Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Roman citizens,” Cleopatra said. What if a Roman was hurt? Did it matter so much?

  “And your own people, perhaps,” Nicolaus reminded her. “There was another boatload of slaves coming in, and who knows where they were seized? The emperor’s men have been all over Africa.”

  The scholar touched her hand, and she pulled away from him, barely suppressing a hiss. Was this what it would be from now on? No one to touch her? No one to love her?

  It did not matter. Antony was dead.

  She should be entering the city with her ancestral crown atop her head, and instead she’d climbed up from the slave quarters and into the dirt. Rome was a colorless city, somber in comparison with Alexandria’s brilliance. At home, everything was draped in silks, every surface ornamented. Here, decoration was seen as weakness. The last time she’d walked off a ship and into this country, she’d had Caesarion in her arms, newborn and perfect, and Julius Caesar beside her. Caesar, at least, had respected Cleopatra. He believed that women were as capable as men, and when, in the course of his long career, his foes had mocked him as being “womanlike,” he’d retorted that the Amazons had once ruled over Asia, and Semiramis had reigned supreme and ferocious over Babylon for a hundred years. If this was womanlike, let him be a woman. Caring nothing for gossips, disregarding his betrayed wife, and scoffing at the way the senators talked, he’d installed his mistress in his own garden house on the Tiber, and there she’d walked, surrounded by roses that reminded her of home.

  They passed those same gardens now, given to the people at Caesar’s death.

  “I am a queen,” she told Nicolaus finally. “You are a servant. You will not touch me.”

  “Keep quiet. We do not need to be captured just as we arrive,” said Nicolaus without looking at her. He pulled her into a doorway as a patrol of legionaries marched past.

  In the shadows, Cleopatra shifted her veil. Her eyes were dilated, she knew. Beneath the veil, she examined her fingers. The nails were long and curving, the claws of a lion. As she watched, they receded.

  Antony, she thought. What have I become?

  Talking to him was the only thing that kept her human. She thought of their marriage ceremony, their hands entwined, all the lamps lit, peacocks parading, their children seated around them, his shaggy mane of hair, the feeling of his muscles beneath his skin as she held his arm. Cleopatra was not gone when she thought of her husband. She had not lost herself entirely, she kept trying to remind herself. Part of her was still human.

  But she feared this was untrue.

  Amongst the cats, she’d stayed quiet enough, forgetting her history, forgetting everything. Vengeance and Rome had seemed far away. She slept curled around the lions and tigers, soothed by the sound of their purring. In the cat’s body, she scarcely noticed what she was doing, and the slaves seemed to expect what was coming for them. They hardly resisted.

  Only slaves, Cleopatra thought, still troubled by what had happened aboard the ship, but it was no comfort. She hadn’t known about the child as she took the mother, as she took the father, as she took everyone, frenzied, glorying in hunger and satisfaction. She’d nearly killed the child, too. Her mouth was on his throat when she realized what she was doing and forced herself backward, screaming into the darkness for discovery. She’d thought herself in control of her hunger by the time she boarded the ship, but she was wrong.

  You will be her slave.

  Half through the voyage, she’d found herself crouched with the cats in the hold, running her fingers over a tiger’s coat, certain she could read the markings on it. The future, she’d thought, believing, if only for a few hours, that her own acts were written here, her own hopes, her own solutions. The tiger’s stripes were hieroglyphs, she’d thought, as she’d sat in the dark, reading in the language of the gods. It was only now, walking through the streets of Rome, that she saw the madness in this.

  Her future, whatever it was, was written nowhere but in her own body, and the writing was unclear. All she knew was that she had arrived in the city of her enemies, and that they were all around her.

  Nicolaus placed the ship’s child in apprenticeship to a scribe he had known in Damascus, and at last, they arrived at their destination.

  “No one will look for us here,” he said as he pried the lock from the door. He hid her in a library, the home of a poet, Virgil, a great favorite of the emperor. Nicolaus had encountered him in Alexandria months before and learned that he planned to be in Campania for some time.

  She tried to study Virgil’s library instead of dreaming of fire and bloodshed. The scholar brought incense to the room, and she burned the resin, but it gave her none of the pleasure it once had. It reminded her of Alexandria, the smell of the cedar planks imported from Cyprus. Those same dockyard planks had caught fire and ignited the library filled with the knowledge of every traveler, every scholar, medicines and magic, maps and death songs, in all the languages of man. Now all that true understanding was lost, dispersed as ashes into the air of Egypt and settled into the sand. Cleopatra had inhaled the ashes herself—she remembered walking the city as it burned, the smoke low and black—and they had not taught her anything.

  Nicolaus went out into the city to glean the location of her children. This was what a queen should do, she knew. Wait for her servants to get her the information she could not herself obtain. She knew that Rome was traitorous, that assassins could appear out of nowhere. She knew she should be reasonable. She would resist Sekhmet’s voice. She could not take revenge until she knew where her children were. She would not run the risk of hurting them more than she already had.

  Cleopatra opened the scrolls, spreading them on the marble floor before her. Studying them as once she had studied her language lessons. Poems and histories, books of myth, romance, and medicines. Words were the things that had made her a true queen of Egypt. They were her power. No longer. The vellum of certain, more precious texts radiated nothing but the lives of dead things. She could scarcely pay attention long enough to absorb the stories in the scrolls.

  Even in this windowless room, Cleopatra could feel the moon crossing the sky. She thought of Ra, an ancient with bones of silver, flesh of gold, and hair the pure blue of lapis, traveling the waters of the sky in his day boat, creating the stars and constellations so that when night came, and he traveled into the Underworld, his path would be lit.

  Now endless night was what she desired. Night was best for murder, and her enemy, like all men, surely slept when the sun was gone. She could feel Sekhmet surging through the world, fueled by Cleopatra’s rampage aboard the ship.

  She bent again over the book before her, searching for distraction. She happened instead upon an unpublished poem about her own marriage. Virgil had obscured it somewhat, and grafted a new and terrible ending onto the story. She was gossip now.

  Virgil had disguised Cleopatra as Dido, the foreign queen of Carthage, in love with Aeneas, who left her behind to return to his own people. In this poem, the queen’s suicide was successful. Aeneas watched the smoke of her pyre from the deck of his homebound ship.

  It was as though Antony had fled her at Actium and gone back to Rome, leaving her to burn.

  Cleopatra threw the pages to the ground, furious. She would not wait here, in this library, in this poet’s house, no matter what Nicolaus said.

  An old city filled with temples. A city filled with people. Her children and her enemy awaited.

  9

  Augustus spilled his drink, startled by the sound of someone in the hallway. He’d raised his glass as a weapon, thinking to smash it in the face of the intruder, when Marcus Agrippa’s face, grim as ever, appeared in the doorway. Augustus leapt to his feet and embraced the man.

  “It’s been six months since Thebes,” he said, nearly overcome with relief. “I thought you were dead, or worse.”

  “What would be worse than death?” Agrippa looked at him irritably. “My men have been from end to end of the world on your orders, and I still do
not know why. I have three magicians for you. I might have recruited three legions of warriors in the same amount of time.”

  “Magicians?” Augustus grimaced. “I can find magicians in Rome.”

  “Witches,” Agrippa amended. “Sorcerers. Whatever you call them, they are all the same kind of creature, and nothing I trust.”

  “I wish you’d brought them more quickly,” Augustus said.

  Agrippa sat down opposite him and leaned over the table.

  “Just as I wish you’d tell me what you plan to war against with witches. This is not the Roman way. Are we threatened by Parthia? Scythia? You need not fear them. We have legions, ready to serve, here in Rome and more abroad.”

  “It is not Parthia,” Augustus said.

  Agrippa was somewhat relieved. Campaigns in Parthia—notorious for its archers and lack of ready forage—had taken many lives.

  “Scythia, then?”

  “Neither is it Scythia.”

  “What is it that threatens us? Long-haired Gaul? Britannia? Is it something sprung of Oceanus, something we’ve never seen before? We can fight anything, be it monster or man. We are Romans!” Agrippa wiped the sweat from his forehead and poured himself a drink.

  “Yes,” said Augustus wearily. “It is something we’ve never seen before.”

  Agrippa drained his first cup of wine, recoiling at the aftertaste.

  “I assume you know your wine is foul,” he said, and served himself another cup, taking only one sip before he grimaced and poured it out, shaking his head. “Is it peace that frightens you, then? I grant you, it’s unusual, but Egypt is conquered, and Rome is fortified against any enemy.”

  Augustus looked at him with a pained expression on his face. He shook his head.

  “You know me, Octavian,” Agrippa said, his voice softening. “You’ve known me since we were boys. Do you not trust me enough to tell me what is wrong? You’ve not been right since we took Alexandria, since the business with Antony. I have forgiven that. It was wrong, but it is long since finished.”

  There was a moment in which Augustus thought he might tell his friend everything, but it quickly passed. He was the emperor now. There was no one he could truly trust, not even his closest associates. He’d learned that much from Caesar.

  “My name is Augustus, not Octavian. I am no longer the boy you knew. See that you remember that,” Augustus said coolly. “Bring me the witches.”

  Agrippa looked at him for a bewildered moment, and then left the room, shaking his head. Augustus poured himself another cup of wine, and with it, theriac. He felt the ingredients edge into the back of his mind. His fingertips tingled.

  The first witch presented to him was a tall, slender, white-haired woman with silvery, slanting, wide-set eyes, her fingers gnarled at the knuckles, her lips pale and thin, like those of a fish. Augustus could not tell her age. She might be seventy or a hundred. She was clearly agitated, and in chains.

  “Her name is Auðr, and I found her myself in Germany,” Agrippa said. “The villagers there relied on her to bring babies, but she came to them over the water, from the frozen lands where nothing lives, and they swore she had other talents.”

  “A midwife?” Augustus barked, disgusted. A midwife was not what he had asked for.

  “That is not all she is,” Agrippa insisted, motioning to a soldier, who handed him a long package wrapped in a cloak. “She involves herself with the Fates. She’s chained for a reason.”

  The woman’s eyes opened wider, a sudden strange light in them, and she made a purring sound of anticipation. With covered hands, Agrippa unwrapped the item, a slender wooden staff with a narrow, rounded top. The creature’s eyes began to shine in earnest. An unpleasant glow, to Augustus’s mind, like those of an animal sighted in the dark. Augustus pulled on his gloves, and his general passed the distaff to him. He could see nothing thrilling in its composition.

  Agrippa brought forth a legionary who’d been standing at the back of the room.

  “What is your name?” he asked the boy.

  The legionary’s face crumpled in consternation. He thought for a moment, his fingers grasping and then releasing some invisible object.

  Agrippa looked pained.

  “She tapped the boy’s forehead with this distaff, and since then, he knows nothing of his own history, and little of anything else. He’s been riding since before he could walk, and yet we’ve had to tie him to his horse all the way here. I would have her pay for this.”

  The old woman looked at the boy and said a few rough words in an unknown tongue.

  The legionary spoke, blank-faced.

  “She says that my fate was dark. She has changed it. Now I do not remember the man I was, and my path has shifted to one of less trouble.”

  “He did not speak her language before she touched him,” Agrippa informed Augustus. “Now he functions as her translator.”

  The woman spoke again.

  “She says she is a seiðkona, a fate spinner,” the boy said. “She does not serve Rome but the Fates. There is trouble here and she seeks to understand it.”

  Augustus was distracted. Her skills had sparked his hopes.

  His own fate was dark, he knew. When he shut his eyes, the visions were there again, red waves rising over red waves, the roaring and tearing of beasts, serpents, that river of blood. His death at Cleopatra’s hands.

  This woman, this seiðkona, might change his destiny.

  “Rome welcomes you to her defense,” he said. “Take her to her bedchamber down the corridor, and bring me the rest.”

  “You would have creatures such as these staying in your house?” Agrippa asked, his brow furrowing. “They would be better kept under guard in my quarters.”

  “I need access to them at all hours. And I need their protection.”

  “I ask you again, from what?”

  Augustus had no answer. He tried to ignore Agrippa’s expression. His friend’s temper had always been slow to ignite but long to burn, and Augustus was slightly surprised to find it directed at him. He drank deeply until Agrippa returned with the second witch.

  “The chieftain of the Psylli, Usem,” Agrippa said. “My men brought him from Libya.”

  Augustus recognized the very man who’d incorrectly declared Cleopatra dead. He’d answer for that, in any case. Black as a burnt field, black as a crow’s plumage, his skin glinting with that same dark, bluish iridescence. His chest was decked in strands of stones the color of fresh blood, and over his shoulders, the spotted skin of a leopard was draped, fixed with golden clasps.

  He placed a woven basket on the floor of the chamber, and Augustus instinctively raised his feet from off the stones.

  “I bring my serpents to battle,” Usem said, removing the cover from the basket. Several snakes slithered from the basket as the Psylli moved his arm into the air. The snakes arced their bodies in mimicry of it, coiling themselves into a rippling design.

  “These are my warriors,” the Psylli informed Augustus. “They can travel anywhere you desire. They can seek out the traitors who hide your enemy from you. They can find those who serve your enemy.”

  Augustus let himself relax, slightly. “And what else do you have for me?”

  “Is this not enough for you, emperor of Rome? I see you are an intelligent man. My tribe controls the Western Wind.”

  “Like a slave? Does it always obey you, then?” Augustus asked.

  “Just as we obey Rome,” Usem said, and smiled. “When Rome fattens our purses. Still, it pleases the wind to serve our friends and plague our enemies.”

  “And which are we to you?” Augustus asked him.

  A sudden breeze appeared in the room, guttering the candles. In the flickering light, Augustus saw Agrippa’s hand tighten on his sword. The shuttered window flew open, rattling in a quick and drenching storm.

  “We are friends,” said the Psylli. “Or have I misunderstood?”

  “Certainly,” replied Augustus, shaken. “We are friends.”
<
br />   “There is a price for my service,” Usem continued.

  Of course. The emperor had been prepared for exactly this eventuality. He signaled to a slave, who wheeled in a barrow of treasure taken from Alexandria, but the Psylli laughed.

  “I do not desire gold,” Usem said.

  “Your people have always taken our gold.”

  “Not for this task. It is too large,” the Psylli said. “If I deliver what you ask for, you will close the Gates of Janus. My people will no longer cower in their tents when they hear hoofbeats. We will no longer travel our desert fearing war, fearing poisoned waters, fearing kidnapping and slavery. My people do not fear the wind, and we should not fear Rome.”

  Augustus was shocked. He looked at Marcus Agrippa. What had the man been thinking? This should have been negotiated and refused already. Since the founding of Rome, the nation had always been at war, fighting off invaders, yes, but also invading and gaining territories through bloodshed. The closing of the Gates of Janus by the emperor of Rome would announce that the empire was at war no longer. The Psylli demanded peace from end to end of the Roman world.

  Agrippa shrugged.

  “It was not for me to refuse. You requested sorcerers, and you knew that it would not be inexpensive.”

  The emperor could not imagine it. The gates had been open his entire life. It was a ridiculous request.

  “You require my assistance,” the Psylli said, standing before Augustus, his jaw tight. The wind whipped about Augustus, shifting his garments. “The wind has told me of your trouble with the queen Cleopatra.”

  Augustus jolted. How did the man know?

  Agrippa stared at Augustus for a moment and then collapsed back into the chair, where he rubbed his temples.

  “I might have guessed this wasn’t finished,” Agrippa muttered. He raised his head to look at Augustus. “Her people may wish her alive, but we all saw her dead and buried. Her body did not walk from that mausoleum. Her people took her corpse, and I am sure it was for some rite common to Egypt. The dead are enemy to no one.”