Their story begins, as best she can remember, along the Tigris river, in Iraq. Of course, it wasn't called Iraq then - the Akkadians named the land Sumer.

He founded a settlement with a new irrigation system; she came up with the idea for more efficiently ferrying water from the Tigris into the fields. He took the credit, but that was a necessary evil (and a common theme for many thousands of years).

Many generations later they were united again along the Nile: he as Aha-Mena, the unifier of Egypt, she as a slave who whispered to him of ambition and immortality.

Duke Huan of Qi accumulated significant power in northern China using her slogan: Respecting the king and defending against the barbarian. Of course, he wished to be king, but that was beyond their grasp.

That was the lifetime during which her memories of their previous victories and defeats began to emerge.

In Greece, he was named Miltiades, and she Hegesipyle - as Strategos, he defeated the Persians at Marathon, but died in prison, disgraced.

He was praefectus castrorum under Julius Caesar when their legion crossed the Rubicon. He had persuaded her that it was Caesar who controlled Rome's destiny, and it was Caesar to whom their loyalties should lie. Their lives ended violently, shortly after Caesar's.

Disturbingly to her, he never remembered her or their previous lives together. They were thrust together time and again to achieve great purpose, across civilizations and centuries. Why was it that she could remember their greatness, and he could not?

As Yuknoom Ch'een II, he ruled the great Mayan city Kalak'mul. She was amazed by the civilization around her, and while he expanded his sphere of influence, she traveled and studied.

Over the next two centuries, her accumulated experience led her to begin to question the wisdom of aggression as a method to achieve long-term success.

In this lifetime, she was his sister Gisela, and she withdrew to an abbey in search of a deeper meaning to their unusual fate. She did not reveal her secret to her brother and companion Charles, but counseled him from a distance, urging him to be circumspect in his treatment of the heathens he sought to convert to Christianity.

Her results were mixed, but at least between his many wars Charlemagne found time to institute significant reforms and attempt to better the lives of his subjects.

It took her another millennium, but she learned how to tame his bloodlust. In the middle of the 20th century, he helped bring down the British empire by leading the people of India in peaceful but unyielding disobedience.

As she walked down the sidewalk in a nondescript neighborhood of a nondescript suburb of a nondescript city in New Jersey, she cursed his many names yet again. In every other lifetime, they had been brought together at a relatively young age, and once she had comprehended the basic nature of their intertwined fates, she learned how to recognize him, even how to find him before their destined rendezvous.