And his regrets had followed him throughout the centuries with the persistence of angry spirits.
Why had he given all the elixir to his soldiers within moments of having stolen it? Why had he not predicted that their allegiance to him would crumble once they were gifted with eternal life? Why had he been so confident he would find the formula in the quarters of the queen from whom he had so brutally stolen it?
His insurrection. His uprising. A grotesque mistake. He should have tried diplomacy. Or, at least, subterfuge.
Would those regrets still plague him now?
Or would the story they brought him give him a true life, and a true resurrection?
"Rise, Saqnos," Jeneva whispered over his body. "Your children bring you hope."
*
His robes had decayed, so they brought him clothes from the ship. But he had not yet dressed. In the nude he chewed great mouthfuls of the fruit and bread they'd brought him. It would have been easier to tend to him on the yacht, of course. But they dared not ask him to board. Not yet. That would be presumptuous.
He had not yet decided to leave this island and this tomb.
For all they knew, he would listen to their tale and ask to be sealed away again.
They had prepared themselves for his anger as well. So far he had shown none.
He listened to the tale of the immortal gambler in Monte Carlo attentively, his eyes bright.
Jeneva marveled at his restored skin, his lustrous tumble of curly ink-black hair. In this modern age, his coloring would be described as Middle Eastern, but in the kingdom to which he had been born, he had served a black-skinned queen.
This ancient, fallen empire, he had told them, existed in a time before the sun had suddenly and mercilessly scorched the northern end of Africa, creating a desert out of his ancestral lands, driving the survivors of the great plague that felled his kingdom south and east. Starved and in dread of disease, these survivors of Shaktanu had aligned themselves into fearful tribes, united by the most primitive of reasons: the shared color of their skin or scattered bits of history, most of it myth, suggesting a common ancestry. And all of this had resulted in ceaseless tribal warfare. All of it, this legacy of scarcity, fear, and misperception, had formed the ancestral basis of the tribes and kingdoms that would rise in later years on the borders of a new desert created by a cruel sun.
But before that terrible time, his had been a truly global civilization, and in it, the concerns of race that afflicted this modern age simply did not exist, and Shaktanu, in what was now the vast Sahara Desert, had been the center of its power.
Shaktanu. Jeneva could count on one hand the number of times her father had been able to say the name without weeping.
He did not weep now.
He listened and he ate, and he allowed them to marvel at the sight of his beautifully restored naked body, bathed in the shafts of sunlight still pouring down from above.
Jeneva had never witnessed the awakening of a pure immortal before.
His confusion was slight and passed quickly. His consciousness returned fully before his strength did. Throughout, his hunger and thirst were enormous.
By the time they had finished their tale, he had eaten all the food they'd brought him. And so, they all realized with a heavy silence, a moment of decision had arrived.
There was more food aboard the boat. Would he join them?
"I did not make these immortals, if that is truly what they are," Saqnos finally said. "Is this why you have awakened me? To learn this?"
"In part, yes," Jeneva answered. "We fear the queen, as you always taught us to. If this Earl of Rutherford is one of her associates, or a child of hers, then we were right not to--"
"Bektaten sleeps," Saqnos said, too gruffly, with too much authority. But they allowed him this certainty. What other choice did they have? They had never meet this queen, the one with the power to destroy them all. He rarely shared details of her beyond the most frightening one. "She seeks to guard the pure elixir, not spread it. She would not make immortals like this. And so what you rouse me for, my children, is the hope of a quest. A quest none of you may have the time to complete."
"You will have the time, Master," Jeneva said. "That is why we awaken you."
"And so there is a choice before us," Callum said, "one we cannot answer alone, given that our numbers are limited."
"What is this choice?" Saqnos asked.
"Do we follow this gambling aristocrat on his travels, or do we assemble in London and seek to learn everything we can of this Mr. Reginald Ramsey of Egypt?"
A long silence followed. For Jeneva, it was torturous.