Queen of Kings (18 page)

What was abduction became marriage, and now the Lord of the Dead kept Hecate chained near the entrance to the Underworld, presiding over hounds.

Chrysate had waited for this day.

The scry showed that the horizon was scarlet. Soldiers marched overland, searching not for battles but for those like Chrysate, who trafficked in dark magic. Rome sought allies, but the Romans had no notion of what Fates they tempted. No notion of what ancient things they drew.

In chaos, there was opportunity for change, opportunity for reversals of power. Hecate, who had been trapped for centuries, her influence limited, might be released. She'd lived far longer than the gods who now presided over Hades, and her powers were as simple and deep as those of the Earth herself, the scalding of lava, the ice of winter storms. Hecate's heart was made of lust and hunger, of murder and rapture. The powers Chrysate saw in the scry were similarly ancient. If Chrysate could find a way to channel such power, Hecate might rise up, and her priestess with her.

Chrysate worked her opal ring, engraved with the face of the goddess she served, over her twisted knuckle and dropped it into the basin, breaking the scry. She'd seen enough.

She glanced quickly about her cave, her gaze flicking over the heap of bones in the corner. She took only a few things in tiny leather pouches, balms made of rare ingredients, some beeswax, a knife so ancient and well used that its blade was a mere whisper of metal.

Murmuring to herself in Greek, she walked barefoot down the rocky trail and toward the soldiers.

As she made her way into their path, the knots in her hair untangled themselves. Her slender body became curvaceous, her crumpled skin silken, and her eyes greener and more glimmering.

By the time she reached the legionaries sent by Marcus Agrippa, she looked almost human.

T
he ship tossed in the storm, the wood singing and creaking, salt water seeping through the cracks. This was a transport bringing goods and slaves from Africa to Italy, and beneath the deck, wild animals destined for combat at the Circus Maximus could be heard howling and shifting. Once they were delivered to Rome, they'd be housed in tunnels beneath the city, and the sounds of beasts would be heard, faintly, by pedestrians walking above them, as though Africa had become Rome's Underworld.

The sailors trod the deck, uneasy, trimming the sailcloth and swarming the ropes, peering out into the night, suspicious of omens. Swallows had nested in the rigging, and a monster had been sighted off the stern. Its dark shadow and sharp fin trailed the vessel, not deep enough in the water to be harmless. The sailors had felt unsafe since they'd left port, what with their shrieking, roaring cargo. And those whose duty it was to feed and tend the animals felt more nervous still.

Something was not right in the darkness there, and lanterns were not enough to illuminate the corners.

A goat skittered across the deck, its white fur standing out in wet tufts.

A swallow wheeled and twisted in the air.

The smell of heated fur and trampled grain, the smell of hungering.

Something was not right.

A lion roared. A rattling, rippling sound, and then a tiger answered. Plaintive bleating of captive goats. The sound of large wings, rising, catching the still air, and then collapsing. Hooves clipping across wood, the jangle of chains. Six lions. Six tigers. Gazelles. Zebras. Crocodiles. Ostriches. A rhinoceros and a hippopotamus, the last captured with extreme difficulty. The Egyptians both revered and dreaded the animals as earthly embodiments of the evil god Seth, and even caged, the hippopotamus was dangerous to everything that came near it.

Elsewhere in the hold, slaves claimed in battle were being transported, the men into the fighting trade, the women into laundries and brothels and kitchens. All of the passengers traveled as one flesh, humans beside beasts, beasts beside humans. Soon, their blood would entertain Rome, red ink pouring out and writing a tale in the dust.

A forlorn strand of song spiraled up from the slave quarters below, and the ship's boy shinnied farther up the mast.

In his miserable cabin, Nicolaus the Damascene sat huddled, moaning with seasickness.

He'd been delayed getting out of Egypt. Three months had passed since the night he'd stood outside the palaces ready to flee.

“The queen is dead,” criers had suddenly called in the streets, and Nicolaus was flooded with guilty relief. She'd killed herself. His problems were solved. Eventually, he'd ended up in a brothel, grieving and celebrating at once. The woman he bought was neither young nor lovely, but she was glorious flesh and bone, nothing of the spirit world about her. Wide hips and round breasts, perfumed and veiled in cheap fabric. He pressed his face into her hair, inhaling her smell, reveling in the life before him.

He had dallied in the city, wondering if indeed it was necessary to leave, until he heard nervous whispers in the streets that Octavian had searched the queen's mausoleum for her body, and that she'd disappeared without a trace. Quickly thereafter, he heard that the Romans were looking for a scholar, one Nicolaus of Damascus, tutor to the royal children.

The walls outside the Museion were papered with his name and a reward, and he knew the other scholars would as easily turn him in as hide him. Everyone's purse was empty now that Alexandria was occupied. He had to leave Egypt, and leave it now.

The port was closed and under guard. Nicolaus smuggled himself out of town in the company of a bribed musician, hidden inside a drum. When he finally got free of the city walls, it took him more than two months of dangerous travel to make his way to an open port. He backtracked through villages, fearful he was being watched. Roman patrols were everywhere, and Marcus Agrippa's men were particularly tenacious. He heard about the missing Damascene scholar in every village he passed through. It was good fortune that his pursuits had taught him languages far beyond his own. Nicolaus very quickly learned to say that he'd never been to Damascus. No. And scholarship? He was apprenticed to a baker.

In his unhappy journey, he was witness to thousands of statues and engravings of Cleopatra being smashed and then covered over with stone. They were all being destroyed, all but the few the emperor had sanctioned.

The workers who were laboring over those images reported strange requests from the conquerors. The emperor had ordered completion on a temple the queen had begun, the outside of which was decorated with a depiction of Cleopatra and her son Caesarion making an offering to Isis.

The temple and its decoration were traditional, the boy depicted with a miniaturized version of himself traveling behind him. The souls of royalty were always portrayed this way.

The depiction of Caesarion was traditional, but that of the queen was not.

At the temple of Dendera, Octavian had ordered that the queen be depicted unaccompanied by her
ka
, her soul.

Most imagined it to be an act of libel, a mockery of the woman Rome had conquered. Cleopatra, robbed symbolically of her soul, no longer royal. It was an elegant metaphoric insult.

Nicolaus the Damascene suspected otherwise.

What did Octavian know?

When, at long last, he arrived at an open port, he was so desperate to get out of Egypt that he leapt aboard the first vessel he saw,
Persephone
, a Greek transport full of slaves and animals, destined, he assumed, for Athens. He bought his passage with coins marked in the queen's image, paying more than he'd expected.

“Those are being melted down now,” the captain told him. It had been nearly two months since the queen's death. The coins were the easiest portraits to obliterate, stirred into a slurry of metal and then recast. The new ones had Octavian and his general, Marcus Agrippa, on the front. The reverse was marked with a chained crocodile.

“Then have them all,” the scholar said. “They are of no use to me.”

They'd been at sea for a week before it occurred to Nicolaus to ask what exactly their destination was.

“We travel to Rome. The animals are to celebrate the emperor's triumph over Egypt.”

Nicolaus would have laughed had it not been so idiotic. Of course. He'd placed himself aboard a ship sailing into the arms of those who hunted him.

Now he stood aboard this ship of animals, watching the vessel breach the waves and wondering if, despite all his fleeing, despite all his planning, his end was coming. He'd seen things as the ship tilted, visions in the green depths, and none of them were bright. Sharks, with their dull, gray eyes, and more. Tentacled things, nothing beautiful. None of the sirens of the great epics. He thought for a moment of his idol, Homer, who had simply lived a poet and died a poet. He had not been a fool, as Nicolaus had. He hadn't trafficked in magic he didn't understand.

Nicolaus sighed and rubbed at his eyes. He could have disappeared into the desert or returned to the court of King Herod, from whence he'd come.

Instead—

The Fates had arranged things differently. He was following her to Italy, however against his will. She'd pursue her enemy and her remaining children. He had no doubt that if she lived, that was where she was headed.

Nicolaus ran his fingers through his long hair, tugging at it in an attempt to galvanize his mind and keep himself awake. Here he sat, on a rocking ship, on a tossing sea, helpless to stop the thing he'd unleashed. Somewhere in the depths of his knowledge, surely there was a solution. Somewhere, there was the right story, a story of triumph, of mortals conquering the gods. Years of reading, years of learning, and yet he couldn't think of what he should have done.

Suddenly, he sat up straight, listening.

From somewhere below, he heard it again. A wailing cry. A moan. A scream.

Somewhere, deep below him, someone was dying.

T
he chieftain of the Psylli tribe watched the sand rising on the horizon as he milked the last droplets of venom from his viper's fangs. He coiled his serpents into their traveling basket.

“Hush,” he told them, looking into their bright, arrowhead faces. “Sleep, sweet ones.”

Usem was already painted for his employment, his ebony skin smeared with reddish pigments and precious violet inks. His ceremonial headdress was in place, and his coral ornaments. There was no point in trying to avoid the Romans. The nomadic tribe was regularly employed by them, for matters relating both to poisoning enemies and to healing those who had been poisoned. Usem himself had been drawn into Roman service only three months before, brought to Alexandria to attend the dead queen Cleopatra. Though Usem tried, his fingers on her heart, his lips on her wound, he was not able to resurrect her.

It was not snake venom that had killed her, he knew that even then, though he could not determine why she lay so still, a shining thing in her shining room. She didn't seem entirely dead, or if she was, it was a kind of dead he'd never encountered before.

Something was terribly wrong. Usem had tried to tell the man who was now their emperor, but the Romans had ignored him, and eventually, he'd given in, taken their payment and departed.

Upon his return from Alexandria, Usem had consulted the wind, who went everywhere and saw everything. Now he understood. A dark goddess had risen, one of the Old Ones, and Cleopatra was her earthly vessel.

The forces of chaos were stirring.

All across Africa, serpents seethed from their nests, and lions padded through villages. Elephants stampeded. One of Usem's own tribesmen had seen the queen walking down a dusty road in the South. The man reported that the very air shook with her power. She killed several villagers before moving on, and nomads picked up the bodies on the roadside, shriveled and pale, bloodless.

The signs had ceased a few days before, but Usem was not foolish enough to imagine that this meant peace. The queen might have left Africa, but it did not matter. Where she went, the world shifted, and what she did was enough to disrupt the balance. The rising of such a force was to no one's benefit.

The seas tossed, higher and higher. Angry waves crashed upon the walls of Alexandria, and strange beasts were washed up from the depths.

Though it was the Romans who enraged her, the violence of such a creature would not be confined to her enemies. Still, Usem was not afraid. His people were warriors by nature. And there were things to be gained in this fight. More than gold, though this was the usual form of payment for a Psylli's services. No. This fight was a matter of life and death, and Usem sought to use this to his advantage. The Romans were desperate. He would drive a harder bargain. If they wished to employ a Psylli to battle with an immortal, it would cost them more than they were accustomed to paying.

Usem, as it happened, had a price in mind.

He looked about him, at the smooth desert, at his camels, at his home. His children, three daughters and three sons, huddled in the tent, and their grandmother stretched her arms to encompass them.

Usem threw the leopard skin over his shoulder as the soldiers rode up to his camp. It represented the starry night sky, and his possession of such a thing would show his power to those who sought to use it.

“I will ride with you against your enemy,” he told their leader, his words precise.

“You have no choice,” said the centurion, looming over him. The fact that the legionaries were mounted meant that speed was required. Otherwise, it would have been a march. “It is the will of the emperor that you come.”

The Psylli laughed, a dry rattle of mirth that shook his ornaments and caused the sand around him to rise into a small tornado. The winds were his dear ones, and he called them to stand with him.