no one else did, and I took to my education with a passion, neglecting all else.

"An early marriage was prepared for me. I wasn't fifteen when I was told of it, and frankly I was rather happy about it because I had seen the man, and I'd found him intriguing and somewhat strange. I wondered if marriage to him wouldn't bring a new existence for me, something more interesting than what I'd had at home. My real mother was dead and I didn't care for my stepmother. I wanted to be out of her house. "

She paused for a moment and I was of course calculating. She was older than me by many years, she was making that plain to me, twice over, and that is why she appeared so utterly perfect. Time had done its work on the lines of her face, as it was doing its work on my own.

She watched me and hesitated for a moment, but then she went on:

' A month before the nuptials, I was abducted right out of my bed at night, and taken over the walls of the house to a dark and filthy place where I was flung down in the corner, to cower on the stone floor while several men carried on a crude argument, as to who would be paid how much for having stolen me.

"I expected to be murdered. I also knew that my stepmother was behind my ruin.

"But there came into the place a tall thin man with a head of shaggy black hair, and a face and hands as white as the moon, who murdered all of these men, throwing them about as if they were weightless, and holding the last up to his mouth for a long time, as though he were drinking blood from the corpse, or eating part of it.

"I thought I was on the verge of madness.

"As he dropped the body, the white-faced being realized that I was staring at him. I had nothing but a torn and dirty night dress to cover me. But I rose to my feet to face him bravely.

" 'A woman,' he said. I shall never forget. 'A woman' as if that were remarkable. "

"Sometimes, it is," I said.

She smiled at me rather tolerantly. She went on with the story.

"After this remark, he gave a strange little laugh and then he came for me.

"Once again, I expected to be murdered. But he made me a blood drinker. There was no ceremony to it, no words, nothing. He simply did it, right then and there.

"Then ripping off the tunic and sandals from one of the men, he dressed me crudely as a boy and we hunted the streets together for the rest of the night. He handled me roughly as we went along, turning me this way and that, pushing me, instructing me as much with shoves as with crude words.

"Before dawn, he took me back to his curious dwelling. It wasn't in the elite Greek quarter where I had been brought up. But I didn't know that at the time. As a matter of fact, I'd never been out of my father's house. My first experience of the city streets had been frankly enthralling.

"Now here I was being carried up the high wall of a three-story dwelling and then brought down into its barren courtyard.

"The place was an immense and disorderly treasure house. In every room there were riches unimaginable.