When Jenny regained her balance, she found herself walking along a crowded cobblestone street that reeked of horse manure, human waste and baking bread. She wore a long, rough skirt and a stiff, scratchy blouse, as well as a pair of gloves to her elbow. Her hair was tied back with a length of ribbon. The crowd jostling around her wore similar archaic, handmade clothing.
All at once, she knew that this was Paris, but not the modern city of wide boulevards and classical architecture. This was more of a medieval warren tucked behind high walls, the streets as narrow and twisted as rabbit-trails in a thick forest. It was the early seventeenth century.
Jenny heard a pained wail behind her. She looked back over her shoulder, and suddenly the crowd was gone. Instead, people huddled in doorways, shivering, their bodies swollen with thick black growths. Corpses littered the streets.
All around her, the dense crowd had turned to scattered individuals staggering their way down the street, afflicted with the horrific disease. She watched a hobbling old man drop his cane, then fall to the street motionless. The city was filled with cries of despair and muffled weeping.
“What do you see?” Alexander's voice said beside her.
“The plague,” Jenny said. “Paris.” She turned to look at Alexander. They were standing just where they'd been, on the top step of the Mayan pyramid. Though Jenny had been part of the street scene, it now appeared to float before her, like a television screen glowing in the vast open darkness in front of the pyramid. She could see herself in that life, pulling the hood of her cloak over her head as she hurried through the plague-ridden city.
She turned to Alexander, whose face was still shifting appearance at least once a second, one face giving way to another. His faces smiled at her.
“Look again,” they said, and the sounds of countless snake rattles grew as loud as a thunderstorm.
Jenny looked. The space in front of the pyramid seemed to unfold, and with each unfolding a burst of images appeared. Ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, medieval Germany, more and more scenes woven together in a vast, animated tapestry drawn from across the millennia. Her past lives, all of them appearing to happen right now, in the present moment, parallel to each other.
Her eyes found a recent life—glimpses of herself on a circus train crossing America, and then in a shadowy tent, the pox all over her skin so that she was unrecognizable under her mask of bleeding sores. A carnival barker: Yes, sir, yes, ma'am, pay a penny and see the world's most diseased woman...a true horror, friends, a true horror...
“Not there.” Alexander lay a finger under her chin and turned her head to a different scene. “Look there.”
Jenny watched Alexander leading an army of the dead toward Babylon, thousands of years ago, Jenny at his side in some kind of horse-drawn wagon. She was dressed in silks and jewels.
Elsewhere, she saw a similar scene: an army of zombies sacking a city in India.
She looked again, and saw herself hurrying down a street in nineteenth-century London, the air heavy with factory smoke. Jenny was bundled in with a coat, scarf and hat, and carrying an armload of books.
“Not there,” Alexander said again. He turned her head to look at another army, both men and women this time, all of them with blue-painted skin. Jenny was one of them, and she blew a plague at an approaching Roman legion.
“Now remember me.” Alexander was behind her, embracing her with both arms. She could feel the heat from his hands on her belly.
She saw the two of them together, making love in countless temples and castles and primeval forests, Alexander ravaging her, her lips crying out in passion and pleasure and pain.
Jenny reached her hand back to his hip, and she rubbed her hand up and down along his thigh. She leaned back against him, her body trembling and aching to be close to his. He kissed her neck, and she could feel every detail of it, the warm texture of his lips, his hot breath damp on her skin.
Jenny turned and kissed him back hungrily. She remembered.
“My lord,” she whispered, but the language she used was a long-forgotten dialect from ancient Sumeria. “My love, my life.”
“My love, my life,” he whispered back.
She ripped open his shirt and kissed the muscles of his shoulders, chest, abdomen. Then she stepped back from him and took off her blouse, her sneakers, her jeans. She took off every stitch of clothing, until she was naked before him, her pale body lit by the moon and stars. Her body trembled and burned with the most painful desire she had ever felt. Her soul swam in an ocean of raw power.
Jenny shoved Alexander back through the door of the temple, and they embraced and fell together on the Mayan blanket inside.
Alexander slid out of his jeans and turned her on her back. He climbed on top of her, and she felt him jab her in the stomach, long and hard.