The Passion of Cleopatra Page 5

  But she had harbored suspicions over this request. Dark suspicions.

  Had he cut some secret deal with these men? Would she be forced to snap his neck with one twist of her powerful hand? And so she had not hidden in the hills as he'd requested, but closer, behind one of the cars, where she could hear their rapid English. And it had all transpired much as Teddy had predicted. With astonishment and handshakes and warnings from these private collectors that the academic community would be in an uproar as soon as word of this place and the speedy sale of its contents reached the press. But what could they do? Men had to make a living, these men said several times.

  A curious phrase, she thought. To make a living.

  There was no room for gods nor queens in this phrase. In this belief that each man, each human, each person, was making a life rather than living one. The more she learned about this modern era, the more she thought it a time of bumbling rulers who took poor care of their subjects, or too many rulers for any one to rule effectively.

  Teddy was exuberant when the men left. The rest would be taken care of back in Cairo, he'd informed her. Deals signed, funds transferred. Their customers had retained the Egyptians they'd hired to stay on as guards.

  Their account, he added with a gleam in his eye.

  He had not betrayed her. He had not stolen from her. And so she had not been forced to kill again in this, her second immortal life.

  "What's next, my love?" he'd asked. "What can I do for you now, my Bella Regina Cleopatra?"

  A stab of pain when he called her this. She had been called this before, by a man who had showed her Teddy's same level of devotion, but with twice the charm.

  Must not think of him, she told herself. Must not think of the young and innocent and noble Alex Savarell. Or his father, Elliott, the Earl of Rutherford. Or that pale, mewling little kitten, Julie Stratford. If I am to be free of death itself, let me be free of Ramses and his wretched twentieth-century lot.

  And so perhaps this tumult of feeling had caused her to answer too quickly, caused her to say words she now regretted.

  "Please, Teddy. I wish to see Alexandria."

  And here she was, standing amidst a gray and dusty relic of her empire that bore no resemblance to the city from which she once ruled.

  There was something else that afflicted her, something which she had not shared with her new companion, but which seemed to have intensified since their arrival here.

  Her returning memories were partial, broken.

  Some were vivid, but others were retreating behind a veil, becoming more indistinct with each passing day. And who knew what she could not remember at all and might never remember? She felt cheated.

  The sight of the sea, slate gray in the setting sun, brought back vivid recollections of her opulent galley's oars dipping into these same waters. On that long-ago journey, to Rome and to Caesar, it had taken an eternity for Alexandria to retreat across the horizon, the lighthouse the last piece of her home to vanish into a void between dark water and night sky.

  She could remember the fear around that journey, the desperate uncertainty about how she would be received by Caesar, by Rome itself. She could remember the city's drab ugliness upon her arrival, its narrow, filthy streets, the whole place a veritable sewer compared to gleaming, sun-bleached Alexandria. That such world-changing might was originating from such a rank, brutish place had filled her with a sense of dread and injustice. These memories flashed through her, pulses of pure emotion with the power to transport her back to her time as queen.

  But she could not remember Caesar's face.

  Many of her memories from that time were like this. Mosaics glimpsed through water pierced by shafts of near-blinding sunlight. Bright things, beckoning things, but still cloudy and unresolved. The events of her past, their chronology, were clear to her now, but the senses and smells and tastes of it all seemed remote still. And how much of her supposed clarity was the result of having read so many history books on the train ride there?

  Yes, she could remember the way Caesar suckled her neck, the way he gripped the sides of her face during his moments of focused and powerful release, and she could also vaguely recall a masculine smell that mingled with the sharp metallic odor of his armor and knew with a strange kind of certainty that this was his smell, Caesar's smell. She could also recall the stark difference between his lovemaking and that of Marc Antony, who claimed her body with boisterous and vocal ferocity.

  But many of these things were facts. They came to her as knowledge, not richly detailed recollections of lived experiences.

  Not yet, at least. Maybe it would take time. Or maybe with each successive resurrection, more of her old lives would be lost. This thought horrified her.

  To be cut off from every memory of her time as queen if she suffered another conflagration like the one in Cairo? Unthinkable.

  And how infuriating that she could remember her every encounter with Ramses in excruciating detail.

  Was it because he'd been there at the moment of her resurrection? His had been the first face she'd seen as the elixir drew her forth out of withered flesh and dried bone. Perhaps the sight of him, standing over the display case as she shattered it with her skeletal, outthrust arms, had awakened all her memories of him just as it had awakened her body. Like the imprinting between a newborn animal and its mother.

  The thought sickened her. Ramses was no mother, no father. No true parent to anyone.

  For Caesar and Marc Antony to be retreating behind some great watery veil, while Ramses, the man who had been her ultimate undoing, danced vividly throughout her mind; this was simply intolerable.

  Such confusion still. It didn't compare in the slightest to those first few awful days after her awakening in Cairo, when her body had been full of gaping wounds, her mind a riot of memories which would vanish and reappear only to vanish again.

  There was greater stability now, in her body, and in her soul. But her mind was not entirely healed. She wanted her memories.

  On the train to Alexandria, she'd devoured the history books Teddy bought for her. And it hadn't surprised her in the slightest how the Romans had told her story. A powerful whore, whose only true power lay in between her legs. As if lust alone would have been enough to subdue a man like Caesar, a man who could have helped himself to any queen he wanted, and often did.

  Would this be a curse of immortality? she wondered. To witness the degree to which victorious nations simplified and cheapened the narratives of their rivals?

  It infuriated her that she was in no position to put her version of events to paper, given the uneven and unreliable return of certain memories over others.

  When reading her own history became too much for her to bear, Teddy had sought to gently lecture her on the world they were traveling through. Of those inventions she had yet to encounter, of conflicts between nations whose names she had never heard spoken before.

  Every now and then he offered her some piece of knowledge of which she was already in possession, and in those moments, she would place a hand gently on his thigh and inform him that even in Alexandria all those years ago, men of science had begun to speculate that indeed the earth itself was round.

  Still, the extent of the known world now shocked her. It seemed impossibly large. Far too large for a single city, London, to serve as its center.

  But this is exactly how Teddy described the city of his birth. The center of a vast and chaotic world that stretched between two frozen poles. It seemed akin to securing a giant tent in desert winds with only one reed. Surely, the dance of empires which had at times ensured long periods of stability during her reign could not tame such an expansive world.

  And now there was talk of a great conflict brewing on the continent of Europe, which she understood was the name given to much of what had once been ruled by Rome.

  But these thoughts could only occupy her mind for a short moment. For in this new, gray, growling Alexandria, the past and present fought for control of
her mind. Which one would win? She was not sure.

  "It was a mistake to bring you here, my love," Teddy finally said. "A terrible mistake."

  "It was nothing of the kind," she answered. "I asked you to do so and you complied. Where is the mistake in this?"

  He took her in his arms so they could avoid getting trampled by a regiment of pale-skinned soldiers in uniforms more drab than any Romans had worn in her day. Were they Romans? Or were they British, like the people Ramses moved among now? And what explained their presence here? Here in her Alexandria.

  No, not mine. Not mine anymore. Not mine for two thousand years.

  They would leave here at once, the two of them. She could easily flee this grief, this regret, simply with another train ride. The fear of death had been removed. And she had Teddy. Boyishly handsome Teddy who hung on her every word. Who...

  ...he was fading right before her eyes. Teddy's smile became a look of concern as he saw the expression on her face. She tried to speak, but his very image wavered before her, and then, instead of his face, she saw another's. A woman's face. A woman she did not recognize. And there was darkness crowding in on all edges of this woman like an expanding frame of starless night sky.

  The woman was pale skinned with tumbles of golden hair, and her expression showed the same bafflement Cleopatra now felt. As if they were mirroring each other. What was the woman wearing? Some sort of lacy robe. A sleeping garment of some kind.

  She reached for this woman, and amazingly, this woman appeared to reach for her.

  And then she was gone.

  And the traffic was blaring all around her, and Teddy had gripped the hand with which she had reached out to her vision.

  Nausea, dizziness; two things she had not felt since her resurrection. They seized her now with fierce power. She stumbled into the nearest wall. For some reason, her body preferred the support of cold concrete to Teddy's arms.

  A vision. A vision that had taken her outside of herself. How else could she explain it? But could she explain this to Teddy? Would he understand? Worse, would his devotion to her flag when her mystery and magic took on a dark tint?

  Who had this strange blonde woman been? Where had she been?

  It was no memory from her past, she was utterly sure of this.

  And why had this woman regarded her with the same curiosity?

  "Something is not right," she whispered. "Something is..."

  "I'm here, Cleopatra. I'm here. Anything you need, just ask it of me. Please."

  Damn you, Ramses. Just as I seek to be free of you...

  "Cleopatra," Teddy whispered.

  "There is nothing you can do, dear Teddy. There is only one who could possibly help and he is..."

  "Ramses," Teddy finished for her.

  She turned to him, accepting the comfort of his embrace again.

  "What did you see?" he asked. "It seemed as if you were looking through me."

  "A vision. A woman I didn't recognize. She was in some other place."

  "It was a dream."

  "I am wide awake. I do not sleep. I have no need for it."

  "That's just it, don't you see? You don't sleep, but your body is still human and your mind is still human and so your mind must process things in the same way. Mortals do it through dreams. And so you must do it through a kind of dreaming while you're awake. That's all, my darling. That's all it is. Truly."

  Oh, how she wanted to believe this pronouncement. And how touching the earnestness with which he delivered it. He was, after all, a man of medicine and science, despite the scandal in his past.

  "Dearest Teddy, I fear the treatment of a being such as myself lies far outside your area of expertise."

  "Indeed," he answered. "And so there's only one who might have the answers to what ails you. Ramses the Great."

  "Ramses the Damned," she whispered.

  When he pulled away from her suddenly, she was afraid she had lost him. But he was rifling in his jacket pocket. He found it quickly, the folded-up piece of paper he'd been searching for.

  "I went back to the Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. I know you said you didn't want to see them again. But Ramses and his friends, I thought perhaps they might be looking for you, and if there was a search under way, you should be aware of it. There was no sign of them except for this. A cable that had been sitting at the front desk for only a few days."

  "A cable?" she asked, baffled, taking the paper from his hands.

  "Yes. They're transmissions. Words. They come over the wires and are written down. Do you need me to read it to you? This was for Elliott Savarell, the man who took care of you. This friend of Ramses. It was his son who sent it. He obviously thought his father was still in residence at the hotel, but the front desk said he had not been there for some time."

  But she had read it herself already.

  FATHER ARE YOU WELL STOP BETROTHAL PARTY FOR JULIE AND RAMSEY EIGHTEEN APRIL OUR ESTATE YORKSHIRE STOP MOTHER THRILLED PLEASE COME OR WRITE YOUR SON ALEX

  Alex Savarell was the author of this message. The beautiful, adoring man with whom she'd shared a single, unforgettable night in Cairo. A man who had promised her everything, even though he hadn't been truly aware of what she was, of how she'd come to live again.

  There was so much to absorb in this simple, terse message. And yet, that was the word that seemed to drift towards her off the paper again and again, as powerful as the strange vision she'd suffered only moments before.

  Alex...

  "That's him, isn't it? Mr. Ramsey? That's his alias. He's to be married, to this Julie Stratford. That's the daughter of the man who discovered his tomb, isn't it?"

  "Yes," she answered.

  "You wish to go to him?" Teddy asked.

  She forced herself to look into his eyes, to banish all thoughts of other men she'd lain with, and women she had almost killed.

  "I do not. I do not wish to go to him. I wish to find answers that only he will possess. And so, I have no other choice."

  "We, my darling," he said, taking her hand. "We have no other choice, my Bella Regina Cleopatra."

  *

  It was she! The woman in the picture. And her companion was a handsome young man, probably British, just like the men who were supposedly searching for this woman.

  The man had followed them there from the train station, and now he was sure. It was a fine sketch, done by an expensive artist, so there was no mistaking the resemblance. It had been delivered to him weeks before by his cousin, who claimed a friend of his from Cairo was searching for this woman. His cousin knew little else, except his friend, a Samir Ibrahim, had been the compatriot of a famous British archeologist who had recently died, and the man's relatives were desperate to find this woman for some reason.

  Ever since then, he had visited the train stations whenever there was an arrival from Cairo. Searched for the woman's face in the crowd.

  And today, just as he'd grown weary of this pursuit, he had spotted her emerging from the morning train on the arm of her handsome companion, and he had followed them throughout their wanderings.

  He had been ordered to follow her long enough to establish a detailed report and nothing more. She was dangerous, this woman, or so these British thought.

  He had seen enough.

  He fell back into the crowd, then hurried in the direction of the nearest telegraph office.

  4

  Chicago

  Sibyl Parker was desperate to record the contents of the dream that had just awakened her. She pulled her diary from the nightstand drawer without turning on the lamp.

  In the pale sliver of light coming through the cracked bedroom door, she wrote feverishly.

  Again, I saw the woman, a beautiful woman with skin darker than my own and raven hair and blue eyes. She stood with the sea behind her in a city I did not recognize. She gazed back at me. She even reached for me at the very moment I seemed to reach for her. And then the dream ended. In this dream, there was no violence like the others. A blessing, it
seems. Could my plague of nightmares be coming to an end?

  Scribbling just these few sentences exhausted her.

  The first peaceful dream since the nightmares had begun. She should savor this relief, she knew. But as soon as she blinked, images from her other nightmares filled the deep shadows around her canopied bed.

  The first one had been the most awful. The one in which she'd stared up at a handsome Middle Eastern man who seemed terrified by the sight of her. His fear baffled her until she saw the hands with which she reached for him were withered almost to the bones. She'd heard splintering wood and breaking glass, and then, in the moment before she woke, she realized she'd been crawling out of some sort of display case.

  Then, a week later, she'd dreamed of closing her hands around a Middle Eastern woman's throat, of watching the life drain from her eyes. And if those two had not been disturbing enough, she'd then suffered another nightmare. In this one, two giant trains bore down on her out of night darkness, coming from opposite directions, the lights from their locomotives like the eyes of angry gods. Then she'd found herself sailing into the sky on a bed of flame, and had awakened with a scream that had drawn everyone in the house.

  Impossible to forget, these nightmares. But a part of her did not want to forget. She was sure these dreams were elements of some sort of experience for which she did not yet have a name or a true understanding, and so documenting them in their entirety was absolutely essential.

  After several minutes, Sibyl's shallow gasps turned into deep, sustaining breaths, and her bedroom seemed to be her own again.

  Had she cried out in her sleep?

  Probably not. If so, Lucy would have come. Or one of the housemaids. Or perhaps one of her brothers, Ethan or Gregory, whichever one had not yet drunk himself into a stupor.

  Powerful winds off Lake Michigan battered the immense house. A few of the shutters had come loose, and now they were tapping out a rhythm against the stone walls that sounded like the loping gait of an injured giant.

  Parker House was one of the first mansions built on this former patch of swampland north of Chicago's commercial district, and her parents had left it to her, and her only, to ensure that its maintenance would not become prey to the vices of her younger brothers. They'd done much the same with the family business, installing Gregory and Ethan in vanity positions which gave them the illusion of power and control while those more qualified kept them from making a mess of things.