Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Usem’s snakes emerged to twine around his neck. The serpents looked impassively at the building, and then slithered back into the folds of his garments. The wind began to blow in earnest, swinging the laundry hanging on the lines, spinning the weather vanes on the rooftops, and sending the chickens balancing on the fences up into the air. Usem placed his hand on the door handle, and felt the wind pushing him away from it.

  I am not strong enough to protect you, the wind whispered.

  Usem hesitated. The wind had never said such a thing before, and he took it seriously. A failed attempt would mean disaster. He would wait until he had more power at his disposal, then, even if it meant trusting in Rome a little longer. He need not fight her alone. There would be legions of soldiers, and the two other sorcerers as well, though Usem was not convinced of their intentions.

  He wavered at the doorway, considering again. His dagger had slain many foes in the past. He had done the impossible and survived it, over and over again, though he wished he had his own men behind him, following his commands.

  You will not kill her, the wind insisted. You can only die.

  A thought occurred to him.

  “Where are her children?” he asked the wind.

  With the emperor, she answered.

  “And her husband?”

  The emperor has him, too. The scorn in the wind’s voice manifested as small whirlwinds. Ghosts were creatures of breath and spirit, like the wind itself. Usem could tell that the wind wished to set the shade free.

  “That is not our place,” Usem told the wind.

  He thought of the legions of soldiers who marched on behalf of the emperor. If he failed here, if he died here, it would be all too easy for them to march upon his people.

  For a moment, he wondered if it would be better to let Cleopatra destroy the Romans. With the threat of Rome removed, the world would function as it once had.

  Still, the queen had been a conqueror herself. His people had lived beside hers, but Egypt had not always been an easy neighbor. Once she had Rome, she would want more of the world. Once she had that, she would want everything.

  At least the emperor was mortal, and he had sworn to the bargain. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to barter for independence. Usem could not let it go. He turned back to the Palatine, his cloak whipped about by the wind.

  You must not trust him, the wind insisted. He lies.

  “Then I will lie, too,” he finally said as he entered the house and made his way down the corridor to his room.

  The wind left him then and made its way through the residence, slipping beneath doors and through windows, listening to conversations, exploring hearts.

  Selene tiptoed into the hallway, her eyes alert, her nightdress barely rumpled. She’d been awake for some time, plagued by bad dreams. Her parents had appeared to her in a nightmare and then abandoned her to a mob of Alexandrians, all of them waiting to tear her apart.

  She heard noise from down the hall, and paused. She was surely not supposed to be roaming the emperor’s house. In Alexandria, a nursemaid would have followed her. In Julia’s room, there were two women stationed to tend to the girl’s every need. Here, no longer the daughter of a queen, Selene had strange freedom. She pressed her back against the wall, breathing shallowly, but it was too late.

  At the end of the passage, a door opened, and a beautiful woman stepped out, smiling.

  “I thought everyone was sleeping,” she said. “Everyone but you and I, it seems.”

  The girl hesitated, on the verge of running back to her bedchamber.

  “There is nothing to fear. I am a guest here, too. You are daughter to Cleopatra, named after her, are you not?” the woman asked.

  “No. My name is Selene, and I am a Roman now,” Selene said, stumbling slightly over the words. “My parents are dead. I am no longer anyone’s daughter.”

  “You cannot change your parentage so easily,” the woman said, smiling. “Your blood is royal. There is no need to apologize for that. It is a precious thing, not a shameful one. You are a precious thing, though they may treat you like a prisoner.”

  “They don’t treat me like a prisoner,” the girl protested. “No one watches me at all. I can do as I please here.”

  Chrysate stepped into the hallway. It would not do to let the girl see the shade of her father, his angry spirit kept in her rooms.

  A bouquet of wildflowers appeared in the priestess’s hand, and Selene gasped in delight.

  The flowers transformed before her eyes into a bouquet of songbirds, their feathers jeweled in every color of the sunrise, every color of the ocean, every color of the deepening end of the rainbow. In spite of her uncertainty, Selene was flooded with desire. The colors in them reminded her of home.

  Chrysate smiled hungrily at the girl. Nothing in the scry had indicated that she might find a child of royal blood in Rome, orphaned. The child was everything Chrysate had been once, long ago. She was everything Chrysate would be again. Selene would be the missing piece of Hecate’s summoning.

  It had taken most of Chrysate’s remaining power to bring Mark Antony from the Underworld, and she was significantly diminished. The gods of the dead did not approve of such transactions, and shades tended to descend back to Hades the moment their summoner released hold. Once, she would have sacrificed an entire animal as part of her spell, a black-fleeced ram. Now, with her patroness Hecate so weakened, a drop of her own blood was all she could spare to bind Antony to her, and she was not sure that it would be enough. The holding stone was a precautionary measure until she regained her strength.

  Chrysate was limited by her depletion, and so this final spell, bringing the birds out of nothingness, conjuring them out of feathers and words to woo the girl, was a slow-acting dream, a soothing song, the most rudimentary of love spells.

  It would do what was needed, however, even if it took more time than Chrysate desired. The body the priestess occupied had been used for much too long, but gifts such as these had to be willing or the spells would fail.

  “Selene,” she purred. “These birds came all the way from Greece to sing to you. Would you deny them?”

  The birds opened their golden throats and sang.

  The wind flickered down the hall, listening as the songbirds sang to Selene of poisons drenched in honey, of corpses dancing beneath starry lights, of bears raising themselves up onto their haunches to orate, and of the moon, dipping itself into blood and drowning there.

  All these words were sweetly sung, but the wind heard the darkness in them and watched as Selene walked toward Chrysate, entranced, her hands outstretched for the bouquet.

  The seiðkona, locked in her chamber, was suddenly alert. Currents of power whipped about the building, slithering down hallways, simmering over hearths, broiling beneath flesh, scalding to the bone. The magic of night and of day. She could feel both sorts. Someone in the house was casting a love spell. The wind was wandering the hallways, and below the ground, the currents of cold fire and death were massing.

  Auðr’s head spun to the window, but she could see nothing.

  Without her distaff, she had not been able to accurately divine the other witch’s roles in the events to come. The man was here for the money, she assumed. Rome was rich in Egypt’s gold, and the Psylli would be paid his weight in it if his services proved useful. The woman was here for other reasons. The threads of her fate, the ones the seiðkona could see, were barbed and bloodied. Chrysate served an old god. It was she who had summoned the dead and set them to intervene in the affairs of the living.

  The seiðkona smiled. This was not a bad thing. A soul whose thread had been cut was now restored to the tapestry, and its presence changed the pattern. It might be useful.

  Auðr stretched her arms out in front of her body, gazing on the knots that bound her wrists. Panting with exertion, she watched as the ropes gracefully unlooped themselves and fell to the floor. Her captors had not understood her nature. She was a spinner of fates, and the
strings of destiny obeyed her. The ropes they’d bound her with were just another form of thread, just another sort of spinning. Her fingers stretched like the legs of a spider, kept too long twisted about a web.

  Her distaff was under guard, somewhere nearby. She could feel it, if she could not see it.

  Now that she had seen Cleopatra, she knew that she would need it. If there was any hope at all, it rested in Auðr.

  She was seized with a spasm of coughing, raw and painful, and when it finally ended, her hands were spattered with blood. She felt about on the tapestry, testing the strength of her own thread. Cleopatra was coming, no matter the seiðkona’s health. Without the distaff, Auðr could be of little use.

  She opened the door into the corridor and made her way through the marble complex. As she walked, she brushed aside the threads belonging to all those who lived in Rome. Her own thread was knotted with these destinies, its golden span tangled and braided in ways she had not imagined it could be. She might ensure the fall or the rise of Rome with her actions here. She might break bloodlines, or make them. Most of all, she might find the source of the chaos, the thing that was twisting the pattern, the reason she’d come.

  The queen, and whatever it was that twined with her.

  Cleopatra’s fate rippled, a strong strand, weaving itself against the souls of those in this house. She was coming, then. She had decided to act.

  The seiðkona found a barely bearded youth standing uneasily against a wall. Her distaff was inside the room he guarded. She bent her back, a crippled old woman in need of an arm to hold. As the youth approached her, she worked a small magic.

  The boy smiled upon her and opened the door.

  12

  Cleopatra crept out of Virgil’s doorway and into the city. She moved quickly over the stones, wending through alleys as though she carried the map of Rome in her bones. She did not know this sector, but she could smell the Theater of Pompey, and she went toward it. Julius Caesar’s heart’s blood, shed there so many years ago, gave off a metallic, vinegary tang that was instantly recognizable.

  She heard the sounds of the inhabitants of Rome, even though she did not see most of them. The splashing of chamber pots emptied over balconies, the terrified cries of those in the grip of nightmares, the coos of Parthian courtesans to their clients, the stretching joints of acrobats preparing for the next day’s employment.

  She trotted past Caesar’s rose gardens and across the wooden bridge over the Tiber, her body regaining memory with each step. Before her was the enormity of the Circus Maximus, the chariot racing and gladiatorial arena, with its high wooden walls and oblong shape.

  There, on the other side of the arena, was the Palatine Hill, crowned so thickly with white marble structures that it looked like a snow-capped mountain. Atop it, gilded, and shining even in the darkness, was the Temple of Apollo, newly built since her last visit. There were more new buildings, too, chief among them a complex that she knew housed Octavian. Augustus, Nicolaus had told her, but she did not care that her enemy had changed his name.

  Cleopatra began to make her way stealthily around the boundary of the circus, planning to slip up the side of the Palatine unseen, but she paused, startled. The sounds of workmen sweating and heaving were nearly deafening after the silence of the night.

  Up above the fence line, they were levering an object with a slender red granite surface and clean lines. A sacred Egyptian obelisk, looted from Heliopolis? She could see the inscriptions from here, praising Ra and wishing him safe passage through the Duat.

  They had stolen it from Egypt, stolen it from under her nose.

  Her mouth opened in a hiss of fury. They would not destroy her country. They would not take its ancient objects and use them for decorations. Her mind filled with Sekhmet’s voice. Ra’s tributes, stolen.

  She was over the lower fence, her teeth exposed, her body ready, before she knew what she was doing, and then it was too late.

  These were not workmen but legionaries, and she had flung herself into their midst.

  How many were there? Twenty at least, surrounding her, and for a moment she was afraid, but then she laughed. She could see them looking at her, bewildered that a woman could have done such a thing. One of them took a tentative step toward her.

  “My lady,” he said. “These grounds are off limits.”

  They were no match for her. This city was no match for her. She had been kept too long belowdecks, and now she wanted to run. She took a step toward the soldier, smiling at him, and then, with a soft leap, she was before him.

  The men shouted in surprise as her claws tore into their fellow’s shoulder. She threw him to the ground easily, using none of her true strength.

  “They are not off limits to me,” she said, and then she leapt to the top of the high fence, daring them to follow.

  After her!” shouted the centurion who’d been supervising the installation of the obelisk. His men, still reeling, charged though the gate, their swords drawn.

  The creature had leapt from the fence top and down to the street without any warning. She would be gone if they did not get to her quickly.

  There she was, atop a building. He could see talons from here, long and silver in the lamplight, attached to her slender human fingers. Her face was shadowed, but he had seen her fangs, her shorn black hair. He could not tell what manner of thing she was.

  She laughed again, a terrible sound, and then she was gone into the shadows. The centurion cursed the darkness, signaling to his men to spread down the street.

  Cleopatra waited above them, looking down at their bodies creeping through the alleyways. She could see their every move, but they could not see her unless she wanted them to. She was seized by the glory of her form once again. All the sorrow of the ship seemed far away, as she leapt from rooftop to rooftop, taunting her pursuers.

  They could not catch her. They could not hurt her. This was her city now and she was a god in it. She was faster than any soldier, stronger than any Roman, and she would find their emperor and kill him. They could do nothing to stop her, with their shouting and swords. Night was her power. She would kill Augustus in front of them and show them how weak they were.

  She sprang from building to building, her steps rattling the rooftops, and the soldiers struggled below her, smashing doors and sprinting up stairways moments too late.

  “There!” shouted a legionary, charging at the figure before him, a slender, barefoot woman. For an instant, the soldiers saw a lioness and then she whirled and was gone again, running ever faster, closer and closer to the emperor’s dwelling.

  There were guards there, but not enough. The legionaries did not understand what it was they were chasing, and they did not want to. They had never seen anything like it.

  His heart pounding, sweating with panic, a centurion crept out of a doorway, leading his men, just in time to see the woman’s garments flutter around a corner.

  “Get her!” he shouted, and his men raised their swords and shields and ran for the end of the alley, but when they turned the corner, all that awaited them was another group of wild-eyed legionaries, looking up into the sky in disbelief.

  “Where is she?” the centurion demanded.

  “Gone,” his counterpart replied.

  “We must report this to Marcus Agrippa,” the centurion grunted.

  “Report what? That we lost something in the dark? That we can’t say whether it was an animal or a woman?”

  Cleopatra watched their argument from her perch at the top of the Temple of Vesta. There were too many lives in Rome, and she felt them all. She wearied of the chase.

  She slipped off the roof and back into the streets, cutting through the Forum. There was nothing to see there, not at night, but it comforted her. She’d strolled there many years before with Julius Caesar, holding Caesarion in her arms. She walked aimlessly through the square, listening to the night birds and the sounds of legionaries running through the city, seeking her. Her mind was so occupied wi
th the past that when she stumbled, she did not at first understand what was before her.

  Her own face, ghostly pale, frozen in the darkness.

  Cleopatra almost screamed, thinking she encountered some new horror, but her fingertips touched marble. A statue perfectly made in her image. She saw herself dead and broken, close to naked, an asp slithering over her breast, her head thrown back, eyes shut as though in ecstasy instead of death.

  Thus is Egypt Conquered, said the inscription. The statue was decked with laurel garlands and, below that, covered in graffiti. It stood in a pile of refuse.

  Her entire body recoiled, her throat convulsing. This was their triumph, this frozen thing. They had carried her through the streets and shown her nakedness to everyone.

  She rocked the statue on its base and pushed it until it fell to the earth, unbroken. Only the serpent’s tail was cracked. The rest remained. Her voice betrayed her, and a wail became a roar.

  It took only moments to ascend the Palatine and arrive, panting, outside the emperor’s residence, her skin icy, her rage cloaked in darkness. She pressed her hands to the stone of the outer wall, feeling the fractures within it. It was vulnerable.

  She might slip in, take the form of the snake, and pass through the hall, silent as death, sleekly moving over the paving stones. To Octavian’s bedchamber. To Octavian’s bed. She would strangle him there.

  Feed, Sekhmet whispered. Cleopatra jolted.

  Her children were inside the house as well. She could feel them dreaming. Alexander Helios playing at weapons in his sleep. Ptolemy, little Ptolemy, dreaming about her. She saw her own face in his mind, her own arms holding him. He dreamt of his mother, but not as she was now. The mother he remembered was dead.

  Where was Selene? Cleopatra could not hear her dreams, and after a moment, she realized that it was because the girl was awake, somewhere in the house. Awake, or not quite. She seemed to be in a waking dream, her thoughts drifting out of the residence as birds and flowers, and the face of a woman Cleopatra did not recognize, a green-eyed girl with braids to her knees.