Page 88

"Cleopatra," Bektaten finally said. "This is the only ruler of Egypt to whom you told your entire story?"

"Yes," Ramses answered.

They were alone. With an upturned palm, she had ordered her men to remain upstairs with Sibyl and Julie. Now she stood with one hand on the stone mantel of the fireplace in the great hall, gazing into the flames. Impossible to tell if she was quietly furious with him or if his revelation had plunged her deep into thought.

Did this give him hope? He wasn't sure.

"And you did not say her name earlier because you did not want to confess what you had done?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I see."

"What I have done," he began carefully. "Have you any knowledge of it?"

"Knowledge of it?" She turned from the fire. "With using the elixir to bring one back from death itself? No, Ramses. Of this I have no knowledge at all."

"How? In all your thousands of years, how could you not have once tested it?"

"It never entered my mind."

"But surely you must have faced death, a loss, a tragedy that tempted you--"

"Never," she said. "We are different beings, you and I. Once the soul has left the mortal body, one is indeed left only with an empty shell. This is the truth as I know it. I have never been tempted to rouse that empty shell, to grapple with a monstrous being whose nature I could not possibly know in advance."

"You had your poison, your strangle lily."

"And so, what? You suggest that to test a theory I might bring a body back from death, and then murder it if the experiment went wrong? I have never been an alchemist. That was the realm of the man who betrayed me and destroyed our kingdom."

"Surely, at some point, you must have become curious. You must have--"

Bektaten smiled and shook her head.

"We are different, you and I," she said again. "But don't seek to confuse me. In all your centuries in Egypt, did you ever once test the elixir in this way? No. Only when you gazed upon her again in the Cairo Museum, your beloved Cleopatra, this queen who humbled Caesar and seduced Mark Antony, this fabled seductress of a thousand talents, were you overcome by this urge. It was not curiosity!"

Her words wounded him, but he would not reveal it, and he saw only patience in her eyes.

"Be truthful, Ramses," she said. "It was not curiosity. It was nothing of the kind. I seek common ground with you, but do not seek to make me your partner in this particular endeavor so that you may avoid the consequences of what you've done."

"There is no avoiding the consequences of what I have done!" Ramses declared. Her words and her patience had infuriated him, as much as the quiet precision with which she'd delivered them. "Those consequences, as you put it, have pursued me across oceans. Does it mean nothing to you, my queen, that I was awakened without my consent? That I walled myself off so as to bring myself as close to death as I could. And yet, all that time, from the fall of Egypt to now, I..."

"You what?" she asked quietly.

"Had I known there was something on this earth that could have ended my life, if I had known of this strangle lily--. Had I at least known that I was not alone."

"I see," she whispered. "So I am your wayward mother. And I'm at fault for not having cared for you as if you were my creation, and not the thief of that which I sought to guard from the world."

"But why? Why did you seek to guard it from the world?"

"You can answer this question. Did you not do the same? Only when you were blinded by love did you reveal your truth. Until then, did you not find Egypt in the hands of ruler after ruler unworthy of knowing your secret? Incapable of being trusted with the elixir's power? Did you not see the seeds of the very things that destroyed my kingdom in the eyes of every king and queen you counseled?

"Consider it the fire of Prometheus if you must. But you knew. You were wise enough to see what I learned when Shaktanu fell. Should this fire touch the earth, it will ignite a conflagration that will incinerate everyone in its path, bringing more death than it could ever remove. In the smoking ruins of my kingdom, I saw this truth. In the warfare that webbed the land. In the bodies mauled by plague. This is history, as I have lived it, as I have known it. Sources of life fall into the hands of those who seek to profit from and abuse them, bringing great death as a result. I will not have the elixir meet such a fate. And if it's loneliness you fear, Ramses, you will join me in this purpose. And you will humbly admit it when passion has blinded you to its importance."

He felt foolish, like a young boy who had made desperate excuses for childish acts. Yes, he was a monarch who had been bred to believe that his every whim should be acknowledged, but he had been born and bred to duty as well, born and bred to uphold justice, reason, what was right. He had been born and bred to a mortal life of ritual and sacrifice that many a humble human would have found unendurable, and when he had slipped from the pages of living history into the legend of Ramses the Damned, he had remained bound by duty, bound to be the advisor of the rulers of Egypt....And what was he now in this woman's presence? Why was he so vulnerable to her, so willing to suffer this?

He must have appeared chastened. She crossed the room and gently took his hands in her own.

"You must never do a thing like this again. Never, Ramses."