Queen of Kings (34 page)

Others were working on the same thing, she realized. She felt in the dark for their fates and found them, one strong and warlike, the general Marcus Agrippa, and the other a historian, fearful and confused. She began to twine them together, quietly, slowly.

Cleopatra was free of Sekhmet for now, and that meant that the goddess had a weakness. Auðr sought to find it.

 

 

T
he Psylli sat on the roof of the imperial residence, looking up at the sky and listening to the wind. Her predictions had come true, and now she returned, furious, to tell him of the plague that Sekhmet had brought to the land. She blew across the world, and in some places, she swept through empty villages, over forgotten thresholds, through broken windows. She whipped across deserts and over seas and found that the plague had touched everywhere. She flew beside the Slaughterer and watched its rampage, helpless to do anything. Sekhmet's arrow rode on the wind's unwilling back, shrilling with pleasure, flinging itself through the clouds and into the world.

“What would you have me do?” Usem asked.

“And how might I wound the queen?”

The wind did not have an answer. The silver box that was Cleopatra's jail waited inside the residence, but Usem's dagger and poison had only pained her, not wounded her. He did not know what to do. He sat, sharpening his dagger, his snakes coiling about him.

T
hey crossed Acheron in Charon's ferry, Antony telling the reluctant boatman that the spirit he carried was a gift for Persephone and that her passage was paid. Cleopatra lay silently as wizened fingers passed over her, determining, after some examination, that she was lifeless. Her skin was cold enough to pass for that of a corpse and scarred with silver veins. The boatman threw a ragged blanket over her body.

Antony kept his hands on her, and where he touched her, she lived. She knew she'd left her body behind somehow, trapped in the witch's hands. She knew that she was traveling in the land of ghosts, an Underworld not her own. Still, she was content.

She was with her love again, and nothing else mattered.

The boat rocked beneath her. A drop of river water splashed onto her wounded skin, and she felt the tears of tens of thousands of mourners sobbing over graves, strewing flowers and libations into the soil. There were no tears for Cleopatra in this river. The tears of Egypt flowed through the caverns of the Duat.

Eventually, after what seemed hundreds of years of travel, the boat scraped rock, and Antony carried her onto a bank dotted not with colored wildflowers but with poisonous plants, dark and ashen. The dead approached, slavering at the sight of one from the world of the living, but then backed away, bewildered by her bloodlessness.

“How did you get us away from the witch?” she asked, hearing the vessel recede back into the river.

Her beloved grinned, a strange, sweet expression here in Hades.

“She may be able to draw a soul up from Hades, but she does not understand Rome,” Antony said. “Everyone is willing to bargain if you have something worth bargaining for. I told the Senate about the emperor and his hiring of witches, and in return, they gave me their blood and stole the stone the witch was using to keep me tied to her in the upper world.”

“What do you mean when you say they gave you their blood?” Cleopatra asked sharply.

“A drop of blood reminds us of what we were and makes us feel human, at least for a time. Now I've tasted the blood of seven senators, and my bond to the witch is lessened.”

Cleopatra thought for a moment. Perhaps he would not mind what she had become.

A ghost approached them, its eyes wide and blank. It offered them a sprig of asphodel.

Antony pushed it away, and it spun on its heels, bowing back into the grasses, plucking flowers and pressing them into its mouth. The spirit moaned with hunger.

“He was a philosopher,” Antony said. “Now he is nothing. The longer a soul stays in Hades, the more longing it feels for its past. Most of them wade into the waters of Lethe and drink until they've forgotten the human lives they left behind.”

Cleopatra shuddered. She was not human. She knew it, and so did Antony. He had seen her a snake, a lioness.

“Am I dead?” she asked, looking at the painful streaks of silver on her skin, a netting melted into her flesh. “Am I a shade? Is that how I come to be here?”

“You are not alive, and you are not dead, either,” Antony answered, his face unreadable. “Your body is above us, trapped in Chrysate's hands, and your soul—”

“I sold my
ka
,” Cleopatra whispered. “I sold it to Sekhmet to bring you back.”

Antony looked at her, his eyes filled with sorrow.

“When I first came to Hades, I could still taste the wine you gave me in our mausoleum.
Who are you?
the dead asked me. ‘Mark Antony,' I answered.
No longer. You are no one here
, they said. ‘Where is my wife?' I asked.
She belongs to another,
they answered.”

“They lied to you!” Cleopatra shouted, infuriated. “I am yours,” she said more quietly. “I swear it. Octavian sent a false messenger to you and bribed my army.”

“They were not wrong,” Antony said quietly. “I saw you in Rome.”

Cleopatra felt as though part of her mind had been left behind with her body. Of course he'd seen her, in the arena.

“I saw you kill a servant in the street. I saw you drink from him until he was dead.”

Cleopatra had a fleeting thought of throwing herself into the river. She started to stand, but he took her hand and held it tightly in his.

“Then why did you bring me with you?” Cleopatra managed. If he did not want her, she should be in that silver box. She should be in Rome, a captive.

Antony touched her chest, the place where her heart had been.

“Te teneo,”
Antony said simply. “No matter what you are, no matter what has happened to you. I love you. That was my pledge. I tried to keep you safe in the living world, but I did not understand what you were. I was a fool. I thought soldiers could protect you. We go to Hades and Persephone, the lord and lady of this realm. They will know how to help you.”

Cleopatra looked quickly at him.

“You risk yourself,” she said.

She knew enough about his Underworld to know that the throne room of its gods was not a place for lowly spirits to visit. There was no petitioning in Hades. The gods were not sympathetic.

“Then I risk myself,” Antony told her. “I am not afraid.”

She could see thousands of other spirits now, in the gray light, making their way about the terrain, dark and dusty, hungry, bewildered. She couldn't hear their thoughts, if they had thoughts at all, and this was a blessing. They smelled of nothing, and their histories were unknowns. There was no blood here, and it was endlessly dusk.

She thought of her own Underworld, and the sun that shone there for one glorious hour each night, waking the dead from sleep. From the Duat, the blessed dead could go forth amongst the living during the day. The dead flew through the clouds as hawks and basked in the sun as cats. The dead swooped as owls and trotted across the sand as dogs and jackals. At night, they went back to the realm of Osiris, fulfilled. Had she and Antony both died, they would have been together in the Duat, and perhaps, had their souls been judged happily, in the Beautiful West.

Home.

Now her only home was Antony.

Her husband laced his cold fingers together with hers and drew her to her feet. They walked on, into the mists of Hades.

T
he walls of the prison oozed filthy water, and there was no food but thin, weevil-ridden mash. Nicolaus comforted himself. At least he still lived. It was a miracle he had not been crucified.

A group of legionaries had caught him breaking into the emperor's chambers at the Palatine, and he had been arrested immediately. He demanded to see the emperor or Marcus Agrippa, but the legionaries took him to the prison without hearing anything he had to say.

He'd languished here for days, surrounded by madmen.

The prisoners, mainly soldiers who had collapsed or betrayed Rome by serving Antony in the battle at the Circus Maximus, compared visions of the queen's transformation, gibbering and wailing from their cells. They told one another tales of Mark Antony, once their fellow, walking as a shade and hiring them to defend his queen, and of wild animals slavering. They spoke of serpents that swarmed through the streets of Rome.

They spoke of the queen dancing in the center of an endless fire, undamaged.

He had to get to the emperor. His life was already ruined, and if he did not wish to spend the rest of it rotting belowground, he must tell his story to the Romans. He must get access to other materials, other libraries. Something to find a way to defeat Sekhmet. It must exist. They did not understand that though they had Cleopatra, they did not contain her. Sekhmet still walked, and she was the daughter of the sun. It was very likely that the burning had made her stronger.

He was tormented by a scrap of memory, something he'd read in the Museion about Sekhmet's Slaughterers, seven ferocious children in the form of monstrous arrows, who served as bringers of chaos, plague, and destruction. They had been punished along with Sekhmet, and if she was free, they were, too.

In desperation, he begged a guard for writing materials, hoping to craft a letter to the emperor, and when they scoffed at him, he mentioned Virgil's name.

Days later, a visitor arrived. He was a head taller than any of the guards, draped in a dark, hooded cloak. Nicolaus watched hopelessly as the man passed coins to the guard. He expected this was some assassin buying his way into the cell, but when the man took off his hood, Nicolaus recognized the poet's face, long and grim.

“You should not have used my name,” Virgil said. “Augustus does not know I am in Rome. Someone else summoned me here, but the emperor wrote me in Campania, begging me to come to his bedside as a storyteller. He is having difficulty sleeping.”

“As well he should,” said Nicolaus. “A monster sleeps in his house.”

“I heard that,” said Virgil. “The emperor's servants leak secrets. A miracle, is it not? They captured a shape-shifting creature. A wonder.”

“It is not a wonder,” Nicolaus said. “It is horrifying. You are fortunate that you have not seen what I have seen. You must get me out of this prison. I have to speak to Augustus.”

Virgil looked at Nicolaus for a moment, measuring him. “I've brought you writing materials, at considerable risk to myself.”

Nicolaus reached out to grasp the scroll, but Virgil held it back.

“I have a price.”

“I have no money,” Nicolaus said, frustrated. “Perhaps you misunderstand my position here.”

“There is a request for a forgery, from high up in Rome, and if I value my life, I cannot do it.”

“Why should I be capable of something you are not?”

“You are dead already,” Virgil said simply.

The Sibylline Books
,
Virgil explained, were a complicated fiction: The original texts, purchased by Tarquinius from the Cumaean Sibyl, had been destroyed in a fire at the Temple of Jupiter fifty years before, and since then, Rome had searched the world to replace them with copies. Naturally, it had quickly become clear that the copies might be edited to reflect favorable omens for Rome. The Sibylline prophecies were now largely, albeit secretly, the work of hired scholars pretending to be longdead prophetic priestesses. They were consulted whenever Rome's rulers wished to justify something with an ancient prophecy. This forgery, however, was a delicate assignment.

“A group of senators desire a doomsday prophecy relating to the rise of Cleopatra and the fall of Augustus's Rome. They wish to sway the public's opinion of Augustus. It seems that the facts support them,” said Virgil.

“To what end?”

“The story you will write might aid them in restoring the republic. It might create a revolution against Augustus. It might merely make for entertaining reading. I cannot tell the future, Nicolaus, but a story like this is difficult to resist, even for a man like me. Sometimes, I miss the days when I wrote what I pleased.”

“You do not miss those days much,” Nicolaus said, snorting. It felt as though they were scholars debating in a courtyard, and for a moment, Nicolaus forgot that he was behind bars in a dungeon and that Virgil stood at liberty, the richest poet in Rome.

“True,” said Virgil, and smiled. “I will visit Augustus when I am finished here. I have become the emperor's lullaby singer, but he pays me in Egyptian gold.”

“What am I to write?” Nicolaus asked.

“And you were once such a promising scholar,” Virgil said. “Can you not guess? The texts are kept under key in the Temple of Apollo, and everyone claims they're incorrupt, but every leader has commissioned his own version of the prophecies, dependent on what he needed the world to believe. The Sibylline prophecies are a creation of convenience and full of lies.
You
, on the other hand, will write the truth. The emperor has employed some sort of witch to steal the memories of those who witnessed the chaos in the Circus Maximus, and the senators fear that the stories will not travel as easily as they need them to.”

“I want to write to Augustus,” Nicolaus insisted.

“He reads the prophecies,” Virgil said.

“Augustus has put Rome in danger. He has put the world at risk by capturing her.”

“Then write that,” Virgil said. “Terrify him. Terrify Rome. Make them think their doomsday is coming, and all because of what Augustus has done. Is that not what you believe? This is an opportunity. Didn't you dream of becoming a historian? This is a history, though it claims to be prophecy. Tell them what they have done, and if it serves the senators, it serves you, too.”