by Anne Rice
“I believe the spirit and the body take separate journeys through this world. And the spirit’s journey lasts far longer.”
“That’s not quite an answer, my love.”
“Tell me this first. Do you want to believe your father was reborn? Is that what drives this obsession with your father’s obsession?”
“No. It’s what I think of when I think of Cleopatra. For if her spirit moved on at the moment of her actual death, two thousand years ago, if that spirit dwells in another living, breathing mortal on this earth, then how can the creature you raised in the museum truly be her? From where did that creature’s soul come? If it has a soul at all.”
Did he still harbor some great love for his last queen, the last queen of Egypt itself? If so, he didn’t loosen his embrace. His breath remained steady and even beneath her cheek.
“Surely, it must wound you, to hear me say these things,” she whispered.
“What wounds me is that I have committed an act for which the consequences seem endless.”
“It mustn’t. It mustn’t wound you. I don’t raise these things to make you feel pain.”
“Of course you don’t. But I swear to you, I shall let no harm come to Alex.”
“And neither will I.”
“Good, then in this effort we are joined, as we are in so many other things, my love.”
15
Cornwall
The agent and the prim, soft-spoken members of the family told her the castle was a ruin.
She would be foolish to take it off their hands, they insisted, even for only a year.
Clearly they did not want to take advantage of this tall, wealthy black woman from Ethiopia.
Large holes had opened in the roof of both the tower and the great hall, and they couldn’t afford to repair them. And so renting it was out of the question, they said. They were in talks to sell it to a conservancy, some organization that might one day turn it into an attraction for tourists who could scale the stair-stepped slopes of the windswept headland on which it stood. Provided, of course, this organization built a strong enough walkway to connect the island to the mainland. It was a short distance, but the drop to the crashing surf below was precipitous, and the current bridge would not hold for much longer.
But when she pressed them, the family revealed that these supposed talks had dragged on for years now. They could not agree on a sum, and there were so many descendants, each having been given an equal share of the old Norman castle that bore their once-proud last name, they quibbled over every detail. Their pain, their frustration, was evident in the first cables and in their subsequent letter. They lacked the funds needed to maintain a piece of property which had been in their family for centuries, and this filled them with shame.
Bektaten promised to remove this shame from them.
She was weary of her London hotel, the venerable St. James’ Court, she said, lovely as it was. She wanted retirement.
She made no mention of the fact that she had with her as always her precious journals, the full account of all her wanderings. And it had been some time since she had copied these into fresh leather-bound parchment volumes. And that work was not to be undertaken in the bustle and noise of London, nor in some fragile city building that might be burned to the ground through human mishap. Bektaten needed a citadel.
She did not mention at all, of course, that she’d completed her exhaustive search of the recent newspaper accounts of the mysterious mummy of Ramses the Damned discovered in Egypt, and the equally mysterious Reginald Ramsey soon to be betrothed to the famous Stratford Shipping heiress.
It had been the international gossip of Ramses and Ramsey that had brought her from her remote palace in Spanish Morocco to this cold northern land which she’d avoided in her endless wanderings. The name Ramses the Damned had particularly excited her and disturbed her.
Centuries ago she had relinquished the fabled British Isles to her old immortal enemy Saqnos. And up until a few hundred years ago, her spies had seen him often, with his fracti, in London. But where was he now? Was he still in existence? If not, she could not help but wonder what had destroyed him. If he did exist, hidden from the prying eyes of the world somewhere, would her presence here draw him out? She dreaded this. She knew that she was conspicuous. She knew that she herself might soon be “an item” in the London papers if she remained here. And that is why she was quite ready to retire to the country, without an attempt to glimpse Ramsey and Stratford for herself.
If the family would rent Brogdon Castle to her for a year’s time, she said quietly, she would leave the building miraculously restored, to become the foundation of a new family fortune.
But how? they asked. And why?
She had been blessed, she told them, using a word for good fortune that meant little to her, but which she was confident would mean everything to them.
All because these blessings had rained down on her for most of her life, she spread them wherever she could.
Finally, the Brogdon family was seduced, and a two-year lease with an option to purchase was signed.
Of course, they did not know that the men who served her could mend the castle’s gaping holes with their bare hands. It was a job ten mortals would need months to complete; Enamon and Aktamu could finish it in a week. But Bektaten shared none of this.
Let the Brogdons think her a member of the Ethiopian royal family on a northern sojourn to escape the African sun. Let them think her eccentric and willing to live like a scurrying animal in a dank old castle, where the rooms were ravaged by fierce winds off the Celtic Sea that could rip through the broken windows without warning. No need to tell them these winds posed no threat to her health, that she was strong enough to maintain her poise amidst powerful blows, be them from the fists of several men or the sky itself.
At last, she was here.
The long exhausting drive from London was over.
And with Enamon and Aktamu beside her, she found herself in the presence of the stark beauty and grandeur described in the history books.
Fully restored, it would be a marvel. And perhaps if she loved it well enough, it would be hers—a new sanctuary for centuries to come. She did not know her mind on this as yet.
Often new mysteries brought her to new lands. But the mystery of Ramses the Damned was not like other mysteries.
The curtain walls of the castle were largely intact, as was much of its proud tower facing the roiling Atlantic. The stones missing from the courtyard’s floor allowed space for her garden, and as she and her beloved servants roamed the tower, they found multiple rooms where she could house the new volumes of her journals as well as trunks of artifacts and old scrolls and parchments which always journeyed with her. People had lived here at least as recently as fifty years ago. It was quite possible, what she envisioned.
“Set to work,” she told the devoted pair. “Do what you can, that is, after you take me to the village inn where we’ll lodge until all this is at least livable. Hire the local workmen if there are any. Spend whatever is necessary.”
A week later the great shipments of furniture arrived, including tapestries, and paintings, and within another week after that, she had softened the harder edges of the castle’s vast interior, made it glittering, and even grand.
But there was still much to be done. And the newspapers, always available at the inn, told her that she had time to ponder the mystery of Ramsey and Julie Stratford, who were quite busy in London visiting old friends at receptions and teas, touring galleries, and even, it seemed, riding bicycles in fashionable attire or dashing about in Ramsey’s new motorcar.
But it was the story of the betrothal party that assured Bektaten she would soon be able to see the couple firsthand—when she was ready.
Until then, she roamed the surrounding cliffs, explored the caves carved by the surf. The nearest tin mines were some distance away, and so the place enjoyed the isolation she sought.
Only the lightest items could be carried by
hand across the short suspension bridge between the mainland and the headland on which the castle stood, so a crane was brought in to swing the furniture and crates over the gap, high above the crashing waves.
As they worked, some of the men caught glimpses of her, a lone, black-skinned woman, swaddled in timeless robes, gazing out at an angry northern sea with which she was largely unfamiliar. When they inquired impertinently as to her history, Enamon and Aktamu repeated the tale that she was a member of the Ethiopian royal family seeking long respite from the heat of her ancestral lands.
It didn’t matter.
She had lived in thousands of places all over the globe, too many to call any one of them home. A network of castles and estates maintained by mortals who had sworn a kind of loyalty to her based in love and adoration. Many of them she had met in the same way she had made the acquaintance of the Brogdons: through an offer of salvation. They were the last descendants of once-wealthy families, struggling to maintain once-grand pieces of property falling to ruin. And then, out of nowhere, it seemed, she appeared to them, offering them restoration. And hope.
Only a few of these mortals knew her secret.
Not a one knew her entire story. That was contained within her journals, and she had allowed no one ever to read them. Written in the ancient language of her lost kingdom, they contained not only the history of her reign but all that had followed. She called them the Shaktanis, and she turned to them now as she awaited the return of Enamon and Aktamu from London.
In the tower room she had transformed into her library, the window nearest to her had been repaired and glassed in. And a cozy fire warmed her.
Ramses the Damned. She turned the pages of her journals, so recently copied, and within minutes, she had found the account that had inspired her to cross oceans, to settle for the first time amidst the cool and the green of an island on which she had vowed never to set foot.
* * *
In the time when Ramses II had ruled Egypt, plague swept through the Hittite Empire to Egypt’s north.
It was not a plague on the order of the one that had brought down the last remnants of her ancient kingdom. But its victims were many, and so she and her servants had traveled into the Hittite Empire in hopes of tending to the sick.
During her wanderings, she had discovered many miraculous plants blossoming atop mountain peaks or thriving deep within dark caverns. Some were miracles only within the blood of those who had consumed her elixir. And one of them, the strangle lily, was an outright poison, discovered when the bold and magnificent leopard she had made into an immortal companion nibbled from its leaves and turned to ash before her eyes.
But she had never resigned her vocation as a healer, a role she’d played long before she rose to become queen of Shaktanu, and so she had discovered and formulated medicines of surprising potency that could be used to treat sick mortals.
She longed to heal the world, of course, but this was a dangerous desire and always would be; a passel of reckless emotions without a clear, organizing purpose. To administer the elixir was to risk exposing it to those who might use it for domination and control. And whenever she considered this possibility, bitter, angry memories of Saqnos paralyzed her.
But plague, its horrors and its ultimate cost, always drew her like a Siren’s call.
Plague stirred her tortured memories of Shaktanu’s final hours.
And so it was to heal those afflicted by plague that she entered the kingdom of the Hittites in the year they now called 1274 B.C., bringing her many medicines and potions with her.
There, in the land of the Hittites, a strange tragedy had befallen Bektaten. She had fallen under the spell of a fearless maverick priestess, a worshipper of the goddess of healing, Kamrusepa. Her name had been Marupa.
Marupa had been possessed of remarkable strength and independence. Weary of cities and courts, she had created a remote mountain sanctuary for her goddess, to which many came for healing. In the eyes of Bektaten, Marupa possessed a wild vintage beauty. Gray streaked Marupa’s hair, and there were times when she would cock her head, listening to the voice of the goddess, and then break forth in frenzied dancing and singing that terrified those who came for her curative magic. But her gnarled hands brought comfort, and her potions could banish pain, even heal bones, it seemed, and Marupa turned away no one from Kamrusepa’s altar.
Marupa had known without being told that Bektaten was no ordinary human being. But she felt only sympathy and awe for the strange Ethiopian who sought to share her own curative potions so generously.
Though Bektaten herself prayed to no god or goddess, and had long ago turned against all pantheons as lies, she marveled at Marupa’s faith, Marupa’s insistence that Kamrusepa spoke to her.
Marupa had become Bektaten’s treasured companion. And at last, succumbing to the loneliness which had so often driven her to confide her secrets, Bektaten told Marupa everything. They had spent many hours talking together, hours which came to be weeks and weeks that came to be months. All her doubts, her griefs, her great fears, Bektaten poured out to this new friend, inspired by Marupa’s tenderness.
The very worst secret of her soul, Bektaten confided, was that she wished she had never discovered the elixir; and she feared she would never know how to use it to help anyone. It was not like her other potions or curatives, she confessed. And Marupa listened with tears in her eyes without censure or judgment.
At last Marupa put a request to Bektaten. “Let me give this elixir to the doves of my shrine, the birds sacred to the great Kamrusepa. And let me put before the goddess herself a goblet of this strange concoction, and let Kamrusepa tell us whether this is bad or good, to be destroyed or used, and how it might help all humankind.”
Bektaten had no faith that Kamrusepa even existed. But to Marupa’s gentle voice and smile, to Marupa’s faith, she yielded.
And so it was that an altar was set up in the mountain shrine, with a goblet of the elixir and even the secret of the ingredients spelled out in writing on a stone tablet. And indeed the elixir was given to the birds of the shrine. And Marupa told Bektaten to be patient and let the goddess deliver her verdict.
It did not surprise Bektaten when the goddess, so often talkative and forthcoming, said nothing to her devoted Marupa. Marupa would never have deceived Bektaten. “Wait,” said Marupa. “Give the great Kamrusepa time to speak,” she said. And Bektaten agreed to it. The altar, the tablet, the goblet, the immortal birds now circling forever about the shrine—all this gave Bektaten a kind of hope. Never mind that that hope might die with Marupa.
Bektaten went about her wandering in the mountains, visiting the lonely shepherds who had need of her cures, and gathering new plants for which she might have a use, her devoted Enamon and Aktamu with her.
Then one morning early Bektaten had returned to the shrine to find a small crowd of crude mountain folk weeping at the entrance. All shrank from her in fear when she questioned them. Going in alone, Bektaten found Marupa dead at the foot of Kamrusepa’s altar. The elixir in the goblet had been drunk or stolen, and the empty goblet itself lay in fragments on the floor, mingled with the broken pieces of the tablet that had contained the formula.
Bektaten had let out a scream so dreadful that the country folk had run for their lives. Her devoted companions had been unable to comfort her. And it fell to them to bury the brave, maverick priestess who had known the whole life of her beloved friend Bektaten.
That woman, who had never asked for the elixir herself, a woman to whom Bektaten might have given the potion one day with her blessing, had been buried in an unmarked grave on a windswept mountainside.
“Who has done this thing?” Bektaten demanded of the mountain folk far and wide. “Who has done this sacrilege?”
She was never to find out. Those she sought to question cowered or shrank from her. Had it been Saqnos? Had he somehow pursued Bektaten here, and stolen not only the elixir itself but the secret of how to make the pure and perfect version?
/> Bektaten was never to know.
At last, she withdrew from the Hittite kingdom, leaving the murder of Marupa unavenged. She abandoned the kingdom to its pestilence and to its wars, as the great Ramses II of Egypt battled the Hittite king, Muwatalli, at Kadesh.
In time, fate did bring Bektaten close to Saqnos again, only for Bektaten to ascertain that he had not been the thief and the murderer. In the fabled city of Babylon with its one hundred thousand citizens, Enamon and Aktamu spied on Saqnos easily from afar, and bribed his mortal servants for intelligence of him.
It was plain enough that he had gathered alchemists around him, paying them absurd sums, and constructing a secret laboratorium where he and they desperately sought the pure, uncorrupted form of the elixir he had begged from Bektaten in Jericho. It almost saddened her to see him still lost in the grip of this obsession.
But she had not confronted him. She had left Babylon without ever speaking to him. However, from then on, she had maintained a network of mortal spies to report to her on Saqnos’s whereabouts and doings. At times, the network had failed, and Saqnos had vanished only to be rediscovered at some later date, engaged in the same desperate experiments. Mortals passed on the tales of the mad one who was ever enticing new healers or alchemists with rich bribes and wild promises, the mad one who paid absurd sums for any new plant or cure or potion or purgative on the market.
Who had stolen the elixir from the slain priestess? Who had murdered Marupa?
Bektaten looked at the news clippings, both old and new, spread out on the table before her.
MUMMY’S CURSE KILLS STRATFORD SHIPPING MAGNATE, “RAMSES THE DAMNED” STRIKES DOWN THOSE WHO DISTURB HIS REST
HEIRESS DEFIES MUMMY’S CURSE, “RAMSES THE DAMNED” TO VISIT LONDON
And the latest:
ENGAGEMENT PARTY FOR REGINALD RAMSEY AND JULIE STRATFORD ATTRACTS FAMOUS NOVELIST FROM AMERICA AND OTHER DISTINGUISHED GUESTS