by Anne Rice
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."
"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.
"Hound catcher," she whispered.
He snapped his fingers. Shadows moved through the doorway behind him. Not just the two immortals she'd glimpsed earlier, but others. Five in all. As they gathered, they blocked out the light from the hallway even further. In their hands, they held chains. By themselves these implements would not have been enough to bind her, but when wielded by those who possessed her strength they would be more than enough to hold her prisoner.
"Tell me your name," he said again.
"Hound slayer," she whispered.
They seemed to work as a single mass, these people.
She was yanked to her feet. Her wrists were bound behind her. A heavy ring snapped closed around her neck. They pushed her out of the cell and into the stone hallway. With the chains, they dragged her up a set of stone steps.
When her bare feet touched the dirt outside, it at first seemed a cold, soft relief. Then she heard the dogs once more, so much louder than before.
A star-filled sky above, but when she tried to look back, the chain attached to the metal collar around her neck was pulled tight. She stumbled forward several steps before finding her balance. Ahead, a tall building rose out of the dark, rolling landscape. Isolated amidst the shadowed hills. The closer they came to it, the more fearsome the baying of these hounds became.
The steel door to the building's first floor was thrown open.
She was shoved through. Empty, this room. Empty with stone walls that made the riot of these fearsome animals all the more loud and overpowering. The sound came through steel bars in one corner of the floor. And when she saw the writhing shadows below, she realized there were many more furious hounds down there than she'd first suspected. So many, their shadows seemed to form an almost-solid mass occasionally pierced by a glint of teeth or a flash of pink gums.
No fear. Show these people no fear. Remember that you are a queen.
They shoved her towards the grate, these immortals. She fell to her knees. The stink of the hounds assaulted her in ceaseless waves. As ceaseless as their hunger, as ceaseless as their strength. She trembled not just from the humiliation but from the stark terror of what might await her should they shove her through.
There were too many of them to subdue. Too many to fight off. And if their hunger was anything like the hunger the elixir had left her with, they would tear into her with abandon. Would they work faster than her body's capacity to heal? Impossible to know this. She still knew so little about her condition, given that her attempt to confront Ramses had ended in this terror.
"Tell me your name." Her captor was forced to shout above the barking dogs.
Again she refused. He shoved her face against the bars. For the first time she saw how little space there was between the grate and the heads of these writhing hounds. A jaw snapped shut only inches from her nose.
"Cleopatra!" she screamed. "I am Cleopatra the Seventh. The last queen of Egypt."
But another string of words formed itself in her mind. Help me, Sibyl Parker. Please. Help me.
At last, he pulled her head away from the grate.
"And so it is true," her captor said. "It is as I suspected when you showed me your fine features."
To her astonishment, he pulled her to her feet, across the floor, and out the door. Before it shut behind her, she saw the other immortals dropping something down into the grate, which suddenly quieted the hounds below. Food.
Once they were outside, this man stood before her as if he were welcoming her to these vast grounds
for the first time, and with pride. But she was still confined. Two immortals flanked her, holding the chains attached to the ring around her neck and the manacles that bound her wrists against the small of her back.
"I attended many of your triumphal parades in Alexandria," he said. "I was a great admirer of yours. Forgive me for not receiving you as I should. But it was not your acquaintance I expected to make this day. We shall dine together, you and I. I'm sure you are as famished as my dogs."
A pretense, this politeness. Perhaps a quieter form of torture.
But did it matter? He had broken her, and he knew it. He was reveling in it. A monster, this man.
"Clean her up and bring her something to wear. Her dress is in tatters. Hardly fit for a queen."
And then he was striding off into the darkness. For the first time, she saw the main house of this vast estate some distance away. The tall windows glowed against the scabbed and barren tree branches. It was a far-grander place than the one from which she'd been abducted. But in its size, she saw only room for even-greater horrors.
34
Cornwall
Sibyl had stopped screaming by the time Ramses and Bektaten burst into the room.
Now she was curled into a ball amidst tangled covers. Ramses was as distressed by her mewling as he'd been by her piercing cries. Apparently she had suffered some sort of seizure. Her water glass was smashed to the floor next to the bed, and there was a large stain on the front of Julie's dress shirt.
Julie took no time to dab at it; she was too busy trying to embrace Sibyl again.
The cat, who had seemed to be guarding Sibyl earlier, was now perched on the mantel over the fireplace, watching the entire scene with human focus.
Aktamu and Enamon stood on either side of the bed. Did they think Sibyl might fly from it and need to be restrained? How severe had this eruption been?
Once Julie managed to take the woman in her arms, Sibyl's words came in a breathless torrent. "They're torturing her. With beasts. Terrible beasts. I can smell them. I can feel the heat of their breath. She screams through me because she will not scream before them!"
Ramses turned to the queen. "These animals. Are they the dogs of which you spoke?"
"I assume so, yes."
Ramses studied Bektaten. "You know where Cleopatra is being held? You have been inside this place where they hold her now?"
"In a manner of speaking, I have been inside it, yes."
"And so you have met with this Saqnos in his own domicile?"
"No," she said. "Aktamu, to the garden. Bring us some etoile blossoms. That should soothe her."
At the mention of her garden, Julie gave Bektaten a fearful look. Ramses, before he could stop himself, did the same.
"They are well suited to her current condition," Bektaten answered. "My garden has yielded countless miracles and only a handful of poisons."
"Save her," Sibyl whispered, "you must save her, please. You must. She cries for my help."
They said nothing. Sibyl was in such a state she might not have heard them if they had. Her eyes were slits from which tears still flowed. She clung to Julie as if a great wind might tear her away the minute she let go.
When Aktamu returned, several blue blossoms in one hand, Julie slowly withdrew from the bed, but not before settling Sibyl down onto the pillows.
Bektaten's faithful servant tore apart the blue petals and the flowers' stamens and ground them all into a powder in his hand. Then he poured water into a fresh glass and began to release this fine blue powder from between his fingers, which he continued to rub together. Graceful and quiet, this process. When they brought the glass to Sibyl's lips, it seemed to work its effect almost immediately. The tremors throughout her body came to an abrupt end.
"Do we know if it will affect Cleopatra?" Julie asked.
"We do not," Bektaten answered, "but if it does, it will make her predicament more endurable as well. Come with me. Both of you."
They did as they were told. Enamon followed. Aktamu stayed behind.
To the first floor of the tower she led them and, from there, down a set of stone steps to a kind of basement chamber with two barred windows literally carved out of the side of the cliff.
Items of great and secret value were stored here, Ramses realized. Although what could be of more value than the enchanted garden in the center of the courtyard, Ramses was not sure. But the garden would be useless to someone who did not know its secrets. And he was sure that here, in this chamber, the garden's magic was distilled, seperated and rendered useful, sometimes fatally so.
The stone walls were covered with weapons from throughout history. Great gilded swords of silver, gold, ebony, and ivory. And on the long central table, a row of silver daggers, each in its scabbard. At the table's far end, several jars of brightly colored powder, labeled in the same script he'd seen in Bektaten's journals. Various pollens, he was sure. Various pollens which had, in some manner that wasn't clear, been applied to the weapons on the table before him. Alongside one end of the row of daggers lay several bronze rings, each containing a bright red stone. These rings were suspiciously larger than ordinary, modern jewelry, for there was a chamber under the stone in each that must have contained one of Bektaten's secrets.
It was an armory, this room. There was no better word for it.
"You seek to arm us with the fruits of your garden," Ramses said.
"I do not seek to arm you. I arm you. The daggers have been dipped in a substance that will stun an immortal for several hours on the clock. Each one is good for five effective strikes before the blade is exhausted. The rings contain the permanent solution you saw today." She uncapped the jewel from one, revealing a small bronze pin underneath. "Complete penetration of the strangle lily is required for it to do its work. On the surface of your skin it will not harm you. And it will harm no mortal at all."
"The sedative," Julie asked, "the one in which you've dipped the daggers, will it work on mortals?"
"No," she answered. "But the dagger will, of course, if your aim is good and your strike is strong. Are you confident in these things, Julie Stratford?"
"It's not entirely clear what you're sending us to do," Julie answered.
"I don't send you anywhere," Bektaten said. "I grant hope of success to a mission you're sure to undertake with or without my consent. That is all."
"And is this all?" Ramses asked. "These daggers and these rings?"
"No." Bektaten turned to the mahogany cabinet behind her. Its matching doors were inlaid with pearl designs. When she opened it, Ramses glimpsed shelves of glass bottles inside. Some large, some tiny vials, each filled with fluids of different colors and luminosities.
How he wanted to explore this cabinet! To hear her describe every magical potion within it. Surely they weren't all pure seeds from her garden, but various mixtures of plants still unknown to man. Given how long she had walked the earth, some of the plants she kept and harvested might now be long extinct. But there was no time for this now. For in this chamber with them was an almost spectral presence: their fear that Sibyl might soon suffer another episode and alarm the castle once again with her terrible screams.
From the cabinet, Bektaten removed a large vial, the length of her hand and the thickness of several fingers, full of some sort of orange powder, and passed it to Enamon.
"And what is that?" Ramses asked.
Enamon placed it inside his jacket pocket. When Ramses met his eyes, he responded with only a blank stare, a quiet, polite reminder that he was under no obligation to answer Ramses' questions.
"It's pollen from the angel blossom," Bektaten said.
"And it requires no ring or dagger to be effective?"
"It's a more complex tool," she answered. "It is how I was able to see inside the estate where he now holds Cleopatra."
"And how does it work?" Julie asked.
"You'll see," Enamon answered.
"You are not to use it yourself," Bektaten said. "Either of you. You
don't have the experience."
"You're giving us your men as well," Ramses said.
"I am," she answered.
"And we're to leave you and Sibyl unguarded?" Julie asked.
"Dear Julie," Bektaten said, running one long-fingered hand down the doors of the mahogany cabinet, "I am not unguarded."
Julie nodded.
In the tense silence that followed, Ramses picked up one of the sheathed daggers by its handle, tested its weight in his hand. When Julie did the same, a protective urge flared inside him, and, as if sensing it, she met his eyes quickly. She was daring him to forbid her to join this mission. So he did nothing of the kind. But he could not help but smile at her show of defiance and strength, the way it tensed her lips, making them look succulent and kissable at the very moment when he knew a kiss might be seen as a crass dismissal of her resolve.
Bektaten studied them both. So did Enamon, as if they thought they might not have the strength for what lay ahead.
"I have armed your mission," the queen said, "and so now it is my right to apply conditions to it."
Ramses placed the dagger back on the table. "If these conditions are not agreed to, will your arms be withdrawn?"
She ignored this question. "You will bring Cleopatra here so that we may confine her and assess the true nature of her being, as well as the nature of what she is becoming and how it affects our new friend Sibyl Parker. You are not to destroy her with what I give you. You are to destroy only her captors and all else that stands in your way. As I have already said to you, Ramses, to kill Cleopatra in haste may place Sibyl in great peril. I will not allow this."
Ramses looked to Julie. Julie nodded her agreement.
"We agree. And your second condition?"
"Bring me Saqnos."
Difficult at first to pinpoint the source of anger in the room; the great heaving breath that sent currents of tension rippling through the silence that followed. The anger came from her servant Enamon. He was the one who had reacted to her order with a great inhalation. It was the first outward display of emotion Ramses had seen from this man, and it suggested he was more than just a servant. A constant companion. Had this Saqnos left wounds in him as deep as those he'd left in his queen?