Channeling Cleopatra

CHANNELING CLEOPATRA

by

ELIZABETH ANN SCARBOROUGH

All rights reserved.

Original Copyright © 2002 by Elizabeth Ann
Scarborough

All rights reserved

Copyright © January, 2011, Elizabeth Ann
Scarborough

Cover Art Copyright © 2011, Karen
Gillmore

Gypsy Shadow Publishing

Manchaca, TX

www.gypsyshadow.com

Names, characters and incidents depicted in
this eBook are products of the author's imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales,
organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher.

No part of this eBook may be reproduced or
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permission from Gypsy Shadow Publishing.

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This eBook is licensed for your personal
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person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you
share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it,
or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return
to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for
respecting the hard work

of this author

To Lea Day,

armchair Egyptologist extraordinaire

and to the memory of her father,

Hubbard Day, Jr.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Lea for the loan
of her library, book hunting, anecdotes, her sense of humor and
enthusiasm for the project. Thanks also to Eileen Clare for sharing
such detailed information of her trip to Alexandria with me, and to
Mike for his anecdotes as well. I also wish to acknowledge Dr.
Michael Croteau of the Washington State Laboratory for information
about DNA collection and analyses. An especially helpful book on
modem-day Egypt was
CULTURE SHOCK!
EGYPT!
by Susan Wilson, who generously
shared additional information with me for this book.

PRELUDE

Cleopatra looked at the snake. The snake,
its tongue flicking, stared back at her. She apologized to the
creature, the emblem of her queenship and the end of it. "My lord,
if only Octavius were as trustworthy as you are, there would be no
need to disturb you with our concerns. But alas, my protectors are
all dead, my beauty faded, and even my hairdresser and handmaiden
have offered their flesh to your fangs for my sake, so I have no
choice. If I live and flee, Octavius will avenge himself upon my
children. If I live and submit, he will degrade and humiliate my
person and position in his accursed Roman triumph, dragging me in
chains through the city where I should by rights have ruled as
empress. Then he will kill me and destroy my body and my hope for
the afterlife. Oh yes, my lord," she said in her tender, singsong
voice, the voice of a natural-born snake charmer. The snake swayed,
half uncoiled to strike, its hood majestically fanned around its
face.

The coils of its body lay still upon the
folds of the yellow, red, and white linens of the Isis robes
covering Charmion's corpse. Iras lay beside the altar containing
the body. Charmion also wore the Isis crown and what was left of
the crown jewels. Iras had dressed her fellow handmaiden's head in
the black Isis curls Cleopatra customarily wore when assuming the
guise of the goddess. The queen herself had employed her
considerable skill with cosmetics to change faces with her
look-alike maid. Now, dressed as Charmion, she explained herself to
the cobra. The cobra did not mind her humble robes. It knew who she
was. She was Egypt, its home, its mother, and finally, its
prey.

She spoke to it to clarify her own mind
before her death and to delay that same death, for she had long
loved life and was loath to leave it, even under the
circumstances.

"Yes, it's true. I have it on the best
authority. Isis in her compassion has sent me a dream so I may save
my body and thus my immortal soul. Whatever lies he tells my
people, Octavius intends to burn me after my death—before it, if he
is given the opportunity, I'm sure. So I have chosen my own time.
My eldest son has fled the country, and as for my younger children,
I am unable to protect them, and moreover, I provide cause for
Octavius to do them harm. Perhaps without me to spite with their
suffering, he will spare them. And so you must give me my last
kiss, my lord. My priests, who know our little secret, will do the
rest. In exchange, I grant you your freedom from your duties as
guardian of this tomb and temple."

She took a deep breath, broke eye contact,
and quickly, so as to startle the fascinated snake, thrust her arm
at it. Having had its part so considerately explained to it, the
cobra performed its last state service and struck her with a force
that staggered her back, away from the altar.

Unhooded and blending with the dust, the
snake then slithered out through an open window.

The pain subsided, quickly replaced with
numbness. Soon she knew paralysis and death would follow. By that
time, Octavius would have received her message begging him to bury
her with Antony. She knew he would not, but the message would serve
to seal in his mind that the body in her robes was her own. He
would expect to see her there, and dead, and that is what he would
see.

The stage was set to perfection, except the
cobra, in striking, had pulled Charmion's wig askew. Slowly, with a
sense of detachment and amusement, as if she had had too much wine,
Cleopatra rose and stretched out her other hand to adjust it.

Which was how Octavius and his soldiers saw
her when they burst into the room.

She felt Octavius staring hard at her, and
she thought for a moment the ruse had failed. Then he said,
puzzled, more to himself than to her, "Is this well done?"

The bastard was trying to figure out if her
death was to his advantage or not.

She felt herself ready to fly to the
afterlife, but she had never been able to resist a good exit line.
"It is well done," she said, her voice unrecognizably husky with
the dying, "and fitting for a princess descended of so many royal
kings."

And so it was that the body of Charmion,
dressed in the robes of Cleopatra, was displayed to the people as
proof of her death. Later, as Cleopatra's dream had warned,
Octavius publicly said she would be interred with Mark Antony but
privately, to his lieutenant, he said, "Burn the bitch. The brats
may watch."

The bodies of the handmaidens were removed
afterward by the priests. Cleopatra's public tomb, stripped of its
glories by Octavius, lay empty, as she had somehow always known it
would. But it secretly connected, through a long and twisting
passage with many stairs and a maze of tunnels, with a private tomb
concealed deep beneath her palace. In some ways, the tomb was very
bare, her special coffin, sealed within three others, the simple
alabaster canopic jars with her cartouche and titles and seals of
gold, some clothing and toiletries, a prettily carved inlaid table
and chair, a bed, a wealth of lamps. The tomb was for one person
only. No place for husbands or children or even trusted servants.
Iras's body had been removed to her family's crypt. Instead, the
side rooms held Cleopatra's greatest treasure, one that Octavius
and other conquerors lacked the wit to covet. But to the queen, for
whom the love of erudition was more fundamental than her love of
either of her Roman husbands or even her kingdom, her burial hoard
was of the most valuable nature possible. It contained the
originals to the best, the rarest, the most informed and
fascinating of the manuscripts collected by her own great Museon,
the Library of Alexandria.

CHAPTER 1

For Leda Hubbard, attending the
International Conference of Egyptologists was the next best thing
to personally participating in a dig. When she found a ticket in
her mailbox, she was giddy with joy but curious and also suspicious
about who would treat her to such a thing. For the cost of one of
those tickets, you could almost buy a plane trip to Egypt.

Most of the attendees who were not
presenting papers or teaching seminars had corporate sponsorship.
Nonetheless, Leda recalculated her budget six times until she came
up with almost enough to go. Then the urgent need for a root canal
and a new radiator for her car gobbled up her ticket money.

Cinderella she wasn't, but nevertheless,
some mysterious benefactor, secret admirer, fairy godmother, or
possibly a stalker, decided she could go to the ball.

After enjoying a splendid day filled with
intellectual delights, Leda was finally ready to turn into a
pumpkin. It was not yet sunset, much less midnight, but the
showroom had closed, the lectures were over, and her feet felt like
they actually were encased in something as agonizing as glass
slippers, which could not have been comfy.

The Portland Convention Center was huge, and
she had walked the equivalent of a marathon attending seminars,
checking out the goodies in the showroom, and searching for
favorite authors of scholarly tomes. She hadn't met any princes,
true. But she now had something that was in her opinion much
better: a rolling suitcase full of books about pharaohs (and
related topics, such as how to identify said pharaohs), now
autographed. The only thing better than that would have been to be
the autographer instead of the autographee.

Alas, she, who had entertained full-blown H.
Rider Haggard/Elizabeth Peters dreams of being an Egyptologist
while still an undergrad at Heidelberg, had never fully realized
her ambitions.

She had achieved the Ph.D. in forensic
anthropology and was a by-Bast doctor-not-of-medicine, though she
had probably handled more cadavers than the average M.D. But she
had not been able to squeeze in the additional studies necessary to
specialize in Egyptology with the time and money allotted her.

The Navy, while debating about paying for
her graduate degree while she was on active duty, suggested in
their cute little bureaucratic way that Egyptologists were less
likely to make it through school without being called into a war
zone than, say, their useful colleagues who studied corpses of more
recent vintage. In the charming phrasing of the Graduate Studies in
Continuing Education financial assistance and career counseling
officer, "This is a weird sort of thing you want to study, Chief
Hubbard, but the Navy does have a certain limited use for forensic
scientists. What we need are people who can put pieces of dead
troops back together so the remains can be identified. Most of
these troops will not be of ancient Egyptian stock; therefore, if
you wish to study any of that elitist crap, you can do so on your
own dime. The Navy has no job openings for Egyptologists. Do I make
myself clear?"

She had sighed, batted her lashes, and said
in the sultry voice that had made her voted by her senior class
"most likely to succeed in a career in the telephonic sex
industry," "I just love it when you get all butch and masterful,
sir."

The officer had blushed. He was about
twenty-four. She was thirty-six at the time. A career that had
until that time been spent aboard aircraft carriers and submarines
dealing with matters that required a top security clearance made
her feel much much older.

But the kid had been right about one thing.
There were, until very recently, few job ops for Egyptologists who
were not Egyptian. This was as true of civilian life as it had been
in the Navy. These days, she worked in the Oregon state laboratory,
mostly helping law enforcement agencies gather evidence to identify
anonymous remains.

Nowadays, there seemed to be a few more
opportunities in Egyptology for those who had had the backing to
tough it out financially. Some of the instructors her hieroglyphics
class used to be able to count on were now unavailable, hired away
to digs.

Leda sighed, bumped her glasses up to the
top of her head, and rubbed her overstimulated eyes. Always the
bridesmaid, never the bride? Screw that. She didn't want to get
married. Her father had instructed her in the course of his five
marriages just how miserable a charming, sexually gregarious man
could make a woman foolish enough to wed him. She was a little
slow, but after an ultimately heartbreaking affair with a Kiwi who
looked very different from her dad but was his emotional clone, she
decided to forgo romance in favor of career. And, like a lot of
women who "settled" for the men they could get instead of the ones
they wanted, Leda had settled for the practical career with a few
readily available opportunities instead of the one she really
wanted.