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THE TEMPTATION OF SAINT ANTHONY

There was no moon on the night when Anthony was bitten by a vampire as he slept within the walls of the abandoned fort at Pispir; the star-shadows were so deep that he got no ore than the merest glimpse of the creature. His only abiding memories were tactile, of skeletal thinness and rags so fragmentary and dust-encrusted that they seemed more like the tatters of an ancient shroud than clothing.

The bite was ragged too, being perhaps more tear than bite, hav­ing apparently been inflicted by blunt and decaying teeth. It never entirely healed, although it did not become infected. Although little trace of spilled blood remained, Anthony was sure that he had lost a good deal—perhaps enough to kill him. For three full days he ex­pected to die; even when he stopped expecting it, he was not at all sure that his condition could still be reckoned as life, rather than a strange kind of undeath.

When the next travelers stopped at the fort to draw water from the well that had determined its site, they found its resident hermit awake and active, but somewhat delirious. They were reassured, however, when he consented to accept a little food from them, and showed no inclination to savage them like a rabid dog. They even offered to escort him to Alexandria, if he decided that it would be best to leave his refuge, but he declined the offer.

“I have sworn to remain here for twenty years,” he told them. “There will be time for preaching when my own education is com­plete.”

“There are schools in Alexandria,” the caravan’s leader told him, “and the greatest library in the world, in spite of the accidents it has suffered.”

“That is not the kind of learning I seek,” he replied. “I want to know what is within myself—what the Lord might communicate to me if only I may hear him.”

The travelers were not Christians, but they understood his no­tion of the Lord better than a Roman would have done. “This is the desert,” the leader of the band told him. “Here, the voices of the djinn are louder than the voice of God. Solitude leads to madness.”

“The Devil will undoubtedly tempt me,” Anthony admitted. “I am ready for that.” He did not tell them that the thirst was already building within him for something richer by far than water or wine, nor what effort it required to resist the urge to cut his visitors’ throats and suck the wounds till he could such no more.

He had always thought that solitude was the best thing for a man of his sort. The fact that the company of living human beings would henceforth be an endless torment of unacknowledgeable de­sire only served to confirm his judgment.

The travelers went on their way on the thirty-first day after An­thony had endured the vampire’s bite; after that he was alone until the evening of the fortieth day, when he woke from a doze at sunset to find a simulacrum of Christ offering him a cup.

“This is my blood,” said the apparent Christ. “Drink of it, and be saved.”

“I have been expecting you, Satan,” Anthony replied. “I knew that you would seize upon my new weakness. Why else would you have sent the demon to suck the fluid from me?”

“This is my blood,” the false Christ repeated. “It is my gift, and the way to salvation.”

“You are the Devil,” Anthony retorted, “and you have no gift to offer but eternal damnation.” He got up and went to the well, setting Satan firmly behind him. He lowered the bucket and brought it up again.

He drank—but he was still thirsty, and he knew that the darker thirst would not be assuaged by water.

Anthony did not doubt that the fluid in the Devil’s cup really was blood, nor that it would answer his terrible need, but he had not come to Pispir in search of satiation—quite the reverse, in fact. He did not drink water to salve his thirst, but only because he would die without it; had he been able to drink and keep his thirst he would have done so. To be able to drink and still have thirst of a sort to test him was a privilege of sorts.

When he turned around again, determined to see things in the light of his faith, the Devil was cloven-hoofed and shaggy-legged, with horns set atop his brow. Satan did not seem comfortable in this form, for his eyes seemed pained and his gaze as roaming restlessly, but Anthony assumed that this was because honesty was a sore trial to a creature of his sort.

“You are foolish to insist on seeing me thus,” the Devil com­plained, casting aside the cup, from which nothing spilled as it rolled over the sand-dusted flagstones bordering the well. “I am nei­ther the Great God Pan, nor the Father of Lies, nor a prideful angel cast out of Heaven. I will admit to being a temptation personified, but mine is the temptation of knowledge and progress. I am one who can and will reveal secrets, if you will only consent to listen.”

“I will not,” Anthony told his adversary. “I am deaf to all but the word of the Lord, and knowledge of the Lord is the only wisdom I seek.”

“I did not send the vampire to bite you,” the Devil insisted, his agonized eyes looking upwards as if to welcome the deeper blue that was consuming the sky from the east. “That is not my way of working—but if I were of a mind to create such creatures, I would shape them as seductive women, whose bite would be a glorious indul­gence and a pleasure unmatchable. The wretched parasite that at­tacked you was one of nature’s sports. If God were responsible for such monstrosities—and I cannot believe that He is—they would be evidence of His sickness or His sense of humor.”

“Have you come to debate with me, then?” Anthony asked. “I do not mind in the least, for the nights are long at this time of year, and often surprisingly cold. It will be a futile occupation, though, from your own point of view. There are many souls in the world, alas, that might be won with far less trouble than mine.”

“This is not a contest,” the Devil said, seeming a little more at ease now that the evening star was shining brightly and the atmos­pheric dust in the west had taken on the color of blood. “There was no war in Heaven, and there is no war on Earth for the souls of hu­mankind. You conceive of yourself as a battleground in which a higher self of faith of virtue, aided by a guardian angel, is cease­lessly at war with a lower self of insatiable appetite and uncontrolla­ble passion, provoked by mischievous imps, but all of that is mere illusion. If solitude really allowed you to look into yourself more clearly, you would know that you are less divided than you imagine, and that the world is not as you imagine it to be.”

“Excellent,” said Anthony. “Nothing can warm a man more, in the absence of tangible heat, than the labor of cutting through soph­istry. Sit down, my enemy, I beg you. Let’s make ourselves as com­fortable as we can, given the hardness of the ground and the aching within.”

“Oh no,” the Devil said, seeming to grow larger as the night ad­vanced, and now unfurling wings like those of a gigantic eagle. “I can do better than that, my friend, by way of distracting us from our mutual plight.”

Anthony had observed that the Devil, in what he took to be the dark angel’s natural form, was not well-adapted for sitting. His goat­ish limbs were not articulated like a humans; even squatting must be awkward for him. Anthony had not expected compliance when he made his teasing offer—but neither had he expected to be carried away.

The Devil did not grow claws to match his wings; indeed, the wings themselves refused to coalesce into avian feathers, but con­tinued to grow and to change, as if they were intent on attaining the pure insubstantiality of shadow. By night, it seemed, the Ape of God and the Adversary of Humankind had more freedom to formulate himself as he wished—and what he wished to be, it seemed, was a vast cloud of negation.

Anthony felt himself caught up by that cloud, but he was not grabbed or clutched, merely elevated towards the sky. The cloud was beneath him and all around him, but it was perfectly transpar­ent—more perfectly transparent, in fact, than a pool of pure water or the unstirred desert air.

Anthony tried to resist the sensation that he could see more clearly through the cloud of absence than he had ever been able to see before, but his eyes were unusually reluctant to take aboard his conviction and he had to fight to secure the dictatorship of his faith.

He saw the walls of the fort shrink beneath him, until the ruin was a mere blur on the desert’s face. Then he saw the coastline of North Africa, where the ocean was separated from the arid wilder­ness by a mere ribbon of fertile ground. Then he watched the curve of the horizon extend into the arc of a circle, and he saw the sun that had set a little while before rise again in the west, as the edge of the world could no longer hide it.

“You cannot trouble me with that,” he told the Devil. “I know that the world is round.”

The Devil no longer had eyes to reflect his anguish, nor a leath­ery tongue with which to form his lies, but he was not voiceless. He spoke within Anthony’s head, like an echo of a thought.

“Fear not, my friend,” the voice said, softer now than before. “I have brought air enough to sustain us for the whole night long—and if, by chance, you would like to slake your thirsts, I have water and blood enough to bring you to the very brink of satisfaction.”

“I have drunk my fill of the Lord’s good water,” Anthony told him, “and human blood I will never drink, no matter how my Devil­led thirst might increase. I can suffer any affliction, knowing that my Lord loves me and that my immortal soul is safe for all eternity.” While he spoke, Anthony observed that the world as spinning on its axis, and moving through space as if to describe a circle of its own around the sun. The moon and the world were engaged in a cu­rious dance, but the sun—whose disk seemed no bigger than the moon’s, when seen from the land of Egypt—seemed to have become far more massive as the cloud moved towards it.

“Were you expecting a sequence of crystal spheres?” the Devil whispered from his hidden corner of Anthony’s consciousness. “Were you unmoved by my promise of air because you never be­lieved in the possibility of a void? Did you think that you could breathe the quintessential ether as you moved through the hierarchy of the planets towards the ultimate realm of the fixed stars?”

“There is but one Lord,” Anthony replied, “and I am content to breathe in accordance with His providence.”

“Alas, you’ll have to breathe in accordance with my provi­dence, for a little while,” said the Adversary of Humankind. “There is neither air nor ether outside this nimbus. Can you see that the world is but one of the planetary family, toiling around the central sun? Do you see how small a world it is, by comparison with mighty Jupiter? Can you see that Jupiter and Saturn have major satellites as big as worlds themselves, and hosts of minor ones? Do you see how the space between Mars and Jupiter is strewn with planetoids? Can you see the halo from which comets come, beyond the orbits of worlds unseen from Earth, unnamed as yet by curious astronomers?” Anthony, who was familiar with the story of Er, as told in Plato’s Republic, looked for the Spindle of Necessity and listened for the siren song of the music of the spheres, but he was not disap­pointed by their absence.

“I am riding in a cloud formed by the Master of Illusion,” he said, not speaking aloud but confident that the Devil, cornered within him, could hear him perfectly well. “You cannot frighten me with empty space and lonely worlds. If the Earth is indeed a solitary wanderer in an infinite void, I shall feel my kinship with its rocks and deserts more keenly than before.”

“The Master of Illusion is sight constrained by faith,” the Devil told him. “I am an Iconoclast, committed to breaking the idols that filter the evidence of your Earthbound eyes. I do not seek to frighten you but to awaken you. Do you see the stars, now that we are mov­ing through their realm? Can you see that they are not fixed at all, but moving in their own paces about the chaos at the heart of the Milky Way? Do you see the nebulae that lie without the sidereal system? Can you discern the stars that comprise them—systems like the Milky Way, more numerous by far than the stars they each con­tain?”

“It is a pretty conceit,” Anthony admitted. “Evidence, I trust, of your sense of humor rather than your sickness of mind.”

“It is the truth,” said the voice within him.

“If it were real,” Anthony retorted, “it would not be equal to the millionth part of the greater truth, which is faith in the Lord and His covenant with humankind.” He knew, however, that while the Devil was lurking inside him, borrowing the voice of his own thoughts, he had no means of concealing the force of his realization that perhaps this was the truth, and that the world really might be no more than a mediocre rock dutifully circling a mediocre star in a mediocre gal­axy in a universe so vast that no power of sight could plumb its depths nor any power of mind calculate its destiny.

Curiously enough, however, the Devil did not appear to be privy to that unvoiced thought, formulated more by dread than doubt. “It was not always thus,” the Devil said. “In the beginning, it was very tiny—but that was fourteen thousand million years ago; it is expanding still, and has a far greater span before it, until the last fugitive stars expend the last of their waning light, and darkness falls upon lifelessness forever.”

“The Lord said ‘Let there be light’,” Anthony reminded the Ad­versary. “He did not say ‘Let there be light forever’—but what does it matter, since our souls are safe in his care?”

“Our souls?” countered the Devil.

“Human souls,” Anthony corrected himself. “Those human souls, at least, which contrive to stay out of your dark clutches.”

The cloud seemed to come to a halt then, in an abyss of space that suddenly seem vertiginous in every direction, where whole sys­tems of stars were reduced to mere points of tentative light. “This is not so awesome,” whispered the Devil, “compared with the empti­ness inside an atom, where matter dissolves into animate mathe­matical entity and uncertainty refuses the definition of solidity. I wish I could show you that, but a human mind’s eye is incapable of such imagination. Trust me when I tell you that there is void within as well as without, and that substance is rarer than you could ever comprehend.”

“There is no void where the Lord is,” Anthony replied, “and the Lord is everywhere—except, I must suppose, in the depths of your rebellious heart, from which He has been rudely cast out.”

As he spoke, though, the hermit became more sharply aware of his thirst for blood: the curse that the Devil had inflicted upon him in order to increase his vulnerability to unreason.

Anthony struggled to keep his next thought unvoiced, but in the end he decided that he had no need to hide from the Devil, while he was still committed to the Lord. “I am a vampire now,” he said, without waiting for any reply to his previous observation, “but I am no more a sinner than I was before. I thirst, but I trust in the Lord to deliver me from evil. I will not drink of human blood, no matter how intense my thirst becomes. If my life is to be a trial by ordeal, then I shall be vindicated.”

“And if you should live forever, unable to die?” the Devil mur­mured. “What then, my friend? What if your thirst should become as infinite as the abysm of space, never ceasing to increase?”

“Eventually,” Anthony reminded him, “the last star will expend the last of its light, and darkness will fall forever. I shall be safe in the bosom of the Lord.”

The cloud condensed around him then, and moved through him, as if it were turning him inside out or drawing him into a fourth di­mension undiscernible by human eyes—but then the dark abyss of intergalactic space was replaced by the familiar gloom of night on Earth. Anthony found himself on the edge of a cliff not far from his fort, kneeling on the bare rock and looking out over the desert dunes.

Anthony bowed his head, and was about to thank the Lord for his deliverance, when he caught sight of a moon-shadow from the corner of his eye. It appeared to be the shadow of a human being, but Anthony knew better than to trust the appearance.

He turned to look at the Devil, who now wore the appearance of an Alexandrian philosopher—an Epicurean, Anthony supposed, rather than a neo-Platonist.

“What now?” the hermit said, glad to be able to speak the words aloud, although his tongue felt thick and the inside of his mouth was parched. “Have you no one else to tempt and torment? I have seen your emptiness, and yet am full. I will no more drink of horror and despair than of human blood. I must suppose that I am a vampire now, but I still have my faith. I shall never be a minion of the Prince of Demons.”

“This is not a contest,” the Devil said, again. “I have nothing to gain or lose by tempting you. I do not need and do not want your soul, your heart or your affection.”

“And yet, you seem to have a thirst of some sort,” Anthony ob­served. “Perhaps you are a vampire too, avid for human blood in spite of your best intentions.”

“There is a thirst,” the Devil admitted, “and it might be mine. Have you ever met the Sphinx, my friend, in your lonely fort? Has she ever asked you her riddle? Her true riddle, I mean; not the one contrived by Sophocles.”

“I have never met a Sphinx,” Anthony said, rising to his feet and brushing the dust from the hem of his ragged coat, “but if I ever did, I would know you in that guise, and I would answer you then as I answer you now: I trust in the Lord, and Jesus Christ is my savior. I fear no possible consequence of that declaration.”

“And yet there are heretics already within the Christian com­pany,” the Devil said. “There is division, disharmony and distrust even among those who worship the One God and accept the same savior. If you could see the future...but I dare say that you would see it as selectively as you see the present, filtered by the lens of faith. They will call you saint if you preach in Alexandria and write letters to the Emperor Constantine when you are done here. You will be the stuff of legend, and I shall not be entirely blameless in that, should I fail in my endeavor—but the vampire’s bite is your secret and mine, and will remain so. History always has its secrets, and a world like yours has more than its share, since it uses writing so sparingly.” Anthony could look into the Devil’s eyes again now, and could see that they were as restless as they had been before, although their pain seemed to have been dulled. He saw the Devil lick his lips, as if to moisten them against the dry and bitter wind that blew from the dunes.

“The scriptures are a gift from the Lord,” Anthony said, al­though he knew that no defense was necessary. “The command­ments are preserved there, as they need to be now that the Ark of the Covenant is lost.”

“Writing is an awkward instrument,” the Devil remarked. “Without measurement and calculation, linear reasoning and syntac­tical complexity, science is impossible—but the learning of letters and numbers requires specialist teachers, and the custodians of cul­ture inevitably become jealous of the privilege the control, establish­ing themselves as arbiters of faith. Their empire is fragile, though; once a man is taught to read, he is better equipped to think...and to doubt.”

Anthony’s eyes were scanning the eastern horizon, searching for the twilight that would precede the dawn, but there was no sign of it. There must still be several hours of night remaining. He licked his own lips, thirsty now for more than blood.

“I want to show you the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle,” the Devil said, softly. “The riddle of life and death, of growth and age­ing, of competition and selection. I cannot force you to read its sig­nificance, but I shall write it in your eyes regardless.”

“I am weary,” Anthony admitted, “but you cannot defeat me. My thirst may be a torment, but it keeps me alert to your wiles.” “Look,” said the Father of Lies, pointing out into the shadowed desert, where the dunes had begun to stir and shift.

Anthony knew that moonlight could play tricks in the desert night. The haze that blurred the air by day seemed to disappear by night, but the fugitive light was deceptive nevertheless.

It seemed to him that the fine sand eddied into life, and that its motes, at first dissociated, began to cleave together into imitations of complex organic forms: leaves and tubers, worms and mites, slugs and crabs, trees and snakes. He saw all these creatures growing from tiny seeds and eggs into complex forms that produced more seeds and eggs, each generation dying off as the next emerged. He saw that, in order to grow, the creatures fed upon one another, not ran­domly but in measured and defined ways. Even the sedentary plants, whose only necessary nourishment was wind and sunlight, accepted the substance of the decaying dead into their own flesh, so that noth­ing that might be incorporate in flesh was lost or wasted, but always recycled and transfigured. He saw that the feeding was always com­petitive, and that there was also competition to delay the moment when the living became food, so that no succeeding generation was exactly the same as the one that had gone before.

Everything was changing, and would continue to change. Crea­tion was continuous, and would never be complete.

Anthony saw, then, that the human species was a product of this process of ceaseless change, and deduced that the human species was no more immune to further change than any other. He under­stood that human beings were merely a part of a much larger pat­tern: a temporary artifact of the irresistible organic flux; a momen­tary fancy of the interminable restlessness of the molecules of life, which were forever in the process of consumption and excretion, hurrying from form to form with only the merest pauses for sleep, death, thought and faith. The answer to the Sphinx’s riddle, the her­mit determined, was that life had its own energy, its own circulation and its own busy complexity. It did not need a sculptor—and he sensed that any sculptor who ever tried to tame its innate exuberance would surely fail.

“What is this to me?” Anthony said to the Devil. “I came to the desert to escape tumult, not to conjure it up in my dreams. It is in loneliness that one finds the Lord, and becomes close to the Lord. Life’s transactions are not uninteresting to me, nor are they irrele­vant, but my first concern is the immortal soul, which rests immune to all of this confusion.”

“And yet, my friend,” the Devil said, “you thirst for water and you thirst for blood. Your flesh has no immunity to need, and your mind can have no immunity to the thirst induced by that need.”

The disguised Father of Lies took a dagger from the folds of his clothing, rolled up his sleeve, and cut his forearm from the crook of the elbow to the junction of his palm. “Come and drink,” he said, as the blood welled out and began to rain down on the rocky escarp­ment. “Drink of my blood, and be content.”

“I will not,” Anthony replied. “Not now, or ever. You cannot terrify me, demon that you are, for I am armored by my faith in the Lord, and in Jesus Christ my savior. You cannot tempt me, demon that you are, for I am armored by the certainty of my salvation, and the inviolability of my immortal soul. Water I shall drink as the need arises, but blood I never shall; I shall bear my thirst to the grave, no matter how long it might take to arrive there.”

The Devil lifted his arm, and licked his own blood, seeming to take considerable comfort therefrom. Then he turned, and looked behind him.

Anthony had not seen the four human figures that were creeping through the night until the Devil looked directly at them, but that did not mean that they had not been there all along, moving forward sur­reptitiously, as men who are abroad at night are wont to do.

“Ah!” the Devil said, as if he were not surprised to find them there, even though he had not suspected their presence until some tiny sound caused him to turn around. “Here are some who won’t refuse a drop of blood, though I dare say they haven’t thirsted quite as long as you, my friend.” He held out his arm, inviting the four to approach.

They did so, warily. They, at least, were surprised. They were not used to such offerings—or, indeed, to any offerings at all.

Anthony stared at the shadowed figures as they came closer, il­luminated by a moon that was less than half full but whose light served nevertheless to augment the feeble glimmer of the distant stars. The newcomers were so thin as to seem like walking skele­tons, their clothing reduced to mere ribbons—but their eyes were large and bright and greedy, and their thin lips were pursed in an­ticipation.

The Devil offered his arm freely. The cut was long enough to allow them all to drink simultaneously, two on each side; if the Devil had as much blood in him as a common man, they might have taken a stomach-full apiece and still left a residue behind—but that was not what happened.

The four vampires leapt upon their prey like a pack of jackals, clawing and snapping at him and at one another. Maddened by the combination of their thirst and their proximity to the means of slak­ing it, they lashed out in every direction, each of them seemingly more intent on keeping his companions away from the prize than to claim it for himself.

They bit and sucked, lapped and swallowed—but for every drop they claimed a dozen were spilled on the rocky ledge. The Devil went down beneath their assault, bitten on both his legs as well as his arms, and about his face and throat as well. He sustained a dozen new wounds within a minute, a hundred within five. All of them bled with what seemed to Anthony to be unnatural copiousness—as if the vampires’ saliva had some agent within it that prevented the blood from clotting.

In his home town of Coma, and in Alexandria too—within the shadow of the library wall—Anthony had seen starving dogs fight­ing over a bone, but this was different. Even starving dogs retained some vestige of respect for one another, snarling and howling at the expense of inflicting deadly bites. The four vampires knew no such restraint. They did not howl and they did not snarl, but they clawed and they bit. They gouged at one another’s eyes and aimed deadly blows at one another’s throats. Their intentions were rarely fulfilled, in the immediate sense, but, as time went by and the Devil’s blood leaked away unharvested, the destruction they sought to wreak could hardly be avoided.

They were close to the edge of the cliff. One went sprawling over the edge, and then another. That left two—at which point the conflict became far less chaotic, more sharply focused.

The two vampires fought with all their might, and the Devil’s precious blood continued to ebb away.

Anthony watched, dumbfounded.

Eventually, one vampire went down for the last time—not dead, but broken in his limbs and stunned into unconsciousness. The sur­vivor, who was by no means uninjured, immediately set about trying to lick the last few rivulets of blood from the Devil’s wounds, and to lap up the few fugitive pools that the rock had cupped. It seemed to Anthony to be a rather meager meal.

When the vampire had finished he sat back warily, supporting himself with his scarred and twisted hands, and he looked up at An­thony. His eyes were bright and wild, but not devoid of intelligence.

“You can’t allow yourself to be paralyzed by fear, my friend,” the vampire said. “You’re one of us now.”

“Are you the one who bit me?” Anthony asked.

“What does that matter?” the vampire retorted, licking his lips avidly in search of one last drop of sustenance. “It’s done. You should come with us—we’re heading for Alexandria.”

“Us?” Anthony echoed. “I think you will be alone from now on—and deservedly so, given that you treat your friends so vilely.” “They’ll recover,” the vampire said. “They’ll be thirsty, but their bones will knit and their scratches will heal. They’ll bear me no ill will. They know that there’s strength in numbers, even if the contest that results when we find a lone victim can have only one winner. In Alexandria, it will be different. Cities were made for our kind. If you stay out here, though, alone, they’ll catch you eventu­ally. Then they’ll behead you, and burn your body. There’s no way back from that. You’d best come with us—you have a great deal to learn.”

“You have the Devil’s blood in you now,” Anthony told the creature. “It might make you stronger, I suppose, but it’s poison nevertheless.”

“If that were true,” the vampire replied, “it would make little enough difference to me, who was damned a long time ago—but I know the blood of a philosopher when I taste it. An Epicurean, I believe—the least intoxicating of all.”

“He wore the guise of an Epicurean,” Anthony admitted, “but he was the Devil. He had been a cloud of transparent darkness only an hour or so before.”

“The desert’s full of djinn,” the vampire told him. “There’s no blood in them, but they can play tricks with your head. Thirst makes it easier. If he gets up again, he’ll be one of us—but they don’t al­ways get up. I was lucky; so were you. Him too, although he won’t feel it when he wakes up.” The creature inclined his head briefly in the direction of his erstwhile companion and adversary, who was still unconscious.

“You cannot hurt me, monster,” Anthony said.

“I certainly could,” the monster replied, “but I’ve nothing to gain by it, and the thirst will punish you enough, if you insist in your stubbornness. You’re welcome to come with us if you wish. If not, do as you will.”

“I shall pray to the Lord for my salvation,” Anthony said, defi­antly. “I shall bear my thirst proudly, grateful to be tried and not found wanting. I shall guard my immortal soul until I die, and then confide it to the loving care of my savior and my Lord. The Devil could not tempt me, and nor shall you.”

The vampire came to his feet, wincing at the pain in his limbs and spine. He leaned over the Devil’s body, then knelt down beside it. “He might come back, I suppose,” was the monster’s off-hand judgment, “but I doubt it. Too much damage done. They say that nothing short of beheading and burning will make certain, but that’s just superstitious dread. Don’t worry about inviting me back to the fort—I’ll camp out down there, in the shadow of the cliff, till night­fall comes again. Are you sure you won’t come with us to Alexan­dria? They’ll start hunting for us eventually, of course, and we’ll have to move on, but there’s plenty of blood to be had in the mean­time. The city is our natural environment.”

Anthony gathered himself together and came to stand opposite the vampire, looking down at the body of the man who had con­sented to be murdered. Anthony had to agree that it was impossible to believe that the corpse would ever be reanimated—but the Devil was a master of deception. He turned round abruptly, and walked away, in the direction of the fort. He suspected that the vampire was staring at the back of his head, but he did not look back.

“The flesh is a distraction,” the hermit said to himself, formulat­ing the words clearly although he did not pronounce them aloud. “Its mortification is an irrelevance. The spirit is capable of rising above such trivial matters. Prayer will sustain me, no matter how long I am forced to endure this torment. As God wills, I shall do, even if I live to be a hundred.”

According to history, he lived to be a hundred and five, but he knew what a liar history can be when legend-mongers get involved in it, and he had lost count long before he died. Once he was offi­cially declared a saint, Anthony was able to ascend to Heaven and look back upon the Earth, so he was able to watch with interest when his old Adversary, the Devil, tried his luck again in Heidel­berg thirteen hundred years later, with a slightly different result.

After that, the cities of the world began to grow in earnest, and vampires to multiply. Anthony estimated that it might soon be time to call a halt to the whole sorry mess, perhaps to try again some­where else in the vast and various universe, but he was not privy to the Lord’s intentions.

“Personally,” Saint Leocadia said to him one day, as they watched the outbreak and rapid progress of World War Three, “I’m glad to be out of it. I don’t miss a single thing—except, I sup­pose....” She trailed off, as the saints always tended to do at that point in the conversation.

Anthony was too polite to finish the sentence for her, although he knew perfectly well what she meant. He certainly didn’t miss the terrible thirst for blood that the Devil’s minion had cruelly inflicted upon him, nor any of the thousand other shocks that flesh was heir to, pleasant or unpleasant—but every so often, he missed the little intellectual shocks that had stimulated his mind while his faith was yet to find its final justification.

The saint knew now that he had been right all along to trust in his savior and the grace of God, and that he would be right in every­thing he believed for all eternity. There was a certain undeniable sat­isfaction in the irresistibility of that confirmation—but he also un­derstood, now, what the Devil had meant when he had insisted that it wasn’t a contest. The Devil really hadn’t had the slightest interest in winning his soul, and really had been trying to explain the answer to the Sphinx’s riddle.

By virtue of that realization, every now and again—if only a lit­tle—Saint Anthony couldn’t help missing temptation.