The Passion of Cleopatra (Ramses the Damned 2)

"Careful with your tone, Ramses. I don't seek to indict. Merely to address accurately and with experience behind me."

"And so you too have suffered these failures of imagination, as you call them?"

"Indeed," she said. "Many times over."

"And how did you survive them? Aside from long sleeps?"

"The risk comes when you find yourself looking upon the mortals around you as puppets. Tapestries. Tiresome children at best, shallow creatures of appetite and ignorance at worst. Once these thoughts take hold, the sense of isolation is soon to follow. There is only one thing that will stop it. You must go to where mortals are most wounded and seek to care for them, heal them. But your entire immortal life cannot consist of journeys like this. Ultimately they would produce an anguish all their own. To dwell only amidst the plague stricken, to walk only those nations brought low by war. But when you feel as if you are but a dry leaf carried by the endless winds of time, and you can bear the thought of what seems like a haphazard wandering no longer, you must go where there is pain and seek to alleviate it."

"To alleviate pain. Did I not do this as I counseled the rulers of Egypt? As I sought to guide them to wisdom and strength?"

"You sought to empower an empire. I do not dismiss this goal. But it is a different thing from what I describe. If you wish to be free of the despair that can grip an immortal, you must reach beyond the very concept of empire. You must go to the place where the pain among mortals is so great it has brought villages and even cities to their knees, and you must do what you can to end it."

"Without using the elixir," he said.

"Yes. Without using the elixir. Use your strength, your knowledge, your wisdom instead."

"And so this is what you would have told me, had we met in Alexandria. Had I told you of my desire to end my immortal life."

"Yes," she answered. "So I ask again. This despair, this anguish. Has it left you? Is your love for Julie Stratford enough?"

"She is a true partner. The first I've ever known."

"Because you made her an immortal."

"Because she is a wise and clever and independent woman, such as I've never known." He hesitated, but then he said it. "I saved her from the very despair I felt in Alexandria all those years ago, when I had lost all those for whom I'd cared most. Wise and clever as she was, she was poised to end her life."

There was more to say. "I drove her to this despair. It was I, the revelation of who and what I was, the assault on her rational mind made by my very being. I had driven her to the brink."

"I see," she whispered.

She retreated to the window and its view of the dark sea. Perhaps she didn't expect an answer right away.

"And so it seems we have an understanding," he said, hoping to steer them back to cooler matters of the business at hand, and away from these great philosophical questions, which she navigated with utter ease even as they filled him with confusion. "You will not give me the strangle lily to end Cleopatra's life."

"Not to end her life, no," Bektaten answered. "But there are other secrets in my garden. Other tools which might bring about an end to this trouble."

Just then, Sibyl's piercing screams echoed through the castle.

33

Havilland Park

Must not show them the extent of her humiliation. Then they might suspect they held a former queen in their rank cell.

She had just resolved to conceal the depth of her misery and her rage from her immortal captors when the door swung open. The handsome, curly-haired man who had menaced her earlier entered with a confident stride. Outside there were others. Just out of view, but she could detect their breathing and the occasional scuff of their boots against the stone floor.

"Tell me your name," her captor said.

His face was in shadow. She would not show him her own again unless forced.

"Hound catcher," she whispered.

He snapped his fingers. Shadows moved through the doorway behind him. Not just the two immortals she'd glimpsed earlier, but others. Five in all. As they gathered, they blocked out the light from the hallway even further. In their hands, they held chains. By themselves these implements would not have been enough to bind her, but when wielded by those who possessed her strength they would be more than enough to hold her prisoner.

"Tell me your name," he said again.

"Hound slayer," she whispered.