by Anne Rice
“But you believe that she has, don’t you?” Sibyl asked. She was fighting sobs now, and it put a miserable tone to her voice that made Julie hug her closer. “You see her as a villain, as a monster. And so you will not help her, because you believe that I will be better off if she continues to decline, as you put it. And if what you say is true, she will experience a madness that is permanent because she cannot die. And I am supposed to be relieved by this, comforted by it, even. And if I tell you that I feel a connection to her more profound than the love I have felt for any person, for my departed parents even, you will not believe me, will you? You will think me blinded by emotion and the strange nature of this connection, as you call it. You will think me unable to see her accurately. Unable to properly judge her crimes.”
“She has taken life wantonly, Sibyl,” Ramses said as gently as he could, but even these soft words caused Sibyl to screw her eyes shut and shake her head. “She has struck down humans as if she were a lawless being, soulless, as Julie has said. She is capable of doing this again.”
“I know,” she said miserably. “I know this. It feels as if I was present for it. But I was also present for her pain and her confusion. I feel those things now. I feel her fear. I feel her terror in the darkness. And it overpowers me, and it will overpower anything you say to me of what she truly is. I crossed the world for you, Mr. Ramsey, thinking you might be the key to my dreams. But now I treasure you, implore you, because you are the key to her. She and I, who we are…” She broke off, her words failing her.
“We are glad you have come, Sibyl,” Julie whispered. “You must know this. You must know that we are glad you have come.”
“Then find her. Please. Find her and free her so that we may learn if her experience matches mine. Find her so that we can discover if another meeting between the two of us will change the nature of this connection in some way that will prevent it from destroying us both. At the very least, let her face your judgment. Not the judgment of whoever holds her captive now. For I can feel her fear of these people as I would a second heartbeat in my breast.”
She had silenced the room with this plea. She collapsed into Julie’s half embrace and let her sobs claim her.
Ramses had done this to her. He and he alone. He had done this to this woman, and he had no choice but to fix it. Like Sibyl, he was not sure if he believed Julie’s theory, or if he simply thought Julie’s current version of it, which cast Cleopatra as a declining aberration, and Sibyl, the custodian of her true spirit reborn, was too neat. Too simple. But did this matter now? Did anything matter more than healing the despair he had brought to this poor, sobbing woman, who had traveled so far under such duress only to almost lose her life at the tip of a drunkard’s knife? Yes, there was something that mattered more: providing rest to that horror that he had resurrected in Cairo. That mattered more.
Sibyl needed more than rest just now, he thought. She needed truth. She needed a truth that they did not yet possess, despite their powers and their knowledge.
These thoughts swam in Ramses’ head.
Julie looked up suddenly. He felt a gentle pressure on one shoulder. A hand coming to rest there, a voice in his ear, Bektaten’s voice. “It seems we have more to consider.”
“Go,” Julie whispered. “I will stay with her.”
32
“Cleopatra,” Bektaten finally said. “This is the only ruler of Egypt to whom you told your entire story?”
“Yes,” Ramses answered.
They were alone. With an upturned palm, she had ordered her men to remain upstairs with Sibyl and Julie. Now she stood with one hand on the stone mantel of the fireplace in the great hall, gazing into the flames. Impossible to tell if she was quietly furious with him or if his revelation had plunged her deep into thought.
Did this give him hope? He wasn’t sure.
“And you did not say her name earlier because you did not want to confess what you had done?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“What I have done,” he began carefully. “Have you any knowledge of it?”
“Knowledge of it?” She turned from the fire. “With using the elixir to bring one back from death itself? No, Ramses. Of this I have no knowledge at all.”
“How? In all your thousands of years, how could you not have once tested it?”
“It never entered my mind.”
“But surely you must have faced death, a loss, a tragedy that tempted you—”
“Never,” she said. “We are different beings, you and I. Once the soul has left the mortal body, one is indeed left only with an empty shell. This is the truth as I know it. I have never been tempted to rouse that empty shell, to grapple with a monstrous being whose nature I could not possibly know in advance.”
“You had your poison, your strangle lily.”
“And so, what? You suggest that to test a theory I might bring a body back from death, and then murder it if the experiment went wrong? I have never been an alchemist. That was the realm of the man who betrayed me and destroyed our kingdom.”
“Surely, at some point, you must have become curious. You must have—”
Bektaten smiled and shook her head.
“We are different, you and I,” she said again. “But don’t seek to confuse me. In all your centuries in Egypt, did you ever once test the elixir in this way? No. Only when you gazed upon her again in the Cairo Museum, your beloved Cleopatra, this queen who humbled Caesar and seduced Mark Antony, this fabled seductress of a thousand talents, were you overcome by this urge. It was not curiosity!”
Her words wounded him, but he would not reveal it, and he saw only patience in her eyes.
“Be truthful, Ramses,” she said. “It was not curiosity. It was nothing of the kind. I seek common ground with you, but do not seek to make me your partner in this particular endeavor so that you may avoid the consequences of what you’ve done.”
“There is no avoiding the consequences of what I have done!” Ramses declared. Her words and her patience had infuriated him, as much as the quiet precision with which she’d delivered them. “Those consequences, as you put it, have pursued me across oceans. Does it mean nothing to you, my queen, that I was awakened without my consent? That I walled myself off so as to bring myself as close to death as I could. And yet, all that time, from the fall of Egypt to now, I…”
“You what?” she asked quietly.
“Had I known there was something on this earth that could have ended my life, if I had known of this strangle lily—. Had I at least known that I was not alone.”
“I see,” she whispered. “So I am your wayward mother. And I’m at fault for not having cared for you as if you were my creation, and not the thief of that which I sought to guard from the world.”
“But why? Why did you seek to guard it from the world?”
“You can answer this question. Did you not do the same? Only when you were blinded by love did you reveal your truth. Until then, did you not find Egypt in the hands of ruler after ruler unworthy of knowing your secret? Incapable of being trusted with the elixir’s power? Did you not see the seeds of the very things that destroyed my kingdom in the eyes of every king and queen you counseled?
“Consider it the fire of Prometheus if you must. But you knew. You were wise enough to see what I learned when Shaktanu fell. Should this fire touch the earth, it will ignite a conflagration that will incinerate everyone in its path, bringing more death than it could ever remove. In the smoking ruins of my kingdom, I saw this truth. In the warfare that webbed the land. In the bodies mauled by plague. This is history, as I have lived it, as I have known it. Sources of life fall into the hands of those who seek to profit from and abuse them, bringing great death as a result. I will not have the elixir meet such a fate. And if it’s loneliness you fear, Ramses, you will join me in this purpose. And you will humbly admit it when passion has blinded you to its importance.”
He felt foolish, like a young boy who ha
d made desperate excuses for childish acts. Yes, he was a monarch who had been bred to believe that his every whim should be acknowledged, but he had been born and bred to duty as well, born and bred to uphold justice, reason, what was right. He had been born and bred to a mortal life of ritual and sacrifice that many a humble human would have found unendurable, and when he had slipped from the pages of living history into the legend of Ramses the Damned, he had remained bound by duty, bound to be the advisor of the rulers of Egypt….And what was he now in this woman’s presence? Why was he so vulnerable to her, so willing to suffer this?
He must have appeared chastened. She crossed the room and gently took his hands in her own.
“You must never do a thing like this again. Never, Ramses.”
“I will not,” he said. “The gods of Egypt must have cursed me in that moment if such gods exist.”
“You condemned yourself, Ramses,” she said. “You were your own god of old. And you must understand, before you say another word, I will not give you the strangle lily solely so you can dispatch into eternal darkness this revenant Cleopatra, the consequence of such an act.”
“I would never ask for such a thing,” he said. “To do so might endanger this fragile being, Sibyl.” He paused, looking at Bektaten.
“Do you not understand how this affects me,” he asked, “that the soul of the true Cleopatra may be inside of this tender mortal woman? In the very moment that I glimpsed Sibyl Parker I saw Cleopatra. My Cleopatra. I sensed her deeply.” He put his hand over his heart. “And we do not know what the connection is between this new tabernacle of Cleopatra’s soul and the risen body of Cleopatra that exists now.”
“And so you don’t believe Julie Stratford’s explanation? You don’t believe Sibyl Parker is claiming her rightful spirit back from the creature you raised, and that soon this creature will descend into madness?”
“I do not,” Ramses answered. “If it were true, Sibyl would be flush with new memories, the very memories Cleopatra is losing. Yet she speaks only of dreams that have been with her all her life, long before I woke this miserable Cleopatra. This connection, whatever it may be, it is more complicated than Julie suggests. I love Julie, but Julie is blinded by animus. When Julie was still mortal, she almost lost her life at the revenant Cleopatra’s hands.”
“I see,” said Bektaten with the same maddening patience. “I think you underestimate Julie Stratford, great king. But I do see what you mean.”
Remarkable the unguarded way she studied him, almost as a lover might study one she was preparing to kiss. But there was no such need or hunger in her expression. Just a quiet fearlessness.
The glimpses he had seen of her anger suggested that she was slow to rage; that her anger, when it showed itself, gathered strength gradually like a storm far out at sea, moving inexorably towards a distant shore. Had her attack today, her slaughter of the children of Saqnos, been the terminus of such a journey? Or was it as she’d said: she had simply sought to send an efficient and indisputable message to the man who had betrayed her thousands of years ago?
Too soon to ask her these things, especially in the wake of his confession. But to converse with her like this, intimately and in relative solitude, was a sobering thing. He was as absorbed with studying and interpreting her every graceful gesture as he was with pleasing her with his insights. At the same time he was quietly on guard.
She released his hands and slowly returned to the fire.
“Would you really have ended it all those years ago?” she asked. “If I had become known to you. If I had showed you how to turn yourself to ash.”
“It is a distinct possibility.”
“A distinct possibility,” she whispered. “You have mastered the language of this age. In particular the queer mannerisms the British use to put strong feelings at a safe remove. So many languages swim in my head. Sometimes it is as if I hear all of them at once, and I am unsure of which one will come from my lips. I envy you, Ramses.”
“How so?”
“Your awakening, what it allowed you after such a long slumber. To drink in the twentieth century in great thirsty gulps after having known only desert kingdoms of the time before Christ. To experience it all without the distractions of the ages in between. The fall of Rome, the darkness that followed. The rage of the Mongols, and the Vikings. The slave ships bound for the Americas. The revolutions that rocked Europe. These things did not crowd your head as you discovered the motorcar and flying machines and powerful medicines that can now prevent plague. But to my existence, these things arrived slowly, as inevitabilities. Not magical constructions. I imagine when you first saw them, they seemed as if they had just arrived from the temple of the gods.”
“Yes. This is true. But still, I would have liked to see Rome fall. For reasons which I’m sure are now clear.”
She smiled. “Do you still think this age magical?”
“I have always dwelled in a kind of magic. It was magic that rendered me immortal.”
“In a manner of speaking, perhaps,” she said. “But I ask you this now because I wish to know if you have been freed from your anguish, freed from the same anguish that drove you to wall yourself away for all time.”
“May I ask a question first?”
“You may.”
“If you had met me then, as Egypt fell to Rome and my queen lay dead by her own hand, if you had met me then, and I told you I wished to end it all, would you have given me your strangle lily?”
She answered without hesitation: “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because you needed then to be freed from your vocation, not from your eternal life.”
“Counselor to kings and queens, you mean?”
“Yes. Yours was not a failure of spirit, Ramses. It was a failure of imagination. For that is the deepest and gravest challenge of immortal life. How to imagine it when we are bred and trained and shaped to see our existence as a brief, fleeting thing in which we skate helplessly across the surface of a violent earth.”
“And from where do you summon your great imagination, Queen Bektaten?”
“Careful with your tone, Ramses. I don’t seek to indict. Merely to address accurately and with experience behind me.”
“And so you too have suffered these failures of imagination, as you call them?”
“Indeed,” she said. “Many times over.”
“And how did you survive them? Aside from long sleeps?”
“The risk comes when you find yourself looking upon the mortals around you as puppets. Tapestries. Tiresome children at best, shallow creatures of appetite and ignorance at worst. Once these thoughts take hold, the sense of isolation is soon to follow. There is only one thing that will stop it. You must go to where mortals are most wounded and seek to care for them, heal them. But your entire immortal life cannot consist of journeys like this. Ultimately they would produce an anguish all their own. To dwell only amidst the plague stricken, to walk only those nations brought low by war. But when you feel as if you are but a dry leaf carried by the endless winds of time, and you can bear the thought of what seems like a haphazard wandering no longer, you must go where there is pain and seek to alleviate it.”
“To alleviate pain. Did I not do this as I counseled the rulers of Egypt? As I sought to guide them to wisdom and strength?”
“You sought to empower an empire. I do not dismiss this goal. But it is a different thing from what I describe. If you wish to be free of the despair that can grip an immortal, you must reach beyond the very concept of empire. You must go to the place where the pain among mortals is so great it has brought villages and even cities to their knees, and you must do what you can to end it.”
“Without using the elixir,” he said.
“Yes. Without using the elixir. Use your strength, your knowledge, your wisdom instead.”
“And so this is what you would have told me, had we met in Alexandria. Had I told you of my desire to end my immortal life.”
&nb
sp; “Yes,” she answered. “So I ask again. This despair, this anguish. Has it left you? Is your love for Julie Stratford enough?”
“She is a true partner. The first I’ve ever known.”
“Because you made her an immortal.”
“Because she is a wise and clever and independent woman, such as I’ve never known.” He hesitated, but then he said it. “I saved her from the very despair I felt in Alexandria all those years ago, when I had lost all those for whom I’d cared most. Wise and clever as she was, she was poised to end her life.”
There was more to say. “I drove her to this despair. It was I, the revelation of who and what I was, the assault on her rational mind made by my very being. I had driven her to the brink.”
“I see,” she whispered.
She retreated to the window and its view of the dark sea. Perhaps she didn’t expect an answer right away.
“And so it seems we have an understanding,” he said, hoping to steer them back to cooler matters of the business at hand, and away from these great philosophical questions, which she navigated with utter ease even as they filled him with confusion. “You will not give me the strangle lily to end Cleopatra’s life.”
“Not to end her life, no,” Bektaten answered. “But there are other secrets in my garden. Other tools which might bring about an end to this trouble.”
Just then, Sibyl’s piercing screams echoed through the castle.
33
Havilland Park
Must not show them the extent of her humiliation. Then they might suspect they held a former queen in their rank cell.
She had just resolved to conceal the depth of her misery and her rage from her immortal captors when the door swung open. The handsome, curly-haired man who had menaced her earlier entered with a confident stride. Outside there were others. Just out of view, but she could detect their breathing and the occasional scuff of their boots against the stone floor.
“Tell me your name,” her captor said.
His face was in shadow. She would not show him her own again unless forced.