Queen of Kings (17 page)

Cleopatra leaned forward to hear her final, rasping words.

“I will not stay to see the world you make.”

T
he ghost ship drifted near Damanhur for two days before Octavian's men brought it to his attention. The villagers refused to approach it. There'd been sounds on the night the ship appeared, screams and struggling. One of the children of the village had seen something tremendous and dark lashing in the water.

“No doubt the captain fell overboard and was eaten by crocodiles,” Octavian said, disgusted anew at the notion of governing this superstitious, illogical country, even from afar, but his messenger, having visited the villagers, disagreed.

“They say it was something else,” he insisted. “Something they've never seen before.”

One of Octavian's legions encountered something in the area as well, some sort of serpent. He felt mildly curious upon hearing the report, though the incident clearly had nothing to do with the missing Cleopatra. A snake, not a woman.

As the hours and days wore on, however, with no sign of either the queen or Nicolaus the Damascene anywhere in Alexandria, he began to feel a disquieting sense of something familiar about descriptions of that snake.

When he looked into Cleopatra's eyes, had he not seen some sort of serpent thrashing? In memory, it appeared to him again, its mouth stretched wide and filled with sharpened teeth. Venom dripped from them. The beast in the vision had risen up from an arena, which now he realized he knew all too well.

The Circus Maximus. He'd seen Rome.

Octavian cursed. He would go himself. His men could clearly not be trusted to find her. They did not know what they were looking for. He ordered his barge prepared and filled with armed soldiers. At least shipboard he'd be safe from her. There was no way to sneak onto a ship unnoticed, not unless one could walk on water. And this barge, repossessed from the queen's personal fleet, was a glorious thing, shining in the sun as if it were made of pure gold, silver oars flashing, a royal purple canopy awaiting the emperor as though it had been made for him.

The odor overwhelmed him as he stepped aboard the felucca at Damanhur, covering his nose and mouth with a cloth. The sickly sweet smell of rot was everywhere. The sun blazed down upon the emperor's head, but even the bright daylight did not improve his nerves.

A hot breeze stirred the air, shifting the deck and causing Octavian to temporarily lose his footing. He leaned against a table to recover and planted his weight on something that gave beneath his hand. It hissed, and there was a high-pitched howl of fury.

The emperor flung himself to the opposite rail, willing himself not to vomit. It was a cat, that was all.

A cat that had been making a meal of a corpse.

“The crew did not abandon ship,” he announced to Agrippa, carefully averting his eyes from the body. He would not look at the mess the cat had made of the man's face. “Determine what killed them.”

The cat looked up from the body with shining yellow eyes and licked its lips. The emperor had always hated cats, but he dared not injure this one. In Egypt, the vile carrion eaters were worshipped as gods.

He was being ridiculous. It was a ship's cat. Every vessel had one. He swatted at it, he hoped surreptitiously. Still, he was the ruler of this place now, he reminded himself. If he banished cats, it was his business.

The cat skittered up into the rigging, where it looked down upon the emperor as though it knew his deepest secrets. It opened its eyes wide, flattened its ears, and then, very deliberately, showing all of its needlesharp fangs, it hissed.

Octavian's face had broken out in a cold sweat, and he mopped his brow with one of the purple-embroidered handkerchiefs from his barge.

The other body lay pale and strangely withered on the deck, just behind the first. The cat had not seen fit to eat from this one, so it was possible to view him. Octavian knelt, breathing through his mouth. He and Agrippa would be an example to his troops, all of whom were showing signs of superstition and fear.

He put out a hand—now gloved—to prod the flesh and found it as stiff and unyielding as he'd expected. The man's head was turned to the side, and the cause of his death was clearly visible, though the withered flesh was peculiar.

“Snakebite,” Octavian announced.

“This one was crushed,” Agrippa commented. Agrippa pushed at the corpse and all assembled watched in disgust as it shifted. It was as though the body were a cloth sack filled with small stones. Every bone seemed to have been broken.

A large—a
very
large—snake had slithered aboard the vessel, bitten one man and smashed the other in its coils. Octavian swallowed hard. It was too much coincidence.

He noticed something on the snakebitten man's arm. There was another mark, this one clearly that of the cat, but there was something odd about it.

“Open the corpse,” he said, and Agrippa pulled out a small blade and slit the corpse's belly.

Octavian was horribly reminded of a sacrifice. Everything inside the body cavity was pale. The emperor had seen enough battles, attended enough deathbed rites, to know that this was not a side effect of death. This was something else.

The man had been drained of his blood.

“Gods,” murmured Agrippa.

The day after Caesarion's execution, the body of the boy's tutor, Rhodon, had been discovered in the Museion. It had surely been the action of thieves, nothing unusual in a port city, but the man who reported the death had been terrified. He claimed the body was strange. Shriveled. Octavian shuddered as he remembered. He had not connected it with the queen, not then.

One of Agrippa's men shouted, beckoning them to view a heap of women's clothing he'd found on the deck. A rough cape and a linen gown. The emperor caught a whiff of a familiar scent, perfume emanating from the fabric.

He suddenly realized that he was trapped. He looked frantically around. Would she come from the river or the sky?

Another legionary directed Octavian to the small pile of gold coins on the table. They were marked with Cleopatra's face. Octavian felt his pulse racing. His eye fell on something else.

A silver box engraved with images of Isis and Dionysus.

He'd last seen this box in Cleopatra's mausoleum. It was a companion to the pyre he'd had her chained to, and inside it was all that was left of her husband.

Octavian stifled a moan. She'd been here. Now she was gone, and he had no way of knowing where she would appear, or who would die next.

He lifted the box of Antony's ashes. She would not have carried it so far only to leave it behind on purpose. It had to have been an accident. Sooner or later, she would realize that she'd lost it, and then—

He wrapped it carefully in his cloak. It was more precious than gold to him now, more useful than his weapons or any hostage. According to Selene, she did not care about her children but only about her husband.

The box might be the one thing Octavian had that Cleopatra wanted.

That and his own life, he knew that well enough. The only reason he was still alive was that he'd been exceedingly lucky. He could stay no longer in this country. He'd depart for home, where he might have enough time to assemble his own forces and the forces of others against her.

His stomach lurched in a most undignified fashion.

“We return to Alexandria,” he announced. “And then to Rome, as quickly as can be arranged. We do not go toward peace. Marcus Agrippa. You and your men will go in search of something special.”

Agrippa looked at Octavian, his eyes unreadable.

“What is that?”

“Sorcery,” the emperor whispered, thinking of Alexander, thinking of what his hero would have done if faced with such things as these. “Magic to defend Rome. We cannot fight without help. You will find the most powerful sorcerers the world can give you.”

“And how will I know them?” Agrippa asked, clearly hoping that this was a whim of Octavian's and not a true order.

“You will find those who are most feared in their villages,” Octavian told him. “The ones whose fires light the woods, who dance with demons, who summon shades.”

He thought of the stories, of Circe and Calypso, of Medea. Powerful things. There were witches in Rome, yes, but they worked only simple magic.

He dreamed of something larger, something stronger. Surely the world was wide enough that it might be found. The future of his country depended on it.

The visions he'd seen in Cleopatra's eyes would come true unless he fought them back into the darkness.

“To your knees,” he said. “All of you. We pray for strength. We pray for Rome.”

C
leopatra bent to touch the rekhet's shoulder. Dead, like everything died, the birds and insects, the animals, the fish, the plants. Cleopatra was the only thing in the world that would not go to dust.

She was chained to Sekhmet.

If she ever wished to join Antony in the Duat, if she ever wished to die, she'd have to kill her. There was too much Cleopatra did not understand still, too much that was strange. Even as she thought it, she felt the hunger surging through her. Flashes of red. Her blood boiled with fury and resentment. She would find the emperor, if she had to follow him around the world.

If she'd sold her soul, the soul of the last queen of Egypt, if Antony and Caesarion had died, it could not be for nothing.

The Romans would call to the Scarlet Lady, they with their leavings of metal and blood. Cleopatra could smell them now, though she was far away. The followers of this emperor who'd killed so many. This emperor who had murdered her son, whose men had murdered her husband. It would not be possible for Octavian to hide her remaining children from her. She was their mother. When she found them, she would destroy their captors.

She would eat the heart of the man who had forced her to sell her own heart.

She turned quickly from the temple and looked out into the empty desert. Dawn was hours off still. The moon was high and white.
Selene,
Cleopatra thought. Her daughter's name and that of the moon as well.
Alexander Helios. Ptolemy Philadelphus
. Her children were still so small.

The silence had ended with the death of the priestess. Night birds cried, and a wind whipped over the sand.

Outside the temple, a lioness lowered her head to drink from the river. Cleopatra could see the blood on the animal's mouth from here. She'd been hunting. A gazelle, perhaps. The lioness raised her head and looked toward the temple, yellow eyes ablaze.

So she had no will of her own? The priestess was wrong about that. Cleopatra was a queen of kings. She was stronger than any the goddess had taken in the past.

Caesarion
, she thought.
Antony
.

Once she avenged herself upon the Romans, once she reclaimed her children and made certain that they were safe, she would find a way to separate from the goddess. She was going to Rome, and in Rome she would be born again. She could feel the human wonder that had been her own heart, filled now with teeth and claws.

She would use them.

She shrugged the red-bordered garment from her shoulders and stood for a moment naked beneath the million shining stars of her country. The woman she had been was gone, and in her place was something more.

Cleopatra dropped to her knees and placed her hands in the dirt, stretching her fingers, feeling the glory of her coming form, the grace, the power. Her back arched and her legs gathered beneath her. The tawny fur on her spine rose into a coarse ridge.

Her tail whipped back and forth, and she bounded into the night, across the desert and toward the sea.

—The Sibylline Oracles, circa 30 B.C.E.
Translated from the Greek
Milton S. Terry, 1899

 

Translator's note regarding the last line: “The text is so mutilated at this point as to leave the exact sentiment of the writer quite unintelligible.”

I
n a tiny cave high on the rocky coast of Thessaly, a priestess of Hecate raised her gaze from the water she'd been using as a scry.

Ships were coming north from Africa. The scry showed blood, oceans of it, cities falling and corpses heaped in the streets. Ghosts and their grievances. Beasts and their hungers. The scry showed something tremendously powerful, risen.

Chrysate smiled. Her dilated eyes were as black as the sea below her cave, and her hair hung in a tangled nest of knotted plaits. Her mistress, Hecate, was a patroness to witches and drew her sacrifices from their activities, but they had reduced in number as Rome's influence shifted the ways of the world. High on this cliffside in Greece, Chrysate was one of the few priestesses left, and her mistress had fallen from favor with the gods and with mortals alike. Hecate was an old god, a Titan who'd once held vast power over earth and sea. In protesting the abduction of Persephone, however, she'd gained an enemy in Persephone's husband, Hades.