Outside the doorway, snow drifted over the pines. In her own land, the gods came in the northern lights, glancing their fires across the skies, spinning clouds from their looms, singing with the thunder. Here, they did not even know that her homeland existed. Oceanus, they called it, as though it were not a true place, as though the water stretched to cover the world apart from them. Still, she had been here for years, had come across the ocean to this forest. Her part in the pattern had dictated that she place herself here. The sound of hooves on the frozen land was distinct, and Auðr cursed quietly. She had not expected the Romans so soon.
Auðr was a fate spinner, a seiðkona, but for the first time in her life, she was unable to see the entirety of the future. Something grave had changed in the world, and for months she’d tried in vain to understand what it was. She knew only that there were torn threads in the pattern, a dark disturbance in the tapestry of time.
Destruction and bloodshed, old gods rising.
Death.
If all humanity was fated to die or to descend into pain and chaos, it was not the place of a seiðkona to try to change it, Auðr knew; she was not supposed to interfere in the fate of the world, but she could not stop herself. Though she was not as strong as she had been in her youth, Auðr had spent her life keeping chaos from finding purchase in an orderly universe. She did not fear death, but she feared that it would take her before she finished her work.
She was far from her home, far from her people, and she had broken the rules.
Two days before, she’d irrevocably transgressed by braiding the threads of her own fate to the ones that began the tangle.
Before her, the girl’s head lolled back, her eyes rolling like those of a terrified animal. The seiðkona curled her aching fingers about her distaff, her seiðstafr, twisting and arranging the threads of destiny about the girl and her child as quickly as she could. The girl screamed, and then writhed, arching up from the bed, her body controlled by Auðr’s power.
The fate spinner caught the baby between her hands. A girl child. Still. Pale as a fish. Lips and eyelids deep blue. No spark of life there, no heartbeat.
She’d been dead three hours, perhaps longer.
Pounding on the door, shouting, horses. The seiðkona clenched her hand around the distaff. Her fingers worked, reweaving the child’s threads into a new pattern. Everyone had a place in the tapestry, and this soul would have one. She would have a life filled with ordinary miracles. The seiðkona would give it to her. It would be the last thing she did in these woods.
Auðr pressed the baby’s lips to her lips and said one word, breathing it into the infant’s mouth, just as the door of the hut burst open, and the soldiers swarmed in, shouting. The new mother screamed, and the seiðkona looked up, seeing only the silhouettes of the men against the door frame.
A pair of hands dragged Auðr from the hut. Someone threw her onto the horse’s back, ripping her leather cloak and tearing her hood from her white braids.
From inside the hut, the baby’s wail rose up, frail at first and then stronger. Hearing it, the seiðkona smiled, but a sharp object hit her hard in the skull, and that was all she knew.
Hours later, light slashed into her eyes, and she found herself sitting bound in the saddle—the smell of leather, the salted scent of horseflesh—an armored man behind her.
The soldiers came at her own request, though they did not know it. Auðr’s manipulation of the fates had ensured that she’d soon be in the center of the darkness, a part of whatever would happen there. She would die there, she knew. There was no other choice.
Blood trickled from the wound on her forehead, dropping onto the pale skin of her thigh. The man’s hand moved on her waist, and she bared her teeth to growl.
“She wakes,” he said, his command of the forest language rudimentary at best. “I am Marcus Agrippa, and you are summoned to Rome.”
6
The sun blazed down upon the emperor’s head, burning his scalp. His chariot was pulled by four white horses, and the laurel wreath was on his head, his gold-embroidered toga perfectly arranged over his tunic. He looked evenly, confidently over the Roman crowd, as though he did not imagine an enemy in their midst, as though he did not expect the world to shake and the city around him to crumble. If a horrible, unnatural war were coming, Octavian needed his allies to believe that his power had been granted by the gods.
Where was Marcus Agrippa? He and the legionaries had gone across the world in all directions to find the assistance Octavian needed, but months had passed and there’d been no word from any of them. What if Agrippa had encountered her? It was Octavian’s fault. He’d been too cowardly to tell his general of Cleopatra’s resurrection.
Octavian smiled tightly and processed forward into Rome, behind the conquered corpse of Egypt’s queen. A sculptor had rendered the image of the dead Cleopatra, incredibly lifelike, an asp clasped to her breast. She was carried on a flowery pyre, and her twins walked on either side of it, holding heavy chains, the younger son at the front. Selene moved regally, her hair loose and straight down her back. There was no grief on that face. It might as well have been carved of the same marble her mother’s was.
It was a cruel irony. Mark Antony, who had no need for heirs, had fathered at least four sons and several daughters, but the gods had given Octavian only one child, and that a girl, incapable of succeeding him. His eleven-year-old daughter, Julia, sat in the chariot beside him, but she would not inherit. There could be no female rulers in Rome, no queens.
Octavian thought for an unpleasant moment about queens. He’d been awake every night since Alexandria, pacing his rooms, troubled by the visions he saw in Cleopatra’s eyes. Flying creatures and lightning sticks, heaps of bodies shoveled into ditches, children fighting, women fighting, men fighting. He might doze for an hour, but then he’d jolt out of bed, screaming himself awake. He employed storytellers and musicians to sit beside his bed and sing, to spin tales of heroes and victories, anything to keep him from falling fully into sleep. Even in daylight, carried in his litter, he feared the nightmares that might overtake him if he leaned too heavily against the cushions and napped.
He wondered now if he’d been mad to send his chief defender seeking something that might not even exist. Witches. Sorcerers. Saviors.
He tried to calm himself. Agrippa and his men would find what Octavian needed. Marcus Agrippa had neither approved of Octavian’s instructions nor understood them, but Agrippa was not in charge. If this was to be war, Octavian must be prepared, just as Alexander the Great would have been. And if his methods were unusual? There could be no shame in fighting an unnatural creature that way. Rome had legions, yes, a hundred and fifty thousand men at the ready, and over three hundred fifty thousand if he added the soldiers stationed in his client states, but what good would legions be against her? He needed something more. He himself had banned witchcraft in Rome, but this was a special situation.
At the conclusion of the procession, Octavian stood before his people to be given his new name. It was the moment he’d imagined for years, and yet he took no pleasure in it. He’d chosen the name Augustus for augury, suggesting that augurs had seen his reign in the signs, and today he renamed Sextilis, the month in which he’d conquered Egypt, after himself. August, he thought, would yearly remind the people of Egypt’s submission to him.
Now he regretted everything about this. Egypt had not submitted.
Instead, Egypt was on the move.
The throngs before him cheered, waving banners and scarves, throwing flowers, singing his new name in the sunlit streets of Rome. The last time he’d been so exposed before so many people had been at Caesarion’s execution. Today, he took the name of Caesarion’s father for his own.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus.
His skin prickled and his stomach shifted uneasily. On the voyage out of Egypt, he’d felt his hair turning gray, strand by strand, and during dinner on the seventh night at sea, he’d experienced a disastrous sensatio
n, lifted his hand to his mouth, and pulled out an entire tooth.
A horrifically bad omen. He shook himself. He did not believe in omens.
He rushed back to the Palatine when the ceremonies were finished, sprinting up the marble steps and into his study, waving off advisors and pouring himself a cup of unwatered wine, pausing to remove the top of a small vial of something his physicians assured him was an antidote to every sort of potential poison. It was theriac, made from Julius Caesar’s own recipe, which had protected Octavian’s benefactor from everything but the treachery of his friends. The potion contained, among other rare and distasteful substances, cinnamon, frankincense, scarab beetle dung, acacia and rhododendron, aconite and iris, anise and turpentine, pulverized bones of kings, viper venom, and, most important, tears from the poppies that bloomed on the great glacial fields of Italy. As a final addition, the emperor had provided his physicians with the powdery piece of cloth stolen from the mummy of Alexander.
The resultant potion smelled like a battlefield after three days’ decay, but Augustus eased a few drops of it down anyway, drained his cup and poured another.
One could never be too careful.
Augustus gazed out his window, his pale eyes squinting in the light. All the emperor could think of was darkness. It would come, no matter what he did to resist it.
He hoped Rome would be ready.
7
The port of Ostia teemed with activity, legions of soldiers arriving and reporting to the emperor’s forces, shipments of grain, cloth, and slaves, and groupings of sailors, soldiers, and whores conducting business.
A transport ship with a cargo of long-awaited animals, imported to celebrate the return of Rome’s first citizen, was being unloaded in the midst of this, the creatures harnessed, muzzled, and then prodded into the crowd.
The zebras descended the planks first, their hooves stamping so hard after long captivity that the wood splintered beneath them. The gazelles followed, their eyes rolling up to show white. Even in the chaos of the shipyard, the ostriches drew attention, with their high-stepping, with their long, wavering necks. Crocodiles, low and dry and scraping, heaved themselves slowly onto the stones, their tails lashing as they went, several sailors clinging to the ropes that bound each one. A set of jaws snapped and a feathered thing was gone.
The most dangerous creatures were the last off the vessel. First, the rhinoceros, its horn tipped with cork in a hopeful attempt to blunt it, and then the hippopotamus, which opened its jaws and bellowed, to the entertainment and awe of the crowd. There’d never been a hippopotamus in Rome before. Then, the tigers, each as long as two men, with their glossy, variegated pelts and flashing, dismissive eyes. Finally, the lions appeared on deck, sailors wrangling them into submission.
“One of the lions went wild and ate up all the slaves that ship was carrying,” a young sailor bragged to his whore. “I got it from the ship’s boy.”
“Which lion?” she asked.
“That one.” He pointed at the largest of the lions, a male with a twisted mane and rheumy eyes.
“That one looks old,” she replied.
The lion chose that moment to roar, revealing a gummy, toothless mouth. The whore looked at the sailor and smirked.
A slender woman wrapped entirely in a dark, hooded cloak and veil too heavy for the weather made her way down the Persephone’s plank. Her gloved hand was roped to that of a young and handsome man, who was draped in scholarly robes. His chin jutting, his other arm supporting a small child, the scholar pushed his way through the crowd.
As the trio of passengers moved alongside them, the lions and tigers began to roar, rearing up onto their haunches and struggling with their captors. It seemed that they were trying to follow her, though surely this was an illusion. The animals that had already been unloaded began to cry out as well, the ostriches looking about in alarm and flapping their useless wings, the gazelles and zebras bolting in terror to the ends of their ropes and then snapping backward. A crocodile broke his bonds and barreled forward, his teeth snapping, as sailors danced about him, trying to wrestle him back into servitude.
The woman in black looked over her shoulder as the scholar led her, and the whore caught a glimpse of her face. A dark-smeared eye, a flash of brightness. Something strange there. And beautiful, too. The whore was intrigued.
She tugged at the sailor’s arm and pointed in the woman’s direction.
“Who’s she? And the boy?”
“The only slaves the lion didn’t kill. The scholar bought them for a couple of coins. She’s bad luck. The captain wanted to be rid of her, and I don’t blame him.”
The whore craned her neck after the woman. What sort of thing might she be, that a slave-selling captain would throw away his prospect of profit? She took a half step in their direction, but the sailor who’d purchased her for the hour pulled her the opposite way, his hands already burrowing into the folds of her gown.
Marcus Agrippa and a small group of his soldiers, ragged after months of travel, marched past a moment later, agitated by the delay the animals had caused their vessel. They bore with them the seiðkona, her long white hair tangled and her eyes as silver as polished metal. She looked about the port, her expression chilling to any who inadvertently met her gaze.
Auðr’s head suddenly whipped to face the woman in black. The old woman hissed in surprise.
“What is it?” Agrippa asked the fate spinner, stumbling over her guttural language.
The seiðkona shook her head, her fingers twitching. Agrippa followed her stare, his face scanning the crowd until it landed on two travelers. Something about the man was familiar, and the woman, too. The way her arm moved, the way her feet seemed scarcely to touch the earth, caught his attention. There was a strange grace about her.
Agrippa’s eyes narrowed and he took a step in their direction, but as he did, the man took the woman roughly in his arms and kissed her.
Agrippa’s attention faded. She was nothing, a whore or a slave, and no business of Marcus Agrippa’s. He was overdue in Rome. Besides, the woman she reminded him of was long dead. Agrippa laughed at himself. The way his heart raced, you would think he’d seen a ghost.
Agrippa’s company marched on, only Auðr looking back. She’d seen something in that woman’s eyes. Something old and dark and familiar.
The seiðkona had seen its like only once before, when she was a girl of thirteen, sold as an unwilling talisman to an exploring ship, but she had never forgotten it. Her ship had capsized in a storm, leaving none but Auðr alive, clinging to a piece of wreckage in the middle of an icy ocean. At last, certain she was dying, she saw something in the waters: a great eye, a long and whirling tail, a creature like the dragon her ship had been carved in imitation of.
The monster hung there in the blue depths, and she looked into the eye for what seemed like thousands of years, seeing its history, a world of water, a melting sea. Worshipped by sailors and by kings, and then forgotten.
She had seen a god living deep beneath the world. An Old One, something from before the beginning. She felt herself falling into darkness and gave herself over, but the god sent her back.
She had stumbled onto the foreign shore, clutching only her seiðstafr, which she’d tied tightly into the cords of her dress as the ship had gone down. Alive. She had not known why, not then, but she knew there was a reason.
The universe worked according to its own laws. She was meant for something, some great task.
This task. She wished it had come sooner, when she was stronger, but the Fates had their own timing.
Auðr whispered to herself, twisting the threads of fate between her fingers as she was pulled through the marketplace and toward the emperor.
A moment later, the scholar and the queen parted from their embrace, and within a few steps, they and the child disappeared completely into the crowds and chaos of Rome.
8
Cleopatra caught her breath, trying to control herself as Nicolaus turned away
. The scholar’s kiss had awoken her hunger, and now she wanted only to be away from him before she did something she would regret.
He wanted to be away from her as well; she could feel it. He wanted to run, but he had promised he would help her. His brave words were false. Nicolaus trembled before her, and yet he managed to turn his back on her, pushing through the throngs, wending their way through the slender, dusty streets of Rome, the child sleeping in his arms.
She had no pity for him. He was the one who’d insisted they depart the ship at dusk and walk into a sea of people, the sights and sounds of Rome, the animals flanking them, the whores and sailors. She could see only the back of his neck as he led her through the crowd, the slender vertebrae above the scholar’s cloak. It would be easy. The rope between them was pulled taut. He was already tied to her, though to observers, it would look as if she was tied to him, his property, his slave.
It would seem to the crowd that he was a trainer and she was his beast, a lion barely tamed by a leash, she thought, bristling, and then remembered that she was not a lioness but a woman.
“Never do that again,” she managed to say. “Never touch me again. I would have had him.”
“It was quick thinking on my part. Agrippa’s men would have captured us. I saved you.”
She was not something to be saved, the voice of Sekhmet whispered. She was something to be worshipped.
Did she need him, truly?
Yes, Cleopatra reminded herself. He could go out in the day when she could not. He could seek her children where she could not. Her face was too easily recognized in this ugly city.
“I wanted him to see me,” she said, rebelling against her own thoughts. “I would confront him. Agrippa was the leader of the army in Alexandria. It is because of him that Antony is dead. And he was there when they killed my son, standing beside Octavian. He gave the order.”
“Confront? You do not mean confront. You mean kill. You would have fought him there, in the port? There were citizens everywhere.”
Queen of Kings Page 15
