by Anne Rice
"In the Cairo Museum," she said softly. "Near Saqqara, and the pyramids. There's a great city there."
She could see how this was affecting him. Very gently, she continued, though she could not tell whether or not he heard:
"In ancient times, the Valley of the Kings was looted. Grave robbers despoiled almost every tomb. The body of Ramses the Great, it was found with dozens of others in a mass grave made for it by the priests."
He turned and looked at her thoughtfully. Even in great distress, his face seemed open, his eyes searching.
"Tell me, Julie. Queen Cleopatra the Sixth, who ruled in the time of Julius Caesar. Her body lies in this Cairo Museum? Or here?" He turned back to the dark building. She saw the subtle changes in him; the high color again in his face.
"No, Ramses. No one knows what became of the remains of Cleopatra."
"But you know this Queen, whose marble portrait was in my tomb."
"Yes, Ramses, even schoolchildren know the name Cleopatra. All the world knows it. But her tomb was destroyed in ancient times. Ancient times were those times, Ramses."
"I understand, better than I speak, Julie. Continue."
' 'Nobody knows where her tomb stood. Nobody knows what happened to her body. The time of mummies had passed."
"Not so!" he whispered. "She was buried properly, in the old Egyptian fashion, without the magic, and the embalming, but she was wrapped in linen as was fitting, and then taken to her grave by the sea.''
He stopped. He put his hands to his temples. And then he rested his forehead against the iron fence. The rain came a little heavier. She felt chilled suddenly.
"But this mausoleum," he said, collecting himself, folding his arms and stepping back now as if he meant to say what he had to say. "It was a grand structure. It was large and beautiful and covered with marble."
"So the ancient writers tell us. But it is gone. Alexandria contains no trace of it. No one knows where it stood."
He looked at her in silence. "I know, of course," he said.
He walked away from her down the pavement. He stopped under the street lamp and gazed up into the dim yellow incandescent light. Tentatively, she followed. Finally he turned to her, and put out his hand for her and drew her close.
"You feel my pain," he said calmly. "Yet you know so little of me. What do I seem to you?"
She reflected. "A man," she said. "A beautiful and strong man. A man who suffers as we all suffer. And I know things . . . because you wrote them down yourself and you left the scrolls there."
Impossible to tell if this pleased him.
"And your father read these things, too," he said.
"Yes. He made some translations."
"I watched him," he whispered.
"Was it true what you wrote?"
"Why should I lie?"
Suddenly he moved to kiss her, and again she backed off.
"Ah, but you choose the oddest moments for your little advances," she said breathlessly. "We were talking of ... of tragedy, were we not?"
"Of loneliness, perhaps, and folly. And the things grief drives one to do."
His expression was softening. There was that playfulness again, that smile.
"Your temples are in Egypt. They still stand," she said. "The Ramasseum, at Luxor. Abu Simbel. Oh, these aren't the names by which you know them. Your colossal statues! Statues all the world has seen. English poets have written of them. Great generals have journeyed to see them. I've walked past them, laid my hands on them. I've stood in your ancient halls."
He continued to smile. "And now I walk these modern streets with you."
"And it fills you with joy to do it.''
"Yes, that is very true. My temples were old before I ever closed my eyes. But the mausoleum of Cleopatra had only just been built." He broke off, letting go her hand. "Ah, it is like yesterday to me, you see. Yet it is dreamlike and distant. Somehow I felt the passage of the centuries as I slept. My spirit grew as I slept."
She thought of the words in her father's translation.
"What did you dream, Ramses?"
"Nothing, my darling dear, that can touch the wonders of this century!" He paused. "When we are weary, we speak lovingly of dreams as if they embodied our true desires-what we would have when that which we do have so sorely disappoints us. But for this wanderer, the concrete world has always been the true object of desire. And weariness came only when the world seemed dreamlike."
He stared off into the driving rain. She let his words sink in, trying in vain perhaps to grasp their full meaning. Her brief life had been marked with just enough pain to make her cherish what she had. The death of her mother years before had made her cleave all the more closely to her father. She had tried to love Alex Savarell because he wanted her to; and her father hadn't minded it. But what she really loved were ideas, and things, just as her father had. Was that what he meant? She wasn't certain.
"You don't want to go back to Egypt, you don't need to see the old world for yourself?" she asked.
"I am torn," he whispered.
A gust of damp wind swept the forlorn pavements; dry leaves scuttered and banked along the high iron fence. There came a dim zinging from the electric wires above, and Ramses turned to look at them.
"Ever more vivid than a dream," he whispered, staring again at the solitary yellow lamp above him. "I want this time, my darling dear," he said. "You forgive me if I call you this? My darling dear? As you called your friend, Alex."
"You may call me that," she said.
For I love you more than I ever loved him!
He gave her one of those warm, generous smiles. He came to her with his arms out and swept her up off her feet, suddenly.
"Light little Queen," he said.
"Put me down, great King," she whispered.
"And why should I do that?"
"Because I command you to do it."
He obeyed. He set her down gently and gave her a deep bow.
"And now where do we go, my Queen, home to the palace of Stratford, in the region of Mayfair, in the land of London, England, lately known as Britannia?''
"Yes, we do, because I am weary to the bone."
"Yes, and I must study in your father's library, if you permit. I must read the books now to 'put in order,' as you say, the things you've shown me."
Not a sound in the house. Where had the girl gone? The coffee Samir had finally accepted was now quite cold. He could not drink this watery brew. He had not wanted it in the first place.
He had stared fixedly at the mummy case for over an hour, it seemed, the clock chiming twice in the hallway, an occasional pair of headlights piercing the lace curtains and sweeping this high-ceilinged large room, and firing the mummy's gold face with life for an eerie instant.
Suddenly he rose. He could hear the creak of the floor beneath the carpet. He walked slowly towards the case. Lift it. And you will know. Lift it. Imagine. Could it be empty?
He reached out for the gilded wood, his hands poised, trembling.
"I wouldn't do that, sir!"
Ah, the girl. The girl again in the hallway with her hands clasped, the girl very afraid, but of what?
"Miss Julie would be so angry."
He could think of nothing to say. He gave an awkward little nod, and went back to the sofa.
"Perhaps tomorrow you should come," she said.
"No. I must see her tonight."
"But, sir, it's so very late."
The clop of a horse outside, the low creak of the hansom's wheels. He heard a sudden little laugh, very feint, but he knew it was Julie.
Rita hurried to the door and drew back the bolt. He stared speechless as the pair entered the room, Julie, radiant, her hair studded with sparkling droplets of rain; and a man, a tall, splendid-looking man, with dark brown hair and glittering blue eyes, beside her.
Julie spoke to him. She said his name. But it did not register.
He could not take his eyes off this man. The skin was pale, flawless. And t
he features exquisitely molded. But the spirit inhabiting the man was the overwhelming characteristic. The man exuded strength and a sudden wanness that was almost chilling.
"I only wanted to ... to look in on you," he said to Julie without so much as glancing at her. ' To see that you were well. I worry on your account. ..."
His voice trailed off.
"Ah, I know who you are!" said the man suddenly, in a faultless British accent. "You are Lawrence's friend, are you not? Your name is Samir."
"We have met?" Samir said. "I do not remember."
His eyes moved tentatively over the figure that approached him now, and suddenly he was staring fixedly at the outstretched hand, at the ruby ring, and the ring with the cartouche of Ramses the Great, and it seemed the room had become quite unreal; that the voices speaking to him were making no sense, and that there was no necessity to answer.
The ring he had seen through the mummy's wrappings! There was no mistake. He could not make such a mistake. And what was Julie saying that could possibly matter now? Words so politely spoken, but all lies, and this being was staring back at him, knowing full well that he recognized the ring, knowing full well that words just didn't matter.
"I hope Henry didn't run to you with that nonsense of his. . . ." Yes, that was the meaning.
But it was not nonsense at all. And slowly he shifted his gaze and forced himself to see for himself that she was safe and sound and sane. Then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, he looked not at the ring but at the King's face, at the steady blue eyes which understood everything.
When he spoke to her again, it was a meaningless murmur:
"Your father would not have wanted for you to be unprotected. Your father would have wanted me to come. ..."
"Ah, but Samir, friend of Lawrence," the other said, "there is no danger now to Julie Stratford.'' And dropping suddenly into the ancient Egyptian with an accent Samir had never heard: "This woman is loved by me and shall be protected from all harm."
Stunning, that sound. He backed away. Julie was talking again. And again he wasn't listening. He had gone to the mantel shelf and held on to it now as if he might fall.
"Surely you know the ancient tongue of the Pharaohs, my friend," said the tall blue-eyed man. "You are Egyptian, are you not? All your life you have studied it. You can read it as well as you read Latin or Greek.''
Such a carefully modulated voice; it was trying to dispel all fear; civilized, courteous. What more could Samir have wanted?
"Yes, sir, you are right," Samir said. "But IVe never heard it spoken aloud, and the accent has always been a mystery. But you must tell me-" He forced himself to look at the man directly again. "You are an Egyptologist, 1 have been told. Do you believe it was the curse on the tomb that killed my beloved friend, Lawrence? Or did death take him naturally as we supposed?"
The man appeared to weigh the question; and in the shadows some feet away, Julie Stratford paled and lowered her eyes, and turned just a little away from both of them.
"Curses are words, my friend," the man said. "Warnings to drive away the ignorant and meddlesome. It requires poison or some other crude weapon to take a human life unnaturally."
"Poison!" Samir whispered.
"Samir, it's very late," Julie said. Her voice was raw, strained. "We mustn't speak of all this now, or I'll give way to tears again and feel foolish. We must speak of these things only when we really want to examine them.'' She came forward and took both his hands. "I want you to come another night, when we can all sit down together."
"Yes, Julie Stratford is very tired. Julie Stratford has been a great teacher. And I bid you good night, my friend. You are my friend, are you not? There are many things perhaps that we can say to each other. But for now, believe I shall protect Julie Stratford from anyone or anything that would hurt her."
Samir walked slowly to the door.
"If you need me," he said, turning back, "you must send for me." He reached into his coat. He took out his card and stared at it, quite baffled for a moment. Then he gave it to the man. He watched the ring glinting in the light as the man took it from him.
"I am in my office at the British Museum very late every night. I walk the corridors when everyone is gone. Come to the side door, and you will find me."
But why was he saying these things? What did he mean to convey? He wished suddenly the creature would speak the ancient tongue again; he could not understand the strange mixture of pain and joy that he felt; the strange darkening of the world, and the keen appreciation of light which had come with that darkening.
He turned and went out, hurrying down the granite steps and past the uniformed guards without so much as a glance in their direction. He walked fast through the cold damp streets. He ignored the cabs mat slowed. He wanted only to be alone. He kept seeing that ring; hearing those old Egyptian words finally denned aloud as he had never heard them. He wanted to weep. A miracle had been revealed; yet somehow it threatened the miraculous all around him.
"Lawrence, give me guidance," he whispered.
Julie shut the door and slipped the bolt.
She turned to Ramses. She could hear Rita's tread on the floor above. They were alone, quite beyond Rita's hearing.
"You don't mean to trust him with your secret!" she asked.
"The harm is done," he said quietly. "He knows the truth.
And your cousin Henry will tell others. And others, too, will come to believe.''
"No, that's impossible. You saw yourself what happened with the police. Samir knows because he saw the ring; he recognized it. And because he came to see, and came to believe. Others will not do that. And somehow ..."
"Somehow?"
' 'You wanted him to know. That's why you addressed him by name. You told him who you were."
"Did I?"
"Yes, I think that you did."
He pondered this. He didn't find the idea too agreeable. But it was true, she could have sworn so.
"Two who believe can make three," he said, as if she hadn't made the point at all.
"They cannot prove it. You're real, yes, and the ring is real. But what is there really to connect you with the past! You don't understand these times if you think it takes so little for men to believe that one has risen from the grave. This is the age of science, not religion."
He was collecting his thoughts. He bowed his head and folded his arms and moved back and forth on the carpet. Then he stopped:
"Oh, my darling dear, if only you understood," he said. There was no urgency in his voice, but there was great feeling. And it seemed the cadence was English now, almost intimately so. "For a thousand years I guarded this truth," hesaid, "even from those I loved and served. They never knew whence I came, or how long I'd lived, or what had befallen me. And now I've blundered into your time, revealing this truth to more mortals in one full moon than ever knew it since Ramses ruled Egypt."
"I understand," she said. But she was thinking something else quite different. You wrote the whole story in the scrolls. You left them there. And that was because you could not bear this secret any longer. "You don't understand these times," she said again. "Miracles aren't believed, even by those to whom they happen."
"What a strange thing to say!"
"Were I to shout it from the rooftops no one would believe. Your elixir is safe, with or without these poisons."
It seemed a shock of pain went through him. She saw it. She felt it. She regretted her words. What madness to think this creature is all powerful, that his ready smile doesn't conceal a
vulnerability as vast as his strength. She was at a loss. She waited. And then his smile, once again, came to her rescue.
"What can we do but wait and see, Julie Stratford?"
He sighed. He removed his frock coat, and walked away from her into the Egyptian room. He stared at the coffin, his coffin, and then at the row of jars. He reached down and carefully switched on the electric lamp, as he had seen her do, and then looked up at the rows and
rows of books rising over Lawrence's desk to the ceiling.
"Surely you need to sleep," she said. "Let me take you upstairs to Father's room."
"No, my darling dear, I do not sleep, except when I mean to take leave of life for the time being.''
"You mean . . . day in and day out, you need no sleep whatsoever!"
"That is correct," he said, flashing her another little smile. "I shall tell you another wicked secret too. I do not need the food or the drink I take, I merely crave it. And my body enjoys it." He laughed softly at her shock. "But what I do need now is to read in your father's books, if you will allow me."
