Queen of Kings (12 page)

A confession. He had told her how he had sinned against her, but she could remember only the taste of his words, not the sound of them.

Something had terrified him. He'd lost his pride and confidence and turned back into a boy scared of the dark. He knew she lived, and he had buried her because of it.

She quivered and then cried out as her skin shifted against the chain. Each link burned and cut her flesh. She tried to still herself, hoping that her body would cease screaming if she were immobile.

It was airless, or nearly so, in this crypt. They'd bricked up most of the air holes near the roof. The window upstairs was gone, too, she could sense that much, and when she stilled herself and stretched her senses—what strangeness, to be able to feel the edges of things far beyond her sight—she knew more. They'd placed a layer of stone outside the mausoleum's walls and then a layer of alabaster, sparing no expense, finishing the structure as she herself had meant to do. She could feel the chisels, the inscriptions carved into its surface. She could feel the march of the guards, several of them, encircling the building, armored as if for battle.

Why would they have done such a thing, after they'd placed her here, still living? Tricking her people, she guessed.

Octavian Caesar had stood on the steps of the mausoleum, looking over the crowd. Cleopatra could smell his fear still lingering there.

The queen is dead,
Octavian told her people.
She killed herself in grief for Mark Antony. It was an honorable death, though it went against the wishes of Rome.

Her people would have suspected her murdered but not dared challenge him. Cities that resisted the Romans ended in ashes. The people of Alexandria would have mourned instead, torn out their hair and knelt, processed about the mausoleum, singing and drinking. She could still hear the echoes of it.

This was a Roman city now.

She heard a man breaking into drunken song out on the street, the guards hushing him. She was suddenly filled with wrath. Would she be doomed to listen to the world forever, trapped away from it?

She screamed in fury, there in the dark, but all she heard was the echo of her voice, bouncing from the high ceiling, rattling against the walls.

Antony's ashes shifted with her scream. She breathed him in, another gasp of betrayal and sorrow, of his blood on her hands. She'd be here forever, beside the ruined body of her beloved, unless she did something to escape.

“FREE ME!” she screamed, every muscle straining and crying out against the chains as she pushed herself up from the slab. She was not strong enough to break them. Her skin was seared, and she felt the metal slipping beneath it, slicing into flesh. Rage boiled inside her and she howled her order out to the ceiling. The guards would hear her. Someone would hear her. “Release me! Your queen lives, and you serve a monster!”

She heard a high call, a keening song. A pulse of sound from outside the building, and another sound, of something creeping, fluttering through a small space. A rustling.

Something was coming.

O
ctavian visited Alexander the Great's grave, crippled with unease. He'd long looked forward to paying his respects at his hero's burial place, nearby as it was to Alexandria. It was the heroic thing to do, after all, a scene that might be written about by the poets of Rome, the young emperor standing beside the tomb of his predecessor, inheriting his power.
Augustus the Great
, he'd thought secretly, tasting the name on his tongue.

The simpleton slaves and keepers of the necropolis insisted that he see the endless Ptolemaic tombs as well, and he was forced to descend an unpleasant stone staircase into a black pit, but he immediately turned and ran back up into the light, fearful of more creatures like Cleopatra, dead and yet not dead.

“I came to see a king,” he snapped, “not a pile of dead bodies.” This was to have been a reward for Cleopatra's death after all, a final triumphant act in her city before departing for other places, other kingdoms, but what he'd seen in Cleopatra's chamber had drastically changed the tone of the visit.

All he could think of now was her glowing eyes, her smiling lips. She lived, she lived, and he'd buried her that way. Too late, he realized that she would not stay buried. She would come for him. He must flee the country.

Before he could, though, he must do this or regret it forever.

“Open the sarcophagus,” he ordered. “I wish to see him.”

He sent the slaves away the moment the case was open, and then forced himself to look into the coffin. Alexander's features, which Octavian had long venerated, dreamt of, were nothing but fragile leather. Nearly three hundred years had passed since Alexander's death by poison at Nebuchadnezzar's palace. His corpse had originally been transported from Babylon in a vat of honey, as though he were a queen bee. The sweetish smell still lingered, along with that of the cinnamon used in his embalming. The odor confused Octavian's mind, twisting his memories. In Egypt, the precious inner bark of the cinnamon tree was used on the dead, but in Rome it was used on the living, as an ingredient in love potions. Octavian himself had wandered the darkest alleys of his own city, sniffing out magic in the corridors, witches brewing potions for hire.

A flash of fury blasted through Octavian's center. His problems here in Egypt were certainly the result of a witch. Were it not for her, he would not be looking at a corpse and wondering if it lived.

“Great Alexander,” he shouted, the walls echoing around him. “I pay you tribute.”

He'd brought with him a golden diadem, discovered in the queen's treasure, and flowers to fill the sarcophagus, but first, he must make certain that Alexander was truly dead. Octavian put out a tentative finger, breathing unhappily through his mouth, icy sweat breaking out over his body. The hand shook so gravely that it knocked against the corpse's face, and with a faint, dusty sound, the flesh gave way.

Octavian jumped away, horrified. The nose hung crookedly now. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the awful sound that would herald the rising of a wounded god, but no sound came.

The eyes of the corpse were closed. No black depths, no shining end of the world there. No life inside the body of his hero. Thank the gods.

Octavian permitted himself a small sigh of relief. He would not have wished to contend with both Alexander and Cleopatra. She was more than enough.

“What should I do?” he whispered to his hero, praying for a revelation, though now he knew there would be no answer. “What should I do with her?”

Alexander the Great would never have trembled in the face of magic. He would have attacked Cleopatra, living corpse or no, monster or no, ferocious with his sword. He would have summoned sorcerers to plot against her, researched potions and poisons. He would have done whatever was necessary to conquer her.

Octavian ran his fingers over the great man's burial garments. He tore off a small section of fabric and hid it on his person, hoping to absorb some of Alexander's godlike courage.

Octavian was himself the son of a god, or so his mother, Atia, had always claimed, swearing Apollo had come down from Olympus in the form of a snake and impregnated her. According to legend, Alexander the Great had also been fathered by a god in snake form, the Egyptian king and magician Nectanebo, and so Octavian had never seen reason to dispute Atia's politically useful story. It made Alexander and Octavian the same sort of hero, the same sort of man.

Octavian did not feel heroic at present. He felt queasy, thinking of Cleopatra's chamber and the missing asp. Might the snake have been a god? What else could explain the queen living and dead at once?

No.

Surely the opening of her eyes had been an aftereffect of the snake's—the
mortal
snake's—poison. Did not dead men's members stand erect on the gallows? Did not the beheaded stare in wonder? Surely, were he to look into Cleopatra's mausoleum now, he'd find her decaying, just as Alexander was.

And if not—

He'd do as his hero would have done. Alexander had won the world through bravery and perseverance, through resourceful actions, and Octavian would follow his lead. He would not flee.

He was the man who controlled Rome, and Rome controlled the world. His enemies were dead, all but her. He had the power in his hands. He would run her through with his sword. Either that, or he'd burn her, a thought that seemed more and more attractive. He'd been childish, imagining that she would set the world aflame. It was his own fears controlling him. What witch could survive a burning? He'd turn her to ash, and let her try to rise from that.

Octavian stood up from Alexander's tomb and looked down one last time at the shriveled figure lying within. Alexander had been killed at twenty-nine, long before he'd reached his full potential. Octavian was thirty-three. He did not plan to die this day.

“There is more world out there than you knew,” he told Alexander, testing a certainty he did not wholly feel. “More things than you ever dreamt of. I've seen the world, and it belongs to me. All of it is mine.”

He turned to march up the stairs. The room echoed with his last exhalation, the dust of empires rising and falling behind him.

T
hey filled the room, arriving from beneath the floor, slipping through impossibly small cracks and portals. They came from above, nearly deafening Cleopatra with their shrill song.

She cringed, her rage gone as quickly as it had arrived. Now she was terrified of the pain that would surely come. They'd tear her skin, and she'd live. They would wound her flesh, and she would remain awake, feeling each ripping movement. Feeling each creature—and she knew them now, not birds but bats—diving toward her heart. Their tiny fangs, their scrabbling claws. Her body, though it was changed, was still hers. It was her only possession, and these were thieves coming to break it apart.

They would find her empty.

Something else was coming, though. She could smell a musky, dry odor. Snakes slithering across the stone, their sleek bodies blending into a rippling surface, roiling as a storming sea. And rats, their skeletons bending against the narrow passages, their fur glittering black, their eyes glowing.

Her subjects.

She laughed, the sound mixing with a sob. Queen of Egypt, in her lost, gilded robes. Naked before her true citizens, she must offer them her last words. Oh, the proclamations she might make, here in the dark.

“Save me,” she whispered. “Your queen commands you.”

She laughed again, feeling hysteria rising. Nothing to calm her here, no wines or potions, no Antony to press his fingertips against her lips. She felt the rasp of snakeskin on her ankle. The brush of leather wings on her face. The lash of a rat's tail, whipping through her fingers.

This is how it would end, then. This is how it would be, from here until the end of time. The queen and her creatures. Eaten, but not consumed.

A snake pressed its skull beneath her breast, fitting its triangular head under the chain and then flowing over her skin. It slipped up her throat, and appeared before her, its eyes glittering in the dark, gazing at her with what seemed to be intention.

She was mad to think the snake might understand her. More were coming. She felt them writhing across her limbs like a living mantle.

The snake stared into her eyes, waiting for something. She tried to move but could not.

“Free me!” she shouted, giving in to the madness. “I am your queen! The queen of Egypt calls upon you!”

The snake slithered away, and Cleopatra laughed and cried at once. She was insane, and worse, she knew it. Her predictions had come true. She, who was the daughter of generations of kings, now thought that she could talk to animals.

The rats began to gnaw at something. Let it not be her bones. She couldn't feel anything anymore, couldn't tell where the animals were.

The chain shifted around her, burning, burning, but she didn't care. Let it burn. Anything was better than this, these beasts of the night pressing against her body, the sounds of hissing and hungering. Another serpent slithered across her abdomen, pressing into the curve of her waist, where once a jeweled belt had hung, tempting kings, tempting warriors.

The chain shifted again.

She could hear the rats gnawing at the wood beneath her, furrowing its surface. She'd commissioned the pyre, just as she'd commissioned the box that held Antony's ashes. Now the rats were turning it to dust. Everything would go to dust, everything but Cleopatra.

The chain loosened. She stretched her arm and touched a serpent. She moved her leg and felt another. The room was dark, but all around her was the sound of movement.

Bats rose through the dark, singing. A moth glowed in a sudden spark of light and was taken, struggling against claws.

The chain lifted from her skin and hung in the air above her.

She lay there for a moment, amazed, and then she felt the creatures waiting, all around her.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

The only reply she heard was the soft swishing of serpents making their way back to where they'd come from, bats singing their way back out into the sky, and rats channeling their bodies into the cracks in the walls. Like ghosts, they returned invisibly to the waking world, populating the hidden spaces, filling the shadows. She realized that she was as good as a ghost herself, and as she listened to the departure of her saviors, she learned from their quiet. There were secret places in her city, places the Romans would not think to look for her.