Queen of Kings (26 page)

“Not today,” Agrippa said. “We fight a woman and a scholar.”

“We'll have the witches,” Augustus said, remembering, with relief, his defenders.

“I do not recommend that,” Agrippa said. “We will bring what Cleopatra loves, and bait the trap with it. My soldiers are well trained.”

“Her husband,” Augustus said, his voice suddenly taking on a liveliness it had not previously possessed. “Antony is what she desires.”

Agrippa was certain that the vision Augustus swore the Greek witch had produced was merely a trick, a creature made of smoke. Nevertheless, such a skill might prove useful.

“Yes,” he agreed, a concession. “We will offer Cleopatra her husband.”

T
he shadow detached itself from the stones and moved invisibly along the wall, slipping out beneath the door of the emperor's bedchamber.

They all thought he was a hopeless wisp of soul, locked in the Greek priestess's rooms, but they were wrong.

As Chrysate slept, exhausted by the spells she'd cast, a wind had gusted suddenly into the room, whipping at the witch's coverlet. The holding stone fell loose in her hand, and Antony was free, at least until she woke. It was well that Chrysate's chambers were far from the emperor's. She had not wakened when Selene screamed.

The witch did not know as much as she thought she did about shades. Antony was no one's servant. She'd told them he could be deployed at Rome's whim, his price a droplet of blood, his memory emptied of all his old grievances, but Antony had not forgotten who he was. Though he'd spent months in the Underworld, he'd repeated Cleopatra's name over and over, willing himself to remember even as he watched spirits fumbling toward the rivers, seeking to forget the ones they'd loved, the lives they'd lost.

His heart filled with fury as he thought of the things he'd overheard. The false messenger sent by Augustus to swear that Cleopatra was dead. The bribes paid by Augustus to sway the Egyptian army and tear them from Antony's service. The fact that Augustus had knowingly buried Cleopatra alive.

The fact that she
still
lived. Antony paid no attention to the other things Augustus swore, the visions he said he'd seen in Cleopatra's eyes. They were the visions of a coward. If he had been as drunk in Alexandria as it seemed he was now, it was no wonder he'd hallucinated Cleopatra into a monster.

Where was Cleopatra? It had been Antony's only question in Hades, and it was his only question here. Augustus swore she was in Rome, swore she'd just left his rooms, and as Antony stood against the wall, shaking with wrath, the emperor and Agrippa had discussed their plans to trap and kill her in the Circus Maximus.

What could he do to save her? He was nothing, an echo of his former self. He had no body, no hands to pick up a sword.

Antony thought about his wife's extraordinary resourcefulness. Long ago, in a betting game, she'd informed him that she could serve him a meal worth ten million sesterces, more expensive than any banquet that had ever graced
his
table.

He took the bet, scoffing, and she promptly called for a cup of
vinum acer
, removed one of her tremendous sea pearl earrings, and dropped it into the goblet. It dissolved, rendering the vinegar free of acid. They drank that wine together, and he laughed, awestruck at her invention.

“A glass of wine with you,” she told him, “is more valuable than anything else I possess.”

She had transformed vinegar to wine for him, no matter the price, and he would do the same for her.

It meant nothing that Antony's hands could not hold a sword. He could still declare war against her enemies. There were many ears in Rome, and not all of them were devoted to the Boy Emperor.

Augustus thought that Antony was only a ghost, and no longer a warrior.

It was not the first time an enemy had fatally underestimated Mark Antony.

He smiled as he emerged from the Palatine and made his way down the hillside, his body nearly transparent in the afternoon sunlight.

 

 

I
t was not hard to find the men who had once been his soldiers. With Rome at peace, they congregated in bars and brothels, and the city was filled with them, in various phases of inebriation. Egyptian gold filled their pockets.

What would be difficult was finding men who would be loyal to him again. Most of the men Antony saw had shifted to the side of Octavian after Actium. He did not need disloyal soldiers. Antony had hoped to locate Canidius and the rest of his senior officers, the best-trained men in the army, but his lieutenant had been executed in Alexandria. Antony listened to the men sing bar songs of the bravery of Canidius Crassus. Of course his officers were dead.

He stood in the dusty street, cursing himself. He had no idea when Chrysate would wake, and when she did, his time for searching would be done.

At last he found a few men, strong and scarred, napping in the backroom of a bar. He shouted, and the men's heads lurched up from their table. It was not the entrance he would have chosen.

“Attention!”

They blinked in the dusty air. Drunkards. Antony had been a drunkard himself on occasion. He knew how they felt, and so he made his voice all the louder.

“Defenders of Alexandria!”

The men squinted.

In a flash, Antony appeared before them, and they gasped, pushing themselves back, stumbling over chairs in their haste to escape him. He looked suspiciously at the state of their muscles. The year since Alexandria had made them fat, but this was the best he could do on short notice. If he'd had time, he might have searched throughout the world, located his true friends, found the strongest men, but he had only until tomorrow evening to save Cleopatra.

“Your commander calls on you,” he said. “Your commander charges you with action.”

“How do we know who you are?” asked one of the soldiers, his cup spilled before him.

“Do you doubt me? I am Mark Antony,” Antony said.

One of the legionaries grinned.

“You look like him, I won't deny that,” he said. “And you sound like him. Who's playing us for fools? Show yourself!”

Antony grimaced. Soldiers were not easy to force into sobriety, nor were they impressed by the impossible.

They would be easier to bribe than command, in this condition.

“I want to hire you,” he said. “Tomorrow night, at the Circus Maximus. You will appear there, armed, and await my signal. There is a woman—” He hesitated and decided not to name Cleopatra. “Who must be protected from other soldiers. You will keep her safe.”

“How much?”

“Enough to keep you in whores until you die,” Antony said.

“And drink?”

“Who do you take me for? It will keep you in drink as well,” Antony said.

“Then I'm your man,” said the legionary, “whoever you are.” The others nodded, and Antony explained what he needed from them. At last, when he had made himself clear, sworn them to sobriety, and promised gold to them, he made his way from the bar and out into the street. He had more to accomplish, and this time he would improve on his performance.

 

 

I
n the private, tiled room where the senators sat, taking their afternoon steam bath, the walls were warm and slippery with oil. The vapor surrounding the men hung as thick as fog, and their voices echoed, disembodied, from out of the clouds. The senators had installed themselves far from the ears of the emperor and his dearest general.

“He claims to be descended from Apollo, though we all knew his mother, Atia, and she was nothing a god would touch, even accidentally in the dark while fumbling around on the temple floor, looking for something better,” muttered one of the senators.

Another senator splashed his hands in the water to make his point.

“Caesar Augustus is only a lowly great-nephew, and yet he dares to call himself Caesar, as though that drop of Julian blood were enough to counterbalance his moneylending grandfather!”

“And the slave!” cried another. “I have it on good authority that his great-grandfather was a freed slave who spent his life twisting rope in the South.”

The senators were appalled.

They shifted themselves on the mosaic-tiled benches, dangling their large, complaining feet into the scalding water below. They mopped sweat from off their shaven heads and muttered further.

“Augustus—”

“Call him Octavian!” shrilled one of the eldest. “He is a tiny child, scarcely sprouted from out of the earth! He is a spring asparagus!”

The other senators looked indulgently upon their elder and continued their lament.

“Augustus will destroy the system of logical discourse. He will shrink Rome until it is under the control of one mind, one voice, and one emperor.”

Emperor
.

The thought made their testicles shrivel, and yet there was nothing to be done about it. They missed the old days of the republic, when they'd run things. When they'd run everything. The glorious days of speeches and arguments, scrolls and debates. The days when the Senate needed to be persuaded, for days on end, before coming to any decision. And perhaps bribed as well.

“Senators!” boomed a voice. “Senators of Rome!”

The men stopped what they were doing and peered into the steam, confused.

It was certainly some trickery, some pageant created to frighten old men. Something done with a trumpet or an actor, falsifying the tones that each of them knew very well.

And yet.

They'd heard him orate. They had heard him address the crowd, offering Caesar's funerary speech. They had heard him cry battle. The voice was an impossible voice.

The man they knew was dead.

The temperature of the room began to drop as a figure emerged from the steam, dusky and faint, as shifting as any vapor. His chin was cleft, and his hair fell in dark, silvering curls over his forehead. His gilded armor was strapped upon him, and there was a wound in his abdomen. A bloody, mortal wound.

The senators murmured in terror. Mark Antony was dead in Egypt, dead nearly a year, and yet here he stood. His sandals did not touch the ground.

Three senators surged in the direction of escape, but cold clouds of fog blossomed over the doorway, and they could not find their way out. A skim of ice had formed over the tiles, and one senator slipped on it.

Another three pressed themselves against the walls of the bathhouse, hiding in the steam and praying to the gods that the spirit had not noticed them.

“I come to you from Hades, with tidings of dark deeds kept from you by the one you call Caesar,” the ghost said, his lip twisting up in a smile of satisfaction. “Will you hear me, who was once a man like yourselves? I come to you with news of your emperor.”

“Augustus?”

“The same.”

That was enough to change their minds about fleeing. Dispensing with the minor matter that their messenger was from the Underworld, the senators leaned hungrily forward on their benches to listen.

“Speak,” they urged. “Tell us everything.”

“There is a price. A small matter. Nothing that such powerful men would find difficult. There is an object I require. A piece of green glass, a
synochitus
, must be stolen from a woman tomorrow night at the Circus Maximus and destroyed. You will send a man to do it.”

“Yes, yes, that's easy enough. Get on with it,” said a senator, and Antony nodded.

“There will be games held tomorrow night, and at the games the emperor's betrayals will be revealed to you. He has bound himself to witches, against the ways of Rome. His defeat of Egypt was false. Cleopatra is not dead. Would you have me speak further?”

The senators leaned forward, shivering in the newly frigid room. One of the pools was entirely ice now, and a thin rime of frost covered the men's pates. Still, they were eager for more information. Rome was powered by such things, and always had been. A rumor of an emperor's betrayal was worth as much as this and more.

“Continue,” said a senator, and the rest nodded.

“You must each give me a drop of your blood, so that I may speak fully,” the shade told them, and the senators held out their hands, willing.

Blood was a small price when one was offered information about the powers that ran Rome.

Blood was nothing.

Antony smiled. All the memory of Rome was contained within these men, and he took it, seven drops of blood, as snowflakes drifted gently from the ceiling of the room.

He told them all he knew, and then, together, they made a plan.

C
leopatra was maddened by her failure. What had stopped her? Fear? Her daughter's face?

She thought at first to return to Virgil's house, but then the thought of Nicolaus kept her out in the city. She hungered too much to trust herself to return to him. With daylight, she'd hidden in a root cellar, but the sounds of Rome plagued her nonetheless.

As soon as the sun dropped, she was out again, scarcely managing to pass the doorways, the stones, the temples that Antony had once visited, without stopping to look for him. She could almost feel him, but she knew he was dead. She'd burned his body.

Nothing was ever entirely gone; she knew it now.

A cryer sprinted past her, shouting his announcement.

“PRIVATE VENATIO, an hour past sunset, tomorrow evening! To be attended by Caesar Augustus, celebrating the arrival of the children of conquered Egypt and offering a special curiosity: a vision of Mark Antony, brought from beneath the earth to bow to Rome.”