Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [156]
We are not finished, she said, and her voice was only in his mind. She reached out her hand, and though she did not touch him, Augustus felt a chill invade him. He felt her touching his heart, clenching it in her talons, and then he felt her tear it from him. Was it his heart? Or something else? He could not tell what was happening.
He gasped, feeling a sudden absence at his center, a loss. A searing pain, like lightning striking, shot through the absence, and he felt a wind whirling inside his chest. Cleopatra smiled.
Augustus fell to his knees, limp, bewildered, curling around the missing place.
Cleopatra turned away from the emperor and looked down at her husband.
Antony stood at the edge of the crater, his skin already flickering and fading as the witch who had summoned him died.
“I will see you again,” Antony said to his wife.
“Te teneo,” said Cleopatra.
“As you are mine,” said Antony. “I will wait for you.”
Cleopatra’s face clenched with pain as she pulled the arrow from her body and threw it into the crater.
“You may wait until the end of time,” she said.
Antony smiled at her. “I will wait,” he said. He gathered their dead children into his arms, and there was a flash in the west, as though the sun had appeared at the edge of the sky and looked over it, onto the battlefield.
Those who were looking in that direction, those who could bear to do so, glimpsed something in the brightness. A ship, perhaps, and its captain leaning out of the vessel with long, shining hair, eyes as blue as lapis, skin made of gold.
Then it was gone, and Antony was gone as well, with their children, and with him Hercules’ arrows.
Cleopatra lay on the ground, her body pale, her wound mortal.
She was dying at last. Her lips curled up in a smile.
She took a final breath, looking into the night sky, and then she was still.
There was a last divine roar of sorrow, one that caused the ocean beyond Avernus to rise up and throw itself against the cliff, and then the battle was done.
26
Augustus, rigid with horror, stood and took a step toward his enemy’s body. She did not move. Blood flowed from her side. She’d done something to him, something he did not understand. His hands fumbled. A coin to pay her passage. He had nothing.
He knelt beside Cleopatra, put out his shaking hand, brushed the snow from her face and closed her eyes.
In the darkness of the crater, Augustus saw a single ghostly spot of light, a shining, wavering thing rising to the surface for a moment, its thousands of teeth, its watery gleaming form, its razor-feathered body, before it, too, dove into the depths, descending back to its home in the Underworld. Something pulled at Augustus. Home. He wavered on the edge of the crater, uncertain, and then looked around the battlefield, at the devastation there.
He looked at the monsters that still walked the earth, the lions and tigers stalking their prey, eating the dead.
The Psylli eyed at him from across the battlefield.
“We have won,” Usem said. “This is a victory. I will not see you again.”
“No,” Augustus said.
“Nor Rome,” said Usem, and nodded at him, only once. “May you live in peace, Emperor.”
The monsters of sand and wind surrounded him, shrinking as he moved. Usem held out his hands to them, and they converged into a single form. A woman, her hair flying behind her, suddenly stood before the snake sorcerer, and Augustus watched her kiss him. He watched as the Western Wind’s daughter took her husband in her arms, watched as the air whirled around them, watched as they rose into the sky and disappeared together into the darkness beyond the hillside.
The morning was coming, gray and sickly at the horizon. Augustus swayed, looking at the legions of Romans who stood, awed and bleeding, mingled into a single dazzled pool of men. There were senators dead before him, and loyal soldiers, too. He saw Agrippa making his way among them, speaking to the wounded,