Ramses the Damned

by Anne Rice

  For a moment, it had seemed as if his lecture had taken hold in her. But at the mention of one of her children, her expression twisted into a grimace.

  Too painful, this memory? Had it been a mistake to include it? He’d also read the history books he’d purchased for her. Caesarion had survived her for only a short time before being slain by Octavian’s men. But Teddy thought it would save her from despair, to be reminded that her suicide in defeat had not been the true end of her family line.

  “Caesarion.” She said the name as if she had never heard it before. “Caesarion…” She was testing the feel of it on her tongue.

  And then, whatever alarm she saw in his eyes, brought the look of torment back to her own.

  “Who is Caesarion?” she asked in a trembling whisper, tears sprouting from her eyes. His lips parted, but he couldn’t bring himself to answer. “My son? My son, you say?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “The child you bore with Caesar.”

  She shook her head, as if she was trying to jostle the memory of him back into place.

  It didn’t work.

  He would have preferred to see her tear the stateroom apart in a rage. If she had needed to hurl him into the nearest wall in a moment of forgetting her own strength, he would have allowed her to. Anything would have been preferable to this convulsive despair.

  She shook with sobs as he carried her to the bed. He forced her to drink.

  Water, first, and then some of the remaining coffee, black, in hopes that it might center her, perhaps bring some clarity to her mind.

  But what a vain, foolish hope. What could a substance as ordinary as coffee do for a creature such as her?

  What could he do?

  This question tormented him once again as she curled her body against him.

  Her sobs quieted, and then it seemed she had left the room in her mind, even as she lay in his embrace. Her stare was so glassy-eyed and vacant he gave in to the nagging urge to jostle her every few minutes to make sure she had not slipped into some kind of coma.

  Sibyl Parker. He played the name in his mind again and again. Something familiar about it.

  British or American? He wasn’t sure. And why the familiarity?

  Finally, it struck him. A book he’d read while working in the Sudan. A spectacularly diverting tale of magic and ancient Egyptian kings and queens. He could barely remember the plot, only that he’d fallen into it with utter enjoyment. The author’s name, Sibyl Parker.

  “I must leave you for only a moment,” he whispered suddenly. “I’ll bring more food and drink when I return.”

  No pain or fear in her expression when he said these words. But she did reach for him. He took her hand. She seemed to study him with pity. “You claim to love me, Dr. Theodore Dreycliff. Is it still so?”

  “It is not a claim,” he said. “It is a statement of fact.”

  “How? How can you when you do not know what I am?”

  “I know what you are,” he said, taking her face in his hands. Even though their lips were only inches apart, her eyes studied him, coldly now. “I know who you are, even if you do not. And I know who will save you from these troubling visions. We will see him soon enough, and we will stop at nothing until he gives us the answers we seek.”

  No kiss, even though his position made him ripe for it. Instead she caressed the side of his face with one hand. Gently, absently, as her focus wandered past him, and she once again stared into the void of her own despair.

  “Minutes, my darling,” he said. “I will be back in only minutes.”

  Disorienting to be rushing about the ship now, after days of having been so isolated from its hustle and bustle while he’d watched over her in the stateroom.

  He found the ship’s library in no time.

  They had not one, but two titles from the author Sibyl Parker. Neither was the one he’d read a few years ago, but a quick skim of the opening chapters told him they were both set in Egypt—rollicking adventures just like the one he’d enjoyed.

  But there were no photographs or illustrations of the author included.

  But still, the name, the connection to ancient Egypt. They were clues, were they not?

  And then a cold suspicion gripped him, coating the pit of his stomach in ice.

  Was she a madwoman? A madwoman who had read fanciful tales such as these and lost herself to them?

  That couldn’t be it.

  That couldn’t be the sum of it, anyway.

  For it didn’t explain her strength. It didn’t explain the nurses who had sworn on their lives that she had recovered from horrific burns in a matter of hours. It didn’t explain the striking similarities between her own face and those of the statues and coins hiding in the tomb outside Cairo.

  But the nature of this connection, it lay somehow in these books. Not so much in the book as in their author.

  Should he show them to her?

  No, not yet. She was too fragile. She believed Sibyl Parker was in her mind, stealing her memories. It wouldn’t comfort her to know the woman might be profiting from the endeavor.

  No, for now, he must keep this to himself. Tend to her. Protect her. Guide her to the end of this journey. But he could not help but wonder if they were on the wrong journey. If it was not Ramses the Great they should be traveling to see but Sibyl Parker herself.

  19

  Havilland Park

  Bektaten had not yet traveled this far north, and the great expanses of open country startled her. This stretch of Britain seemed far more isolated than the rugged coastline she now called home. There one found the spidery constructions of mines and the villages needed to house those who worked them. Here, great stone walls seemed to run forever. They fenced in seas of rolling green hills. Occasionally a grand house rode these hills like an ocean liner cut adrift.

  Havilland Park was one such house, Aktamu had explained.

  For most of the drive, she’d cradled Bastet on her lap. When they rolled to a stop, the cat sat up suddenly, placed her paws against the window, and stared out into the shadows.

  From this distance, the estate was but a halo pushing through a dense canopy of branches, like a star rising over a sea shrouded in fog.

  The car in which they’d traveled was intended for taxi service, Enamon had told her: a Unic Landaulette. In back, it contained two facing bench seats, which offered plenty of room for her to recline while the men stood guard outside.

  She’d ground several flowers of the angel blossom into a fine powder and placed all of it inside a vial she now wore around her neck. She emptied it onto her palms, rubbed them together. Once her hands bore an orange tint visible even in the shadows, she rubbed them through the cat’s slinky fur, swirling the pollen across the cat’s nose.

  Bastet purred, licked at her mistress’s fingers. Then once the cat had consumed her fill, Bektaten rubbed some across her own nose and lips.

  A few yards from the parked car, Enamon had taken up his post like a sentry.

  Aktamu held the Landaulette’s back door open as he watched Bektaten work.

  She’d demanded that both men find hats correctly sized for their giant heads, and they had. They wore them now, and together with their dark overcoats, these accessories helped them to merge with the shadows.

  And then, silently, and without fanfare, the connection was forged.

  The last thing Bektaten heard before Bastet’s point of view claimed hers completely was the soft click of Aktamu closing the car door behind the cat as she sent it racing off into the night.

  A small war with the creature’s instincts was to be expected.

  When Bektaten felt the scurry of a rodent through the nearby brush, she was forced to pull back against Bastet’s desire to pursue it. Wordlessness governed this connection; she could control the cat best through visualizing what she wanted it to do next, and occasionally, great swells of want and need could drive the creature to respond. Language, for the most part, was useless.

  They travel
ed up and over the stone wall bordering the estate, down onto the lawn beyond, and then the great house came into view.

  She saw the driveway Aktamu had described, still full of the cars he’d seen days before. Whoever had gathered recently at this house, they seemed to have taken up residence here. Above this driveway, a massive porte cochere, itself the size of a London townhouse. The wings of the house ended in rounded sandstone towers.

  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 ha
d 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 quiet, 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.”