“And thou shalt be no more a widow, but thou shalt cohabit with a man-eating lion, terrible, a furious warrior. And then shalt thou be happy, and among all men known; And thee, the stately, shall the encircling tomb receive, for he, the Roman king, shall place thee there, though thee be still amongst the living. Though thy life is gone, there will be something immortal living within thee. Though thy soul is gone, thy anger will remain, and thy vengeance will rise and destroy the cities of the Roman king.”
He slashed away at that section, bewildered by it, making additions and subtractions, changing what it said. It was all familiar, and yet he couldn’t grasp exactly what it was that so angered him. At last, he walked away from the tablet, his skin flushing with mad wrath. He had not understood why he felt so. He still did not.
Augustus fretted now. He suddenly remembered only the horrible things.
He thought of Marcus Agrippa, dead at fifty-five of blood poisoning, the legacy of a long-ago wound. He’d been on a campaign, and soaked his leg in vinegar in an attempt to relieve the pain of his old injury. By the time Augustus arrived, he was dead of it.
Augustus could almost remember the getting of that wound. Something about an arrow, something about a poison, something about a mistake, something about a flash of light.
The emperor’s teeth felt loose in his mouth. He ran his tongue over the space where, long ago, he’d lost a tooth on a ship journey. He’d thrown it into the sea between Egypt and Italy. Now it might be a pearl. He was so old that his bones might by now be golden. His hair lapis. His teeth pearls. Somewhere in his memory, there was a god whose body was made of precious stones. A god who crossed the sky in a boat.
Augustus thought longingly of that. He himself was cold in the heat of the sun, and now, in the moonlight, he froze.
He turned his face toward the heavens, squinting to see more clearly. His spine protested as he moved his head, but still, there was beauty here, this night, this orchard, the trees hanging heavy with ripe figs, the smell of the grass, the perfection of the place. His father’s orchard. He had not been here in years. His father had died in this very place, long ago, when the emperor was only a child. It was all so familiar, and yet, when he tried to grasp it, it flew.
He raised his hand and plucked a fig from the tree. A soft thing, the fig, perfectly ripe. He preferred them green. There was danger in enjoyment.
A beautiful woman stepped from behind the fig tree and smiled at him. He felt himself smiling back, toothless and old. His hand, when he lifted it to his mouth, was spotted with age.
She was young and lovely. A servant, but too beautiful for a servant. A guest? A dignitary?
He should know her. Something in the back of his mind cried out like a child.
Augustus thought, but he could not place her. Her eyes were rimmed in kohl, and her arms were decked with coiled bracelets in the shape of serpents. Her body was curving and tightly wrapped in a white linen gown. Her mouth was plump and painted with something red.
He bit into the fig—honey sweet and seeded, nearly overripe—and it came to him. He had been her lover once, long ago. Or he had loved her.
“Do I know you?” he asked her.
“Octavian,” she said. She held her hand to her side, tightly pressing it against her waist.
“Are you injured?” he asked.
“I was,” she said. “I was injured once, and gravely. I’ve been a long time healing, and you have had a long life. I did not intend that, but I do not regret it. You suffered.”
Augustus felt indignant.
“I did not suffer,” he began, but even as he spoke the words, he remembered nights sleepless, insomniac, haunted. At the same time, he wondered at himself. He was not dressed for night, nor for company. He was nearly naked. He felt his skin prickling as he looked at her.
“Do you not know me, Octavian?” the woman before him asked.
“I do not,” he insisted. He felt his throat beginning to swell. The fig was scratching at his tongue. He coughed unhappily. He was chilled here in the night air. He wanted to go in, to his bed, to his sleep. He wanted to wake in the morning and watch the sun rise.
“I made a bargain once,” the woman told him. “With a powerful king, in a country not far from here.”
“A gamble?” Augustus asked. He thought of games played with bones and rocks, games played with coins. He thought, horribly, of placing a coin in Agrippa’s mouth, to pay the boatman of Hades. The cold of the tongue as it touched his fingers. The rotten hardness of the teeth. The damp of the tomb he’d placed his friend inside, with all the proper ceremony, with all the proper ritual.
A sudden memory of another tomb, and an empty slab therein. A silver box engraved with Isis. A serpent, a serpent. He cringed involuntarily.
“A gamble,” she agreed.
He coughed, and sat heavily on the dew-covered grass. A servant should bring him a cloak. He should not be out at night.
“It was a gamble over a soul,” she said.
Augustus lay carefully back, anticipating a story and fearing it at the same time. In his life, he’d hired many tellers, heard many tales, and he had slept little. He found himself nearly looking forward to it. Sleep. Rest.
The woman looked steadily at him.
He thought suddenly of two little boys, lost long ago on a battlefield. He’d brought the last of the Egyptian children, Selene, back to Rome and married her to the king of Mauretania, giving her a dowry of gold as though she were his own daughter. He owed her something, though even then he could not remember why. Selene was dead eight years past. He’d commissioned a Greek poet to eulogize her. A good daughter. The only good daughter he’d had, and she was not even his own.
“The moon herself grew dark, rising at sunset,” Augustus whispered. It was a lovely epitaph, the eulogy, and somehow it reminded him of the woman before him. Selene had looked like her, perhaps that was it. “Covering her suffering in the night, because she saw her beautiful namesake, Selene, breathless, descending to Hades. With her, she’d had the beauty of her light in common, and mingled her own darkness with her death.”
The woman before him smiled. He thought he saw her eyes shining with tears, though it might have been the moonlight.
He regretted everything on earth.
“A soul?” he asked. “Whose soul? Yours?”
“Not my own,” she said. “I had already sold my own soul when I made this bargain. No, Octavian. I did not act to save my soul but that of my love. Your soul has been with me all these years, since the battle at Avernus. You’ve lived without it, as I have lived without mine. Did you never notice its absence? Tell me, Octavian, was it a glorious life? Did you love? Did you find joy?”
Augustus looked at her miserably. She was so beautiful. Her lips were bright, even in the darkness.
She seemed taller now, somehow, and her skin paler, as though she had absorbed the moonlight. She smiled indulgently upon him.
Her teeth were pointed.
His throat was closing. He could scarcely breathe. A name drifted up from out of his past, a name he should never have forgotten. He did not understand how he had.
“Cleopatra,” he said.
“Te teneo,” she told Augustus. “You are mine.”
She bent toward him, taking his body in her strong hands. She came closer, brushing her cold lips over his cold lips, and the emperor looked up into her eyes, seeing fires, seeing volcanoes, seeing destruction.
He watched Rome fall in a moment, watched the sky fill with metal wings, watched all he had built crumble.
He felt Cleopatra biting into his throat, and he struggled weakly. Her hand pressed down upon him, heavy as a coverlet, and he relaxed under her weight. It was a kiss.
Yes. They had once been lovers, he was sure. They were lovers again, it seemed. The kiss was sweet.
Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. Queen of Kings.
“You will live,” her voice said to him, and he was, in his last moments, a boy again, fevered i
n his bed. “You will live a long life.”
Then it was over.
Cleopatra stood, leaving the husk that had been the emperor of Rome on the ground, and walked away from the country that had been her unwilling home all these years.
Dying on the battlefield at Avernus, so many years before, she’d felt Sekhmet leave her heart, felt the hollow spaces fill again with her own ka. In memory, she glimpsed her death, the snowflakes falling upon her skin, her blood flowing slowly, cold and endless.
She’d found herself lying on a mossy bank beside a silver lake. The world was night, the pearl-round moon high in the sky, and yet it was also sunrise, the horizon all rose, gold, and coral. As far as she could see, there were rolling hills and valleys, the dewy green grasses and blooming wildflowers of midsummer, but this was not earth.
There were stars in the heavens, and she gazed up at them, the constellations showing familiar shapes, shapes she’d known in every land she’d lived in. On the grass about her, and on the smooth, silver water, she could see the shadows of the stars, and she was comforted by this, the tracery of her former life in the wildness of the waking world.
“You are in Elysium,” a voice said. “You died at my gates.”
“Where is Antony?” she asked, turning to see the god of the Dead before her. “I must go to where he is.”
Hades nodded his head ruefully.
“As you wish. You have done me a large favor. I owe you recompense.”
A flash of light, and she found herself transported again.
She saw the Island of Fire, with its scales for the weighing of her heart, the gleaming feather of Maat upon them. Antony and her sons stood before her, all of her beloved dead, Caesarion, Alexander Helios, and Ptolemy.
She walked toward them, overcome with joy, but then, without warning, she was torn from the Duat and pressed into her own broken body again.
The fate spinner had brought Cleopatra back from the death she’d longed for. Helpless, paralyzed on the battlefield, the queen felt Sekhmet reenter her heart.
I can see it all now, the seiðkona rasped, then, her hands on Cleopatra’s face. I can see everything.
Cleopatra walked on into her future. Her love was in the Duat, waiting for her, and she was on earth, dreaming of him. She would not see him yet.
It is your destiny to destroy the world, the seiðkona had whispered to her, all those years before. But you must also save it. They are the same fate.
Cleopatra walked into the darkness, the stars overhead glittering, the moon a pointed crescent, her body filled with blood, her mind filled with night. Sekhmet would rise again now that Cleopatra had finished her healing. The queen could feel her hunger. Sekhmet had been wounded, too, with the Hydra venom, but she still had six Slaughterers in her quiver: Famine, Earthquake, Flood, Drought, Madness, and Violence.
Though this was finished, Cleopatra was not done. She did not know when she would be. It was not her decision.
The emperor of Rome was dead.
Long live the queen.
ACTA EST FABULA.
Historical Note
Lots of the things that happen in this book really occurred. Lots of the characters portrayed in this book really existed. Lots of their deeds and misdeeds, and many of their wildly unlikely actions—including some of the things you’re no doubt sure I invented—actually happened.
Let me clarify that. Lots of the things that happen in this book really are historically based. However, much of the history we rely on to tell us the truth of what happened to Antony, Cleopatra, Octavian, Agrippa, and the rest of these characters in the early days of the Roman Empire is as much enhanced by fiction, imagination, and mythology as this book is.
History is written by and for the conquering heroes—in this case, the Romans—and so the classical sources that deal with Cleopatra and Antony are fascinatingly skewed documents, full of hyperbole, humor, hysteria, and contradiction. Much like today’s political climate, persons on both sides of the events had a great deal to say about the players, some of it true (maybe), and some of it invention.
None of the major primary sources were contemporary with the historic events portrayed herein—Plutarch was writing nearly a hundred years after the death of Cleopatra, who committed suicide (or perhaps not) in 30 B.C.E. They relied on earlier sources, rumor, poetic license, and a hefty dose of subservience to the Roman Empire. Therefore, works of contemporary scholarship on these topics—as the authors themselves agree—have a limited pool to draw from when it comes to factual accounts of what did and did not happen in Alexandria and thereafter.
As a priest of Apollo states in this book, speaking of the mythic arrows of Hercules, “Everything is true. Once a story is told, it becomes true. Every unlikely tale, every tale of wonders, has something real at its core.”
That is absolutely true of the history that inspired and informs this particular tale.
That said, I’m tremendously indebted to a variety of volumes dealing in fact and “fact,” most notably Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars, Plutarsch’s Lives of Noble Grecians and Romans, Joyce Tyldesley’s Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt, and Anthony Everitt’s Augustus: The Life of Rome’s First Emperor. For a fantastic fictional biography—and a completely different take on many of the characters I portray here—I recommend John Williams’s National Book Award–winning novel, Augustus. As well, I consulted Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Dio, Strabo, Shakespeare, and many more, some poetic, some historic.
One of the great pleasures of writing Queen of Kings was that I was able to use the biographical details of Antony, Cleopatra, Augustus, and more to a new effect, braiding history with my own imagined possibilities. The death of Cleopatra, for example, is portrayed in Plutarch as a locked-room mystery—the queen and her maids discovered dead, with the only mark visible on Cleopatra a couple of pinpricks. No suicide-assisting asp was ever discovered, and Plutarch himself seems suspicious that this was what happened. As time passed, death by asp became the accepted version. It was a small leap of imagination to imagine a different prelude to Cleopatra’s “death,” and a different explanation for the fang marks on her body.
In terms of ancient sorcery, religion, augury, and mythology, I drew inspiration and information from Apuleius’s The Golden Ass (sometimes known as Apuleius’s Metamorphoses), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Naming the Witch by Kimberley Stratton, and for some great thoughts on the creepiness and creativity of ancient world warfare, and on the Hydra’s venom, Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World by Adrienne Mayor.
In regard to Greek witchcraft, Hades, and shades, I consulted a variety of sources and inspirations both classical and contemporary, including The Aeneid (which readers will recognize as the inspiration for the geography of Hades), the Odyssey, Medea (the character found both in Euripides’ play and in Ovid’s Metamorphoses). The classically accepted process for summoning shades is very similar to what I’ve outlined here. They really do require a blood sacrifice, which brings their consciousness and memory back from the faded world of Hades. Cleopatra’s brief experience of Elysium in the epilogue is inspired by James Agee’s beautiful poem “Description of Elysium.”
I have the extraordinary good fortune of counting among my friends a scholar in classical and early Christian magic, so I used the work and words, some published, some not, of Dayna S. Kalleres as guides in the research process.
In regard to Egyptian history, magic, religion, folklore, and hieroglyphic evidence, I consulted a variety of documents, both ancient and contemporary, including The Egyptian Book of the Dead (more properly known as The Book of Going Forth by Day). Sekhmet is a real goddess, and her history as laid out in this book is, for the most part, supported by Egyptian lore. A particularly good account of the relationship between Sekhmet and Ra and the attempted destruction of humanity by Sekhmet may be found in Geraldine Pinch’s Magic in Ancient Egypt. Discussion of Sekhmet’s Seven Slaughterers may also be found in t
his excellent book, though Plague, as depicted in Queen of Kings, is inspired by the Irish legend of the Boyhood of Finn and Birgha, the spear he uses to defeat the lovely voiced giant, Aillen. Sekhmet’s more contemporary incarnation, post-Isis, had placed her as a “women’s goddess”—meaning that she presided over childbeds and menstruation—a definite demotion from her earlier responsibilities, which were waging war and destroying enemies of both Ra and the Egyptian pharaohs. It is no wonder, in my opinion, that in this book, she is ready for something a bit more interesting.
Chapter 4 of Book of Divinations is inspired by my favorite section of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The notion of a ghost ship whose passengers and crew have (all but the captain) been slaughtered by the monster they’ve unwittingly brought aboard has always made my skin crawl, and when I saw the chance to create my own variation, I was delighted to do so. The ship in Stoker’s novel is the Demeter.
The Sibylline Oracles are a complicated collection of documents created mainly in the second through fifth centuries A.D., but encompassing fragments dating back to the first century B.C.E. They are scholarly forgeries of earlier oracular texts—the Sibylline Books—which were mostly lost in a fire in 83 B.C.E. In the time of Augustus, they began to be commissioned propaganda, and written by scholars on both sides. They’d be consulted and read aloud as the words of the gods. However, the scholars who wrote the Oracles came from all sides of the events—even from Alexandria—and so some of them predict Cleopatra’s destruction of Rome, and others predict the glittering rise of Rome under Augustus. The quotations that begin Book of Divinations and Book of Lightning, and which are referenced throughout Queen of Kings, are from the oldest sections of the Sibylline Oracles, Books III–V. The quotations are taken unaltered from the 1899 translation of the Sibylline Oracles, and are generally agreed to be referencing Cleopatra and her dealings with Antony and Augustus.
As crazy as this may sound, given the Sibylline Oracles depiction of “the widow,” the “cataract of fire” and the cohabitation with a “man-eating lion” as well as the mutilated fragment involving Cleopatra being buried: “thee the stately shall the encircling tomb receive . . . is gone . . . living within,” this book was not inspired by them. I found these bits of awesomeness long after I conceived the book’s plotline, as I was in the midst of writing the final battle. Needless to say, I screamed with joy when I discovered them. Augustus really did historically burn a vast quantity of books, and personally and specifically censored the Sibylline Oracles. I took a few wild, thoroughly enjoyable leaps in imagining the creation of the Sibylline fragments, and the literal nature of them.
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