Queen of Kings (10 page)

Evening fell, shadows dancing over the stones, and the streets of Alexandria lit up with the wildly spent gold of the Romans. Every brothel in the city was busy, and every doctor, too, quelling the poxes that were spreading from whores to soldiers and from soldiers to whores. Goats were being slaughtered for feasting, and bulls were bleeding into basins. A troupe of young men walked below the palace window, drunk and disarrayed, laughing raucously. The smell of blood and lust and anticipation rose through the open windows and filled the room.

Cleopatra could wait no longer. She was caged, yes, but not chained, and suddenly, she felt she could break free. Octavian pretended for the sake of her people's trust that she was in the palace as his guest, willingly surrendering her throne to him, and now she would take advantage of his error. There were few guards. She would be out.

“Charmian,” she called, making her voice as sweet as mead. “Eiras. Tend your queen.”

They'd fit her out for the night, she told herself, and she'd slip out and leave them. Her cloak dark and rough. Her hair braided as a commoner's. She'd walk the streets, unseen. Inhale the evening air. That would be enough. Surely that would be enough.

The girls entered the room. They were such pretty things, their throats long above their gowns, their cheeks ablaze, nervous that she'd heard them gossiping. She smiled, pretending she had not.

“What will you have us do?” asked Eiras.

The queen rose from her couch, her body suddenly vibrating.

The girl came closer, a questioning look on her face.

Her expression changed as she saw the queen's eyes. They were wide and golden, dilated. They were not human.

Cleopatra felt the maid's shock and saw herself through the girl's sight. She was a monster. An animal.

She inhaled the girl's fear as though it were her own. Her body filled with desire, a searing heat, a slashing hunger.

She sprang.

C
leopatra's teeth were on the girl's throat just as the scream rose from it. The beautiful, unheard sound of Eiras's voice rippled through the queen, absorbed into her body like music.

Her blood was salty and bright, and the queen's fingers spread on her servant's skin, holding her smooth, bronze face. Seventeen, was she? A child. Eiras struggled in her grip, making muted, desperate sounds. Her life was strong. With each movement, Cleopatra drank the girl's youth, her strength, her ambition. She drank her history, her dreams, her hopes, her jealousies and sorrows.

“Help me,” the girl whispered, and Cleopatra felt the plea traveling from Eiras's heart and all the way through her lips, the words like teetering boats on a swift-flowing river, before they coursed out of the girl's body and into Cleopatra herself.

Her skin warmed as the blood flowed into her lips, hot and pure, perfect. She heard herself moaning with pleasure, her body trembling as it fed, her very skin tightening, her hips shuddering. This was what she had needed. This was right.

She drank Eiras's desire for the strong soldiers marching into Alexandria, her blushing heat as she stood in the shadows, waiting for the one who would be her lover. She drank the girl's simple hopes of babies, of a home, of a tree and a garden, of food to eat and pretty clothes to wear. She lapped at her throat, at the sweet liquid, the wine of the gods.

Eiras's body began to seize. Her hands grappled hopelessly, but Cleopatra scarcely noticed her. She was prey, an insect or bird, and Cleopatra was a cat, playing with her as she ate.

The voice inside her sang for pleasure.
Drink
, it sang.
Drink!

She was the queen, and before that, a king's daughter. Slaves had brought her trays of food, poured her wine, and formed her honeyed cakes.

Slaves had always fed her.

The spark of life began to leave the girl. Her flesh was still pliant, but she breathed no longer. Cleopatra, her hand on the slave's breast, felt the girl's heart stop beating and, her mouth on the slave's throat, felt the blood slow, the pulsing end. She pulled her lips away and laid Eiras down. She gazed upon her for a moment.

Her body hummed with it, a ferocious, glorious sound, a song, a call to reenter the world. A call to feed. Cleopatra looked down at the girl's body and felt as though an army had revealed itself. She was not what she had been, a woman, a mortal. No.

She was more.

The dark voice inside her cried out in triumph.

Her eyes turned to the corner, easily picking the other slave out of the shadows, where she hid, hands over her face, crying.

“Please,” Charmian whispered. “Please don't. I won't tell anyone. I should never have said those things. Mark Antony was a good king. You are my queen.”

Cleopatra heard her, but these things were unimportant. There was nothing but her body, still quivering with hunger, nothing but the blood that even now filled her, fed her. Her eyes swam with red. She could smell the girl's terror radiating from her skin like perfume.

Her thirst was boundless, deeper than the sea that surrounded her city, and she felt she could drink until the world was empty.

She shook her head, trying to rid it of the image of blood-filled oceans, of corpses. Suddenly, her eyes opened wider. What was she doing?

Why should you be denied?
the voice inside her purred.
Why should we hunger?

“Don't be afraid,” Cleopatra heard herself say, her voice soft, the blood soothing her throat. “I will not hurt you. I need you to do something for me.”

“What would you have me do?” the girl asked, still crying, trying to regain her composure. She would run, she was thinking, as soon as Cleopatra turned her back. She'd go to the country and never leave it again. She thought of her mother and her younger sister. She thought of the riverbank and the old temples, suddenly dear to her.

Cleopatra heard it all, and yet she could not find herself any longer. The voice inside her was too loud. It felt like her own heart speaking.

“Dress me,” said Cleopatra. She'd go into the world as she had planned. The beautiful, throbbing world, the dark, the songs and dances and brothels. She would not go out a peasant, though.

She would go out a queen, dressed in her finest gown, radiant, jeweled. She had not been a goddess in her previous life. She'd been a woman pretending to be divine, pretending to be immortal. She was a goddess now, and nothing could stop her. She felt the girl's blood filling her, rushing through her, and the feeling was of pure, clean power.

“Dress me in my wedding robes,” she said. “And bring me my crown.”

When Charmian had tied every ribbon and fastened every clasp, washed her feet and fitted them into her sandals, and veiled her hair with cloth of gold, Cleopatra bent her head as though in modesty.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Beautiful, my queen,” the girl said, a thrum of delicious hope moving through her now. She was to live. She would be free.

“I would pay you for your service,” said Cleopatra.

The girl was not accustomed to being paid. She stood on her toes, startled. Then she thought she would take what was offered. Gold, perhaps. Enough to keep her quiet, and certainly enough to make a life elsewhere.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for the honor.”

She held out her hands.

More
, said Sekhmet's voice, rising up from inside Cleopatra.
More.

Deep inside the queen, a tiny human voice cried out in opposition, demanding to know what she was doing, ordering her to stop. She banished it. She was no one's slave. She would not take orders, least of all from something so weak, so powerless.

“I pay you the greatest honor of all,” Cleopatra said to her slave. “You feed your queen.”

 

 

W
hen she finished, she lay back upon her gilded couch, dizzy with pleasure. Her body was sated, and her eyelids felt heavy for the first time in days.

While drinking from the girl's throat, something wonderful had occurred. A reward, perhaps, from the one she fed. Her heart, quiet all these days, began to beat. Slowly at first, and then more quickly.

She had not lost it after all, and with a heart, she could still enter heaven. If her heart was in her breast, it could be weighed in the Underworld. It could tell Osiris of her deeds on earth and bear witness for her in the court of the dead. She would be allowed into the Duat.

With Antony.

It was his death that had given her this power. It would not be in vain. The heartbeat hadn't lasted long, just a few minutes, but it had been enough to reassure her that she still lived, that she was still Cleopatra.

She would avenge his murder. She would fling these villains from her palace. She'd seize her children from their clutches. She would find Caesarion in Myos Hormos and bring him home. She needed no army this time. She had the strength of a thousand, here, in her fingertips.

She would kill everyone who opposed her.

For the first time since all this had begun, sleep swept over Cleopatra like a veil.

She would dream, for just a little while, and then she would go forth into the world.

A
t last, the queen of Egypt was dead. Octavian had been uncertain how much longer he'd be able to bear occupying the palace with her.

His official resistance to her suicide had been a mere formality, a necessary evil meant to win her subjects to his side. He'd imagined she would be more resourceful. Every time he met with her, he'd half hoped to find her strangled or stabbed, and instead, she looked at him through sunken eyes, starving herself for all to see.

At last, gritting his teeth, certain that Cleopatra would be forced to kill herself to avoid being taken as a trophy to Rome, he leaked the rumor himself and caused the guards about her chamber to be reduced. Then he waited, tapping his foot, agonizing with both guilt and rapture.

Five hours later, it was done. The spy sent to peer in at the peephole confirmed as much, and now it was time for the official discovery of the body.

He could barely contain the sound that threatened to erupt from his mouth, a sort of gasping sob. He clenched his teeth. It would not do. Marcus Agrippa was looking at him, and as a concession to his general's paranoia of lurking assassins, the new ruler of Egypt sent Agrippa before him to knock down the door of the queen's bedchamber, while he tried to master his emotions. It was triumph, that was all. Triumph long desired, long deserved.

Cleopatra had sent incoherent messages to Octavian in the last few days, demands that she be placed beside her husband in the mausoleum, whether she be dead or alive, begging pleas about the fate of her children, but he would not honor them. They were the requests of a whore. He was an emperor. What use did he have for her last wishes? He had what he needed from her. The locations of Alexandria's treasures, including Caesarion, the heir to Egypt's throne.

Only Marcus Agrippa disapproved of Octavian's methods. He was more tight-lipped than usual, more terse, but the man was a traditionalist. Octavian was the new world. Agrippa would come around. He always did.

Octavian stepped into the room, behind Agrippa. It was aggravatingly dark in here, but a couple of lamps burned low.

He started at an unexpected movement in the shadows, near where he assumed the body of Cleopatra would be lying. His men raised their swords, only to see that the queen's pretty little serving slave was still in the room, on her knees beside the queen's body, adjusting the diadem.

Octavian looked at the girl's trembling hands. No doubt, they'd surprised her as she was in the act of thieving.

She was strange-looking, this servant. Her skin seemed bruised, and her eyes rolled in her head. Her lips were blue.

“What is wrong, Charmian?” one of Octavian's soldiers asked, moving toward her.

She turned toward the men and gave them a look of betrayal.

“The queen is dead,” she said. “And I am dead, too. I do my last duty that I may go to heaven.”

She slipped to the floor, and Octavian's man ran to her side. He looked up, grim. At his feet, the body of the other handmaiden lay contorted.

Octavian rejoiced internally. All were dead, and at the queen's hand. That made things easier. He'd make a show of sorrow and convince the citizens that none of it was his doing. Tears sprang to his eyes in advance of the performance. He'd trained himself well. Some of the tears, it occurred unpleasantly to him, were real, but he would not think on that now.

He'd bring her corpse to Rome with him. Those mummies of the ancient days were impressive things, in their gilded wooden cases. Octavian's hero, Alexander the Great, had been treated so, and his grave, near Cleopatra's palaces, contained his body, glittering in a sarcophagus. That was an old tradition, though. Not Roman, not Greek. And he wouldn't do Cleopatra such honors. To be worshipped long after her death.

Octavian would have her corpse draped with plain linen, and he'd place her atop a rolling cart surrounded with flowers, a parade spectacle with her children in chains behind her. They'd all know it to be her that way. There would be no rumors of an empty coffin.

When that was finished, he'd scatter Cleopatra's ashes in Italy, do it himself, make a public ceremony of it. She, who had stolen Mark Antony from Rome, would feed the soil of his country with her dust.

Tensing his jaw, Octavian stepped closer to the queen's corpse, dodging around Agrippa, who stood, ridiculously, with his sword still drawn.

There she was, wrapped in a cloth of sheer, spun gold with a royal purple border. She reclined on a gilded dais, her body as supple and curving as it had been in life, and—