Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [122]
The dog bared its teeth as the serpents about his throat tightened their grip on him, twisting and constricting his movements.
“Kill him,” she told the serpents, for this was a creature in opposition to herself.
Antony gripped her arm, distracting her from her task.
“Persephone and Hades will not take kindly to that,” he told her. “We should not anger them before we ask for their benevolence.”
The tremendous dog slipped to the floor of the cavern, a high whine coming from its mouths, his six eyes closing as the snakes twisted about him.
“Let him sleep,” she told the snakes. “Let him dream. Do not let him die.”
The serpents reluctantly loosened their hold, and she sang the last notes of their song as she and Antony climbed over the sleeping beast, feeling its rattling breath and sighs.
“That was well done,” Antony said, but Cleopatra still felt the violence that had nearly overtaken her. It receded only with effort. And the sight of the goddess, chained, had reminded her too much of herself. Her own chain was long now, and she could not feel Sekhmet, but how much time did she have before her mistress called again?
The sound of babies crying for their mothers stopped Cleopatra in the center of the passageway, brutally reminded of her children.
“Where have you taken me?” she asked.
“We must pass through the Cavern of Infants to reach the rest of Hades,” Antony said. “There is nothing to be done. For some, this is more frightening than anything else they see here, but you have seen many things. This is not the worst of them. Take my hand.”
They were surrounded by shades of newborns who’d been taken outdoors and left exposed on the rubbish heaps of Rome, ready forage for wild dogs. This was the fate of infants unacknowledged by patriarchs, even those of noble families. It was perfectly legal. The fortunate were plucked up from the street and sold into the slave trade. The less fortunate died unmourned and were sent here, to a nation of dead babies, an endless nursery of weeping infants as far as the queen could see.
Cleopatra felt her chest contract. The shades were nearly all daughters.
Antony pushed her along, but she looked back, aching in the places that remained her own, mourning the dead. Their tiny hands stretched up, grasping nothing. Their lips moved, suckling at nothing. There were no nursemaids in the Cavern of Infants, no caressing arms, no tiny carved lions, no language tutors. These ghost babies would never walk, nor talk.
“We must continue,” Antony told her. “There is nothing to be done. The Underworld has its own ways.”
“Wrong ways,” Cleopatra informed him, furious.
“It grants you the favor of passage.”
“They are in Rome. Do you think of them?” she asked Antony. “Alexander and Ptolemy, Selene? They are with Augustus.”
“There is nothing to be done. They live, and we are shadows,” he said.
“They do not live, not all of them,” she said. “Some of them may be here. Caesarion died after you did. The Romans cut my son down in the square.”
“I miss them as much as you do,” he said. “Both the living and the dead. But now all we can do is save you.”
Cleopatra’s sorrow grew at the thought of Caesarion wandering alone through this Roman Underworld. Perhaps this was wrong, she thought with a flash of hopefulness. Perhaps he was in the Duat. He had died in Egypt. His mother was Egyptian. Perhaps it had worked the way it should have. Perhaps his pure heart had been weighed. Perhaps he was in the Beautiful West, safe there.
And so they went from the infants, and through the nameless suicides, through the court of Minos, where innocents executed on the testimony of liars were tried and tried again by juries of their dead fellows.
After days and nights of walking, Cleopatra and Antony passed into the fields of mourning, arranged like beautiful gardens with paths paved in tiny fragments of bone and blooming black roses and myrtle trees. Those who had died of love wandered here, brokenhearted and betrayed still, drowning in tears and inflamed by lust despite