Queen of Kings (46 page)

She tilted her head, noticing for the first time the man beside the emperor.

“Nicolaus,” she said, and the emperor heard sorrow in her tone. Beside him, the historian moved uncomfortably closer to Agrippa. Augustus pushed him back into the shelter of the pavilion. He was derailing the negotiation.

“You lost your husband and your children when you lost your city, and you lost your city because you were not strong enough to keep it. You will surrender to me!” Augustus continued, looking into her dark eyes. He would kill her. He held the bow of Hercules behind his back, with its deathly poisoned arrow.

“Do you believe your own words?” Cleopatra asked him, her tone warning. “Do I look weak to you, Octavian? I am not the woman who lost a war in Alexandria. I am no longer Cleopatra.”

Augustus stood his ground. “You are nothing!” Augustus shouted. “You are a slave to this empire!”

Agrippa shouted a command, and the men of the Roman army marched forward around the rim of the crater in perfect formation, though their feet slipped and dislodged boulders at the crater's edge. A man fell screaming into space, tumbling into the dark and sinking beneath the lake's waters, weighed down by his armor.

The others of his line maintained their spacing. Their shields were raised to form a wall of metal before them.

Cleopatra merely raised her hands, and the sounds of her animals, heretofore silenced, ripped through the air. There was no line, and this was no normal battle formation.

Instead, the Romans were faced with a mass of beasts, sleek and rough, fanged and tremendous. The lions and tigers roared, and gathered themselves into shining masses of violence, and the Romans felt their bodies liquefy in fear. What sort of war was this? They were not bestiarii. They had not been trained to fight animals, and their commander had not warned them that this would be the case. Still, they stayed in their lines. They looked neither to the left nor to the right. They kept their positions. They marched forward, their heads protected by their shields, hiding their fear. As long as they kept to their lines, nothing could touch them. They were warriors.

Several men whispered prayers.

The elephant, fled from an arena, trumpeted and reared onto its hind legs, silhouetted against the starry sky. A tremendous bear rose over the crest of the hill, looking into the midst of the army with dark, intelligent eyes. It tossed its head and bellowed, each fang as long as a finger.

A leopard, lean and bloodthirsty, lifted its lip and snarled as it came.

The queen marched toward the Roman line, her animals following her, their bodies moving as though powered by a single soul. Her eyes glowed with an unearthly light, and from his position, Augustus watched her, raging. What right had she to bring animals against him?

Augustus nodded at Agrippa.

“Archers!” shouted the general.

The archers, positioned behind the infantry, pulled their bows from their backs and fit the special silver-tipped arrows into them. Each man had been provided with a rich quiver full.

“Fool,” said Cleopatra quietly, as if to herself.

“Fire!” shouted Agrippa.

The men moved to draw back their bowstrings, but then stared at them, bewildered at the lack of tension in the strings, some sort of sabotage of their weaponry.

A rat leapt out of a Roman arrow case. Another. Soon, a swarm of rats covered the ground, and each of the Roman archers stood appalled, their gnawed bowstrings in their fingers, their bows useless.

The rats seethed about Roman feet, climbing Roman bodies, biting and scratching, and the Romans were, for a moment, in total disarray, their archers incapacitated.

“Infantry!” Agrippa screamed, signaling the lines.

“Kill them,” Cleopatra whispered, and every animal on the battlefield heard her command.

Her cats, leopards, lions, and tigers, drew back on their haunches and leapt over the shields and into the legionaries, claws shredding the unprepared men, teeth rending their flesh. No shield could save them. A tiger died, impaled on a short sword, and as it fell, its body crushed the astonished soldier who had slain it.

The world rang with screams, with shouting and moaning, with ululations in the face of foes, and Cleopatra pushed forward, the emperor still her focus. Augustus kept the precious bow behind his back. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his side. Agrippa stood beside him, shouting orders.

Surely the Romans must outnumber the beasts, Augustus thought. They would win. They had the advantage of order in the face of chaos. Chaos could not possibly prevail. A guard surrounded Agrippa and Augustus, tightly spaced, shields raised.

Lightning flashed in the sky, and thunder shook the earth. High above, the heavens echoed with the sound of something enormous, roaring. The hairs rose on Augustus's neck, and he felt the air charged with the presence of the divine.

Beside him, Auðr's hands twisted frantically in the air, her distaff spinning threads, trying to balance the dead with the living. The goddess and Cleopatra were both present, but the thread of the Slaughterer was a frayed end in the Underworld, and Sekhmet's strand, where it had been braided to her child's, was ragged.

Cleopatra had injured the goddess.

She had pulled a part of her soul away from Sekhmet, and yet she continued to war. Auðr still could not see the entire pattern. Her eyes flickered over the darkness, a swooning miasma. Her lungs were tight. She was not strong enough to hold the two fates, that of the queen and of the goddess, apart from each other for long, and she knew it.

Sekhmet is here,
the seiðkona said, and Augustus heard it in his mind.
She hungers for Rome. I cannot keep her from you. She will have you.

A bolt of lightning struck the earth just before Augustus's pavilion, and he leapt backward, his skin singed. Agrippa stayed firm, fearless, devoted. Augustus shook off the terror and shouted orders at his guard.

The men looked toward the sky and panicked, as bats swooped down from above, into their faces. Shields began to flail. Swords lashed out at the creatures, who came diving downward on their thin wings, blacking out the stars. With them came the birds of night, their claws outstretched for eyes, their wings flapping into faces, their beaks spearing, their shrieks deafening.

The lines began to break down.

Men gasped, slashing at their feet as serpents flooded the ground, twining about their ankles and up their thighs, biting and coiling, tripping and tangling. A viper's head, chopped off by a blade, rolled into the crater, staining the waters and leaving the serpent's body, writhing headless, still strangling a dying man on the battlefield above. A mass of crocodiles, their bodies nearly invisible in the darkness of the rocky ground, lumbered out of the water, snatching soldiers' legs and soldiers' arms, dragging men into Avernus.

Augustus watched, horrified. Could he be losing this battle? No. Certainly not. Where were the rest of the legions that had come before them? Agrippa had sworn they would be there. Thousands of men. Agrippa had sent the orders himself. Augustus felt frantic, seeing his own Romans tiring, watching them slain and battling, falling to the ground and being trampled, killing one another inadvertently.

Usem fought before Augustus, his own sword flashing in the moonlight, bloodied, guarding the emperor's position.

Cleopatra was still too far from him to shoot, but as he watched, the Romans gained slight traction. The lines were broken and men were fighting blindly, but the animals, though savage, were not strategists. He watched three men heave a screaming lion into the crater, watched his army clutching poisonous snakes and throwing them back at the other side. They were brave, even in the face of an unprecedented melee. Augustus felt a strange pride along with his terror at the monstrous scene before him. This was not Rome, nor was it empire. This was a battle from the lands of myth, a story.

Everything is true,
the priest of Apollo had said.
Everything.

This was a story told to him in darkness, a story to bring sleep, and at the end of stories like this, the Romans conquered the savages.

Yet it was here before him. Blood flew through the air, and the screams of the dying and the raging echoed over the water. Augustus moved his hand where it clutched the bow of Hercules, feeling the smoothness of the wood and metal, the place worn in the weapon where it had been held by heroes far greater than himself.

He was a hero.
He swore it to himself. If he was not a hero, then what was he?

He would save Rome from this monstrous thing, from this woman.
Despoina,
the sibyls had called her, but she would not be mistress of the end of the world. Augustus would stop her.

Cleopatra kept moving toward him, her face calm and collected, her hands rising in the air and commanding her creatures.

The sound of marching was suddenly upon them, and with the marching, a chanting cry.

“Thank the gods,” Augustus breathed, and Agrippa nodded tightly at him.

Augustus looked up to greet his relief armies cresting the hill and instead saw an army at odds with his own. They held a flag, and it was not emblazoned with Rome's eagle but with a snake.

A group of elderly senators, with their bald pates and white togas fresh from the fullers, marched onto the hilltop with their army and massed with Cleopatra and her army of wild animals. Augustus looked up and saw a senator across the battlefield, smiling directly, triumphantly into his face.

Augustus felt Agrippa seize with fury beside him.

“Romans!” he shouted. “I am Marcus Agrippa, your commander! I am he who summoned you here!”

Augustus straightened the laurels on his head and leapt atop a rock to address the crowd.

“I am your emperor!” he screamed. “You will serve Rome or you will be declared traitors!”

This was his empire, his world. The senators would not win against him, and he would have them killed when this was finished. He would save Rome from all these traitors. He would save his people.

“Surrender!” Cleopatra yelled back from across the battlefield. A loyal soldier ran at her, his sword poised to slice through her body.

Cleopatra grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him into the air, breaking his body in her hands. She dropped him like a discarded toy.

In the crowd before the boulder, Augustus watched an ivory horn tossing a legionary into the air, piercing his kidneys and heaving him up and into his fellows. A glittering black eye, and dark, scaled skin trickled with tarry blood.

Usem ran forward and slashed at the rhinoceros and it retreated, bellowing, even as Augustus's own Romans, his own soldiers, marched forward at their counterparts, the men still loyal to Rome. Augustus watched, his breath catching in his chest, as the soldiers just before him, the men guarding him, began to cave in.

Usem shouted, and the beasts of the Western Wind were released against the betraying Romans. They snarled, their bodies created of dust and light, of dark and chill, of tornado and hurricane, of lightning and thunder. Their bodies contained uprooted trees and boulders, ships and creatures. The betraying Romans and the senators who commanded them wavered.

“I would never give you your children!” Augustus shouted. “Why would I give them to such a mother?”

She need only come a little closer. Behind his back, he positioned the bow. The arrow was already placed in it. Only the string remained to be pulled taut, and it could be fired.

“You must kill her,” Usem hissed. “That is the only way this will end. Wait for me. I will give you room.”

C
leopatra's vision blurred with blood and light. It was as it had been aboard the ship, her hunger, her fury. She lost moments and then found herself with blood on her hands. The waters below were red and the lake was dotted with Roman corpses. The ground was slick and the fallen lay in heaps, arms spread out, their gods nowhere to be seen.

She could feel Sekhmet's glory. She was Sekhmet's glory.

It was all going according to her plan. Her army of beasts and Romans spread across the field, fighting at her command. Her body surged with the violence, with the bloodshed, and she felt her strength growing with every kill. Sekhmet, high above, roared.

Nicolaus dashed across the battlefield, too near her, and she leapt at him.

“Betrayer,” she hissed.

“I did not mean to be,” the historian whispered, and she could see that he had not. Still. He would be punished.

She clawed him, only once, from his shoulder to his wrist, his writing hand. Then she left him on the field and moved on, closer, closer, to the emperor.

Suddenly, before her was an unexpected warrior. The snake charmer. She hissed at him, and he hissed back, his knife dancing from hand to hand. She clawed at him, spitting with fury as his blade nicked her arm, in the very place where the Hydra venom had wounded her. He danced faster than light, faster than air, and suddenly, it seemed as though he was flying.

What was she fighting?

The Psylli rose on the back of a beast, and the beast spat dust and bone in her face. It spat salt water, a tidal wave of ocean, and fish, gasping, plucked from the deep, and still Usem attacked her, his eyes blazing.

Vengeance. Reckoning. Augustus was standing behind the man, fumbling with something behind his back, but she couldn't get past Usem.

The warrior and the wind were stronger than she had expected, and it took all her power to fight them.

 

 

T
he elder boy struggled, drugged though he was, but the witch had him, a rope twisted about his neck. What was left of Chrysate's face contorted as she dragged the child up the hillside path, invisible to those battling above her. The other boy she had by the wrist, her fingernails digging into his flesh. Her scry had revealed strange things, changes in the fates. She'd consulted it just before the battle. What had happened? What had the Northern witch done?