Ramses the Damned Read online

  But her discovery of him had been no accident.

  And she had spared his life, even though she had the power to destroy him.

  Before the expanse of her history, he felt a great humility. And with this humility came relief, for he was no longer the lone ancient among newly made immortals.

  But had she brought him here to stand trial?

  If so, why was she being so generous with her story?

  Why was she taking great pains to care for this Sibyl Parker?

  Perhaps, for now, she sought only to educate him and be educated in return.

  But would all that change when she learned he had used her creation to awaken Cleopatra?

  Footsteps startled all three of them. It was the one she called Aktamu, the one with the young face.

  “She is awake,” he said. “Sibyl Parker is awake.”

  “Then we will go to her,” Bektaten said.

  * * *

  In a great four-poster bed, Sibyl Parker lay propped up on a mountain of pillows. As Ramses approached, her face seemed to dance in the flickering light from the fire. He was relieved to see her pale neck free of wounds. Curled next to the twin lumps of her feet was a slender gray cat who watched his approach with unnerving intensity.

  Even though he had entered this bedchamber with Bektaten and Julie at his side, Sibyl seemed to see only him. And in her expression, he saw the same recognition he felt when he’d looked upon her across the crowded party.

  Aktamu and Enamon stood silently in the far corner, closest to the window, and Bektaten next to the fireplace, as still as a statue, as if she thought a safe remove from all of them would allow her to absorb whatever strange story Sibyl Parker had brought to her castle.

  “You saved me,” Sibyl whispered. “You saved me from that terrible man.”

  “Are you well, Sibyl Parker?” Ramses asked. “Are you unharmed?”

  “How do you know my name? Do you recognize me as well?”

  Before he could answer, Julie stepped forward and said, “It was I who recognized you. I know your books quite well. My father, Lawrence Stratford, enjoyed them.”

  “And now I have thoroughly ruined your engagement party.” Tears filled Sibyl’s eyes. Tears and a piteous expression made worse by exhaustion, he was sure. “I hope you can forgive me.”

  “No, no.” Julie rounded the foot of the bed, then sat down on the opposite side of it so she could take Sibyl’s hand in hers. “Nothing of the kind.”

  “She speaks the truth,” Ramses said. “You were but one of several extraordinary and unexpected guests.”

  “Well, that is a most polite way of putting it. I thank you. But that man. That crazy, drunken man—”

  “You have nothing more to fear from him.” The note of finality in his voice brought about a long silence. “Now, please, Miss Parker. You must tell us what brought you all this way. You are American, are you not? Your accent.”

  Ramses said nothing of the woman’s mysterious demeanor, nothing of her expression so suggestive of the long-lost Cleopatra, the Cleopatra who was as dead as ever now. He said nothing of the bizarre effect upon him of this woman’s manner and voice.

  Sibyl seemed to realize for the first time that Julie held one of her hands in between her own, and this made her smile. “Oh, Lord. Where do I begin?” Sibyl whispered.

  “Wherever you would like,” Julie said, “for we are in no great hurry.”

  “This is most kind. You are most kind. It is like a dream that you are all being so kind. You see, most of my life I’ve been a woman of distinct and powerful dreams. Dreams of Egypt, mostly…Oh, I’m afraid it makes so little sense, what I’ve been through.”

  Ramses smiled. “You have come to the right place, Miss Parker. We are experts in that which does not make very much sense.”

  “Good,” she said, through her gentle laughter and her tears. “Good.”

  Julie filled Sibyl’s water glass and pressed it into the woman’s trembling hand.

  After she drank, she began again.

  “As I told you, all my life I’ve experienced vivid dreams of Egypt. But there was one in particular which recurred again and again. I could always remember only fragments of it when I awoke, and those fragments felt more like an awareness, or a knowledge of what had taken place, rather than an actual recollection. But in this one dream in particular, I am aware that I am a queen. And you, Mr. Ramsey, or a man who looks exactly like you, you are my guardian. And I am also aware in this dream that you are immortal somehow.

  “One night, you arrive at my chambers carrying the clothes of a common woman, and you ask me to dress in them so that we may walk through my kingdom. So that I may view my people through a different pair of eyes. A commoner’s eyes. Compassionate, sympathetic eyes. And I obey. Because it is you, my immortal counselor, who has made the request, I obey. And together, we make this journey on foot.

  “But when I would awake from this dream, I would remember almost nothing of the city we’ve walked through, and nothing of your face. Only the sense that I felt nothing for you but love and respect and awe. I have written and published an entire novel inspired by this dream, you understand? And then when I saw you at the party today, I realized this man, my immortal guide, was you.

  “You see, I crossed an ocean because you’ve appeared in other dreams of mine. More recent dreams. Terrible dreams. And then someone sent me a news clipping with your picture in it, and there you were. But only when I laid eyes upon you in the flesh for the first time did I realize you were the missing piece from a dream that has been with me my entire life. So I ask you now, how can this be? And is it possible that it was more than a dream?”

  Ramses reflected. If they continued on this path, if his suspicions about what had brought Sibyl Parker here were correct, he would soon have no choice but to reveal his great crime to Bektaten. But Julie’s look implored him to answer Sibyl’s question as honestly as he could.

  “Yes, it is far more than a dream, Sibyl Parker. The city was Alexandria. I was, indeed, your immortal counselor. And you were Cleopatra.”

  Like a thunderbolt this news hit her. She tightened her grip on Julie’s hand. It seemed she might lose her tenuous hold on the moment, on this place, and slip into dreams so deep she might never come back from them. But she struggled to concentrate, to ignore a vast undiscovered country of memories and sensations and voices.

  “It is not a dream,” he said. “It is a memory. A memory from a former life.”

  “And from your former life?” Sibyl whispered.

  “No,” he answered. “No, from my continuing life, for I am immortal, and I have lived for thousands of years. And so what you experienced today at the party, it was an experience without compare.”

  “How do you mean?” Sibyl asked.

  “You, for the first time, looked upon someone you had known in a past life. And not a reincarnated version of the person, but the person himself. In the flesh. And this experience by itself was powerful enough to make your vague dream into a coherent memory.”

  “You. You are from a…past life?”

  “Yes.”

  Sibyl shook her head gently and Julie pressed one palm to her forehead to comfort her. Again it seemed Sibyl might lose her hold on the moment, and that the long shadowy and undiscovered country would claim her. But against the pull of a dark wonderland, she clung to a purpose. To live now, to live and think and know now.

  For a while, no one spoke, and there was only the rumbling of the sea.

  A sense of resignation quieted Ramses. He did not look back over his shoulder at Bektaten, to see how the great queen responded to this new intelligence. No one in this room understood better than Ramses the prerogatives of ancient monarchs, the divine authority that had surrounded them, and the swiftness with which they might judge or act. But I too am a monarch, he thought, born and bred a monarch, born and bred with authority, and I must protect not only myself but my beloved Julie. Whatever is to come, I will be Ramses
as I have always been.

  “These other dreams,” Julie finally said, “the more recent ones, the ones in which you also saw Ramses. Describe them to us.”

  “In the first one, it was as if I were coming out of darkness, out of death itself. I saw you standing over me, and when I reached for you, my hands, they were a skeleton’s hands, and you were terrified.”

  “My God,” Julie whispered. “The Cairo Museum. Almost exactly as it happened.”

  “In another, there were two great trains, bearing down on me out of darkness, and then fire. Terrible fire everywhere. And then, in another…” Tears spilled from her eyes now, but she still bravely tried to recall every detail. “I took life. My hands. I closed my hands around a woman’s throat and I took her life. It was as if I did not know what I was doing. And the very fact that life could be taken by my bare hands, it was a source of great confusion….” And then it became too much for her, and she shook her head as if to banish these thoughts.

  “It’s exactly as I suspected,” Julie said.

  She looked to Ramses, but he could not speak.

  Guilt paralyzed him, filled his throat with something that felt like cloth, for here it was again, another consequence of the crime he’d committed in the Cairo Museum, the crime against life and death, against nature, against fate. They were ceaseless, the repercussions of this terrible event, and now this poor mortal woman had been laid low by it, and his terrible actions were being exposed to a queen whose existence had been entirely unknown to him before this day. He could think of nothing to say in this moment, nothing to do besides take Sibyl’s other hand in an effort to comfort her. The face he revealed to Julie was strong, confident, a monarch’s mask for the turmoil within.

  Julie had slipped one arm around the woman’s shoulders, and brought Sibyl Parker’s head to her breast. Tenderly Julie supported her even as she rested amidst these silken bed pillows and luxurious covers.

  “Our Cleopatra of the Cairo Museum is ill,” Julie explained. “In the temple today she could barely stand upright. She had difficulty walking. Her skin was shining and her eyes too vibrant. She bore all the marks of one who had consumed the elixir. The vitality, the physical health. But there was an illness within her. A deep illness in her mind, she said. And at the very moment when you, Sibyl, were assaulted by that awful man, it was as if she experienced the assault as well. Every blow. There is a connection between you two, a vital connection that was awakened when our Cleopatra opened her eyes in the Cairo Museum.”

  “When I awakened her,” Ramses said, “which I never should have done.” He gave a deep sigh, his eyes moving over the ceiling. “These dreams you had, Sibyl Parker,” he said. “These nightmares, they were all connected to this newly arisen Cleopatra as she roamed Cairo only months ago. The two of you have been connected since she woke.”

  He shook his head, all Julie’s talk of soulless clones returning to him, deepening his sense of horror for what he had done.

  “Because you, Sibyl, are Cleopatra reborn,” Julie said excitedly. “You’re the vessel for her true spirit.”

  “We don’t know this, Julie,” Ramses said. “It may be true, but maybe it is not true. You speak of things no one can know for certain.” Such anguish. What had possessed him as he had stood there in the museum with the vial of the elixir in his hand? He’d been a man then in the most tragic sense of the word, a fumbling and imperfect human being, struggling with a god’s power and a lover’s broken heart.

  “We don’t know this?” Julie questioned him. “Ramses, what other explanation could there be? This resurrected Cleopatra is an aberration. I’ve always known it. She was never meant to exist. The true soul of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, had long ago moved on in its journey—living and dying in countless others, and finally being reborn in this all-too-human American woman, Sibyl Parker. The clone reaches out desperately for the soul in Sibyl Parker, because the clone has no soul. And Sibyl profits from this, while the clone sinks deeper into a decline.”

  “You see me as profiting from this?” Sibyl whispered.

  Julie was startled into silence by this response. She appeared flustered, unable to find the right words for what she had meant to say.

  “I have been besieged by visions,” said Sibyl, “many of them terrifying. Paralyzing. They grip me in public places and quite literally bring me to my knees. What were once only nightmares, they have begun to spill into my days. This process you describe. In which one of us rises, while the other one falls, it is not what I have experienced, Julie. It is not what I experience now.”

  “Maybe not,” Ramses said, “but would you say it became ever more real as the two of you drew closer to each other? Intensified? That is the modern word.”

  “Yes. Most definitely.”

  “And after today, when you were both on the grounds of the same estate, did the nature of this connection change in any way?”

  “It changed the minute I arrived in London. It felt as if…Well, it felt as if we suddenly enjoyed the type of connection often described by twins. I felt pricks of pain that seemed to come from nowhere. I felt myself unable to sleep, despite great exhaustion. And emotion. Great swells of emotion that swept over me without warning, without any connection to what was unfolding in my immediate environment. As if I was suddenly privy to the feelings of another.”

  “She does not sleep,” he explained. “No one who has consumed the elixir does. We can enjoy a kind of slumber for only a short while. It is never really sleep. Both of you are fundamentally different beings. Yet you are connected somehow and so your different natures struggle with each other.”

  “Well, we must find out if it’s the same for her,” Sibyl said, as if it were the most obvious of suggestions. “We must find her and bring her here. If this is a refuge for me, among sympathetic beings, then can’t we provide the same refuge for her?”

  Silence.

  “In the dream,” said Sibyl, “the one where we spoke, she asked, Are you the one who took me? She’s being held captive somewhere, isn’t she?” Sibyl studied their faces. What she saw in their expressions seemed to frighten her. “You will help me find her, won’t you? Is that too much to ask of you? That you help me bring this to an end?”

  Ramses smiled, but it was a small, secretive, and sad smile. After all this woman had endured, she wanted only to help the resurrected Cleopatra. Here, surrounded by immortals, privy to revelations that should have shaken her to the core, she thought only of the other, the horrid revenant that he’d brought into being, as if she had no choice. That is it, he thought. They are so intimately connected this woman can’t think of anything else.

  “An end,” Julie said, as if she dreaded the thought. “What end do you imagine to this, Sibyl?”

  “An end to this confusion will surely help us both,” Sibyl said. “How can I tell you the urgency I feel to be with her, to look into her eyes, to hold her hands?” She paused. “Yes, Ramses,” she said finally. “To answer your question, something has changed in the wake of the party. For the first time, we seemed to share a dream, she and I. We chased each other through the streets of some city. A child’s voice called out to his mother. In Greek. The word mother again and again. And then we stared at each other across a canal of some sort. For the first time we gazed upon each other without vagueness or distraction. We spoke.”

  “What words did you exchange?” Ramses asked.

  “She asked me where I was hiding him. Where I was hiding her memories of her son. And I told her…” Tears again. “And I told her I would never hide anything from her.”

  “She’s losing her memories,” Julie said. “She said so in the temple today. Specifically she mentioned her son, Caesarion. She can remember nothing of him at all. The knowledge that she even had a son torments her now. A great yawning blackness. Those were the words she used to describe the place where the memories of her son should be, but are not.”

  “Did she mention Sibyl specifically?” Ramses asked.
r />   “No, but there was something she was holding back, something she would not say. I asked her why an illness in her mind would cripple her body so. She wouldn’t answer me. But that was the moment in which it seemed she was being tossed about by invisible forces. The very moment when Sibyl was assaulted, I believe.” Tears hovered in Julie’s eyes. “I felt sorrow for her,” Julie confessed. “Much as I loathe her—I can’t help but loathe her—I felt such pity for her.” Julie’s voice softened, became little more than a murmur. “What must it be like to have no soul, to be groping for a soul that resides in another? What is it like to be conscious that one is an empty shell?”

  “The man who attacked me,” Sibyl said, “he knew my name. He accused me of invading her mind, of trying to destroy his queen.”

  “Ah,” Ramses said, “and so it was that one, just as I thought. The doctor with whom she traveled. This Theodore Dreycliff. And so we know that Cleopatra is aware of you as well. That she detects your presence just as you detect hers. And that she was able to do so before the party today, before you two were within a stone’s throw of each other.”

  “I sent her a message,” Sibyl said, as if it were a shameful admission. “I sent her a message when I was aboard the Mauretania. I told her my name and asked her how I could find her.”

  “And did you receive a response?” Julie asked.

  “Only the man who brought a knife to my throat,” she answered, lips quivering from her tears. “I wanted to help her. I wanted to help us both. And now I feel as if I have done a terrible thing.”

  “You have done nothing terrible, Sibyl Parker,” Julie said quickly. “Nothing terrible at all.”