Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [51]
“You came to learn how best to kill those who have offended you. You know already what kind of deity the Scarlet Lady is, or I mistake you,” the rekhet said.
“Tell me,” Cleopatra insisted, and the priestess relented, speaking slowly and deliberately, as though she’d long ago memorized the narrative.
“Sekhmet was born out of Ra’s divine eye, a messenger sent to light up the waters of chaos and to find lost things. Her first task was to locate Ra’s two disloyal children, Tefnut and Shu, who’d abandoned their father. The tears Ra cried upon being reunited with them created humanity, but Ra cried no tears of gratitude to Sekhmet. Instead, he created a new eye to replace her, and placed her in his crown as a cobra spitting fire. The humans created of Ra’s tears prospered, filling the earth with their lovemaking and children, with their eating and singing. The gods prospered, filling the firmament with their lovemaking and children, with their sacrifices and their magic, with their rituals and with the singing of their acolytes. Sekhmet was left spitting fire from Ra’s crown, the only one defending her father from his enemies, the only loyal child.
When Ra was old and weak, and humans began to rise up against him, he sent Sekhmet to the desert as a lioness to slaughter the traitors. That day, she created pain and death, which had not existed in the world before. She killed everything she saw, drinking the blood of the world indiscriminately. Ra changed his mind in the middle of her massacre, taking pity on his dying human children. He tricked Sekhmet by mixing the Nile with drugged pomegranate juice. She saw its color and thought it was blood. When she staggered and fell to her knees, when she slid beneath the Nile’s waters, crying as she fell, Ra threw her back into the heavens, and there she stayed. Until you brought her to earth again.
“I am the last of my line,” the rekhet continued, looking out into the darkness beyond the temple. “Here, we have honored Ra and pacified the Lady of Slaughter with sacrifices. We’ve worked for centuries to keep humankind safe from her fury. The believers have become few, and the land changes around us. The Roman gods have come to our land. You know this much. Were you not once a queen?”
The rekhet took her hand and touched her palm. Cleopatra flinched at her expression.
“You were,” she said, her fingers traveling over the skin, her tone increasingly hostile. “Though you are not now. Did you not invite the invaders into your bed? Did you not call to the Romans, worship their gods, sacrifice to their altars? All that has happened was your doing. Did you not proclaim yourself a goddess? Now you are dead, or so they say.”
The priestess dropped Cleopatra’s hand, poured something from a tiny, elegant bottle into an alabaster goblet, and sipped from it.
“Are you dead?” she asked.
“I am not!” Cleopatra cried, fighting the urge to strike this crone, this woman who knew nothing about what she was saying.
“Are you certain?” the priestess asked.
Cleopatra’s mind spun. Dead? She was not dead. And a betrayer of Egypt?
What did this woman know about power? What did she know about the demands put on the powerful? She was a priestess of a forgotten religion. The rekhet should be thanking her queen, not judging her.
“What does Sekhmet desire?” the priestess continued, as though Cleopatra had not spoken. “She desires the end of everything. Can you not feel it? There is no place for her in Ra’s boat, no home for her in the Duat. She was banished by her family, and she lives in endless hunger, searching for prey. You brought her sacrifice. You gave her enough to revive her, enough to bring her from the heavens. She desires an ocean of blood in payment for the wrongs that were done her. She will use you to get it. There is no peaceful end for you. You will wander with Sekhmet.”
Cleopatra felt an echoing loneliness rising inside her.
“This is a passing form. Until I have my vengeance on Rome,” she said.
“And then?” the priestess asked.