Memnoch the Devil (The Vampire Chronicles, #5)

by Anne Rice

He laughed outright, though it was very low, and he shook his head, flashing a glance on David that implied they knew each other very well, maybe too well. I didn’t like it that they knew each other at all. David was my David, and Armand was my Armand.

“How is that possible? I don’t like myself, you know. I love myself, of course, I’m committed to myself till my dying day. But I don’t like myself.”

God died knowing He was God. He died and rose knowing the whole time. The world argues over it and debates and wonders, but He knew. When they drove the nails, He knew He was God.”

All around and high above, the golden mosaics blazed with faces which seemed now transfixed in horror as they beheld this slaughter. Saints and saints and saints. Flames rose and danced. Piles of books were burning! Icons were smashed into pieces, and statuary lay in heaps, smoldering and blackened, the gold gleaming as it was eaten by the flames. “Where are we!” I cried out. Memnoch’s voice was right beside me. He was sitting, collected, against the stone wall. “Hagia Sophia, my friend,” he said. “It’s nothing, really. It’s only the Fourth Crusade.” I reached out with my left hand for him, unwilling to let go of the veil with my right. “What you see is the Roman Christians slaughtering the Greek Christians. That’s all there is to it. Egypt and the Holy Land have for the moment been forgotten. The Venetians have been given three days to loot the city. It was a political decision. Of course they were all here to win back the Holy Land, where you and I have lately been, but the battle wasn’t in the cards, and so the authorities have let the troops loose on the town. Christian slaughters Christian. Roman against Greek. Do you want to walk outside? Would you like to see more of it? Books by the millions are being lost now forever. Manuscripts in Greek and Syriac and Ethiopian and Latin. Books of God and books of men. Do you want to walk among the convents where the nuns are being dragged out of their cells by fellow Christians and raped? Constantinople is being looted. It’s no...

“Would you like a change of scenery? We can move on. We can go to Madrid and treat ourselves to an auto-da-fé, do you know what that is, when they torture and burn alive the Jews who won’t convert to Christ? Perhaps we should go back to France and see the Cathars being slaughtered in the Languedoc? You must have heard those legends when you were growing up. The heresy was wiped out, you know, the whole heresy. Very successful mission on the part of the Dominican Fathers, who will then start on the witches, naturally. There are so many choices. Suppose we go to Germany and see the martyrdom of the Anabaptists. Or to England to watch Queen Mary burn those who had turned against the Pope during the reign of her father, Henry. I’ll tell you an extraordinary scene that I have often revisited. Strasbourg, 1349. Two thousand Jews will be burned there in February of that year, blamed for the Black Death. Things like that will happen all over Europe.…”

In the name of the cross, more injustice has been perpetrated than for any other single cause or emblem or philosophy or creed on Earth.

“Hell is where I straighten things out that He has made wrong,” he said. “Hell is where I reintroduce a frame of mind that might have existed had suffering never destroyed it! Hell is where I teach men and women that they can be better than He is.