"I will not," he said. "The gods of Egypt must have cursed me in that moment if such gods exist."
"You condemned yourself, Ramses," she said. "You were your own god of old. And you must understand, before you say another word, I will not give you the strangle lily solely so you can dispatch into eternal darkness this revenant Cleopatra, the consequence of such an act."
"I would never ask for such a thing," he said. "To do so might endanger this fragile being, Sibyl." He paused, looking at Bektaten.
"Do you not understand how this affects me," he asked, "that the soul of the true Cleopatra may be inside of this tender mortal woman? In the very moment that I glimpsed Sibyl Parker I saw Cleopatra. My Cleopatra. I sensed her deeply." He put his hand over his heart. "And we do not know what the connection is between this new tabernacle of Cleopatra's soul and the risen body of Cleopatra that exists now."
"And so you don't believe Julie Stratford's explanation? You don't believe Sibyl Parker is claiming her rightful spirit back from the creature you raised, and that soon this creature will descend into madness?"
"I do not," Ramses answered. "If it were true, Sibyl would be flush with new memories, the very memories Cleopatra is losing. Yet she speaks only of dreams that have been with her all her life, long before I woke this miserable Cleopatra. This connection, whatever it may be, it is more complicated than Julie suggests. I love Julie, but Julie is blinded by animus. When Julie was still mortal, she almost lost her life at the revenant Cleopatra's hands."
"I see," said Bektaten with the same maddening patience. "I think you underestimate Julie Stratford, great king. But I do see what you mean."
Remarkable the unguarded way she studied him, almost as a lover might study one she was preparing to kiss. But there was no such need or hunger in her expression. Just a quiet fearlessness.
The glimpses he had seen of her anger suggested that she was slow to rage; that her anger, when it showed itself, gathered strength gradually like a storm far out at sea, moving inexorably towards a distant shore. Had her attack today, her slaughter of the children of Saqnos, been the terminus of such a journey? Or was it as she'd said: she had simply sought to send an efficient and indisputable message to the man who had betrayed her thousands of years ago?
Too soon to ask her these things, especially in the wake of his confession. But to converse with her like this, intimately and in relative solitude, was a sobering thing. He was as absorbed with studying and interpreting her every graceful gesture as he was with p
leasing her with his insights. At the same time he was quietly on guard.
She released his hands and slowly returned to the fire.
"Would you really have ended it all those years ago?" she asked. "If I had become known to you. If I had showed you how to turn yourself to ash."
"It is a distinct possibility."
"A distinct possibility," she whispered. "You have mastered the language of this age. In particular the queer mannerisms the British use to put strong feelings at a safe remove. So many languages swim in my head. Sometimes it is as if I hear all of them at once, and I am unsure of which one will come from my lips. I envy you, Ramses."
"How so?"
"Your awakening, what it allowed you after such a long slumber. To drink in the twentieth century in great thirsty gulps after having known only desert kingdoms of the time before Christ. To experience it all without the distractions of the ages in between. The fall of Rome, the darkness that followed. The rage of the Mongols, and the Vikings. The slave ships bound for the Americas. The revolutions that rocked Europe. These things did not crowd your head as you discovered the motorcar and flying machines and powerful medicines that can now prevent plague. But to my existence, these things arrived slowly, as inevitabilities. Not magical constructions. I imagine when you first saw them, they seemed as if they had just arrived from the temple of the gods."
"Yes. This is true. But still, I would have liked to see Rome fall. For reasons which I'm sure are now clear."
She smiled. "Do you still think this age magical?"
"I have always dwelled in a kind of magic. It was magic that rendered me immortal."
"In a manner of speaking, perhaps," she said. "But I ask you this now because I wish to know if you have been freed from your anguish, freed from the same anguish that drove you to wall yourself away for all time."
"May I ask a question first?"
"You may."
"If you had met me then, as Egypt fell to Rome and my queen lay dead by her own hand, if you had met me then, and I told you I wished to end it all, would you have given me your strangle lily?"
She answered without hesitation: "No."
"Why not?"
"Because you needed then to be freed from your vocation, not from your eternal life."
"Counselor to kings and queens, you mean?"
"Yes. Yours was not a failure of spirit, Ramses. It was a failure of imagination. For that is the deepest and gravest challenge of immortal life. How to imagine it when we are bred and trained and shaped to see our existence as a brief, fleeting thing in which we skate helplessly across the surface of a violent earth."
"And from where do you summon your great imagination, Queen Bektaten?"