Queen of Kings (3 page)

His men surrounded him, drawing him into the warrens of the Old City and hiding his recognizable figure behind their shields.

“What have you done?” he screamed, again and again, and his guards, pressing him into a decrepit building, surrounding the building with their swords, could not tell whether he referred to his queen or to himself.

T
he queen of Egypt willed herself to press the point of the knife deeper into her palm. Slowly, blood rose to the wound, and with it, a strange and terrible feeling. For an instant, she felt as though everything she loved was sealed away from her, forever trapped on the other side of the mausoleum walls. She stopped, her heart pounding.

No. They were only fears, and she was running out of time. Determined, Cleopatra cut more quickly until blood trickled over her fingers and into the goblet she held to catch it.

She glanced down at the incision from life line to heart line, trying not to tremble. She was doing the right thing.

There was no other choice. Her enemy was camped just outside the Gate of the Sun, his forces overwhelming the remaining resistance of Egypt.

Cleopatra must perform this spell or lose the kingdom. Her country had once been a place of magicians and gods. It would be again. She would not surrender.

She stood, her hair unbound, her feet bare and painted, her eyes rimmed in thick kohl, in the center of an intricate, faceted symbol incorporating countless glyphs etched in pigments. At each locus, priceless pyramids of fine-ground ebony, cinnamon, and lapis balanced, ready to be dispersed with a breath. Here, a scarab drawn in dust of malachite, and here, a sun disc poured in saffron. Polished metal bowls placed at intervals around the room smoked with clouds of incense, a perfume both sweet and biting. Her crown, with its three golden cobras, shone in the lamplight.

Cleopatra shivered, noticing the chill of the marble beneath her feet. The blood welling over her fingertips was the warmest thing in the room. She was alone in the mausoleum she'd built with Antony, the safest and most secure location in the city, or so she hoped. Cleopatra's two handmaidens kept watch over the stairs that led to the second floor of the structure, though there was little need for that. The crypt, designed not just for burial but as a fortress, was two stories high, and the lower floor had no windows or doors, just thick, smooth stone walls. The top floor had only one entrance, a barred window some forty lengths above a man's head, accessible only from the interior. The place was unfinished—Cleopatra and Antony had not expected to need it so soon—but it was complete enough to be formidable.

All the treasures of Alexandria were piled around her, the entirety of Egypt's war chest, along with firepots, papyrus, and wood, stacked from end to end of the chamber, the better to kindle the flames should things not go as Cleopatra planned.

Everything was ready. Everything but Antony, who was somewhere outside the city walls, stubbornly fighting a last, hopeless battle against the invaders. He belonged here, beside her, but time had run out. Two hours before, she'd sent a messenger running across the city to tell her husband that all was not lost, to bid him join her, but Antony had not come.

She could not let herself think about what that might mean.

She'd woken up beside him that morning, and for a moment, looking at the lines in his sleeping face, at the gray in his beard, at the scars and bruises on his body, she felt more woman than queen. The past year had aged Antony, and where Cleopatra had always seen his courage and strength, she now saw his mortality. The time for hesitation was past, and yet, as she thought of the day ahead, of the power she planned to invoke, her heart raced with uncertainty.

Cleopatra had not told Antony what she planned to do. She knew he would not approve, and there was no time to argue with him. She was the queen. The decisions were hers alone. This was her home country, not his.

Looking at him beside her in the bed, however, she'd suddenly felt very foolish, wondering if this would be the last day she held her children, the last day she kissed her husband. She sought to summon powers unseen in thousands of years. What if she did not succeed?

Cleopatra nearly shook Antony awake with a plan to flee and take their children with them. As she put her hand on his chest to wake him, though, he opened his eyes.

“We will win this war,” he told her, and smiled.

His resolve brought her duties back to her, her responsibilities to the kingdom, to her people, to her crown. Of course she could not flee. She was the queen. She must save the kingdom.

She helped Antony don his armor, kissed him good-bye, and went to her throne room to meet with her advisors as though this were a day like any other, instead of a day on which she might lose everything.

The advisors urged her to send her ancestral crown out to the conqueror, but she refused. Instead, she made a public sacrifice to assure Octavian that she was on the verge of giving Alexandria over to him. Goat. Her nostrils curled at the smell of its blood. There was no question of surrender, but it was in her interest to suggest that there was.

Now Cleopatra felt like vomiting, whether from fear or anticipation, she did not know. She'd be the first in thousands of years to perform this spell, such as it was. There were pieces missing from it, and Nicolaus, the scholar who'd translated the spell, had guessed at them. She only hoped he was right.

The scholar had refused to accompany her to the mausoleum, insisting nervously that there was no role in the spell for him. He was not wrong, she reminded herself. No one but she could perform this sacrifice. She was the ruler, the pharaoh. It was hers to do, reserved for royalty, and if it ended badly—

She must not lose courage now.

In the darkness of the siege, Cleopatra had remembered the stories of the time before Alexander. The old gods of Egypt had intervened frequently in the lives of men, savage instead of beautiful, bloodthirsty instead of thoughtful. They'd been born out of the waters of Chaos, and their natures—lust, rage, hunger—were undiluted by the rules of civilization. Cleopatra's patron goddess was Isis, but Isis was not the right deity for this task. She'd evolved over the centuries into something too much a part of the new world, too much a part of Rome.

Sekhmet, Nicolaus suggested. An older goddess, and a darker one.

The Scarlet Lady some called her. That, or the Lady of Slaughter. Sekhmet's breath was the desert wind, and her purpose was warfare. The lion-headed deity was a protector in battle, stalking over the land and destroying the enemies of the pharaoh. Death and destruction were her nectar. She was the goddess of the end of the world, the Mistress of Dread, and she drank the blood of her foes. Sekhmet would as easily drink the blood of the Romans. They would have no idea what had come for them. If Octavian thought to conquer Cleopatra, he could die trying.

Cleopatra surveyed her preparations. The goddess, in the form of an icon encrusted with coral, lapis, malachite, carnelian, bloodstone, and opal, occupied a new place of honor, enshrined near the tombs. The icon was older than anything else in the room, dating from a time long before Cleopatra's family had reigned. As for the rest, Cleopatra had spent a lifetime acquiring these treasures. More than a lifetime. The portions she hadn't obtained herself as offerings and gifts had come down from her father, and his father before him, from her queenly grandmothers and from Alexander himself. They had accrued over three hundred years, from all of Africa and Macedonia, from Italy, from India, from the waters and the deserts, from the sky and caves and stars, from the edges of the world.

All that time, Egypt had been ruled over by her family, beautiful, ferocious descendants of the gods.

It was fitting that it would be she who saved Egypt, using her own wits and talents. Her father had been a weak-willed ruler. The men before him were the same, fattening on the luxuries afforded them as kings. Cleopatra and her grandmother, on the other hand, warred and gained lands. They'd made alliances and brokered compromises. This was the culmination of Cleopatra's work.

Why, then, was she so afraid? A droplet of blood flew out from her shaking hand, spattering on the icon. She quickly pulled her hand back.

“Find me a spell,” she'd ordered the scholars days before, when it had become clear that Octavian would not give up his claim on Egypt. “A spell for a summoning.”

Nicolaus the Damascene, tutor to Cleopatra's twins, found this one deep in the collection, although he complained that it was not entirely complete. A part of the scroll had been lost in the fires at the Great Library of Alexandria, and what remained was unclear.

Cleopatra called upon another scholar, this one Egyptian, to assist in the translation. He startled when he saw the scroll.

“Where was this found? It should not exist. The spell is not to be used lightly,” he informed her indignantly.

“Lightly?” Cleopatra asked. “I do nothing lightly. Do you believe that Egypt is governed lightly?”

“It is forbidden,” he insisted.

“I am a queen. Nothing is forbidden. It is not a spell for commoners. I will do it myself.”

“Then you are a fool,” the Egyptian said, looking her in the eyes.

She was shocked. How dare he speak so? She was still the ruler, though she did not know how much longer that would be true.

“The lost portion of the text would contain spells to protect the pharaoh who summoned the goddess. Do not think that your station will force Sekhmet to obey your wishes. She destroys. That is her nature. Such a one will not be easily controlled.”

“I thought you were a man of letters,” she said. “Not a common villager. Translate the spell. What I do with it is none of your concern.”

“I will not,” he replied, his voice shaking. “I cannot.”

“Then you will die,” she warned him. How dare he delay Alexandria's defense?

“I would rather die by the hand of a queen than by the hand of this goddess.”

She stared at him a moment, impressed by his bravado but disgusted by his resistance. She had him beheaded, and Nicolaus nervously translated the remainder of the scroll himself.

Now, as her blood filled the goblet, Cleopatra felt the dread she'd banished that morning rising again. She placed the goblet beside the icon and lit a pyramid of incense, breathing in deeply.
The scent of death
, she thought, and instantly corrected herself. No. It was the scent of victory.

Ayear had passed since the Battle of Actium, and Octavian, the man Cleopatra still thought of as the child general, had spent it mocking Egypt, while gathering his forces to invade it. The slight boy with the pale gray eyes was a child no longer.

It was sixteen years since she'd seen him last, during a visit to her then lover, Julius Caesar. She was twenty-one and the new mother of Caesarion, Caesar's first and only son. Octavian was stretched across a sickbed, a reedy, fevered skeleton by the time Caesar and Cleopatra arrived at his mother's house.

How she wished that she'd known then what she knew now: that the frail great-nephew of Rome's imperator would one day besiege her city. She might have killed him and saved herself years of pain.

Instead, she sat beside him on the bed and smoothed his fine, curly hair from off his brow. Octavian had just turned seventeen, but he looked twelve. He opened his eyes to survey Cleopatra.

“Am I dying?” the boy asked her. “They will not tell me.”

“Certainly not. You will live a long life,” she promised, though she could see his heart racing beneath nearly translucent skin, and the edges of his bones protruding, birdlike, all over his body.

Poor little thing,
she actually thought, tucking his coverlet more tightly around him before leaving the room.

Now that poor little thing wielded more power than anyone else in the world.

Cleopatra had spent every moment of the past year at his mercy, fruitlessly bribing and extracting promises of protection from her neighboring rulers, all the while comforting her husband. Antony was guilt-ridden, blaming himself for the defeat at Actium. Cleopatra did not blame her husband.
She
was the queen. She should have known better than to do what she'd done in that battle. Funds for the continuing war had seemed the most important thing, and so, when Actium began to look like a defeat, she fled for Alexandria with her gold. Her husband followed her, his ships shielding hers, and this armed Octavian with damning propaganda, painting Antony as loyal to a foreign queen instead of to his home country.

Antony's Roman troops, some fifty thousand men betrayed by his departure, deserted him, leaving Egypt with a fraction of the legions it had previously commanded, and Octavian declared victory, shouting his triumph from end to end of the world.

Now he came nearly unopposed to the shores of Alexandria, held off only by Antony and his small remaining forces. He thought he'd already won the country.

He had not.

The ritual knife had been sharpened enough to kill without the victim noticing the wound. If the spell failed, however, it would not be Octavian who was killed. Cleopatra would never get close enough to him.

No. If the summoning failed, it would be she who died, and by her own hand. She could not let the Romans take her as their captive, a trophy to parade in the streets of Italy. She and Antony had long since agreed that if the city were taken, they'd both commit suicide. It would be the only honorable course of action left to them.

Where is he?
Another jolt of panic ran through Cleopatra. It had been hours since the messenger was sent, hours since Antony should have returned.

She shook herself back to focus. She could not stop to worry. There was no time. Brilliant crimson filled the agate goblet, and Sekhmet would accept it.