Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [12]
The door shook again, someone throwing himself at it.
“The queen requests that Mark Antony join her at their mausoleum! She informs him that all is not lost!” the messenger shouted from outside the room.
“The queen is dead, you fool,” his soldier shouted in return. “The queen has killed herself.”
“She has not!” said the messenger. “I have just left her company. I was delayed in the city!”
The door burst open, and a horrified soldier stumbled over Eros’s body and to Antony’s side.
“He’s wounded!” the legionary cried to the other guards outside the door, and they crowded into the room.
“No,” said Antony, calm now, feeling his life running out. “I am dead.”
“But I recognize the man,” the soldier said. “He is the queen’s secretary, Diomedes, and he says that the queen lives! The first messenger lied. She calls you to come to her.”
Antony took a shuddering breath, trying to bring himself back to consciousness. It was too much to make sense of this. A false message? She lived?
“Carry me to Cleopatra,” he ordered, and when he noted the hesitation on the men’s faces, he used a stronger voice. “You will take me to the queen. This will be your last duty in my service. Perform it well.”
They dressed the wound as best they could, covered Antony to protect him from the eyes of enemies, and then lifted the pallet carefully onto their shoulders, and proceeded into the street.
The mattress was a boat, and there was a stormy sea beneath him. Antony laid his hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. The lighthouse rose into his vision, smooth and white, a perfect thing. He’d lived on Pharos island for a time, in a small house away from the city, at the foot of the great stone tower. It was just after his return from Actium, when his sorrow at his own betrayals was too much to bear in company.
At the top of the tower, so high it could scarcely be seen, a golden statue of Zeus glittered in the sun. Antony smiled, seeing it still shining there even as he passed through the city, a witness to his own funerary procession.
The only sounds he’d heard while he stayed in that house were those of waves crashing up against the shore. There was no Rome, no legions, no love. He’d never felt so peaceful. He might have stayed forever in that little house, like a philosopher in his cave, but he craved company, drink, and jokes, and he dreamed of his wife. He walked back across the causeway and found everything at the palace as though he’d never left. Back into her arms he went then, and back to them he would go now. If he had died for her, let her see it done. Let there be an end.
An Egyptian soldier, drunken and disheveled, bowed his head as Antony was carried past, thinking him dead already.
“Is it the king you carry?” the soldier asked Antony’s men.
“It is Mark Antony,” they answered.
“You carry the king of Egypt, the honored husband of our queen,” the soldier said.
Beneath his covering, Antony’s lips curved into a painful smile. He’d never imagined that he would die a king.
5
The boy darted back through Alexandria, singing to himself. He’d delivered his message to Mark Antony and seen the great man in person. He was still heroic to look at, despite the dirt of battle upon him. His dark hair was iced with silver. The boy had seen it in the dim light of the building. But his arms were still ropy with muscle, and his chest was wide and armored.
One day, perhaps, the boy would grow up to be a warrior, and if he did, he hoped he would be tall and strong like Mark Antony. The great soldier looked down upon the boy, and the boy saw that he controlled the sun and the moon. He patted the boy’s shoulder. His body still vibrated with the honor.
By the time he reached the boundary of the city, the Gate of the Sun was open, and the boy skittered through it, toward the Roman camp. A tall, broad-chested man emerged from the tent and looked at him carefully, his lips tight.
“Did you see him?” he asked the boy.
“I