Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  The felucca drifted lazily in the current. The captain had decided to press on to Naukratis and visit the whorehouses there, spend some of their Cleopatra-marked currency on women before the new emperor declared it worthless and demanded that it be reminted into coins in his own image. A warm breeze propelled the ship down the river at a reasonable speed, and the moon rose high in the sky.

  “I hear the redheaded whore came back,” the captain said.

  “I don’t know about her,” his crewman replied warily. “The last time I saw that woman, I had to visit a physician and drink something made of moths and frankincense. Cost me half my wages.”

  The captain laughed.

  “There’s always another whore. Five more, each one better than the last.”

  The seaman nodded in agreement and then looked up, the expression on his face changing. The captain glanced at him, curious. The pox must have been a terrible one to warrant such horror.

  “Look,” the crewman whispered, pointing over the captain’s shoulder.

  The captain spun lazily in his seat and then leapt to his feet.

  There she was, shining in the moonlight, their passenger, naked to the waist.

  “Lady,” the captain began. Where had she come from? She balanced her arms on the rail, her body still partially in the water. Was she injured? “We did not mean to leave you behind.”

  Something in her eyes transfixed him. They glowed, that was it. Even her short black hair seemed to shine. Her breasts hung heavy over the rail, the smooth skin glittering with droplets of water. She smiled.

  The captain smiled back, nervous. She was angry, he could feel it. It would be better to throw her off the vessel now, put her back into the waters and leave her to die. There was no explanation for her appearance here, two hours after she had fallen overboard. Surely, she could not swim as quickly as the felucca could sail.

  She shifted on the rail, pushing herself up higher, the better to climb aboard. The captain admired the rosettes of the woman’s nipples, the precise curve of her waist, her navel. It was most unusual to see a naked woman outside of a whorehouse. His gaze roved downward and then stopped, unbelieving.

  His passenger undulated her hips to push herself over the rail, and the captain jumped backward, feeling his gorge rising. He opened his mouth to scream, but the sound died. Impossible.

  The woman was half snake.

  “I hired you,” she said, too calmly, “and you left me.”

  The crewman, with startling presence of mind, laid hands on an axe normally used for rope cutting. He heaved it high in the air and swung it with all his strength toward her throat.

  Her tail whipped up out of the water and lashed around him, crushing him in its coils just as the blade touched her skin. The creature arced gracefully onto the deck, her body slithering from the depths, an endless serpentine length.

  The terrified captain pushed the pile of coins across the table, but she paid them no attention. He fell to his knees to beg for mercy. Surely, this was a deity he’d failed to ferry, and now he would die for his offense. She was a monster with the face of a goddess, scales catching the darkness and turning it to light.

  She rose up on her coils, high above him, and looked down upon him without benevolence. Her body writhed, nearly covering the entire deck. He felt her tail twist around his ankles, an icy strength.

  Would no one save him? There were no villages nearby. Out there in the dark, all that would hear him would be crocodiles and lions, bats and snakes.

  She wrapped about him, and his last thought was that she felt like a woman still, a strong and lovely woman, clutching his entire body as a woman would clutch him between her thighs. Her beautiful face was inches from his. He could almost forget what she was.

  “But you shouldn’t forget what I am,” she whispered, her voice bitterly sweet, her hair soft as silk as it wrapped about his fist. He tried to pull himself free, but he was already too weak.

  She looked into his eyes just before her fangs sank into his throat.

  23

  Cleopatra emerged from the river near Thebes and lay on the bank of the Nile, her naked skin basking in the darkness. She’d left the vessel behind hours before, still shocked by the glory of her transformation. Traveling underwater, her body skimming the silted floor, absorbing stories from every creature she touched, from every droplet of water that had come to the river from elsewhere in the world, she’d felt the histories of the raindrops that had fallen from the sky to become the Nile, and of the grains of sand that had once been the shells of animals. She’d felt the stories of the crocodiles and the fish, the water snakes and the creatures that drank from the river.

  She thought of the destruction she could wreak on the Romans in this new form. She could slip through underground passages, through places her human form could not travel. She could speak to animals, feel their needs and hungers. She could rise from beneath the Tiber, and the Romans would never know she was coming.

  She thought of the power she now possessed.

  Her mind had shifted while she was in the form of the serpent. The things that mattered to her human form suddenly meant little to her. It wasn’t until she surfaced at Thebes and her body became human again that she realized she’d left more than just her clothing and coins behind. She’d left Antony’s ashes as well.

  She should have left him in the mausoleum, safely buried; she knew it now, but it was too late. She moaned, imagining him without her. He was dead, she knew, but holding him had comforted her. His body was still in Egypt, she realized at last, and thus his soul remained here. The silver box that contained him would surely sink to the bottom of the river and never be found. His soul would be safe. She tried to calm her unease.

  She stood and walked toward the temple, a ghostly white skeleton perched on the horizon. As she walked closer, she could see that brush had grown up around it, and parts of the walls had crumbled. The temples to the old Egyptian gods were now largely abandoned, and Cleopatra knew that she herself was to blame. For twenty years, she’d largely ignored the native religions in favor of the Greek and Roman gods.

  A sleek, black granite statue of the ibis-headed god, Thoth, still stood sentry. She looked at the statue for a moment. This was the Egyptian god of knowledge and resurrection, the god who’d given Isis the magic words to bring her husband, Osiris, back to life, uniting the pieces of his body that had been scattered from end to end of the world. Why had Cleopatra not summoned him?

  She’d acted with only the spells she had, she reminded herself, trapped in the mausoleum as she had been. Osiris had not survived, in any case. Isis had lost him again, just as Cleopatra had lost Antony to a second death. Osiris had become the Lord of the Dead, and Isis had been left to grieve him.

  The New Isis. Cleopatra moved slowly toward the temple, all the rapture of her transformation forgotten.

  She entered one of the seven doorways, once resplendent with cedar and copper trims, but now empty of wood. The world and all its creatures might come in and out as they wished here. She made her way through the temple rooms, hearing nothing. The wise woman—the rekhet of this temple, the reason Cleopatra had come—was gone, or hidden.

  At last, she entered the sanctuary of Sekhmet and stopped, her breath coming quickly. She could feel the power here, different from that contained in the other rooms. There’d been recent sacrifices. Her nostrils flared. She could smell the blood. Nothing large. A hare. A bird.

  Against the back wall of the sanctuary was a tremendous statue of the goddess, smooth black stone carved into the shape of the familiar lioness with the body of a woman. A sun disc with a uraeus balanced atop the statue’s head, and over this, a portal in the stone admitted moonlight to illuminate her figure.

  Cleopatra stood in front of the statue, uncertain. The light glinted off the goddess’s pitiless features, and though Cleopatra knew that the statue was not the actuality, she still found herself trembling. The statue reminded her too clearly of the summonin
g, and the things she’d done in the mausoleum. The man’s heart in her hands. The brilliant absence of her own heart. She heard her voice giving Sekhmet anything. Anything I have is yours.

  It had been the right thing, surely. She had power now, beyond anything she’d dreamed. Enough to avenge Antony and Caesarion, enough to destroy her enemies.

  Why, then, was she afraid? What was there for her to fear?

  It was horribly quiet. There were not even any birds. She looked into the flat eyes of the icon, remembering the shining light within the living version, the sharp white teeth, the talons.

  Was this what she wanted to be?

  Did it matter? This was what she had become. She could feel it.

  Suddenly, the hair rose all over her body.

  “There is no need to fear me,” said a voice from the room behind her. “I am the last priestess of this temple.”

  Cleopatra spun, placing her back against the statue, feeling its stone claws digging into her shoulders. “I do not fear you,” she said, her voice clear and queenly. But somehow, she did.

  A white-haired woman stood before Cleopatra, gazing at her with thin-lipped reserve. She walked forward and draped Cleopatra’s naked body with a pale, red-bordered robe.

  “This is your home, and you are welcome here,” the priestess said quietly, but there was a note in her voice of something other than welcome. Cleopatra looked at her, but the woman’s eyes revealed nothing, and her thoughts were veiled. “Come with me.”

  The priestess led her from the sanctuary and into an open area. In any other temple, there would have been soft carpets, goblets of wine. Here, there was only the darkness and the chill of the marble floor. A tiny animal, some rodent or lizard, skittered across the stones and was gone. Cleopatra felt her head snapping to the side, following its progress into the night. Her tongue rasped against her teeth.

  “I have been waiting for you,” said the priestess. “I felt it when you joined her. The earth shook, the animals fled, and I knew one would come. What is it you seek?”

  “Knowledge,” Cleopatra managed through the hunger that had overtaken her.

  “What knowledge? Two have become one,” said the priestess. “You share your soul with the goddess I serve. Though I am certain you know that already.”

  “I do not know enough. You will tell me what you know of her,” Cleopatra said. “Where she came from. What she desires. I came only as a courtesy.”

  “You came to learn how best to kill those who have offended you. You know already what kind of deity the Scarlet Lady is, or I mistake you,” the rekhet said.

  “Tell me,” Cleopatra insisted, and the priestess relented, speaking slowly and deliberately, as though she’d long ago memorized the narrative.

  “Sekhmet was born out of Ra’s divine eye, a messenger sent to light up the waters of chaos and to find lost things. Her first task was to locate Ra’s two disloyal children, Tefnut and Shu, who’d abandoned their father. The tears Ra cried upon being reunited with them created humanity, but Ra cried no tears of gratitude to Sekhmet. Instead, he created a new eye to replace her, and placed her in his crown as a cobra spitting fire. The humans created of Ra’s tears prospered, filling the earth with their lovemaking and children, with their eating and singing. The gods prospered, filling the firmament with their lovemaking and children, with their sacrifices and their magic, with their rituals and with the singing of their acolytes. Sekhmet was left spitting fire from Ra’s crown, the only one defending her father from his enemies, the only loyal child.

  When Ra was old and weak, and humans began to rise up against him, he sent Sekhmet to the desert as a lioness to slaughter the traitors. That day, she created pain and death, which had not existed in the world before. She killed everything she saw, drinking the blood of the world indiscriminately. Ra changed his mind in the middle of her massacre, taking pity on his dying human children. He tricked Sekhmet by mixing the Nile with drugged pomegranate juice. She saw its color and thought it was blood. When she staggered and fell to her knees, when she slid beneath the Nile’s waters, crying as she fell, Ra threw her back into the heavens, and there she stayed. Until you brought her to earth again.

  “I am the last of my line,” the rekhet continued, looking out into the darkness beyond the temple. “Here, we have honored Ra and pacified the Lady of Slaughter with sacrifices. We’ve worked for centuries to keep humankind safe from her fury. The believers have become few, and the land changes around us. The Roman gods have come to our land. You know this much. Were you not once a queen?”

  The rekhet took her hand and touched her palm. Cleopatra flinched at her expression.

  “You were,” she said, her fingers traveling over the skin, her tone increasingly hostile. “Though you are not now. Did you not invite the invaders into your bed? Did you not call to the Romans, worship their gods, sacrifice to their altars? All that has happened was your doing. Did you not proclaim yourself a goddess? Now you are dead, or so they say.”

  The priestess dropped Cleopatra’s hand, poured something from a tiny, elegant bottle into an alabaster goblet, and sipped from it.

  “Are you dead?” she asked.

  “I am not!” Cleopatra cried, fighting the urge to strike this crone, this woman who knew nothing about what she was saying.

  “Are you certain?” the priestess asked.

  Cleopatra’s mind spun. Dead? She was not dead. And a betrayer of Egypt?

  What did this woman know about power? What did she know about the demands put on the powerful? She was a priestess of a forgotten religion. The rekhet should be thanking her queen, not judging her.

  “What does Sekhmet desire?” the priestess continued, as though Cleopatra had not spoken. “She desires the end of everything. Can you not feel it? There is no place for her in Ra’s boat, no home for her in the Duat. She was banished by her family, and she lives in endless hunger, searching for prey. You brought her sacrifice. You gave her enough to revive her, enough to bring her from the heavens. She desires an ocean of blood in payment for the wrongs that were done her. She will use you to get it. There is no peaceful end for you. You will wander with Sekhmet.”

  Cleopatra felt an echoing loneliness rising inside her.

  “This is a passing form. Until I have my vengeance on Rome,” she said.

  “And then?” the priestess asked.

  “Then I will die,” said Cleopatra. “I will join my husband in the Duat.”

  The rekhet laughed, a laugh as old and sad as the temple itself. “You will not,” she said. “You are her slave now, and she does not die.”

  “Surely, there is a ritual, a spell of separation,” Cleopatra said.

  The rekhet shook her head.

  “You cannot reclaim your ka from her,” she said. “You gave your soul willingly. She grows stronger each day with your sacrifices. You are a rare prize for one such as she. A queen of Egypt. She’ll fulfill her nature with you. Together, you will make war. Together, you will kill. The rivers will run red, and you will drink the blood in them. You are an immortal now, and you will serve her.”

  “I will not,” said Cleopatra, surprising herself, her voice shaking. “I will not be a slave.”

  “Yet you will hunger. Will you stop yourself? Can you?” The rekhet looked deep into Cleopatra’s eyes, judging her. “You’ve shed blood. You’ve started wars. It was your nature long before she found you. She chose wisely. Together, you will return the world to chaos. This is your destiny.”

  “Is there not a poison?” said Cleopatra, desperate. There must be something that would separate her. Something that would kill her. Her revenge must be done, but she could not live this way forever, hungering. Murdering.

  Alone and enslaved.

  “You are past poisons,” said the priestess, and her face shifted into what might have been a smile. “I am not.”

  The rekhet indicated her goblet, drained of the liquid it had contained, and then closed her eyes and leaned back against the pillar.
She was ancient, Cleopatra saw now. The power that had filled her had made her look younger, but now her skin was wizened.

  “I, and my sisters, have sacrificed at this temple for thousands of years, to keep the goddess at peace, to keep her at rest,” the rekhet whispered, her voice ragged, as the poison began to take effect. “You have undone our work. She is released to do her will, and you with her, hand in hand, heart in heart, soul in soul. You belong to her.”

  Cleopatra leaned forward to hear her final, rasping words.

  “I will not stay to see the world you make.”

  24

  The ghost ship drifted near Damanhur for two days before Octavian’s men brought it to his attention. The villagers refused to approach it. There’d been sounds on the night the ship appeared, screams and struggling. One of the children of the village had seen something tremendous and dark lashing in the water.

  “No doubt the captain fell overboard and was eaten by crocodiles,” Octavian said, disgusted anew at the notion of governing this superstitious, illogical country, even from afar, but his messenger, having visited the villagers, disagreed.

  “They say it was something else,” he insisted. “Something they’ve never seen before.”

  One of Octavian’s legions encountered something in the area as well, some sort of serpent. He felt mildly curious upon hearing the report, though the incident clearly had nothing to do with the missing Cleopatra. A snake, not a woman.

  As the hours and days wore on, however, with no sign of either the queen or Nicolaus the Damascene anywhere in Alexandria, he began to feel a disquieting sense of something familiar about descriptions of that snake.

  When he looked into Cleopatra’s eyes, had he not seen some sort of serpent thrashing? In memory, it appeared to him again, its mouth stretched wide and filled with sharpened teeth. Venom dripped from them. The beast in the vision had risen up from an arena, which now he realized he knew all too well.

  The Circus Maximus. He’d seen Rome.