“Yes, ma’am, that’s me,” he said. “At least, that’s what I am, not who. It’s a job, is all.”
“Yet you are not a Zulu. You remind me of the people of Kôr—the Amahaggar. They too were tall and strong and comely, like the Nubians, my father’s people. They too had lost their great civilization, which lies beneath the jungle. By the time I came to Kôr, it was already a city of the dead, and the Amahaggar had become a tribe rather than a great nation. Your ancestry is East African, is it not?
“I don’t know,” said Clarence. “All my mother could tell me was that her people came from Virginia. Her mother was a slave on a plantation there. Her father was a freedman, a blacksmith who had to buy her to marry her. And I don’t know about my father’s family. He died before I was born of typhoid fever. He was working for one of the railroad companies in Colorado, building the railroad, trying to make enough money to send back home, when he caught sick and died. He never told my mother where his folks came from, so that’s all I know.”
Ayesha frowned in anger. Catherine worried for a moment that she was going to start zapping someone! “How can this century pride itself on progress, when it perpetuates the barbaric institutions of the past in even baser form? Someday, the depredations of the European nations will end, and the land above the Zambezi will be free once more. If it happens within your lifetime, I will show you the land of your ancestors, Mr. Jefferson. Alas that I could not be the one to free it! But I was one woman against the British East Africa Company and its soldiers.”
“Beatrice told me that you were a priestess in Egypt, a land I would like to visit,” said Clarence. “How did you come to be here in Budapest, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Ayesha smiled. It was the first genuine smile Catherine had seen her give in—well—ever. “Would you like to hear my story, Mr. Jefferson? Or Clarence, if I may? We were going to stop for coffee in about an hour, but perhaps this is as good a time. Sit down, all of you. Kati, could you fetch us some coffee? And perhaps some kifli to go with it.”
“I’ll help her,” said Frau Gottleib. “I’ve heard this story, and I have more important things to do than hear it again.”
“Thank you, Eva. If the rest of you would care to sit? That is, if you have nothing more pressing.”
Well, they did have to finish packing! They would need to catch the Orient Express to Paris tomorrow morning, and Catherine had not even started yet. She always seemed to put packing off until the last minute. Soon, they would be rejoining Mary and Justine—and Diana, of course. Hopefully Mary and Justine had already found Alice! But they could certainly spare an hour, and anyway, Clarence had already sat down. From the way he was looking at Ayesha, it was obvious that he wasn’t going away without hearing her story, and Beatrice would not want to leave without him. Catherine was amused by Beatrice’s jealousy. Not that Beatrice was vain, of course, but she was used to being the most beautiful one in any room.
BEATRICE: I was not jealous! I was merely concerned that his fascination with Ayesha would put him in danger. Do not misunderstand me—I have great respect for our Madam President. But she has lived so long that she no longer understands human morality. Those around her must remind her of the need for empathy and compassion.
CATHERINE: Oh, so “concerned” is now a synonym for “jealous,” is it? And she’s certainly not my Madam President!
Ayesha, Princess of Meroë, Priestess of Isis, Queen of Kôr, and now President of the Alchemical Society, sat down on a corner of her desk and, with a faraway look in her eyes, began to speak.
“When my mother left me at the temple of Isis at Philae, I became just another of the postulants—that is the closest equivalent in English, I think—of the Goddess. In my father’s palace, there had been servants to tend to me and my sisters—but at the temple, we were all servants of the Goddess. The girls came from every corner of Egypt and beyond—the sophisticated salons of Alexandria, the temple complexes of Memphis, the merchant houses of Damascus and Tyre. There were girls from Athens and Carthage and Babylon, for Isis was worshipped throughout the known world. We were all equal—that is, servants in the house of the Goddess—and the priestesses did not let us forget it! Indeed, I was considered rather slow and old, for I had come to the temple on my twelfth birthday, and some of the novices had been there since they were seven. We woke at dawn and bathed in cold water, then oiled our skin and hair. For an hour before breaking our fast, we cleaned the temple, so it would be fresh for each day. After a breakfast of barley bread with butter and honey, and a mug of beer for each of us, we studied for the rest of the morning. I missed my mother, my sisters, and brother—but to learn as we were learning! No school now teaches as we were taught in the temple of Isis.
“The greatest of our teachers, the one whose image even today I hold in my heart, was an Assyrian named Heduana, the priestess in charge of novices when I myself was one. She had been a princess in her own country, but at the temple such worldly distinctions meant little. We were all equal in the sight of the Goddess, except for those ranks established within the temple itself—the novices, junior priestesses, senior priestesses, and of course the High Priestess herself. Even she, despite her power, was simply called Tera.
“You know—or perhaps you infants of the modern age do not know—the story of Isis, how she healed her husband, Osiris, after he was murdered by his brother Set, who had cut his body into pieces and scattered them across Egypt. Isis searched for his body parts, keening with grief like a falcon. Her tears flooded the Nile, which is why the Nile floods to this day. When she had found all the parts of his body, she assembled the pieces and brought Osiris back to life with herbs and spells. She was, in a sense, the first physician. When I grew older and was inducted into the mysteries of the temple as a priestess myself, I learned that the gods were metaphors, names for energic forces—that all the world, from the stars down to gems hidden in the rocks, was filled with these energic forces, and that we could use them to heal. As novices we studied all the plants in the temple garden, learning their names and properties, their uses in medicine. We helped the priestesses treat the sick and poor who came to the temple.
“So I grew up in that place, under the tutelage of Heduana, and of Tera herself. She had been a queen—the wife of foolish Ptolemy, called by his friends Auletes and his enemies Nothos, which means bastard, for he was illegitimate, and she was the mother of ill-fated Cleopatra. When her husband died, she had been sent to the temple to serve as High Priestess, for Cleopatra considered her own mother a rival for the throne. She had a curious physical feature—seven fingers on her left hand. Now it would be considered a deformity, a congenital abnormality. Then, it was seen as the mark of Isis, whose sacred number was seven. She was an effective, if exacting, High Priestess. She ruled the temple as efficiently as she has once ruled Egypt while her husband was in exile. The novices were frightened of her, but the priestesses treated her with respect. Heduana always told us that she was not as frightening as she appeared to inconsequential beings such as ourselves. But she said this with a smile, for she loved us and we loved her in return. Heduana was our leader and guide. She never allowed us to slack in our studies or shirk our responsibilities to the sick who came to see us. ‘You are serving the Goddess,’ she would say. ‘See that you do it well.’ I remember, once, a novice who used her energic powers to kill a mouse that had been bothering her at night, squeaking about her room. The next day she was sent back home to Thebes. All of the novices were assembled to watch her walk out through the lion gates, wearing the clothes she had arrived in rather than the white linen of the Goddess. It would, Heduana said, be a lesson to us all never to abuse our powers.”
“Yet you used your power to kill those vampires,” said Beatrice. She sounded both perplexed and accusing.
Ayesha turned to her. “I am not the girl I was then. I have lived and learned a great deal, and I do not value life as I did. What would Heduana think of me now? I do not know.” She looked grim.
>
Just then the door opened. In walked Kati with a coffee tray, followed by Lady Crowe bearing a plate of crescent pastries. “Hello, Catherine, Beatrice,” she said. “How nice to see you again. Do give my love to Mary and Justine, and of course little Diana, when you see them. Ayesha, can I borrow Kati for a while? I need help sorting through the receipts from the conference. Based on how much was eaten, you’d think we had put on a conference for elephants!”
“If she doesn’t mind, I don’t,” said Ayesha. “We’re taking a sort of break, as you see. Kati, tudsz segíteni Lady Crowe?”
“Well, some people have time to,” said Lady Crowe, but she was smiling. “Gyere, Kati. Let’s leave these ne’er-do-wells to their break.”
DIANA: Little Diana! I’ll little her.…
Catherine poured herself a cup of coffee, then looked inquiringly at Beatrice. Beatrice held up two fingers, so she poured out two more. She was surprised—Beatrice did not ordinarily drink coffee, just green goop. But she supposed coffee beans were plant matter as well? Beatrice would not want cream or sugar, Clarence would want sugar, and she wanted hers with a great deal of cream. She prepared each cup, then passed two to Beatrice. Ah yes, that was better! As for the pastries, pumas did not eat such things. Professor Holly took several and poured himself a cup of coffee, but Leo simply shook his head.
MARY: You never drink coffee here at home! Or even tea, unless it’s one of those goopy green tisanes.
BEATRICE: I do not like the taste of it. But that day, somehow, I wanted to seem more normal, more like an ordinary woman. Yes, Catherine, I suppose I was a little jealous. Clarence seemed so fascinated by Ayesha’s story, and of course with Ayesha herself.
CATHERINE: Leo Vincey was looking daggers at him! If it were physically possible, he would have killed Clarence with his eyes.
MARY: And yet, Bea, you know that Clarence loves you. I can’t think of anyone more constant, more faithful under difficult circumstances.
BEATRICE: Alas, that I myself am the difficult circumstance.
“This Tera was Cleopatra’s mother?” said Clarence, taking his coffee cup from Beatrice. “Then you must have been there when Egypt was conquered by Augustus.”
“Augustus!” Ayesha said the name with contempt. “Of course a man as vain as Octavian would call himself Augustus and declare himself a god! He detested Egypt, and he destroyed Rome. At first we thought the war would have nothing to do with us. After all, we were in Philae, far away from the turmoil in Alexandria. But his soldiers came for the High Priestess—either because Tera had been respected as a queen, or because of the knowledge she possessed as High Priestess of Isis, who knows? They stormed the temple, and we fought back with everything we had, except the powers that would have made the only difference, but that we had been taught never to use for harm. I was a junior priestess by then and in charge of the novices, the eight- to fourteen-year-olds. Heduana herself, who had risen to senior priestess, had recommended me as her replacement. Before the fighting started, I was able to get the novices out through a passageway known only to the priestesses, which led down to the river. I put them in reed boats and fled with them to my father’s household. My mother took charge of the girls and arranged to send them back to their families. Therefore, I was out of the battle and heard about it only afterward.
“Knowing that they were about to be defeated, Tera ordered the priestesses to fight back using their energic powers. Heduana argued against it, saying it was better to die than betray their oaths to the Goddess. Many of the senior priestesses, particularly those who were close to Tera, in her inner circle, followed the High Priestess, but the ordinary priestesses followed Heduana. They could not imagine breaking their oaths, and anyway did not know how to use their powers in battle. If they had all followed Tera and fought back, could they have prevailed against the Roman forces? I do not know. As it was, the temple itself was sacked and the remaining priestesses, those who escaped or surrendered and were allowed to live, scattered—to other temples or back to their home countries. One of them told me that rather than being captured, Tera had drunk poison before the altar of Isis. So perhaps the price of Heduana’s idealism was the destruction of our order. You see, Beatrice, I have become a realist, or what you might call a cynic.
“Suddenly, everything that had been my world since I entered the temple was gone. My father said he would try to find me a husband—at eighteen, I was past the age when most princesses married, but I came from the royal house of Meroë, and there were men who would have wanted my hand for an alliance with my father, particularly since Rome was flexing its might. But what did I want with a husband, I who had been a priestess of Isis? No, I wanted to learn. Only learning would assuage my grief and anger. So I left Meroë and began to travel—up through Egypt, then by ship to Greece, trading my knowledge of medicine for food and shelter. In Sparta, then Athens and Corinth, I studied with physicians, learning about new medicines, new methods. In Ithaca I met a Greek man, Kallikrates. We became lovers.”
Catherine looked over at Leo Vincey. He was staring at Ayesha intently, with a peculiar look on his face. What was it? Not jealousy, which she had expected. No, it was a kind of longing.
“Kallikrates was a physician, the best I have ever known. He had a school of medicine in the hills above Ithaca, where he trained young men and a few women in his methods. They came from all over the known world. I asked him to teach me all he knew, and when he learned that I had come from the temple of Isis at Philae, he asked me to teach him as well. I became one of the teachers at his school, and slowly we began to care for each other. I had never been in love before. It was a new and delightful experience for me. He was the great love of my life—” She paused for a moment. “Until Leo, of course.”
Catherine glanced over at Leo again. Now he was staring down at his hands.
“But even then our aims were different. He wanted simply to heal. I wanted to continue learning what I had been taught by the priestesses of the temple—how to manipulate the energic powers of the Earth. It seemed to me that if I could gain enough power, I would be able to heal the body by a touch and a thought—I would knit bone to bone, turn the tumor back into healthy tissue, restore vitality when disease had enervated the patient. I might even defeat death! Kallikrates had no such ambition. ‘Death is the natural end of all life,’ he told me. ‘We practice medicine to provide a good life, and eventually a good death—that is our duty to Asclepios, Ayesha. But beside Asclepios walks Thanatos, and we must not deny or disrespect either of those gods. What would life be without death? It would not be life.’
“I did not listen to him. One summer, when the olive flowers were blooming on the hillsides around his medical school, I traveled back to Egypt, to the library of Alexandria, to consult all the ancient scrolls I could find on the energic powers. The philosophers had written of them centuries before, in metaphor and myth. Then I traveled to Nineveh, to consult the library of Ashurbanipal, or what remained of it, for much of it stood in ruins. Then down to Arabia Magna, where I traveled with the Arabian tribes, consulting their healers and elders. I went, by caravan, as far as Kandahar, always searching for wisdom and knowledge.
“It was two years before I returned to Ithaca. I was still young—despite the destruction of my temple, I knew little of life’s losses, of how time is the one thing we can never regain, until our understanding of the energic powers is much greater than mine. I am convinced that time itself is only energy… but you want to hear my story, not scientific theories. I came back to find that Kallikrates was dying of a cancer, which had already spread too far for any of his students to heal.
“ ‘Let me try,’ I said, kneeling beside his pallet. ‘I have learned so much since I left you! Let me use my new powers and abilities, the knowledge I have gained, to make you well.’ I have never been one to weep, but at the sight of his emaciated body, my tears flowed like the Nile.
“ ‘No, beloved,’ he said to me. ‘I feel the wings of Thanatos b
eating the air—can you not hear them? He has come for me. It is my time, and it would be ungrateful of me—ungrateful to Hera who watched over my birth, to Hades who is waiting to welcome me into the land where all must go—to ask for more. Place obols on my tongue and over my eyes so I can pay Charon. Put a biscuit in my hand so I can placate Cerberus. In my other hand put a sprig of olive flowers so I can present them to Queen Persephone. And let me go.’
“Three days and nights I did not leave his side, but sang to him and slept beside him. On the third night, he crossed the river over which no mortal returns. I had lost my beloved.”
Ayesha grew silent. There was no sound in the room, until Catherine heard a sniff. It was Beatrice, her eyes swimming with tears. She took out a dainty linen handkerchief and wiped her nose with it. Clarence reached over and held her gloved hand. Vincey was still looking down at the floor. Holly took another of the crescent pastries and poured himself a second cup of coffee. He was barely paying attention, as though he had heard this story before—as no doubt he had.
After a moment, Ayesha continued. “What did I have left but my studies? I returned to them. Finally they led me to Delphi, where in a storage chamber, still intact among the ruins of the ancient temple of Apollo, I found a manuscript written by the priestess Themistoclea, who had been the teacher of Pythagoras. It was her writing that allowed me to unravel the final mystery of extended—perhaps eternal—life. I took that manuscript and placed it in the library of Alexandria, where I hoped it would remain safe. But Aurelian set fire to the library in order to defeat Queen Zenobia, and spread, once again, the power of Rome. Then came Constantine, convert to the new religion, and Theodosius, who destroyed the temples of the old gods. By then, I was almost five hundred years old. I had lived as a wanderer, a healer traveling from village to village of the Roman Empire, applying my skills, teaching where I could. But the world was changing around me. The government in Rome was growing more corrupt. Faith and fanaticism had replaced philosophy and science. Ignorance and superstition were spreading throughout the civilized world—when I healed, the villagers called me a witch. Outside it, Germanic tribes were waiting to break through the gates. I could stand it no longer, so I returned to Egypt, now simply another Roman province. Even there, I saw the disintegration of all that had been. The temple of Isis was deserted—no one practiced the healing arts in those halls anymore. Only the descendants of the temple cats remained. I saw one sleeping in the stone chair where Queen Tera had once sat with her black cat curled in her lap, welcoming me to the temple. Sick at heart in a way even I could not heal, I traveled south. For the first time since I had left my father’s house, I went home to Meroë. The city had been sacked by King Ezana of Aksum, and was a shadow of its former self. That was when I determined I would no longer live among men.
The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl Page 16