Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Dress me in my wedding robes,” she said. “And bring me my crown.”

  When Charmian had tied every ribbon and fastened every clasp, washed her feet and fitted them into her sandals, and veiled her hair with cloth of gold, Cleopatra bent her head as though in modesty.

  “How do I look?” she asked.

  “Beautiful, my queen,” the girl said, a thrum of delicious hope moving through her now. She was to live. She would be free.

  “I would pay you for your service,” said Cleopatra.

  The girl was not accustomed to being paid. She stood on her toes, startled. Then she thought she would take what was offered. Gold, perhaps. Enough to keep her quiet, and certainly enough to make a life elsewhere.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for the honor.”

  She held out her hands.

  More, said Sekhmet’s voice, rising up from inside Cleopatra. More.

  Deep inside the queen, a tiny human voice cried out in opposition, demanding to know what she was doing, ordering her to stop. She banished it. She was no one’s slave. She would not take orders, least of all from something so weak, so powerless.

  “I pay you the greatest honor of all,” Cleopatra said to her slave. “You feed your queen.”

  When she finished, she lay back upon her gilded couch, dizzy with pleasure. Her body was sated, and her eyelids felt heavy for the first time in days.

  While drinking from the girl’s throat, something wonderful had occurred. A reward, perhaps, from the one she fed. Her heart, quiet all these days, began to beat. Slowly at first, and then more quickly.

  She had not lost it after all, and with a heart, she could still enter heaven. If her heart was in her breast, it could be weighed in the Underworld. It could tell Osiris of her deeds on earth and bear witness for her in the court of the dead. She would be allowed into the Duat.

  With Antony.

  It was his death that had given her this power. It would not be in vain. The heartbeat hadn’t lasted long, just a few minutes, but it had been enough to reassure her that she still lived, that she was still Cleopatra.

  She would avenge his murder. She would fling these villains from her palace. She’d seize her children from their clutches. She would find Caesarion in Myos Hormos and bring him home. She needed no army this time. She had the strength of a thousand, here, in her fingertips.

  She would kill everyone who opposed her.

  For the first time since all this had begun, sleep swept over Cleopatra like a veil.

  She would dream, for just a little while, and then she would go forth into the world.

  13

  At last, the queen of Egypt was dead. Octavian had been uncertain how much longer he’d be able to bear occupying the palace with her.

  His official resistance to her suicide had been a mere formality, a necessary evil meant to win her subjects to his side. He’d imagined she would be more resourceful. Every time he met with her, he’d half hoped to find her strangled or stabbed, and instead, she looked at him through sunken eyes, starving herself for all to see.

  At last, gritting his teeth, certain that Cleopatra would be forced to kill herself to avoid being taken as a trophy to Rome, he leaked the rumor himself and caused the guards about her chamber to be reduced. Then he waited, tapping his foot, agonizing with both guilt and rapture.

  Five hours later, it was done. The spy sent to peer in at the peephole confirmed as much, and now it was time for the official discovery of the body.

  He could barely contain the sound that threatened to erupt from his mouth, a sort of gasping sob. He clenched his teeth. It would not do. Marcus Agrippa was looking at him, and as a concession to his general’s paranoia of lurking assassins, the new ruler of Egypt sent Agrippa before him to knock down the door of the queen’s bedchamber, while he tried to master his emotions. It was triumph, that was all. Triumph long desired, long deserved.

  Cleopatra had sent incoherent messages to Octavian in the last few days, demands that she be placed beside her husband in the mausoleum, whether she be dead or alive, begging pleas about the fate of her children, but he would not honor them. They were the requests of a whore. He was an emperor. What use did he have for her last wishes? He had what he needed from her. The locations of Alexandria’s treasures, including Caesarion, the heir to Egypt’s throne.

  Only Marcus Agrippa disapproved of Octavian’s methods. He was more tight-lipped than usual, more terse, but the man was a traditionalist. Octavian was the new world. Agrippa would come around. He always did.

  Octavian stepped into the room, behind Agrippa. It was aggravatingly dark in here, but a couple of lamps burned low.

  He started at an unexpected movement in the shadows, near where he assumed the body of Cleopatra would be lying. His men raised their swords, only to see that the queen’s pretty little serving slave was still in the room, on her knees beside the queen’s body, adjusting the diadem.

  Octavian looked at the girl’s trembling hands. No doubt, they’d surprised her as she was in the act of thieving.

  She was strange-looking, this servant. Her skin seemed bruised, and her eyes rolled in her head. Her lips were blue.

  “What is wrong, Charmian?” one of Octavian’s soldiers asked, moving toward her.

  She turned toward the men and gave them a look of betrayal.

  “The queen is dead,” she said. “And I am dead, too. I do my last duty that I may go to heaven.”

  She slipped to the floor, and Octavian’s man ran to her side. He looked up, grim. At his feet, the body of the other handmaiden lay contorted.

  Octavian rejoiced internally. All were dead, and at the queen’s hand. That made things easier. He’d make a show of sorrow and convince the citizens that none of it was his doing. Tears sprang to his eyes in advance of the performance. He’d trained himself well. Some of the tears, it occurred unpleasantly to him, were real, but he would not think on that now.

  He’d bring her corpse to Rome with him. Those mummies of the ancient days were impressive things, in their gilded wooden cases. Octavian’s hero, Alexander the Great, had been treated so, and his grave, near Cleopatra’s palaces, contained his body, glittering in a sarcophagus. That was an old tradition, though. Not Roman, not Greek. And he wouldn’t do Cleopatra such honors. To be worshipped long after her death.

  Octavian would have her corpse draped with plain linen, and he’d place her atop a rolling cart surrounded with flowers, a parade spectacle with her children in chains behind her. They’d all know it to be her that way. There would be no rumors of an empty coffin.

  When that was finished, he’d scatter Cleopatra’s ashes in Italy, do it himself, make a public ceremony of it. She, who had stolen Mark Antony from Rome, would feed the soil of his country with her dust.

  Tensing his jaw, Octavian stepped closer to the queen’s corpse, dodging around Agrippa, who stood, ridiculously, with his sword still drawn.

  There she was, wrapped in a cloth of sheer, spun gold with a royal purple border. She reclined on a gilded dais, her body as supple and curving as it had been in life, and—

  He would not look at her body.

  “You will have a long life,” she’d said sixteen years before, and now she was dead, and he stood over her corpse.

  She was still wearing the same perfume.

  Disgusted with himself, Octavian shook the past from his mind.

  He would melt this entire palace into money and thank the gods for it. Rome would be rich again, as it was meant to be. He’d pay his soldiers. It had been a near thing, bringing them here unpaid, with all her treasure hidden in that mausoleum, and her threatening to set the place on fire, but Egypt was conquered at last.

  Cleopatra’s breasts were clearly visible through the cloth, he noticed, one completely bare, the nipple erect, as though recently touched. Or kissed. Her arm was thrown back, the better to display the indecency.

  Octavian—no, Augustus; that was the name he’d chosen and by which he
would soon be known—snorted in revulsion. Whatever poison the queen had consumed, it had treated her as a lover. She was a changed woman from their last meeting a few days earlier, when she’d inexplicably revealed the location of Caesarion. He could only assume she’d been delirious with grief. Why else would she have been so foolish? Gray and gaunt, her eyes blackened, she’d certainly looked ill. Nothing about her had attracted him then. It had been a relief.

  In death, however, Cleopatra nearly glowed, and a sheen of perspiration covered her skin. Her position was appalling, one knee bent, the other leg dangling off the edge of the couch. Her back had arched, seizing in her last moments, no doubt.

  It was too quiet in this room, far from the noise of the city.

  He’d won. His enemies were dead. It puzzled Octavian that he did not feel peaceful.

  He moved toward Cleopatra to adjust her draperies, he told himself, to protect her from prying eyes, but in fact, he wanted to run his fingers over her skin, press his lips to her throat. He wanted to—

  “Summon doctors,” he said, jolting away from her. “Let them determine how she fell.”

  Agrippa bent over the queen, pulling aside the scarf twined about her neck.

  “There’s no need,” he said. “It was an asp. Here’s the mark of its bite.”

  Octavian leapt back.

  “Kill it,” he ordered, suppressing the tremor in his voice.

  “It has gone already,” Agrippa replied. Octavian glanced suspiciously about the throne room. It could be hiding anywhere: in the queen’s garments or those of her maids. Beneath the furnishings. How had it gotten into the room in the first place? Smuggled in, no doubt. The queen was sly. He approached her again, willing himself to breathe normally.

  “Show us the marks,” he ordered. “And summon the Psylli. We will do everything that can be done. Perhaps she is not dead yet.”

  The marks of the fangs were strangely large, and bright against the pallor of her skin. Octavian looked at them for a moment, disturbed, and then turned away. Whatever had bitten her, it had not been a typical asp but something much larger. It was a painful and strange way to die. Why did she look so calm?

  The troupe of snakebite magicians came and knelt to the queen’s throat to suck forth the venom, but she did not revive.

  “She is dead,” the leader of the Psylli said, his dark face grave. “But her soul is not far gone. Something is strange with her. She is not as she seems.”

  Octavian shrugged at the man’s phrasing. What did Rome care for her soul?

  He dismissed the Psylli, paying them in gold. Word of the queen’s suicide and of the emperor’s attempts to save her would be all over the city by nightfall.

  Agrippa hesitated at the doorway.

  “Go,” Octavian said. “I’m nearly done here.”

  When Agrippa had gone, Octavian bent over Cleopatra one last time, to remove her crown. He let his hand rest on her breast, still amazingly soft. One would think her heart still beat.

  He bent closer, inhaling her perfume, telling himself that he was simply taking the measure of his enemy. One last conversation with his foe, before she was gone forever.

  “Caesar taught me that true leaders fight with words instead of swords,” he told her. “An army hears an order they think is from their queen, and they turn on their commander. A man hears a message that his queen has killed herself, and he acts to save his own honor. Have I done as you would have done, had you come to my country with your army? Now you will travel to Rome with your emperor. You, who said you belonged to no one, belong to me.”

  He leaned closer yet. He pressed his mouth against her parted lips, and then—

  The queen’s eyes opened.

  14

  For the rest of his life, the emperor would remember what he saw that day, looking into the eyes of a dead queen. Visions, he thought at first. Prophecy, he realized as they went on. He was seeing what would come.

  He saw the future laid out before him like polished gems on a black cloth, each moment distinct, each moment vibrating with its own horror.

  Black clouds filled with slashing lights. Crippled bodies, skeletons. Ships beached on dying shores. Rats swarming bodies, covering them so completely that no skin was left visible. These were the trappings of war, Octavian tried to tell himself. Though he was a young man, he’d commanded armies. He had seen civilization.

  This, this blazing place, this horror, was nothing like it.

  Here, soldiers herded women and children into machines, tore away their rags, their shoes, their belongings, held metal sticks at eye level as their victims stood against fences, hands behind their heads, waiting for death to take them. Here, child warriors slew other child warriors, brandishing cleavers and metal rods, throwing something that blasted hearts away, carousing in an ecstasy of violence, singing and whooping as they smashed the skulls of less lucky children. Here, the naked and the dying ran through the roads of some dark city, their skin melting away, their mouths gaping with horror.

  Wolves prowled cobbled streets, stalking lanes that still held homes. A baby cried out, only to be snatched up by an animal. He saw a flamehaired, white-faced woman crowned with gold, her mouth stretching in a cry of agony, a bearded man throwing his hands into the air, summoning some vast, horned creature. He saw an island of fire, a river of lava, creatures flying through the sky.

  A human heart on a scale, a weighing.

  A tremendous serpent thrashed and coiled, its fangs shining in the moonlight, high above an arena strangely familiar to Octavian. Metal monsters flew through the air and ignited, screaming people leaping from inside them, and below it all, the blood ran, scarlet rivers of it surging into the oceans and coloring the waters. The great beasts of the sea rose up, fins and teeth, battling over bloated corpses.

  The sky rained fire.

  Octavian saw himself suddenly as though in a nightmare, a slight, young man walking down a deserted road, and behind him, a lioness padding softly, her maw dripping with gore.

  He shouted from afar, trying to send a warning, and the lion—no longer on the road but, impossibly, with him in the palace—turned to look at him, her body shifting, growing larger.

  She was a woman now, with a lion’s head, and she gazed upon him, seeing him utterly. He felt his organs dissolving and a red miasma floating over his eyes. The creature’s mouth curved into a smile, and Octavian was transported again to a place that seemed, for a moment, peaceful.

  A green orchard, a star-spattered sky, and himself, walking the paths between the trees. He was old now, older than his true father had been when he’d died, older than Caesar, too. His skin was as dry as papyrus and his hands, opening before him, were spotted with age. His spine was hunched, and one leg was short, hobbled. He chewed his meal with rotting teeth, and swallowed painfully.

  He looked nervously into the darkness, feeling himself watched by a predator. He tried to cry out, but his throat seized, and something burned its way through his center.

  Then he saw her, Cleopatra, unchanged, standing in the shadows. She stepped toward him, her hands outstretched, her fingers tipped with talons. He saw her pointed teeth bared. He felt her breath on his face.

  Above him, the trees spread their darkness against the sky, blotting out the stars, and he was falling backward, convulsing, vomiting fire.

  “Guards!” he screamed, and Marcus Agrippa charged into the throne room, leading his men.

  Octavian was drenched in sweat, and he found that he was down before Cleopatra. Kneeling to her. He couldn’t stand. The men, swords drawn, ran from end to end of the room, searching for the enemy that had upset their leader. Agrippa knelt beside Octavian.

  “Are you ill? Do you need a physician?” asked Agrippa, and he couldn’t answer.

  Her eyes were shut now, as though they had never opened, as though he’d never seen into the depths of—what? What had he seen? He knew one thing, and that was that he never wanted to see such visions—such omens—again.

>   “What happened here?” Agrippa demanded. “Is there an enemy?”

  “She was—” Octavian stopped. Agrippa would not believe him. How could he tell him that a dead woman was not dead? That he’d seen a vision of the end of days in her eyes? Agrippa would think he was mad.

  “I thought I saw the asp, but I was mistaken.” Struggling to his feet, Octavian commanded, “Bury her.” He wanted nothing to do with his previous plan to take her corpse with him to Rome and parade it through the streets as proof of his victory. “Bury her with Antony, if that is what she wants so much. Wall up the tomb with two layers of mortared stone. Make sure there are no entrances or exits. We do not want anything getting out. Set guards around the perimeter. Give them the best weapons.”

  Agrippa looked at him, bewildered.

  “Getting out?” he asked.

  “Do you question me?” Octavian asked, regaining his authority at last. Finally, he could draw a breath. His damp garments chilled against his skin, even in the heat of the room. He would not look at the queen. He would not.

  Her eyes had been bottomless. He had seen in them the very sphere of the sky, the edges of the horizon, and the green, living world, just before it all went dark.

  He would burn her body, if he only knew what would result. It might spur the visions to take place, like a spark to kindling, and he’d be the man who begat the end of the world.

  No, he thought, his breath coming too quickly, his head spinning, the safest course would be to wall her up with the man she’d wanted so badly. The proper rituals, a funeral fit for a queen, for a wife. That would placate her. That was what she had wanted, after all, this soulless creature, this thing. Love.

  “Don’t touch her!” he shouted as one of the men laid a hand on the queen’s arm. What if she woke? The men, accustomed to carrying out peculiar orders, lifted the couch with Cleopatra upon it and carried her over their heads, making a funerary procession. But Agrippa remained, eyeing Octavian worriedly.