Queen of Kings (15 page)

The little girl looked at him.

“Then why are you so afraid?” she asked.

C
leopatra pulsed with fury and grief, with guilt and despair, and most of all, with rage. Her empty heart was a hornet's nest.

The Romans had taken both of her loves. She remembered the songs she'd sung to Caesarion in the womb. She remembered the feel of him suckling at her breast. Cleopatra twisted, her body pounding with visions of destruction. Of revenge.

You are mine,
said the voice in her head, a whisper now, a voice that sounded like her own.

“I am yours,” Cleopatra said aloud.

She would tear Rome to the ground. She'd make the streets run with blood, pile bodies wherever Octavian walked, in the Forum, in the Circus Maximus. His wife, his generals, his sister, his friends. Would the citizens scream in the streets, saluting their brave emperor, killer of children? She'd fill the temple of the vestal virgins with blood. All the gods of Rome would bow to her. All the leaders of Rome would beg her mercy, and she would not grant it. Antony and Caesarion would be avenged. They would be avenged.

All around her, during the execution, she'd sensed the goddess, felt her bloody smile, heard her rumbling breath, but she couldn't see her anywhere. As she fell to the ground, as her child was murdered, she'd realized that the goddess was not in the crowd but inside her own body.

Cleopatra could feel her, furious, blinding in her desire. She could not tell what part of these feelings were her own and what part belonged to Sekhmet.

She hungered now, so desperately that had there been blood pooled on the stones, she would have lapped it up. As the stars appeared and she healed from the damage done by the sun, her strength increased. A tongue of fire made its way up her spine, licking at her like a lioness, rasping away any resistance she had left.

Feed,
her body commanded, and she would not deny it. There would be no more forgetting what she had done. Her eyes were open now
.

There were people sleeping behind easily entered windows, her body told her. There were people drunk in the streets, easily harvested. She stopped herself, with effort.

She did not know enough about what she had become. The sun had thrown her to the earth, weakening her, breaking her power. It was only luck that the Romans hadn't found her there, lying in the dirt, and brought her back to their prisons.

She must learn what she was. She must understand how to control it. She could not afford to surrender completely, to lose herself in hunger and fury.

It seemed a thousand years ago, those metal bowls, the lighting of incense, the scrolls. Sekhmet's order, Nicolaus had said. In Thebes, there was a temple to the goddess. Priestesses to the old gods. A place where she might find knowledge.

Cleopatra did not plan to leave her enemies for long. Just long enough to put them at ease, to make them think themselves safe.

She'd once felt safe.

A soft sound made her spin, searching the darkness for soldiers, but all she saw was a dog wandering the open area, its ribs visible, its nose pressed to the ground. It raised its head and looked toward her with a dry whine. She would not kill an animal, not now.

No. This was a city full of Romans, and she could smell them, feel them, and hear them everywhere.

This was a city of betrayers, too. Her son had been under the protection of one of them. At least she might avenge herself on
him
.

She picked her way over the cobblestones, watching bats flying about the sky, listening to birds shrieking their hunting calls. Eventually, she stood at the Museion's gates. With one leap, she was over them and inside the courtyard.

Another few steps and she stood outside an open window, inhaling the history of Rhodon, Caesarion's tutor. The scent of libraries, of languages learned and forgotten. The scent of gold, of promises, of ambition.

A lantern flickered in his window, and the man packed his bag, preparing to leave for Rome. Cleopatra stood in the dark, watching him for a moment. Rhodon's robes were finer than they had hitherto been. She saw a gleam of gold beneath his linen and the ruddy flush of good health on his face. Her son's sacrifice had made him rich.

When he stepped out into the courtyard, his step jaunty, his jingling bag slung over his shoulder, she was waiting for him.

 

 

A
n hour later, east of Alexandria, she slipped into a seaside bar, listening to the jokes and shouts of drinking men.

“A felucca?” she called, showing only her arm from out of her cloak, having veiled the rest. In her hand, she held a piece of gold, stolen from her victim. Cleopatra's own face was printed on one side with her name. The reverse was Antony. They'd laughed when they saw them for the first time. She'd thought him far more handsome than the coin would suggest, and he'd felt the same about her image, though her profile had conveyed power.

She held the coin tightly in her hand, letting the image of Antony's face press into her flesh. In better days, she'd traveled to her beloved in her own golden barge, a purple silk sail stretched above the ship, and the sides fitted with silver oars. Now, she was reduced to hiring a rickety felucca with a drunken captain.

A man approached her, his eyes gleaming for gold, and she withdrew it into her cloak.

“You will take me to Thebes,” she told him. “Immediately. There will be more when we arrive.”

She saw him smirk at his fellows, telling them wordlessly that he'd love to take a woman aboard his vessel. To Thebes? Hardly. Thebes was days away. They'd have to proceed east along the Mediterranean, to the Canopic branch of the Nile. He'd take her a few miles down the river and see how long it took her to spread her legs.

Every man in the bar had similar ideas; she could hear them echoing.

She strode across the dock and leapt into the small, wooden vessel, accompanied by the captain and his single crewman.

The moonlight soothed her injured skin, healing the remainder of the wounds of the earlier sun. She put her face up toward the stars and felt their cool radiance as the ship set off. A cat wound itself around the rigging and stalked toward her, purring as it approached. She stroked its golden head and looked into its clear, yellow eyes. It gave a small cry and leapt into her arms.

Within moments, she'd settled herself into the vessel, though she could not afford to sleep as deeply as she had before her burial. With the dawn, she would conceal herself belowdecks, wrapped in her cloak. The vessel was sun-tight enough to suit her, and she would know if the men sought to harm her there. The motion of the water rocked her to sleep, and she dropped into blackness, losing track of time and place, dreaming of the Underworld, of Antony taking the form of a falcon and soaring up into the light, of the Beautiful West stretching before her.

 

 

A
ll ships searched by order of the Emperor!”

The shouts woke Cleopatra from dreams of heaven, tears running down her cheeks, and she nearly cried out. She pressed her back against the ship's side, panicked. They were looking for her. They'd stretched a chain across the Nile to block the passage of any vessel.

There were several dozen soldiers on the shore, all armed. Battlehardened, for the most part, but young and excitable. Romans. She kept herself still.

“Are there passengers aboard this vessel?”

The captain of her ship answered in the affirmative. “A woman, traveling alone.”

“Have her show herself,” one of the legionaries commanded.

The other soldiers laughed raucously.

“Have her show everything!” one yelled. “By order of himself, the Emperor of the World!”

“Lady?” the crewman asked, pulling aside the curtain Cleopatra had drawn to protect herself from prying eyes.

There was no one there.

The legionaries searched the ship but found only a tangle of linen, a rough cloak, and a small silver box of what seemed to be dust.

Beneath the water, the queen of Egypt waited for them to depart.

Her hair streamed in the current as she laid the flat of her hand against the hull of the ship, feeling the smooth grain of the wood. Soon enough, she told herself, she would be back on board with Antony's ashes. She did not like leaving them, but she had no other option. She'd slipped into the river as the soldiers came toward her hiding place.

All around her, fish coursed through the water, their mouths gaping as they consumed tiny living things. She could feel each of their bodies, their scales shifting as they moved, their gills opening and closing silently. She could feel the crocodiles as well, slithering from the banks and melting themselves deep into the teeming waters. A yellow eye opened beside her, and she felt the corrosive friction of the beast's skin against her thigh.

She'd slipped into the dirty water only out of desperation, used to the pure, rain-filled cisterns beneath the city of Alexandria, but now she stretched in pleasure. She had not recognized the life that filled the Nile, the tiny creatures and the large, the plants and sands and scents of faraway places. She began to silently raise her head above the level of the water to take a breath, but the boat rocked with legionaries boarding it, and the wooden hull struck her skull. She was driven downward, inhaling burning fluid, her lungs protesting, gagging, but as she sank, something began to change in her body.

Her eyes widened under the water, and she felt her nostrils close. She felt her spine thrash and elongate, her throat stretch endlessly. Within moments, her shape was that of the river itself, long and narrow, limbless and yet pliant. Her bones fit together like a perfect necklace, an articulated chain, and each motion heralded the next.

She slithered past the legs of a legionary who'd entered the water to hold the rope detaining the felucca.

She let her midsection appear above the surface, lashed her tail for a moment, and felt them nervously wielding their swords, trying to predict her next position.

“Serpent!” they shouted. “Serpent! Onto the bank!”

T
wo hours later, the felucca's captain and his crewman hunched over a table in the captain's quarters, counting the coins they'd gained from their missing passenger. She must have leapt from the ship and been eaten by a crocodile, stupid thing. She'd have been better off staying aboard. The Romans had been too fearful of the water to reboard the vessel after seeing the serpent, and so they'd waved it on. Now the felucca was on its way past Damanhur. No matter what the captain had planned to do with the woman, it would have been better than jumping into the Nile. Who knew what she'd been running from? The legionaries weren't seeking her, surely. They were looking for a dead body, and there were certainly no corpses aboard the felucca.

“That, or any oddity,” the leader of the legionaries had muttered. “Any feminine oddity.” They did not seem to have any more specific description than that.

The felucca drifted lazily in the current. The captain had decided to press on to Naukratis and visit the whorehouses there, spend some of their Cleopatra-marked currency on women before the new emperor declared it worthless and demanded that it be reminted into coins in his own image. A warm breeze propelled the ship down the river at a reasonable speed, and the moon rose high in the sky.

“I hear the redheaded whore came back,” the captain said.

“I don't know about her,” his crewman replied warily. “The last time I saw that woman, I had to visit a physician and drink something made of moths and frankincense. Cost me half my wages.”

The captain laughed.

“There's always another whore. Five more, each one better than the last.”

The seaman nodded in agreement and then looked up, the expression on his face changing. The captain glanced at him, curious. The pox must have been a terrible one to warrant such horror.

“Look,” the crewman whispered, pointing over the captain's shoulder.

The captain spun lazily in his seat and then leapt to his feet.

There she was, shining in the moonlight, their passenger, naked to the waist.

“Lady,” the captain began. Where had she come from? She balanced her arms on the rail, her body still partially in the water. Was she injured? “We did not mean to leave you behind.”

Something in her eyes transfixed him. They glowed, that was it. Even her short black hair seemed to shine. Her breasts hung heavy over the rail, the smooth skin glittering with droplets of water. She smiled.

The captain smiled back, nervous. She was angry, he could feel it. It would be better to throw her off the vessel now, put her back into the waters and leave her to die. There was no explanation for her appearance here, two hours after she had fallen overboard. Surely, she could not swim as quickly as the felucca could sail.

She shifted on the rail, pushing herself up higher, the better to climb aboard. The captain admired the rosettes of the woman's nipples, the precise curve of her waist, her navel. It was most unusual to see a naked woman outside of a whorehouse. His gaze roved downward and then stopped, unbelieving.

His passenger undulated her hips to push herself over the rail, and the captain jumped backward, feeling his gorge rising. He opened his mouth to scream, but the sound died. Impossible.

The woman was half snake.

“I hired you,” she said, too calmly, “and you left me.”

The crewman, with startling presence of mind, laid hands on an axe normally used for rope cutting. He heaved it high in the air and swung it with all his strength toward her throat.

Her tail whipped up out of the water and lashed around him, crushing him in its coils just as the blade touched her skin. The creature arced gracefully onto the deck, her body slithering from the depths, an endless serpentine length.