Blood and gold, or, The story of Marius - Anne Rice

The Vampire Chronicles continue with Anne Rice's spellbinding new novel, in which
the great vampire Marius returns.

The golden-haired Marius, true Child of the Millennia,
once mentor to The Vampire Lestat, always and forever the conscientious foe of the
Evil Doer, reveals in his own intense yet inti-
mate voice the secrets of his two-thousand-year
existence.

Once a proud Senator in Imperial Rome, kidnapped and made a "blood god"
by the Druids, Marius becomes the embittered protector of Akasha and Enkil, Queen
and King of the vampires, in whom the core of the supernatural race resides.

We
follow him through his heartbreaking abandonment of the vampire Pandora. Through
him we see the fall of pagan Rome to the Emperor Constantine and the horrific sack
of the Eternal City itself at the hands of the Visigoths.

Bravely, Marius seeks
a new civilization in the midst of glittering Constantinople, only to meet with the
blood drinker Eudoxia. We see him ultimately returning to his beloved Italy, where
after the horrors of the Black Death, he is restored by the beauty of the Renaissance.
We see him become a painter living dangerously
yet happily among mortals, giving
his heart to the great Botticelli, to the bewitching courtesan Bianca, and to the
mysterious young apprentice Armand.

Moving from Rome to Florence, Venice, and Dresden,
and to the English castle of the secret scholarly order of the Talamasca, the novel
reaches its dramatic finale in our own time, deep in the jungle where Marius, having
told his life story, seeks some measure of justice from the oldest vampires in the
world.