Servant of the Bones by Anne Rice

knew it would happen. I knew it.’ And then he came forward and he kissed me on both cheeks. His hands were so smooth. He was my height, and I was right, there was a great resemblance between us, though his eyebrows were set just a bit higher than mine and his forehead was smoother, so he didn’t look so mischievous or ferocious by nature as I did.
    “I wanted to throw my arms around him. He didn’t wait for me to say it. He said, ‘Do it, but for that moment maybe others will see me too.’
    “I hugged him as my oldest friend, as the dearest to me in the world next to my father, and it was that night I made the mistake of telling my father that I talked with my god all the time. I should never have done it. I wonder now what would have happened if I had not done that.”
    I interrupted. “Did anyone else see him, to the best of your knowledge?”
    “Yes, as a matter of fact, they did. The doorkeeper of our house saw him and all but fainted dead away to see a man all covered in gold paint, and one of my sisters looking down from the lattice above saw him too, and an elder of the Hebrews got a glimpse of him for a moment and came flying at me later that night with his staff, claiming he had seen me with a devil or an angel, and he did not know which.
    “That’s when my father, my beloved, sweet, good-hearted father said, ‘It was Marduk, Babylon’s god, whom you saw.’ And maybe that is why…that is why, we are here now. My father never meant to hurt me. Never. He never meant to do a cruel thing to anyone in his life! He never meant it! He was…he was my little brother.
    “Let me explain. I have figured it out. I was the eldest son, born when my father was young, because the deportation fromJerusalem had been hard on our people and they married quickly to have sons.
    “But my father was the baby of his family, the little Benjamin beloved by everyone, and somehow or other in our family I fell into being his elder brother, and treating him as such. As eldest son I bossed him about a bit. Or rather, we became…we became as friends.
    “My father worked hard. But we were close. We drank together. We went to the taverns together. We shared women together. And I told him, drunk that night, how Marduk had talked to me for years, and how now I had seen him, and my personal god was the great god of Babylon himself.
    “So foolish to have done it! What good could have come of it! At first he laughed, then he worried, then he became engrossed. Oh, I never should have done it. And Marduk knew this. He was in the tavern but so far from me that he had no visibility, he was vaporous and golden like light, and only I could see him, and he shook his head ‘no,’ and turned his back when I told my father. But you know, I loved my father, and I was so happy! And I wanted him to know. I wanted him to know how I had put my arms around the god!
    “Stupid!
    “Let me return to the background. The foreground is suddenly too hot for me and it hurts me and stings my eyes.
    “The family. I was telling you what we were. We were rich merchants and we were scribes of our Sacred Books. All of the Hebrew tribes in Babylon were in one way or another scribes of the Sacred Books and busy making copies for their own families at all times, but with us it was a very large business because we were known for the rapid and accurate copy. And we had a huge library of old texts. I think I told you, we had maybe, I don’t know, twenty-five different stories about Joseph and Egypt and Moses and so forth, and it was always a matter of dispute what to include and what not to. We had so many stories of Joseph in Egypt that we decided not to give all of them credit. I wonder what became of all those tablets, all those scrolls. We just didn’t think all those stories were true. But maybe we were wrong. Oh, who knows?
    “But to return to the fabric of my life. Whenever I left the court of the palace, or the tablet house, or the marketplace, I came right