Queen of Kings (19 page)

Out along the horizon, the sky grew black and whirling, the shapes of great and horned beasts forming in the dust. Their eyes flashed heat lightning as they began to move toward the interlopers.

The soldiers drew back from this spectacle, quaking and disbelieving, just as Usem intended them to be.

“There is always a choice,” said the Psylli, as he leapt atop the horse, kicking his bare heels into its sides. “I have made mine. We ride to war.”

T
he scream was repeated, high, desperate, desolate, and then there was a deep, rattling roar. Nicolaus ran onto the deck, where the sailors were surging about in panic, swearing.

“If the lions are loose,” one said, “I'm going up the mast.”

“They can climb,” said another. “Didn't you see them draped over the trees? We'd be better off jumping into the water.”

They looked over the rail at the dark, finned shape still accompanying them. More had joined the first, and now the vessel was trailed by a shifting underwater cloud of predators. The captain, a stout, weatherworn man with a lifetime's worth of steel-gray tattoos on his shoulders, looked down at the sharks, spat, drew his sword, and attempted to instill order.

“If the lions are loose,” he said, “we'll kill them or we'll cage them back up. Nothing to be afraid of, boys.”

Another roar, followed by screaming.

Screaming.

Screaming.

And silence. Which lasted much too long.

The swallows launched themselves off the rigging. The moon slid across the sky, and the sun crept about under the horizon, its bright fingers grasping at the edge of the sea. Still, the crew stayed on deck.

No one wanted to be the first to investigate what had transpired below.

“The lions sleep,” said the captain, though he was not entirely convinced of this. There had been something about that roar that had stayed in the pit of his stomach. “The lions have eaten, and now they sleep.”

No one moved. The gladiatorial slaves were an expensive cargo, if nothing else. No one wanted to go below and discover carnage. Least of all, if the creatures that had created it were still hiding there, hungering.

“I'll go,” said the lone passenger just as dawn broke.

The sailors looked at him.

He was mad, clearly. The passenger talked in his sleep, swinging fretfully in his hammock, and he spoke in languages the sailors had never heard before.

Still, he was not one of them, and so they were willing to let him go to his death.

“How many lions are below?” Nicolaus asked, standing over the locked hatch that led to the animal's hold.

“Six,” said the captain.

“If one is loose, then they all are?”

“Exactly.”

The captain had armed himself with aconite-smeared arrows. He passed Nicolaus a sword and shield, and then the sailors stood in formations, waiting for the lions to be chased up onto the deck.

Nicolaus eased himself down the ladder, at each rung expecting hot breath on his back. His lantern was not bright enough to illuminate the darkness to his satisfaction. He might only travel in a small circle of light, and beyond the edge of it was something horrible.

What was he doing, climbing down a ladder into a dark and haunted hold?

He was as good as dead anyway, a wanted man traveling to Rome.

He could hear breathing, there, in the far darkness. He held the lantern out in front of him, the sword in his other hand overmatched by trembling.

A lion, tawny, amber-eyed, enormous, stretched on the floor, his mane streaked in gore. The beast regarded Nicolaus calmly for a moment, and then, just as casually, lifted his lip and bared his long teeth. The historian felt his bowels liquefy. There were bars between them, though. This lion had not escaped.

There was a sound behind him. The sound of air displaced in a silent leap.

Nicolaus whirled, the lantern swinging, catching a glimpse of golden fur before it disappeared into the shadows. He smelled the silk of the creature, the sleek fur, the musk.

He turned his head slowly, counting them. There were six lions in the cage.

But there had been seven lions in the room.

He suddenly heard the muffled sobbing of a woman. Nicolaus walked cautiously toward the door that led to the slave quarters. His lantern went out as he entered the room, and then he could see nothing at all. His other senses compensated, attempting to draw understanding from invisibility.

The pungent, smothering smell of bodies kept too close, sweat and salt, feces and blood.

The dripping heat, radiating from the walls and floor.

The sound of sobbing. Only one voice. A female voice.

He could see light coming in from somewhere, a fissure in the side of the ship. He walked toward it, stepping carefully, his feet slipping on something he chose not to think about.

He could not find her at first. The ground was covered in straw and—

His feet nudged against solid objects, strangely frail. His eyes began to adjust, and he recoiled.

Bodies.

The sobbing continued, softer now.

Nicolaus pressed his hand over his mouth, swallowing bile. The lion had killed all the slaves. All but one, and here she was, crying in the darkness. Every nerve in the historian screamed for his departure, demanding that he bolt up the ladder and into the light.

But where was the beast?

Something moved quickly in front of him in the dim light, a form barely visible and impossible to define. He pressed his sword out before him, slicing the air. Nothing there.

“You will not be able to kill me that way,” someone whispered from close behind him. He felt breath on his ear.

He whirled, the blade cutting through the place the sound had come from. His shoulders clenched. His heart pounded, and he suddenly realized that—

He knew the voice.

It was ravaged, changed from the silvery thing it had been, but he knew it. He'd listened to her tell tales, listened to her sing, listened to her call to her children. He'd listened to her spell chanting, teaching her the pronunciation of the words.

“Shall I kill you, too?” the voice asked him, and then there was another choked sound of pure misery. “I cannot stop myself. Leave me if you want to live.”

He moved toward her. There she was, curled in a coil of rope.

“How can you be here?” he managed to ask. An inadequate question.

She looked up at him, and he saw, in the dim light, her eyes glittering, her expression weary. Her face was streaked with misery, her mouth with blood.

“You do not know me,” she said. “I am nothing that lives in light.”

What had his life become? Here he was, on a slave ship in the middle of the sea, with the creature who had been the queen of Egypt.

“Queen Cleopatra, I am Nicolaus of Damascus. I was tutor to your children,” Nicolaus said. He could not lift his voice above a whisper. “I know you.”

She made a sound that was a cross between laughter and sobbing.

“Knew,” she replied. “You knew me. You know me no longer.”

She lifted her hand toward him. Her long limbs, her delicate fingers, all of it smeared with red. She cradled something covered in cloth.

“What have you done?” he asked, his voice strangely high and sharp. He was near to swooning, and yet anger tripped up from within him, triumphing over fear. “There were a hundred slaves aboard this ship.”

“Did you think they were people?” she asked. She raised her chin, and there was a trace of the old pride. “They were not treated as people. They were animals on this vessel. The Romans feed them the same food they feed the lions. Less food. I was a queen, and now I am a lion. I was a lion and now I am a slave. I was a slave, and now I am a beast. As a beast, I hunger. Should I not be fed?”

“Where are the rest?” Nicolaus asked.

Cleopatra moved her hand to indicate the hole in the ship's side. There was, Nicolaus noticed now, a shred of fabric clinging to the splintered wood.

The sharks. Nicolaus understood it suddenly, the mass of silver flesh tracing the route of the vessel.

“If you knew me once, then help me now,” she said.

Nicolaus stepped back. He did not want what she had to give him.

Cleopatra pulled the cloth in her arms aside and revealed the face of a small boy, perhaps four years old. Ashen cheeks, dark, knotted hair.

The child's eyes opened and he looked at Nicolaus, terrified. The historian snatched him from Cleopatra. The boy was unwounded.

“This was his mother.” She touched a corpse with her fingertips. “My hands were on him, when I realized.”

She opened her fists and revealed long scores in the flesh.

The grief on the monster's face crippled Nicolaus with guilt. She was not wholly a monster. He could see the Cleopatra he had known, still inside.

“I would not kill a child. You must believe me.
She
takes my body, and she hungers. I thought I was strong enough to resist her.”

The historian wrestled with his soul. He'd helped to do this. She was here because of him.

Sekhmet cared nothing for gold, nothing for gems. All she desired was blood. Once she began to kill, she could not stop. That was her nature. Cleopatra had killed not of her own volition but because he'd translated that spell, translated it badly, and summoned the goddess with no protections for the summoner.

Had he not, the queen would have been dead and buried these months. Had he not, Nicolaus would never have found himself aboard this vessel, hunted by Romans, a criminal.

“What do you want from me?” he asked.

“My children are in Rome with the emperor. Help me find them. He killed my husband. He killed my son. He killed
me
.”

“And yet you live.”

“Then you do not know what the living are.”

She grabbed Nicolaus's hand and placed it on her breast. He tried to pull away from her, but she held him there until he felt the absence of her heartbeat.

“I will help you,” he managed.

A
uðr was kneeling beside a bed deep in the northern forest, when she heard the legionaries approaching. The girl she was tending gasped, her swollen belly bluish and rigid, the pallet beneath her soaked with blood, and Auðr hissed in frustration. The horses outside were distracting, and she needed all her powers for this. Her arms trembled with tension. Too much time had passed.

Outside the doorway, snow drifted over the pines. In her own land, the gods came in the northern lights, glancing their fires across the skies, spinning clouds from their looms, singing with the thunder. Here, they did not even know that her homeland existed.
Oceanus
, they called it, as though it were not a true place, as though the water stretched to cover the world apart from them. Still, she had been here for years, had come across the ocean to this forest. Her part in the pattern had dictated that she place herself here. The sound of hooves on the frozen land was distinct, and Auðr cursed quietly. She had not expected the Romans so soon.

Auðr was a fate spinner, a
seiðkona
, but for the first time in her life, she was unable to see the entirety of the future. Something grave had changed in the world, and for months she'd tried in vain to understand what it was. She knew only that there were torn threads in the pattern, a dark disturbance in the tapestry of time.

Destruction and bloodshed, old gods rising.

Death.

If all humanity was fated to die or to descend into pain and chaos, it was not the place of a seiðkona to try to change it, Auðr knew; she was not supposed to interfere in the fate of the world, but she could not stop herself. Though she was not as strong as she had been in her youth, Auðr had spent her life keeping chaos from finding purchase in an orderly universe. She did not fear death, but she feared that it would take her before she finished her work.

She was far from her home, far from her people, and she had broken the rules.

Two days before, she'd irrevocably transgressed by braiding the threads of her own fate to the ones that began the tangle.

Before her, the girl's head lolled back, her eyes rolling like those of a terrified animal. The seiðkona curled her aching fingers about her distaff, her
seiðstafr
, twisting and arranging the threads of destiny about the girl and her child as quickly as she could. The girl screamed, and then writhed, arching up from the bed, her body controlled by Auðr's power.

The fate spinner caught the baby between her hands. A girl child. Still. Pale as a fish. Lips and eyelids deep blue. No spark of life there, no heartbeat.

She'd been dead three hours, perhaps longer.

Pounding on the door, shouting, horses. The seiðkona clenched her hand around the distaff. Her fingers worked, reweaving the child's threads into a new pattern. Everyone had a place in the tapestry, and this soul would have one. She would have a life filled with ordinary miracles. The seiðkona would give it to her. It would be the last thing she did in these woods.

Auðr pressed the baby's lips to her lips and said one word, breathing it into the infant's mouth, just as the door of the hut burst open, and the soldiers swarmed in, shouting. The new mother screamed, and the seiðkona looked up, seeing only the silhouettes of the men against the door frame.

A pair of hands dragged Auðr from the hut. Someone threw her onto the horse's back, ripping her leather cloak and tearing her hood from her white braids.

From inside the hut, the baby's wail rose up, frail at first and then stronger. Hearing it, the seiðkona smiled, but a sharp object hit her hard in the skull, and that was all she knew.