Upon discovering that they had been granted eternal life, upon realizing that they had been made impervious to most fatal wounds, these once-loyal soldiers laid down their arms and abandoned their new leader. What need did they have for a ruler? What need did they have for the shelter of a kingdom when they could explore the world endlessly without fear of cold, starvation, or the serpent's bite?
Saqnos...
But the man who watched them now was not him.
"Once we are inside the city walls, prepare the ring," she said quietly.
"Yes, my queen." Enamon caressed the leather pouch at his side with a long-fingered hand.
They made frequent visits to this place. They were assumed to be traders from the land of Kush, and they never disabused anyone of this notion. Their bags always bulged with blossoms and spices, many of which she'd plucked from peaks so high and dangerous, so battered by powerful winds and drenching rains, no mortal could reach them. The other visitors to the market did not know this.
These journeys to Jericho filled her with joy, for they interrupted her long wanderings. The vast, forbidding landscapes her immortality allowed her to visit spoke their own languages; there was a certain music to the whisper of winds through the leaves of jungles where no humans dwelled, a harmony to the contrasting winds that swept high mountain peaks. But the languages spoken in Jericho, and the tales of loves, deaths, and newly born cities, they were a music without which she could not endure. And after days of collecting these stories, of listening to mortals tell their tales, she would then return to her camps and record them in her leather-bound papyrus journals, clumsy books she had made herself and kept throughout her centuries of existence, books she had vowed to keep for all time.
Bektaten would not allow her love for this place to be spoiled by the sudden appearance of strange immortals, immortals she had not made.
Immortals like the one who was following them now from just outside the toss of a stone. Or the one who stood poised next to the city gates, regarding them with a fearless and penetrating gaze.
We are being hunted, Bektaten thought. Someone has heard tell of tall black-skinned people with blue eyes visiting Jericho, and they know what we are and they have come here to lie in wait for us.
As they passed through the gates and into the tunnel just beyond, Enamon used the cover of shadow to follow her instructions. He held one open hand out to his side, indicating she should fall behind them by several steps. She complied.
Enamon swung his leather satchel around to the front
of his body, then removed a bronze ring Bektaten had fashioned with her own hand. He passed it to Aktamu, who quickly unscrewed the small jewel, revealing the tiny chamber and pin underneath. Enamon then removed a small fabric pouch.
Bektaten watched them closely.
The next few steps could be very dangerous for all three of them, but as long as the contents of the pouch did not pierce their skin, all would be well.
Unless she was soon given cause to use the ring.
Once the ring had been filled, its jewel fastened back in its place, Enamon handed it to her, and she slid it gently up one long, dark finger.
They continued to walk as if no transfer of a great, secret power had just taken place.
And then she saw him.
He stood in the shadows of the rectangular towers behind him, the bright glare of sun at his back. His swaddling of robes matched those of the two spies he'd sent to watch her approach.
Saqnos.
The man who had condemned her to immortal life trapped beneath the earth. The man who, in his desperate desire to re-create the elixir, had harvested every plant in Shaktanu, penetrated jungles she had forbidden her subjects to enter. The plague he had unleashed had brought down a civilization that once stretched across the seas.
So much had been lost to the man who now stood before her, she was rendered speechless by his presence. And yet she felt no rage.
What had she expected to feel upon seeing him again after all this time?
They had been lovers once. And now, despite herself, she felt an unwanted kinship with him. Ah, the loneliness, the unspeakable loneliness, how it presses on the heart.
There were so few like them. So few who had witnessed the fall of the first great civilization since Atlantis. So few who had known the vast desert when it had been dotted with trees and shimmering pools and animals and the scattered palaces and temples of Shaktanu. That was before the plague. Before the great heat of the sun had scorched the earth she once ruled, driving the survivors towards the Nile, where they would eventually form the empires they now called Egypt and Kush.
A great hunger, a great desire for companionship, arose within her, even at the sight of a man who had been willing to condemn her to eternal darkness.
It would not have been quite such a fate. For what she'd realized as soon as the stone slab had been placed over the tomb was that, without the light of the sun, she had begun to slowly weaken. Soon after, she had fallen into a gentle sleep that became a stupor until Enamon and Aktamu freed her, exposing her body to the sunlight once again.
But Saqnos could not have known these things at the time. The elixir was too new to them both. Saqnos had been perfectly willing to let her wither away to dust.
And yet still, she could not help but see him now not as a lover, or a prime minister, but as a brother in immortal life. Yes, that was it. He was her kindred in immortal life.