Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [148]
She found the entire thing wearing.
They’d left the slow-moving litter after a few days and traveled in the bed of a wagon, Chrysate’s skin parching beneath the cloth that covered her. By then her charges were heavy and dull-witted with potions and disguised with the witch’s ebbing magic. It had been no small labor keeping them with her, no small labor keeping them hidden.
She ran her fingernails over Alexander and Ptolemy. She did not care for children, particularly male children. There was no point to them, none but this.
They were her only currency now, but it was not time. Not yet.
22
Usem loped across the hill to where Augustus and Agrippa sat on horseback, their armor and regalia shining. The lines of Roman soldiers spread around them, each man perfectly distanced from the next, each man still and resolved. Waiting.
“If she is here, the battle will begin soon,” Usem said, looking at the position of the moon in the sky, and the emperor shuddered. “Do you remember my price?”
There was a light in the man’s eyes, an amber glow, and his teeth seemed sharper than they had before. The Psylli’s snakes twisted about his limbs, hissing at Augustus, their eyes, all of their eyes, directed at him. The wind twisted about him as well, passing over his sweating skin, and it chilled him.
“I do,” Augustus said. Peace for the Roman Empire would not be too great a price for this, he knew now. To be free of Cleopatra. To be free of witches and sorcerers.
“Then my family is at the ready,” Usem said, pointing to the horizon. “Remember. We must kill her. Not trap her.” The clouds were massed there, dark and full of lightning. As the Psylli pointed, Augustus watched horns appear on a cloudy skull, a cloudy tail lashing, a cloudy maw open in a roar. His warriors.
Augustus looked appreciatively at the lines, so measured, so plotted. What could resist the Roman army? Nothing.
The men were silent, watchful. Overhead, Augustus saw a bird flit across the sky, and the wind began to rise, touching each section of the battlefield.
A faint sound of drumming began to echo over the crater, and Usem’s head whipped around, searching the dark for the source. Nothing.
From far across the battlefield, there was a single sound, a roar, long and hoarse and primal. The legionaries shifted uneasily, looking blindly into the dark. Whatever it was, it was nearby.
Suddenly, though, all around the Romans, the night was alive with sparks of light. Augustus drew in his breath. What was happening? He felt surrounded, but he could not see what surrounded him. The light was cold and seemed unattached to any army. The sparks moved, slowly, encroaching.
On the crest of the hilltop, the darkness stretched into silhouettes, and the Romans gasped as one, disbelieving the shape of what they saw.
The moon came out from behind a cloud and revealed Cleopatra’s army.
Augustus was speechless.
The sparks of light were thousands of eyes reflecting like jewels. Cleopatra shone at the center of the line and the sound Augustus had thought was drumming, was not.
It was footsteps.
The earth vibrated with their coming. The queen was flanked by an army of animals. They covered the hillside like a carpet, no space between them. There were as many of them as there were Romans. Tigers and leopards and lions. A bull elephant, its tusks long and yellow. A rhinoceros. Everything the Romans had ever seen in the arenas, in marketplaces, in dreams, and in nightmares. Animals who had been captured and pressed into service. Animals who’d danced