Queen of Kings (6 page)

Then the goddess pulled away, and agonizing pain tore through Cleopatra. She was a tree, and each leaf was on fire. She was a city, and every building was pillaged. The streets ran with boiling oil, citizens fleeing, their hair clouds of smoke, their clothing gusts of flame, orange and blue. She was a volcano erupting, and her skin was furrowed with the passage of lava, deep tunnels of searing, searching heat. The soles of her feet melted where they touched the floor, and she staggered to keep from collapsing. The goddess was the light of a thousand suns, and Cleopatra felt her skin peeling away, exposing her very bones. She was turning to ash. No human could live in flame. Her eyes dilated, blinded.

The words appeared in Cleopatra's mind, echoing there like the sound of men stomping over decks, readying themselves for war. She could smell her own blood slipping down her throat and over her breasts, and she could smell the scent of rage as well, emanating from Sekhmet to wrap about the queen's arms, binding them to her sides as though she were mummified already.

“That is all I have,” whispered Cleopatra, her voice ravaged by smoke and pain.

Is it?
The goddess laughed, a horrible sound. Somewhere in the room, a glass goblet shook, shattered, and turned back into the sand from which it had come.
I think you have something more.

“Anything,” Cleopatra managed, looking at Antony. “Anything I have is yours.”

And then Cleopatra felt a change. The pain was blinding but uncertain. Where did it come from? What had been taken? A sudden sense of loss, a hole at the center of her being. Her body convulsed around this absence, and she screamed and could not stop screaming. She was a husk, as thin as eggshell, and inside her was nothingness, black night, rushing chill, the frigid glow of dying stars. She gasped, searching for air, and found nothing. She was drowning, and her heart, her heart—

Her beloved moaned.

She spun toward him and saw his eyelids flutter.

Joy rose up inside her, replacing the emptiness that had been there only moments before. She was whole, with him beside her. She was herself again.

She flew to Antony and knelt at his side, her hands on his chest, feeling it expand as he took his first breath. She ran her fingers over his bare skin and felt it warming under her touch. Her pain, if not gone, no longer mattered.

Antony's dark eyes opened, and she kissed him. She brushed her fingers over his stomach, felt the edge of the wound that had killed him, and sensed it healing. The goddess had done as she'd promised.

“
Te teneo
,” she whispered in Latin. “You are mine.”

His hands rose to cup her face, stroking her jaw, her lips, her earlobes, her hair.

“You followed me,” he said, and smiled. “I did not think you would.”

She realized that he thought they were both dead, traveling together to the Duat.

“No. We live,” she told him. “I've brought you back.”

She laid her face against his chest, listening to his heartbeat. “I am yours,” she said. Her eyes brimmed with tears.

Antony moved uncertainly, restless, silent. His hands brought her face up to his, and he looked into her eyes.

“You betrayed me,” he said.

“Lady! You are taken alive!” Charmian shrieked from the staircase, and then flew from the stairs to the opposite side of the room, pursued by one of Octavian's legionaries. He'd somehow penetrated the sanctuary, scaled the walls, removed the bars, and fitted himself through the window.

Cleopatra spun, searching for Sekhmet, but the goddess was gone. Gone! How dare this man, this plebeian, break into her sacred place? How dare he force the goddess out?

Cleopatra threw herself in front of her husband, blocking the soldier's access to him.

“You are in the presence of a goddess,” she told the invader, and her voice did not shake. She was herself again, the queen of Egypt, fearless. “Leave this place or face the consequences.”

She needed only a few minutes more for Antony to recover himself, and then they would go forth, together again. She would show compassion. She would let this man go.

If not—she grasped her ritual knife. It was a once-in-a-lifetime act, the summoning of such a power, and she had lived through it only by luck. She'd given all the blood she could give and still walk the earth. She could not bring her love back a second time.

The legionary rushed toward the queen and her beloved, his sword drawn.

Suddenly, Cleopatra was racked with
knowing
. She could smell the legionary's sweat, the sweat of an endless, unpaid march, of years of battle. And more than that. She could smell his children back in Rome, their hunger and hope. She could smell the sea in his hair. She could smell his longing for a woman, any woman.
The Whore Queen
, that was what he believed her to be. She heard it now, his thought of taking her as a chained captive to present to his master. He thought her weak.

The fool. He was nothing to her.

Her heart swelled with a clean, white fury. Her limbs shuddered in their sockets, her spine became a sword of flame, and her lungs filled with the heat of the desert sand.

She heard herself gasp, felt herself consumed, and then the world went black.

 

 

C
leopatra looked down at her hand, feeling something strangely heavy. Her head spun, racked with pain, and she narrowed her eyes, trying to focus on what she held.

What was it? She gazed at it for a moment, uncertain, her fingers pressing into its slippery, scalding edges. The thing ran purple over her fingers, weighty and profane, still trembling with its last life.

His heart.

She'd torn out his heart.

She screamed and flung it away from her, away from Antony. Her servants crept along the wall, their eyes wide with horror.

Against her will, Cleopatra found herself looking down at the legionary's ruined body. She had the taste of metal in her mouth, blood running from her lips to soak her garments.

What had she done?

“Lady,” Charmian whispered. “Lady?”

Antony took a rattling breath, a cry of agony. Cleopatra turned and saw the legionary's sword piercing her beloved's body. It had been thrown in the struggle and was pinning him to the floor. The blood. The smell of iron, the taste of honey. She gagged, clutching her mouth in horror, and her hands came away from her lips covered in scarlet.

“Cleopatra,” her husband whispered. “Come to me.”

She stumbled to Antony's side and touched his skin. Stiffening. Cooling.

“You will not die now,” she told him, her voice breaking. “You cannot.”

She pressed her mouth to his, breathing her air into his lungs. When she pulled away, the legionary's blood stained Antony's lips.

She'd brought him back from death only to watch him die again. She moaned, listening to the sound that wasn't. No heartbeat. No breath.

The stairs rattled with the steps of legionaries. She turned to see them. Dozens of men, armed, shouting. They were coming to take her to their general. She felt strangely calm. They would not take her alive. Nothing mattered now that he was gone. She'd failed, and this was the end.

The legionaries swarmed around her, their weapons drawn, shouting and shoving, but she was beyond them.

“Surrender by order of the emperor,” they yelled, tearing at her hands, throwing her to the ground, but her hand was already on the ritual knife.

She twisted and drove it into her stomach, feeling none of the pain she should have felt.

And when she drew the dagger out of her body, no blood stained the blade.

T
hree nights later, the conquered queen of Egypt lit the fire that burned her husband. And they reveled in Rome. A prisoner surrounded by enemies, she could hear their trumpets, smell their foul feasting, carried across the water all the way to Alexandria. The world rang with proclamations of the new ruler's name as Cleopatra stood before Antony's pyre stunned, dazed like one in a dream.

“Hail Caesar,
” they sang as Cleopatra lifted the torch to Antony's shroud. He was as still as a statue, yet he had been warm. She had brought him back and lost him again. He'd spoken to her. He'd thought himself betrayed by she who adored him, she who'd summoned the goddess and given up her—

She did not want to know what she'd given up.

She did not want to know why she remained here, among the living. This was not where she belonged.

The ceremony was held in darkness, to keep the crowds from assembling. Not even the royal children were in attendance. Cleopatra wondered where they were imprisoned. Surely they still lived, or she would have felt it. The funerary group consisted only of Cleopatra and Romans, the general Marcus Agrippa, second to Octavian, and a slew of lesser functionaries. Whether through mercy or insult, Octavian did not appear. It was to be Cleopatra's last act as the queen of her country.

With a burst of brightness, her love went up in flame.

Cleopatra tilted her chin and watched the rising cloud of smoke that had been her king. She wanted only to fall into the flames and join him, but the guards surrounding her kept her from moving.

The smoke obscured the stars, and Cleopatra thought of the gods that had failed her, the goddess that had tricked her. She lived, and he was dead. She lived, and she did not know why.

She stretched her fingers to feel the flames. Someone barked an order, and the Romans pulled her back. They let her—indeed, they
made
her—stay until the pyre went out. When everything was ash, she knelt miserably in the char and gathered what was left of her husband's body. Her tears fell then, for the first time since the horror in the mausoleum.

As she touched the ash, her mind filled with a strange and roaring sequence of images: galleys saluting Rome, herself naked and sleeping in bed, the buckles of Antony's armor as they were fastened, the sword he used to stab himself, the lighthouse shining pale in the sky, her own face, blurry and bloodless, grief-stricken. She heaved with suppressed sobs, but they let her hold him only for a moment.

A stone-faced centurion, a former soldier of Antony's, took the ashes from her and placed them in a silver box, one Cleopatra recognized as having commissioned herself. Isis and Dionysus decorated its sides. She'd had it made as a wedding gift for Antony, and in her foolishness, ordered that the gods depicted on it have human faces. Dionysus had a cleft chin, and Isis a crown of cobras. Their hands were twined together, the marriage of Cleopatra's gods and Antony's.

She was no god. Why had she been so stupid as to declare herself one? All of this, everything, was her fault. She'd started things in motion and now she'd lost control. Her life was a cart careening down a hillside, horses shrieking and stumbling, unable to stop themselves from falling.

The box would be taken back to the mausoleum. The murderers would bury Antony in Egypt. They'd given her that much at least. The proper ceremonies, the rituals. Antony's wishes would be granted. He'd renounced his Roman rites and declared himself a citizen of her country. As long as his ashes remained in Egypt, she hoped his soul would eventually travel to the Duat. Cleopatra would not be there to meet him.

She thought of him wandering alone through the caverns of the dead, making his way toward the Beautiful West without her. They'd planned their lives and deaths so carefully, and now it was all for naught.

She lived.

Still, with these ceremonies, he belonged to this country. Or so Cleopatra hoped. She realized that she knew nothing now, nothing true, nothing solid. Not since the thing that had happened in the mausoleum. Who knew which Underworld would claim him, or what the gods would do with him once they had him? Who knew whom she'd offended?

She watched as they marched away with the box that contained Antony. Too quickly, the legionaries were out of sight, and she was left in the dark with the guards to take her back to the palace.

The Romans kept her caged in her own bedchamber, where she awaited the emperor's summons.

Outside the room, sentries trod the marble, their steps echoing through Cleopatra's mind. Her luxurious bedding had been stripped from the bed for fear she'd use it to strangle herself. All that was left was a bare pallet, but it didn't matter. She'd neither slept nor eaten since Antony's death.

Her mind seeped with an unpredictable darkness. Was it madness? Had she imagined everything that happened in the mausoleum? She saw herself in a horrible flash, a soiled linen shift, muddied feet, tangled hair, wandering the roads, collapsing, her flesh picked over by vultures, yet still living, a shrieking husk. This would be her legacy, not her years of rule, of preserving the city from the Romans, not her pure love of Antony.

The Mad Queen Cleopatra.

She unwrapped her robes and ran her fingers over her skin to confirm what she already knew. Smooth. No evidence of the knife that had penetrated just below the ribs. She was chilled, and she shook as though fevered, but her body, at least, was unwounded. She could not say the same for her soul.

Something, everything, was terribly wrong. She could feel it, but she could not find it.

All night, she lay wide-eyed in her chamber, every sound magnified, the darkness dazzling.

At dawn on the sixth day after Antony's death, she opened the shutters to watch the sunrise, once her particular pleasure. She sought to comfort herself with ritual, standing in the window, watching the indigo sky turn pale gold, but as the sun broke over the edge of the world and touched her face, she felt a searing pain. She gasped and leapt back from the window, her skin burning.