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How unexpected, the anger she felt at this request. The rage she felt when she saw the fear in Julie's eyes, so similar to the fear in Teddy's when she'd left him a few hours ago.

"Leave him to forget me and our time together, you mean."

"Yes," Julie whispered, "that is exactly what I mean."

"And so he thinks of me often, does he? And this pains you? Do you love him still?"

"I never loved him. Not as a woman should love her husband."

"I see. So you think of me as poison, his thoughts of me as a corruption."

"He is tortured by memories of your madness."

"My madness?" she roared. "My madness born of your lover's guilt and arrogance! This is how you describe what was done to me? As a madness that comes from the fiber of my being and not his? Tell me, sweet, dear Julie, how did he offer you the elixir? Did he anoint you with oils? Did he uncap the bottle in some palatial bedchamber while musicians played? Did he explain to you its power and its defects? What you would gain, wh

at you would lose? He did me no such kindness in the Cairo Museum. He rendered me a monster and abandoned me."

"He offered it to you two thousand years before. You--"

"And I refused it! I refused it and still he forced it upon me two thousand years later in death. In a death I chose!"

Why did Julie cry now? Was she simply afraid? Or was there such pain in Cleopatra's words, she too was overwhelmed by it. It seemed almost as if she felt guilty herself.

"He has said these very things, hasn't he?" Cleopatra asked. "He knows what he did. It tortures him, because he knows."

"He loved you," Julie whispered.

"Twice he abandoned me. Once as my empire fell, then again at the very moment when he brought me back to a life I did not want. May you, his new bride, be forever spared the kind of love he showed me."

"I am offering you what you want, but I cannot erase the centuries between you two. And neither can he."

"What I want...?" she muttered, circling past Julie. The answer to this question seemed to stare down at her on all sides, from the strange, stoic face of every statue in this shadowed tribute to the empire that had conquered her. "I want to know who these men are, these men of Rome. These men whom I should know. Even if these statues, these faces, are but caricatures, there should be some facet of them I recognize. Something of the cut of their chin or their hair or their armor. And yet my memories of them fade to nothing. More vanish with each journey of the sun across the sky. Caesar..." She turned towards the statue in the center of the floor. "Is this meant to be Caesar? I would not know. The man I lay with, the man with whom I bore a son, his face is lost to me. His smell. The sound of his voice. Lost to me. And my son. I am told I bore a son by him, a son who briefly became pharaoh after my death, and yet when I reach for any memory of him I swim in a great yawning blackness in my mind. His name, it is meaningless to me. And what next? What next will be consumed?"

"Caesarion," Julie whispered. "His name was Caesarion."

"Do you delight in this, Julie Stratford? Do you delight in my undoing?"

"Do you still wish to snap my neck solely because you know it will hurt Ramses?"

"That is not why I have traveled this far."

"Then I take no delight in your anguish, Cleopatra. And neither will he. But you have still not told me what you want."

"I want the elixir," she said bitterly. How she hated the sound of her own desperation. "He did not use enough when he brought me back. There were holes all over my body. I could see my own bones and it drove me mad. Now there are holes in my mind, my memory. They grow bigger each day. There is only one possible thing that can heal them. And it lies with him. And it is the only reason I would ever wish to lay eyes on him, or you, again."

Relief in Julie's eyes.

But just then Cleopatra felt a sharp pain in her throat.

Her hand flew to the spot where she'd felt it. Her fingers came away bloodless.

Julie advanced on her quickly.

Cleopatra recoiled, bracing herself against the statue's pedestal.

"Stand back," said Cleopatra. Impossible not to interpret this woman's advance as an attack. As Julie seizing upon a moment of weakness. But the woman's expression was one of absolute concern. Absolute pity. Somehow this only made the pain worse.

"Stand back," Cleopatra said again, but it was a tortured whisper. "Come no nearer to me."