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Suddenly, she realized that she shouldn’t have come back this way. She’d run back to her rooms once before. And already something had changed. Too still, too empty, too quiet. On most feast days, these fields flooded with children, running, screeching, clamoring. Not only street urchins, but the honest sons and daughters of merchants and even low noblemen crowded the gated gardens. But now the expanse lay empty save for a small cluster of Jews, either too old or too young to fight, who’d gathered to bear witness. A gust of wind filled Arsinoe’s nostrils with smoke; she coughed into her elbow and squinted at the palace gate. It was bolted shut.

On careful toes, she approached the group of men. “Strange beliefs or no, Jews hear all,” Ganymedes had told her once when she’d grown tired of learning Aramaic; she could only hope that his words would prove correct. Head hung nearly to her chest, Arsinoe tried to make herself as small as possible. When one of the quorum glanced back at her, she squatted and pretended to search for some lost jewel in the sand. Massaging the cool grains, she strained her ears to listen. The act was comforting in itself: eavesdropping came as naturally to her as breathing.

“Romans? The House of Ptolemy?” the youngest one, a boy of fourteen or so, spat. He went on, but Arsinoe could not make sense of the rest of his quick words. Her ears rang with the one:
Romans.

An old man—the boy’s grandfather, perhaps—growled a correction. The only phrase she caught was “at the Canopic Gate.” Arsinoe needed no further bidding. She raced back through the gardens and toward the smaller streets. She couldn’t return to the palace now, perhaps not ever. Soon the royal grounds would swarm with Romans.
Your father isn’t the most forgiving of men.
She saw the eunuch’s meaning now. Two years—more—she’d spent in Berenice’s court. She’d shared her sister’s food and table, even her counsel. Enough to taint her a traitor too.

Arsinoe’s feet carried her through the market and by the Temple of Tyche and into the belly of the city. She ran past drunken men and fat donkeys and women selling fabrics and grapes and beans. She ran past grand homes with red-tile roofs and terraced temples with friezes of the gods, along knotted alleys stinking of fish and lush boulevards lined with drinking pools, by stone houses that slowly gave way to wood-roofed shacks. She ran until she could no longer smell the sea.

Even the hovels grew thin. Before her stretched an empty field of green dotted with stone markers and marble hutches. Tombs. The city of the dead. She’d heard of this lesser settlement that held the bones of lesser men, but she’d never seen it with her own eyes. Her own forefathers were buried by the palace, glass eyes gazing toward Macedonia across the sea. These modest graves marked the corpses of sundry Jews, Assyrians, and Africans who flocked to the great city on the delta. The dead brought quiet with them. As Arsinoe crept between their houses, she shivered. The last specks of sun had sunk beneath the horizon. The chill of night took hold.

Her belly growled—loudly. She recognized it as hunger now, but she could ignore it for a while longer. She hadn’t forgotten the lessons from the early days of Berenice’s rule. She knew that she could last for whole days with scarcely any food at all; she’d need to grow accustomed to such rumblings again. And this time, she was on her own. Myrrine didn’t know where she was, Ganymedes had left her to rot, her fire-bearded guard was dead.

So much death,
she thought as she looked over the tombs upon tombs that lined the field. The next one was full of corpse markers too; they stretched as far as she could see in the dying light.
Will Berenice soon join them?
The morbid thought pulsed in her ears as though she’d spoken it aloud. Arsinoe cast her gaze about, willing herself to forget, to cleanse the dark thoughts from her mind. Her eyes caught on a darkened spot, the maw of a cavern. She squinted at it until she could make sense of what she saw. It wasn’t a cavern at all, but something far better: an entrance to the catacombs. She caught her breath, but she didn’t run. Rushing might draw attention, but here, she knew, she might pass the night.

A torch blazed merrily below, lighting the way for the dead’s visitors, she supposed. Her own ancestors’ tombs were sealed and guarded, but these simple folks had few valuables worth protecting. She’d likely find little more than bones.

And stink. The putrid stench of decay rose to greet her as she began her downward climb. These bodies, clearly, hadn’t been prepared for second life, embalmed with the deathless juices of the gods. Tunic clutched over her nose, Arsinoe crept down the sandstone steps into the homes of the dead, like Odysseus descending into the shade world of the damned.

The torch’s flame licked away some ten paces of the dark, but no more. She curled just outside its warming reach. Weariness weighed her down; she needed rest. Rest or food, and she wouldn’t eat until the morning came, or longer still. Arsinoe’s mind wandered over the city streets, over the eastern wall, over to her father’s camp. There she would explain to Cleopatra what had happened under Berenice’s rule, how she hadn’t betrayed Father, how she’d merely done what…

“That all you got?” a boy’s voice cracked. Arsinoe’s eyes opened to blackness. “What ’m I supposed to do with six coppers?”

“I thought—I thought—I thought them’s gold.” A trembled squeak.

“How many times I’ve got to tell you? Gold don’t stick when you bite.”

“We—we might buy a bit o’ food with it.”

“Food?” the first replied. “Where d’ya think we’d get food for
that?
”

Their accents lashed against Arsinoe’s ears, but she forced herself to listen. She’d have to learn to speak that way as well. Otherwise she’d never pass for a gutter rat.

Their voices hushed. The older slammed the younger aside. “Shut your trap,” he hissed. “Someone’s about.”

In the darkness, Arsinoe’s fingers fumbled for her knife. She turned and drew it from her scabbard—but not quickly enough. A coarse hand knocked it away.

“Grab that,” the boy ordered his friend—his fingers struck against her shoulders. “That’s a nice knife for a mouse. And those ’r’ fancy clothes. What’s a stinking girl like you doing with such finery?” he sneered. “Ajax, seems the gods smile at the likes of us af’er all.”

From the corner of her eye, Arsinoe caught the other boy—a child of eight, perhaps, not a half-grown youth—nodding timidly. His hands shook where he held the knife.

“Give us the clothes,” the older boy told her. “And maybe we won’t kill ya slow.”

Wild, impulsive, Arsinoe sank her teeth into his flesh. A string of curses, only half of which she understood, escaped his mouth. He socked her hard across the lips. On hands and knees, she groped across the grainy earth. Her fingers struck what felt like a stone, long and narrow. She wrapped her fingers around its weight, and swung it hard. This time she wasn’t too slow. Her elbow braced as she struck the youth’s temple.

Her assailant collapsed. His young accomplice shrieked and dropped the knife.

“Shut your trap.” She flung the new words at him. Her hand trembled but her voice did not. Crimson streaked the older boy’s brow. He looked younger than before. Perhaps he’d seen only eleven summers, the same as her.

“You killed him,” the little one whispered.

Her heart pounded in her head. For the first time, Arsinoe looked down at the weapon clutched in her fist. It was no stone at all, but a bone—a femur, by the look of it. Ganymedes had made her learn the parts of the body after he’d found her thumbing over Hippocrates. She’d traced the illustrated skeletons with her adorned fingers. How different she must look now, seizing bones as weapons, like the savages who lived far up the Nile and didn’t speak a word of Greek. A day out of the palace and already a murderer. She wasn’t sure whether to be proud or ashamed.

With a timid foot, she nudged the fallen boy. His body was warm and heavy against her sandaled toes. “I just knocked him out. He’ll be all right,” she declared with a confidence she didn’t feel. A strange energy pulsed through her as she looked back at the younger child. Frightened, he shrunk away from her gaze.

“I won’t hurt you,” she offered with a shrug. The boy nodded quickly, in silence. She was suddenly afraid he might cry.

“Come. He wasn’t so kind to you to begin with.” Arsinoe nodded at the creature at her feet. He showed no signs of stirring; perhaps she had killed him. Shouldn’t boys die harder than that? If killing was so easy, why write songs in praise of it? What honor was there in Achilles’s slaying of Hector if souls were so prompt and skittish in flight?

“He was my cousin,” the child murmured, eyes fixed on the dirt.

Her stomach growled. She’d no answer for that. “Do you want something to eat, Ajax?” She was glad that she remembered his name. There was a power in naming things.

“You have food?” he asked, eager. Arsinoe could see the hunger in his eyes, wide and open to the whites.

“No, but I know how we might get some.” Her fingers caressed the smooth bone in her hand. She liked the weight of it, the heft. And it was easier to wield than a knife. “D’you know where I might sell these clothes?”

He nodded, wary eyes still fixed on the ivory in her hand. “I do. I know a woman who buys those fine sorts of things.”

“Take me to her. And hold on to that knife.”

With a last glance at his cousin’s body, the boy grabbed the blade and scampered ahead toward the steps and the newly breaking day.
Hunger runs deeper than blood.
Her first lesson. One she’d learned all on her own.

As they neared the blink of sunlight, the boy turned back to her, like Orpheus to Eurydice. He stopped and gaped, openmouthed.

“What now?”

“You can’t bring that.” He motioned toward the bone still clutched in her fingers. “Ya know: bad luck to bother the dead.”

Of course. It would be bad luck. Arsinoe knew the curses that fell upon grave robbers and cretins who disturbed the tombs of good men.

“The dead don’t need it,” she said, beaming at her own irreverence. “I do.”

Elder

T
he battle limped on, creeping toward Alexandria’s gates. At first, Archelaus’s letters had sounded sanguine enough. He detailed the army’s successful crossing of the Nile’s western mouths, even joking about how one of his men had fallen from his horse in midstream and completed the journey clinging to the creature’s tail. In all, he seemed proud of his young recruits. His scouts, he mentioned, suspected that the rumors of the size of Gabinius’s army had been overblown. But once her husband had confronted the Roman legions in the flesh, his tone changed. Despite his attempts to cloak the bad news with good, Berenice found it easy enough to read between the lines: her infantry had been decimated, and while her cavalry may have won a few meager victories, more often it, too, suffered defeat. She was outmatched. That much was clear. Each day, she awaited Archelaus’s carrier pigeon with a jumble of impatience and dread.

And at night, she could not sleep. Her body writhed in the darkness. Though Merytmut promised that her illness was unrelated to her brew—“I swear it on my life, my queen”—Berenice didn’t believe it. She’d been soft to take her husband to her bed, to long for closeness when she deserved none. And she was being punished for it. Poison claws wrenched her baby from her womb. She didn’t deserve to be a mother; she wasn’t fierce enough for that.

It was only when dawn dragged her nails across the sea that her mind quieted at last, and she wished for nothing more than to spend the whole morning sleeping away her troubles. But she did not. She’d already revealed her weakness by retreating to her chambers for a few short days. Now she had to be strong. Alexandria had to be reminded that she still had a queen.

Berenice crossed the chamber and cast aside the curtains. The sky cloudless, the sun drained over the horizon, soaking the sea crimson.
Blood.
If she believed in omens, she had to admit that this was a poor one. A pang struck her stomach; her fingers clutched the phantom pain. But it was nothing. An echo of what had lived and died inside her. Nothing more.

“Merytmut,” she cried out. The girl should be by her bed. She’d promised not to leave her side. “Merytmut!”

The copper-faced maid scampered in. If either the early hour or the foreboding that lingered over the palace bothered her, she gave no sign of it. She looked as fair and fresh as ever. Perhaps that was true fortitude—the ability to sail through adversity unmoved by hunger or fatigue.