Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [158]
Now his history was the history of millions. He knew everything, and there was no forgetting. He was the one who would remember.
He ran from the battlefield, holding his injured arm, tears running down his face. The skin began to heal as he ran, and he knew she had twined his fate with something else. He knew that he would not die tonight.
He had a purpose yet.
He was the keeper of the history of this day, and of the days before it. He would tell the stories of the serpents and the soldiers, of the gods and of the goddesses. He would tell the story of the queen and of her love, of their children, and of the shades who had come from below the earth.
All of it, all of everything and of everyone, was within him.
He was a historian at last, wholly and utterly.
He would tell the world.
Epilogue
The emperor hobbled through an orchard at the foot of Vesuvius, the wind pressing against his robes, chilling his thin skin, ruffling his sparse hair. Something was familiar to him here. The pattern of the stars against the sky, perhaps, was like a tattoo he’d seen once on a woman’s back. Augustus searched his memory for the details, but it was no use. It was only a fleeting recognition, maybe something he’d dreamt long ago. He laughed quietly, a rasping cough of dark amusement. His mind had become like Oceanus, and all the places he’d once known were drowned in salt sea, peopled with ghosts. He could no longer tell truth from fiction, nor his own recollections from things he’d invented.
Augustus was seventy-six years old. He’d reigned over Rome, over his empire, for nearly forty-four years. It was the nineteenth of August, the month he’d named after himself. Other Augusts crowded his memory, one spent in Alexandria. He thought suddenly of Antony. Augustus had long outlived his old enemy, his old friend, his old idol, but he did not know why he thought of him now. He remembered walking into the cool depths of a mausoleum and—
No, no. He would not think of that.
A flash of memory, another August, this one on a battlefield. Tigers roaring and an emptiness where his heart had been, snow falling down upon him from the heavens. A god screaming from the sky, and his enemy, his beautiful enemy, bleeding in the snow. What had she done with his heart? What was the strangeness he felt? His soul—
He did not know.
He remembered an ancient woman with silver eyes, tapping him on the forehead with her distaff, emptying his history and replacing it with unknowns.
He had run back to Rome, served the empire, served the people. Dazed, he’d closed the Gates of Janus and brought peace to his realm. A price owed to a warrior, a price he knew he must pay, but his own life had not been peaceful.
Rome was his only daughter now. Julia, his sole blood heir, had betrayed him, conducting an affair with the last surviving son of Mark Antony, sacrificing to old religions, dancing naked in the city’s temples, offering herself to anyone who desired the emperor’s daughter. On her finger, she’d worn a ring engraved with Hecate’s face, something she claimed she’d found in Augustus’s own house.
Augustus had banished her from Rome and ordered her lover killed, but these punishments did not ease his pain. Just hours before arriving at this orchard, he’d given the order for the execution of his final grandson, the youngest son of Julia. The boy was a child of an unknown father, and the emperor could not take the chance of Rome being inherited by a descendant of his old enemy. No. He must pass Rome to Tiberius, his stepson, a man he disliked and distrusted. There was no other option. All his other heirs were dead, and his line was broken.
The emperor felt a grasping seizure in his chest,