The Passion of Cleopatra (Ramses the Damned 2)

"And to know she cannot be stopped."

"That's precisely it, Ramses. That's precisely it."

"So I offer you this, and I hope it comforts you. She has made no effort to see him. She has walked this earth for months now. During that time, she has allowed him to pine for her, to grieve for her. Take comfort in this, Julie. She may have the power to seduce him. But she has shown no desire to use it."

"I hope you're right, Ramses. I pray that you are right, even though I am no longer sure to whom I pray."

He took her in his arms and kissed her forehead. "If I'm wrong, I shall do everything in my power to correct it. I promise you this."

"What else can be done?" Julie whispered.

Samir's men continued to watch each ship that arrived from Port Said. They'd also learned the possible identity of the man she traveled with, a doctor by the name of Theodore Dreycliff. His family had left London some time ago.

"Julie?"

"Yes, Ramses," she whispered into his chest.

"Cleopatra. You called her the clone. You insist she can't have Cleopatra's soul. And I try to understand you, but I don't really understand you. Help me grasp this, Julie."

"I've tried to explain before," she answered. "I often reflect upon it when the hour is late. My father, he was more obsessed with reincarnation than I realized. I learned this from reading his notes in the margins of the books he loved. When he began to study Egypt, he thought Egyptians believed in the transmigration of souls. Of course, he soon realized this was a misunderstanding. And he studied it extensively, this misunderstanding. How the Greeks misinterpreted whole sections of the Egyptian Book of the Dead."

"Yes. Once again, Herodotus is to blame, I fear. During my reign, the high priests taught that the soul went through a succession of journeys. It grew and evolved during these journeys. But they did not take place in the physical realm. They took place in the afterlife."

"Indeed. But still, this idea that we come back again and again to this plane. It captivated him more than I knew. More than he ever let me know. What do you believe, Ramses?"

"I believe the spirit and the body take separate journeys through this world. And the spirit's journey lasts far longer."

"That's not quite an answer, my love."

"Tell me this first. Do you want to believe your father was reborn? Is that what drives this obsession with your father's obsession?"

"No. It's what I think of when I think of Cleopatra. For if her spirit moved on at the moment of her actual death, two thousand years ago, if that spirit dwells in another living, breathing mortal on this earth, then how can the creature you raised in the museum truly be her? From where did that creature's soul come? If it has a soul at all."

Did he still harbor some great love for his last queen, the last queen of Egypt itself? If so, he didn't loosen his embrace. His breath remained steady and even beneath her cheek.

"Surely, it must wound you, to hear me say these things," she whispered.

"What wounds me is that I have committed an act for which the consequences seem endless."

"It mustn't. It mustn't wound you. I don't raise these things to make you feel pain."

"Of course you don't. But I swear to you, I shall let no harm come to Alex."

"And neither will I."

"Good, then in this effort we are joined, as we are in so many other things, my love."

15

Cornwall

The agent and the prim, soft-spoken members of the family told her the castle was a ruin.

She would be foolish to take it off their hands, they insisted, even for only a year.

Clearly they did not want to take advantage of this tall, wealthy black woman from Ethiopia.

Large holes had opened in the roof of both the tower and the great hall, and they couldn't afford to repair them. And so renting it was out of the question, they said. They were in talks to sell it to a conservancy, some organization that might one day turn it into an attraction for tourists who could scale the stair-stepped slopes of the windswept headland on which it stood. Provided, of course, this organization built a strong enough walkway to connect the island to the mainland. It was a short distance, but the drop to the crashing surf below was precipitous, and the current bridge would not hold for much longer.