Queen of Kings (48 page)

Those who were looking in that direction, those who could bear to do so, glimpsed something in the brightness. A ship, perhaps, and its captain leaning out of the vessel with long, shining hair, eyes as blue as lapis, skin made of gold.

Then it was gone, and Antony was gone as well, with their children, and with him Hercules' arrows.

Cleopatra lay on the ground, her body pale, her wound mortal.

She was dying at last. Her lips curled up in a smile.

She took a final breath, looking into the night sky, and then she was still.

There was a last divine roar of sorrow, one that caused the ocean beyond Avernus to rise up and throw itself against the cliff, and then the battle was done.

A
ugustus, rigid with horror, stood and took a step toward his enemy's body. She did not move. Blood flowed from her side. She'd done something to him, something he did not understand. His hands fumbled. A coin to pay her passage. He had nothing.

He knelt beside Cleopatra, put out his shaking hand, brushed the snow from her face and closed her eyes.

In the darkness of the crater, Augustus saw a single ghostly spot of light, a shining, wavering thing rising to the surface for a moment, its thousands of teeth, its watery gleaming form, its razor-feathered body, before it, too, dove into the depths, descending back to its home in the Underworld. Something pulled at Augustus. Home. He wavered on the edge of the crater, uncertain, and then looked around the battlefield, at the devastation there.

He looked at the monsters that still walked the earth, the lions and tigers stalking their prey, eating the dead.

The Psylli eyed at him from across the battlefield.

“We have won,” Usem said. “This is a victory. I will not see you again.”

“No,” Augustus said.

“Nor Rome,” said Usem, and nodded at him, only once. “May you live in peace, Emperor.”

The monsters of sand and wind surrounded him, shrinking as he moved. Usem held out his hands to them, and they converged into a single form. A woman, her hair flying behind her, suddenly stood before the snake sorcerer, and Augustus watched her kiss him. He watched as the Western Wind's daughter took her husband in her arms, watched as the air whirled around them, watched as they rose into the sky and disappeared together into the darkness beyond the hillside.

The morning was coming, gray and sickly at the horizon. Augustus swayed, looking at the legions of Romans who stood, awed and bleeding, mingled into a single dazzled pool of men. There were senators dead before him, and loyal soldiers, too. He saw Agrippa making his way among them, speaking to the wounded, dedicating their shades to Hades, and the seiðkona, her distaff in her hand, touching the men and taking their memories with her.

By the time Auðr arrived before Augustus, he no longer feared her. She lowered her distaff to his forehead, and when it touched him, he felt his mind laced with a filigree of frost. All the pain was gone for the moment, the memories of broken things, the guilt.

For a glorious moment, he did not know who he was, and he was grateful.

He did not want to know who he was. He did not want to know what he had lost.

Auðr walked onward, and Augustus knelt on the hilltop beside the dead woman, a woman he now only faintly recognized. He stayed there, bewildered and uncertain for he knew not how long. At last, Agrippa walked up the hillside behind him, bloodied, his face scored with new lines.

“I found her among the wounded,” he said.

A small hand took Augustus's fingers. He looked down, startled. Selene, her face smeared with dirt, snow in her eyelashes. He recognized her in a rush of sorrow.

“Rome has won,” she said, her voice wavering. “And I am a Roman. I will go with you.”

And then, without looking at her mother's body, without looking down, she led Augustus down the hill and away from the battlefield.

“We have won,” she said, and only then did Augustus realize that he was crying.

 

 

W
hen they had gone, Auðr bent over Cleopatra's body, coughing as she knelt. Her own thread, tangled with all of these, was moments from completion. She could see its tattered end in the light of dawn, shorn and frayed.

She looked at the queen's face. Peaceful. Where did she travel? the seiðkona wondered. Which of her gods had taken her?

Auðr twisted her distaff, employing all her remaining strength to wrap the queen's thread about it. She groaned as she tore at the fates, unraveling, her powers withering even as she used them.

The universe shifted above her. A pattern in the sky, a ripple in the gray as the sky began to roll, a shifting of seasons, night to day and back again. The last stars peeled back to reveal sun, and the last sun peeled back to reveal emptiness, and still the seiðkona labored, weaving the pattern, the warp and weft of the future, the edges of the universe in her hands.

At last, she rose and walked toward the historian.

It was nearly finished. All of it.

 

 

N
icolaus could not move, even as he watched Auðr approach him. Blood coursed from the ragged tear that ran from his shoulder to his wrist. He was going to die, he knew, but he could not bring himself to run.

He wanted to die.

The battlefield was covered in bodies, and the waters ran red. Vultures wheeled high in the sky, and soon they would land.

The seiðkona's hair had come unbound, and it twined in the air, a white nebula. Her lips curled as she assessed him. She put out a hand and touched his mouth with icy, bluish fingers. Her other hand gripped the distaff.

Nicolaus braced himself for its touch. He discovered that he was crying. His tears froze on his face, and one fell to the ground, shattering as it hit the earth. He bowed his head toward her, giving himself over.

Let her touch him. Let her take away the things he'd seen and done. Let her take his mind and thoughts. Let her take him and all the words he'd clung to.

No,
she said, her lips unmoving.
You will remember this.

He looked up and was caught, pinned by her silver gaze.

The seiðkona lifted her distaff over her head, and Nicolaus watched it move toward his brow.

As it touched him, his mind broke open, making room for everything it must encompass. He felt his own memories splinter and spin like marbles, rolling to the edges of his consciousness, to be lost there.

The distaff touched him for only an instant, and yet he was no longer only Nicolaus.

He
knew.
Everything. His mind swelled with it, agonizing, horrifying, filled beyond its capacity, and then filled more. Love and sorrow. Death and despair. Hunger. Bloodshed. Armor being donned and swords being sharpened, children waking from dreams, mothers holding their babies, lionesses hunting for prey. All the stories of the dead. All the stories of the living. All the memories she had taken from them were his to keep. He cried out, pressing his hands to his forehead, feeling his skull splitting open with the contents of the world. There could not be enough room in him for all of this. But there was.

Now his history was the history of millions. He knew everything, and there was no forgetting. He was the one who would remember.

He ran from the battlefield, holding his injured arm, tears running down his face. The skin began to heal as he ran, and he knew she had twined his fate with something else. He knew that he would not die tonight.

He had a purpose yet.

He was the keeper of the history of this day, and of the days before it. He would tell the stories of the serpents and the soldiers, of the gods and of the goddesses. He would tell the story of the queen and of her love, of their children, and of the shades who had come from below the earth.

All of it, all of everything and of everyone, was within him.

He was a historian at last, wholly and utterly.

He would tell the world.

T
he emperor hobbled through an orchard at the foot of Vesuvius, the wind pressing against his robes, chilling his thin skin, ruffling his sparse hair. Something was familiar to him here. The pattern of the stars against the sky, perhaps, was like a tattoo he'd seen once on a woman's back. Augustus searched his memory for the details, but it was no use. It was only a fleeting recognition, maybe something he'd dreamt long ago. He laughed quietly, a rasping cough of dark amusement. His mind had become like Oceanus, and all the places he'd once known were drowned in salt sea, peopled with ghosts. He could no longer tell truth from fiction, nor his own recollections from things he'd invented.

Augustus was seventy-six years old. He'd reigned over Rome, over his empire, for nearly forty-four years. It was the nineteenth of August, the month he'd named after himself. Other Augusts crowded his memory, one spent in Alexandria. He thought suddenly of Antony. Augustus had long outlived his old enemy, his old friend, his old idol, but he did not know why he thought of him now. He remembered walking into the cool depths of a mausoleum and—

No, no. He would not think of that.

A flash of memory, another August, this one on a battlefield. Tigers roaring and an emptiness where his heart had been, snow falling down upon him from the heavens. A god screaming from the sky, and his enemy, his beautiful enemy, bleeding in the snow. What had she done with his heart? What was the strangeness he felt? His soul—

He did not know.

He remembered an ancient woman with silver eyes, tapping him on the forehead with her distaff, emptying his history and replacing it with unknowns.

He had run back to Rome, served the empire, served the people. Dazed, he'd closed the Gates of Janus and brought peace to his realm. A price owed to a warrior, a price he knew he must pay, but his own life had not been peaceful.

Rome was his only daughter now. Julia, his sole blood heir, had betrayed him, conducting an affair with the last surviving son of Mark Antony, sacrificing to old religions, dancing naked in the city's temples, offering herself to anyone who desired the emperor's daughter. On her finger, she'd worn a ring engraved with Hecate's face, something she claimed she'd found in Augustus's own house.

Augustus had banished her from Rome and ordered her lover killed, but these punishments did not ease his pain. Just hours before arriving at this orchard, he'd given the order for the execution of his final grandson, the youngest son of Julia. The boy was a child of an unknown father, and the emperor could not take the chance of Rome being inherited by a descendant of his old enemy. No. He must pass Rome to Tiberius, his stepson, a man he disliked and distrusted. There was no other option. All his other heirs were dead, and his line was broken.

The emperor felt a grasping seizure in his chest, where his heart should have been.

He'd banished his friends as well. Nicolaus of Damascus, his biographer, he'd sent away when he'd given the emperor a copy of his history of the universe. It rankled. Even the sections pertaining to Augustus, which he'd dictated himself, seemed strange, filled with untruths. Had he talked in his sleep? He could not say.

He had Ovid sent to the Black Sea because something in his stories, in those
Metamorphoses
, those women transforming into beasts, those beasts transforming into women, those gods walking amongst men, reminded Augustus of—

What?

Something in them made Augustus believe that someone had gotten to the poet, whispered in his ear, told him all the secret things, initiated him into mysteries the emperor himself did not recollect.

And so he burned the plays, burned the verses, burned the histories, burned the biographies. He stood on the steps of the Palatine, a torch in his hand, and set the pages afire. He did not know what he was hiding. He burned everything, even his own writings.

He left the Sibylline prophecies, but he censored them, cutting offensive words from them with his own knife. Whole sentences and passages. Augustus remembered one of them, shivering with the memory.

He slashed away at that section, bewildered by it, making additions and subtractions, changing what it said. It was all familiar, and yet he couldn't grasp exactly what it was that so angered him. At last, he walked away from the tablet, his skin flushing with mad wrath. He had not understood why he felt so. He still did not.

Augustus fretted now. He suddenly remembered only the horrible things.

He thought of Marcus Agrippa, dead at fifty-five of blood poisoning, the legacy of a long-ago wound. He'd been on a campaign, and soaked his leg in vinegar in an attempt to relieve the pain of his old injury. By the time Augustus arrived, he was dead of it.

Augustus could almost remember the getting of that wound. Something about an arrow, something about a poison, something about a mistake, something about a flash of light.

The emperor's teeth felt loose in his mouth. He ran his tongue over the space where, long ago, he'd lost a tooth on a ship journey. He'd thrown it into the sea between Egypt and Italy. Now it might be a pearl. He was so old that his bones might by now be golden. His hair lapis. His teeth pearls. Somewhere in his memory, there was a god whose body was made of precious stones. A god who crossed the sky in a boat.