Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  “Ride!” Usem shouted. “We cannot stay here!”

  Agrippa stumbled and fell against Nicolaus, who dropped the box containing Hercules’ arrows. Agrippa grabbed the arrows and bow in his arms, smashing them back into their vessel.

  Usem flung Nicolaus onto his horse, using strength he did not know he possessed. He took Augustus in his arms and pushed him atop his horse as well.

  Agrippa started to mount. They must get away from here before the beast, whatever it was, noticed them. None of them were strong enough to fight it.

  Agrippa’s eyes blurred suddenly, and he staggered.

  The world went dark. Agrippa could hear shouting, feel hands pounding his shoulder, feel himself being dragged along the stones and heaved onto the back of a horse.

  He could see nothing. He could hear running feet, the clashing of swords, shouting, and a searing heat overtook his body, beginning in his calf. He could smell metal. A naphtha firepot? The contents would attach to a soldier’s skin and ignite, not quenchable with water but only by smothering. Agrippa had seen them in the Circus Maximus. He’d spent a fortune to obtain the fire that had failed to burn the queen, but he’d never been touched by naphtha.

  He prepared himself for the end, whispering what prayers he could remember, wishing only that he had been able to save Augustus. He felt himself beginning to detach from everything he’d been.

  In Agrippa’s mind, the world was white and covered in snow.

  Then the world was black and covered in raining ash.

  Hades would take him. It was an honorable death for a soldier, to die protecting his commander. He tasted his own blood filling his mouth. He inhaled the scent of burning. A pyre, he thought. The rites were being performed for him. He would not wander the shores of Acheron, improperly buried.

  Suddenly, though, the smell of burning was replaced by that of sea.

  He opened his eyes and found himself tied to a saddle, seated, the ground bouncing beneath him. He thought in a flash of the many captives he had carried over his own saddle. He’d been captured by some invading, fire-wielding army. Were they Parthians? Warriors from Babylonia? He strained his ears for their language, flexed his muscles for any give in the ropes.

  Agrippa gritted his teeth and began to twist in the saddle. Before him, he saw a dark, muscled arm, decked in war ornaments.

  He became aware of a pain in his calf. It felt as though a red-hot ember had lodged beneath his muscles, as though he were caught in a million-toothed trap. He moaned.

  “He wakes,” a voice said in Latin. The horse slowed, and Agrippa found himself looking into the gray eyes of his oldest friend. Augustus’s face showed deep concern.

  “My leg,” Agrippa managed.

  “You fell on one of the arrows,” Usem said grimly, from in front of Agrippa. The general discovered that he was riding on the Psylli’s horse.

  “The temple,” Agrippa managed.

  “Sekhmet’s Slaughterer hit it, just as we got you on the horse,” Nicolaus said.

  Slaughterer? Agrippa felt himself writhe, his leg cramping and contracting. There was a piece of fabric tied tightly about his thigh. He looked down, expecting his leg to be grievously injured, but it was not. There was a tiny wound on his calf, its edges bright and swollen with inflammation. A clean wound made by a sharp arrow, but pain radiated out from it like lava from the mouth of an erupting volcano. He felt himself, shamefully, screaming in agony. A vial was pressed to his lips, and a caustic, sickly sweet liquid dripped into his mouth.

  He knew nothing more.

  16

  The queen sprinted through the city, her bare feet scarcely touching the street. She fed on the first meat she saw, a fuller stumbling from a doorway, his robes reeking of his profession, his blood hot and sweet as she bit into his throat and drank of him. Feeding would make Sekhmet stronger, but it was necessary. Cleopatra could not function without it. She left the man, pale and withered, in another doorway, and felt the now familiar rushing of love, of power, of satisfaction. Somewhere in her mind was the sound of singing, ancient temple songs, and priestesses worshipping her.

  Worshipping Sekhmet. She could become the ruler of everything—

  Cleopatra shook her head frantically, trying to clear it of the visions.

  What had happened? How had she come to be here? Her body had been dragged suddenly up from Hades and Persephone’s throne room, and still she did not know who’d opened the box that had contained her. She’d woken in the air, returned to her body, sensing her daughter in the house somewhere, and witches, but who had released her? In the chaos, she’d been unable to tell what was happening. The smell of blood was everywhere, but she ran from it. No time.

  Her bargain weighed on her, and it was her first focus. She sought the Slaughterer first. The Slaughterer, she understood. She and Sekhmet’s child had things in common. The priestess of Thessaly was a different sort of creature.

  The wound her dreaming self had sustained in the Underworld burned her, though it was not visible here. Her body was perfect, unscarred, unbroken, no matter the pain she felt. The silver box she clutched in her fingers burned her, too, but it was a distraction from her arm. It was also a distraction from the pain in the place her heart had been. She’d done the right thing. She knew she had, but Antony was gone.

  She shook off the pain and ran on. She had to accomplish the task or she would fail Antony, fail her children, fail everyone she loved.

  The voice of the goddess was instantly back in her head. She ignored it as she ran, trying to keep it from understanding her purpose.

  Kill, Sekhmet told her.

  The Slaughterer had served the goddess well in the queen’s absence, Cleopatra could feel. It had sacrificed so many that Sekhmet felt nearly blissful. Nearly happy.

  Blood ran through the streets of villages. Corpses rotted. Now Plague traveled, hungering always, and Cleopatra could feel its work as it moved through the country, through the world, from island to island, from mountain to mountain.

  The temples, Sekhmet directed the queen.

  Cleopatra considered. Surely, Plague was traveling with the same directions.

  Cleopatra imagined she could see Ra’s boat traveling through the caverns of the Duat. Imagined she could see the Island of Fire. Imagined she could see Ra himself, the brilliance of his skin, the light of his face, the place on his forehead where Sekhmet had once lived.

  She felt Sekhmet, her strength and her weaknesses. It took a great deal of bloodshed to release the Slaughterers. Six Arrows still waited in her quiver: Famine, Earthquake, Flood, Drought, Madness, and Violence. They hummed their deathly songs, desiring, wanting, while the seventh traveled the earth.

  Cleopatra killed another man near the imperial residence. The taste of the blood flowed through the goddess, and the queen felt the blood placate her mistress.

  Cleopatra killed others, several more in quick succession, and then she ran faster through the city, trying to avoid the populated areas, the smell of people, the hunger that would destroy her resistance. She was traveling nearly as quickly as Sekhmet herself, and the goddess roared, her voice echoing through the heavens as thunder, jolting Romans from their sleep and making them shake in their beds.

  “What was that?” they asked one another.

  None of them had an answer. They sat quietly in their beds, wide-eyed in the darkness, waiting, without knowing that they were waiting, for the queen to come for them.

  Cleopatra knew that she would not kill them, but Sekhmet did not.

  Sekhmet was convinced that her slave hungered for the citizens of Rome. She did not know that Cleopatra had set herself on killing one of Sekhmet’s children.

  Cleopatra lifted her chin and scented the air, the pungent, bloody odor of the killing arrow. The Slaughterer. She looked up, her throat vibrating like that of a cat stalking a bird.

  High above her, she could see what seemed to be a tremendous star crossing the heavens, and she followed it, bounding over the la
nd, out of the city and into the countryside.

  In an untended orchard, far from where Cleopatra ran, a beady, black eye flickered. An ivory horn, its tip lethally sharpened, its protective cap of cork long since disappeared, shone slightly in the moonlight. The dark and scaly creature turned its armored head quickly and lumbered to its feet. Horses whinnied around it, bewildered by their companion.

  The rhinoceros stood, and pushed its way through a gap in the fencing.

  Three crocodiles slipped into the Tiber, fitting their reptilian forms through the gutters and into the river.

  The snakes of Rome slithered into their tunnels, their burrows, their underground passages.

  A tiger crouched and leapt, silently, to the top of the Temple of Apollo, on the Palatine, where a peacock was roosting.

  A wild-eyed gazelle looked frantically about her, hearing something, hearing everything, before there was a swift flurry of wind, and her breast was pierced by an arrow. She was slung over a set of broad shoulders and brought home by an ambitious hunter for dinner.

  Feathers fell from the sky, and blood pooled in the street, and the rhinoceros trotted through the darkness of the city, far from his home, shaking the dreams of every house he passed.

  He followed behind his queen.

  As night fell, Cleopatra arrived in Krimissa at the Temple of Apollo, following the trail of the Slaughterer. In twilight, she examined the fallen bodies of Romans from the Praetorian Guard and of priests from the temple’s order.

  For a moment, she was sure she smelled the scent of the emperor. Surely, that was impossible, though. He could not have been here. It was shadowed with something else, an herbal scent, and that with horseflesh and metal.

  Upon the statue of a centaur, an inscription informed the reader that Chiron had died accidentally, pricked by a Hydra arrow when Hercules fired it in a display of prowess, and that, though he was a master of medicines, Chiron had not been able to cure himself.

  The centaur had been an immortal, and the pain of the wound had caused him so much suffering that he had given up his immortality in order to die.

  Hail Prometheus, said the inscription engraved below the wounded centaur’s hooves, who took willingly the gift of Chiron’s immortal life, and who then suffered the endless punishment of Zeus. Hail Prometheus, who gave mankind fire and offended the gods.

  The chained man’s liver was plucked out nightly in Hades. Cleopatra knew the story. Immortality sometimes had a steep and awful price.

  She had known that already.

  After a time, she moved on from the scarred place and back into the night, following behind the Slaughterer.

  17

  The road back to Rome was long and hard. On the rear of the emperor’s horse, the bundle containing the poisoned arrows was tied, dangerously shifting and jolting, even within its metal case. Augustus feared it, irrationally. It was not as though the arrows could strike him without being fired from a bow. He had seen them only for a moment, when the case had spilled, but the knowledge of what the venom had done to Agrippa scared him.

  Poisoned arrows were not the Roman way, or, at least, not a way of honor. There had been tales of poison since the beginning of Rome, however. Augustus knew it as well as anyone. He did not desire to be a poisoner, known in the annals as a man who employed such methods.

  Still, the arrows tempted him.

  With a poison such as they contained, a man might be the master of all he saw.

  The effects of the poison were so great that Agrippa, famously stoic, moaned in his sleeping and waking, his face flushed with suffering. The last of Augustus’s theriac had been given to Agrippa to take away his pain, but once it was gone, the pain dispensed with any hunger. At last, on the third day, Augustus was able to put food into his friend’s mouth, and Agrippa looked at him with clear eyes.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”

  “He is improving,” Augustus said. He hoped this was true.

  Augustus was convinced that the world was coming to an end. They’d not seen the fireball again, but he expected they would. It was not the sort of thing that disappeared. It was not the sort of thing that was quickly vanquished. Surely, it was Cleopatra’s doing.

  He’d looked back at the temple as they’d ridden away, and seen a priest running down the hillside, his skin smoking. The man had thrown himself off the cliff and into the waters below.

  They rode past dying villages. They saw few people on the road, and he could not help but wonder where his citizens were.

  Still, he found himself in oddly good cheer.

  On the sixth day of their journey back to Rome without theriac, however, conditions quickly changed. Augustus began to wobble in his saddle, his legs feeling too short for the horse, and his mind feeling once again broken and useless.

  When at last, under cover of darkness, they arrived in Rome and reached the Palatine, Augustus was scarcely himself. He thirsted for his tonic so gravely that his tongue was swollen in his mouth, and he could not speak. Usem helped him from his horse and half carried him indoors. Agrippa limped behind, carrying the bundle they had risked their lives to obtain.

  “We must open the box together and stab Cleopatra with the arrow as soon as she emerges,” Usem told Agrippa, and Agrippa nodded tightly.

  “Physician!” Nicolaus cried, entering the residence. “Physician!”

  It was not physicians who came forth to meet them but the seiðkona and the household guards, all with grave faces.

  “Cleopatra is escaped,” the leader of the guard said. “And Chrysate is gone as well.”

  “Together?” Augustus cried. He had misjudged everything. He had been a fool to leave for Krimissa, imagining himself a warrior.

  “Not together, no,” said the guard.

  Moments later, Augustus stood over Selene, gasping in horror. Her eyes opened slightly, and she looked at him. The wound stretched over her breast and up to the hollow at the base of her throat. She had been cut open like a sheep for augury.

  “Where is my mother?” Selene asked deliriously.

  “You should not speak,” Augustus said.

  “I should not have come here,” she said. “I should not have trusted you. You said that you would protect me if I helped you. You did not protect me.”

  What did the witch want with Cleopatra’s daughter? He’d left Rome, and hell had broken free from its boundaries. This was all his fault.

  Augustus staggered away from Selene, and ran through the house until he reached the room where he’d arranged for Cleopatra’s sons to be held in his absence. It had seemed the safest course of action to cage them in the same room where the queen herself was caged. The silver box had been kept in a separate case, safe from the children’s hands, but if Chrysate had gotten to Cleopatra, she surely would have gotten to the children as well. He fumbled with the key, and then threw open the gleaming door to the silver-lined chamber.

  Amazingly, the two children were there, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, their small faces blinking in the sudden light. He had that, at least. He still had her children.

  Augustus swayed. If he gave them up, she might leave him alone. She might cease attacking him. Another thought occurred to him. If he killed them, he might avenge all the pain Cleopatra had caused him, all the strife and chaos. He’d nearly lost control of Rome, and the sons of his enemy would only grow into new enemies.

  And yet—

  It was not Cleopatra who had attacked Selene. It was his own witch, Chrysate. He’d brought the creature into the house. He had done this.

  Augustus closed the door to the princes’ prison. He slid to the floor, his back against it. What was he doing? What had he become?

  “I failed,” Augustus moaned. “I thought to fight monsters, and I became one.”

  Agrippa came upon Augustus and looked at him with infinite concern.

  “We have a weapon against Cleopatra now,” he said. “We will fight her, and we will fight the witc
h, too.” But Augustus could not hear him. Augustus could not understand the words the man was speaking. Were they in another language? Agrippa picked the emperor up like a child and, limping with his own wound, carried him from the corridor and into his own bedchamber.

  “Where is she?” Usem asked the wind, and a wisp of air fluttered past him.

  The Psylli’s face shifted as he walked down the corridor, the arrows of Hercules in his arms. He would not wait much longer, but for his wife, he would stay his hand.

  18

  Cleopatra waited for Sekhmet’s arrow. She’d seen it crossing the sky hours before, arcing downward into a mountain village and eventually returning to the heavens. She’d draped herself in her cloak and hidden herself in the mouth of a cave in the area known as Cumæ. The sun still burned her skin slightly as she gazed out over the landscape. She did not care.

  Her task would be accomplished tonight.

  She sheltered in the ancient lair of the Sibyl of Cumæ, who had once called out prophecies to loyal citizens, her voice echoing from the crater walls. She’d asked for an extended life but had forgotten to ask for eternal youth, and as a thousand years passed, as many years as the grains of sand she’d foolishly demanded equal her days, she’d grown smaller and smaller, older and older, until all that was left of her was a voice, and a body so tiny that it had to be kept inside a bottle to avoid being lost. At last, even those things had gone. She was long absent from here now.

  Cleopatra had listened for her when she arrived and heard nothing, only the whispers of bats roosting in the dark cave corners.

  She closed her eyes and felt the Slaughterer journeying. She felt Sekhmet, her back stretched against the sky, catlike, taking the light of the sun as succor while she awaited sacrifices by Cleopatra and by her arrow.

  Cleopatra had sacrificed more to her on the journey here. A shepherd calling to his sheep, his blood tasting of an old grudge against a scholarly brother. A prostitute painting her face for evening, her blood tasting of the time she fell down a flight of stairs and was picked up and bandaged by a man who turned out not to love her. A slave drawing water for an evening meal, his blood tasting of a spice market, of a wooden cage shared with a dying friend. A fisherman reeling in his nets, his blood tasting of a mistress in another port, mother to several bastard children. An old widowed man left outdoors to see the stars, who looked up at Cleopatra with dazzled eyes, smiling in the face of his death. He had no secrets left.