It seemed for a moment that her former prime minister would not be able to tear himself away from the sight of his mercenary's emptied, ash-strewn robes lying in a puddle on the dirt. Then a fear unlike any he had known for centuries seized him. He raced past her towards the city gates.
Once he was gone, Bektaten felt a hand come to rest on her shoulder, and then another. They were on either side of her once again, Enamon and Aktamu, wordlessly alerting her to their constant presence and their enduring commitment to accompany and protect her for all time.
"Collect the ashes and the robes," she said. "And then we go to the market. This is a good city full of good people. And we have successfully expelled its invaders."
"Yes, my queen," Enamon whispered.
Part 1
1
1914: Outside Cairo
The young doctor had never met a woman as enchanting as the one who lay beneath him now. Her desire was insatiable. Her hunger for him seemed a hunger for life itself.
When he'd first been called to her room days before, they'd assured him her death was imminent. Burned from head to toe, the nurses had cried. Her body had been pried from underneath the crates at the very bottom of a freight car. No telling who she was or how far she had been carried by the train. Or how on earth she was still alive.
But when he'd pulled back the mosquito netting, he had found her sitting up in bed, so beautiful it had been almost painful to look at her. Her unmarred features exquisitely proportioned. Her rippling hair, parted in the middle, making a great pyramid of darkness on either side of her head. Words like fate and destiny crossed his mind. Still, he was instantly ashamed of how the sight of her nipples beneath the bedsheet had aroused him.
"What a handsome man you are," she'd whispered. Was she a fallen angel? How else to explain the miraculous physical recovery? How else to explain her complete absence of pain or disorientation? But then there was her accent. Perfect, polished British. And when he'd asked her if she had any friends, anyone he should contact, she had said the strangest thing: I have friends, yes. And appointments to keep. And accounts to settle.
But she made no further mention of these friends in the hours after he spirited her away from that little outpost on the edge of the Sudan. Hours in which he'd thrown himself into her arms, ridden the serpentlike undulations of her unblemished, golden-skinned body.
First, she insisted they go to Egypt. When he asked her if these friends she'd mentioned could be found in the land of the pharaohs, she said simply, I have had a great many friends in Egypt, Doctor. A great many. And her smile had disarmed him once again.
In Egypt, she claimed, she would reveal more of her mystery.
In Egypt, she would give him some sense of how it was she could go without sleep, consume great quantities of food at all hours without gaining a pound. How she could make love with a consuming passion that never tired her in the slightest. And perhaps she would offer too some explanation for the dazzling blueness of her eyes, so rare in a woman of her Mediterranean complexion.
But would she share with him the most important detail of all?
Would she tell him her name?
"Theodore," he whispered to her now.
"Yes," she answered. "Your name is Dr. Theodore Dreycliff. A fine British doctor."
Even after the time they'd spent together, she said these words as if they were vaguely unfamiliar. As if they contained facts of which she needed to be constantly reminded.
"Not so fine in the eyes of my colleagues, I'm sure," he said. "A fine doctor doesn't abandon his hospital without explanation. Doesn't just run off with a beautiful patient at a moment's notice."
She didn't greet this remark with the indulgent giggle he would have expected from one of those wretchedly boring women back in London his parents had wished him to marry. She merely gazed at him in silence. Perhaps she truly didn't understand, or perhaps she sensed there was more to his story he hadn't shared as well.
He had no fine reputation, that was for sure. He'd done good work at that little outpost in the Sudan, but it was a terrible, youthful mistake that had banished him there years before. Fresh out of medical school and desperate to appear competent to his elder colleagues, he hadn't asked the questions he should have during his first weeks of practice. As a result he'd nearly crippled a patient by prescribing her an obscenely inappropriate amount of medication.
Inappropriate was hardly the word his colleagues had used for it, however. Reckless. Criminal. Their practice had been spared ruin only by God's good grace. They'd railed against him for placing his vanity over the needs of a patient. And they had only agreed not to report him provided he did one of two things: left the practice of medicine altogether or left London.
What a grim satisfaction he'd taken from their wretched hypocrisy. They cared little whether or not he harmed a patient in some far corner of the world, so long as the repercussions didn't travel the breadth of the empire back to their doorstep.
Vanity indeed, he'd thought.
That's how he'd wound up practicing medicine in what his old college chums would sneeringly call darkest Africa. He'd arrived a different man, brash and arrogant, but also coddled and spoiled. Africa had changed him, shown him the weaknesses and limits of the British Empire, shown him miraculous experiences for which the Christian church of his youth had no explanation or even language.
Like her. Indeed, it was easier to think of her as an experience than a person.
The word person was far too ordinary to describe the magical impossibility that was her very being.
And yet, even as they lay twined in each other's naked limbs, her expression radiant with bliss, his thoughts were still occupied by the second and perhaps unsurvivable scandal he'd surely set into motion with his sudden absence from the hospital.