Queen of Kings (49 page)

Augustus thought longingly of that. He himself was cold in the heat of the sun, and now, in the moonlight, he froze.

He turned his face toward the heavens, squinting to see more clearly. His spine protested as he moved his head, but still, there was beauty here, this night, this orchard, the trees hanging heavy with ripe figs, the smell of the grass, the perfection of the place. His father's orchard. He had not been here in years. His father had died in this very place, long ago, when the emperor was only a child. It was all so familiar, and yet, when he tried to grasp it, it flew.

He raised his hand and plucked a fig from the tree. A soft thing, the fig, perfectly ripe. He preferred them green. There was danger in enjoyment.

A beautiful woman stepped from behind the fig tree and smiled at him. He felt himself smiling back, toothless and old. His hand, when he lifted it to his mouth, was spotted with age.

She was young and lovely. A servant, but too beautiful for a servant. A guest? A dignitary?

He should know her. Something in the back of his mind cried out like a child.

Augustus thought, but he could not place her. Her eyes were rimmed in kohl, and her arms were decked with coiled bracelets in the shape of serpents. Her body was curving and tightly wrapped in a white linen gown. Her mouth was plump and painted with something red.

He bit into the fig—honey sweet and seeded, nearly overripe—and it came to him. He had been her lover once, long ago. Or he had loved her.

“Do I know you?” he asked her.

“Octavian,” she said. She held her hand to her side, tightly pressing it against her waist.

“Are you injured?” he asked.

“I was,” she said. “I was injured once, and gravely. I've been a long time healing, and you have had a long life. I did not intend that, but I do not regret it. You suffered.”

Augustus felt indignant.

“I did not suffer,” he began, but even as he spoke the words, he remembered nights sleepless, insomniac, haunted. At the same time, he wondered at himself. He was not dressed for night, nor for company. He was nearly naked. He felt his skin prickling as he looked at her.

“Do you not know me, Octavian?” the woman before him asked.

“I do not,” he insisted. He felt his throat beginning to swell. The fig was scratching at his tongue. He coughed unhappily. He was chilled here in the night air. He wanted to go in, to his bed, to his sleep. He wanted to wake in the morning and watch the sun rise.

“I made a bargain once,” the woman told him. “With a powerful king, in a country not far from here.”

“A gamble?” Augustus asked. He thought of games played with bones and rocks, games played with coins. He thought, horribly, of placing a coin in Agrippa's mouth, to pay the boatman of Hades. The cold of the tongue as it touched his fingers. The rotten hardness of the teeth. The damp of the tomb he'd placed his friend inside, with all the proper ceremony, with all the proper ritual.

A sudden memory of another tomb, and an empty slab therein. A silver box engraved with Isis. A serpent, a serpent. He cringed involuntarily.

“A gamble,” she agreed.

He coughed, and sat heavily on the dew-covered grass. A servant should bring him a cloak. He should not be out at night.

“It was a gamble over a soul,” she said.

Augustus lay carefully back, anticipating a story and fearing it at the same time. In his life, he'd hired many tellers, heard many tales, and he had slept little. He found himself nearly looking forward to it. Sleep. Rest.

The woman looked steadily at him.

He thought suddenly of two little boys, lost long ago on a battlefield. He'd brought the last of the Egyptian children, Selene, back to Rome and married her to the king of Mauretania, giving her a dowry of gold as though she were his own daughter. He owed her something, though even then he could not remember why. Selene was dead eight years past. He'd commissioned a Greek poet to eulogize her. A good daughter. The only good daughter he'd had, and she was not even his own.

“
The moon herself grew dark, rising at sunset
,” Augustus whispered. It was a lovely epitaph, the eulogy, and somehow it reminded him of the woman before him. Selene had looked like her, perhaps that was it. “
Covering her suffering in the night, because she saw her beautiful namesake, Selene, breathless, descending to Hades. With her, she'd had the beauty of her light in common, and mingled her own darkness with her death
.”

The woman before him smiled. He thought he saw her eyes shining with tears, though it might have been the moonlight.

He regretted everything on earth.

“A soul?” he asked. “Whose soul? Yours?”

“Not my own,” she said. “I had already sold my own soul when I made this bargain. No, Octavian. I did not act to save my soul but that of my love. Your soul has been with me all these years, since the battle at Avernus. You've lived without it, as I have lived without mine. Did you never notice its absence? Tell me, Octavian, was it a glorious life? Did you love? Did you find joy?”

Augustus looked at her miserably. She was so beautiful. Her lips were bright, even in the darkness.

She seemed taller now, somehow, and her skin paler, as though she had absorbed the moonlight. She smiled indulgently upon him.

Her teeth were pointed.

His throat was closing. He could scarcely breathe. A name drifted up from out of his past, a name he should never have forgotten. He did not understand how he had.

“Cleopatra,” he said.

“
Te teneo,”
she told Augustus
. “You are mine.”

She bent toward him, taking his body in her strong hands. She came closer, brushing her cold lips over his cold lips, and the emperor looked up into her eyes, seeing fires, seeing volcanoes, seeing destruction.

He watched Rome fall in a moment, watched the sky fill with metal wings, watched all he had built crumble.

He felt Cleopatra biting into his throat, and he struggled weakly. Her hand pressed down upon him, heavy as a coverlet, and he relaxed under her weight. It was a kiss.

Yes. They had once been lovers, he was sure. They were lovers again, it seemed. The kiss was sweet.

Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. Queen of Kings.

“You will live,” her voice said to him, and he was, in his last moments, a boy again, fevered in his bed. “You will live a long life.”

Then it was over.

 

 

C
leopatra stood, leaving the husk that had been the emperor of Rome on the ground, and walked away from the country that had been her unwilling home all these years.

Dying on the battlefield at Avernus, so many years before, she'd felt Sekhmet leave her heart, felt the hollow spaces fill again with her own
ka
. In memory, she glimpsed her death, the snowflakes falling upon her skin, her blood flowing slowly, cold and endless.

She'd found herself lying on a mossy bank beside a silver lake. The world was night, the pearl-round moon high in the sky, and yet it was also sunrise, the horizon all rose, gold, and coral. As far as she could see, there were rolling hills and valleys, the dewy green grasses and blooming wildflowers of midsummer, but this was not earth.

There were stars in the heavens, and she gazed up at them, the constellations showing familiar shapes, shapes she'd known in every land she'd lived in. On the grass about her, and on the smooth, silver water, she could see the shadows of the stars, and she was comforted by this, the tracery of her former life in the wildness of the waking world.

“You are in Elysium,” a voice said. “You died at my gates.”

“Where is Antony?” she asked, turning to see the god of the Dead before her. “I must go to where he is.”

Hades nodded his head ruefully.

“As you wish. You have done me a large favor. I owe you recompense.”

A flash of light, and she found herself transported again.

She saw the Island of Fire, with its scales for the weighing of her heart, the gleaming feather of Maat upon them. Antony and her sons stood before her, all of her beloved dead, Caesarion, Alexander Helios, and Ptolemy.

She walked toward them, overcome with joy, but then, without warning, she was torn from the Duat and pressed into her own broken body again.

The fate spinner had brought Cleopatra back from the death she'd longed for. Helpless, paralyzed on the battlefield, the queen felt Sekhmet reenter her heart.

I can see it all now,
the seiðkona rasped, then, her hands on Cleopatra's face.
I can see everything.

Cleopatra walked on into her future. Her love was in the Duat, waiting for her, and she was on earth, dreaming of him. She would not see him yet.

It is your destiny to destroy the world,
the seiðkona had whispered to her, all those years before.
But you must also save it. They are the same fate
.

Cleopatra walked into the darkness, the stars overhead glittering, the moon a pointed crescent, her body filled with blood, her mind filled with night. Sekhmet would rise again now that Cleopatra had finished her healing. The queen could feel her hunger. Sekhmet had been wounded, too, with the Hydra venom, but she still had six Slaughterers in her quiver: Famine, Earthquake, Flood, Drought, Madness, and Violence.

Though this was finished, Cleopatra was not done. She did not know when she would be. It was not her decision.

The emperor of Rome was dead.

Long live the queen.

L
ots of the things that happen in this book really occurred. Lots of the characters portrayed in this book really existed. Lots of their deeds and misdeeds, and many of their wildly unlikely actions—including some of the things you're no doubt sure I invented—actually happened.

Let me clarify that. Lots of the things that happen in this book really
are
historically based
.
However, much of the history we rely on to tell us the truth of what happened to Antony, Cleopatra, Octavian, Agrippa, and the rest of these characters in the early days of the Roman Empire is as much enhanced by fiction, imagination, and mythology as this book is.

History is written by and for the conquering heroes—in this case, the Romans—and so the classical sources that deal with Cleopatra and Antony are fascinatingly skewed documents, full of hyperbole, humor, hysteria, and contradiction. Much like today's political climate, persons on both sides of the events had a great deal to say about the players, some of it true (maybe), and some of it invention.

None of the major primary sources were contemporary with the historic events portrayed herein—Plutarch was writing nearly a hundred years after the death of Cleopatra, who committed suicide (or perhaps not) in 30 B.C.E. They relied on earlier sources, rumor, poetic license, and a hefty dose of subservience to the Roman Empire. Therefore, works of contemporary scholarship on these topics—as the authors themselves agree—have a limited pool to draw from when it comes to factual accounts of what did and did not happen in Alexandria and thereafter.

As a priest of Apollo states in this book, speaking of the mythic arrows of Hercules,
“Everything is true. Once a story is told, it becomes true. Every unlikely tale, every tale of wonders, has something real at its core.”

That is absolutely true of the history that inspired and informs this particular tale.

That said, I'm tremendously indebted to a variety of volumes dealing in fact and “fact,” most notably Suetonius's
The Twelve Caesars
, Plutarsch's
Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans,
Joyce Tyldesley's
Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt,
and Anthony Everitt's
Augustus: The Life of Rome's First Emperor
. For a fantastic fictional biography—and a completely different take on many of the characters I portray here—I recommend John Williams's National Book Award–winning novel,
Augustus
. As well, I consulted Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Dio, Strabo, Shakespeare, and many more, some poetic, some historic.

One of the great pleasures of writing
Queen of Kings
was that I was able to use the biographical details of Antony, Cleopatra, Augustus, and more to a new effect, braiding history with my own imagined possibilities. The death of Cleopatra, for example, is portrayed in Plutarch as a locked-room mystery—the queen and her maids discovered dead, with the only mark visible on Cleopatra a couple of pinpricks. No suicide-assisting asp was ever discovered, and Plutarch himself seems suspicious that this was what happened. As time passed, death by asp became the accepted version. It was a small leap of imagination to imagine a different prelude to Cleopatra's “death,” and a different explanation for the fang marks on her body.

In terms of ancient sorcery, religion, augury, and mythology, I drew inspiration and information from Apuleius's
The Golden Ass
(sometimes known as Apuleius's
Metamorphoses
), Ovid's
Metamorphoses
,
Naming the Witch
by Kimberley Stratton, and for some great thoughts on the creepiness and creativity of ancient world warfare, and on the Hydra's venom,
Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World
by Adrienne Mayor.

In regard to Greek witchcraft, Hades, and shades, I consulted a variety of sources and inspirations both classical and contemporary, including
The Aeneid
(which readers will recognize as the inspiration for the geography of Hades), the
Odyssey, Medea
(the character found both in Euripides' play and in Ovid's
Metamorphoses
). The classically accepted process for summoning shades is very similar to what I've outlined here. They really do require a blood sacrifice, which brings their consciousness and memory back from the faded world of Hades. Cleopatra's brief experience of Elysium in the epilogue is inspired by James Agee's beautiful poem “Description of Elysium
.
”