Queen of Kings

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Cleopatra screamed with agony and rage, and it did no good.

  Augustus aimed the bow, first into the crater, then at Chrysate. Then at Cleopatra. Which was he meant to kill? He could not tell. Usem shouted at him from across the crater, but he could hear nothing. He could see Agrippa’s mouth moving as well, signaling Augustus, but the emperor did not know what to do.

  He aimed the bow at Chrysate’s heart at last, the fiend he himself had summoned to Rome. She smiled at him, daring him to shoot, and that was what made his decision.

  “You will die,” he said, and pulled at Hercules’ bowstring, but it did not move. How could this be? It was his bow. He had taken it from its hiding place. He, Augustus Caesar, the emperor of Rome. This was his destiny.

  The witch looked into his eyes and laughed.

  Augustus pulled with all his might, but the string did not move. Augustus, his heart despairing, his shame infinite, his fury unalloyed, recalled the words of the priest of Apollo.

  The bow of Hercules could be drawn only by a hero.

  Mark Antony looked at him, a shade, his enemy, the man he had painted as a coward, as slave to a woman. He held out his ghostly hands.

  Augustus handed the bow to him without a word. There was no other choice.

  Antony pulled back the string and drew the bow easily. He aimed, trying to find a clear shot at the witch, but it was impossible.

  Cleopatra’s mouth was covered in blood, and her hair flew in the wind. Her eyes were lit with golden wrath, and her body was nothing human any longer. She was a goddess, shining and tremendous. Her feet did not touch the ground as she grappled with the witch. She tore at the woman’s throat and lifted her high into the air, their bodies entwined.

  Antony squinted at the light that emanated from her. He could not see for brightness.

  “Shoot!” Cleopatra screamed. “Shoot her now! Hecate is coming!”

  Antony could not shoot the witch without risking his wife. His fingers hesitated on the bowstring, the arrow trembling. The witch gained the upper position, and he caught a glimpse of her gaping jaws, her claws tearing at Cleopatra’s breast, her strength increased by Hecate’s presence.

  Antony looked down. On the grass at his feet, Ptolemy stared sightless at the moon. Alexander lay covered in blood, drained by ghosts. The shades of his children moaned, bent over their lost bodies. He did not know what had happened to Selene.

  Antony felt himself falling, felt his fingers weakening. Cleopatra twisted, her body between Antony and the witch. She strained to hold Chrysate, looking at her husband.

  “If you love me, you will do it!” Cleopatra screamed.

  He looked at her. His love. His wife, her hair bloodied, her hands talons, and her eyes golden. He could see her inside all of the chaos. Cleopatra was there.

  “I am yours,” Cleopatra said, and then Antony shot her.

  25

  The arrow of Hercules pierced them both, stabbing into Cleopatra’s back and passing through her into Chrysate’s body.

  The sounds ripped through the sky. The Earth herself roared. The Earth herself cried out, and Antony’s cry mixed with Cleopatra’s scream of agony and Chrysate’s wailing howl of despair. Sekhmet, bonded to Cleopatra, sharer of her soul, screamed in unison with her, doubled over, holding the place where the Hydra’s immortal venom had entered her body. Stars dropped and scattered.

  Cleopatra pressed her hands to the wound, and, for the first time since she had summoned the goddess, there was blood.

  The queen released Chrysate, and the witch fell, spinning and screaming.

  “I dedicate this soul to Hades!” Cleopatra shouted, her voice strangled.

  In the crater, Hecate’s shine dimmed, the water taking her back into itself, the chain of the dead wrapping about her ankle and pulling her down. The crater awaited Chrysate, and in it, the millions of ghosts she had called from Hades.

  The army of shades rose up and took her beneath the waters, and Chrysate, witch of Thessaly, was gone into the darkness with her goddess, swept under and fallen upon.

  Holding her wound, tears running down her face, Cleopatra hung in the air over the abyss and turned her gaze to Augustus, who stood, stunned, looking up at her.

  She smiled at him, and he shuddered, unable to move. Her gaze was the deep indigo of twilight, and darkness rose within it. Cleopatra shone upon him, tremendous, blinding, looking through him. A god.

  We are not finished, she said, and her voice was only in his mind. She reached out her hand, and though she did not touch him, Augustus felt a chill invade him. He felt her touching his heart, clenching it in her talons, and then he felt her tear it from him. Was it his heart? Or something else? He could not tell what was happening.

  He gasped, feeling a sudden absence at his center, a loss. A searing pain, like lightning striking, shot through the absence, and he felt a wind whirling inside his chest. Cleopatra smiled.

  Augustus fell to his knees, limp, bewildered, curling around the missing place.

  Cleopatra turned away from the emperor and looked down at her husband.

  Antony stood at the edge of the crater, his skin already flickering and fading as the witch who had summoned him died.

  “I will see you again,” Antony said to his wife.

  “Te teneo,” said Cleopatra.

  “As you are mine,” said Antony. “I will wait for you.”

  Cleopatra’s face clenched with pain as she pulled the arrow from her body and threw it into the crater.

  “You may wait until the end of time,” she said.

  Antony smiled at her. “I will wait,” he said. He gathered their dead children into his arms, and there was a flash in the west, as though the sun had appeared at the edge of the sky and looked over it, onto the battlefield.

  Those who were looking in that direction, those who could bear to do so, glimpsed something in the brightness. A ship, perhaps, and its captain leaning out of the vessel with long, shining hair, eyes as blue as lapis, skin made of gold.

  Then it was gone, and Antony was gone as well, with their children, and with him Hercules’ arrows.

  Cleopatra lay on the ground, her body pale, her wound mortal.

  She was dying at last. Her lips curled up in a smile.

  She took a final breath, looking into the night sky, and then she was still.

  There was a last divine roar of sorrow, one that caused the ocean beyond Avernus to rise up and throw itself against the cliff, and then the battle was done.

  26

  Augustus, rigid with horror, stood and took a step toward his enemy’s body. She did not move. Blood flowed from her side. She’d done something to him, something he did not understand. His hands fumbled. A coin to pay her passage. He had nothing.

  He knelt beside Cleopatra, put out his shaking hand, brushed the snow from her face and closed her eyes.

  In the darkness of the crater, Augustus saw a single ghostly spot of light, a shining, wavering thing rising to the surface for a moment, its thousands of teeth, its watery gleaming form, its razor-feathered body, before it, too, dove into the depths, descending back to its home in the Underworld. Something pulled at Augustus. Home. He wavered on the edge of the crater, uncertain, and then looked around the battlefield, at the devastation there.

  He looked at the monsters that still walked the earth, the lions and tigers stalking their prey, eating the dead.

  The Psylli eyed at him from across the battlefield.

  “We have won,” Usem said. “This is a victory. I will not see you again.”

  “No,” Augustus said.

  “Nor Rome,” said Usem, and nodded at him, only once. “May you live in peace, Emperor.”

  The monsters of sand and wind surrounded him, shrinking as he moved. Usem held out his hands to them, and they converged into a single form. A woman, her hair flying behind her, suddenly stood before the snake sorcerer, and Augustus watched her kiss him. He watched as the Western Wind’s daughter took her husband in her
arms, watched as the air whirled around them, watched as they rose into the sky and disappeared together into the darkness beyond the hillside.

  The morning was coming, gray and sickly at the horizon. Augustus swayed, looking at the legions of Romans who stood, awed and bleeding, mingled into a single dazzled pool of men. There were senators dead before him, and loyal soldiers, too. He saw Agrippa making his way among them, speaking to the wounded, dedicating their shades to Hades, and the seiðkona, her distaff in her hand, touching the men and taking their memories with her.

  By the time Auðr arrived before Augustus, he no longer feared her. She lowered her distaff to his forehead, and when it touched him, he felt his mind laced with a filigree of frost. All the pain was gone for the moment, the memories of broken things, the guilt.

  For a glorious moment, he did not know who he was, and he was grateful.

  He did not want to know who he was. He did not want to know what he had lost.

  Auðr walked onward, and Augustus knelt on the hilltop beside the dead woman, a woman he now only faintly recognized. He stayed there, bewildered and uncertain for he knew not how long. At last, Agrippa walked up the hillside behind him, bloodied, his face scored with new lines.

  “I found her among the wounded,” he said.

  A small hand took Augustus’s fingers. He looked down, startled. Selene, her face smeared with dirt, snow in her eyelashes. He recognized her in a rush of sorrow.

  “Rome has won,” she said, her voice wavering. “And I am a Roman. I will go with you.”

  And then, without looking at her mother’s body, without looking down, she led Augustus down the hill and away from the battlefield.

  “We have won,” she said, and only then did Augustus realize that he was crying.

  When they had gone, Auðr bent over Cleopatra’s body, coughing as she knelt. Her own thread, tangled with all of these, was moments from completion. She could see its tattered end in the light of dawn, shorn and frayed.

  She looked at the queen’s face. Peaceful. Where did she travel? the seiðkona wondered. Which of her gods had taken her?

  Auðr twisted her distaff, employing all her remaining strength to wrap the queen’s thread about it. She groaned as she tore at the fates, unraveling, her powers withering even as she used them.

  The universe shifted above her. A pattern in the sky, a ripple in the gray as the sky began to roll, a shifting of seasons, night to day and back again. The last stars peeled back to reveal sun, and the last sun peeled back to reveal emptiness, and still the seiðkona labored, weaving the pattern, the warp and weft of the future, the edges of the universe in her hands.

  At last, she rose and walked toward the historian.

  It was nearly finished. All of it.

  Nicolaus could not move, even as he watched Auðr approach him. Blood coursed from the ragged tear that ran from his shoulder to his wrist. He was going to die, he knew, but he could not bring himself to run.

  He wanted to die.

  The battlefield was covered in bodies, and the waters ran red. Vultures wheeled high in the sky, and soon they would land.

  The seiðkona’s hair had come unbound, and it twined in the air, a white nebula. Her lips curled as she assessed him. She put out a hand and touched his mouth with icy, bluish fingers. Her other hand gripped the distaff.

  Nicolaus braced himself for its touch. He discovered that he was crying. His tears froze on his face, and one fell to the ground, shattering as it hit the earth. He bowed his head toward her, giving himself over.

  Let her touch him. Let her take away the things he’d seen and done. Let her take his mind and thoughts. Let her take him and all the words he’d clung to.

  No, she said, her lips unmoving. You will remember this.

  He looked up and was caught, pinned by her silver gaze.

  You will remember all of this. You will tell this story. You will write it.

  The seiðkona lifted her distaff over her head, and Nicolaus watched it move toward his brow.

  As it touched him, his mind broke open, making room for everything it must encompass. He felt his own memories splinter and spin like marbles, rolling to the edges of his consciousness, to be lost there.

  The distaff touched him for only an instant, and yet he was no longer only Nicolaus.

  He knew. Everything. His mind swelled with it, agonizing, horrifying, filled beyond its capacity, and then filled more. Love and sorrow. Death and despair. Hunger. Bloodshed. Armor being donned and swords being sharpened, children waking from dreams, mothers holding their babies, lionesses hunting for prey. All the stories of the dead. All the stories of the living. All the memories she had taken from them were his to keep. He cried out, pressing his hands to his forehead, feeling his skull splitting open with the contents of the world. There could not be enough room in him for all of this. But there was.

  Now his history was the history of millions. He knew everything, and there was no forgetting. He was the one who would remember.

  He ran from the battlefield, holding his injured arm, tears running down his face. The skin began to heal as he ran, and he knew she had twined his fate with something else. He knew that he would not die tonight.

  He had a purpose yet.

  He was the keeper of the history of this day, and of the days before it. He would tell the stories of the serpents and the soldiers, of the gods and of the goddesses. He would tell the story of the queen and of her love, of their children, and of the shades who had come from below the earth.

  All of it, all of everything and of everyone, was within him.

  He was a historian at last, wholly and utterly.

  He would tell the world.

  Epilogue

  The emperor hobbled through an orchard at the foot of Vesuvius, the wind pressing against his robes, chilling his thin skin, ruffling his sparse hair. Something was familiar to him here. The pattern of the stars against the sky, perhaps, was like a tattoo he’d seen once on a woman’s back. Augustus searched his memory for the details, but it was no use. It was only a fleeting recognition, maybe something he’d dreamt long ago. He laughed quietly, a rasping cough of dark amusement. His mind had become like Oceanus, and all the places he’d once known were drowned in salt sea, peopled with ghosts. He could no longer tell truth from fiction, nor his own recollections from things he’d invented.

  Augustus was seventy-six years old. He’d reigned over Rome, over his empire, for nearly forty-four years. It was the nineteenth of August, the month he’d named after himself. Other Augusts crowded his memory, one spent in Alexandria. He thought suddenly of Antony. Augustus had long outlived his old enemy, his old friend, his old idol, but he did not know why he thought of him now. He remembered walking into the cool depths of a mausoleum and—

  No, no. He would not think of that.

  A flash of memory, another August, this one on a battlefield. Tigers roaring and an emptiness where his heart had been, snow falling down upon him from the heavens. A god screaming from the sky, and his enemy, his beautiful enemy, bleeding in the snow. What had she done with his heart? What was the strangeness he felt? His soul—

  He did not know.

  He remembered an ancient woman with silver eyes, tapping him on the forehead with her distaff, emptying his history and replacing it with unknowns.

  He had run back to Rome, served the empire, served the people. Dazed, he’d closed the Gates of Janus and brought peace to his realm. A price owed to a warrior, a price he knew he must pay, but his own life had not been peaceful.

  Rome was his only daughter now. Julia, his sole blood heir, had betrayed him, conducting an affair with the last surviving son of Mark Antony, sacrificing to old religions, dancing naked in the city’s temples, offering herself to anyone who desired the emperor’s daughter. On her finger, she’d worn a ring engraved with Hecate’s face, something she claimed she’d found in Augustus’s own house.

  Augustus had banished her from Rome and ordered her lover killed, b
ut these punishments did not ease his pain. Just hours before arriving at this orchard, he’d given the order for the execution of his final grandson, the youngest son of Julia. The boy was a child of an unknown father, and the emperor could not take the chance of Rome being inherited by a descendant of his old enemy. No. He must pass Rome to Tiberius, his stepson, a man he disliked and distrusted. There was no other option. All his other heirs were dead, and his line was broken.

  The emperor felt a grasping seizure in his chest, where his heart should have been.

  He’d banished his friends as well. Nicolaus of Damascus, his biographer, he’d sent away when he’d given the emperor a copy of his history of the universe. It rankled. Even the sections pertaining to Augustus, which he’d dictated himself, seemed strange, filled with untruths. Had he talked in his sleep? He could not say.

  He had Ovid sent to the Black Sea because something in his stories, in those Metamorphoses, those women transforming into beasts, those beasts transforming into women, those gods walking amongst men, reminded Augustus of—

  What?

  Something in them made Augustus believe that someone had gotten to the poet, whispered in his ear, told him all the secret things, initiated him into mysteries the emperor himself did not recollect.

  And so he burned the plays, burned the verses, burned the histories, burned the biographies. He stood on the steps of the Palatine, a torch in his hand, and set the pages afire. He did not know what he was hiding. He burned everything, even his own writings.

  He left the Sibylline prophecies, but he censored them, cutting offensive words from them with his own knife. Whole sentences and passages. Augustus remembered one of them, shivering with the memory.