The older one was smiling at him now as he sat composed with his hands folded in his lap. The soft white thawb, or cassock, hung softly about his dignified frame, and he seemed pleased, very pleased, that Marius knew the truth. He was as splendid an immortal now with his smooth tawny skin and full white hair as any Marius had ever seen.

Something quickened in Marius, something he had not felt in a very long time. There was some certainty of goodness, perhaps, that overcame him, some certainty of happiness, of the true possibility of life containing moments of exultation and joy. He’d never really felt that certainty for very long at any one time, and he hadn’t expected to feel it now. Yet he was overcome with the purest goodwill, suddenly, that such a thing could be possible, that this one, known to him in a fatal intimacy at the very beginning of his dark journey, could in fact be here with him now.

In the past only young ones and strangers had brought such comfort. Nothing good had ever united him with those first years, nothing to warm the heart.

He wanted to speak but he feared to cheapen his feeling in trying to express it. He sat quiet, wondering if his face expressed the gratitude he felt that this being had come to him here.

“I suffered unbearably,” said Teskhamen, “but it was all that you’d revealed to me, Marius, that gave me the strength to crawl away from that pyre and reach for hope. You see, I had never known a being like you, Marius. In that awful northern forest, I had never known anything of your Roman world. I’d known the old Blood religion of Queen Akasha. I’d been her faithful blood god. I knew the worship of the Druids echoing the ancient blood drinker cults of Egypt, and that was all I knew. Not until that night when I took you in my arms to make you the new blood god, and your heart and soul poured into mine.”

The smile was gone and Teskhamen’s face was reflective, his dark brows knitted, his eyes narrow, as he looked out at the foaming sea. He went on speaking.

“For a thousand years, I’d served the Mother, believed in the old religion. Remain imprisoned until the worshippers bring the evildoers; look into their hearts for right and wrong and truth; and then execute them for the Faithful of the Forest and drink their precious blood. A thousand years. And never had I dreamed of the life you lived, Marius. I’d been born a village child, a farmer’s boy, and, oh, what an honor, they told me, that as a young man I had become beautiful enough to offer to the Secret Mother, the Queen Who Reigns Forever, and from whom a poor boy, an ignorant boy, could not conceivably escape.”