Only a few of these mortals knew her secret.
Not a one knew her entire story. That was contained within her journals, and she had allowed no one ever to read them. Written in the ancient language of her lost kingdom, they contained not only the history of her reign but all that had followed. She called them the Shaktanis, and she turned to them now as she awaited the return of Enamon and Aktamu from London.
In the tower room she had transformed into her library, the window nearest to her had been repaired and glassed in. And a cozy fire warmed her.
Ramses the Damned. She turned the pages of her journals, so recently copied, and within minutes, she had found the account that had inspired her to cross oceans, to settle for the first time amidst the cool and the green of an island on which she had vowed never to set foot.
*
In the time when Ramses II had ruled Egypt, plague swept through the Hittite Empire to Egypt's north.
It was not a plague on the order of the one that had brought down the last remnants of her ancient kingdom. But its victims were many, and so she and her servants had traveled into the Hittite Empire in hopes of tending to the sick.
During her wanderings, she had discovered many miraculous plants blossoming atop mountain peaks or thriving deep within dark caverns. Some were miracles only within the blood of those who had consumed her elixir. And one of them, the strangle lily, was an outright poison, discovered when the bold and magnificent leopard she had made into an immortal companion nibbled from its leaves and turned to ash before her eyes.
But she had never resigned her vocation as a healer, a role she'd played long before she rose to become queen of Shaktanu, and so she had discovered and formulated medicines of surprising potency that could be used to treat sick mortals.
She longed to heal the world, of course, but this was a dangerous desire and always would be; a passel of reckless emotions without a clear, organizing purpose. To administer the elixir was to risk exposing it to those who might use it for domination and control. And whenever she considered this possibility, bitter, angry memories of Saqnos paralyzed her.
But plague, its horrors and its ultimate cost, always drew her like a Siren's call.
Plague stirred her tortured memories of Shaktanu's final hours.
And so it was to heal those afflicted by plague that she entered the kingdom of the Hittites in the year they now called 1274 B.C., bringing her many medicines and potions with her.
There, in the land of the Hittites, a strange tragedy had befallen Bektaten. She had fallen under the spell of a fearless maverick priestess, a worshipper of the goddess of healing, Kamrusepa. Her name had been Marupa.
Marupa had been possessed of remarkable strength and independence. Weary of cities and courts, she had created a remote mountain sanctuary for her goddess, to which many came for healing. In the eyes of Bektaten, Marupa possessed a wild vintage beauty. Gray streaked Marupa's hair, and there were times when she would cock her head, listening to the voice of the goddess, and then break forth in frenzied dancing and singing that terrified those who came for her curative magic. But her gnarled hands brought comfort, and her potions could banish pain, even heal bones, it seemed, and Marupa turned away no one from Kamrusepa's altar.
Marupa had known without being told that Bektaten was no ordinary human being. But she felt only sympathy and awe for the strange Ethiopian who sought to share her own curative potions so generously.
Though Bektaten herself prayed to no god or goddess, and had long ago turned against all pantheons as lies, she marveled at Marupa's faith, Marupa's insistence that Kamrusepa spoke to her.
Marupa had become Bektaten's treasured companion. And at last, succumbing to the loneliness which had so often driven her to confide her secrets, Bektaten told Marupa everything. They had spent many hours talking together, hours which came to be weeks and weeks that came to be months. All her doubts, her griefs, her great fears, Bektaten poured out to this new friend, inspired by Marupa's tenderness.
The very worst secret of her soul, Bektaten confided, was that she wished she had never discovered the elixir; and she feared she would never know how to use it to help anyone. It was not like her other potions or curatives, she confessed. And Marupa listened with tears in her eyes without censure or judgment.
At last Marupa put a request to Bektaten. "Let me give this elixir to the doves of my shrine, the birds sacred to the great Kamrusepa. And let me put before the goddess herself a goblet of this strange concoction, and let Kamrusepa tell us whether this is bad or good, to be destroyed or used, and how it might help all humankind."
Bektaten had no faith that Kamrusepa even existed. But to Marupa's gentle voice and smile, to Marupa's faith, she yielded.
And so it was that an altar was set up in the mountain shrine, with a goblet of the elixir and even the secret of the ingredients spelled out in writing on a stone tablet. And indeed the elixir was given to the birds of the shrine. And Marupa told Bektaten to be patient and let the goddess deliver her verdict.
It did not surprise Bektaten when the goddess, so often talkative and forthcoming, said nothing to her devoted Marupa. Marupa would never have deceived Bektaten. "Wait," said Marupa. "Give the great Kamrusepa time to speak," she said. And Bektaten agreed to it. The altar, the tablet, the goblet, the immortal birds now circling forever about the shrine--all this gave Bektaten a kind of hope. Never mind that that hope might die with Marupa.
Bektaten went about her wandering in the mountains, visiting the lonely shepherds who had need of her cures, and gathering new plants for which she might have a use, her devoted Enamon and Aktamu with her.
Then one morning early Bektaten had returned to the shrine to find a small crowd of crude mountain folk weeping at the entrance. All shrank from her in fear when she questioned them. Going in alone, Bektaten found Marupa dead at the foot of Kamrusepa's altar. The elixir in the goblet had been drunk or stolen, and the empty goblet itself lay in fragments on the floor, mingled with the broken pieces of the tablet that had contained the formula.
Bektaten had let out a scream so dreadful that the country folk had run for their lives. Her devoted companions had been unable to
comfort her. And it fell to them to bury the brave, maverick priestess who had known the whole life of her beloved friend Bektaten.
That woman, who had never asked for the elixir herself, a woman to whom Bektaten might have given the potion one day with her blessing, had been buried in an unmarked grave on a windswept mountainside.
"Who has done this thing?" Bektaten demanded of the mountain folk far and wide. "Who has done this sacrilege?"
She was never to find out. Those she sought to question cowered or shrank from her. Had it been Saqnos? Had he somehow pursued Bektaten here, and stolen not only the elixir itself but the secret of how to make the pure and perfect version?