Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Augustus ignored him.

  “She walks,” Usem continued, and smiled, showing his keen, pointed white teeth. “And she is more than she was. You will not conquer her with soldiers.”

  Augustus wavered for a moment, and then hurriedly thrust out his hand to the Psylli.

  “Yes,” he said. “I swear it. I will close the Gates of Janus, if you deliver me the queen.”

  Usem took Augustus’s hand.

  “It will be done. Now I require accommodations and a meal. My snakes hunger, and so do I.”

  “Take him to his room,” Augustus ordered. “And let him give his directions to the kitchen on the way.” A legionary led the Psylli from the chamber. Out of the corner of his eye, Augustus could see Agrippa seething.

  “You make promises to such a man?” Agrippa asked when he was gone. “You swear to give him something you will not deliver? You ask him to hunt something that does not exist? Cleopatra is dead. What has gotten into your mind? This man will pretend he has conjured and beaten her, and then he will demand that you keep your promise. It is all a sham.”

  “Are you a fool? I have no intention of closing the gates,” Augustus snapped.

  Agrippa looked at him, his gaze steely. “We do not want the Psylli as enemies,” he warned. “They have warred against the strong many times before, and won.”

  “They will not win against Rome. I have not yet met the last of our warriors,” said Augustus.

  “This discussion is not finished,” Agrippa warned.

  “Nicolaus the Damascene, then,” Augustus said. “What of him? Where is he? You say I have no enemies, but you have not brought me the man I asked for.”

  “He is nowhere to be found. My men have sorted through every grain of sand in Egypt. He’s likely cowering in a cave somewhere. The man you seek is a tutor, Octav—Augustus. He is no assassin.”

  “The night is filled with enemies. You know that as well as I,” Augustus said. “Where is the last witch?”

  Agrippa surrendered for the moment.

  “You will not enjoy her company,” he said. “She offered herself into our service. This one comes from Thessaly, and my men say that the village near where they found her was filled with tales of her deeds. The men thought she was a whore, but she is not. She is certainly not. I met her tonight, and I do not think Rome should trust her.” The general’s face rippled with distaste.

  “Who are you to say whom I should and should not employ?” Augustus asked.

  The third of Rome’s defenders was led into the room. There was a moment of silence before Augustus could find his voice.

  “Your emperor welcomes you to Rome,” he stammered at last.

  The third witch was an Aphrodite, her body curving and generous, her limbs perfectly formed and draped in indigo-embroidered linen. Her hair fell to her knees, braided in thousands of complicated plaits, each knotted with beads and shells. Her eyes were wide and emerald green, and her lips, unpainted, were the color of the roses in Caesar’s gardens.

  The girl—for she could not be older than seventeen—had the grace of a dancer. She stretched her arms over her head and yawned, catlike.

  “It has been a long journey,” she replied in Greek. Her voice was deep and rough-edged for such a fragile creature.

  “What is your name?” Augustus asked.

  “What is yours?” she replied.

  The emperor leaned forward. “Do you not know?”

  “Rome is nothing to me,” the girl said. “I live by my own laws.”

  “You may call me Octavian,” said Augustus, though he did not know why. It was no longer his name. He felt Agrippa staring at him.

  “You may call me Chrysate,” said the girl.

  “She is a priestess of Hecate,” Agrippa interjected. “And a psuchagoĝoi. You should not get too near her.”

  A summoner of souls. Augustus did not believe in such things.

  “I will not harm you,” the girl said, and Augustus believed her. Such beauty could only hold goodness.

  “Leave us,” Augustus said, and when Agrippa did not immediately move away, he repeated the order in a voice that left no possibility of resistance. “You will leave us, Agrippa.”

  Marcus Agrippa looked defiant, but he sheathed his weapon, nodded his head in a somewhat brusque display of surrender, turned on his heel, and left the room. He slammed the door behind him.

  “Have her if you will,” Augustus heard his old friend call, his angry voice fading as he marched down the corridor. “She is nothing good.”

  Chrysate came closer. Augustus could see a ring on her finger, a huge, shining opal flashing shades of rose and blue, green and purple. It was carved with an intaglio of some kind, an image of a woman’s face, perhaps.

  Augustus reached out and laced his hands around the girl’s tiny waist. He could smell her scent: salt, wood smoke, rosemary, and sex. He put out his tongue to taste her skin.

  She threw back her head and laughed, reaching over him to lay her hands on an object on his shelf.

  “Is that all you think I am?” Chrysate asked. “A woman?”

  “I know you are more or you would not be here,” Augustus replied, though in truth, he did not think she was much more. He smiled into the girl’s throat, and then took her breast in his teeth. This was exactly what was needed to make him forget about the misery to come. What was war without a woman? He pulled the girl onto his lap.

  She leaned back, away from him. He noticed that her eyes were greener than they’d been a moment before, her cheeks brighter.

  “What is this?” she asked, showing him the object she’d taken from his shelf. “It’s a pretty thing. I might use it for my jewelry.”

  It was the engraved silver box containing Antony’s ashes.

  “Not that one,” Augustus said. “Let me give you something better. Something made of ivory and rubies, to suit your complexion.”

  She smiled. Augustus noted a fleck of gold in one of her eyes. Her skin was the color of milk. Her lips were like warmed wine now.

  “What shall I do with this, then?” she asked.

  “You’ll put it back where you found it,” he said, smiling.

  She was a tease, this girl. Augustus thought about the things he would do to her. He had some ropes here, and a whip braided of soft leather, which would leave lovely marks on that pale flesh. His body hummed pleasantly.

  “I think I will not,” Chrysate said.

  Something changed in her. Her thighs clasped his, and Augustus felt, all at once, as though she were made of iron. The softness of her waist became something live and brutal beneath his palm. Augustus caught a glimpse of her face as she arched her spine, her throat toward the ceiling.

  The green of her eyes had been eclipsed by black.

  Augustus gasped beneath her, pain coursing through him. His hands scrabbled at her skin.

  She opened the box, curled backward and drew her fingernails, almost lazily, along the stone of the floor. With a wrenching sound, a fissure appeared, a trench in the very earth. The priestess poured a measure of ash into the soil.

  Augustus watched, horrified and paralyzed.

  Chrysate pulled a pin from her braids and stabbed it into her fingertip. She held the finger above the ash for a century-long moment, before a glob of blood formed and fell into the trench.

  With her terrifying, dilated pupils, she looked into Augustus’s eyes.

  “Watch,” she ordered. “Listen.”

  A wailing moan came from deep beneath the house. The floor tilted. The books spilled from the shelves, and Augustus himself fell to the floor, his face inches from the trench. He could not see to the bottom of it.

  There were more sounds, shrieks and wails, indistinct calls in unknown languages, sounds of hunger and lust, sounds of despair.

  A chill filled the room, and something began to move in the frozen dark down there. A dusky thing, twisting and rising like vapor over a river, a scrap of mist.

  “Come,” the witch s
aid to the mist. “Come to me.”

  The thing rose, a creature taken from some deep ocean, and reeled into the air.

  And then, before them, in Augustus’s chamber, was a man, transparent, strange, his eyes wide and black and terrified. A wound in his stomach, the blood itself transparent.

  Augustus could see through his chest and into his motionless heart.

  “Tell us your name,” Chrysate said. “Tell us who you are.”

  There was a long pause. The man raised his hand slowly to his mouth and removed a metal coin from his tongue. He looked at it for a moment, and then clenched his fist, holding it tightly in his palm.

  “I was,” the man said at last. “I was Mark Antony.”

  “And so you are again,” the priestess said. “I have opened the gates of Hades for your shade to pass through.”

  10

  The shade wavered, the light of the candles pouring through the place where his wound had been. He held his hand to the spot, pressing his fingers against his lost flesh. He moved his hand from the wound and held it up, gazing at it. There was blood on the fingers, but it was immaterial, like a faint residue of ink washed over with water.

  He was a flickering presence in the now frigid room. Augustus had to narrow his eyes to distinguish the man, and even then, he moved in and out of clarity, as though he were a sunken ship glimpsed deep beneath rippling waters.

  In spite of his state, he was certainly Mark Antony. There was no doubt. The unruly hair and trimmed beard, the cleft chin, the wide chest, the handsome, weathered face. Augustus recognized the ragged, coiled scars, evidence of battles they’d fought together.

  His enemy was more man than he, even as a ghost. Augustus picked up his goblet in trembling fingers and refilled it with wine, taking care not to meet Antony’s eyes.

  “Is this safe?” Augustus asked Chrysate, taking care that his voice did not wobble. “You’ve brought my enemy into my house. I trust you know how to control him.”

  “He is a shade,” Chrysate answered, smiling. “Not the man you knew. They are the perfect servants. Their will begins to slip away from them the moment they enter Hades. The river of forgetfulness beckons them, and they always surrender. Look at him. He is nothing of what he was. He cannot take up arms against you. But he may be useful.”

  “What have you done?” Antony asked, the full darkness of his gaze upon the emperor. “Where is my wife?”

  His voice seemed to come from far away, an aching echo propelled from the depths of the earth and into the room.

  In spite of the witch’s assurances, the emperor clung to his chair, his entire body desirous of flight. He wanted the sun to rise, and it did not. The only glow came from the stars outside the window, and that light was cold. The soul-drawing witch—the psuchagoĝoi—stood beside him, her fingers resting lightly on his shoulder. Augustus did not like the way they felt.

  “Where is she?” Antony demanded. “Where is Cleopatra?”

  Augustus glanced nervously at the witch, at her gleaming, bone-white skin, her phosphorescent eyes and bloodred lips and the tongue that ran hungrily over them. He mastered his voice with another deep draught of wine and theriac.

  “First, you must tell us where you have been,” he informed the shadow before him. “Tell us of your time in Hades.”

  The ghost stood straighter, clearly angered. He shook his shoulders, and ripples of gray light came off him.

  “Is this why you have summoned me?” Antony asked. “To tell you of the Underworld? You will go there yourself one day, and knowing will not ease your mind.”

  “Tell us,” Augustus insisted.

  Antony laughed, a short exclamation of disgust. “Do you think you will find yourself in Elysium, soothed by the light of Elysium’s stars, basking in the glow of Elysium’s own lovely sun? No. You will not go to Elysium, Octavian, though you call yourself a god on earth. Only heroes go to Elysium.”

  “Your emperor orders you to tell what you know,” Augustus said, his voice cracking and betraying him.

  Antony smiled, only his lips moving. His eyes remained bleak.

  “My emperor? You are not my emperor. I live in the land of the dead now. I’ll tell you something, though, if you insist. In Hades, you starve. You perish, and you perish forever, without cease, without respite, without home. I am of Egypt. My love is of Egypt. I should not be in Hades.”

  “And you are not,” Augustus retorted. “You are in Rome.”

  “I should be in the Duat,” Antony said. “My body should be in Egypt, and it is not. Where is my wife? What have you done with her?”

  Augustus started to speak, but the witch interrupted him.

  “Your wife is why we have called you here,” she said. “She lives.”

  Antony’s eyes narrowed.

  “If she lived, I would have felt her tears filling the river Acheron,” he said. “Cleopatra would have sacrificed on my behalf. Her sacrifices would have fed me. She is certainly dead. What have you done to her?”

  “She does not live,” the witch corrected. “And she does not die. She is here.”

  “Cleopatra is in Rome?” Antony asked, looking up with focused eyes for the first time.

  “In Rome,” Chrysate confirmed. She glanced at Augustus and tossed her hair back. “What is wrong, Emperor of the World? Are you afraid? Protected as you are by women, snake charmers, and shades? Do you fear for your life?”

  “No,” said Augustus, lying. “I fear nothing. Rome is well fortified.”

  So she was here. He had felt as much.

  “She is in Rome,” Antony murmured to himself. “And yet she betrayed me in Egypt. Is she here? With you?”

  Augustus glanced at him impatiently. The emperor’s hands were now quite numb, and his lips felt frozen.

  “You will guard my home,” Augustus instructed the witch.

  “I will find her,” Antony murmured. “If Cleopatra is here, I will find her.” He moved toward the window.

  “You are my creature,” Chrysate told him sharply. “You’ll abide with me.”

  The witch opened her hand to reveal a carved stone. A synochitis meant to hold shades in the upper world once they had been summoned. “You are held here,” she continued, moving her hand in the air. The stone disappeared from view.

  Antony looked at her for a long moment. Augustus felt nervous, seeing the look on his face. He had known Antony, known him well, and he knew him to be no one’s creature.

  At last, the shade bowed his head in assent.

  “I am yours, then,” he said. “My lady.”

  Chrysate smiled, fingering the carved box of ashes she held against her breasts.

  “You are mine,” she repeated, and there was something rapturous in her tone. Something triumphant. “We are done with you, emperor of Rome. Octavian, is that your name? You may go to your bed.”

  She gazed at Augustus steadily, until he was forced to look away.

  The emperor left the room, swaying with unaccustomed wine and theriac. He could not say why he allowed himself to be dismissed from his own rooms by a witch. Perhaps Agrippa was right. There should be more soldiers, more Romans, not these unnatural things. Everything about this made him uneasy.

  He made his way to his daughter’s bedchamber and stood in the doorway for a moment, his eyes filling with strange tears. He would protect Julia from all of this, these creatures in his house, this monster in his city. She moved in her sleep, pressing her rosy cheek to her pillow. What did Julia know of the powers of an emperor? What did she know of trouble?

  Augustus envied her, blearily, for a moment.

  He gently closed the door and walked to the next bedchamber, that of Cleopatra’s daughter, Selene. She’d been of service to him, and she might be of more. Selene was superior to his own daughter. Smarter. Perhaps Julia might learn virtue from his enemy’s child.

  Augustus wavered in the corridor, uncertain, intoxicated. He was tired. So tired.

  He made his way to his own bedchamb
er and lay upon his bed without even undressing. He shut his eyes and slept. In his dreams he walked through a fig orchard, ancient and miserable, knowing that his life had come to nothing.

  In his dreams, Cleopatra came for him, as she did every night. He saw her teeth and claws.

  11

  The Psylli crept from the Palatine and wound his way through the wealthy alley ways of Rome, considering his position. Certainly, this came at the proper time. The Psylli tribe had fought against enslavement for centuries, and they’d won, but the Roman Empire’s power was on the rise.

  If Usem served Rome and won against Rome’s enemy, he would guarantee his tribe’s independence. Still, the Psylli felt uneasy. He did not trust Augustus. The man had agreed too easily to the bargain.

  What if Augustus did not want to destroy Cleopatra? What if he wanted to harness her power instead? Currently, the Psylli might work for whomever they chose, but if the Romans added Cleopatra’s strength to their arsenal, Usem suspected that the emperor would claim the Psylli tribe as his personal poison ministers.

  As Usem walked, his dagger in hand, he plotted his course. The best thing would be to find the queen before they did, and take her unaware. When she was dead, he would bring them her body and claim his reward. It did not occur to him to be afraid. The wind traveled with him, kicking up straw and clay dust, dancing into windows and out again, seeking the house that was sheltering her, and the wind was an immortal defender.

  The wind whispered into his ear, telling him of the things it saw in Rome, the secrets kept behind grates and up chimneys. One house had a murdered corpse beneath the floorboards. Another had a fortune stuffed into a straw pallet.

  The wind entered, finally, at a narrow window and fluttered through the rooms behind the bars. It emerged, and told Usem what it had found therein. A library, filled with all the poems of Rome and Greece. The wind had browsed the pages, flicking through the vellum and papyrus, turning inks to powder and stories to dust.

  A woman, said the wind. Perhaps the woman you seek. She is dead.

  “Does she move?” Usem asked.

  She does.