Ramses the Damned

by Anne Rice

  The ground here had not been disturbed for ages, and she’d known the exact location of this buried temple.

  The Egyptian men fell back.

  Were they right to be afraid?

  There’d been all that talk in the papers recently. A magnate of some powerful British shipping company had discovered a mummy’s tomb, filled with inscriptions proclaiming it the final resting place of RAMSES THE DAMNED. Also within, Roman furniture and a statue purported to be of Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.

  The whole affair was utter lunacy, the journalists had cried. Ramses II had ruled a thousand years before Cleopatra’s reign. And his body lay in the Cairo Museum. Everyone knew that!

  But when the man who discovered the tomb suddenly fell dead within its once-buried walls, talk of ancient curses overtook academic quarrels. The mummy’s body had been shipped off to London, the last he read, at the request of the late archeologist’s daughter. Stratford, that was their name, he remembered now. Where had she put it? he’d wondered. In her drawing room? How ghoulish! Clearly she had not feared any mummy’s curse.

  Perhaps it wasn’t a curse the men all around him feared now, but the woman who had brought them to this place.

  His lantern barely pierced the darkness within. She walked far enough ahead to remain just inside the halo. But she was eager to strike out into the black, he could tell. This tomb, even in deep shadow, was utterly familiar to her.

  When the light from his lantern fell across the glittering treasures up ahead, he gasped. She halted and waited for him to catch up, waited until the glow filled the space with the strength of a dozen candles.

  Nerves alight, he spun in place, looking for a sarcophagus or some other sign of a desiccated mummy slumbering within this dark place. But all he saw were piles of coins. An ancient vault of untold treasures. And his beautiful companion walked among them leisurely, sweeping the dust and sand from atop the glittering piles with one gentle passing hand. There were statues of varying sizes as well, lined against stone walls without elegance. They had been brought here in haste, it seemed, and for their protection.

  “How did you know this was all here?” he asked.

  “Because I ordered my soldiers to bring it here,” she answered.

  His laughter was sharp, disbelieving. Then he saw the face of the statue closest to him. His breath left him along with any sense of an orderly, rational world.

  “You have been very kind to me, Teddy,” the woman said. “May I expect more kindness from you in return for some of these riches?”

  He tried to answer. He could only make a dry, rasping sound that reminded him of the one time he’d almost choked on a piece of steak.

  Her breath was at his ear now, her slender arms curving around him from behind. Her moist lips grazed his neck. Living, breathing, alive. The statue staring down at him through the lantern’s flickering light bore her exact likeness, as did every statue stashed inside of this crypt. The same perfectly proportioned face; the same raven-colored hair and rich olive-toned skin. Only the color of the eyes was different. On the statues the eyes were dark, not blue, but they were of the same generous size and seemed full of life and calculation even beneath layers of dust.

  “A modern man would look upon this crypt and accuse me of simply looting my own kingdom in its final hours. Of having no faith in my own lover. No faith that the Battle of Actium would halt Octavian’s advance.”

  Octavian. Actium. A woman who did not sleep and could not die. The woman before him and behind him. Alive, alive, alive…

  “This isn’t…,” the doctor tried. “Impossible. This is…impossible.”

  “No one knew more than I that an empire’s greatest protection was in its wealth, not its army. It was riches that bought us peace with Rome for years. Riches and grain. So it would make sense to these historians, wouldn’t it? That in my kingdom’s final hours, in my final hours as queen, I did little more than grab for treasure.

  “But they are wrong, you see. Very wrong. Once it was clear Octavian could not be stopped, once I’d chosen to give my life to the serpent’s bite, I couldn’t bear the thought of my likeness being destroyed by their soldiers. Let them write my history as the harlot queen, but before Isis, I would not surrender my countenance to the dismemberment of Roman hordes.”

  It wasn’t just the statues, he realized. It was the coins, it was the treasures. She appeared on all of these coins. And they’d all been hidden here in this vault for more than two thousand years.

  “Ask me again, dear Teddy,” she whispered. “Ask me my name.”

  “What is your name?” he whispered.

  She turned him gently, cupped his chin in delicate hands that possessed a supernatural degree of strength. But her kiss was gentle, lingering, and she delivered it while gazing into his eyes.

  “Cleopatra,” she answered. “Cleopatra is my name. And I wish for you to show me all the joys of this new world, so that I may share those joys with you. Would you like this, Teddy?”

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Yes, Cleopatra.”

  * * *

  It was a remarkable tale she told. A tale of immortals and awakenings and terrible, tragic accidents.

  She spoke of her death as a great lake of blackness from which she had been suddenly pulled.

  Before its discovery, her corpse had been preserved by the mud of the Nile delta. For decades afterwards, it lay in the Cairo Museum inside a glass case, branded with the drab label UNKNOWN WOMAN, PTOLEMAIC PERIOD. Thereafter, countless historians and tourists had pressed their faces to the glass without realizing they were gazing upon the same likeness that had entranced Caesar and Marc Antony.

  And then, two months prior, she had been recognized in death, recognized by a man from her ancient past who walked again.

  Ramses! And so they were true, those wild tales in the papers about the recently discovered tomb whose mummified occupant had left scrolls claiming he was, in fact, Ramses II, one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs. The Roman furniture inside, the impossible tale of an immortal counselor who had served and advised many of Egypt’s great rulers for thousands of years. All of it, so resoundingly dismissed by academics and historians, was absolutely true, and the woman before him was living, resurrected proof of it.

  Ramses II. He walked even now, she claimed. In London, perhaps. Or maybe some other place, Cleopatra did not know. What she knew was this: He had been awakened by the sun after his tomb had been discovered and the body shipped back to London. Then, upon recognizing her in the Cairo Museum, he had awakened her with the same elixir that had given him immortal life, an elixir he had stolen from a mad Hittite priestess during his reign as Egypt’s pharaoh.

  Their reunion was a reversal of their first meeting two thousand years before, when the old priests in Alexandria had told her tales of a wise immortal counselor who had been raised from eternal sleep by her own great-grandfather. She had laughed at them, these priests, and demanded to be taken to the crypt of this so-called immortal. Upon seeing the withered mummy within, she had ordered the shutters in his tomb opened so that the place would flood with sunlight. Her disdain for old myths had turned to awe as this bath of celestial light brought skin and hair and handsome features back to the lifeless form on the slab.

  The tales had been true! And the man she awakened, Ramses the Great himself, had served as her chief advisor and lover for years afterwards.

  And then came his betrayal.

  He had approved of her affair with Caesar, advised her to pursue it, even. But in Marc Antony he had glimpsed the seeds of his queen’s undoing. And so, when she came to him on the eve of the Battle of Actium, demanding the elixir, not for herself, but for her lover, so that he could create an immortal army to stop Octavian’s advance, Ramses had refused. And she, in despair, had eventually given herself over to the serpent’s bite.

  And now?

  The Ramses of this new century had fallen in with a group of London aristocrats, friends and relatives of the man,
Lawrence Stratford, who had discovered his tomb and died shortly thereafter. Together, this group had traveled to Egypt. For what precise reason, she did not know. She knew only that when Ramses came across her body in the museum he had been overtaken by grief and had performed an act he’d never once performed before.

  He had poured his precious elixir across the remains of her corpse. Then, apparently, he had fled, abandoning her to the madness and confusion that had beset her in those first few days. A madness she spoke of in the most general of terms.

  Teddy did not press.

  But it was clear, terribly clear, that Ramses had fled in horror from what he’d done, that she had been left in the care of one of the members of his traveling party, a British earl, Elliott Savarell. This man had a son, Alex, but when she came to the part of the story in which he played a role, she became distant and distracted again. She said this name twice…Alex…Alex Savarell. As if its very mention overwhelmed her. As if the sound of it placed weight upon her tongue.

  Was it anger or guilt or heartbreak she felt when she remembered this man, this viscount from London? There was something there, for sure. Something between her and this Alex that was enough to distract her even now.

  And there were other gaps in the story, other moments when her pauses became long silences that suggested either a failure of memory or riots of emotion to which she refused to surrender. And Teddy could sense from these silences that in those first days of madness, of not knowing what she truly was, she had taken life.

  And so be it.

  She was not a creature governed by natural laws. How dare he impose upon her the laws of man?

  “And the accident?” he asked finally. “The one in which you were so terribly burned?”

  It was the first thing he’d said in an hour. The winds had finally died down, and the excited chatter of the men nearby was no longer being blown away from their tent. Of course they were excited. She had promised to give them a percentage of the treasures to which she had led them all that day.

  “An accident, yes,” she said. “It was a terrible accident.”

  And she would not say more.

  And so it had ended badly. Terribly, perhaps. Two tragic ends with this immortal Ramses, and she did not want to speak of either one. But in those first few hours after her miraculous healing, she had alluded to revenge. And now, he realized that whatever she asked of him, he would give himself over to it.

  “You wish to see these people again?” he asked, knowing as he spoke that there was a very real possibility she wished to do these people harm.

  For a while, she gazed at him. He wanted to believe she was assessing him, judging whether or not he was a worthy companion now that she had revealed her truth. But he knew that was unlikely, and it pained him. It pained him to believe she was gazing through him and into her own history.

  “In time,” she whispered. “In time.”

  “And so what do you wish to do now?”

  “I wish to be alive, Teddy.” Her smile gave him as much pleasure as the feel of her fingernails along his spine. “I wish to be alive with you.”

  No other words had ever brought him such joy.

  2

  Venice

  Ramses felt he was living in a dream. Never had he beheld a city more magnificent. He gazed out the window now, across the Grand Canal at the endless row of palaces facing him, and looked to the brilliant afternoon blue sky above, and then down once more at the dark green water. Sleek black gondolas streaked past, crowded with brightly costumed Europeans or Americans gazing with awe and enthusiasm on the same wonders that held him captive and silent. So many luxuriant hats, laden with plumes and flowers. And on the banks the flower markets with their radiant blooms. Ah, Italy. Ah, paradise. He smiled, marveling that he could not learn modern languages fast enough to unpack their treasure load of words to describe this loveliness. There were dazzling names for the faded red and dark green of these old buildings, for their decorative arches and balconies, names for the periods of history and the styles which had given birth to them.

  Ah, this great earth, this splendid earth, and this time of all times that it could nurture such dense metropolises where commoner and noble alike could enjoy such beauty so effortlessly. He wanted to see more, he wanted to see the whole world, and yet never to leave here.

  The afternoon heat was being swept away by the breeze off the Adriatic. The city had risen from its siesta. Time for him to go out as well.

  He closed the green shutters and moved back into the splendid bedroom, which was in itself magical to him, a treasure. Kings and queens had lodged in this gaily painted chamber, or so he had been told.

  “Appropriate for you, my darling,” Julie had said to him. “And the cost means nothing.” His Julie gave him her all with perfect trust.

  Stratford Shipping, the great corporation she’d inherited from her father, was back on track under the watchful eye of her remorseful uncle, and gold, she assured Ramses, would always be plentiful. But no amount of gold in Ramses’ time could have purchased this level of luxury.

  Floors of patterned wood as hard and lustrous as stone, inlaid bed and dressing tables trimmed in shining brass, and mirrors, ah, the enormous mirrors. Everywhere he looked he saw himself smiling faintly in these vast dark mirrors as if his duplicate lived and breathed on the other side of the glass.

  This was a glorious age, no doubt of it, and the culmination of many glorious ages during which he’d slept in his tomb in Egypt, lost to time, lost to consciousness, and not even dreaming that such wonders might await him.

  Ramses the Damned, who had closed his eyes rather than witness the utter fall of Egypt. Ramses the Damned, who had known that once he was buried away from the sun, he would grow powerless, and then slumber, slumber unendingly—until brought into the sunlight by unwary mortals of a future age.

  He might have pondered all this in quiet here forever, what he had missed, and what enchanted him now everywhere that he turned.

  But Elliott Savarell—the Earl of Rutherford—and his beloved Julie were waiting for him, and this city waited for him, waited for him again to travel its lovely watery alleyways to the Piazza San Marco, where he must again enter the church that had almost brought him to his knees when he’d first seen it. All over this land, he’d seen churches filled with statues and paintings of unimaginable perfection, but no hallowed sanctuary had subdued him as had San Marco.

  Quickly, he finished his toilet, adjusting the black tie at his neck, and putting on the gold cuff links that Julie had given him. He ran the pearl-handled brush through his thick brown hair. And applied the smallest amount of cologne to his smooth-shaven face. In the mirror he saw a modern man, a European man of dark tan skin and radiant blue eyes, and nothing of the ruler he had been to thousands in a time that could not have imagined this one.

  “Ramses,” he whispered aloud. “Never, never go to that passive and hopeless sleep again. Never. No matter what this world offers you or does to you. Remember this moment and this bedchamber in Venice, and vow you will have the courage for whatever is to come.”

  With a springing step, he made his way down the broad marble staircase and through the busy hotel lobby to the docks.

  Within seconds the liveried attendant had a gondola at his disposal.

  “Piazza San Marco,” he said to the brightly costumed gondolier as he handed him several coins. “And if you will get me there quickly—”

  He sat back, gazing up at the buildings once more, trying to remember the name for the arches he most admired. Were they Moorish? Were they Gothic? And what was the name for the finely turned little posts on the balconies? Balusters. So many words ran through his mind, with their infinite connotations—decadent, baroque, grandeur, rococo, monumental, enduring, tragic.

  Ideas, concepts, stories, stories without end of the rise and fall of kingdoms and empires, of far-off lands beyond wide seas, and mountainous terrain and realms of ice and snow—all crowded in upon him
wondrously.

  Such a world needed a wealth of words to define it, all right. And enthralled as he was, his mind drifted back, back to his own pleasure barge on the Nile so long ago, with his precious naked maidens pulling the oars, and the breeze that hovered over the broad river where the simple folk gathered on either shore to bow to their passing pharaoh. How slow the pace without ticking and chiming clocks, and how eternal seemed the golden sand and the patches of dark river silt with their carefully tended green fields. Palm trees swaying against a perfect sky, and the limits of all that could be known so very certain. It seemed the dream now, this bygone time, and not these great substantial palaces towering over him.

  “No, never retreat into sleep again,” he whispered aloud to himself.

  Soon enough the long black boat reached the dock and he was entering the huge crowded square in search of the restaurant where he was to meet his beloved and their dearest friend. Tourists thronged the shadowy portals of the great church of San Marco. He would have liked to slip inside alone now and see once more all that glittering gold and those splendid mosaics.

  But he was late as it was. The church would have to wait for now, for tomorrow or the day after.

  Perhaps they did not care, his beloved friends. Perhaps they too were swept up in the beauty and gaiety of this most splendid of cities.

  He saw them before they caught sight of him, and he stopped amid the loitering tourists merely to look at them—Julie and Elliott at the outside table beneath the red awning, Julie dressed smartly as a man in her white linen suit with a brilliant blue silk tie, her hair swept back and up into a man’s straw hat with a black band above the brim, her blue eyes vibrant as she spoke passionately, earnestly, to the youthful-appearing Earl of Rutherford, who lounged in his woven chair, ankles crossed, nodding to Julie as he gazed past her.

  How the elixir had transformed both of them—these mortals, the only living beings to whom he’d ever given the divine fluid. How it had cured their subtle fears, and dissolved their many inhibitions.