Ramses the Damned

by Anne Rice

  But there had been a shift in their manner. She was their prisoner still, but they now believed her to be a queen.

  The dress was a thin and insubstantial thing, studded with pearls and glittering stones, that reminded her of froth on the Nile. Less of a garment than a silly form of adornment. Jewels in clothing form. It would diminish her to wear it, but not as much as it would to remain in this wretched little cell.

  So she glared at her captors turned gift-bearers until they departed, then she disrobed.

  If she had not just suffered the terror of almost being fed to their immortal hounds, she would have been unable to bear this indignity, washing herself with a single cloth she had to wet from a basin at her feet. But the rag was soft and the water just the right temperature, so she found herself grateful for them both.

  And when she slid the dress over her skin, a wave of comfort washed over her. She knew instantly it was not solely the result of the material coming to rest on her skin. Perhaps the feel of this new garment had triggered this suddenly overpowering feeling, but its true source was far away. It was Sibyl Parker. Sheets of silk and a heavy comforter; that’s what Cleopatra felt the kiss of in this moment. Someone was caring for and comforting this Sibyl Parker. Someone had placed her in a luxurious bed with fine linens. Just at the moment when this thought filled her with envy and anger, she heard Sibyl’s voice, as clear as it had been in the dream.

  We are coming, Cleopatra. Do not fear. We are coming for you, I promise.

  She could hear the ocean, a great roar of surf, and when she allowed her eyes to drift shut, she saw the spectral outline of a blazing fireplace and the shadows of people passing before it. But then the vision was gone; Sibyl’s voice, however, her memory of it, remained clear as the toll of a bell.

  “Who?” she called out before she could stop herself.

  The cell door opened. Her captors had never left, it seemed. And so, to cover this small outburst, she said quickly, “I am dressed. I’m ready to dine.”

  Who is coming, Sibyl? What real hope of rescue do they provide?

  No answer.

  Erratic the frequency of this connection, not as clear as it had been in the dream. And it seemed now to be based more in physical sensation than wild visions. Was it possible Sibyl chose not to answer, refused to tell her who was coming? Did Sibyl truly send a rescue party, or was Cleopatra about to fall prey to a second kidnapping?

  No home on this day. No home, no refuge, no temple, no palace. Only those few memories she could still cling to and a resolve that felt like ice under her skin.

  Scuffling sounds of boots on stone.

  This time her gift-bearers brought chains once more.

  She didn’t fight them. What was the point? They were as strong as she was, and they outnumbered her.

  They left her wrists free, but secured the ring around her neck and extended the attached lengths of chain on either side so that they might hold the other ends at a safe distance as they all walked together from the cell.

  She wasn’t just their prisoner anymore.

  She was Sibyl Parker’s as well.

  36

  Beneath sparkling electric chandeliers, the long dining table was set with a feast that could have served ten mortals. But the only person seated at the table was her host, who greeted her with a stare so immutable as to be statuesque.

  Around the edges of the tablecloth, she caught glimpses of woven-pearl designs. The hardwood floors underfoot gleamed. The purple draperies on the wall of soaring windows off to her right were so long they puddled on the floor.

  She was brought into this grand dining room in chains and delivered to the end of the table, opposite her handsome host at the head.

  As she settled uneasily into the high-backed chair, she saw a small slip of paper resting on her empty plate.

  It was a newspaper clipping. A story about a great cache of artifacts from Ptolemaic Egypt recently sold to private collectors. Archeologists and museum curators throughout the world were outraged. For these statues and coins may well have contained the actual likeness of Cleopatra VII, and they belonged in a museum.

  What madness had beset the sands of Egypt? they cried. Was this just another fraud like the discovery of a tomb occupied by a madman pretending to be Ramses the Great? An illustration accompanied this article. A surprisingly accurate rendering of one of the statues she’d hidden inside the tomb to which she’d led Theodore Dreycliff. An illustration that bore a striking resemblance to her.

  So this was how he had recognized her. Had he known her real name even as he tortured her with his hounds? How else to describe the speed with which he’d believed her?

  But is it your real name? Will you still consider it your real name once your last memory of Alexandria is gone?

  She blinked. Must not shed tears before this man. Must be strong. For soon, this strength might be all she had left.

  If he had known her name as he tortured her, then he sought to break her spirit as well, and she could not allow him this. So she took the newspaper clipping and crumpled it in her fist as one might a dispatch from an enemy in war. Then, once she had crushed it into a ball, she dropped it to the floor.

  She looked to her surroundings, willfully ignoring whatever reaction her host might have to this gesture of disrespect.

  Through the windows, she saw only darkness. She could just make out the dim outline of the lone faraway building where they’d almost driven her into their pit full of hounds. On the walls above, tapestries depicting animal hunts and battles from times that had passed during her sleep of death. She felt here, as she had felt during her visit to Rome thousands of years before, as if all the adornments and lush fabrics were meant to hold back the ever-encroaching threat of wilderness and great forests and fields of green. Windows could not be left open without fear here. Fear of animals, fear of rain, fear of wildness.

  And so there was that memory; that long-ago judgment of verdant, untamed landscapes; that longing for the clean simplicity of the desert coast. Could she hold on to it? Could she capture this memory, and others like it, in her fist?

  Standing against the wall opposite the windows, three other immortals. All pale-skinned blue-eyed men who seemed to hail from this land called Britain. More of his children, no doubt. Was this the entire lot of them, the two who held her in chains and the three who watched her every move warily?

  “Eat,” her captor said.

  Could she? There was silverware before her, and her arms and hands were free. Within easy reach, a platter piled with small cooked birds.

  She tore the first bird apart with her bare hands, pulled the meat from its tiny bones with her teeth.

  Her captor observed her display coolly. Was her refusal to use a clumsy modern knife and fork an insult? his gaze seemed to ask.

  She had no desire to answer. She just ate. Her captor ate as well, but without once looking to his food. There was incredible patience in this man. A steadiness that frightened her as much as the callousness with which he’d almost tossed her to his dogs. But he ate with the ceaseless appetite of an immortal.

  I know that I have charmed many men, she thought. I know that I have charmed rulers of Rome. I cannot remember how, exactly, but the history books tell me I have done it and so I must be able to do it again.

  But this man was no ruler of Rome. Rather, there was an absence of emotion in him which made him seem not quite human.

  “And so you faked your death,” the man said suddenly. “The tale of the serpent. Your suicide. Another of Plutarch’s lies?”

  She said nothing. What would happen if she let this man know her death had, in fact, taken place, that she’d been brought back from it two thousand years later? Had he been made in this way? If he knew she had not been, would he see her as inferior, deserving of more torture?

  “I wish to know your story,” he said.

  “And I wish to know yours.”

  “Let us begin with what we do know of each other, the
n. You are lucky to have survived the events of the day. Our abduction of you, it spared you from slaughter.”

  “What do you mean by this?”

  “A poison was unleashed at the engagement party for Julie Stratford and Mr. Ramsey. A poison that works only on immortals. Which can reduce them to ash.”

  He gave her a moment to absorb this. She found herself chewing more slowly. Her hands shook. Poison that could kill immortals? Ramses had never alluded to the existence of such a substance in all the years they’d spent together.

  “I take it you didn’t know there was such a thing?” he asked.

  “Did you know?”

  He sipped wine from his silver goblet.

  “How were you spared?” she asked.

  “I didn’t attend this party.”

  “I see.”

  “What is it you see, Cleopatra?”

  “You unleashed this poison.”

  “Why would you say this?” He seemed intrigued.

  “You have heard tales of Mr. Ramsey. Tales of the tomb that was discovered right before his sudden appearance in London. You recognized in these tales the presence of an immortal you didn’t know. And you had no desire to share the world with him. So you sought to poison him. To restore that which you define as order.”

  These thoughts had tumbled from her, but once she’d said them, once she’d thought of Ramses poisoned, a wave of sadness rose in her. Sadness that rivaled the grief she felt, not for her son, but for her very memories of a son.

  Could the cruelty of these people awaken her old love for Ramses? Would such a result be worse than a broken spirit or merely the product of one?

  “If your story is true,” he said, “and I merely sought to poison Mr. Ramsey, how do you explain the trap into which you stumbled by mistake?”

  “The trap you set for Julie Stratford, you mean?”

  Finally, a flicker of some emotion in his blue eyes that looked almost human. But impossible to read. Anger? Simple surprise? Was he impressed by her deduction?

  “I didn’t seek to poison Mr. Ramsey,” he said with ice in his tone.

  “But you sought to abduct Julie Stratford?”

  “I did.”

  “And the poison?” she asked.

  “The poison was not mine. Was it yours?”

  And so he’d brought them to the threshold of her strange origin story, a story too dangerous for her to reveal.

  “It was not,” she answered. “I didn’t know of its existence before today. Did you?”

  It was the second time she’d asked this question. This time his answer was silence.

  The tension in the captors on either side of her was so strong she could feel it.

  He had, she realized. He had known of this poison, and still he had dispatched some of his people to carry out this abduction. How many had died as a result? The survivors stood on either side of her now, she was sure. Had they been saved by their mission in the tunnel beneath the temple?

  She sensed in their tense silence a division in this group she might exploit. If she was careful. If she was patient.

  “You should be grateful to me,” the man said, an edge to his tone now.

  “Share your name with me so my gratitude may take proper shape,” she said quietly.

  “Saqnos,” he answered. “And you are Cleopatra, last queen of Egypt. Friend to Julie Stratford and her inamorato, the mysterious Egyptologist, Reginald Ramsey.”

  He was mocking the name Ramses had assumed in this modern era. Goading her to reveal what she knew of his real identity. But all she said in return was “Saqnos. From where does this name come?”

  “From my history, of course. From my past.”

  “From which land?”

  He considered his response. “From the land that existed when all the lands were one.”

  “You speak of the continents before they were divided?” she asked.

  “You are a student of modern science?”

  “I read many languages.”

  “And you speak many. Or you did when you were queen.”

  “I am no longer a queen.”

  “You will always be a queen.” Almost parental the way he said this, as if there were concepts that mattered more to him than the stakes of their present exchange. Concepts such as the endurance of royal titles. “Just as I will always carry the title I held in my ancestral kingdom. The burdens we have shouldered, the visions and dreams, they will forever shape our immortal lives.”

  “And so you were a king three hundred million years ago, when the lands were all united?”

  “You speak of unity in the literal sense. In terms of continents. I speak of a kingdom that united most of the world through treaties and trade and shared knowledge. It was not three hundred million years ago. And I was not its king, but its prime minister.”

  “How long ago?”

  “In the time they now call eight or nine thousand B.C.”

  She could only gaze at him.

  “Shaktanu,” she finally whispered.

  “You believe it to be a myth.”

  “It is a myth.”

  “You say this to me with a confidence that can only be described as arrogance.”

  “You demand gratitude for the degradations I have suffered here because you saved me from a poisoning by chance. Arrogance is a topic in which you are expert, Saqnos. Prime minister of Shaktanu.”

  “Degradations? You refused to tell us your name.”

  “You took me prisoner.”

  “You stumbled into our trap. I remain curious as to how and why. What ties you, Cleopatra, to Ramses the Great? Did the tales of this mysterious Egyptologist draw you as they drew me? How is it this Mr. Ramsey makes such a splash in modern life, and you somehow remain in the shadows until today? Did someone awaken you? Did someone bathe you in sunlight so that you might walk again? Did they tell you an old lover had risen?

  “Or maybe Ramses is nothing of the kind. Maybe he is an old rival, an enemy in war. I’ve heard tell you made no friend of the great King Herod in your day. Of course, history today remembers Herod for crimes far worse than plotting your assassination.”

  “Ramses was much more to me than any of these things you describe,” she said.

  “Was,” Saqnos said. “And is?”

  This was worse than the dogs, she realized, worse than being forced to reveal her name. To admit the complexity of her feelings for Ramses before this awful man. But what other choice did she have? How else could she steer him away from the strangeness of her resurrection, the destructive consequences of it? Hard enough to admit those things to Julie Stratford, but to this man, this brutal, coldhearted immortal? Impossible.

  “He was my counselor and my guide during the darkest hours of my reign,” she said. “He brought with him centuries of wisdom. He used that wisdom to help me. Against my own siblings, against Rome. And with Rome, when it was possible.”

  And so she had stumbled into another trap. If Saqnos chose to question her, she would not be able to answer specific questions about her past without revealing the speed at which her ancient memories were leaving her.

  “That was not all he brought with him, was it?” Saqnos asked.

  She met his gaze.

  “The pure elixir,” he said. “Its power. Its exact ingredients. Its formula.”

  Strangely specific, this statement, and the way he brought his goblet to his mouth quickly, as if to distract her from the eagerness in his eyes.

  Its formula…

  She tried to chase all emotion from her face, to assemble the pieces of information he’d provided her. And so he had not poisoned anyone that day. But he had sought to abduct Julie.

  Had his plan been to leave Ramses alive so that he might use Julie’s abduction against him in some way?

  Its formula…

  So that he might torture Julie into giving him the formula for the elixir?

  She made a show of returning to her food. Chewing, tearing apart tiny bones,
and spearing little beef Wellingtons with her fork, all of which allowed her to disguise the evidence of her rapid thoughts.

  Could it be that this Saqnos, clearly immortal, did not have the elixir? That he had been transformed by it, just as she had been transformed, without ever possessing it or the knowledge to make it?

  Was the same true for the other immortals who did his bidding? The ones who called him Master? Strange for them to call him Master if he had not made them. But there was no ignoring the particular hunger that had come into his voice when he said those two simple words. Its formula.

  Did he believe she knew the elixir’s ingredients?

  Should she allow him to believe this?

  And then she recalled another word he’d just used. His final phrase had distracted her from it, but now it came to her, bright as one of her visions of Sibyl Parker.

  Pure. He had called it the pure elixir. And so the version he had of it was impure, incomplete. Corrupted.

  She had stayed quiet for too long.

  “And so you have no idea who’s to blame for the poisoning today?” she asked.

  “This is not so.”

  “Who is it?” she asked. “Who has done this thing?”

  “We are exchanging information, are we not?”

  “We are. I have told you of my connection to Ramses. I confirmed for you the man who calls himself Mr. Reginald Ramsey is in fact Ramses the Great. I now request information in return.”

  She felt a surge of triumph. She had tricked him. She could see it. He believed she knew the formula for the pure elixir, as he called it. His eyes were too focused as his jaw worked.

  “The librarians in Alexandria,” she said, “my Alexandria, they called Shaktanu a myth. A fanciful tale. A tale of a golden age, free of warfare. A comforting fantasy for those with no taste for war. Who could not accept its inevitability.”

  “Nothing is inevitable. Not even death. We are proof of that.”