Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [1]
The one thing I know with certainty is that she will come for me.
By virtue of position, I have been witness to more than any other man. I have seen rooms filled with gold, and streets stacked with bones. I have seen lakes turn to blood. I have watched the moon dance on the fingertips of witches, and stars extinguishing their lights at the behest of immortals. I have seen the beasts of the wilderness commanded into war by a woman. I have seen a lioness become a queen, and a queen become a monster.
I have seen things I cannot say aloud, though I am bound to write them here.
I will recount the story the emperor forbade me to tell. I will write the truth as far as I know it, in desperate hope that this may be enough. I cannot fight alone. All I have are words.
May these words be enough to save you.
The old scholar paused in his writing, tracing his fingers over the twisting branch of scar that ran from his palm to his shoulder and down across his back. It had been there so long that it seemed an original part of him, but it gave him pain still, particularly when the thunder came. Outside the sibyl’s cave, the air smelled of storms, and Nicolaus’s scar lit with knowledge of the weather. There was a tremor in his hand that nearly obliterated his writing, and when he drew breath, it was with difficulty. He’d delayed almost too long. She walked the earth, and there was nothing he could do to stop her now, nothing but this.
He willed his thoughts back to the Egypt of his youth. The pale, marble-paved passageways of Alexandria, the flashing-eyed women, the feel of his sandaled feet against the road. The gilded barges and shining faces. He’d come to the center of the world. All these things, in memory, held a sweetness, a tenderness that he knew would flee him as he wrote. That far-off past was a clear pool, and his subsequent history was a measure of dark ink fouling the waters. Or blood, perhaps. His memories were stained with red.
He’d been an innocent back then, convinced of immortality, if not of the flesh, then of the words. He’d thought himself a writer of great truths, imagining his histories held in the hands of young scholars, his name inscribed on monuments, his tomb garlanded.
Those dreams were long gone. Nicolaus had seen the future, and it was not a place for poets.
He thought of the Museion, where he’d studied with his friends, working, so arrogantly, on what he believed would be the first and only true history of the universe. He’d finished it, a hundred and forty-four books of it, only to watch them burn. He’d written too much of the truth, where he ought to have written lies. He’d imagined himself a friend of the emperor and therefore untouchable, and he had been wrong.
Nicolaus was lucky. The Romans had never found his real work, and for this he was thankful. It was this work he held in his hands now, as he tried to summon the courage to finish writing what was necessary.
He thought of her, of the graceful beckoning of her jeweled hand, when she’d set him the task that would ruin his life as well as her own.
“Find me a spell,” she whispered, as alive in his memory as though she stood before him. He smelled the spicy perfume of her skin, the honey on her breath. “A spell for a summoning.”
It was not even a question that he would help her. She smiled at him, and he looked into her beautiful, dark eyes, seeing her hope, seeing her need.
The last time he’d seen her, her eyes had been changed into something quite different.
He promised then to do her bidding, and he did it willingly. How could he not? Nicolaus hadn’t been the first man to sacrifice his own life for hers, but he had also sacrificed the lives of countless others. For more than fifty years now, he’d watched helplessly as the prophecies came to pass, knowing she’d scarcely begun.
He’d seen the future in his emperor’s eyes. The ruler, in delirium, sleepless and haunted, had confided his visions to Nicolaus, swearing him to secrecy, but