Queen of Kings Read online

  Cleopatra awaited him in the doorway of their bedchamber.

  “It is not over,” she said, breaking his trance. He shook off his thoughts and took her in his arms, relishing, even in these dark times, her shape against him.

  “It is,” he told her. “It will be.”

  He ran his hands down her back and over the roundness of her hips, pulling her tightly to his chest. Grief nearly overtook him then. If he did not win the next morning, the Romans—his own Romans—would tear her from him, and there would be nothing he could do to stop them.

  Antony had been married three times before and had even thought he loved before, but he had been wrong. This woman was all he wanted. She was his general, his queen. The gods had willed it.

  Antony put out a hand to run his fingers along Cleopatra’s throat and over her collarbone, and she tilted her head, watching him as he touched her. Her body had borne three children for him, another for Julius Caesar, and still, at thirty-eight, she looked like a young girl, with her smooth, bronze skin, her humorous mouth, her dark, long-lashed eyes. He could see the beginnings of lines around those eyes. The passage of time became her. Her curves had gotten softer, though she was still slender. She’d never looked more beautiful, even in her simple nightdress, her face without its customary paints, her fingers and arms stripped of their jewels. He untied the knots at her shoulders and let the gown fall.

  She walked to the window and drew back the curtains to let the full moon shine in on them.

  “A good omen,” Cleopatra whispered, smiling at him. “We will win this war.”

  He looked at her as she stood naked in the moonlight. Her straight spine, her golden skin, her black hair still twisted up with glittering pins.

  “We will win this war,” she repeated, her tone suddenly fierce.

  “I fear we’ve already lost it,” he said.

  “Perhaps I know something you do not,” Cleopatra replied.

  “Is there a legion hidden in the palace cellars?” he asked, and laughed bitterly. He didn’t have enough men. He had known it from the beginning, and he’d fought anyway.

  “The gods are on our side. I can feel it,” she said, her jaw tensing with determination. She suddenly leaned out the window, looking at something passing on the street below, her brow furrowed.

  Antony rose to see what she was looking at, but she whirled, guiding him away from the window and pushing him back onto the bed.

  “Don’t look out there,” she said. “Nothing is wrong. The city sleeps. Look at me.”

  Antony wondered for a moment what it was she kept him from seeing, but she stroked him, kissed him, swore to him that together they would prevail.

  As ever, he was unable to resist her. In truth, he did not wish to. If this was the end, then let it be spent with his beloved, his hands memorizing the smooth hollow at the top of her thigh, his lips singing the silken folds of her. Antony marveled at the miracle of it, feeling her take a breath in even as he cried out, her fingers clenching his shoulders and her muscles tightening around him.

  “Again,” she whispered, and he saw that her eyes were full of tears. He kissed her face until they were gone.

  They made love for hours, even as the sounds outside the window grew louder and louder, music and laughing, screaming and shouting.

  “I am yours,” she swore again and again, and he believed her, took strength from her.

  “As I am yours,” he told her. “Until we both are dead.”

  “And thereafter?” she asked.

  “And thereafter,” he answered, holding her tightly, feeling his heart beating, and feeling hers as well.

  At dawn, he kissed Cleopatra good-bye and marched his remaining troops through the Canopic Gate and toward the hippodrome, resolved to meet his death with honor.

  He watched from a hillside as his fleet, rowing in galleys from the harbor, threw themselves courageously against Octavian’s force. Maybe Cleopatra was right. They might win yet.

  He drove his fist into the air, preparing a battle cry, when, out on the water, his men suddenly raised their oars to salute the enemy. A moment later, his Egyptian legion hoisted the Roman flag and joined with Caesar’s fleet. The two armies rowed back toward Alexandria, attacking the city together.

  Antony spun to consult with the head of his Egyptian cavalry, and the man finished the war with a single sentence.

  “Cleopatra belongs to Rome now,” the man said. “Egypt’s armies go where Cleopatra goes.”

  “What do you mean?” Antony asked. The words did not make sense. Egypt’s armies served Antony, and Cleopatra’s only goal was to defend her city.

  The man looked at Antony with a pitying expression for a moment. “Your queen has betrayed you, sir. We no longer serve you.”

  “Liar!” Antony shouted, tearing his sword from its scabbard to strike the man for his impudence, but he was already galloping away with his company, leaving Antony and his last loyal soldiers hopelessly outnumbered by enemy Romans and by his own former men. Still, they did not take him prisoner. They did not kill him. Why not? Whose orders did they follow?

  Surely not hers. She would never do such a thing. Never.

  With the remainder of his infantry, Antony attacked Octavian’s forces near the hippodrome, but he was forced back into the city in retreat, even as the ghastly understanding sank into him. Antony staggered as he made his way into Alexandria, scarcely noticing the enemy forces pushing their way through the gates behind him.

  Betrayed. The knowledge boiled inside him.

  “I am yours,” she’d sworn, but she had lied.

  There was no other explanation for what had happened.

  Cleopatra had directed the Egyptian legions to leave him, commanded his own men to abandon him. She’d sold him to save herself.

  What would she receive in return?

  Had she done with Octavian as she had done with Julius Caesar when he’d marched into Alexandria? Smuggled herself into his camp and wooed him? Caesar had given her the throne. Octavian might let her keep it, given the right bribe. This was a personal war more than a political one. Octavian wanted Antony’s shame, and what better way than to take his wife and all of his loyal soldiers? To laugh as Antony stood alone and beaten?

  His men surrounded him, drawing him into the warrens of the Old City and hiding his recognizable figure behind their shields.

  “What have you done?” he screamed, again and again, and his guards, pressing him into a decrepit building, surrounding the building with their swords, could not tell whether he referred to his queen or to himself.

  3

  The queen of Egypt willed herself to press the point of the knife deeper into her palm. Slowly, blood rose to the wound, and with it, a strange and terrible feeling. For an instant, she felt as though everything she loved was sealed away from her, forever trapped on the other side of the mausoleum walls. She stopped, her heart pounding.

  No. They were only fears, and she was running out of time. Determined, Cleopatra cut more quickly until blood trickled over her fingers and into the goblet she held to catch it.

  She glanced down at the incision from life line to heart line, trying not to tremble. She was doing the right thing.

  There was no other choice. Her enemy was camped just outside the Gate of the Sun, his forces overwhelming the remaining resistance of Egypt.

  Cleopatra must perform this spell or lose the kingdom. Her country had once been a place of magicians and gods. It would be again. She would not surrender.

  She stood, her hair unbound, her feet bare and painted, her eyes rimmed in thick kohl, in the center of an intricate, faceted symbol incorporating countless glyphs etched in pigments. At each locus, priceless pyramids of fine-ground ebony, cinnamon, and lapis balanced, ready to be dispersed with a breath. Here, a scarab drawn in dust of malachite, and here, a sun disc poured in saffron. Polished metal bowls placed at intervals around the room smoked with clouds of incense, a perfume both sweet and biting. Her crown, wi
th its three golden cobras, shone in the lamplight.

  Cleopatra shivered, noticing the chill of the marble beneath her feet. The blood welling over her fingertips was the warmest thing in the room. She was alone in the mausoleum she’d built with Antony, the safest and most secure location in the city, or so she hoped. Cleopatra’s two handmaidens kept watch over the stairs that led to the second floor of the structure, though there was little need for that. The crypt, designed not just for burial but as a fortress, was two stories high, and the lower floor had no windows or doors, just thick, smooth stone walls. The top floor had only one entrance, a barred window some forty lengths above a man’s head, accessible only from the interior. The place was unfinished—Cleopatra and Antony had not expected to need it so soon—but it was complete enough to be formidable.

  All the treasures of Alexandria were piled around her, the entirety of Egypt’s war chest, along with firepots, papyrus, and wood, stacked from end to end of the chamber, the better to kindle the flames should things not go as Cleopatra planned.

  Everything was ready. Everything but Antony, who was somewhere outside the city walls, stubbornly fighting a last, hopeless battle against the invaders. He belonged here, beside her, but time had run out. Two hours before, she’d sent a messenger running across the city to tell her husband that all was not lost, to bid him join her, but Antony had not come.

  She could not let herself think about what that might mean.

  She’d woken up beside him that morning, and for a moment, looking at the lines in his sleeping face, at the gray in his beard, at the scars and bruises on his body, she felt more woman than queen. The past year had aged Antony, and where Cleopatra had always seen his courage and strength, she now saw his mortality. The time for hesitation was past, and yet, as she thought of the day ahead, of the power she planned to invoke, her heart raced with uncertainty.

  Cleopatra had not told Antony what she planned to do. She knew he would not approve, and there was no time to argue with him. She was the queen. The decisions were hers alone. This was her home country, not his.

  Looking at him beside her in the bed, however, she’d suddenly felt very foolish, wondering if this would be the last day she held her children, the last day she kissed her husband. She sought to summon powers unseen in thousands of years. What if she did not succeed?

  Cleopatra nearly shook Antony awake with a plan to flee and take their children with them. As she put her hand on his chest to wake him, though, he opened his eyes.

  “We will win this war,” he told her, and smiled.

  His resolve brought her duties back to her, her responsibilities to the kingdom, to her people, to her crown. Of course she could not flee. She was the queen. She must save the kingdom.

  She helped Antony don his armor, kissed him good-bye, and went to her throne room to meet with her advisors as though this were a day like any other, instead of a day on which she might lose everything.

  The advisors urged her to send her ancestral crown out to the conqueror, but she refused. Instead, she made a public sacrifice to assure Octavian that she was on the verge of giving Alexandria over to him. Goat. Her nostrils curled at the smell of its blood. There was no question of surrender, but it was in her interest to suggest that there was.

  Now Cleopatra felt like vomiting, whether from fear or anticipation, she did not know. She’d be the first in thousands of years to perform this spell, such as it was. There were pieces missing from it, and Nicolaus, the scholar who’d translated the spell, had guessed at them. She only hoped he was right.

  The scholar had refused to accompany her to the mausoleum, insisting nervously that there was no role in the spell for him. He was not wrong, she reminded herself. No one but she could perform this sacrifice. She was the ruler, the pharaoh. It was hers to do, reserved for royalty, and if it ended badly—

  She must not lose courage now.

  In the darkness of the siege, Cleopatra had remembered the stories of the time before Alexander. The old gods of Egypt had intervened frequently in the lives of men, savage instead of beautiful, bloodthirsty instead of thoughtful. They’d been born out of the waters of Chaos, and their natures—lust, rage, hunger—were undiluted by the rules of civilization. Cleopatra’s patron goddess was Isis, but Isis was not the right deity for this task. She’d evolved over the centuries into something too much a part of the new world, too much a part of Rome.

  Sekhmet, Nicolaus suggested. An older goddess, and a darker one.

  The Scarlet Lady some called her. That, or the Lady of Slaughter. Sekhmet’s breath was the desert wind, and her purpose was warfare. The lion-headed deity was a protector in battle, stalking over the land and destroying the enemies of the pharaoh. Death and destruction were her nectar. She was the goddess of the end of the world, the Mistress of Dread, and she drank the blood of her foes. Sekhmet would as easily drink the blood of the Romans. They would have no idea what had come for them. If Octavian thought to conquer Cleopatra, he could die trying.

  Cleopatra surveyed her preparations. The goddess, in the form of an icon encrusted with coral, lapis, malachite, carnelian, bloodstone, and opal, occupied a new place of honor, enshrined near the tombs. The icon was older than anything else in the room, dating from a time long before Cleopatra’s family had reigned. As for the rest, Cleopatra had spent a lifetime acquiring these treasures. More than a lifetime. The portions she hadn’t obtained herself as offerings and gifts had come down from her father, and his father before him, from her queenly grandmothers and from Alexander himself. They had accrued over three hundred years, from all of Africa and Macedonia, from Italy, from India, from the waters and the deserts, from the sky and caves and stars, from the edges of the world.

  All that time, Egypt had been ruled over by her family, beautiful, ferocious descendants of the gods.

  It was fitting that it would be she who saved Egypt, using her own wits and talents. Her father had been a weak-willed ruler. The men before him were the same, fattening on the luxuries afforded them as kings. Cleopatra and her grandmother, on the other hand, warred and gained lands. They’d made alliances and brokered compromises. This was the culmination of Cleopatra’s work.

  Why, then, was she so afraid? A droplet of blood flew out from her shaking hand, spattering on the icon. She quickly pulled her hand back.

  “Find me a spell,” she’d ordered the scholars days before, when it had become clear that Octavian would not give up his claim on Egypt. “A spell for a summoning.”

  Nicolaus the Damascene, tutor to Cleopatra’s twins, found this one deep in the collection, although he complained that it was not entirely complete. A part of the scroll had been lost in the fires at the Great Library of Alexandria, and what remained was unclear.

  Cleopatra called upon another scholar, this one Egyptian, to assist in the translation. He startled when he saw the scroll.

  “Where was this found? It should not exist. The spell is not to be used lightly,” he informed her indignantly.

  “Lightly?” Cleopatra asked. “I do nothing lightly. Do you believe that Egypt is governed lightly?”

  “It is forbidden,” he insisted.

  “I am a queen. Nothing is forbidden. It is not a spell for commoners. I will do it myself.”

  “Then you are a fool,” the Egyptian said, looking her in the eyes.

  She was shocked. How dare he speak so? She was still the ruler, though she did not know how much longer that would be true.

  “The lost portion of the text would contain spells to protect the pharaoh who summoned the goddess. Do not think that your station will force Sekhmet to obey your wishes. She destroys. That is her nature. Such a one will not be easily controlled.”

  “I thought you were a man of letters,” she said. “Not a common villager. Translate the spell. What I do with it is none of your concern.”

  “I will not,” he replied, his voice shaking. “I cannot.”

  “Then you will die,” she warned him. How dare he del
ay Alexandria’s defense?

  “I would rather die by the hand of a queen than by the hand of this goddess.”

  She stared at him a moment, impressed by his bravado but disgusted by his resistance. She had him beheaded, and Nicolaus nervously translated the remainder of the scroll himself.

  Now, as her blood filled the goblet, Cleopatra felt the dread she’d banished that morning rising again. She placed the goblet beside the icon and lit a pyramid of incense, breathing in deeply. The scent of death, she thought, and instantly corrected herself. No. It was the scent of victory.

  Ayear had passed since the Battle of Actium, and Octavian, the man Cleopatra still thought of as the child general, had spent it mocking Egypt, while gathering his forces to invade it. The slight boy with the pale gray eyes was a child no longer.

  It was sixteen years since she’d seen him last, during a visit to her then lover, Julius Caesar. She was twenty-one and the new mother of Caesarion, Caesar’s first and only son. Octavian was stretched across a sickbed, a reedy, fevered skeleton by the time Caesar and Cleopatra arrived at his mother’s house.

  How she wished that she’d known then what she knew now: that the frail great-nephew of Rome’s imperator would one day besiege her city. She might have killed him and saved herself years of pain.

  Instead, she sat beside him on the bed and smoothed his fine, curly hair from off his brow. Octavian had just turned seventeen, but he looked twelve. He opened his eyes to survey Cleopatra.

  “Am I dying?” the boy asked her. “They will not tell me.”

  “Certainly not. You will live a long life,” she promised, though she could see his heart racing beneath nearly translucent skin, and the edges of his bones protruding, birdlike, all over his body.

  Poor little thing, she actually thought, tucking his coverlet more tightly around him before leaving the room.

  Now that poor little thing wielded more power than anyone else in the world.

  Cleopatra had spent every moment of the past year at his mercy, fruitlessly bribing and extracting promises of protection from her neighboring rulers, all the while comforting her husband. Antony was guilt-ridden, blaming himself for the defeat at Actium. Cleopatra did not blame her husband. She was the queen. She should have known better than to do what she’d done in that battle. Funds for the continuing war had seemed the most important thing, and so, when Actium began to look like a defeat, she fled for Alexandria with her gold. Her husband followed her, his ships shielding hers, and this armed Octavian with damning propaganda, painting Antony as loyal to a foreign queen instead of to his home country.