The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) (12 page)

Eleanor picked herself up from the ground, but could not stop staring at the palace. The marble structure appeared both gold and blue in the combined flood of moonlight and lantern light. Even from here, she could see the carved lions, their massive paws resting upon perfectly smooth spheres of marble. She knew that one day the world would swallow this, leaving nothing behind. As the lighthouse had been swallowed, as the library had burned, some things could not be saved, even by the hand of an archaeologist.

“Is that…” Cleo’s voice trailed off.

“Yes.”

Eleanor looked at the rings she wore. She rubbed them, thinking fervent thoughts about how they needed to be in their own time Right Now, but the landscape did not shift or otherwise move by her command. But for the lapping of the water against the shoreline and the approach of four large guards, there was no movement at all.

“Oh, dear.” Cleo’s voice sounded strained by more than simple concern.

Eleanor offered a confident smile to the guards as the men approached, each with a long spear pointed toward her and Cleo. They might run in the opposite direction, but where might they go? Eleanor had only one destination in mind and it was the palace.

“You will show me your hands,” the lead guard demanded in Greek.

The language surprised Eleanor, though she supposed it should not have. Many in the Ptolemic era had refused to speak Egyptian, even while in-country. Greek was superior, or so they believed, but had never quite erased Egyptian customs as they had possibly hoped.

“You will take us to your queen,” Eleanor returned in Greek, refusing to be cowed by the man, even if he did have a spear. She did as he ordered, however, extending her hands, ensuring that he could see the rings she wore. She had no idea if he would recognize them, but if the rings had brought them here, of all places…

The guard grunted and his spear twitched in his hands. Then, every spear lowered, and the guards made a bow to both women.

“Follow.”

The guards marched in a loose formation and Eleanor and Cleo fell into step behind them, Eleanor holding to Cleo’s metal hand when she reached out. Being separated here would only complicate things and Eleanor had in desire for complications.

“Were you named for the queen?” Eleanor asked Cleo in whispered French.

“Yes,” she whispered back. “As were my mother and grandmother, but… Eleanor, we cannot be about to
meet
her.”

“I don’t know who we’re about to meet, but that is Cleopatra’s palace, is it not? Standing in the harbor, not yet the rubble of ages.” She frowned, her thumb worrying at the ring as she tried to piece the puzzle together. “Akila told me these were wedding bands. You don’t suppose—”

Cleo interrupted her with a gasped “No! It—but how? Eleanor. This is… Oh, I would say we are dreaming. We are dreaming and I— Oh,
gods
.”

When Cleo would have stopped walking, Eleanor pulled her along so as not to lose pace with the guards. “Tell me.”

“There was a woman, in my room.” Cleo’s steps did not falter again, her hand tightening slightly on Eleanor’s. “She must be kept so, she said; it is the blood that binds it. That woman could not have been…Cleopatra? Doctor Fairbrass and a woman—a group of women. They…they changed me, or ensured that I had been changed…so that I would—”

“It is the blood that binds it,” Eleanor echoed, thinking of Anubis’s rings, of the way blood pooled in her own hand as she slid them on and opened the portal to another age. “So that you would
live
.”

Despite her wish to stay with the guards, Eleanor stopped walking at the sight of the light that abruptly cut across the water. The gold light washed across the harbor and snatched her breath away when she realized what it had to be. She followed the arc of light, out and further out still, until she found the dark, shape against the horizon. It was four centuries gone in her own time, but here, Pharos of Alexandria stood yet, spilling light into the darkness to guide ships safely to shore. The lighthouse was not entirely helpful when it came to figuring out what year they had landed in. If the palace were indeed that of Cleopatra…if she lived yet, they were at some point before 30 BC, perhaps even within that year itself.

“Eleanor.”

Cleo tugged her arm and Eleanor stutter-stepped back into motion, her eyes still on the distant light. “I never thought…” But she thought now, about seeing things that no one in her time had known, about studying them, and bringing information back into her own time. How might it benefit scholars and other archaeologists? To know of these places that were otherwise gone.

Maybe, Eleanor thought, they weren’t gone at all—simply removed from common reach. If rings had guided her to Hatshepsut’s thriving kingdom, and now too Cleopatra’s…where else might other rings take her? Take anyone. If she had carried Virgil back and now Cleo…who else might she take…

“Is
that
what Pettigrew wants?” Eleanor whispered. She clung more tightly to Cleo as they approached the palace, their feet crunching over the gravel that lined the walks. “But the honey… Does he want to be immortal and travel as Anubis does? Does—” She shook her head, knowing she was rambling. “Why the goddamn pageantry?”

“Some men refuse to do things simply,” Cleo whispered.

The guards came to a halt at the palace, and Eleanor peered past them, to the woman who approached on one of the aisles of marble. She was barefooted and clad in a simple gown that was more Greek than Egyptian; its white pleats moved with every step she took, making her look like wavering grain as she passed in and out of the light cast from bowls of firelight that lined the route. She wore no wig or makeup, for it was late; her own hair had been brushed and drawn into a single dark tail down her back.

“They have come?”

The queen spoke Greek to her guards, but when they bowed and parted ranks, allowing the queen access to Eleanor and Cleo, the queen spoke the same Egyptian Eleanor recalled from Anubis.

“You have come, daughter of Anubis, and she who has been…touched.”

Cleo flinched but Eleanor did not loosen her hold on her friend. “Your majesty,” she said in Greek, “I speak Greek, if that remains easier for you. As does this Cleo.” She inclined her head toward the Cleo at her side.

Cleopatra’s mouth moved in a smile and she bowed her head to Eleanor, as if addressing an equal and not a commoner from another time. “Greek then,” she said.

“You are not surprised to see us,” Cleo said, echoing Eleanor’s own thought on the queens’ demeanor.

Cleopatra reached for Eleanor then, moving down the steps between her guards; her warm fingers slid around Eleanor’s be-ringed hand and lifted it so the rings could be seen in the firelight. Cleopatra’s thumb skimmed over them, the metal heating under her touch. Eleanor shuddered, thinking the queen had stroked a hand over her jackal fur the wrong direction.

“I am not surprised,” the queen said. “These rings were my own—are my own, will yet be my own. Never worn, but never false.” Her brown creased with a frown and she released Eleanor’s hand. “I have much to show you—you, honey-touched, have questions. Have you remembered the oracles?”

At Eleanor’s side, beneath the stern and seeking gaze of the queen, Cleo shivered. What the queen thought of Cleo’s mechanical arms, Eleanor could only wonder.

“M-majesty?”

Cleopatra exhaled. “The oracles who harvest the honey, the honey that infuses us, makes us as the gods are: undying. Come with me.”

With a gesture she told the guards to fall back; they were unobtrusive as they followed, but their presence calmed Eleanor. This was a time and place unknown to her, but for fragments she had read in books or studied in museums. That she and Cleo were speaking with Queen Cleopatra , the last pharaoh of Egypt, was something she had trouble accepting. And yet, here they were. Cleopatra had touched her and they had not vanished. She had also expected them.

Cleo’s mechanical hand tightened within Eleanor’s as the queen guided them into a courtyard with a deep and far-reaching pool. The surface of the pool was covered in lotus blossoms; flowers of every color rose above a splattering of round, flat leaves. The fragrance in the air was one Eleanor knew immediately. It was the scent of the honey they had discovered within the sarcophagus. Beyond the pool, there were hives, their stone bases marked with bee and lotus hieroglyphs.

“Oh.” Cleo said the word and it sounded as if she had been punched. “This isn’t making any logical sense.”

“Or,” the queen said, “it has been logical all along, and your mind has simply rejected it. Refused what is …within your own hands, such as they are. You…you are proof that such a thing is possible. You are also proof that what I mean to do is possible. My time here grows short, but my time elsewhere…” She smiled, and it was not the happy expression it should have been. It was broken and crumbling. “We will be far-removed from this place and all will be made well.”

“Highness, what is it you mean to do, then?” Eleanor asked. She moved slowly from Cleo’s side, to take a closer look at the lotus, and the markings upon the distant hives. How like the carnelian bee, as if the clay hives had been impressed with that very piece of carnelian. She turned to look at the queen anew, discovering the bee on her very person, attached to the belt she wore low across her hips. Little bee.

“This world changes,” the queen whispered. “I have used and been used. It is time to pass into another age—an age where we can live as we will, where we can…”

The queen’s hand passed over her chest, lingered at the hollow between her breasts, then moved on. Eleanor knew this motion—it was one she had made, when she wore a ring she kept hidden from the world. She pressed a fist against her breastbone now, not liking this puzzle any more than she had the last.

“Highness, tell me that you don’t intend to eat this honey,” Eleanor said. “That you don’t mean for
him
to. He won’t—” She broke off. She had no evidence that the body within the honey sarcophagus was that of Mark Antony—none other than the small ring around his finger, a possible remembrance of the woman he loved. “You have no idea if this honey can do such a thing.”

“Evidence stands before me,” the queen said. “You are both here. You have come with my rings—his and mine own from the future world—and she…” Her hand moved toward Cleo, yet didn’t dare touch her. “She would not have lived, not unless my oracles had tended her.”

Cleo took a step backward and Eleanor was not quick enough to reach her side before she stumbled to the marble floor. Cleo threw a hand out to ease the fall, but still landed with a hard thump. She had not taken her eyes from the lotus pool.

“There were figures,” Cleo said.

“My oracles, no doubt,” the queen said.

“And you as well—
future
you…in
our
time.”

“The honey is not quite enough on its own,” the queen murmured. “It requires a spark of life.”

Eleanor left the beehives and crouched by Cleo’s side, wanting to help her up. But Cleo recoiled from her touch and shook her head.

“This…is too much.”

“You likely would have died otherwise,” the queen said. “Would you have wished that? Think on all you would not have otherwise seen.”

Cleo pushed herself away from Eleanor and came quickly to her feet, nearly snarling at the queen before them. “Think on all I still cannot do!” Cleo’s mechanical hands curled into hard fists. “I may travel the world and see its every wonder down through the ages, but that is not—” She broke off and looked at Eleanor. “I cannot give my life to any other,” Cleo whispered before Eleanor could ask. “Not as you have.”

“Cle—”

“You will tell me what Doctor Fairbrass did—that surely I can share my life with another. I have only to watch him wither and age as I will ever other person I have ever cared for. I will outlive them
all!
” Cleo turned her back on the queen and Eleanor both, pacing away from the lotus pool before she turned and came back. “You mean to do the same?” She aimed the question at the queen, as sharp as any viper’s mouth.

“It has already begun, don’t you see? When Antony returns…then, we shall go. They will think us dead and we will be at last able to live under this guise.”

Eleanor bowed her head and pressed a hand against her own breast, thinking of how history had remembered Cleopatra and her love, she dead from the bite of an asp and he dead by his own hand, thinking she was already dead. But neither of them dead? Could it be? Eleanor pushed impossible ideas to the side. There was yet more, with Pettigrew having taken Virgil and Auberon prisoner.

“So what of Pettigrew then?” she asked softly. She could not solve Cleo’s woes, nor change the queen’s mind when she had already taken such steps—her honey, her oracles, her undying. “What is he after with this honey?” She looked at the queen who had said the honey was not quite enough on its own. “Is it ritual? Is it you? Your oracles? That binds the honey to a person and creates the…”

“Spark,” the queen offered when Eleanor fell to silence.

“If you have already done this,” Eleanor said, “then surely you…you exist within our own time. Our time is also your own, and…” She thought of the Defenders, how they also moved through the ages. “Your oracles?”

The queen nodded. It was a simple motion, it should not have been so elegant, but Eleanor recognized something of Hatshepsut in that motion; something of her grandmother, too. These women who commanded great power as if it were second nature.

“Pettigrew needs your oracles—and possibly you, Highness—to make himself… Undying? So why summon me?”

The queen smiled, an expression that chilled Eleanor despite the warmth of the Egyptian night. “Daughter of Anubis—you are chosen. You have Egypt in your very blood, but something more. The mark of a god, the ability to cross time. You think anyone can do such a thing and survive? Only those chosen are so fortunate. Now that you have found me
now
…I will know you
then
should you come to me.”

“And what, I send you an invitation to make Pettigrew’s undying dreams come true?” Eleanor shook her head. “No—this is not a thing that should ever happen.”