He had returned without them so that he could ensure she concealed herself in the nearby hills before they arrived. Should their potential buyers see her likeness so near to the statues carved in her image, he had insisted, she would be exposed to the world.
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.