Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Your commander calls on you,” he said. “Your commander charges you with action.”

  “How do we know who you are?” asked one of the soldiers, his cup spilled before him.

  “Do you doubt me? I am Mark Antony,” Antony said.

  One of the legionaries grinned.

  “You look like him, I won’t deny that,” he said. “And you sound like him. Who’s playing us for fools? Show yourself!”

  Antony grimaced. Soldiers were not easy to force into sobriety, nor were they impressed by the impossible.

  They would be easier to bribe than command, in this condition.

  “I want to hire you,” he said. “Tomorrow night, at the Circus Maximus. You will appear there, armed, and await my signal. There is a woman—” He hesitated and decided not to name Cleopatra. “Who must be protected from other soldiers. You will keep her safe.”

  “How much?”

  “Enough to keep you in whores until you die,” Antony said.

  “And drink?”

  “Who do you take me for? It will keep you in drink as well,” Antony said.

  “Then I’m your man,” said the legionary, “whoever you are.” The others nodded, and Antony explained what he needed from them. At last, when he had made himself clear, sworn them to sobriety, and promised gold to them, he made his way from the bar and out into the street. He had more to accomplish, and this time he would improve on his performance.

  In the private, tiled room where the senators sat, taking their afternoon steam bath, the walls were warm and slippery with oil. The vapor surrounding the men hung as thick as fog, and their voices echoed, disembodied, from out of the clouds. The senators had installed themselves far from the ears of the emperor and his dearest general.

  “He claims to be descended from Apollo, though we all knew his mother, Atia, and she was nothing a god would touch, even accidentally in the dark while fumbling around on the temple floor, looking for something better,” muttered one of the senators.

  Another senator splashed his hands in the water to make his point.

  “Caesar Augustus is only a lowly great-nephew, and yet he dares to call himself Caesar, as though that drop of Julian blood were enough to counterbalance his moneylending grandfather!”

  “And the slave!” cried another. “I have it on good authority that his great-grandfather was a freed slave who spent his life twisting rope in the South.”

  The senators were appalled.

  They shifted themselves on the mosaic-tiled benches, dangling their large, complaining feet into the scalding water below. They mopped sweat from off their shaven heads and muttered further.

  “Augustus—”

  “Call him Octavian!” shrilled one of the eldest. “He is a tiny child, scarcely sprouted from out of the earth! He is a spring asparagus!”

  The other senators looked indulgently upon their elder and continued their lament.

  “Augustus will destroy the system of logical discourse. He will shrink Rome until it is under the control of one mind, one voice, and one emperor.”

  Emperor.

  The thought made their testicles shrivel, and yet there was nothing to be done about it. They missed the old days of the republic, when they’d run things. When they’d run everything. The glorious days of speeches and arguments, scrolls and debates. The days when the Senate needed to be persuaded, for days on end, before coming to any decision. And perhaps bribed as well.

  “Senators!” boomed a voice. “Senators of Rome!”

  The men stopped what they were doing and peered into the steam, confused.

  It was certainly some trickery, some pageant created to frighten old men. Something done with a trumpet or an actor, falsifying the tones that each of them knew very well.

  And yet.

  They’d heard him orate. They had heard him address the crowd, offering Caesar’s funerary speech. They had heard him cry battle. The voice was an impossible voice.

  The man they knew was dead.

  The temperature of the room began to drop as a figure emerged from the steam, dusky and faint, as shifting as any vapor. His chin was cleft, and his hair fell in dark, silvering curls over his forehead. His gilded armor was strapped upon him, and there was a wound in his abdomen. A bloody, mortal wound.

  The senators murmured in terror. Mark Antony was dead in Egypt, dead nearly a year, and yet here he stood. His sandals did not touch the ground.

  Three senators surged in the direction of escape, but cold clouds of fog blossomed over the doorway, and they could not find their way out. A skim of ice had formed over the tiles, and one senator slipped on it.

  Another three pressed themselves against the walls of the bathhouse, hiding in the steam and praying to the gods that the spirit had not noticed them.

  “I come to you from Hades, with tidings of dark deeds kept from you by the one you call Caesar,” the ghost said, his lip twisting up in a smile of satisfaction. “Will you hear me, who was once a man like yourselves? I come to you with news of your emperor.”

  “Augustus?”

  “The same.”

  That was enough to change their minds about fleeing. Dispensing with the minor matter that their messenger was from the Underworld, the senators leaned hungrily forward on their benches to listen.

  “Speak,” they urged. “Tell us everything.”

  “There is a price. A small matter. Nothing that such powerful men would find difficult. There is an object I require. A piece of green glass, a synochitus, must be stolen from a woman tomorrow night at the Circus Maximus and destroyed. You will send a man to do it.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s easy enough. Get on with it,” said a senator, and Antony nodded.

  “There will be games held tomorrow night, and at the games the emperor’s betrayals will be revealed to you. He has bound himself to witches, against the ways of Rome. His defeat of Egypt was false. Cleopatra is not dead. Would you have me speak further?”

  The senators leaned forward, shivering in the newly frigid room. One of the pools was entirely ice now, and a thin rime of frost covered the men’s pates. Still, they were eager for more information. Rome was powered by such things, and always had been. A rumor of an emperor’s betrayal was worth as much as this and more.

  “Continue,” said a senator, and the rest nodded.

  “You must each give me a drop of your blood, so that I may speak fully,” the shade told them, and the senators held out their hands, willing.

  Blood was a small price when one was offered information about the powers that ran Rome.

  Blood was nothing.

  Antony smiled. All the memory of Rome was contained within these men, and he took it, seven drops of blood, as snowflakes drifted gently from the ceiling of the room.

  He told them all he knew, and then, together, they made a plan.

  15

  Cleopatra was maddened by her failure. What had stopped her? Fear? Her daughter’s face?

  She thought at first to return to Virgil’s house, but then the thought of Nicolaus kept her out in the city. She hungered too much to trust herself to return to him. With daylight, she’d hidden in a root cellar, but the sounds of Rome plagued her nonetheless.

  As soon as the sun dropped, she was out again, scarcely managing to pass the doorways, the stones, the temples that Antony had once visited, without stopping to look for him. She could almost feel him, but she knew he was dead. She’d burned his body.

  Nothing was ever entirely gone; she knew it now.

  A cryer sprinted past her, shouting his announcement.

  “PRIVATE VENATIO, an hour past sunset, tomorrow evening! To be attended by Caesar Augustus, celebrating the arrival of the children of conquered Egypt and offering a special curiosity: a vision of Mark Antony, brought from beneath the earth to bow to Rome.”

  She hissed, hearing it, but thought she imagined things. Her hunger was great now, and she could scarcely contain it. A group of legionaries stumbled from a bar and p
ast her, and she thought she heard them say Antony’s name. She shook her head to clear it.

  In an alley near a bathhouse, she caught the scent of Antony, stronger this time. Her eyes filled with tears as she inhaled. It was as though he were beside her. If only that were true.

  A legionary passed her, pasting notices of the venatio onto a fence. She paused to look at them. A drawing of a man, his body familiar, broad-chested and tall. She looked more closely. The man in the drawing had a cleft chin. He bowed before a drawing of Rome’s emperor.

  Cleopatra tore the notice from the wall and then followed behind the man who was posting them. How dare they mock Antony this way? It would be an actor, painted and costumed, a theatrical show exploiting the memory of her husband.

  Still.

  She would not stop this time. It had been a mistake. She’d had the emperor, and she could have killed him. This would all be done.

  Now it would be in public. That might be better. There would be so many people there that her children would not be in any danger. No frenzy could take her and injure them, not with so many Romans present. Sekhmet craved the blood of enemies, Cleopatra convinced herself, not the blood of loved ones.

  The animals Cleopatra had traveled with would fight here, to celebrate Conquered Egypt. She could feel them beneath her, in the cages that had been installed in the catacombs beneath Rome. They’d be prodded up into the light and given shouts and applause when they surfaced in the arena to meet their fighting partners, the bestiarii, gladiators doomed to fight the doomed. Lions, tigers, and crocodiles pitted against men.

  She would attend.

  The poster hanger paused, looking behind him nervously.

  She leapt at him, her talons slashing, her teeth in his throat before he had time to make the slightest sound. If he broadcast the emperor’s filthy lies about Antony, then he deserved to die.

  From the shadows, Antony watched his wife tear savagely into the man’s throat. He’d searched every corner of the city for Cleopatra, and now he had found her. In shock, he watched her drink the workman’s blood.

  What the emperor said was true. Was she under a spell or sickened with some sort of poison? He did not know what she had become, but he was horrified. He turned and disappeared into the shadows of the falling sun. He could not talk to her. Not now.

  16

  Chrysate woke suddenly and looked quickly about the room. It was empty but for the shade of Antony, who sat beside her, quiet and still. She had slept most of the day, and she still felt weak from the spells she’d cast the night before.

  She felt magic around her, and not her own. The house was filled with it. She had not seen the other witches in the scry, and the old woman in particular made her uneasy. Chrysate had slept like one drugged, dreaming of threads, of being entangled in a sticky web spun by a tremendous spider. She stretched, reassuring herself that nothing had changed in the room, and then turned to look at her captive.

  Antony stared beyond the ceiling, his eyes dark.

  Had she not known better, she would have thought he grieved over something. This was impossible, though. No shade Chrysate had ever seen was strong enough to resist the forgetfulness of Hades for long, even if the shade was that of a previously formidable man.

  “You may eat,” she instructed Antony, though he looked strangely substantial.

  He passed to the table, dipping his fingers into the honey and milk all shades craved. Was her memory flawed? His skin had been ashen, and now it seemed less so. His arms had been nearly transparent, and now she could swear there was blood moving through the faded veins.

  Had he left the room while she slept?

  “What has changed?” she asked him.

  “Nothing, my lady,” he answered.

  She shook her head. The holding stone was tight in her hand, but something was not right, and her powers were not strong enough to understand what it might be. She wished the girl was ready, but that spell was not complete yet. There was no time to do what she planned for Selene, not before the venatio. Chrysate would have to suffer through the night in this condition and perhaps longer. It would not do to be interrupted.

  There was enough power contained within Cleopatra to remove Hecate from her lowly position and bring her to rule over Persephone herself. There was enough power there to do anything Chrysate desired. She had only to capture her, and the change foreseen in the scry would be set in motion.

  Chrysate smiled.

  Sekhmet must have been foolish or desperate, to tie herself to a human, like a hawk to a chain. If the human was captured, the chain might be reeled in and the hawk seized, or so Chrysate hoped.

  She did not expect it to be easy. She’d have to sacrifice more blood to keep Antony in her power. She needed him to lure his wife.

  Wincing, she took a long, keenly pointed ritual knife from her garments and ran it across her wrist. Even after all these years, even across the white line of scar first put there when she was a girl, on a body long since abandoned, the necessary sacrifices remained unpleasant. Her skin felt frail and furrowed under the tip of the knife, though it appeared as smooth as silk.

  She held her wrist to Antony’s lips.

  Antony pressed his mouth to the cut, licking the blood from it. His color improved as he drank, her blood running through him.

  Oh, he was hers. There was no doubt about it.

  Why, then, did she still feel that something was wrong?

  17

  The night before the venatio, the emperor was too frightened to leep. The thought of Cleopatra in his city caused his heart to race. He kept seeing her outside his window, outside his door, in his bed, her scaled skin slipping across his naked chest.

  He tossed for hours, his eyes clenched shut, the pillow lumpy beneath his head, his cot as tight and hard as a stone-covered hillside. At last he rose. It had been months since he’d slept through the night, since his ship waited outside the Alexandrian harbor. He cursed Cleopatra and Antony. They had stolen his sleep, and now he walked, half waking, half delirious, through the halls.

  Usem, patrolling outside the emperor’s chambers, heard bare feet shuffling across the stones toward him.

  He turned and found the emperor behind him, dressed in only a thin tunic, his eyes wild, his skin clammy.

  Augustus blinked, as though looking at a bright light.

  “You will live a long life, she told me,” he whispered. “Now she means to take it. She smells of lemons and fire. Her perfume is the same as it ever was, and I smell it in Rome.”

  “She is not in the house,” Usem said, taking pity on the man, but the emperor shook his head frantically, as though trying to rid himself of an insect.

  “Tell me a story,” he asked the Psylli. “Tell me something to make the night come.”

  Usem laughed, a dry sound of curious pleasure, something that calmed the emperor vaguely. If the man still laughed, all could not be lost.

  “It is night already,” the Psylli told him. “It is hours until dawn.”

  “It is not night in my mind,” the emperor replied.

  “I will tell you a story,” Usem said. “But there is a price.”

  “There is always a price,” the emperor said wearily. “I will pay it.”

  Augustus was now convinced that any fee owed to the Psylli and his tribe would never need to be paid, at least not by him. His death would no doubt occur long before he paid his debts, and Usem wanted peace. Who could promise such a thing in a world where creatures like Cleopatra existed?

  The two walked back to the emperor’s room, where Augustus lay down again and Usem settled into a crouch beside his cot. The Psylli began to speak, his voice low and even.

  “A young man was in the desert one day, walking over the sand and dreaming of his future. He had reached the age of marriage, but the neighboring tribes would not surrender their daughters. They were afraid of his people, who consorted with poisonous serpents. When other tribes saw the Psylli coming near, they fled, leavi
ng even their camels behind. The Psylli grew rich on abandoned possessions, but their own tribe became smaller and smaller. This boy longed for a bride, but he did not wish to take a woman against her will. He knew that he would have to walk for days to find a tribe who knew nothing of his people, but he swore to himself that he would not return to the snake people until he had found his wife.

  “He walked for seven days and six nights, sleeping in caves dug amongst the serpents. On the seventh night, as dawn neared, the boy saw something spinning on the horizon, dancing and throwing light across the darkness. The boy walked closer, wondering.”

  The emperor turned his head toward the Psylli and saw the man’s eyes glitter.

  “As the young man neared the tornado, he could see a graceful hand twisting in and out of the sand, its long fingers bedecked with sparkling rings, the source of the light he had seen.

  “As he got closer still, shielding his eyes to protect them, he saw a slender form in the center of the sandstorm, her long hair twirling and whipping through the air to cover her naked body. The young man cried out in wonder, and a rapturous, startled face turned toward him for only a moment. Then she was gone, across the desert, away from him.

  “The boy had caught a glimpse of the youngest daughter of the Western Wind,” the Psylli said. “She was the most beautiful woman on earth, and he was instantly determined that he would take her for his bride.”

  Augustus shifted in his coverlets. The moon outside, though it was but a crescent, crept through his window, leaving a slice of brightness on the Psylli’s face. He could see only the man’s eyes, which were so black he could not discern their expression. The Psylli continued.

  “The young man chased after the wind, but she disappeared from his view, whipping the sand into new dunes to block his passage as she fled. The sun laughed from above as the young man walked the day long, sizzling in the still air, searching for his love. At last he saw her far across the sand, but she blew away as soon as he was close enough to ask her name. This time, however, she smiled at him before she was gone, and he heard her laughter echoing over the desert. The young man kept following, sometimes seeing flowering branches from far-off places left in the sand, and sometimes watching exotic birds ride on the wind’s back, high over his head. Once, she left him an empty ship dropped gently from above, with its sails billowing, but she would not speak to him, nor would she come near enough that he might touch her hand.