Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  He took a step toward it.

  The room was very still, and Augustus suddenly felt terrified. There was nothing to fear. She was not here. Then he looked down at the floor. His slippers were soaked with blood.

  There was something inside the cauldron. Something large.

  Something moving.

  Augustus could not find his voice. He had given her Selene. What had she done?

  “No,” he whispered.

  With a screaming gasp, something rose from the cauldron, pale and streaming with dark water, naked, and with her hair plastered to her back.

  Augustus fell backward onto the floor as Chrysate emerged from the boiling liquid, her skin clear and perfect as a statue’s, her eyes startled at his presence.

  He turned and sprinted from the room, his mind spinning, his heart racing. Witchcraft. Blood. A boiled corpse, or at least, that was what he was sure he’d seen, and then—

  Perfect and young, Chrysate coming out of the fire. How had he forgotten her powers? She was not human, and he’d been sharing his bed with her. He nearly convulsed with horror.

  “Agrippa!” Augustus shouted, running through the corridor. “Marcus Agrippa!”

  This was Agrippa’s fault. He had brought the witch to Rome, and now—

  What had he seen? He didn’t know. He should never have used witches. He should never have trusted witches. He bolted theriac directly from its bottle, desperate for calm. His heart was beating too quickly, his breath coming too fast.

  “What is it?” The general arrived more quickly than Augustus had expected. “I was on my way to you,” Agrippa said. “I have news of a weapon, a way to destroy Cleopatra—”

  “Chrysate has done something, killed someone. I saw her, at the fire, in the fire—”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The silver box is gone,” Augustus stammered. His mind felt tangled and drunk, and suddenly he was dizzy. Was she working a spell on him?

  “It is not gone. I have just seen it. The guards watch it all night and all day. My own men.”

  “Then perhaps Cleopatra is escaped from it—”

  “The queen is captured.” Agrippa’s face was suspicious, but for a moment, Augustus saw terror flash across it. “Or so I believed. Tell me I am not wrong.”

  “Usem told me that there is a plague,” Augustus interrupted. “All over Italy. Everywhere but Rome.”

  “There are always plagues,” Agrippa replied. “It’s summer.”

  “The plague comes from Cleopatra’s vengeance. She’s missing,” Augustus insisted. “And Chrysate has done something monstrous—” But even as he said it, Chrysate appeared behind him, opening the curtains of his bed.

  “She does not seem to be missing,” Agrippa said. “Did you forget who shared your bed?”

  Augustus was terrified. She had not been there. Had she? Had he gone mad? She was wearing only a flimsy silk gown, and he could see everything through it. Her hair was still wet from the cauldron.

  “I am here,” Chrysate said. “I have been with you all night, as you should certainly know. If Cleopatra is missing, you are the one who has charge of her. Your guards guard her.”

  Augustus nearly screamed. He could not understand what was happening. He felt dizzy, and his slippers were still soaked in blood. He held one out to show Agrippa, and for a moment, the general looked startled.

  “The kitchen slaughtered a chicken and made a soup for me,” Chrysate said. “He tread in the blood. Do you not remember, Augustus? You are not well. If I were you, I would summon a physician.”

  She spun on her heel, leaving the room.

  The general’s lip curled in disgust.

  “If you’re looking for a creature who might cause a plague, I suggest you look into your own bed. You might look to your witch.”

  “I am looking to her! You must go out and fight this plague!” Augustus insisted.

  Agrippa slammed his fists on Augustus’s desk, tipping the theriac over.

  “I AM A SOLDIER!” he shouted. “I wage war against men, not gods! Not Fates! Not witches! Not curses invented by drunkards! You sit here in your study, drinking your potion and wallowing in your fears. Your uncle would be ashamed of you. You do not rule. You rave!”

  Augustus sputtered, stunned. Agrippa had never spoken so to him.

  “How dare you?” he managed. “I will have you crucified!”

  “I speak as your friend. There are threats out there. There are threats in here! Real threats. I will fight them for you, but you cannot ask me to fight the invisible. There are rumors in the streets that you’ve gone mad, and prophecies that Rome is cursed and doomed. I delivered them to you a week ago, and have you read them? You have not. What have you done? You stay here all day and all night with your witch and your drug. Your power grows weaker every day.”

  Agrippa paused, breathing heavily.

  “I am done,” he said. “Do what you will with me, but do something!”

  “Get out of my sight,” Augustus screamed. “I am governing Rome! You have no idea what I do!”

  “With pleasure. I have a city to defend.” Agrippa smacked his hand against the theriac, and the bottle sprayed across the room. “If you care anything for that city, I suggest you stop drinking this poison. It makes you blind.”

  He slammed the door as he left.

  Augustus’s heart raced, his brain straining at the base of his skull. A blazing light began to flash and rotate before him, like a sun newborn in the confines of his room. His eyes rolled backward, and the lioness approached him in the crimson darkness, her golden eyes slitted, her breasts bared, and her fingers placed on a bowstring. She looked at him with such knowing. Such understanding. She was the only one who knew what he had been through.

  He should give himself to her, that was it. He should give Rome to her—He heard himself shout, and his eyes flew open. He dunked his head in a basin of cool water, raising his face from the liquid only when it felt that he might drown. In the polished glass above the basin, he saw his pallor, and a thin thread of blood trickling from his nose onto his lips.

  He was losing himself.

  Augustus sat down carefully, his legs shaking. Was Agrippa right? And the Psylli? He’d said the same thing.

  He stood and went to the sword that hung above his mantel. He took it from the wall and swung it experimentally. It had been years since he’d fought. He was not sure he remembered how to do it. He looked at the pool of theriac on the floor. Had he hallucinated what he saw in Chrysate’s chamber?

  He looked at his bloodied slippers. No. He had not.

  Agrippa was wrong about the theriac, a simple medicine, but still, he’d become too used to its effects. He needed all his strength now, all his intellect. He would significantly lessen his dose, wean himself from it.

  He swung the sword again, his arms shaking. He buckled on his armor. It was heavy and clammy against his skin.

  Augustus peered out the window, squinting in the sunlight. Where would he go? Who would go with him?

  10

  A ferocious howling began, the sound of thousands of dogs left out in a freezing wind or of wolves high in the hills, making their way into a city full of children. All around, there were ghostly sounds of snapping jaws and crunching bones. The wandering dead covered their ears and fled from the region.

  Hades was an echoing vault, and each sound was magnified, bouncing over and across the river and back to Cleopatra and Antony.

  “Where are we?” Cleopatra asked.

  “Hecate is near,” Antony said. “Those are her hounds.”

  Cleopatra turned her head slowly in the direction of the noise and saw a sight that chilled her. A tremendous form, her skin veined with the darkness of a stormy sea, lay on her side nearly covered with brambles and vines, a few hundred lengths away from them. A thick chain was wrapped about her ankle. As Cleopatra looked, the goddess’s eyes opened slightly, a flickering. All around her, ghostly dogs leapt and snapped their jaws.


  Cleopatra felt repulsed, but also something else.

  “Who jails her?”

  “The gods,” Antony said. “She interfered.”

  “I was a queen, too,” a soft voice said, the sound echoing around them, rattling and hungry. “Do not be so proud.”

  “Don’t look at her,” Antony told her. Cleopatra could not help herself.

  She shuddered, but Antony strode on past the apparition, Cleopatra’s hand in his.

  “The witch who imprisoned me serves that goddess. She sought to use you and Sekhmet to bring Hecate up from the Underworld,” Antony said. “To release her and upturn Hades.”

  “How would she do that?”

  “She would sacrifice you,” Antony said. “The longer we stay here, the more likely it is she will get her way. She still has your body. It is only luck that she does not know how to kill you.”

  “No one knows how to kill me,” Cleopatra said. “I do not. Do you?”

  “I don’t want to kill you,” Antony said. “I am the only one who feels that way.”

  At last, before them, crouching in the darkness at the mouth of a cave, was an enormous black dog with three heads, its throat wreathed with a tangle of hooded serpents.

  The dog’s eyes glowed red, and its fur shone with a dark and oily iridescence. Each of its teeth was as long as a ritual dagger, and it tossed its heads, rotating each one to look upon Cleopatra. The creature was as tall as an elephant, and its tremendous body filled the entrance to the cavern. It snorted and slavered, and its fur rippled with muscle and sharp bones. Its eyes were as bright as flames.

  Cleopatra felt her body flexing, twisting, and preparing itself for battle.

  “She does not live,” Antony informed Cerberus. “And we will pass. You will clear the way for us.”

  Growling, the dog inhaled the air about Cleopatra’s face.

  Cleopatra felt her own jaws stretching into a hiss, whether serpent or feline, she was uncertain. Antony looked at her, clearly startled.

  She gazed into the eyes of the snakes twined about the dog’s throat and spoke with them in a language she did not know. She felt the empty chamber where her heart had been, filling with a rippling endlesstongued chant.

  A version of the song that had flung her own body into the dust at the arena poured from her mouth. She was mistress of this new language, as easily as she’d always understood foreign tongues. The words were hers now.

  “Give me your everything,” the song went. “You belong to me. We are one thing, and we have the same longings. We are one thing, and we have the same desires. Sing with me, serpent children, dance with me. We are one.”

  The dog bared its teeth as the serpents about his throat tightened their grip on him, twisting and constricting his movements.

  “Kill him,” she told the serpents, for this was a creature in opposition to herself.

  Antony gripped her arm, distracting her from her task.

  “Persephone and Hades will not take kindly to that,” he told her. “We should not anger them before we ask for their benevolence.”

  The tremendous dog slipped to the floor of the cavern, a high whine coming from its mouths, his six eyes closing as the snakes twisted about him.

  “Let him sleep,” she told the snakes. “Let him dream. Do not let him die.”

  The serpents reluctantly loosened their hold, and she sang the last notes of their song as she and Antony climbed over the sleeping beast, feeling its rattling breath and sighs.

  “That was well done,” Antony said, but Cleopatra still felt the violence that had nearly overtaken her. It receded only with effort. And the sight of the goddess, chained, had reminded her too much of herself. Her own chain was long now, and she could not feel Sekhmet, but how much time did she have before her mistress called again?

  The sound of babies crying for their mothers stopped Cleopatra in the center of the passageway, brutally reminded of her children.

  “Where have you taken me?” she asked.

  “We must pass through the Cavern of Infants to reach the rest of Hades,” Antony said. “There is nothing to be done. For some, this is more frightening than anything else they see here, but you have seen many things. This is not the worst of them. Take my hand.”

  They were surrounded by shades of newborns who’d been taken outdoors and left exposed on the rubbish heaps of Rome, ready forage for wild dogs. This was the fate of infants unacknowledged by patriarchs, even those of noble families. It was perfectly legal. The fortunate were plucked up from the street and sold into the slave trade. The less fortunate died unmourned and were sent here, to a nation of dead babies, an endless nursery of weeping infants as far as the queen could see.

  Cleopatra felt her chest contract. The shades were nearly all daughters.

  Antony pushed her along, but she looked back, aching in the places that remained her own, mourning the dead. Their tiny hands stretched up, grasping nothing. Their lips moved, suckling at nothing. There were no nursemaids in the Cavern of Infants, no caressing arms, no tiny carved lions, no language tutors. These ghost babies would never walk, nor talk.

  “We must continue,” Antony told her. “There is nothing to be done. The Underworld has its own ways.”

  “Wrong ways,” Cleopatra informed him, furious.

  “It grants you the favor of passage.”

  “They are in Rome. Do you think of them?” she asked Antony. “Alexander and Ptolemy, Selene? They are with Augustus.”

  “There is nothing to be done. They live, and we are shadows,” he said.

  “They do not live, not all of them,” she said. “Some of them may be here. Caesarion died after you did. The Romans cut my son down in the square.”

  “I miss them as much as you do,” he said. “Both the living and the dead. But now all we can do is save you.”

  Cleopatra’s sorrow grew at the thought of Caesarion wandering alone through this Roman Underworld. Perhaps this was wrong, she thought with a flash of hopefulness. Perhaps he was in the Duat. He had died in Egypt. His mother was Egyptian. Perhaps it had worked the way it should have. Perhaps his pure heart had been weighed. Perhaps he was in the Beautiful West, safe there.

  And so they went from the infants, and through the nameless suicides, through the court of Minos, where innocents executed on the testimony of liars were tried and tried again by juries of their dead fellows.

  After days and nights of walking, Cleopatra and Antony passed into the fields of mourning, arranged like beautiful gardens with paths paved in tiny fragments of bone and blooming black roses and myrtle trees. Those who had died of love wandered here, brokenhearted and betrayed still, drowning in tears and inflamed by lust despite the blankness on their faces.

  “Is this where you live?” Cleopatra asked Antony, and he shook his head, though his eyes, when she looked into them, seemed to slant away from her.

  “We must go farther,” he said.

  Cleopatra wondered how long they had been walking through the Underworld, and how long her body had been caged in the silver box above. She wondered what would happen to them when all this was finished. She could think of no happy ending.

  He brushed his ghostly fingers over her skin.

  “When the dead are called from Hades,” he said, “the living pound their hands on the earth so that we may hear them grieving us. When the dead are called from Hades, the living pour blood into the soil, so that we may drink of life. We thirst. We hunger. We are too far from the living in this place. The longer we stay, the more I fade, and the less I am Antony.”

  He brushed his lips over her hand, and she felt a chill.

  “You are still Cleopatra,” he said. “Still my wife, but I am of Hades now.”

  Cleopatra looked at him, feeling her universe collapsing all over again. The gods of the dead held their citizens tightly. His skin, which had been brown with sun, was paler the longer she looked on him. She could see the trees through his breastplate.

  “Then we must
leave here together,” she told him. “Hurry. We must travel to the chamber where the gods dwell, is that not what you told me?”

  “To Persephone,” he said, and his voice wavered. “We are running out of time.”

  Cleopatra took his hand in hers and held it as best she could.

  Together they ran through the ghostly battlefields of the improperly buried dead, where some men saluted him and other men cursed him.

  Together they ran across roads of bone, and all around them, the world was winter, though in Rome the sun beat down on the city, and outside Rome, the countryside sweltered, the Slaughterer traveling from village to village, from temple to temple, killing and sending endless shades down from the summer and into the snow.

  11

  A grippa and his small band of men rode south to Krimissa and to the temple of Apollo, dedicated in the time of Troy by the warrior Philoctetes. All of Italy was founded on myth, and when Nicolaus had told him the tale of what this place concealed, he’d nodded in recognition. He knew the story. It was part of the living and proud history of Rome, like the hut of Romulus.

  Nicolaus was not with Agrippa’s group. With a sword, the historian would be a danger to no one but himself. Instead, Agrippa had left him to watch over Augustus, enlisting the seiðkona as well. All that was necessary was that Augustus stay in the residence. The emperor was weakened by the potion he insisted on consuming. It would take little effort, even for a scholar and an ancient, to keep him stationary.

  Agrippa held out little hope that anyone could keep Chrysate away from Augustus, but he hoped that Augustus might be tantalized by the historian introduced as a new biographer. The emperor fancied himself a writer of some skill, though he typically wrote only rhymes. Agrippa smiled in spite of himself, thinking of it as they rode around a promontory. He felt better, now that he was out of Rome. He was doing something about the problem. Never mind that he was the only one who was. At least Cleopatra was no longer under Chrysate’s control. The room she was jailed in was lined at every seam with silver, and the box she was inside was wrapped in silver chain. Agrippa’s most trusted men guarded it.