Queen of Kings (14 page)

She'd led the Romans to her son.

“KILL HIM!” the crowd screamed, pummeling one another in their desire to snatch at Caesarion's garments. Cleopatra saw knives flashing out of concealment and smelled blood being shed all around her.

With the bloodshed, everything came rushing back to her, all that she had done, her maid arching backward, struggling to free herself from Cleopatra's clutches. The other girl, paling quietly, as her body dropped like a shed garment to the floor of the queen's chamber. Cleopatra gasped, convulsing with the memories, but she could not afford to let them stop her.

She threw herself forward, clawing her way closer to her child, her voice drowned by the rioting around her.

“CAESARION!” she screamed, fighting the crowd. The last rays of sun shot through a gap in the buildings, and light flared off the raised shields of the legionaries, momentarily blinding Cleopatra and amplifying the heat. She lost her balance and stumbled to the ground, stunned and weakened, her clothing in disarray, her veil sliding off to bare her face to the glare, blistering her skin instantly.

Fingers tore at her clothes, and sandaled feet kicked her trapped body. Her bones shifted in her skin, crushed and then repaired. Her cheekbone shattered under a heel. She felt her arms break and then knit themselves back together.

She knew the mind of the crowd then, with that horrible
knowing
. They hated her, hated the royal family for their neglect, for their distance, for their scandal, for their Greek ancestry. They hated her for losing their city to Rome. It was her fault that they were inflamed now against her child. They demanded a sacrifice.

She screamed wordlessly from the ground, pushing herself up, rising, rising.

Her son threw his hands into the air and shouted a desperate proclamation.

“Hear me!” he cried, his voice cracking, speaking in Greek. “Hear me! I am your king! I am son of the Ptolemies! I will rule over you! I will keep you safe from the Romans! They will enslave Egypt! I will keep you free!”

He repeated his declaration in Latin and then in Egyptian, to prove that he was a man of the people, but his voice was drowned by the sounds of rioting. His words were exactly the wrong ones.

“I AM YOUR KING!” the boy shouted again, and Cleopatra struggled to her knees, the sun still searing her flesh, her eyelids blistering, glimpsing her son mere lengths from her now, almost within reach.

Just as her fingers touched him, a centurion appeared behind her child, raised his hands to Caesarion's throat, and placed them on his perfect skin.

“Kill him!” the crowd screamed, and she tore at the centurion's tunic, desperate to get to her son before he did. This could not happen. Not this. Not while she watched.

Someone kicked her in the face, throwing her back to the ground, and her eldest child disappeared, dragged into a sea of hungering, murderous bodies as she was dragged in the opposite direction.

She could not reach him.

She saw, fleetingly, pale gray eyes, light hair, a laurel crown, as the emperor fled the platform. He would not even watch what he had set in motion.

She heard the sound of bones giving way as the centurion wrapped his fingers around Caesarion's throat. She heard her son's last breath as the Roman broke his neck.

Her howl of agony shook the buildings of the agora, calling the crows in chaos down from the sky, but it did not stop what was happening. It did not stop anything.

T
he boy died quietly, gracefully, in the manner of a king. Octavian was able to watch only a moment of it before he was forced to turn away. It had taken twenty-three thrusts of his betrayers' daggers to bring Caesarion's father down, and Caesarion was more a man than Octavian himself, who vomited from the platform as he heard the bones in the boy's neck shatter.

Then, there was that sound, that unearthly, animal howl, which came from no discernible place, from no discernible person. The crowd boiled before him, and crows filled the sky, circling and shrieking.

Octavian was suddenly aware of how exposed he was.

The crowd erupted before Octavian, rushing toward the body of the boy, and the centurions pulled their leader away, pressed him into a litter, drew the curtains. There was blood on Octavian's white toga; he could see it, scarlet droplets standing out from the ivory linen.

The queen had not appeared. Where could she be? What army might she be raising against him? Octavian secured an extra slave to taste his food, in case she thought to poison him. It was a faint protection. She could be anywhere. She could be part of his own army, hidden in the guise of a man. He called his troops to order and had them inspected. Agrippa, his only trusted general, tore their tunics from their bodies, revealing all their scars and puckered battle wounds.

She was not among them, though part of the emperor now desired to execute everyone who had accompanied him to Alexandria. Any of them could be guilty of hiding her. Any of them could have been seduced by her magic. They could be plotting against him even now. He well remembered her beauty, echoed in that of her son. Now the son was dead and the mother was not, and Octavian could neither sleep nor eat. Dread overcame him in his bedchamber, and when he sat at his table, his fear of poisoning was too great to allow him to partake of anything more than a dry crust of bread.

He remembered a hideous story involving the queen of Parthia, who had dined in peacetime with an enemy. The enemy, watching the queen's robust consumption of her meal, had believed he was safe.

He was wrong.

The queen had coated one side of the serving knife with a lethal dose of poison and left the other side clean. When she sliced the meat, the poisoned side calculatedly went to her foe, while she innocently served herself the other half of the dish.

This
queen, Octavian's enemy, was easily as intelligent and crafty. He trusted nothing, not until he was safely ensconced in Rome, though he knew that there was no way to be entirely protected, not even in his own city. How could he have let her escape him? She'd been his, conquered and killed. And yet she lived.

He had
let
her live, and every moment she lived ensured his death.

He sent patrols in search of her, turning up every paving stone, investigating every secret passage. Agrippa's men searched the kitchens, the far warrens of the palace rooms, the Soma itself, and there was no trace of Cleopatra.

“
Who
is it we seek?” Agrippa asked him, for the hundredth time.

“The body of the queen,” he said. That it was a living body, he did not add.

The emperor instituted blockades on the roads and river, announcing that the body might have been transported by a solitary woman, smuggled out of Alexandria, but he knew that she would evade any such measures. What need had such a creature to travel by land and water? She could as well be traveling in the sky, taking flight like a sacred falcon or, more appropriately, like a vulture.

“Bring the children,” he ordered. He had them under guard, deep in the palace, and now he thought they might know something he did not.

He pressed his back against Cleopatra's golden throne, cursing the discomfort of his position. The twins, when they came, unnerved him.

The boy looked down, as was proper, but the girl tilted her head to look at him. She was the image of her mother, black hair rippling down her back, though her lips held none of Cleopatra's sensuality. The girl's mouth reminded him of Antony's, drawn tight in a moment of petulance, and below her lips was Antony's own cleft chin. Cleopatra Selene's eyes were large, black pools, also inherited from her father, who'd used his limpid gaze to seduce half the wives in Rome.

“Where is your mother?” he asked her, abandoning the canny line of questioning he'd prepared. Her glare discomfited him.

The girl spoke in an unknown language, a torrent of bewildering, crackling sounds. She then looked at him as though he ought to understand everything she said.

“Interpreter,” he called. It was ridiculous. Surely, someone had been aware of this problem before now and failed to alert him of it. Perhaps the girl was simple.

She took a step closer toward him, and involuntarily he drew back. She seemed to be taking his measure.

“There is no need for a translator. Our mother is dead,” Cleopatra Selene announced in Latin, her voice unexpectedly deep and rasping. “I am surprised you do not know where she is, as we were informed that you'd buried her.”

What fool had told them the details of their mother's death? He'd ordered them sequestered. It would not do to have them grieving their parents and blaming him for their deaths.

“Where is my brother?” the boy asked, speaking unexpectedly. The girl put out her hand to silence him.

“Ptolemy is sleeping in our bedchamber,” she reminded him, and then turned back to the emperor. “Do you not speak Egyptian?”

“Of course not,” he said. “I am Roman.”

“As is our father, but he can speak the tongue of our people. How is it that you do not?”

“I'd like to visit Rome,” Alexander Helios interrupted, his eyes bright. “I'd like to train in the army.”

“I will take you to Rome,” Octavian told him. “In exchange for information.”

“We do not wish to go to Rome,” Cleopatra Selene interrupted. “We will await our father here at the palace. He is traveling, and we would not like to leave without his knowledge. He will grieve over our mother's death, and we will comfort him.”

A stroke of luck. She did not know everything.

“If you tell me where your mother is,” he tried, “I'll let your father live.”

The girl smiled a nasty, vindicated smile.

“So you are a liar as well,” she said, this time in Greek.

Octavian straightened his spine and put on his most regal air.

“Do not question me,” he said.

The girl laughed, a short, harsh bark, and continued in Greek.

“My brother doesn't study when the tutor comes and so he cannot speak any language but Latin. He does not know that our father is dead. I heard the slaves talking, while everyone else slept. I do not wish to stay in Egypt. The people will kill us.”

Octavian was taken aback. The girl no longer looked like a ten-year-old, but like a full-grown woman, and it appeared that she was attempting to negotiate with him.

“Ask him where Caesarion is,” the boy whimpered, and his sister pinched him.

“He is dead,” Octavian said, resigned. “He was a traitor to Rome.”

The boy looked shocked. The girl did not, though Octavian caught her face wavering for a moment.

“A traitor? He isn't a traitor. He's the son of Julius Caesar! Our mother says he is as good a man as his father,” cried Alexander.

“He wasn't a man,” Octavian said. “He was a boy.”

“Then why did you kill him?” Alexander asked. His eyes were wide and disbelieving.

“
I
did not kill him. He was killed in battle. No more of that. This is war.” The boy's eyes were leaking tears, and Octavian felt disgusted.

“We will not need to be killed
in battle
,” Cleopatra Selene informed him. “I will go with you to Rome. I will walk in your procession, behind her body. Is that not what you are planning? My mother's body displayed with the asps that killed her? I will salute you as my emperor. My parents loved each other more than they loved anyone else. My mother planned to live forever with my father, but she did not plan anything for my brothers and me. They forgot about us.”

The girl's lip wobbled slightly, the first real indication of weakness Octavian had seen. She was nearly the same age as his own daughter, Julia. A child.

“What do you know about living forever? Did she consult with a magician? A witch?” Octavian asked. He could not help himself.

“I know nothing of my mother's whereabouts, but perhaps I know other things,” she said, giving him a steady look. “My mother did nothing to keep us safe. She left it to me. I will give you my allegiance, and I will tell you what I know, if you will protect us.”

A small movement caught Octavian's eye, a flutter in the tapestry. His heart rattled against his ribs. He leapt from the throne and dashed across the room, sword pointed into the fabric, at the spot where he knew she would be. He stabbed through it and blunted his blade against a stone wall, seeing only a rat disappearing into a crack therein.

Octavian could barely keep from screaming. Egypt was that wall, full of cracks, and Cleopatra could be in any one of them. The queen could be on her way to Rome. He might arrive home in triumph, crowned with laurel, and find her awaiting him in his own bed, his wife and daughter murdered and their blood staining her hands.

“I will protect you,” Octavian managed, even as he wondered why he felt compelled to make promises to a child. And what did he propose to protect her from? What foes did she have? It was he who was in danger.

“Then I will kiss your hand,” she said, and a moment later, he felt her lips brush his fingertips. “It is settled. We will be Romans. You will want to find our tutor, Nicolaus the Damascene. He knows what she summoned.”

Octavian felt his heart shudder.
Summoned.
He'd suspected it was something like this.

“You asked if she consulted with sorcerers,” the girl said. “I do not know the answer to that. I do know she consulted with scholars, and she practiced a spell to summon a goddess to our city. It was meant to be a secret, but our tutor helped her. If you can find him, you may find her.”

“She is not missing,” Octavian said. “She is dead and buried.”