"How do you mean?" Sibyl asked.
"You, for the first time, looked upon someone you had known in a past life. And not a reincarnated version of the person, but the person himself. In the flesh. And this experience by itself was powerful enough to make your vague dream into a coherent memory."
"You. You are from a...past life?"
"Yes."
Sibyl shook her head gently and Julie pressed one palm to her forehead to comfort her. Again it seemed Sibyl might lose her hold on the moment, and that the long shadowy and undiscovered country would claim her. But against the pull of a dark wonderland, she clung to a purpose. To live now, to live and think and know now.
For a while, no one spoke, and there was only the rumbling of the sea.
A sense of resignation quieted Ramses. He did not look back over his shoulder at Bektaten, to see how the great queen responded to this new intelligence. No one in this room understood better than Ramses the prerogatives of ancient monarchs, the divine authority that had surrounded them, and the swiftness with which they might judge or act. But I too am a monarch, he thought, born and bred a monarch, born and bred with authority, and I must protect not only myself but my beloved Julie. Whatever is to come, I will be Ramses as I have always been.
"These other dreams," Julie finally said, "the more recent ones, the ones in which you also saw Ramses. Describe them to us."
"In the first one, it was as if I were coming out of darkness, out of death itself. I saw you standing over me, and when I reached for you, my hands, they were a skeleton's hands, and you were terrified."
"My God," Julie whispered. "The Cairo Museum. Almost exactly as it happened."
"In another, there were two great trains, bearing down on me out of darkness, and then fire. Terrible fire everywhere. And then, in another..." Tears spilled from her eyes now, but she still bravely tried to recall every detail. "I took life. My hands. I closed my hands around a woman's throat and I took her life. It was as if I did not know what I was doing. And the very fact that life could be taken by my bare hands, it was a source of great confusion...." And then it became too much for her, and she shook her head as if to banish these thoughts.
"It's exactly as I suspected," Julie said.
She looked to Ramses, but he could not speak.
Guilt paralyzed him, filled his throat with something that felt like cloth, for here it was again, another consequence of the crime he'd committed in the Cairo Museum, the crime against life and death, against nature, against fate. They were ceaseless, the repercussions of this terrible event, and now this poor mortal woman had been laid low by it, and his terrible actions were being exposed to a queen whose existence had been entirely unknown to him before this day. He could think of nothing to say in this moment, nothing to do besides take Sibyl's other hand in an effort to comfort her. The face he revealed to Julie was strong, confident, a monarch's mask for the turmoil within.
Julie had slipped one arm around the woman's shoulders, and brought Sibyl Parker's head to her breast. Tenderly Julie supported her even as she rested amidst these silken bed pillo
ws and luxurious covers.
"Our Cleopatra of the Cairo Museum is ill," Julie explained. "In the temple today she could barely stand upright. She had difficulty walking. Her skin was shining and her eyes too vibrant. She bore all the marks of one who had consumed the elixir. The vitality, the physical health. But there was an illness within her. A deep illness in her mind, she said. And at the very moment when you, Sibyl, were assaulted by that awful man, it was as if she experienced the assault as well. Every blow. There is a connection between you two, a vital connection that was awakened when our Cleopatra opened her eyes in the Cairo Museum."
"When I awakened her," Ramses said, "which I never should have done." He gave a deep sigh, his eyes moving over the ceiling. "These dreams you had, Sibyl Parker," he said. "These nightmares, they were all connected to this newly arisen Cleopatra as she roamed Cairo only months ago. The two of you have been connected since she woke."
He shook his head, all Julie's talk of soulless clones returning to him, deepening his sense of horror for what he had done.
"Because you, Sibyl, are Cleopatra reborn," Julie said excitedly. "You're the vessel for her true spirit."
"We don't know this, Julie," Ramses said. "It may be true, but maybe it is not true. You speak of things no one can know for certain." Such anguish. What had possessed him as he had stood there in the museum with the vial of the elixir in his hand? He'd been a man then in the most tragic sense of the word, a fumbling and imperfect human being, struggling with a god's power and a lover's broken heart.
"We don't know this?" Julie questioned him. "Ramses, what other explanation could there be? This resurrected Cleopatra is an aberration. I've always known it. She was never meant to exist. The true soul of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, had long ago moved on in its journey--living and dying in countless others, and finally being reborn in this all-too-human American woman, Sibyl Parker. The clone reaches out desperately for the soul in Sibyl Parker, because the clone has no soul. And Sibyl profits from this, while the clone sinks deeper into a decline."
"You see me as profiting from this?" Sibyl whispered.
Julie was startled into silence by this response. She appeared flustered, unable to find the right words for what she had meant to say.
"I have been besieged by visions," said Sibyl, "many of them terrifying. Paralyzing. They grip me in public places and quite literally bring me to my knees. What were once only nightmares, they have begun to spill into my days. This process you describe. In which one of us rises, while the other one falls, it is not what I have experienced, Julie. It is not what I experience now."
"Maybe not," Ramses said, "but would you say it became ever more real as the two of you drew closer to each other? Intensified? That is the modern word."
"Yes. Most definitely."
"And after today, when you were both on the grounds of the same estate, did the nature of this connection change in any way?"
"It changed the minute I arrived in London. It felt as if...Well, it felt as if we suddenly enjoyed the type of connection often described by twins. I felt pricks of pain that seemed to come from nowhere. I felt myself unable to sleep, despite great exhaustion. And emotion. Great swells of emotion that swept over me without warning, without any connection to what was unfolding in my immediate environment. As if I was suddenly privy to the feelings of another."
"She does not sleep," he explained. "No one who has consumed the elixir does. We can enjoy a kind of slumber for only a short while. It is never really sleep. Both of you are fundamentally different beings. Yet you are connected somehow and so your different natures struggle with each other."