Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Cleopatra realized with a start that Selene was dreaming of a new mother.

  She slipped around the outer wall, searching for Selene’s room. She could not face her sons, but the thought of her daughter had sustained her aboard the ship. She was so like Cleopatra, and the rejections she’d shouted in Alexandria were exactly what Cleopatra herself would have said had their places been switched. Selene was ambitious, truly royal. She might understand why her mother had done as she had, even if her brothers could not. Cleopatra suddenly wanted desperately to explain, to woo her child back to her side. Her daughter was near. She moved silently along the building, ever closer.

  She imagined herself as she was, bounding into Selene’s room. The girl would rise from bed, and run to the windows, and—

  She halted in confusion, scenting something she recognized. A musky smell, mint and night, wine and sweat, blood and metal. She turned slowly, looking into the dark.

  “Antony?” she whispered, her body straining for a reply. But there was nothing. After a moment, she realized she was a fool. With her heightened senses, she must have caught an echo of long ago. This was Antony’s city, after all.

  Whose bedchamber was it coming from? She looked up to the second floor of the residence.

  The shutters stood open, and from them she could hear the emperor’s nightmares. He dreamt of Cleopatra. She saw her own face in his sleeping thoughts. Her dead face, like the statue he’d had made in her image. All thoughts of her children forgotten, Cleopatra fit her fingertips into a crack in the stones, and began to climb, her claws scraping against the rock. It took only a few moments before she was in the window itself, and there he was. Her enemy in his bed, his pale hair lit with moonlight, the lines in his face deep and contorted. Tears ran down his face. He cried in his sleep.

  She thought of the taste of tears.

  She stepped over the sill, her feet silent. She dropped to the floor, her body shifting as she moved toward Augustus.

  She could hear the legionaries coming up the hillside, resolved to tell Marcus Agrippa what they had seen. She could hear them pounding on his door. They had no idea where she was.

  She undulated across the silken carpet, the sound of her passage a mere whisper. She fit her pointed jaw beneath the counterpane and slithered, cool and slender, into the emperor’s bed. He stirred, murmuring as her body slipped over his ankle, over his wrist, over his chest.

  She swayed above his face, looking at him through a serpent’s gaze, her spine arching as she drew back to strike. His eyelids fluttered. Yes. She wanted him awake.

  Feed.

  A sound from the hallway startled her, and she turned to see her daughter in the open doorway, her steps as slow and light as a sleepwalker’s, her hands filled with a bouquet of what first seemed to be flowers and then seemed to be birds. A strange fragrance followed the girl, something dark and ashen.

  Selene turned to look into the room, her eyes dazed, and Cleopatra felt herself falter.

  Her daughter took a step forward, blinking into the shadows at the serpent that coiled atop the emperor’s chest.

  Selene’s eyes widened. She dropped the bouquet, and the songbirds scattered to the ceiling.

  The girl screamed, her piercing voice tearing through the Palatine.

  Cleopatra tore herself from the emperor’s bed, disobeying Sekhmet’s hunger.

  She was gone before Augustus’s eyes were fully open.

  13

  A grippa spun and raced from his quarters at the sound of the screams, certain that it must be the Greek witch in Augustus’s room. He knew he should not have left him alone with her the night before. The emperor was a fool when it came to women. But why was she screaming?

  The general sprinted down the hallway and into the room, his sword drawn, only to stumble over Selene crumpled on the floor. Augustus was still in bed, staring out the unshuttered window, tightly wrapped in his coverlet and shivering. He remained there even as Agrippa shouted his name. No one else was visible.

  The Psylli was close on Agrippa’s heels, and when he saw that there was no enemy in the room, he fell to his knees beside the girl, checking her heartbeat.

  “What is it?” Agrippa shouted, spinning in search of the villain. Selene took a gasping breath. The emperor said nothing, and Agrippa turned his attention to her. “What did you see?”

  The little girl shook her head weakly. Her skin was too pale, and her eyes were oddly dilated.

  “A snake,” Selene said, her voice quivering.

  “A snake,” Augustus whispered, and Agrippa tore the coverlet from his bed. There was nothing there.

  Agrippa took a threatening step toward the Psylli.

  “Have you let a serpent loose in the emperor’s house?”

  “Not one of mine,” Usem said. “They are all accounted for, safe in my chamber. I told you. You do not know what it is you fight.”

  “It went out the window,” Augustus managed, pointing his finger. Agrippa crossed the room at top speed, placing himself beside the window frame. He angled his eyes cautiously downward, scanning for threats.

  All he saw was the clay-daubed hut of Romulus, founder of Rome. The emperor had built his house in order to be near the landmark. The hut was his special prize.

  “Is someone concealed there? Tell me where he is,” Agrippa whispered.

  Augustus did not answer for a moment, and Agrippa shifted, grasping his sword more tightly and raising his shield to barricade the window.

  “She,” said Selene. “It wasn’t a man.”

  “No,” Augustus interrupted. “It was nothing. Take the child away. I did not sleep well, and I scared her. I thought I felt a serpent in my bed. I thought I saw someone climbing out my window.”

  “I saw it, too,” Selene protested.

  “Take her to her chamber,” Augustus insisted. “She does not belong here. This is a conversation for men, not children. This is a discussion of war.”

  The Psylli took the child from the room, looking over his shoulder at Agrippa and Augustus. A breeze stirred the girl’s hair, and in the emperor’s room, the curtains blew suddenly out from the window.

  In the hallway outside the chamber, Auðr stood against the wall, trembling. She had felt the line of Cleopatra’s fate slithering into the residence, and shifted the emperor’s fate just in time, pulling Selene’s thread to bring her past the bedroom door. Now she would pay the price of working such magic without preparation. She felt as though she were drowning. The Psylli gave her a sharp glance as he passed, noting the distaff in her hand. He nodded tightly at her.

  “There is no enemy out there. There is only Rome,” Agrippa said, his voice terse. He’d spent an infuriating night, first walking the corridors and then consulting with a group of legionaries who reported a strange intruder in the Circus Maximus. The men were at a loss to describe what the intruder had done, insisting she had been able to run more quickly than they, that she’d leapt from street to rooftop with ease, that she’d seemed one moment an animal and the next a woman.

  Agrippa accused the men of drunkenness, not unusual after a return from a long sea voyage, and sent them back to their quarters. But only moments after their departure, the screaming had started.

  Augustus looked up, startled, as his general slammed the chamber door and threw his weapons down upon the stones.

  “What exactly is it we seek to war against?” Agrippa roared. “Why do you have me dealing with the blackest creatures in the world? Why do you insist that such things stay in your own house? You will tell me what all this means or I will be gone from you.”

  His friend looked up at him, and sighed. Agrippa noticed that Augustus’s face had developed new lines. His eyes were grimmer than Agrippa had ever seen them, the whites streaked with red. Though it was early morning, there was wine on Augustus’s breath. Wine and something else, something herbal and caustic. He’d lost weight in the past months, and his hair had the ragged look of a badly shorn sheep. In Alexandria, he ha
d sent false messages. Now he called for witches. Perhaps the guilt over the sabotage of Mark Antony had made him ill.

  “Cleopatra lives,” Augustus said. “I swear it. I should have told you long ago. What the Psylli said was true. She is not dead, Agrippa. She was here last night.”

  Agrippa leaned closer to his friend. He would summon a physician discreetly, and immediately upon leaving this conference.

  “She is certainly dead,” Agrippa said, attempting to soothe Augustus. “Look out that window, not at Romulus’s hut but at the Circus Maximus. Have you not noticed what is being erected there by your own army? An obelisk, taken from Alexandria. See the point, rising over the fence? Would we have such a thing had we not won the war?”

  “She lives, and she is in Rome. I swear it. You think I’m mad,” Augustus said, his mouth twisting into a wry smile. “I am not. I saw her, just now. Selene saved me by screaming.”

  “Such visions come of fever.” Agrippa brushed the emperor’s icy forehead with his hand, worried enough to defy all protocol. The room was strangely cold suddenly, though it had been warm enough when he entered. He would order a fire lit.

  “I am as well as any man could be, knowing that his enemy stalked him, knowing that his enemy resisted death. There would be no witches in Rome if I were not desperate. She lives, and she is not human.”

  The emperor brought forth a mound of rough fabric. A linen tunic. A cloak such as a peasant might wear. An agate goblet.

  Agrippa looked at the objects, bewildered. He could see no meaning in them.

  “I took this from the queen’s mausoleum in Alexandria,” Augustus said, picking up the goblet and holding it to the light. The sun glowed through it.

  The residue of something dark lay in its well.

  “Once, there was a queen of Egypt,” he began. “A queen who became through magic something else.”

  When Augustus was done speaking, Agrippa pushed himself back from the table, furious.

  “I passed her yesterday at the port,” he said, his voice hoarse with frustration. “She was just arriving in the city, and had you seen fit to inform me of all this earlier, I would have had her, and her scholar, too. A patrol of my men saw her an hour ago and gave chase, but they did not capture her, because you had not told me what we were looking for. Now she’s hidden under our noses. I thought I imagined things. A dead woman walking through Rome.”

  “A dead woman walking through Rome,” Augustus echoed.

  “You misunderstand me,” Agrippa said. “Cleopatra never died. The snake venom counterfeited death. We should have burned her body. I believe you when you say that she was aboard that boat in Egypt, but I do not believe she worked alone there to kill the crew. She had an accomplice, the scholar perhaps, or a hired warrior. Perhaps a magician to manufacture the illusions my men described. Alexandria is full of magicians, all of them dealing in fragrant smoke and mirrors. It would not take much. You’ve let superstition take hold of you, and everyone else in this city has done the same.”

  “I told you! I saw visions in her eyes, Agrippa, visions of dark things! She’s a serpent! A lioness! Her daughter swears she and the tutor summoned something in Alexandria, something powerful, and I saw blood—”

  “Now that I know what I am to fight, we will defeat her,” Agrippa interrupted. “She is only a woman. A single enemy who has lost everything she once had. She has no army, no weapons, no friends beyond the tutor. We’ll hold a venatio tomorrow night and trap her in the Circus Maximus. What could be better than an arena, enclosed, with a moat about its edge and lined with my soldiers? We’ll capture her easily, and this time we will kill her.”

  “And how will we attract her there?”

  “Her children,” said Agrippa.

  “She did not oppose us when we executed Caesarion. If we use only the children, we will fail.”

  “She is their mother,” Agrippa insisted. “Think of our beginnings, when everyone in Rome thought we would fail in attacking Caesar’s assassins. We did not fail. Look around you.”

  Augustus looked around the room, at the trappings of an emperor. It all looked fragile. He thought of his great-uncle, stabbed twenty-three times at the height of his power, by men he called friends. Augustus felt dizzy.

  “We won those battles when we were boys,” he said. “And now we have much more to lose.”

  “Not today,” Agrippa said. “We fight a woman and a scholar.”

  “We’ll have the witches,” Augustus said, remembering, with relief, his defenders.

  “I do not recommend that,” Agrippa said. “We will bring what Cleopatra loves, and bait the trap with it. My soldiers are well trained.”

  “Her husband,” Augustus said, his voice suddenly taking on a liveliness it had not previously possessed. “Antony is what she desires.”

  Agrippa was certain that the vision Augustus swore the Greek witch had produced was merely a trick, a creature made of smoke. Nevertheless, such a skill might prove useful.

  “Yes,” he agreed, a concession. “We will offer Cleopatra her husband.”

  14

  The shadow detached itself from the stones and moved invisibly along the wall, slipping out beneath the door of the emperor’s bedchamber.

  They all thought he was a hopeless wisp of soul, locked in the Greek priestess’s rooms, but they were wrong.

  As Chrysate slept, exhausted by the spells she’d cast, a wind had gusted suddenly into the room, whipping at the witch’s coverlet. The holding stone fell loose in her hand, and Antony was free, at least until she woke. It was well that Chrysate’s chambers were far from the emperor’s. She had not wakened when Selene screamed.

  The witch did not know as much as she thought she did about shades. Antony was no one’s servant. She’d told them he could be deployed at Rome’s whim, his price a droplet of blood, his memory emptied of all his old grievances, but Antony had not forgotten who he was. Though he’d spent months in the Underworld, he’d repeated Cleopatra’s name over and over, willing himself to remember even as he watched spirits fumbling toward the rivers, seeking to forget the ones they’d loved, the lives they’d lost.

  His heart filled with fury as he thought of the things he’d overheard. The false messenger sent by Augustus to swear that Cleopatra was dead. The bribes paid by Augustus to sway the Egyptian army and tear them from Antony’s service. The fact that Augustus had knowingly buried Cleopatra alive.

  The fact that she still lived. Antony paid no attention to the other things Augustus swore, the visions he said he’d seen in Cleopatra’s eyes. They were the visions of a coward. If he had been as drunk in Alexandria as it seemed he was now, it was no wonder he’d hallucinated Cleopatra into a monster.

  Where was Cleopatra? It had been Antony’s only question in Hades, and it was his only question here. Augustus swore she was in Rome, swore she’d just left his rooms, and as Antony stood against the wall, shaking with wrath, the emperor and Agrippa had discussed their plans to trap and kill her in the Circus Maximus.

  What could he do to save her? He was nothing, an echo of his former self. He had no body, no hands to pick up a sword.

  Antony thought about his wife’s extraordinary resourcefulness. Long ago, in a betting game, she’d informed him that she could serve him a meal worth ten million sesterces, more expensive than any banquet that had ever graced his table.

  He took the bet, scoffing, and she promptly called for a cup of vinum acer, removed one of her tremendous sea pearl earrings, and dropped it into the goblet. It dissolved, rendering the vinegar free of acid. They drank that wine together, and he laughed, awestruck at her invention.

  “A glass of wine with you,” she told him, “is more valuable than anything else I possess.”

  She had transformed vinegar to wine for him, no matter the price, and he would do the same for her.

  It meant nothing that Antony’s hands could not hold a sword. He could still declare war against her enemies. There were many ears in Rome, and
not all of them were devoted to the Boy Emperor.

  Augustus thought that Antony was only a ghost, and no longer a warrior.

  It was not the first time an enemy had fatally underestimated Mark Antony.

  He smiled as he emerged from the Palatine and made his way down the hillside, his body nearly transparent in the afternoon sunlight.

  It was not hard to find the men who had once been his soldiers. With Rome at peace, they congregated in bars and brothels, and the city was filled with them, in various phases of inebriation. Egyptian gold filled their pockets.

  What would be difficult was finding men who would be loyal to him again. Most of the men Antony saw had shifted to the side of Octavian after Actium. He did not need disloyal soldiers. Antony had hoped to locate Canidius and the rest of his senior officers, the best-trained men in the army, but his lieutenant had been executed in Alexandria. Antony listened to the men sing bar songs of the bravery of Canidius Crassus. Of course his officers were dead.

  He stood in the dusty street, cursing himself. He had no idea when Chrysate would wake, and when she did, his time for searching would be done.

  At last he found a few men, strong and scarred, napping in the backroom of a bar. He shouted, and the men’s heads lurched up from their table. It was not the entrance he would have chosen.

  “Attention!”

  They blinked in the dusty air. Drunkards. Antony had been a drunkard himself on occasion. He knew how they felt, and so he made his voice all the louder.

  “Defenders of Alexandria!”

  The men squinted.

  In a flash, Antony appeared before them, and they gasped, pushing themselves back, stumbling over chairs in their haste to escape him. He looked suspiciously at the state of their muscles. The year since Alexandria had made them fat, but this was the best he could do on short notice. If he’d had time, he might have searched throughout the world, located his true friends, found the strongest men, but he had only until tomorrow evening to save Cleopatra.