Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Cleopatra was not injured by this liar. Antony had had a queen at his disposal, ready to make love to him and counsel him on battle, all at once. They’d spent countless nights together, their bedchamber filled with soft silks and sea charts, Cleopatra plotting the routes of his ships even as he kissed her thighs. What need could he have had for other women when he was married to an equal? No. It was not true.

  “What is it you want from me?” she asked Octavian. “I have nothing for you.”

  “A friendly meeting,” the boy general said, and smiled an unfriendly smile.

  In other days, she would have wooed him. Talked sweetly, extended her arms in graceful motions, sung and danced, shown him his importance. She’d done as much in the past and profited by it, with his adoptive father no less, smuggling herself into Julius Caesar’s chambers, wrapped in a carpet, then rolling out of it like a spirit and slipping directly into his bed. Time had passed, though, and things had changed. She could not find it in herself to seduce her enemy today. It was as though her past did not belong to her.

  And there was something disgusting about Octavian. He smelt of nothing. What was he, this thing adopted into emperor?

  “Libations?” she offered.

  “I do not drink,” he replied.

  “I suppose you don’t eat, either,” she said.

  “Not while a queen starves before me,” he said, and smiled, revealing small and somewhat crooked teeth. He drew the gilded chair toward her couch.

  “Such courtesy is unusual in a barbarian,” she commented.

  “I am a family man. My daughter Julia is my chief joy. I would not have your children lose a mother,” he said. “Bastards though they are.”

  Her skin prickled with fury. “They are not bastards,” she replied. “Their mother is a queen. I doubt the Romans would understand.”

  Octavian leaned forward, his elbow on his knee.

  “Unless you dine with me,” he said, his voice and smile unchanged, “I will be forced to slit your bastards’ throats.”

  She inhaled deeply, scenting this nothing man. She would rip out what heart he had, and she would drink his watery blood.

  “What would you have me eat?” she asked, her tone savagely polite. “I see no emperor’s banquet here. Shall I dine upon you?”

  She laughed, but something twisted inside her.

  It was a joke. Barbed words, that was all. She was not well, she was not well. Her skin chilled. Her robes were drenched. Could he not see it? How could she be expected to sit here and listen while he talked of slitting her babies’ throats? The barbarian.

  Why hadn’t she killed him when she’d first met him? He’d been so weak, that reedy, feverish boy in the bed. So vulnerable.

  No, she was not a killer, not in those days; she knew it even as she thought it.

  She’d changed.

  “I am ill—” she managed, and then gagged, covering her mouth with her veil.

  The conqueror waved his hand, signaling his men to bring in trays.

  “You are weak with hunger,” he said, pressing into her fingers a piece of roasted meat dripping with oils and rubbed with spices.

  She felt muscles clenching in her back and arms, clenching against her will. Her thighs tightened. She would spring at him—

  She pressed herself back against the hard metal frame of the couch.

  No. She’d eat the food he offered. If it bought her children’s lives, it was no price. Those dying of hunger, she knew, often hallucinated. Perhaps that was all this was, the voice in her head, the strange desires. She took the meat between her teeth.

  Oozing juices. Foul, rotting flesh. Her throat closed against it, and she spat it out.

  “You would not allow me to kill myself, yet you try to kill me with poisons? You’ve already seen me die when my husband was taken from me. You are dining with the dead, even now.”

  He sliced a piece of meat from the same platter, put it into his mouth, and chewed it.

  “It is not poisoned,” he said. “And you are a stubborn fool. Is my food not fine enough for you, lady?”

  He beckoned to his men, and they approached Cleopatra. One of them came from behind, bringing a chain from beneath his cloak, and before the queen knew what was happening, he’d wrapped it about her wrists.

  The metal burned her skin, and she cried out at the unexpected pain.

  “Behold, a chain fit for a queen,” Octavian said. “Did you not put Mark Antony on a silver throne while you sat above him, on the gold? And he thought you were naming him king instead of slave, the fool. This chain is forged of that throne.”

  “He was never my slave,” Cleopatra whispered, curling into her couch, willing the pain away. “He is my husband. Summon a physician. I tell you, I am not well.”

  Octavian gazed at her, impassive.

  “Look at the whore’s false tears. I know them, lady, just as I know a whore’s false cries of pleasure. Force the food down her throat if she will not eat it herself,” he said as he left the room. “I will not be seen to starve the queen of Egypt.”

  8

  In the corridor outside Cleopatra’s chamber, Octavian leaned against the wall, panting with the effort of the conversation. He hadn’t expected seeing her to be so jarring, unpredictable emotions rising within him and threatening to disable his voice. He thought he’d conducted himself well, despite this, but he was not certain. Perhaps he should not have involved the children. Perhaps he should not have met with her at all.

  Octavian groaned quietly, seeing Cleopatra as if she were still before him, the diadem in her hair, the soft gown draped over her breasts. The fullness of her lips. She had not looked well, no, but it had been profoundly shocking to see her so close.

  She was his prisoner. He might do as he pleased with her—

  No. It was not safe.

  Cleopatra was a witch, he knew that much. Antony had clearly been under her spell for years. He’d left Rome for her, left glory, left peace. He’d left everything that made him a man in order to follow her like a slave, kissing her feet and carrying her through crowds on his shoulders. It was shameful.

  In spite of himself, Octavian’s mind boiled with visions of their lovemaking. It was only with effort that he put it from his mind. He refused to think of her the way he’d thought of her these past sixteen years. He remembered their single meeting quite clearly, though Cleopatra had clearly forgotten it.

  If Octavian closed his eyes, he could still summon every detail of the young queen’s weight beside him on his sickbed, of the heavy outline of her milk-swollen breasts, the way they had been revealed when she bent over him, telling him he’d live through the fever that had almost killed him.

  It was that sentence that had kept him fighting his way free of the delirium, the hope of seeing her again that had kept him alive.

  And now, here he stood in her palace, her conqueror.

  When he’d received the news of Antony’s suicide, he’d felt a strange uncertainty rising within him. He’d behaved dishonorably in sending that false message, though only Marcus Agrippa knew what he’d done. To his horror, Octavian had begun to weep in front of all his men. He’d found himself pawing through his trunk, unearthing old correspondence and waving it in the air.

  “He was my friend!” he’d heard himself shouting. “I warned him! I tried to warn him away from the witch!”

  They had never truly been friends, but despite their differences, they had, until this most recent series of battles, fought for fifteen years on the same side. When Antony had disappeared into Cleopatra’s arms, Octavian illegally raided the temple of the vestal virgins for his will and discovered proof of betrayal.

  Even if he died in his own country, Antony’s will demanded that his body be sent to Egypt and Cleopatra. No Roman would ask such a thing. Rome was home and heart. Octavian read the shocking provisions aloud in the Senate, drumming up support for the war. If Antony was so loyal to Egypt that he wanted his soul laid to rest there, what would p
revent him from other loyalties? What if Cleopatra desired more from him? What if she wanted Rome for her own plaything?

  Octavian had found himself in frantic pursuit, bewilderingly unable to let Antony depart into Cleopatra’s bed.

  Now, though, Octavian wondered whether his pursuit had been legitimate. Antony had died for Cleopatra. Perhaps he had wedded himself to Egypt for love, and not for ambition at all.

  Octavian coughed, inhaling dust from some corner of the palace. He wanted nothing so much as to leave this wretched country. He’d put someone else in charge of Egypt. Some lower general. There was a list in his mind already, of suitable men who were owed reward. Some reward, this mosquito-ridden hell. Octavian felt infuriated that he’d been forced into this war by arrogance, by Antony’s disobeying the rules of Rome. The man could have been discreet about his love affair. He should never have divorced Octavia. He’d provoked Octavian, and he deserved what he got.

  He stomped down the hallway, relishing the sound of his steps. Let her wail there in her chamber. Let her refuse to eat, even though it was obvious she was hungry. He did not care. She’d destroyed Antony, and now she destroyed herself, and none of it mattered to the soon-to-be emperor of Rome.

  None of it mattered in the least.

  9

  The soldiers pressed meat into Cleopatra’s mouth as though she were a fattening fowl, and then left her, still chained. She vomited again and again, her maid tending her, bathing her face and throat with cool water.

  Hours passed, and with each of them, Cleopatra’s fury grew stronger. Her wrists burned where the chain rubbed against them, her body revolting against the metal. The voice in her head now sounded like her own. No matter how she struggled with the metal, it did not give, and her skin tore and mended, seared invisibly, scalded and wounded. She howled with exhaustion and rage as dawn came, as the night birds took themselves back to their nests, as the cocks crowed and the city began to speak.

  “I will say I have eaten,” she growled when the soldiers returned. “I’ll swear to it. Release me from these chains. Your master will not know.”

  One soldier eyed the other and shrugged.

  “Some of the food must have gone in,” he said. “She swallowed it, at least.”

  Cleopatra looked into the soldier’s eyes. So slender, a boy. A virgin yet.

  “Release me,” she whispered, and the soldier came toward her. She could smell him now, his sweet flesh, the nick in his skin where the blood had come to the razor’s edge. His home, a small structure made of trees his father had felled, high on a hill. The village girl he loved, a cobbler’s daughter, and the taste of her lips on his, only once, the day before he left for war. The two of them had lain in a meadow of wildflowers, watching the clouds drift across the sky, just as Cleopatra had once done, long ago, with Antony at her side—

  No. She would not think of Antony.

  The soldier came closer still, looking at her, his face open as a child’s. He reached out a hand.

  The other boy swallowed nervously.

  “We’re not to converse with the prisoner,” he reminded his companion. “She’s clever, this one. She snared Mark Antony, wrapped her legs around his waist and took him to her bed. You saw what happened at Actium. She deserted him and fled with her own ships, leaving him to die. And what did he do? He left his men and followed her back here. It was no wonder he killed himself.”

  Cleopatra bit her lip to keep from screaming at him. He was wrong. Everyone was wrong.

  “I only want to touch her,” stammered the first soldier. “Just to see what a queen feels like.”

  Cleopatra laughed her most seductive laugh, but from afar, she watched herself, horrified by her own actions. What was she trying to do? Surely not.

  “Free my wrists,” she cooed. “And see if the stories you’ve heard are true.”

  He bent closer, closer still. She felt her lips parting, as she inhaled the smell of his skin.

  “She’s supposed to be beautiful, but she doesn’t look beautiful to me,” the other soldier complained.

  Her wrists were free. She spread her hands and readied herself. The boy’s pale throat was inches from her mouth. His sweet smell was in her nostrils. She pressed her fingers against his chest and leaned toward the glorious, pulsing vein in his neck.

  At that moment, the other soldier drew the curtain back, and the newborn sun came in, a blinding rise as it broke over the horizon.

  “There,” he said. “Now we’ll get a look at her.”

  But the queen was cringing away from the burning light, stunned by what she had almost done. She threw her body into the shadows and turned her face to the wall. Her hands trembled, and with effort, she forced her muscles to be still. She was salivating, and her tongue felt rough, like that of a cat.

  “Leave me,” she said, and when they hesitated, she screamed the words again. “LEAVE ME!”

  They left, disgruntled. Changeable things, women. One moment ready for love, the next for war, and men never knew which was coming. They muttered their way down the corridor, their long bodies banging against the tapestries, the smell of their histories fading.

  The queen drew a breath. The danger was over.

  In the window, a bird appeared, and before Cleopatra knew what she was doing, her hand had snatched it from the sunrise, its hollow bones shattering in her grasp. The softness of its feathers. The throb of its racing heart. It still lived.

  She would not—

  She could not—

  She sobbed as she drank the swallow’s blood.

  10

  The tutor stood outside the entrance to the palaces, cursing himself. He could stay in Alexandria no longer. He’d miss the royal children. The girl was bright, a fiery thing. The boy, her twin, was dull in comparison, always wanting to play at battle, while his sister read in seven languages. In the employment of the queen, Nicolaus had set about training the children into scholars, though only the girl took to books. Now it was all for nothing. The city was taken, and no matter what had truly happened, he would be considered an enemy of the state.

  Though Cleopatra was imprisoned, he suspected she would not be for long. Allegiances would shift. He heard she’d met with Octavian, and perhaps seduced him. The people of the city were convinced that soon she’d be ruling again, this time with more power than before, new mistress to the Roman emperor. Their queen was resourceful in such matters.

  There were things about Cleopatra that only Nicolaus knew, however, and they disturbed his sleep.

  He’d felt it the moment she summoned Sekhmet. In the air over Cleopatra and Antony’s mausoleum, a flock of birds fell out of the sky. He knelt in the courtyard of the Museion, and picked up one of them. Its feathers were mysteriously singed, as though it had flown in the path of a meteor. Something had gone wrong with the spell.

  His spell. Nicolaus took off at a run for the mausoleum and Cleopatra, but he was too late.

  When he arrived, it was only to witness the queen of Egypt, her wrists tied behind her, being lowered out of the upstairs window by Octavian’s centurions. Her hands, face, and gown were covered in blood, and her eyes were black and bottomless with suffering. Nicolaus quickly turned away so she would not see him.

  He’d be blamed, whether the spell had failed or succeeded.

  It did not appear that it had succeeded.

  Later, though, Nicolaus bribed a physician to view the body of the legionary Cleopatra had killed. In the underground chamber in the Museion, he stood paralyzed with horror, looking down upon the raw wound where the corpse’s heart should have been. The queen had been in possession of a weapon of some kind, the doctors concluded. An exceedingly sharp though strangely rough-edged knife.

  Nicolaus feared that he knew better.

  He’d never understood why he, lowly tutor to the queen’s children, had been the one chosen to seek and then to translate the summoning spell, but he’d done it eagerly, nurturing some small thoughts of finding a deeper favor with
Cleopatra, even as the city seemed poised to fall.

  Before all this had happened, he’d been convinced that she would rise again, regain power over Egypt and perhaps other territories as well, and that when she did, he would rise with her. The queen’s historian. The queen’s lover, yes, say it, was what he most desired, and the summoning had been too tempting a project to resist. The opportunity to be near her, to meet with her in secret. He’d loved paging through the motheaten and worm-bitten records, catching the scents of ancient herbs, running his fingers across the brilliant colors of the hieroglyphs. At last, a crackling scroll of papyrus bound in a red cord. As he spread it out to view, parts of it disintegrated in his hands.

  The scroll depicted a summoning, a pharaoh kneeling over an altar, making cuts in his hands. The goddess herself was unmistakable, with her lioness head and the sun disc balanced over it, with her voluptuous female body. Nicolaus made a deep if somewhat rushed study into the elements of the spell, the snake skins and venoms, the honey, the herbs, the pigments and proper designs. The most important thing was, of course, the blood sacrifice. He made some guesses as to what else the spell might contain, some conclusions based on instinct, thinking of it as an academic exercise.

  He’d never imagined it could go this far.

  Nicolaus was a historian, after all, not a magician. He’d come most recently from Jerusalem, where he was employed as King Herod’s personal philosopher, following a dream of greater stature. Cleopatra and Antony seemed like the rulers who would eventually be remembered, while Herod seemed a waning force.

  Nicolaus cursed his ambition now. He’d been a fool. His actions had left him one choice: Flee Alexandria or die, and he had no plans to die here, at the beginning of his career.

  Nicolaus turned away from the shuttered palace windows and walked into the night, heading for the port. He’d find a ship and leave.

  He could never see Cleopatra again, he knew that much. Not if he valued his life.