Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [152]
“Surrender!” Cleopatra yelled back from across the battlefield. A loyal soldier ran at her, his sword poised to slice through her body.
Cleopatra grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him into the air, breaking his body in her hands. She dropped him like a discarded toy.
In the crowd before the boulder, Augustus watched an ivory horn tossing a legionary into the air, piercing his kidneys and heaving him up and into his fellows. A glittering black eye, and dark, scaled skin trickled with tarry blood.
Usem ran forward and slashed at the rhinoceros and it retreated, bellowing, even as Augustus’s own Romans, his own soldiers, marched forward at their counterparts, the men still loyal to Rome. Augustus watched, his breath catching in his chest, as the soldiers just before him, the men guarding him, began to cave in.
Usem shouted, and the beasts of the Western Wind were released against the betraying Romans. They snarled, their bodies created of dust and light, of dark and chill, of tornado and hurricane, of lightning and thunder. Their bodies contained uprooted trees and boulders, ships and creatures. The betraying Romans and the senators who commanded them wavered.
“I would never give you your children!” Augustus shouted. “Why would I give them to such a mother?”
She need only come a little closer. Behind his back, he positioned the bow. The arrow was already placed in it. Only the string remained to be pulled taut, and it could be fired.
“You must kill her,” Usem hissed. “That is the only way this will end. Wait for me. I will give you room.”
23
Cleopatra’s vision blurred with blood and light. It was as it had been aboard the ship, her hunger, her fury. She lost moments and then found herself with blood on her hands. The waters below were red and the lake was dotted with Roman corpses. The ground was slick and the fallen lay in heaps, arms spread out, their gods nowhere to be seen.
She could feel Sekhmet’s glory. She was Sekhmet’s glory.
It was all going according to her plan. Her army of beasts and Romans spread across the field, fighting at her command. Her body surged with the violence, with the bloodshed, and she felt her strength growing with every kill. Sekhmet, high above, roared.
Nicolaus dashed across the battlefield, too near her, and she leapt at him.
“Betrayer,” she hissed.
“I did not mean to be,” the historian whispered, and she could see that he had not. Still. He would be punished.
She clawed him, only once, from his shoulder to his wrist, his writing hand. Then she left him on the field and moved on, closer, closer, to the emperor.
Suddenly, before her was an unexpected warrior. The snake charmer. She hissed at him, and he hissed back, his knife dancing from hand to hand. She clawed at him, spitting with fury as his blade nicked her arm, in the very place where the Hydra venom had wounded her. He danced faster than light, faster than air, and suddenly, it seemed as though he was flying.
What was she fighting?
The Psylli rose on the back of a beast, and the beast spat dust and bone in her face. It spat salt water, a tidal wave of ocean, and fish, gasping, plucked from the deep, and still Usem attacked her, his eyes blazing.
Vengeance. Reckoning. Augustus was standing behind the man, fumbling with something behind his back, but she couldn’t get past Usem.
The warrior and the wind were stronger than she had expected, and it took all her power to fight them.
The elder boy struggled, drugged though he was, but the witch had him, a rope twisted about his neck. What was left of Chrysate’s face contorted as she dragged the child up the hillside path, invisible to those battling above her. The other boy she had by the wrist, her fingernails digging into his flesh. Her scry had revealed strange things, changes in the fates. She’d consulted it just before the battle. What had happened? What had the Northern witch done?
The end of everything, but she saw nothing for herself. No Chrysate. No Hecate. No cave in Thessaly. Nothing.
Chrysate