Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  All of this had been set in motion by Octavian’s lies.

  When she found him, she would hurt him as he had hurt her.

  The palace seethed with activity when first she entered, servants running from room to room, the foul scent of roasting meat, excited gossip, but as the day passed, the place quieted. Octavian had left the palaces just before she’d arrived, or so she gleaned from listening to the chatter. He’d taken a mass of his soldiers, bodyguards, and armor, kindling, and firepots, and gone out into the tombs. Starting a tiny war somewhere in her city, she imagined.

  When at last she emerged from the cellar, creeping along a kitchen wall, the place was nearly empty. The creature she finally spoke with was ancient, a blind crone hovering over a basin, scrubbing away at some vile root.

  “Where are the other servants?” Cleopatra asked her.

  “Are you not one of us?” the crone asked.

  “I’ve been away,” Cleopatra said, trying to repress her regal tone. This was not the sort of conversation she would normally have with a slave.

  “They’ve gone to the execution,” the servant said.

  This was a stroke of luck, though who might Octavian be killing now? His own soldiers? She would not be surprised by such an act. He would kill his trusted allies. Antony had been his friend, his teacher, and look at what he’d done to him.

  There was no one left to war against. The city had surrendered. Mark Antony was dead, and so was she, for all Octavian knew. She looked forward to seeing his face when she proved that assumption wrong. Her mouth filled with saliva. Hunger. She still could not remember the last time she’d eaten. Something about the shock of her false burial, she concluded. There were gaps in her memory. It was a blur of light, a glimpse of red that failed to resolve into anything clear.

  Cleopatra found a kitchen knife. In the dark, she held out a lock of her hair and sawed it off, shuddering as it drifted to the floor, braided strands and loose ones. A single shining twist of silver. Her hair had been beautiful, and the coif she’d been buried with, dressed by Charmian, was complex, each knot signifying something specific. Those things were gone. She grieved them as much as she gloried in her new state. Free, she reminded herself. Free.

  Soon, it was all sheared, cut into a rough tumble, and her head bound up in a swath of dirty cloth. She washed the paints from her face with cold, greasy water. She looked like a slave. None of the assembled would know her for their queen. Still, she would cover herself fully, for though the day was waning, the sun shone low in the sky, and she did not imagine she would be immune to its rays. She wrapped the box containing Antony’s ashes in a piece of cloth and slung it over her shoulder before dressing herself in a robe, a pair of leather sandals, and a rough traveling cloak stolen from one of the cook’s chambers.

  At last, she veiled her head and made her way into the city, following the sounds of reveling.

  Her enemy would be at the execution. She looked forward to seeing his face when she appeared before him.

  18

  Octavian strode onto the platform where the accused awaited him. Cleopatra was the reason for this. The only reason. She’d forced Octavian’s hand, and he resented it, but he had to find her.

  It had taken only a moment to determine that the queen was gone from her mausoleum. The chain that had bound her draped the pyre like a glittering veil, and the fastenings that had bound the chain itself to the teak were destroyed.

  Something, or someone, had clawed the wood away.

  As for how she’d escaped the building, he could not tell. Octavian himself, claiming that he sought some forgotten treasure inside the mausoleum, had required stonemasons to break into the covered window at the top of the building, and there was no other way in or out, not that he could see. The witch had spirited herself away.

  Well, he would spirit her back.

  Somewhere out there, she was watching him. He seethed, despite his dread. He was surrounded by guards, and it would not be he who died today. Marcus Agrippa stood beside him, and though he remained bewildered by the episode in the mausoleum, the general was the most reliable defender a man could ask for.

  Octavian caught a glimpse of the criminal’s liquid golden eyes, those long limbs beneath the Roman toga, and he feared that he was not making the right decision.

  The boy gave him a pleading stare. Octavian turned away and cleared his throat.

  “Citizens of Alexandria,” he said, looking down into the wild-eyed crowd. She was not visible, if she was here. “Your emperor addresses you.”

  The crowd cheered for him, and though he knew it to be false—they were Egyptians, after all, cheering for a conqueror—it pleased him.

  “This man stands accused of treason,” he continued. Treason? He made up the accusation as he said it. “He is Caesarion, son of Cleopatra, who herself conspired against the Roman Empire and against her own people.”

  Octavian had sent riders to Koptos and Myos Hormos as soon as Cleopatra revealed where the boy had gone. His messengers caught up with the boy’s trusted tutor, Rhodon, at a roadside inn, and as the boy slept, innocent of betrayal, the price for a peaceful delivery had been negotiated. Five days before, even as Cleopatra was being buried in her mausoleum, Caesarion had been delivered back to Alexandria by Rhodon, who was paid a bounty in Egyptian gold for the task.

  Octavian had been undecided about what to do with Egypt’s heir. He could see his own adoptive father in the shape of the sixteen-year-old’s jaw, and it unsettled him.

  “How did my mother die?” the boy asked Octavian during dinner the night he arrived, a strong set to his mouth, sitting straight and true in his chair.

  “Suicide,” Octavian replied, and the boy nodded bravely, asking no further questions. Octavian straightaway took him out for weapons training, and the boy excelled, his smooth, copper skin shining in the sun, his form perfect. This boy, this Caesarion, was so obviously Julius Caesar’s son, Octavian could hardly bear to kill him.

  Octavian had slept restlessly, dreaming of taking Caesarion back to Rome and installing him in his own house. His wife, Livia, would protest, of course, but what place did Livia have to protest anything? She’d married him while pregnant with another husband’s child, and who would blame him for adopting a male heir when Livia had not provided one for him? This boy was Caesar’s own blood! Far better than Octavian’s stepson, Tiberius, who carried no heroic line in his ancestry. Just as Octavian had been adopted by Julius Caesar, Octavian would adopt Caesarion. It was fitting.

  The symmetry had pleased the emperor, and he’d been on the point of announcing his decision when the absence of Cleopatra’s body from her mausoleum changed things.

  Octavian needed a lure for the queen, and the son must serve. He announced that he’d changed his mind, that Caesarion could not be trusted.

  A bewildered Agrippa resisted this sudden shift in Octavian’s plans, insisting that if Caesarion had to be executed, it should be done in private. He feared a riot, angry Alexandrians resisting the death of their prince.

  Octavian could not bring himself to explain that the execution was a trap for a dead woman.

  Where was she? He scanned the crowd again.

  Perhaps she’d appear in the final moment. He signaled to his forces to remain on guard. The sun was setting, and he must kill the boy or lose the light. The crowd, whatever their loyalties, desired a death. All this was Cleopatra’s fault, and Octavian resented her for it.

  He took a deep breath and nodded to his centurion. He would not do this dirty thing himself. The crowd screamed with bloodlust, recognizing the gesture.

  “Traitor!” they cried, and pushed closer, some of them attacking each other in their excitement.

  His men raised their shields in a ceremonial gesture, and he searched the crowd one last time. No one. Only an old woman wrapped from head to toe in rough veils struck his eye, and she was at the farthest edge of the throng, pushing her way forward. Not the queen.

  Octavian glanced
toward the boy, questioning his haste in condemning him. Scarcely Cleopatra’s son at all. Far more the son of Caesar. He looked toward his advisors, wondering what excuse he could use to render this afternoon forgotten, wondering how he would calm the crowd should he not give them what they expected.

  Just then, the boy’s eyes blazed open, and he lurched in the grip of the centurion, flinging his arms upward and his body back. He kicked and connected with the older man’s leg, and the centurion lost his hold. Caesarion began to run, launching himself off the platform like a gazelle, and even in such dire circumstances, Octavion could only look upon him in wonder.

  Here was a warrior. Everyone had seen his bravery. The boy was a credit to his father’s country. Octavian moved his hand to call the execution off.

  “Pardon him!” he managed, but the noise of the crowd was too loud.

  They surged forward, fists in the air, throwing punches and bellowing, surrounding the boy.

  “Kill him!” they shouted, and Octavian’s centurion, now recovered, leapt off the platform with a roar of fury.

  19

  People kicked about Cleopatra, pulling and tugging at her robes. The scent of flesh seared her nostrils. She inhaled deeply, feeling the press of limbs against hers, the weight of bodies. Her fingers curled, hidden beneath her robe. Cleopatra could almost see the emperor, almost see his intended victim, whoever it was. She pushed her way forward, craning her neck for a view.

  She hungered, troubled by the gaps in her memory. Surely, she had last eaten weeks ago, before Antony’s death. She’d dined with her love, that was it. The night before he died.

  But somehow, she was not certain of that. There were flashes in her mind that felt like memory, pale skin, blood trickling.

  The last light of the sun shone directly on the shields ahead, reflecting into her eyes. Her wrappings were not enough to keep it from burning. She felt weak, with both hunger and heat, her skin sparking beneath its coverings, her eyes filling. She needed to get out of the light, but there was nowhere to go. She pushed herself deeper into the crowd toward Octavian.

  Odd. She caught a glimpse of someone she knew, close to the platform. It couldn’t be he, though. Rhodon the tutor was long gone, to Myos Hormos with her son Caesarion. She was mistaken.

  Drink, her body called, urging her onward.

  Octavian was somewhere up there, and even if she could not see him, she could smell his strange absence of odor. The smooth grayness of him, like a gap in all the other scents and thoughts. Ahead.

  She pressed forward, her mouth filling with saliva.

  Feed.

  A shaven-headed centurion appeared on the platform, his short toga newly white. Bleached in urine, and then rinsed in water until it passed for clean. Cleopatra wrinkled her nose, sniffing the foul Roman odor from where she stood, even if no one else in the crowd could smell it. The centurion leapt off the platform in pursuit of the victim, and then, suddenly, through a gap in the crowd, Cleopatra caught a glimpse of her son.

  Caesarion.

  His panicked face, his slender brown limbs scrabbling as he ran from his executioner. Cleopatra staggered with shock even as she shoved herself deeper into the crowd, toward him, toward him. It could not be.

  Why had he returned to Alexandria? He’d been safe, taken from the city by Rhodon. How had they found Caesarion? Who had betrayed him? It came to her, in a devastating realization.

  She had.

  “I am a family man,” Octavian had sworn, and she’d trusted him, thinking to save her other children, thinking to bargain with a fiend.

  She’d led the Romans to her son.

  “KILL HIM!” the crowd screamed, pummeling one another in their desire to snatch at Caesarion’s garments. Cleopatra saw knives flashing out of concealment and smelled blood being shed all around her.

  With the bloodshed, everything came rushing back to her, all that she had done, her maid arching backward, struggling to free herself from Cleopatra’s clutches. The other girl, paling quietly, as her body dropped like a shed garment to the floor of the queen’s chamber. Cleopatra gasped, convulsing with the memories, but she could not afford to let them stop her.

  She threw herself forward, clawing her way closer to her child, her voice drowned by the rioting around her.

  “CAESARION!” she screamed, fighting the crowd. The last rays of sun shot through a gap in the buildings, and light flared off the raised shields of the legionaries, momentarily blinding Cleopatra and amplifying the heat. She lost her balance and stumbled to the ground, stunned and weakened, her clothing in disarray, her veil sliding off to bare her face to the glare, blistering her skin instantly.

  Fingers tore at her clothes, and sandaled feet kicked her trapped body. Her bones shifted in her skin, crushed and then repaired. Her cheekbone shattered under a heel. She felt her arms break and then knit themselves back together.

  She knew the mind of the crowd then, with that horrible knowing. They hated her, hated the royal family for their neglect, for their distance, for their scandal, for their Greek ancestry. They hated her for losing their city to Rome. It was her fault that they were inflamed now against her child. They demanded a sacrifice.

  She screamed wordlessly from the ground, pushing herself up, rising, rising.

  Her son threw his hands into the air and shouted a desperate proclamation.

  “Hear me!” he cried, his voice cracking, speaking in Greek. “Hear me! I am your king! I am son of the Ptolemies! I will rule over you! I will keep you safe from the Romans! They will enslave Egypt! I will keep you free!”

  He repeated his declaration in Latin and then in Egyptian, to prove that he was a man of the people, but his voice was drowned by the sounds of rioting. His words were exactly the wrong ones.

  “I AM YOUR KING!” the boy shouted again, and Cleopatra struggled to her knees, the sun still searing her flesh, her eyelids blistering, glimpsing her son mere lengths from her now, almost within reach.

  Just as her fingers touched him, a centurion appeared behind her child, raised his hands to Caesarion’s throat, and placed them on his perfect skin.

  “Kill him!” the crowd screamed, and she tore at the centurion’s tunic, desperate to get to her son before he did. This could not happen. Not this. Not while she watched.

  Someone kicked her in the face, throwing her back to the ground, and her eldest child disappeared, dragged into a sea of hungering, murderous bodies as she was dragged in the opposite direction.

  She could not reach him.

  She saw, fleetingly, pale gray eyes, light hair, a laurel crown, as the emperor fled the platform. He would not even watch what he had set in motion.

  She heard the sound of bones giving way as the centurion wrapped his fingers around Caesarion’s throat. She heard her son’s last breath as the Roman broke his neck.

  Her howl of agony shook the buildings of the agora, calling the crows in chaos down from the sky, but it did not stop what was happening. It did not stop anything.

  20

  The boy died quietly, gracefully, in the manner of a king. Octavian was able to watch only a moment of it before he was forced to turn away. It had taken twenty-three thrusts of his betrayers’ daggers to bring Caesarion’s father down, and Caesarion was more a man than Octavian himself, who vomited from the platform as he heard the bones in the boy’s neck shatter.

  Then, there was that sound, that unearthly, animal howl, which came from no discernible place, from no discernible person. The crowd boiled before him, and crows filled the sky, circling and shrieking.

  Octavian was suddenly aware of how exposed he was.

  The crowd erupted before Octavian, rushing toward the body of the boy, and the centurions pulled their leader away, pressed him into a litter, drew the curtains. There was blood on Octavian’s white toga; he could see it, scarlet droplets standing out from the ivory linen.

  The queen had not appeared. Where could she be? What army might she be raising against him? Octavian secure
d an extra slave to taste his food, in case she thought to poison him. It was a faint protection. She could be anywhere. She could be part of his own army, hidden in the guise of a man. He called his troops to order and had them inspected. Agrippa, his only trusted general, tore their tunics from their bodies, revealing all their scars and puckered battle wounds.

  She was not among them, though part of the emperor now desired to execute everyone who had accompanied him to Alexandria. Any of them could be guilty of hiding her. Any of them could have been seduced by her magic. They could be plotting against him even now. He well remembered her beauty, echoed in that of her son. Now the son was dead and the mother was not, and Octavian could neither sleep nor eat. Dread overcame him in his bedchamber, and when he sat at his table, his fear of poisoning was too great to allow him to partake of anything more than a dry crust of bread.

  He remembered a hideous story involving the queen of Parthia, who had dined in peacetime with an enemy. The enemy, watching the queen’s robust consumption of her meal, had believed he was safe.

  He was wrong.

  The queen had coated one side of the serving knife with a lethal dose of poison and left the other side clean. When she sliced the meat, the poisoned side calculatedly went to her foe, while she innocently served herself the other half of the dish.

  This queen, Octavian’s enemy, was easily as intelligent and crafty. He trusted nothing, not until he was safely ensconced in Rome, though he knew that there was no way to be entirely protected, not even in his own city. How could he have let her escape him? She’d been his, conquered and killed. And yet she lived.

  He had let her live, and every moment she lived ensured his death.

  He sent patrols in search of her, turning up every paving stone, investigating every secret passage. Agrippa’s men searched the kitchens, the far warrens of the palace rooms, the Soma itself, and there was no trace of Cleopatra.