Queen of Kings (35 page)

Thus it was that Nicolaus the Damascene began to write prophecy, passing each page to a bribed guard as he finished it. His mind was vague and scattered, but writing kept him from falling over the edge of sanity. He wrote the truth, or at least as much of it as he could, in the guise of a sibyl, thinking back on the various books he'd scanned in Virgil's library and the tone of the prophets' voices.

“Then shall all declare that I am a true prophetess, oracle-singing, and yet a messenger with maddened soul. And when thou shalt come forward to the Books, thou shalt not tremble, and all things to come and things that were, ye shall know from our words,”
he wrote, pretending that these same words had been written centuries before.

The prophecies would be published as newly discovered, unearthed from an ancient ruin, scrolls found rolled into an amphora or entombed with some hero. They would be read aloud in the Forum and all across the country, drawing support away from Augustus and toward his foes. If the emperor would not deal rationally with Cleopatra, if he would not understand that he caged an immortal, then perhaps someone else would. She must be destroyed, and though Nicolaus did not know how to destroy her, he hoped that someone who read his words might. As for Sekhmet, Nicolaus could only hope that if Cleopatra were killed, the goddess would go back into oblivion, back to where she had been before they summoned her.

Nicolaus was not permitted to use Cleopatra's name—even oracles could not know everything—and so he named her “the widow.”

He was not permitted to speak directly of Augustus, so he referred to him obliquely.
“And then shall come inexorable wrath upon Latin men. Three shall, by piteous fate, endamage Rome. And perish shall all men with their own houses, when from heaven shall flow a fiery cataract.”

Three men and the eye of Ra. Augustus, Antony, and Agrippa, he meant, though he might as well add himself amongst that group. Sekhmet, a flaming vengeance making her way across the heavens. They all would perish, and it was all of their fault. Antony for inciting Cleopatra into trading herself for his life, Augustus for warring against her in the first place, and Agrippa for serving as his general.

As he wrote, his mind chewed over the possibilities. Somewhere in his reading, somewhere in his books, there was an answer.

Immortals had been killed before, he knew it, though their deaths were portrayed only in myth. Hercules had used his sword to chop off forty-nine of the heads of his enemy, the Hydra, and then cauterized the wounds with fire to keep them from renewing. He'd buried the furiously immortal head deep below the ground on the road to Lerna, and placed a boulder over the spot. Poison seeped from it and into the darkness, but the Hydra lived now only in Hades. It had not come back to the surface. Thus far.

The thought of the Hydra spurred some memory deep within the historian's mind. He pressed his hands to his temples, searching for the connection. Some fragment read in Virgil's library, something in the tasks of Hercules. Deaths of immortals. The Hydra's venom.

Nicolaus looked down at his task and discovered that he had heedlessly signed the prophecy he'd been writing with his own name. He swore, dropping it on the floor. He would have to begin again.

He paused, still thinking, and at last, the idea he'd been searching for came swimming into the light of his consciousness.

He knew how to defeat the queen. Immortal to immortal. Chaos to chaos. There was a way.

T
he queen lives” went the refrain whispered in the streets of Rome.

“Cleopatra has returned from the dead to kill the emperor.”

The scrolls said as much. A newly published set of oracular texts informed the public that the fall of Rome was imminent, that
Despoina
had risen from her imprisonment, and that her anger at Augustus would destroy everything in the world.

A centurion read from the text, sitting beside a campfire on the shores of the Black Sea.
“And thou shalt be no more a widow
,” he said, and one of his young legionaries laughed.

“They only mean Cleopatra was a whore who went to our leader's bed after her husband killed himself,” he said. “Trying to buy freedom for Egypt. Augustus likes a conquered woman, too, just like Caesar did before him. I was in Alexandria. I guarded the queen in her private chambers.”

“How did you guard her?” another legionary snorted. “From your knees?”

“She was the one kneeling,” the first legionary boasted.

The centurion looked sharply at them.

“These are ancient prophecies, god-given. Have some respect. Listen.
‘But thy soul shalt cohabit with a man-eating lion, terrible, a furious warrior. And then shalt thou be happy, and among all men known; for thou shalt leave possessed of shameless soul.'”

“What do you make of that?” another legionary asked, a feeling of unease creeping through his belly.

“Cleopatra is not a mortal woman, if she ever was. Some say she was a witch and that was how she got Mark Antony to do her bidding.”

The company made a sign against witchcraft. Antony had been their idol, and then he had betrayed them. It would be a comfort if that had not been his fault. It would be a comfort if, in fact, Augustus, who was known to be no warrior, who had fled several battlefields, turned out to be a liar. Stranger things had happened in the history of Rome.

The commander read the rest of the prophecy.

He put the scroll down, his face grim.

“In Alexandria, I was with the emperor when we went into the mausoleum. The queen's body was not there, though we had carried it to the pyre and chained it in place three days earlier. We thought it had been stolen, but the emperor went pale. This prophecy says she lives, and I believe it. The prophecy says that Augustus has inflamed her wrath—”

“It doesn't say Augustus,” one of the men interrupted.

“Destroy the cities of the
Roman king
,” the commander said. “There is a plague, or haven't you heard? Everywhere but Rome. She is saving Rome for last.”

The men stared into their campfire, sobered.

“Perhaps she saves Rome for something worse than plague,” said the young legionary who had guarded Cleopatra.

Elsewhere in the new texts, the oracles implied that a return to the republic would save Rome. Messages began to be exchanged, from end to end of the country, from legion to legion, from commander to commander. Soon, the senators and their emissaries traveled to these distant legions, soliciting their support, working their way through country villages and ports, where the rumor of the emperor's misdeeds had already spread.

The new Sibylline prophecies did as the senators hoped they would.

An army constructed of legions that had once been loyal to Antony, and of legions that were commanded by allies of the seceding senators, began to rise.

A
ugustus sat in his chamber, staring out the window at the strange glow that remained on the horizon even in the dark. The night was live with shooting stars, and watching them cross the sky, and cross again, Augustus felt an irrational terror. He had been awake too long, sitting at the window too long. Marcus Agrippa had stayed away from his chambers since the battle at the Circus Maximus, and lately, his only company had been the priestess.

Chrysate practiced spells of binding, spells which, she told him, would serve to keep the queen under her power, but for now, it was best to keep the box under Roman guard, in the silver-lined room.

Augustus trusted Chrysate. Though perhaps not entirely. Strangely scented smoke trailed down the hallway, and when Chrysate kissed him, her hair smelled of burning balsam and damp sand, of honey and cinnamon. The smell reminded him of Egypt's tombs.

They had won, he told himself, but Augustus still could not sleep. He thought of Cleopatra slithering inside the silver box, twisting and looping around herself, and Antony, his eyes burning embers. Every night, he stared at the paintings on his ceiling, fearful of things he could not name. The fireball he'd seen streaking across the heavens, perhaps. The roars that still shook Rome. His servants called them thunder, but he knew better.

There were petitioners and senators, armies and advisors, and all of them demanded his attention. On the table beside him was a tall stack of oracular prophecies, discovered in a cave and newly unrolled from amphorae, along with a message from Agrippa stating that they must be read.

Augustus did not feel like reading.

Augustus had even summoned his favorite poet Virgil from Campania, but the man failed to bring him rest. Nothing Virgil said, no matter the beauty of the words, could keep Augustus from thinking about Cleopatra. The poet seemed to have a special liking for poems about Hades these days, and the verses only made Augustus think of Antony. At last, the emperor had dismissed his poet.

He poured theriac into his cup and drank. His original dosage of two drops had begun to seem ineffective, and now he poured it in equal proportion to his wine. He'd lost his appetite for food other than this. With each sip, he felt his twisting mind smoothed and relaxed.

 

 

I
n her chambers, Chrysate lit the fire. With the queen captured, with Selene in her possession, Chrysate should have been at her most powerful. Augustus had given the girl to Chrysate three days after the battle at the Circus Maximus, transferring her sleeping chamber to the one beside the priestess and telling Selene that she was to be an apprentice. But the girl was resistant to her spells. After her flight from the Circus Maximus, Selene had spent two days hidden somewhere in Rome, finally sighted by a centurion and brought back to the emperor's house. It should have been easy to woo her, but Selene looked at Chrysate with dark, suspicious eyes, and the priestess found herself scarcely able to accomplish the simplest things. She'd spent the past nights trying to communicate with Hecate, to no avail. Her goddess was still bound in the Underworld, and nothing Chrysate did brought clarity. The scry was blurry, everything bloody, but the future was invisible. Now that she had Cleopatra, she did not know what to do with her. There was no clear way to bind her, and the power contained within Cleopatra was inaccessible.

Had she captured the queen for nothing? Was she no longer linked with the goddess? Was there anything inside the silver box at all, or had it all been an illusion? Had the Northern witch tricked her? Did
she
have Cleopatra? Or did the Psylli? The box rested in its silver room, and Chrysate left it there. At least if something went wrong, Cleopatra would be trapped in the second prison.

Chrysate opened her hand and looked at the green holding stone. She shut her eyes, clenching her fist, and said the name of the man who was tied to the
synochitus
. She might send a message to Hecate through him. He could pass through Hades and find the goddess.

Her call should have brought him, but it did not. Her powers had ebbed too far, she assumed. She could not find Antony, and she could not understand what had happened.

She did not dare go to the silver room and open the box to find out. She needed Hecate if she was to use that power, and to summon Hecate, she needed royal blood.

She needed Selene to submit. Every day, Chrysate grew weaker. The effort of keeping herself disguised was wearing on her. Finally, the deteriorating condition of her body had become too obvious. The spell she was about to perform was necessary. If she appeared as she truly was, Selene would never give herself over willingly, and that would invalidate all of Chrysate's efforts.

Beauty was a tremendous part of her currency, both with Augustus and with Selene. Who would trust her as she truly was?

She scarcely trusted herself.

Groaning with effort, she opened a small leather pouch and pulled from it a bronze cauldron large enough to hold a boar. She settled the cauldron atop the flame, and tugged open the pouches that held the supplies she'd brought from her cave. Crystalline sand from the beach at the end of the world, and a pinch of frost gathered from beneath the shine of a thousand-night moon. The feathered wings of a screech owl, struggling against her hands and threatening to fly from her even as she crushed them into the cauldron. Nectar from a star torn from the sky one night long ago, when Chrysate was only a girl. The powdered liver of a stag that had once been a prince. The entrails of a man who had once been a wolf. The eyeless head of a crow, which opened its dry black beak and spoke to her as she brought it from the bag.

“Murderer,” it said.

She no longer listened to it. She brought out a dry olive branch and stirred the mixture, letting it come to a boil over the fire, and as she stirred, the branch grew glossy green leaves. Chrysate let a bit of the contents of the cauldron boil over, and where they landed, the stone floor became grass, and flowers began to bloom.

It was ready.

She removed her gown, shuddering at the condition of her flesh. She was withered. She'd let it go much too long, trying to conserve her power, trying to contact Hecate, and it was a miracle Augustus had not noticed. Of course, his theriac had something to do with that. She had introduced a few ingredients to it. Nothing that would disable the man permanently. She did not seek to topple Rome. She sought to use Rome's power, and for that, Rome needed to be stable. Selene, on the other hand, seemed to notice everything. Chrysate reassured herself. After this spell, Selene would not see through her. Things would be easier.