Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [144]
A messenger from Cleopatra awaited him. He had known it was coming.
Cleopatra had sent a child she’d plucked from the village near her hiding place. It was fitting. Augustus had sent a message to Antony that way, the message that had led to Antony’s death.
All who saw the messenger pass, in the towns that had been scarred by disease, in the towns that had been touched by the rumors of strange goings-on in Rome, of monsters, of a dying emperor, looked to the heavens and tried to interpret the signs.
Surely, they imagined the child they saw riding on the back of a running tiger, his tiny form jouncing as he held tight to the cat’s fur. Surely, it had not been a tiger but some other sort of animal.
The boy stood before Agrippa and Augustus, offering them a message addressed to “Octavian, Augustus, Emperor, Fool.”
Augustus took it, aggrieved, and read it aloud. The writing was elegant.
“Surrender my children and yourself, and I will leave your country and your people. I will not return here.”
Agrippa looked at Augustus.
“The rest?” Agrippa asked.
“If you choose not to surrender, know that I will lay waste to Italy. I will kill everyone you love, and I will destroy your country as you destroyed mine.”
“Rome will not surrender,” Augustus informed the messenger. “Rome does not surrender. Its emperor is not a coward. We will fight.”
“Midnight, then,” the boy trilled, excited. “Seven nights from tonight. At Avernus. She will meet you there, and in fair battle.”
“Avernus?” asked Augustus, appalled.
It was to the south of Rome, a crater where Aeneas had descended into Hades, according to the legends. There the rivers of the Underworld came aboveground in bitter springs and a poisoned lake, and caves housed creatures Augustus did not want to encounter. There was one cave in particular, at the ancient Greek settlement of Cumæ, which he remembered all too well from his fight against the pirate Sextus Pompeius, twenty years before. It had a chill about it, and a depth that was beyond sounding. It was an ideal hiding place for a monster, meandering, as it did, deep into the hillside.
Augustus did not want to go to Avernus. Nor did he want to stay in Rome. He could not fight her here, in a city filled with people. He thought of the plague springing from village to village. Too many would die, and the streets and buildings offered ample hiding places for a thing such as the queen. Better the wide, open expanses surrounding the crater. Better, he knew, but it made him uneasy nonetheless.
“Will she fight alone?” Augustus asked the boy.
The boy shrugged.
“It will not matter,” said Agrippa. “We are Romans. Have we not fought on plains and in mountains? Have we not fought our way through the cities of Babylonia and the forests of Germany? We have fought at Cumæ and at Avernus.”
“Not well,” Augustus pointed out. The fumes of the crater lake had sickened the men. Birds were said to die midair above the place.
“My men are prepared, and we have our weapon now.”
Augustus returned to the messenger, outside the doors of the study, and handed him a coin.
“Tell your mistress we will meet her.”
He wondered if he imagined what he saw next. The striped, shining fur, the boy mounting the beast’s back as though he were mounting a horse, the liquid stalking motion of the thing, and moments later, the lashing tail disappearing around the corner of the courtyard wall.
Shaking his head to dispel the vision, he returned to his study, where Agrippa had taken the bow from its box. Wincing at the pain in his still festering calf, Agrippa attempted to draw the bow, straining at its string.
“We need not use Hercules’ bow,” Augustus pointed out. “The poison is in the arrows.”
Agrippa was still weak, Augustus knew, and moreover, the bow was meant to be drawn only by a hero, which Agrippa clearly was not.
Augustus had no doubts about himself in this regard. He would draw the bow when the time came. He would fire the arrows. He would kill the queen. It was his fated task, and he was the