writing."
  My Father smiled and said, "Marius is always writing. Marius is good for writing, if 
for nothing else. Turn around, Lydia. Be still."
  "But he looked at me, Father. I want to talk to him."
  "You will not, Lydia! You will not grace him with one small smile!"
  On the way home, I asked my Father, "If you're going to marry me to someone - if 
there's no way short of suicide that I can avoid this disgusting development - why don't 
you marry me to Marius? I don't understand it. I'm rich. He's rich. I know his Mother was 
a wild Keltoi princess, but his Father has adopted him."
  My Father said witheringly, "Where have you learned all this?" He stopped in his 
tracks, always an ominous sign. The crowd broke and streamed around.
  "I don't know; it's common knowledge." I turned. There was Marius hovering about, 
glancing at me. "Father," I said, "please let me speak to him."
  My Father knelt down. Most of the crowd had gone on. "Lydia, I know this is dreadful 
for you. I have caved to every objection you have raised to your suitors. But believe you 
me, the Emperor himself would not approve of you marrying such a mad wandering historian 
as Marius! He has never served in the military, he cannot enter the Senate, it is quite 
impossible. When you marry, you will marry well."
  As we walked away, I turned again, thinking only to pick Marius out from the others, 
but to my surprise he was stark still, looking at me. With his flowing hair, he much 
resembled the Vampire Lestat. He is taller than Lestat, but he has the same lithe build, 
the same very blue eyes and a muscular strength to him, and a squareness of face which is 
almost pretty.
  I pulled away from my Father and ran up to him.
  "Well, I wanted to marry you," I said, "but my Father has said no."
  I'll never forget the expression on his face. But before he could speak, my Father had 
gathered me up and gone into obliterating respectable conversation:
  "How now, Marius, how goes it with your brother in the Army. And how is it with your 
history. I hear you have written thirteen volumes."
  My Father backed up, virtually carrying me away.
  Marius did not move or answer. Soon we were with others hurrying up the hill.
  All the course of our lives was changed at that moment. But there was no conceivable 
way Marius or I could have known it.
  Twenty years would pass before we would meet again.
  I was thirty-five, then. I can say that we met in a realm of darkness in more respects 
than one.
  For now, let me fill up the gap.
  I was married twice, due to pressure from the Imperial House. Augustus wanted us all to 
have children. I had none. My husbands seeded plenty, however, with slave girls. So I was 
legally divorced and freed twice over, and determined then to retire from social life, 
just so the Emperor Tiberius, who had come to the Imperial throne at the age of fifty, 
would not meddle with me, for he was more a public puritan and domestic dictator than 
Augustus. If I kept to the house, if I didn't go abroad to banquets and parties and hang 
around with the Empress Livia, Augustus's wife and mother of Tiberius, perhaps I wouldn't 
be pushed into becoming a stepmother! I'd stay home. I had to care for my Father. He 
deserved it. Even though he was perfectly healthy, he was still old!
  With all due respect for the husbands I have mentioned, whose names are more than 
footnotes in common Roman histories, I was a wretched wife.
  I had plenty of my own money from my Father, I listened to nothing, and yielded to the 
act of love only on my own terms, which I always obtained; being gifted with enough 
beauty to make men really suffer.
  I became a member of the Cult of Isis just to spite these husbands and get away from 
them, so that I could hang around at the Temple of Isis, where I spent an enormous amount 
of time with other interesting women, some far more adventurous and unconventional than I 
dared to be. I was attracted to whores. I saw the brilliant, loose women as having 
conquered a barrier which I, the loving daughter of my Father, would never conquer.
  I became a regular at the Temple. I was initiated at last in a secret ceremony, and I 
walked in every procession of Isis in Rome.
  My husbands loathed this. Maybe that's why after I came home to my Father I gave up the 
worship. Whatever, it was a good thing perhaps that I had. But fortune could not be so 
easily shaped by any decision of mine.
  Now Isis was an imported goddess, from Egypt, of course, and the old Romans were as 
suspicious of her as they were of the terrible Cybele, the Great other from the Far East, 
who led her male devotees to castrate themselves. The whole city was filled with these 
"Eastern cults," and the conservative population thought them dreadful.
  These cults weren't rational; they were ecstatic or euphoric. They offered a complete 
rebirth through understanding.
  The typical conservative Roman was far too practical for that. If you didn't know by 
age five that the gods were made-up creatures and the myths invented stories, then you 
were a fool.
  But Isis had a curious distinction - something that set her far apart from the cruel 
Cybele. Isis was a loving mother and goddess. Isis forgave her worshipers anything. Isis 
had come before all Creation. Isis was patient and wise.
  That's why the most degraded woman could pray at the Temple. That's why none were ever 
turned away.
  Like the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is so well known today throughout the East and West, 
the Queen Isis had conceived her divine child by divine means. From the dead and 
castrated Osiris, she had drawn the living seed by her own power. And many a time she was 
pictured or sculpted holding her divine son, Horus, on her knee. Her breast was bare in 
all innocence to feed the young god.
  And Osiris ruled in the land of the dead, his phallus lost forever in the waters of the 
Nile, where an endless semen flowed from it, fertilizing the remarkable fields of Egypt 
every year when the River overflowed its banks.
  The music of our Temple was divine. We used the sistrum, a small rigid metal lyre of 
sorts, and flutes and timbrels. We danced, and we sang together. The poetry of Isis's 
litanies was fine and rapturous.
  Isis was the Queen of Navigation, much like the Blessed Virgin Mary would be called 
later, "Our Lady Star of the Sea."
  When her statue was carried to the shore each year, the procession was so splendid that 
all Rome turned out to see the Egyptian gods with their animal heads, the huge abundance 
of flowers and the statue of the Queen Mother herself. The air rang with hymns. Her 
Priests and Priestesses walked in white linen robes. She herself, made of marble, and 
carried high, holding her sacred sistrum, dressed regally in a Grecian gown with Grecian 
hair.
  That was my Isis. I fell away from her after my last divorce. My Father didn't like the 
worship, and I myself had enjoyed it long enough. As a free woman, I wasn't infatuated 
with prostitutes. I had it infinitely better. I kept my Father's house and he was just 
old enough, in spite of his black hair and his remarkably sharp vision, that the Emperor 
left me alone.
  I can't say I remembered or thought of Marius. No one had mentioned Marius for years.