“If she doesn’t mind, I don’t,” said Ayesha. “We’re taking a sort of break, as you see. Kati, tudsz segíteni Lady Crowe?”
“Well, some people have time to,” said Lady Crowe, but she was smiling. “Gyere, Kati. Let’s leave these ne’er-do-wells to their break.”
DIANA: Little Diana! I’ll little her.…
Catherine poured herself a cup of coffee, then looked inquiringly at Beatrice. Beatrice held up two fingers, so she poured out two more. She was surprised—Beatrice did not ordinarily drink coffee, just green goop. But she supposed coffee beans were plant matter as well? Beatrice would not want cream or sugar, Clarence would want sugar, and she wanted hers with a great deal of cream. She prepared each cup, then passed two to Beatrice. Ah yes, that was better! As for the pastries, pumas did not eat such things. Professor Holly took several and poured himself a cup of coffee, but Leo simply shook his head.
MARY: You never drink coffee here at home! Or even tea, unless it’s one of those goopy green tisanes.
BEATRICE: I do not like the taste of it. But that day, somehow, I wanted to seem more normal, more like an ordinary woman. Yes, Catherine, I suppose I was a little jealous. Clarence seemed so fascinated by Ayesha’s story, and of course with Ayesha herself.
CATHERINE: Leo Vincey was looking daggers at him! If it were physically possible, he would have killed Clarence with his eyes.
MARY: And yet, Bea, you know that Clarence loves you. I can’t think of anyone more constant, more faithful under difficult circumstances.
BEATRICE: Alas, that I myself am the difficult circumstance.
“This Tera was Cleopatra’s mother?” said Clarence, taking his coffee cup from Beatrice. “Then you must have been there when Egypt was conquered by Augustus.”
“Augustus!” Ayesha said the name with contempt. “Of course a man as vain as Octavian would call himself Augustus and declare himself a god! He detested Egypt, and he destroyed Rome. At first we thought the war would have nothing to do with us. After all, we were in Philae, far away from the turmoil in Alexandria. But his soldiers came for the High Priestess—either because Tera had been respected as a queen, or because of the knowledge she possessed as High Priestess of Isis, who knows? They stormed the temple, and we fought back with everything we had, except the powers that would have made the only difference, but that we had been taught never to use for harm. I was a junior priestess by then and in charge of the novices, the eight-to fourteen-year-olds. Heduana herself, who had risen to senior priestess, had recommended me as her replacement. Before the fighting started, I was able to get the novices out through a passageway known only to the priestesses, which led down to the river. I put them in reed boats and fled with them to my father’s household. My mother took charge of the girls and arranged to send them back to their families. Therefore, I was out of the battle and heard about it only afterward.
“Knowing that they were about to be defeated, Tera ordered the priestesses to fight back using their energic powers. Heduana argued against it, saying it was better to die than betray their oaths to the Goddess. Many of the senior priestesses, particularly those who were close to Tera, in her inner circle, followed the High Priestess, but the ordinary priestesses followed Heduana. They could not imagine breaking their oaths, and anyway did not know how to use their powers in battle. If they had all followed Tera and fought back, could they have prevailed against the Roman forces? I do not know. As it was, the temple itself was sacked and the remaining priestesses, those who escaped or surrendered and were allowed to live, scattered—to other temples or back to their home countries. One of them told me that rather than being captured, Tera had drunk poison before the altar of Isis. So perhaps the price of Heduana’s idealism was the destruction of our order. You see, Beatrice, I have become a realist, or what you might call a cynic.
“Suddenly, everything that had been my world since I entered the temple was gone. My father said he would try to find me a husband—at eighteen, I was past the age when most princesses married, but I came from the royal house of Meroë, and there were men who would have wanted my hand for an alliance with my father, particularly since Rome was flexing its might. But what did I want with a husband, I who had been a priestess of Isis? No, I wanted to learn. Only learning would assuage my grief and anger. So I left Meroë and began to travel—up through Egypt, then by ship to Greece, trading my knowledge of medicine for food and shelter. In Sparta, then Athens and Corinth, I studied with physicians, learning about new medicines, new methods. In Ithaca I met a Greek man, Kallikrates. We became lovers.”
Catherine looked over at Leo Vincey. He was staring at Ayesha intently, with a peculiar look on his face. What was it? Not jealousy, which she had expected. No, it was a kind of longing.
“Kallikrates was a physician, the best I have ever known. He had a school of medicine in the hills above Ithaca, where he trained young men and a few women in his methods. They came from all over the known world. I asked him to teach me all he knew, and when he learned that I had come from the temple of Isis at Philae, he asked me to teach him as well. I became one of the teachers at his school, and slowly we began to care for each other. I had never been in love before. It was a new and delightful experience for me. He was the great love of my life—” She paused for a moment. “Until Leo, of course.”
Catherine glanced over at Leo again. Now he was staring down at his hands.
“But even then our aims were different. He wanted simply to heal. I wanted to continue learning what I had been taught by the priestesses of the temple—how to manipulate the energic powers of the Earth. It seemed to me that if I could gain enough power, I would be able to heal the body by a touch and a thought—I would knit bone to bone, turn the tumor back into healthy tissue, restore vitality when disease had enervated the patient. I might even defeat death! Kallikrates had no such ambition. ‘Death is the natural end of all life,’ he told me. ‘We practice medicine to provide a good life, and eventually a good death—that is our duty to Asclepios, Ayesha. But beside Asclepios walks Thanatos, and we must not deny or disrespect either of those gods. What would life be without death? It would not be life.’
“I did not listen to him. One summer, when the olive flowers were blooming on the hillsides around his medical school, I traveled back to Egypt, to the library of Alexandria, to consult all the ancient scrolls I could find on the energic powers. The philosophers had written of them centuries before, in metaphor and myth. Then I traveled to Nineveh, to consult the library of Ashurbanipal, or what remained of it, for much of it stood in ruins. Then down to Arabia Magna, where I traveled with the Arabian tribes, consulting their healers and elders. I went, by caravan, as far as Kandahar, always searching for wisdom and knowledge.
“It was two years before I returned to Ithaca. I was still young—despite the destruction of my temple, I knew little of life’s losses, of how time is the one thing we can never regain, until our understanding of the energic powers is much greater than mine. I am convinced that time itself is only energy… but you want to hear my story, not scientific theories. I came back to find that Kallikrates was dying of a cancer, which had already spread too far for any of his students to heal.