The rats seethed about Roman feet, climbing Roman bodies, biting and scratching, and the Romans were, for a moment, in total disarray, their archers incapacitated.
“Infantry!” Agrippa screamed, signaling the lines.
“Kill them,” Cleopatra whispered, and every animal on the battlefield heard her command.
Her cats, leopards, lions, and tigers, drew back on their haunches and leapt over the shields and into the legionaries, claws shredding the unprepared men, teeth rending their flesh. No shield could save them. A tiger died, impaled on a short sword, and as it fell, its body crushed the astonished soldier who had slain it.
The world rang with screams, with shouting and moaning, with ululations in the face of foes, and Cleopatra pushed forward, the emperor still her focus. Augustus kept the precious bow behind his back. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his side. Agrippa stood beside him, shouting orders.
Surely the Romans must outnumber the beasts, Augustus thought. They would win. They had the advantage of order in the face of chaos. Chaos could not possibly prevail. A guard surrounded Agrippa and Augustus, tightly spaced, shields raised.
Lightning flashed in the sky, and thunder shook the earth. High above, the heavens echoed with the sound of something enormous, roaring. The hairs rose on Augustus’s neck, and he felt the air charged with the presence of the divine.
Beside him, Auðr’s hands twisted frantically in the air, her distaff spinning threads, trying to balance the dead with the living. The goddess and Cleopatra were both present, but the thread of the Slaughterer was a frayed end in the Underworld, and Sekhmet’s strand, where it had been braided to her child’s, was ragged.
Cleopatra had injured the goddess.
She had pulled a part of her soul away from Sekhmet, and yet she continued to war. Auðr still could not see the entire pattern. Her eyes flickered over the darkness, a swooning miasma. Her lungs were tight. She was not strong enough to hold the two fates, that of the queen and of the goddess, apart from each other for long, and she knew it.
Sekhmet is here, the seiðkona said, and Augustus heard it in his mind. She hungers for Rome. I cannot keep her from you. She will have you.
A bolt of lightning struck the earth just before Augustus’s pavilion, and he leapt backward, his skin singed. Agrippa stayed firm, fearless, devoted. Augustus shook off the terror and shouted orders at his guard.
The men looked toward the sky and panicked, as bats swooped down from above, into their faces. Shields began to flail. Swords lashed out at the creatures, who came diving downward on their thin wings, blacking out the stars. With them came the birds of night, their claws outstretched for eyes, their wings flapping into faces, their beaks spearing, their shrieks deafening.
The lines began to break down.
Men gasped, slashing at their feet as serpents flooded the ground, twining about their ankles and up their thighs, biting and coiling, tripping and tangling. A viper’s head, chopped off by a blade, rolled into the crater, staining the waters and leaving the serpent’s body, writhing headless, still strangling a dying man on the battlefield above. A mass of crocodiles, their bodies nearly invisible in the darkness of the rocky ground, lumbered out of the water, snatching soldiers’ legs and soldiers’ arms, dragging men into Avernus.
Augustus watched, horrified. Could he be losing this battle? No. Certainly not. Where were the rest of the legions that had come before them? Agrippa had sworn they would be there. Thousands of men. Agrippa had sent the orders himself. Augustus felt frantic, seeing his own Romans tiring, watching them slain and battling, falling to the ground and being trampled, killing one another inadvertently.
Usem fought before Augustus, his own sword flashing in the moonlight, bloodied, guarding the emperor’s position.
Cleopatra was still too far from him to shoot, but as he watched, the Romans gained slight traction. The lines were broken and men were fighting blindly, but the animals, though savage, were not strategists. He watched three men heave a screaming lion into the crater, watched his army clutching poisonous snakes and throwing them back at the other side. They were brave, even in the face of an unprecedented melee. Augustus felt a strange pride along with his terror at the monstrous scene before him. This was not Rome, nor was it empire. This was a battle from the lands of myth, a story.
Everything is true, the priest of Apollo had said. Everything.
This was a story told to him in darkness, a story to bring sleep, and at the end of stories like this, the Romans conquered the savages.
Yet it was here before him. Blood flew through the air, and the screams of the dying and the raging echoed over the water. Augustus moved his hand where it clutched the bow of Hercules, feeling the smoothness of the wood and metal, the place worn in the weapon where it had been held by heroes far greater than himself.
He was a hero. He swore it to himself. If he was not a hero, then what was he?
He would save Rome from this monstrous thing, from this woman. Despoina, the sibyls had called her, but she would not be mistress of the end of the world. Augustus would stop her.
Cleopatra kept moving toward him, her face calm and collected, her hands rising in the air and commanding her creatures.
The sound of marching was suddenly upon them, and with the marching, a chanting cry.
“Thank the gods,” Augustus breathed, and Agrippa nodded tightly at him.
Augustus looked up to greet his relief armies cresting the hill and instead saw an army at odds with his own. They held a flag, and it was not emblazoned with Rome’s eagle but with a snake.
A group of elderly senators, with their bald pates and white togas fresh from the fullers, marched onto the hilltop with their army and massed with Cleopatra and her army of wild animals. Augustus looked up and saw a senator across the battlefield, smiling directly, triumphantly into his face.
Augustus felt Agrippa seize with fury beside him.
“Romans!” he shouted. “I am Marcus Agrippa, your commander! I am he who summoned you here!”
Augustus straightened the laurels on his head and leapt atop a rock to address the crowd.
“I am your emperor!” he screamed. “You will serve Rome or you will be declared traitors!”
This was his empire, his world. The senators would not win against him, and he would have them killed when this was finished. He would save Rome from all these traitors. He would save his people.
“Surrender!” Cleopatra yelled back from across the battlefield. A loyal soldier ran at her, his sword poised to slice through her body.
Cleopatra grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him into the air, breaking his body in her hands. She dropped him like a discarded toy.
In the crowd before the boulder, Augustus watched an ivory horn tossing a legionary into the air, piercing his kidneys and heaving him up and into his fellows. A glittering black eye, and dark, scaled skin trickled with tarry blood.
Usem ran forward and slashed at the rhinoceros and it retreated, bellowing, even as Augustus’s own Romans, his own soldiers, marched forward at their counterparts, the men still loyal to Rome. Augustus watched, his breath catching in his chest, as the soldiers just before him, the men guarding him, began to cave in.
Usem shouted, and the beasts of the Western Wind were released against the betraying Romans. They snarled, their bodies created of dust and light, of dark and chill, of tornado and hurricane, of lightning and thunder. Their bodies contained uprooted trees and boulders, ships and creatures. The betraying Romans and the senators who commanded them wavered.
“I would never give you your children!” Augustus shouted. “Why would I give them to such a mother?”
She need only come a little closer. Behind his back, he positioned the bow. The arrow was already placed in it. Only the string remained to be pulled taut, and it could be fired.
“You must kill her,” Usem hissed. “That is the only way this will end. Wait for me. I will give you room.”
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Cleopatra’s vision blurred with blood and light. It was as it had been aboard the ship, her hunger, her fury. She lost moments and then found herself with blood on her hands. The waters below were red and the lake was dotted with Roman corpses. The ground was slick and the fallen lay in heaps, arms spread out, their gods nowhere to be seen.
She could feel Sekhmet’s glory. She was Sekhmet’s glory.
It was all going according to her plan. Her army of beasts and Romans spread across the field, fighting at her command. Her body surged with the violence, with the bloodshed, and she felt her strength growing with every kill. Sekhmet, high above, roared.
Nicolaus dashed across the battlefield, too near her, and she leapt at him.
“Betrayer,” she hissed.
“I did not mean to be,” the historian whispered, and she could see that he had not. Still. He would be punished.
She clawed him, only once, from his shoulder to his wrist, his writing hand. Then she left him on the field and moved on, closer, closer, to the emperor.
Suddenly, before her was an unexpected warrior. The snake charmer. She hissed at him, and he hissed back, his knife dancing from hand to hand. She clawed at him, spitting with fury as his blade nicked her arm, in the very place where the Hydra venom had wounded her. He danced faster than light, faster than air, and suddenly, it seemed as though he was flying.
What was she fighting?
The Psylli rose on the back of a beast, and the beast spat dust and bone in her face. It spat salt water, a tidal wave of ocean, and fish, gasping, plucked from the deep, and still Usem attacked her, his eyes blazing.
Vengeance. Reckoning. Augustus was standing behind the man, fumbling with something behind his back, but she couldn’t get past Usem.
The warrior and the wind were stronger than she had expected, and it took all her power to fight them.
The elder boy struggled, drugged though he was, but the witch had him, a rope twisted about his neck. What was left of Chrysate’s face contorted as she dragged the child up the hillside path, invisible to those battling above her. The other boy she had by the wrist, her fingernails digging into his flesh. Her scry had revealed strange things, changes in the fates. She’d consulted it just before the battle. What had happened? What had the Northern witch done?
The end of everything, but she saw nothing for herself. No Chrysate. No Hecate. No cave in Thessaly. Nothing.
Chrysate tripped on a soldier’s body and fell, her fingers slipping in his blood. The children were wailing. She heard their high tones over the deeper ones of the battle. Music. The heavens bent to listen. The gods, even the gods of love, loved war.
Chrysate pushed herself back to her feet, dragging her prisoners with her. The small one kicked at her legs, and she shook him until he was limp. The larger flung himself at her, and she hit him in the brow with the hilt of her stolen sword. Easier now. She laid them, almost gently, on the grass. No one was watching her. Everyone fought, insensible to what was about to happen.
Across the battlefield, she could see the queen, hear her battle cries, and watch the legions falling before her strange army of beasts. She was wreaking havoc, and Sekhmet was within her, all around her. She battled the Psylli, and all her attention was on him.
Chrysate whispered, and the sky shifted at her urging. A star came closer to light her work, sending a glow down upon the witch of Thessaly and her charges.
The moon’s pale surface turned red as Chrysate laced her spell about the moon’s surface and drew it down from its orbit until it hung just above her hilltop. She’d placed herself purposefully. There was a price, of course, but she had planned for this. For all of this.
Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus, sons of Egypt. Royal children. The girl would have been more powerful, but the boys would do.
Were they unwilling sacrifices? It no longer mattered. They were drugged, and Chrysate, priestess of Hecate, psuchagoĝoi of Thessaly, supplemented her diminished strength with the borrowed power of the sky. The waters at the bottom of the crater opened for her, and the bitter lake of hatred shone in the moonlight.
She drew her dagger from her belt and slit the younger child’s throat, the skin soft and yielding. The child’s eyes widened as she cut him, but he did not protest. The drug had him quieted, and he was frozen, scarcely capable of movement. She laid Ptolemy back on the bank for the moon to take as her fee.
Chrysate held Alexander out over the waters, and slit his throat—dull-eyed, she thought, like a goat, and dull-spirited, no match for his royal title—letting his blood pour down into the crater. It splashed in the dark liquid, Hecate’s gift.
“I summon you,” she shouted, exultant. “Come to me!”
The world froze in a moment as Hades opened, frost riming the armor of the Romans.
From the darkness, snow began to fall.
Pale shapes surged up through the boundary. There was a wailing deep in the lake. Fingers breached the surface of the freezing water, and then thousands of shades, hundreds of thousands of shades, crying for the royal blood that had been spilled in their sacrifice. Suicides and heroes, warriors and women, infants and ancients, they came surging upward into the cruel red light of the moon, and behind them, the Underworld emptied.
“Hecate! Hear me!” Chrysate cried. “Take them, take these fighters, take these wounded, take these dying and these dead! I dedicate their sacrifice to you! Feast on them and join me!”
The earth shook, and from beneath the hillside, the hounds of Hecate began to howl. Chrysate could hear the great Cerberus growling with fury.
The shades drank of life, their mouths wide-open. The blood poured from the child into the dead.
Chrysate was listening to one more sound below all of them, the rattling of a tremendous chain, a song, twisting and ecstatic, the song of a goddess rising from her banishment, when the shade of Antony rose from the crevasse, his body whipping with anguish, moving faster than light.
The witch laughed as he emerged. He was too late.
Antony screamed, his wails echoing through Hades and across the upper world. He held his children in his dark arms, but the younger was gone already. The elder was dying. Antony cursed, a dead man holding his dead children.
Cleopatra, battling with Usem and his wife, heard Antony’s screams, gathered her haunches beneath her and leapt over the Roman army, across the impossible distance at Chrysate, her teeth bared, her claws outstretched.
There was a shudder across the battlefield as Chrysate raised her hands into the air and pushed her long nails into the moon, holding it tightly. She hurled it across the crater, the crescent’s points serving as spears. It spun in the air, bright, lighting the world, but Cleopatra raised her hand, heaved the moon aside and kept coming.
Cleopatra grew larger as she charged, swollen with chaos, swollen with war. Her body was lioness, and her arms were serpent. Her face was her own.
Screaming, she bared her teeth to sink them into Chrysate.
The moon careened across the battlefield, slaying those it touched, igniting the grass. The shades surged across the battlefield, an army of teeth and claws, their mouths open, and all the blood in the world not enough for them.
The lake was filled with souls, and beneath them, something else began to surge upward, a darkness streaming with all the waters of Lethe.
The moon, flying through the sky and bouncing against the crater walls, was one moment blinding and the next blackness, and in the crater, tremendous fingers began to be visible, dark and drowned hair streaming in the waters, the skin blue with cold, the eyes deeper than night, reflecting their own moons and stars.
“Hecate,” Chrysate cried, rapturous. “HECATE!”
And then the daughter of the Western Wind, pushed too far by the sacrifice of still more children, by the rising of Hecate from beneath the earth, switched from fighting against Cleopatra to fighting against Chrysate.
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The battle seemed to slow about Cleopatr
a as she spun, her arms flying, her hair twisting in a wind that had come from nowhere. Where was the Psylli? Augustus looked frantically around. The wind began to blow in the face of Augustus’s forces, and dust blew up into their eyes.
Cleopatra hurled herself onto Chrysate as the beasts of the whirlwind surrounded her.
Standing beside Augustus, Auðr lost her hold on the strands of fate that kept the queen and the goddess apart, and they snapped back together again. She sagged, her body conquered by the Fates. What would be would be. She could not control it all. What happened to Sekhmet would happen to Cleopatra. What happened to Cleopatra would happen to the world.
The witch’s body was everywhere, clawed and scaled, writhing and snarling, and Cleopatra wrestled her over the void that led to Hades. The witch bit at the queen, twisting in her grasp.
Usem shouted directions to the wind, but the wind had ceased to listen to him. The beasts came at the witch of Thessaly, and Cleopatra came at her as well, and Augustus, screaming in the storm, threw his fists into the air and came at his enemies from still another direction.
In his hands, the emperor bore the shining bow of Hercules, strung with a shining arrow.
He saw the thing rising in the crater. He knew, as he had known nothing before, that it could not be allowed to rise.
Behind Chrysate, Mark Antony got to his feet. He was strong now, with the blood that had been spilled and the spells that had been cast. His fingers could grasp and his feet could touch the ground. Rage propelled him toward the witch, and she saw him, incandescent with it.
Chrysate did not care. He could not hurt her. Her spells were working. She could feel Hecate coming from beneath the earth, filled with the sacrifices made in her name. She stood her ground, and the ghosts swarmed about her feet, killing the dying and drinking of the dead.
Cleopatra tore at Chrysate’s throat, but it made no difference. She drank of darkness, endless darkness, and the witch was renewed. Her laughter flowed into the queen, drunken and rapturous, as the sky filled with monsters, and the world shook. Cleopatra dug her fingers into the witch’s heart but felt nothing but night. On the ground, her children stared up at nothing. In the air above them, two bewildered ghosts, wisps of pain, fluttered.
Queen of Kings Page 35
