The Passion of Cleopatra

by Anne Rice

  Everything about this place appeared to be medieval in design: its blunt volumes, its general austerity. But the sandstone was too clean and new to be from that period. The estate was one of the many Gothic revivals that had sprouted up throughout the country during the last century.

  What that suggested about the inhabitants, aside from a desire to convey a bit of menace, Bektaten was not yet sure.

  She commanded the cat to circle the house's perimeter, passing walls veined with manicured ivy. In the rolling grounds beyond, outlying buildings were shrouded in shadows and thickets of trees. But beyond those trees, she could just make out the shadow of a lonely, three-story stone building sitting atop a gentle slope. It looked like a smaller version of the Tower of London. She'd seen drawings of it in the Victorian guidebooks of England's great country estates. Those books referred to it as the Cage, and they described it as having been built in the Middle Ages, designed so noblewomen could peer out its upper windows and watch their men hunt stag on the slopes below.

  Perhaps she would explore it later if she had the chance, but first she had to learn who lodged inside this vast house.

  She looked for a perch or an open window, found only a healthy full-grown ash tree kissing one of the house's side walls.

  She imagined the cat climbing, and the cat began to climb.

  The first ledge offered a view down into a massive Gothic drawing room. A succession of severe, pointed arches made up the ceiling.

  It was a cool night, but not so cool as to justify the inferno roaring in the marble fireplace, its mantel carved with some sort of battle scene she could not make out from this height. Tapestries covered the soaring walls; their images of stag hunts seemed to flicker in the candlelight thrown by the massive chandelier.

  There was some sort of gathering in the room below. Whatever this group, it had the makings of a gay assembly but the expressions of those present were somber, serious. Focused. They were finely dressed, these people. The majority of them were pale skinned. And all of them were blue eyed. And it was that particular shade, that telltale shade. All of them, she could now safely assume, were immortals. But she did not recognize a one.

  Were they fracti? Did they have any connection to Saqnos at all?

  For a while, she watched them from this safe perch, and then a man she didn't recognize entered the room through one of its swinging doors, a great bundle of rolled-up papers tucked under one arm.

  He called the group to attention with verbal commands alone.

  He was not poised to present anything so formal as a toast. He did not even smile at those present. His deeply lined face did not seem capable of smiling, and his mane of bristly salt and pepper was parted into two wings that seemed to contain the same tense energy as the rest of him. Then he began to unroll the papers he had brought, spreading them out across a round card table in the center of the room.

  The table's chairs had all been pushed back earlier. This allowed the group to close in around this new display.

  And then the door swung open again. A white woman entered, blue eyed, and dressed in a flowing tea gown that matched the dark, muted colors of the room. She was trailed by a towering giant of a man in evening dress and then a more spry and significantly shorter gentleman, also in a black jacket with a white dress shirt and bow tie. Those already present stood more erect at the sudden entry of these three.

  The door swung open again.

  Saqnos.

  Did she shake at the sight of him? Did her lips quiver?

  Impossible to know these things, for she had given herself entirely over to the angel blossom's connection. And she did not want to know. She wanted only to see, to learn. To not be waylaid by the shock of her old lover, the man whose betrayal had set the course of both their destinies. Any profound emotional upset might disturb the connection between her and Bastet, and so she had no choice but to contain it. To focus. And to look for a way inside the house.

  She compelled Bastet along ledge after ledge. At last, they found a half-open window, and she sent Bastet hurrying across the Oriental carpet in an opulent bedroom, across stone floors and down a grand staircase, until the voices of the people in the drawing room became gently audible.

  It was not the best way for a cat trying to avoid detection while entering a room, blind and without a sense of where the people inside were standing.

  But Bektaten had no choice. The door was about to swing shut behind a new arrival. She forced Bastet to race through the gap. Then she commanded her to seek out the nearest vein of shadow and slink slowly along its length while she got her bearings.

  A large burgundy sofa concealed the cat, she realized, which was why the man speaking had not missed even a word.

  A few careful steps later, the cat was peering around the sofa's edge.

  The man who'd brought the papers was leading this presentation. He reminded her of an ancient Roman she had once taken as a lover. Killed in battle. And she had not cared much for him after a while because he had so often made clear that it was the darkness of her skin that aroused him and little else. But it was a rare thing for an immortal to find a lover who could match one's appetite, and so she had made use of him for as long as she could stand his cooing talk about her ebony beauty. Fate had done away with him in the end, as it had so many she had loved and lain with, sending her back to her cherished immortals.

  To dwell on memories of him now was a distraction and nothing else; a distraction from another man, actually present in the room, whose countenance inspired in her a storm of feelings she feared she would not be able to control.

  Saqnos.

  He was the only one seated. The group had parted, giving him a line of sight to the round table and the man addressing them all in a tone best described as brittle.

  "And here is the Roman temple, built in the nineteenth century by the father of the present Earl of Rutherford. It's a rather small structure. But it will suit our purposes perfectly as it sits atop an old underground tunnel dating back to some earlier civil war. Today there is a wooden trapdoor in the temple floor, providing access to the tunnel. It is covered with the thinnest of stone tiles, yet undetectable. A Roman statue stands beside it. This temple stands on the western lawn. And if the accounts we've managed to collect from their friends are accurate, the house and the western lawn are the only two places where the Savarells have chosen to entertain in the past. And so--"

  "A tunnel?" Saqnos asked, with an authority that silenced the man. "Explain all this."

  He wore the sheen of a recent resurrection: the brightness of the eyes, the lush pinkness to his lips. She had seen these qualities in herself after an awakening, and she recognized their source now. They did not age visibly, but long sleeps could be restorative nonetheless.

  "It is perfect for us, Master. There was much debris in the tunnel. Apparently the present earl used it in his debauched youth to meet there with friends his father despised. All that has been removed by us."

  Saqnos rose to his feet.

  "Get to the point!" he said. "You weary me with all this. What is the actual plan here?"

  The entire group took a step back. This, along with the manner in which the elderly, supercilious man leading this meeting had referred to him as Master, was proof that Saqnos was the creator of these beings.

  A mistake, she realized now, with equal parts dread and fear. A mistake to give this island of Britain to Saqnos, to allow him to create legions of his broken children, his fracti. How many generations had there been? How much trouble had they wrought?

  Why had she not struck him down in Jericho when she had the chance? Or in Babylon, when her spies had found his secret alchemical workshop? Why had she chosen to rule him by one decree and the fear of the strangle lily? There was only one answer, and she had wrestled with it for centuries. To destroy him would be to destroy her most powerful connection to Shaktanu.

  There was a coldness to these people, these fracti slaves of Saqnos. A coldness and a qui
et, restrained delight in the mechanics of this business they now discussed. Were these qualities intrinsic to his fracti, a product of the corrupted elixir?

  So many questions. Too many to answer in this moment.

  She must bear witness now, and nothing more.

  And what she witnessed was that despite the vitality provided to him by his recent resurrection, Saqnos was vacant eyed. Exhausted. Broken. When he rested his hands against the edge of the table and gazed down at the schematics his child had been using to give this little presentation, nothing but weariness radiated from him. He was far from being the energized madman she had spied on in his various secret laboratories over the years.

  Yet these slaves of his were frightened of him.

  "And so, Burnham, you plan to lure her to this temple and abduct her through its very floor?" Saqnos asked. "Is that it? And this during some gala affair in which guests roam the grounds? How do you propose to achieve this?"

  "Master," said the one called Burnham. "As I mentioned there is a statue in the temple, before the trapdoor. It is a statue of Julius Caesar which functions as a lever. Several of us will ask Julie Stratford to give us a tour of the grounds. We shall be most insistent. Once we've surrounded her in the temple, we'll open the floor and send her through. Others will not see this."

  "And then what?" Saqnos asked, brow furrowed, staring down at the schematics as if they had offended him.

  "More of us will wait in the tunnel below, where we will at once confine her in a coffin. We shall seal her inside of it with our collective strength, and transport her to the distant opening near the pond. Close to there lies an access road. We'll have taken her from the party before anyone notices."

  Saqnos smiled. "Very well," he said. "Not such a bad plan. And a coffin, a coffin will terrify her, this newborn immortal."

  "Yes, Master. And with all light shut out, she will begin to weaken."

  Saqnos looked away, as if he could not make himself attend to these plans. "It will take time for darkness to weaken her," he said.

  "Yes, but she will be afraid. And she will know that she has been deprived of all light. And she will know that if she does not cooperate with us in future, she can be buried alive easily."

  Saqnos smiled wearily. "Yes. And you will be sure to tell her beloved Ramses the Damned that she is in a coffin."

  "That is our plan, Master," said Burnham. "We will most certainly tell him that she has been sealed within a coffin. But we will not be keeping her in this coffin all that long. Only until we reach our final destination."

  Burnham smiled with delight as if inviting his master to smile with him.

  "It is the Cage that we have in mind for her," he said, and he could not stop himself from laughing. "Come, we will show you, Master."

  20

  It was too much of a risk to follow at the heels of this group, so Bektaten commanded the cat up the grand staircase and out the window through which she'd come.

  From the ledge, Bastet watched the group round the side of the massive house and begin their short trek towards the lone three-story building in the distance, the one they called the Cage. Once they were a safe distance away, Bastet descended the ash tree and began to follow them from the shadows.

  They walked in silence, this man Burnham and Saqnos in the lead. Their shoes crunched the grass underfoot. The swells in the surrounding landscape were too modest to be called hills.

  What an odd thing, this building they now approached. It was like the remnant of some town center otherwise destroyed.

  The closer they came to it, the more some primal, defensive instincts awakened inside of Bastet.

  Something lived within this building, something which stirred at their approach. She could smell it now. A strange mingling of musky scents. Somehow familiar, but seemingly out of place and therefore hard to pinpoint.

  "What of the queen?" Burnham asked timidly. "How goes it with the queen?" he pressed.

  "The queen sleeps," Saqnos growled.

  "But how do you know--"

  "She sleeps," insisted Saqnos as though he did not want to be questioned. "Or she has done herself in with her own poison. She thought she could spend eternal life posing as a healer and a trader. Wandering without end, in search of what, she did not know. A torment, this lack of ambition. This lack of clarity, it destroyed her. It has driven her into a tomb of her own making, I am sure. If not, we would have heard from her long before now."

  Ambition, clarity, so these were the twentieth-century words he now used for his avarice and greed, Bektaten thought. And he assumes me dead by my own hand because I did not share in his desire to clutch the entire world in one fist? And what sneering arrogance in his tone. Did he truly believe this, or did he simply desire to make his children believe it?

  "But, Master, we can't be sure that--"

  "Speak no more of the queen, Burnham. She is my concern and always has been, not yours."

  They were only a few paces from the Cage. Its entrance was a single steel door; Bektaten was sure it was not original to the building.

  The windows on all three floors were dark.

  One after the other, the group filed inside. She waited until the last possible second.

  Again the shock of a blind entry. But Bastet's senses were assaulted by more than just the smell of animals within--a terrible, deafening sound. Howls, barks, growls; all of them echoing madly off the bare stone walls. There were no furnishings here; just a crude staircase without a railing. It was up these stairs she darted, to the thicket of shadows at the top, so she could turn and survey the group below.

  The most notable feature in the room was a large steel grate in one corner of the floor. Perhaps it had once been the entrance to some basement. Now it seemed this basement had become a pit, and from it came this chorus of ferocious barks and howls.

  Was it the cat's presence that had driven these hounds to madness? Or did they react this way to all intruders?

  One of the fracti stepped forward, a compact, elegantly dressed woman, her great mane of blonde hair fastened to the back of her head with a jeweled pin. She opened her handbag and dropped several raw steaks through the grate--four, five, six...Bektaten was startled to count eight in all. Not until the last one passed through the bars did the chorus of growls collapse into the moist sounds of a ravenous feast.

  Eight steaks it took to quiet this horde. How many beasts were down there?

  Stunned into silence, Saqnos watched the creatures eat.

  "They are immortal," Saqnos finally said. "You have given the half elixir to these...dogs?"

  "Yes, Master," Burnham answered. "And it has made them quite hungry. And quite strong. They were fighting beasts before, trained to hunt and kill. Now they can do both with incredible strength."

  "I can see this. I can see this, Burnham." His words were almost a whisper. Was he pleased or revolted?

  From her vantage point, she saw flashes of the dogs' great chocolate-colored flanks as they wrestled and fought each other for scraps of meat. Massive heads, floppy ears. Mastiffs, these dogs. Great, powerful mastiffs given even greater strength by the half elixir.

  The barks resumed. The steaks were gone. Eight steaks, gone in the span of a few seconds.

  Monsters. In the bowels of this building meant for the idle habits of nobility long deceased, the children of Saqnos had bred monsters.

  "You wish to put Julie Stratford in here?" Saqnos asked.

  "Indeed, Father," Burnham answered.

  Impossible to tell if the others were as horrified as Bektaten was by this.

  "Surely you do not expect her to die?" Saqnos asked.

  "No. And that will be worse. She may fight them off for moments at a time. Perhaps she will recover from their wounds as we might, or as someone of your strength might. But the cycle of attack and defense and regeneration will be ceaseless. It will not end until we decide it should. It will not end until Mr. Ramsey tells us everything he knows." And then this Burnham smiled prim
ly at his brothers and sisters, and his father. "I have named them the hounds of Sisyphus."

  Monstrous, Bektaten thought. But she felt a strange flutter of anticipation in her own human chest as she watched this scene through Bastet's unfailing eyes. What was this feeling? Was it hope?

  It was an abominable crime, what this man Burnham proposed, what these people had created here. A form of torture that rivaled those of the Spanish Inquisition, an event that had sent her into the earth on a long sleep.

  Did Saqnos feel the same way? Could he feel the same away? Was he even capable of such compassion? Did this explain his silence and the time he took to study the ravenous animals? Was he imagining some poor woman, immortal or not, fracti or pure, being forced to fight off these terrible beasts again and again? And if so, would this fantasy of barbarism resurrect the thoughtful, patient man she had known thousands of years before, before his thirst for the elixir transformed him into a man of pure appetite?

  Reject this, Saqnos. Reject this plan. Throw its architect into the pit with his creations if you must so he may know the horror of his own actions. There is a part of you that knows no immortals or fracti should marshal their power against any human in this way. You know this. You must.

  "Burnham?"

  "Yes, Master."

  Saqnos turned to his child and clapped his hands on the man's shoulders. "This is a good plan, and you are a good servant."

  Everyone below suddenly spun and looked in her direction. The dogs erupted again. Only then did she realize her own anguish and fury had caused Bastet to yowl; this feline cry had given her location away.

  She launched herself from the stairs, hit the stone between their scrambling legs, and raced out the open door. The fracti didn't pursue. Neither did Saqnos.

  To them, Bastet was just a feral cat whose secret lair had been disturbed. Perhaps they would later question why a cat would willingly draw so close to mad dogs, but for now, she had time to escape. She raced across the lawn, scaled the stone wall.

  Then, just at the moment when Bastet saw the Landaulette in the shadows up ahead, Aktamu seemed to appear out of nowhere. He scooped her up in one arm.