by Anne Rice
Saqnos.
The man who had condemned her to immortal life trapped beneath the earth. The man who, in his desperate desire to re-create the elixir, had harvested every plant in Shaktanu, penetrated jungles she had forbidden her subjects to enter. The plague he had unleashed had brought down a civilization that once stretched across the seas.
So much had been lost to the man who now stood before her, she was rendered speechless by his presence. And yet she felt no rage.
What had she expected to feel upon seeing him again after all this time?
They had been lovers once. And now, despite herself, she felt an unwanted kinship with him. Ah, the loneliness, the unspeakable loneliness, how it presses on the heart.
There were so few like them. So few who had witnessed the fall of the first great civilization since Atlantis. So few who had known the vast desert when it had been dotted with trees and shimmering pools and animals and the scattered palaces and temples of Shaktanu. That was before the plague. Before the great heat of the sun had scorched the earth she once ruled, driving the survivors towards the Nile, where they would eventually form the empires they now called Egypt and Kush.
A great hunger, a great desire for companionship, arose within her, even at the sight of a man who had been willing to condemn her to eternal darkness.
It would not have been quite such a fate. For what she’d realized as soon as the stone slab had been placed over the tomb was that, without the light of the sun, she had begun to slowly weaken. Soon after, she had fallen into a gentle sleep that became a stupor until Enamon and Aktamu freed her, exposing her body to the sunlight once again.
But Saqnos could not have known these things at the time. The elixir was too new to them both. Saqnos had been perfectly willing to let her wither away to dust.
And yet still, she could not help but see him now not as a lover, or a prime minister, but as a brother in immortal life. Yes, that was it. He was her kindred in immortal life.
Saqnos fell to his knees before her, took her hand gently in his, and kissed it.
Would a mortal woman have recoiled?
“My queen,” Enamon said softly.
She lifted her free hand to one side. Stay where you are, the gesture said.
“You are surprised that I live?” Bektaten finally asked. “How can you possibly feel this when you have hunted me to this place?”
“Hunted. This is not the right word.”
“Then provide me with the right word, Saqnos.”
He still held the hand he’d just kissed. A gentle tug was all that was needed to bring him to his feet.
“Walk with me, my queen. Walk with me so—”
“Did I not cease being your queen when you placed me in the earth?”
If only she could be convinced by the woeful expression, the bowed head, the seizure of remorse that seemed to grip his powerful body. But she was not convinced. And she saw his true motive: to separate her from her men. And from his men as well. This latter fact intrigued her.
“There is much I must repair,” Saqnos whispered.
“Indeed, the theft of my creation.”
“Your creation?” he asked. Anger in his eyes now, the remorse quickly gone. “You were in search of medicine, not the secret to eternal life. Do you no longer give the gods credit for the accident of its discovery?”
“Which gods? There have been so many. The fall of our kingdom, Saqnos. How do you plan to repair this?”
“You cannot lay blame for the plague at my feet.”
“I cannot? You entered jungles from which no creature returned. We knew there was sickness within. And yet you slashed them to ruin.”
“Because you would not give me the formula.”
“Because you demanded it at the tip of a spear.”
It was impossible to read his expression now.
“Please, Bektaten. Walk with me.”
And so he had granted her request to stop calling her his queen. Did that earn him some small measure of obedience? Perhaps so.
“A few paces. Nothing more.”
He reached for her hand, the same one that wore the ring, and she withdrew it. And so they walked side by side, without touching, towards the clamor of the market. But she dared not leave the shadows. Not when his motives remained so unclear.
“If you blame me for Shaktanu’s fall, would you give me the chance to rebuild it?” he asked.
“There is no rebuilding Shaktanu.”
“I do not speak of resurrecting temples out of what is now desert sand.”
“Temples out of desert sand? This is how you refer to what you destroyed? Our empire crossed seas in ways unknown to the people of this age. We charted the stars with maps now lost to dust. Lands that remain unknown to the people of this city were our colonies and our outposts and full of our loyal subjects. And all of this you now dismiss as temples in desert sand?”
“Do not chain me to the past when I offer you a better future,” he whispered.
“I am listening, Saqnos. Speak to me of this better future.”
“The people of the lands around us claim control of what was once Egypt. But I have walked its length. There is great chaos there, and wars between its people. There is an opportunity for us, Bektaten. An opportunity among their confusion to remake what we have lost.”
“There is no remaking what we have lost.”
“Then something new. Something greater.”
“To what end, Saqnos?”
“To bring order.”
“Order? This is a concept that possesses you even now? You have eternal life and you speak of something greater? This is madness. The same madness that turned you against me. To see it unchanged after centuries…I have no words for it. No words for you.”
“This city, this Jericho, is but a pile of sand compared to what we once had. A great empire, an empire ruled by immortals, people of our vast knowledge and experience, it could bring about a new age.”
“And so it is not order you seek but control.”
“You were a queen. You know there cannot be one without the other.”
“How can you be so unchanged, Saqnos?”
“I do not seek to change!” he said.
“I see. And so your remorse over what you did to me, it was a display, as I suspected.”
He did not bow his head now. He did not look away. Anger burned in his blue eyes. The anger of one confronted by an unwanted truth.
“Leave me out of your dreams of a new kingdom. I shall never be your queen again.”
“Bektaten—”
“Do not grovel, Saqnos. It demeans you. If you wish to create an immortal army to claim Egypt as your own, you have everything you need. Don’t seek to enlist me so that you can be free of your regrets. You betrayed me. This is history now. It is our history and it shall never change.”
“I do not,” he said, seizing her wrist in his powerful grip. “I do not have everything I need.” Rage now, rage that flared his nostrils and exposed the whites of his eyes. “The formula…it is corrupted. These men, they will not last. Not as long as we have. They are fracti. At most I have given them two hundred years of life. Then they will decay and I will be forced to make others. I need the pure elixir. I need it as you made it.”
And so this is why he had sought to separate her not just from her men, but from his own, so that they would not hear this secret. So that they would not know that somewhere on this earth was an elixir more powerful and potent than the one Saqnos had given them.
“And so, after thousands of years, you seek exactly what you sought in the final hours of our kingdom,” she answered. “You seek what I shall never give.”
He withdrew from her suddenly and let out a high, piercing cry.
They came from both ends of the tunnel, men just like the two who had followed them into the city. Six in all, daggers drawn. In an instant, Enamon and Aktamu were surrounded. Saqnos had fallen back entirely, leaving his men to do his bidding.
&
nbsp; They were focused on wresting the leather satchel from Enamon’s body. But two grabbed Bektaten’s arms from behind to restrain her. She had already unscrewed the jewel on her ring, revealing the tiny bronze pin within. It didn’t take much movement. She simply drove the knuckles on her confined hand upwards towards the forearm of the man attempting to hold her in place.
The ring pricked his skin and he let out an anguished cry. If the strangle lily worked as it always did, the man would not have much time for screams.
He stumbled away from her. Extended one accusing finger in her direction, and then the finger turned to ash. His wide, terrified eyes blackened in the same moment his jaw withered into dust. All around them, the fighting came to a halt. Suddenly, the man she’d poisoned was nothing more than a pile of robes laced with ash.
The remaining men, these fracti, as Saqnos had called them, fled in desperate terror.
And when she turned to face Saqnos, it appeared as if he too wanted to flee.
There was something of this earth that could end him in an instant. This knowledge had paralyzed him. He was breathless and wide eyed.
Carefully, Bektaten picked up the ring’s jewel from where she had discarded it and screwed it back into place.
“You shall dwell in the shadows of kingdoms and never again in their royal palaces,” she said quietly. “Should you refuse this command, should you ever seek to raise an army of immortals, I will find you, Saqnos, and I will end you. Let this be the last command you ever hear from your queen.”
It seemed for a moment that her former prime minister would not be able to tear himself away from the sight of his mercenary’s emptied, ash-strewn robes lying in a puddle on the dirt. Then a fear unlike any he had known for centuries seized him. He raced past her towards the city gates.
Once he was gone, Bektaten felt a hand come to rest on her shoulder, and then another. They were on either side of her once again, Enamon and Aktamu, wordlessly alerting her to their constant presence and their enduring commitment to accompany and protect her for all time.
“Collect the ashes and the robes,” she said. “And then we go to the market. This is a good city full of good people. And we have successfully expelled its invaders.”
“Yes, my queen,” Enamon whispered.
Part 1
1
1914: Outside Cairo
The young doctor had never met a woman as enchanting as the one who lay beneath him now. Her desire was insatiable. Her hunger for him seemed a hunger for life itself.
When he’d first been called to her room days before, they’d assured him her death was imminent. Burned from head to toe, the nurses had cried. Her body had been pried from underneath the crates at the very bottom of a freight car. No telling who she was or how far she had been carried by the train. Or how on earth she was still alive.
But when he’d pulled back the mosquito netting, he had found her sitting up in bed, so beautiful it had been almost painful to look at her. Her unmarred features exquisitely proportioned. Her rippling hair, parted in the middle, making a great pyramid of darkness on either side of her head. Words like fate and destiny crossed his mind. Still, he was instantly ashamed of how the sight of her nipples beneath the bedsheet had aroused him.
“What a handsome man you are,” she’d whispered. Was she a fallen angel? How else to explain the miraculous physical recovery? How else to explain her complete absence of pain or disorientation? But then there was her accent. Perfect, polished British. And when he’d asked her if she had any friends, anyone he should contact, she had said the strangest thing: I have friends, yes. And appointments to keep. And accounts to settle.
But she made no further mention of these friends in the hours after he spirited her away from that little outpost on the edge of the Sudan. Hours in which he’d thrown himself into her arms, ridden the serpentlike undulations of her unblemished, golden-skinned body.
First, she insisted they go to Egypt. When he asked her if these friends she’d mentioned could be found in the land of the pharaohs, she said simply, I have had a great many friends in Egypt, Doctor. A great many. And her smile had disarmed him once again.
In Egypt, she claimed, she would reveal more of her mystery.
In Egypt, she would give him some sense of how it was she could go without sleep, consume great quantities of food at all hours without gaining a pound. How she could make love with a consuming passion that never tired her in the slightest. And perhaps she would offer too some explanation for the dazzling blueness of her eyes, so rare in a woman of her Mediterranean complexion.
But would she share with him the most important detail of all?
Would she tell him her name?
“Theodore,” he whispered to her now.
“Yes,” she answered. “Your name is Dr. Theodore Dreycliff. A fine British doctor.”
Even after the time they’d spent together, she said these words as if they were vaguely unfamiliar. As if they contained facts of which she needed to be constantly reminded.
“Not so fine in the eyes of my colleagues, I’m sure,” he said. “A fine doctor doesn’t abandon his hospital without explanation. Doesn’t just run off with a beautiful patient at a moment’s notice.”
She didn’t greet this remark with the indulgent giggle he would have expected from one of those wretchedly boring women back in London his parents had wished him to marry. She merely gazed at him in silence. Perhaps she truly didn’t understand, or perhaps she sensed there was more to his story he hadn’t shared as well.
He had no fine reputation, that was for sure. He’d done good work at that little outpost in the Sudan, but it was a terrible, youthful mistake that had banished him there years before. Fresh out of medical school and desperate to appear competent to his elder colleagues, he hadn’t asked the questions he should have during his first weeks of practice. As a result he’d nearly crippled a patient by prescribing her an obscenely inappropriate amount of medication.
Inappropriate was hardly the word his colleagues had used for it, however. Reckless. Criminal. Their practice had been spared ruin only by God’s good grace. They’d railed against him for placing his vanity over the needs of a patient. And they had only agreed not to report him provided he did one of two things: left the practice of medicine altogether or left London.
What a grim satisfaction he’d taken from their wretched hypocrisy. They cared little whether or not he harmed a patient in some far corner of the world, so long as the repercussions didn’t travel the breadth of the empire back to their doorstep.
Vanity indeed, he’d thought.
That’s how he’d wound up practicing medicine in what his old college chums would sneeringly call darkest Africa. He’d arrived a different man, brash and arrogant, but also coddled and spoiled. Africa had changed him, shown him the weaknesses and limits of the British Empire, shown him miraculous experiences for which the Christian church of his youth had no explanation or even language.
Like her. Indeed, it was easier to think of her as an experience than a person.
The word person was far too ordinary to describe the magical impossibility that was her very being.
And yet, even as they lay twined in each other’s naked limbs, her expression radiant with bliss, his thoughts were still occupied by the second and perhaps unsurvivable scandal he’d surely set into motion with his sudden absence from the hospital.
A modest amount of money had been enough to save his hide the first time, covering his travel to the Sudan and his living expenses in the months after his arrival. Now he wasn’t sure what the exact cost to his professional reputation would be. Or if he could afford it. There was no going back to his family. Once he tallied up the expenses from this journey, there was precious little for him left to even live on. Two hired motorcars, one for the tents and supplies, one for the two of them, and a driver for each. Enough food and water for days. Or not, if his beautiful companion’s appetite didn’t flag at some point. And dynamite. Sever
al menacing sticks of dynamite.
But she had promised him, promised them all, that whatever they found at the end of this desert journey would be enough to pay off all of their debts, now and forever.
In the ensuing quiet, the tent flaps shuddered in the desert wind. He could make out the distant laughter of the drivers. He’d told them to keep a respectful distance from the tent. So far they had obeyed.
“Teddy,” she whispered.
Her fingers grazed his cheek.
He was so surprised by this sudden touch he jumped.
“Soon I shall tell you my name,” she whispered.
* * *
He felt like a foolish boy for plugging his ears with both fingers. But he’d never been this close to an explosion before. He had no idea what to expect.
His beautiful companion showed no fear as she watched the men disappear in between the ridges up ahead, strings of dynamite in their hands.
Before them lay an island of eroding sandstone spires. They formed a loose cage around a high mound of golden sand. Teddy knew precious little about Egypt’s archaeological digs aside from the webbing of tents they threw across the landscape. There were no signs of any such excavations here.
They were a two days’ drive from Cairo. In the middle of nowhere, it seemed. And yet she had directed them here with utter confidence simply by watching the stars. And now, as the men scurried across the sand, lit fuses abandoned in their wake, her body coiled with an almost sexual tension.
He drove his fingers deeper into his ears.
The men, still running, clapped their hands over their own.
The blast sent a shimmering shock wave through the sand at their feet. A plume of smoke rose high into the air. She actually clapped, his female companion. Clapped her hands together and smiled as if dynamite contained a magic as powerful as the kind he sensed coming from her.
Once the smoke cleared, he could see one side of the mound blown away. A stone doorway had been punched through by the explosion, its shattered remains left behind like rotting teeth.
