She’d brought him back from death only to watch him die again. She moaned, listening to the sound that wasn’t. No heartbeat. No breath.
The stairs rattled with the steps of legionaries. She turned to see them. Dozens of men, armed, shouting. They were coming to take her to their general. She felt strangely calm. They would not take her alive. Nothing mattered now that he was gone. She’d failed, and this was the end.
The legionaries swarmed around her, their weapons drawn, shouting and shoving, but she was beyond them.
“Surrender by order of the emperor,” they yelled, tearing at her hands, throwing her to the ground, but her hand was already on the ritual knife.
She twisted and drove it into her stomach, feeling none of the pain she should have felt.
And when she drew the dagger out of her body, no blood stained the blade.
7
Three nights later, the conquered queen of Egypt lit the fire that burned her husband. And they reveled in Rome. A prisoner surrounded by enemies, she could hear their trumpets, smell their foul feasting, carried across the water all the way to Alexandria. The world rang with proclamations of the new ruler’s name as Cleopatra stood before Antony’s pyre stunned, dazed like one in a dream.
“Hail Caesar,” they sang as Cleopatra lifted the torch to Antony’s shroud. He was as still as a statue, yet he had been warm. She had brought him back and lost him again. He’d spoken to her. He’d thought himself betrayed by she who adored him, she who’d summoned the goddess and given up her—
She did not want to know what she’d given up.
She did not want to know why she remained here, among the living. This was not where she belonged.
The ceremony was held in darkness, to keep the crowds from assembling. Not even the royal children were in attendance. Cleopatra wondered where they were imprisoned. Surely they still lived, or she would have felt it. The funerary group consisted only of Cleopatra and Romans, the general Marcus Agrippa, second to Octavian, and a slew of lesser functionaries. Whether through mercy or insult, Octavian did not appear. It was to be Cleopatra’s last act as the queen of her country.
With a burst of brightness, her love went up in flame.
Cleopatra tilted her chin and watched the rising cloud of smoke that had been her king. She wanted only to fall into the flames and join him, but the guards surrounding her kept her from moving.
The smoke obscured the stars, and Cleopatra thought of the gods that had failed her, the goddess that had tricked her. She lived, and he was dead. She lived, and she did not know why.
She stretched her fingers to feel the flames. Someone barked an order, and the Romans pulled her back. They let her—indeed, they made her—stay until the pyre went out. When everything was ash, she knelt miserably in the char and gathered what was left of her husband’s body. Her tears fell then, for the first time since the horror in the mausoleum.
As she touched the ash, her mind filled with a strange and roaring sequence of images: galleys saluting Rome, herself naked and sleeping in bed, the buckles of Antony’s armor as they were fastened, the sword he used to stab himself, the lighthouse shining pale in the sky, her own face, blurry and bloodless, grief-stricken. She heaved with suppressed sobs, but they let her hold him only for a moment.
A stone-faced centurion, a former soldier of Antony’s, took the ashes from her and placed them in a silver box, one Cleopatra recognized as having commissioned herself. Isis and Dionysus decorated its sides. She’d had it made as a wedding gift for Antony, and in her foolishness, ordered that the gods depicted on it have human faces. Dionysus had a cleft chin, and Isis a crown of cobras. Their hands were twined together, the marriage of Cleopatra’s gods and Antony’s.
She was no god. Why had she been so stupid as to declare herself one? All of this, everything, was her fault. She’d started things in motion and now she’d lost control. Her life was a cart careening down a hillside, horses shrieking and stumbling, unable to stop themselves from falling.
The box would be taken back to the mausoleum. The murderers would bury Antony in Egypt. They’d given her that much at least. The proper ceremonies, the rituals. Antony’s wishes would be granted. He’d renounced his Roman rites and declared himself a citizen of her country. As long as his ashes remained in Egypt, she hoped his soul would eventually travel to the Duat. Cleopatra would not be there to meet him.
She thought of him wandering alone through the caverns of the dead, making his way toward the Beautiful West without her. They’d planned their lives and deaths so carefully, and now it was all for naught.
She lived.
Still, with these ceremonies, he belonged to this country. Or so Cleopatra hoped. She realized that she knew nothing now, nothing true, nothing solid. Not since the thing that had happened in the mausoleum. Who knew which Underworld would claim him, or what the gods would do with him once they had him? Who knew whom she’d offended?
She watched as they marched away with the box that contained Antony. Too quickly, the legionaries were out of sight, and she was left in the dark with the guards to take her back to the palace.
The Romans kept her caged in her own bedchamber, where she awaited the emperor’s summons.
Outside the room, sentries trod the marble, their steps echoing through Cleopatra’s mind. Her luxurious bedding had been stripped from the bed for fear she’d use it to strangle herself. All that was left was a bare pallet, but it didn’t matter. She’d neither slept nor eaten since Antony’s death.
Her mind seeped with an unpredictable darkness. Was it madness? Had she imagined everything that happened in the mausoleum? She saw herself in a horrible flash, a soiled linen shift, muddied feet, tangled hair, wandering the roads, collapsing, her flesh picked over by vultures, yet still living, a shrieking husk. This would be her legacy, not her years of rule, of preserving the city from the Romans, not her pure love of Antony.
The Mad Queen Cleopatra.
She unwrapped her robes and ran her fingers over her skin to confirm what she already knew. Smooth. No evidence of the knife that had penetrated just below the ribs. She was chilled, and she shook as though fevered, but her body, at least, was unwounded. She could not say the same for her soul.
Something, everything, was terribly wrong. She could feel it, but she could not find it.
All night, she lay wide-eyed in her chamber, every sound magnified, the darkness dazzling.
At dawn on the sixth day after Antony’s death, she opened the shutters to watch the sunrise, once her particular pleasure. She sought to comfort herself with ritual, standing in the window, watching the indigo sky turn pale gold, but as the sun broke over the edge of the world and touched her face, she felt a searing pain. She gasped and leapt back from the window, her skin burning.
Tentatively, she stretched her fingers back into the light, and they blistered as though doused in boiling oil. She snatched them back, cradling her hand to her breast. Her eyes watered and sparked with the sun. Hissing with pain, she slammed the shutters closed again.
Had she offended Ra as well as his daughter? Might she throw open the shutters and die in the sunlight?
No. As she watched, her hand healed with agonizing speed. Where the flesh had been burned, there was smooth skin again. Soon, it was as though the burning had never happened.
It seemed that even this pain would only cripple her, and that only temporarily. She tried to calm herself by counting her heartbeats, but she could not find them.
She checked again. Nothing. Silence where there had always been motion and song, emptiness where her soul had been.
The goddess had taken her heart, her soul, her ka.
Cleopatra curled in the corner of her chamber, shaking, her hands clasped to her breasts, feeling the place where the darkness had touched her. Even if she died, without a heart to be weighed she could never enter Egypt’s Underworld. She could not follow Antony. She imagined herself ferried across the water to the Island of Fire, Osiris standi
ng on the shore waiting to judge her. What would she offer him? She had nothing.
She sat in darkness, listening to the sound of nothing, listening to the beat of nothing, feeling the hollow space within her breast.
At last, after days of Cleopatra’s solitude, Eiras and Charmian arrived to dress the queen’s hair and paint her face for her audience with the emperor. The maids held up a mirror of polished metal so that the queen could catch her reflection. In it, she was beautiful but for the sunken cheeks that no paint could hide, and the mark of Sekhmet’s fangs bright against the skin of her throat.
Cleopatra looked into her own eyes for the first time since Antony’s death and saw a stranger inhabiting her skin. She drew in her breath sharply.
This stranger hungered to kill everyone in the palace, she realized for the first time. Everyone in the city. Cleopatra’s fingers flexed, endowed with strange fire. The thing inside her, the thing she was not ready to accept as her own, hungered to kill everyone in the world, and perhaps it was capable of doing so.
Everyone except herself.
She felt a sound rising, humming behind her lips, a roar that might shatter glass, that might avalanche a city, and from deep inside her body, from deep inside her mind, something spoke to her.
You are mine, the voice said, dark and shining as any night.
Cleopatra shuddered, panicked. What thoughts were these? What voice had stolen Antony’s words? Flickering images paraded through her mind, lakes of blood, cities destroyed. Things she’d never seen. Things she would never have wished to see.
Charmian took her hand, concerned.
“Are you well, lady?” she asked. Cleopatra straightened her spine, feeling flickers of flame running down it, willing herself to stay seated. Madness. It was clearly madness. She must resist it. She touched her brow, expecting to find it burning, but it was as cold as marble.
Eiras dabbed at her eyelids, painting them the gleaming green of sacred insects, bordering her lashes with warmed kohl.
“Perfect,” said the girl, though her brow furrowed as she brushed her mistress’s strangely icy lips with carmine.
Together, Eiras and Charmian braided her hair, frowning at the thread of silver that had appeared in it since Antony’s death, a glittering ribbon.
She was no longer young, Cleopatra realized suddenly. The sun god had seen her face for thirty-eight years, though he saw it no more. She felt ancient, and yet she was no closer to the grave than these girls were. Death did not want her.
“He is yours, lady,” said Charmian, draping the fine linen gown lower on Cleopatra’s bosom, arranging the lapis pendants and diadem to better frame her face. “Your Caesar was this man’s kin. Surely, they share the same temptations. No man can resist you, if only you smile.”
“You’ll bewitch this man, as you have every other,” Eiras assured her, daubing perfumed oil behind Cleopatra’s ears, scattering flecks of gold dust on her naked shoulders. Somehow, the maids had forgotten what they’d seen in the mausoleum, or were too loyal to speak of it.
Charmian twined a jeweled snake about Cleopatra’s arm and wrapped a silken veil around her throat to hide the evidence of the goddess. There was that, at least, to prove Cleopatra’s memory. Those two fang marks, swollen at the edges, burning with an invisible fire.
She wanted to disappear, to die as she had been meant to die, but instead, the first citizen of Rome desired her to dine with him. He feared that she was planning a death by starvation, a martyrdom that would reflect badly on him.
“Eat something,” Eiras begged, offering her a platter of sliced figs, in better days her favorite fruit. The scent, the seeping red centers, revolted her. She would starve to death if she only could. Her stomach twisted with hunger; her mouth was parched with thirst; yet water nauseated her, and wine held no allure. She could not eat.
She’d kill Octavian, she promised herself. He would pay for Antony’s murder. It was murder. Antony had been alive when the legionary stabbed him. She would make the emperor of Rome pay for her lover’s death, no matter what it cost her.
“The emperor approaches,” Eiras whispered.
Cleopatra looked up, but it was not Octavian who entered the room. He’d sent her children instead.
The ten-year-old twins, Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene, ran toward Cleopatra. The sun and moon, she and Antony had named them, imagining themselves, the royal parents—oh, she regretted it now—to be the sky. The baby, Ptolemy Philadelphus, just four, scampered in behind them, grinning wildly at his mother, his face smeared with sweets.
He had them, Octavian was telling her. They were at his mercy should their mother not provide what he desired.
An icy wave of misery ran through her. She loved her children. She’d often dismissed the governesses and tutors, and spent hours teaching her children to talk and write and read, sharing with them her command of the languages of the world. She’d cooed at them in Arabic, chided them in Greek, praised them in Egyptian, denied them in Macedonian. She’d fed them in Hebrew, and now that they were growing tall, she advised them in Latin.
“Mama,” Ptolemy cried, the joy in his voice crumpling what was left of her calm. The cleft in his chin, the tilt of his head—
Her children were the images of Antony. Each face brought his face back to her, the nights spent drinking and dancing, his hands on her waist, his lips on her throat, and the memories grieved her anew. She could see it as if it were happening again, the two of them sharing one cloak, walking the streets of their city, pretending to be common people. They’d thought themselves immortal, but he had been wrong. And she? She had not imagined they would end like this, herself bereft of a husband, her children bereft of their father, and all of them broken.
She could feel the absence blasting through her center even now, the horrible feeling she’d had in the mausoleum, the emptiness, the bleak, black sky, and her heart missing, her skin frozen, her love halting and hopeless.
Ptolemy climbed into her lap, nuzzling into her arms, and though she tried to stay strong, she clutched him. She did not want to show Octavian that she loved them. If he knew this, he’d be more likely to kill them.
“Send them away,” she ordered, desperate to keep herself from crying in front of her children. Their father was dead. Did they not know it? Cleopatra had grown up with only a father, her mother having died birthing her. Did her children not feel the strangeness inside her?
“But, Mama,” said Ptolemy, tears already streaking his face. He had a toy with him, a small lion carved out of ebony, and he showed it to his mother. His fingers on the toy were chubby, and she knew he would never survive without her. He was a baby still. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she held him tighter for a moment, then let him go.
He stared at her, bewildered. His eyes looked just like Antony’s had in those last moments. Antony, who’d been convinced she had betrayed him.
The twins comforted their brother. Cleopatra Selene, the beautiful, black-haired daughter, looked back as she was led toward the doorway. Her eyes smoldered at Cleopatra.
“Who are you?” she asked, her tone sharp. “You are not our mother.”
Cleopatra was silent for a moment, though her daughter’s words felt as the sun had, searing and blistering. What did her daughter see?
“I am not well,” Cleopatra told her finally, her voice shaking. “Your mother is not well.”
“They say you betrayed our father,” Selene said.
“They lie!” Cleopatra shouted. Her sons cringed away from her, and she pushed herself back into her chair. She should not scream at this child. Her own child. “Who told you that?”
“They say that you killed a man in the mausoleum,” the daughter persisted, her eyes wide and scared but her tone harsh.
“Who says that?” Cleopatra asked again. “Tell me who.”
“Is it true?”
“You must not speak to your mother that way, Selene,” said a voice from the doorway. “It is not respectful. She is
your queen.”
Cleopatra raised her head slowly.
There the monster stood, a slight blond man with unsettlingly pale gray eyes. He had not bothered to put on formal dress for the meeting.
Ptolemy ran to the conqueror, and Octavian scooped the child up into his arms. Cleopatra stood up, her muscles aching with the effort of remaining on her own side of the room. She must keep them safe. She must pretend she didn’t care.
Octavian put Ptolemy down and waved his hand at Cleopatra’s twins. They let themselves be led from the chamber, only Selene looking back.
“You betrayed us,” Selene said. “They say you betrayed our father, but you betrayed us.”
Then they were gone.
Octavian sat down disrespectfully in Cleopatra’s chair, leaving her standing. He appraised the queen, slowly looking her up and down. Discomfited, she sat on her couch. She would not be forced onto the bed.
“I thought you’d be beautiful,” he finally said, “given all the lives you’ve ruined.”
In spite of her pain, Cleopatra nearly laughed. Was this the conversation they’d have, here, now, after all that had come before? Did he think beauty mattered to her? And yet, even as she thought this, she wondered what she looked like. Was she no longer beautiful, even gilded and glittered, wrapped in diaphanous silks like a gift to the conquerors? No. She’d seen herself in the mirror. He was merely trying, in his small way, to wound her.
She was disgusted to realize he’d succeeded.
“Just as I thought you would be a man,” hissed Cleopatra. “It seems we are both disappointed.”
“You’ve dallied too long in the company of eunuchs and drunkards,” Octavian said. “It is no wonder you do not recognize a man when you see one. Your consort—”
“My husband,” Cleopatra corrected.
“My sister Octavia’s husband, Mark Antony, was a glutton. He never saw wine nor woman he didn’t sample. You were an exotic meal, nothing more. He tasted Cleopatra, and then he moved down the table, dipping his spoon in every other dish. You do not imagine your lover was faithful, do you? Not to Fulvia, not to Octavia, and certainly not to you.”
Queen of Kings Page 5