Queen of Kings (11 page)

He would not look at her body.

“You will have a long life,”
she'd said sixteen years before, and now she was dead, and he stood over her corpse.

She was still wearing the same perfume.

Disgusted with himself, Octavian shook the past from his mind.

He would melt this entire palace into money and thank the gods for it. Rome would be rich again, as it was meant to be. He'd pay his soldiers. It had been a near thing, bringing them here unpaid, with all her treasure hidden in that mausoleum, and her threatening to set the place on fire, but Egypt was conquered at last.

Cleopatra's breasts were clearly visible through the cloth, he noticed, one completely bare, the nipple erect, as though recently touched. Or kissed. Her arm was thrown back, the better to display the indecency.

Octavian—no,
Augustus;
that was the name he'd chosen and by which he would soon be known—snorted in revulsion. Whatever poison the queen had consumed, it had treated her as a lover. She was a changed woman from their last meeting a few days earlier, when she'd inexplicably revealed the location of Caesarion. He could only assume she'd been delirious with grief. Why else would she have been so foolish? Gray and gaunt, her eyes blackened, she'd certainly looked ill. Nothing about her had attracted him then. It had been a relief.

In death, however, Cleopatra nearly glowed, and a sheen of perspiration covered her skin. Her position was appalling, one knee bent, the other leg dangling off the edge of the couch. Her back had arched, seizing in her last moments, no doubt.

It was too quiet in this room, far from the noise of the city.

He'd won. His enemies were dead. It puzzled Octavian that he did not feel peaceful.

He moved toward Cleopatra to adjust her draperies, he told himself, to protect her from prying eyes, but in fact, he wanted to run his fingers over her skin, press his lips to her throat. He wanted to—

“Summon doctors,” he said, jolting away from her. “Let them determine how she fell.”

Agrippa bent over the queen, pulling aside the scarf twined about her neck.

“There's no need,” he said. “It was an asp. Here's the mark of its bite.”

Octavian leapt back.

“Kill it,” he ordered, suppressing the tremor in his voice.

“It has gone already,” Agrippa replied. Octavian glanced suspiciously about the throne room. It could be hiding anywhere: in the queen's garments or those of her maids. Beneath the furnishings. How had it gotten into the room in the first place? Smuggled in, no doubt. The queen was sly. He approached her again, willing himself to breathe normally.

“Show us the marks,” he ordered. “And summon the Psylli. We will do everything that can be done. Perhaps she is not dead yet.”

The marks of the fangs were strangely large, and bright against the pallor of her skin. Octavian looked at them for a moment, disturbed, and then turned away. Whatever had bitten her, it had not been a typical asp but something much larger. It was a painful and strange way to die. Why did she look so calm?

The troupe of snakebite magicians came and knelt to the queen's throat to suck forth the venom, but she did not revive.

“She is dead,” the leader of the Psylli said, his dark face grave. “But her soul is not far gone. Something is strange with her. She is not as she seems.”

Octavian shrugged at the man's phrasing. What did Rome care for her soul?

He dismissed the Psylli, paying them in gold. Word of the queen's suicide and of the emperor's attempts to save her would be all over the city by nightfall.

Agrippa hesitated at the doorway.

“Go,” Octavian said. “I'm nearly done here.”

When Agrippa had gone, Octavian bent over Cleopatra one last time, to remove her crown. He let his hand rest on her breast, still amazingly soft. One would think her heart still beat.

He bent closer, inhaling her perfume, telling himself that he was simply taking the measure of his enemy. One last conversation with his foe, before she was gone forever.

“Caesar taught me that true leaders fight with words instead of swords,” he told her. “An army hears an order they think is from their queen, and they turn on their commander. A man hears a message that his queen has killed herself, and he acts to save his own honor. Have I done as you would have done, had you come to my country with your army? Now you will travel to Rome with your emperor. You, who said you belonged to no one, belong to me.”

He leaned closer yet. He pressed his mouth against her parted lips, and then—

The queen's eyes opened.

F
or the rest of his life, the emperor would remember what he saw that day, looking into the eyes of a dead queen. Visions, he thought at first. Prophecy, he realized as they went on. He was seeing what would come.

He saw the future laid out before him like polished gems on a black cloth, each moment distinct, each moment vibrating with its own horror.

Black clouds filled with slashing lights. Crippled bodies, skeletons. Ships beached on dying shores. Rats swarming bodies, covering them so completely that no skin was left visible. These were the trappings of war, Octavian tried to tell himself. Though he was a young man, he'd commanded armies. He had seen civilization.

This, this blazing place, this horror, was nothing like it.

Here, soldiers herded women and children into machines, tore away their rags, their shoes, their belongings, held metal sticks at eye level as their victims stood against fences, hands behind their heads, waiting for death to take them. Here, child warriors slew other child warriors, brandishing cleavers and metal rods, throwing something that blasted hearts away, carousing in an ecstasy of violence, singing and whooping as they smashed the skulls of less lucky children. Here, the naked and the dying ran through the roads of some dark city, their skin melting away, their mouths gaping with horror.

Wolves prowled cobbled streets, stalking lanes that still held homes. A baby cried out, only to be snatched up by an animal. He saw a flamehaired, white-faced woman crowned with gold, her mouth stretching in a cry of agony, a bearded man throwing his hands into the air, summoning some vast, horned creature. He saw an island of fire, a river of lava, creatures flying through the sky.

A human heart on a scale, a weighing.

A tremendous serpent thrashed and coiled, its fangs shining in the moonlight, high above an arena strangely familiar to Octavian. Metal monsters flew through the air and ignited, screaming people leaping from inside them, and below it all, the blood ran, scarlet rivers of it surging into the oceans and coloring the waters. The great beasts of the sea rose up, fins and teeth, battling over bloated corpses.

The sky rained fire.

Octavian saw himself suddenly as though in a nightmare, a slight, young man walking down a deserted road, and behind him, a lioness padding softly, her maw dripping with gore.

He shouted from afar, trying to send a warning, and the lion—no longer on the road but, impossibly, with him in the palace—turned to look at him, her body shifting, growing larger.

She was a woman now, with a lion's head, and she gazed upon him, seeing him utterly. He felt his organs dissolving and a red miasma floating over his eyes. The creature's mouth curved into a smile, and Octavian was transported again to a place that seemed, for a moment, peaceful.

A green orchard, a star-spattered sky, and himself, walking the paths between the trees. He was old now, older than his true father had been when he'd died, older than Caesar, too. His skin was as dry as papyrus and his hands, opening before him, were spotted with age. His spine was hunched, and one leg was short, hobbled. He chewed his meal with rotting teeth, and swallowed painfully.

He looked nervously into the darkness, feeling himself watched by a predator. He tried to cry out, but his throat seized, and something burned its way through his center.

Then he saw
her
, Cleopatra, unchanged, standing in the shadows. She stepped toward him, her hands outstretched, her fingers tipped with talons. He saw her pointed teeth bared. He felt her breath on his face.

Above him, the trees spread their darkness against the sky, blotting out the stars, and he was falling backward, convulsing, vomiting fire.

“Guards!” he screamed, and Marcus Agrippa charged into the throne room, leading his men.

Octavian was drenched in sweat, and he found that he was down before Cleopatra. Kneeling to her. He couldn't stand. The men, swords drawn, ran from end to end of the room, searching for the enemy that had upset their leader. Agrippa knelt beside Octavian.

“Are you ill? Do you need a physician?” asked Agrippa, and he couldn't answer.

Her eyes were shut now, as though they had never opened, as though he'd never seen into the depths of—what? What had he seen? He knew one thing, and that was that he never wanted to see such visions—such omens—again.

“What happened here?” Agrippa demanded. “Is there an enemy?”

“She was—” Octavian stopped. Agrippa would not believe him. How could he tell him that a dead woman was not dead? That he'd seen a vision of the end of days in her eyes? Agrippa would think he was mad.

“I thought I saw the asp, but I was mistaken.” Struggling to his feet, Octavian commanded, “Bury her.” He wanted nothing to do with his previous plan to take her corpse with him to Rome and parade it through the streets as proof of his victory. “Bury her with Antony, if that is what she wants so much. Wall up the tomb with two layers of mortared stone. Make sure there are no entrances or exits. We do not want anything getting out. Set guards around the perimeter. Give them the best weapons.”

Agrippa looked at him, bewildered.

“Getting
out
?” he asked.

“Do you question me?” Octavian asked, regaining his authority at last. Finally, he could draw a breath. His damp garments chilled against his skin, even in the heat of the room. He would not look at the queen. He would not.

Her eyes had been bottomless. He had seen in them the very sphere of the sky, the edges of the horizon, and the green, living world, just before it all went dark.

He would burn her body, if he only knew what would result. It might spur the visions to take place, like a spark to kindling, and he'd be the man who begat the end of the world.

No, he thought, his breath coming too quickly, his head spinning, the safest course would be to wall her up with the man she'd wanted so badly. The proper rituals, a funeral fit for a queen, for a wife. That would placate her. That was what she had wanted, after all, this soulless creature, this thing. Love.

“Don't touch her!” he shouted as one of the men laid a hand on the queen's arm. What if she woke? The men, accustomed to carrying out peculiar orders, lifted the couch with Cleopatra upon it and carried her over their heads, making a funerary procession. But Agrippa remained, eyeing Octavian worriedly.

“What happened?” Agrippa asked quietly, and Octavian shook his head. He could not answer.

Cleopatra had stayed motionless as they lifted her, a smile on her lips, as though taken with a pleasant dream.

The monster slept, Octavian knew. She slept. But for how long?

“And chain her,” he ordered.

S
he awoke in darkness. The sound of marching steps encircled the building she found herself inside. High above her, the pale heat of moonlight transferred through the stone. Here, the smell of new mortar and dust. Her mouth was dry. She shook at the cloth that covered her and stretched her fingers. They curled at the touch of teak.

She was naked, she realized now. Naked but for her crown, and a silver chain that wrapped about her body, binding her to the wooden slab.

The pain of the silver had woken her.

The queen knew the place now. This was her own mausoleum, but the room was changed, all its treasure stolen, even the pearls pried off the walls. How had she come to sleep here? How had she come to be bound? Where was her gown? She'd been dressed in her finest garments, she remembered, glorious in her silken wedding clothes, decked in jewels.

The chain scored her flesh, wrapped about her body like a strangling serpent, pressing in upon her tender skin, biting at her. It crossed her at the shoulders and bound her arms to her sides before wrapping again across her breasts and, again, over her stomach. Her legs were chained together, and her entire body was secured to the wooden pyre she lay upon.

Dread filled her. Was she to have her liver plucked out by birds, as in the Greek story? Was she to be immobilized as she was tortured, crying out to the gods, unanswered?

The smell of burning flesh lingered still. Antony's ashes. The silver box sat on the pyre beside her, open to the air. She could taste his bones each time she inhaled, and worse than that, she could taste his sorrow, his great losses, his fears. Until the end, he'd believed that she had traded him for Egypt, given him up to Rome, conspired secretly with his enemy. Her eyes welled, but there was nothing she could do to change it now. Her beloved had died mistrusting her.

There was a movement of some kind, just outside the walls. Leathery wings. Bats returning home after their hunting, hiding themselves in cracks in the stones. It must be near dawn. How many days had passed? How long had she slept? Why had she slept here at all?

She recalled only snatches of what had passed in the hours before she'd arrived here. A hunger. A feeding. The feeling of her body swelling with pleasure, warming. What had she eaten?

She remembered the touch of the emperor's lips on hers. She'd felt the pressure of him against her thigh, his hand on her breast, yet she'd been unable to move. He'd spoken to her. She struggled to remember what he said.