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.
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