Her hand, transparently pale with the blue veins standing out, hung over the edge of the bed. Dio touched it with her lips as lightly as the night wind and again it seemed to her it was not her hand but his.
"The two are one," she thought. "How could they have parted? How could he have left her? What will become of her, what will become of him?"
He had told the queen before his departure that he was going to Horemheb, the Viceroy of the North, to persuade him to accept the throne. The queen had always dreamed of resigning the throne and being free from the heavy yoke of sovereignty. She was glad and believed him, though not quite; she was surprised at his not taking her with him: for so many years they had hardly ever parted for a single day, and now in those dreadful weeks after Maki's death he left her, ran away as it were. She felt he was concealing something from her. She soon learned that he had never arrived at Memphis and no one knew or wanted to tell her where he was. She asked Dio, but she did not know either, or did not want to tell. Dio said nothing for days, but at last, seeing that the torture of uncertainty was worse than anything for the queen, she told her.
The queen listened to her calmly, as though she had been prepared for it; she had submitted to him in everything and she submitted to this, also. But she still failed to understand why he had not taken her with him. Together in happiness but apart in sorrow: so then he did not love her as much as she loved him? But for this, too, she blamed herself: she evidently had not known how to love; had she loved him more this would not have happened.
That same day she took to her bed and did not get up any more. The heart disease she had had for years grew very much worse.
Dio never left her for a moment: she remembered her promise to the king. But she sometimes fancied that her love was worse than hatred. She acted like a skilled torturer who preserves his victim's life, inflicting wounds and then healing them to prolong the torture. She deceived the queen from day to day, telling her that they were looking for the king, would soon find him, had already traced him; but each deception was found out and the torture grew worse.
Sometimes she felt indignant on her account: "What has he done to her! He did not want to kill the victim with his own hands—he ran away; he took a light burden upon himself and put upon her a burden no human being can bear."
That night the invalid had a terrible heart attack. The physician, Pentu, thought she would not survive it. The pang in her breast was so severe that she turned blue as though she had been strangled. No drugs were of any help. Finally Pentu decided to try, as the last resort a very powerful and dangerous remedy—the stupefying juice of Kidjevan belladonna, Lybian sylphium, Arabian myrrh and poppy juice with powdered turquoise and bones of the sacred ibis.
The remedy helped: the invalid dropped asleep.
Would she wake? "Oh, if only...." Dio thought and broke off, remembering the king's words, "if she dies, I will die with her." She knew this would be so.