Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Each one of her killings weighed on her.

  She’d never thought of these things when she was in power, when she was mortal. Thousands had died in battle, acting on her orders or killed by her soldiers. She’d ordered killings of the families of traitors, of opponents. She had been a queen, and as queen she had done what she thought necessary, regardless of the human cost.

  She’d never thought about where their souls went.

  Now, since Hades, it was all she could think of. As she drank of their blood, she knew all of their hidden things, all of their failures and glories, and she tried to send their souls to wherever they should go. There was no time for ritual. She left their bodies in the open so that they might be found and buried, so that they might not wait on the shores of Acheron, unmourned. Having seen that place, she could not doom souls to it knowingly.

  A light appeared in the sky, brighter than the dying sun, brighter than the rising moon, moving toward the Cumæan temple as she watched.

  Cleopatra leapt from her hiding place and bounded out into the daylight, her skin searing, her eyes blurring as she ran at the murderous grandchild of the sun god.

  “You will not kill here!” she shouted.

  It hissed at her, and its mouth was infinite, deep and black as the heavens and filled with uncountable fangs. Cleopatra knew, horribly, that her soul was bonded with this creature as well as with its mother.

  What was she giving up to kill it? Her soul weighed heavier, heavier yet.

  The Slaughterer shifted its face toward her, and she saw its mindless eyes. It did not care what she said. Once it had hissed, it did not bother to truly acknowledge her again.

  She threw herself upon it as it turned its back to fly toward the temple and to its killing task there.

  Cleopatra clutched its pulsating throat, its burning body, feeling its knife-sharp feathers cutting into her palms. She gasped as it twisted and bit her hand—and this was true pain, unlike the echo of pain her bloodless body had experienced since her transformation—but she held it still tighter, straining all of her muscle and bone against its escape. Its feathers sliced into her as it struggled, and its slender, arrow body twisted in her grasp.

  “You will not kill,” she told it, and for the first time, she heard its voice, faint, strangely musical.

  And what of you? Will you not kill?

  She screamed with rage, feeling a tearing pain as she broke the Slaughterer’s back, snapping its spine.

  Her fury was replaced with devastating agony as she held the broken arrow up to the light, Sekhmet’s roar of sorrow rattling her own bones.

  “I dedicate this soul to Hades,” Cleopatra shouted, and then she hurled the body of the Slaughterer down, into the dark waters of Avernus, as she’d promised the god of the Underworld she would.

  Cleopatra waited for the sky to open and strike her down, but nothing happened.

  The waters steamed and boiled as Plague sank into them.

  Her skin blistered, her body smoking, her hands burning, and healing cruelly even as they burned, Cleopatra limped back into the cave of the sibyl, sobbing at the loss of the thing she had killed. She did not love it, no, she did not, but Sekhmet did, and what Sekhmet felt, Cleopatra felt. The loss of a child. A dear one.

  And what was she? A betrayer. A child killer. Was she not the same as the creature she had murdered? Was she not herself a murderer? At the same time, she had torn herself from Sekhmet. She had done something on her own, something in opposition to the goddess. She had delivered the first portion of her bargain. One more act, the sacrifice of Chrysate, and she would win Antony’s soul and those of her children as well. They would go to the Duat. If that was all she could do, it would be enough. She might be a slave to a goddess, but they would be in heaven.

  She stretched herself on the cold stones of the sibyl’s cave. The bats looked down upon her, their faces curious. Their high-pitched song filled her ears and gave her no comfort.

  At last, she slept, dreamless.

  As she slept, snakes slithered into the cave. Cats twined their sleek forms against the rock walls. In the valley beyond the crater, a bear trundled down a hillside, and a tiger traveled silently across the field. The rhinoceros immersed itself in the lake of Avernus, washing the dust of the road from its rough skin. A small splash, and a crocodile surfaced in the lake, having traveled by water through underground caverns and along coastlines for days.

  An elderly lion, toothless and mangy, padded across the mouth of the cave, lashing its tail, and guarding the queen who slept within.

  19

  Sekhmet reeled on her hilltop, gasping and shaking. The quiver of Slaughterers hummed with confusion. Only six were left, and one had gone into the dark, where she could not see it. Where she could not feel it. Where she could not find it.

  Her youngest child had been taken from her, by the human she had made into a god.

  Night fell, and still she was broken. Ra did not come to comfort her. He traveled senselessly, silently, his boat traversing the Duat. He cared nothing for his daughter. He’d abandoned her, and she was alone.

  The wind spun about her head, blowing and singing, and Sekhmet shook with sudden cold.

  The earth rattled with the grief and fury of the sun god’s forgotten daughter, but she could not smite Cleopatra without smiting herself.

  20

  The seiðkona sat in Selene’s room, her back straight in her chair, her seiðstafr spinning in her hands. The floor still quaked beneath the Palatine, and high above the house, there had been a long and woeful scream. A hungry star had died, and the seiðkona had heard it. A goddess grieved her child. The seiðkona stretched her fingers, paying close attention to the alterations in the tapestry. Sekhmet’s fate had shifted. An immortal’s child had been killed. Auðr searched for the thread of the killer and discovered that she already held it in her hand.

  Cleopatra.

  She looked up, feeling the movement of dark magic somewhere on the grounds. She twisted her distaff just slightly, and the sharp thread of the witch coiled about it. Chrysate would not enter this chamber. She felt the creature stop, change course, depart to another place. Soon, Auðr could no longer feel her.

  She shifted her attentions to Selene. The girl’s fate had been dark, and now it was brighter. She had taken her from death and brought her back. A queen. Selene would have a long life, be married by the emperor of Rome to an African king. A happy marriage. Recompense for her pain. Her heart would be further broken in the days to come, and Auðr had taken mercy on her.

  Selene had no great acts left to perform. The seiðkona had shifted them away.

  The witch’s ring sat on a table in the seiðkona’s chambers. Auðr did not know how to destroy it, but she had gotten it free of Selene’s finger, and surely now it was a mere bauble.

  In her tapestry, the seiðkona saw lives ending, and lives beginning. She saw a battle, and many dead. She saw the moon rotating in its orbit, gleaming like a tooth in a demon’s smile, and she saw lightning slashing the sky. She saw herself walking the battlefield. She did not know which side she fought on, if she fought on a side at all.

  Things looked dark ahead, things looked broken, but there might still be change.

  Cleopatra had surprised her. She’d fought her fate. She had not given in.

  The seiðkona would not either. She curled herself about her tightening lungs, willing herself to survive just a little longer. She had a part to play.

  She knew she did, even if she did not know what it was.

  In his chamber, the emperor’s skin prickled with constant terror, and nothing gave him ease. A string of rough, scarlet blotches ran from his throat to his thigh. He turned his head and vomited into the basin that waited beside his cot.

  His mind was blotted with visions, Sibylline prophecies of his own manufacture. He saw Cleopatra and Chrysate wherever he looked, in every corner, beneath every veil, in shadows and in light. Kidnappers surged at him when he left his house to a
ttend to his business, and then disappeared without touching him, their dark cloaks slipping into the cracks in the stones. Every flash of sun revealed a sword, half concealed, threatening his throat. Every flutter of wings told him that she was waiting somewhere nearby. He thought of the moth she had been when last he’d seen her. The bloodred body and the wings white as death.

  His organs twisted in his body, reminding him of all the ceremonies he’d overseen, the augurs pawing through animal organs, announcing omens.

  Slice yourself open, said his mind. Read your own entrails. See if they tell you what to do. See if they tell you of the fall of Rome. See if they tell you how you invited a witch into your bed.

  He would die if he did not sleep. He knew this much.

  Nicolaus sat in the corner, waiting to take down changes to the emperor’s will.

  Augustus fretted. Who would he leave Rome to if he died?

  He could not leave the empire to Julia, to a daughter, but she was all he had. He thrashed in his covers, chilled and then boiling, frozen and then sweating. He summoned the seiðkona, leaving the will for later when he might have a moment of clarity. Perhaps she might take his thoughts and make him sleep. She hobbled into the room, older than she had been. Augustus felt as ancient as he ever had. Perhaps this was what happened when one fought immortals. Life passed in an instant.

  “Will I live?” he asked Auðr, hearing his childhood self asking the same question of Cleopatra.

  She placed her hands on his face, touched the air around him, spun her fingers.

  You will live a long life, she said in his mind. He felt, suddenly, that he had not asked the right question.

  He walked from his bedchamber on thin and fragile legs, and out into the sunlight of the courtyard, where Agrippa was standing, one leg bandaged, his armor already tightened.

  A messenger from Cleopatra awaited him. He had known it was coming.

  Cleopatra had sent a child she’d plucked from the village near her hiding place. It was fitting. Augustus had sent a message to Antony that way, the message that had led to Antony’s death.

  All who saw the messenger pass, in the towns that had been scarred by disease, in the towns that had been touched by the rumors of strange goings-on in Rome, of monsters, of a dying emperor, looked to the heavens and tried to interpret the signs.

  Surely, they imagined the child they saw riding on the back of a running tiger, his tiny form jouncing as he held tight to the cat’s fur. Surely, it had not been a tiger but some other sort of animal.

  The boy stood before Agrippa and Augustus, offering them a message addressed to “Octavian, Augustus, Emperor, Fool.”

  Augustus took it, aggrieved, and read it aloud. The writing was elegant.

  “Surrender my children and yourself, and I will leave your country and your people. I will not return here.”

  Agrippa looked at Augustus.

  “The rest?” Agrippa asked.

  “If you choose not to surrender, know that I will lay waste to Italy. I will kill everyone you love, and I will destroy your country as you destroyed mine.”

  “Rome will not surrender,” Augustus informed the messenger. “Rome does not surrender. Its emperor is not a coward. We will fight.”

  “Midnight, then,” the boy trilled, excited. “Seven nights from tonight. At Avernus. She will meet you there, and in fair battle.”

  “Avernus?” asked Augustus, appalled.

  It was to the south of Rome, a crater where Aeneas had descended into Hades, according to the legends. There the rivers of the Underworld came aboveground in bitter springs and a poisoned lake, and caves housed creatures Augustus did not want to encounter. There was one cave in particular, at the ancient Greek settlement of Cumæ, which he remembered all too well from his fight against the pirate Sextus Pompeius, twenty years before. It had a chill about it, and a depth that was beyond sounding. It was an ideal hiding place for a monster, meandering, as it did, deep into the hillside.

  Augustus did not want to go to Avernus. Nor did he want to stay in Rome. He could not fight her here, in a city filled with people. He thought of the plague springing from village to village. Too many would die, and the streets and buildings offered ample hiding places for a thing such as the queen. Better the wide, open expanses surrounding the crater. Better, he knew, but it made him uneasy nonetheless.

  “Will she fight alone?” Augustus asked the boy.

  The boy shrugged.

  “It will not matter,” said Agrippa. “We are Romans. Have we not fought on plains and in mountains? Have we not fought our way through the cities of Babylonia and the forests of Germany? We have fought at Cumæ and at Avernus.”

  “Not well,” Augustus pointed out. The fumes of the crater lake had sickened the men. Birds were said to die midair above the place.

  “My men are prepared, and we have our weapon now.”

  Augustus returned to the messenger, outside the doors of the study, and handed him a coin.

  “Tell your mistress we will meet her.”

  He wondered if he imagined what he saw next. The striped, shining fur, the boy mounting the beast’s back as though he were mounting a horse, the liquid stalking motion of the thing, and moments later, the lashing tail disappearing around the corner of the courtyard wall.

  Shaking his head to dispel the vision, he returned to his study, where Agrippa had taken the bow from its box. Wincing at the pain in his still festering calf, Agrippa attempted to draw the bow, straining at its string.

  “We need not use Hercules’ bow,” Augustus pointed out. “The poison is in the arrows.”

  Agrippa was still weak, Augustus knew, and moreover, the bow was meant to be drawn only by a hero, which Agrippa clearly was not.

  Augustus had no doubts about himself in this regard. He would draw the bow when the time came. He would fire the arrows. He would kill the queen. It was his fated task, and he was the only one who would perform it.

  Agrippa looked nervously at the arrows.

  “I prefer the sword,” he said.

  “As do I,” said Augustus. “We do not have that luxury. One arrow, and this will be done. One arrow, and she will be gone. Think of that. Do not worry. I will take charge of the bow.”

  “I must prepare my men to march,” said Agrippa. He wanted the Hydra arrows returned to their grave, far from here. His calf blistered and seeped. It was wrapped in layers of bandages, and still it did not heal. He’d die of this wound, if not soon, then eventually. He knew it in his bones. He tightened the bandage about the leg and limped from Augustus’s study.

  Augustus deliberated about the princes of Egypt. At last, he decided to leave them in Rome, safely caged in their silver room. They were children, and he would not bring them into battle. He could not bring himself to kill them. He could not bring himself to let their mother kill them, either, as he was certain she would.

  He would win this battle with the arrows of Hercules, and she would be conquered, completely this time. He had the seiðkona and the Psylli. He had the powers of the Western Wind and of memory. He had Agrippa’s armies. What did she have?

  No matter what Cleopatra and Sekhmet were capable of, they could not beat back all the forces of Rome.

  There would be no more of this. When it was done, he’d return to Rome and to his daughter. He would return to these sons of Egypt. They showed promise, particularly the smallest one. He remembered the little boy’s strength in the Circus Maximus, his determination as he ran into the arena. They would forget their parents, as their sister had. He felt a pang as he thought of Selene, still half conscious in her room. He pushed the thoughts away.

  He would be their hero. Sons.

  Augustus went to his chamber and called his servants. They bathed him, anointed him. He put the gilded laurel crown atop his head. They strapped his armor onto his chest.

  He brought Cleopatra Selene with him, ensconced in a padded litter with the seiðkona beside her. The legionaries that had gone in pursuit of th
e Greek witch had not found Chrysate, and he no longer trusted the guards to keep the girl safe. It would not matter. Selene would not remember this. She was still not herself, sleeping her wound away, waking only occasionally, mutely.

  His skin pricked with righteous rage, thinking of the witch. She would be next, after Cleopatra. He would find her, if he had to go to Thessaly himself.

  He made his way outside and ascended the steps of the platform that had been erected for his speech. Before him, a legion waited, armed, their faces still and watchful. Beside him, Usem and Agrippa stood, strong and loyal. The emperor of Rome was ready to fight, and he rallied his warriors.

  “We march toward an enemy we have not seen before, but we will prevail!” he shouted, flanked by Agrippa and Nicolaus. “We will return home to our wives and our children!”

  He glanced at the Psylli and felt a pang of jealousy, comparing himself to the snake charmer’s story. Augustus knew that he did not care enough about his family. He did not love them as much as he ought to. He loved Rome more. Was not Rome family enough? Was not Rome love enough?

  It was.

  “Though I cannot tell you what it is we will meet at Avernus, I can tell you that we are Romans. No enemy is as strong as we are. We’ve come from warriors, and we’ve been adopted by wolves. We have built Rome from out of the wild, and it will not return to chaos! We will fight and we will win, our swords bloodied, our arrows broken, and our voices carrying across the world. This is the empire of Augustus, and you serve beside me! I fight with you!”