Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [160]
Augustus thought, but he could not place her. Her eyes were rimmed in kohl, and her arms were decked with coiled bracelets in the shape of serpents. Her body was curving and tightly wrapped in a white linen gown. Her mouth was plump and painted with something red.
He bit into the fig—honey sweet and seeded, nearly overripe—and it came to him. He had been her lover once, long ago. Or he had loved her.
“Do I know you?” he asked her.
“Octavian,” she said. She held her hand to her side, tightly pressing it against her waist.
“Are you injured?” he asked.
“I was,” she said. “I was injured once, and gravely. I’ve been a long time healing, and you have had a long life. I did not intend that, but I do not regret it. You suffered.”
Augustus felt indignant.
“I did not suffer,” he began, but even as he spoke the words, he remembered nights sleepless, insomniac, haunted. At the same time, he wondered at himself. He was not dressed for night, nor for company. He was nearly naked. He felt his skin prickling as he looked at her.
“Do you not know me, Octavian?” the woman before him asked.
“I do not,” he insisted. He felt his throat beginning to swell. The fig was scratching at his tongue. He coughed unhappily. He was chilled here in the night air. He wanted to go in, to his bed, to his sleep. He wanted to wake in the morning and watch the sun rise.
“I made a bargain once,” the woman told him. “With a powerful king, in a country not far from here.”
“A gamble?” Augustus asked. He thought of games played with bones and rocks, games played with coins. He thought, horribly, of placing a coin in Agrippa’s mouth, to pay the boatman of Hades. The cold of the tongue as it touched his fingers. The rotten hardness of the teeth. The damp of the tomb he’d placed his friend inside, with all the proper ceremony, with all the proper ritual.
A sudden memory of another tomb, and an empty slab therein. A silver box engraved with Isis. A serpent, a serpent. He cringed involuntarily.
“A gamble,” she agreed.
He coughed, and sat heavily on the dew-covered grass. A servant should bring him a cloak. He should not be out at night.
“It was a gamble over a soul,” she said.
Augustus lay carefully back, anticipating a story and fearing it at the same time. In his life, he’d hired many tellers, heard many tales, and he had slept little. He found himself nearly looking forward to it. Sleep. Rest.
The woman looked steadily at him.
He thought suddenly of two little boys, lost long ago on a battlefield. He’d brought the last of the Egyptian children, Selene, back to Rome and married her to the king of Mauretania, giving her a dowry of gold as though she were his own daughter. He owed her something, though even then he could not remember why. Selene was dead eight years past. He’d commissioned a Greek poet to eulogize her. A good daughter. The only good daughter he’d had, and she was not even his own.
“The moon herself grew dark, rising at sunset,” Augustus whispered. It was a lovely epitaph, the eulogy, and somehow it reminded him of the woman before him. Selene had looked like her, perhaps that was it. “Covering her suffering in the night, because she saw her beautiful namesake, Selene, breathless, descending to Hades. With her, she’d had the beauty of her light in common, and mingled her own darkness with her death.”
The woman before him smiled. He thought he saw her eyes shining with tears, though it might have been the moonlight.
He regretted everything on earth.
“A soul?” he asked. “Whose soul? Yours?”
“Not my own,” she said. “I had already sold my own soul when I made this bargain. No, Octavian. I did not act to save my soul but that of my love. Your soul has been with me all these years, since the battle at Avernus. You’ve lived without it, as I have lived without mine. Did you never notice its absence? Tell me, Octavian, was it a glorious life? Did you love? Did you find joy?”
Augustus looked at her miserably. She was so beautiful. Her lips were bright, even in the darkness.
She seemed taller now, somehow, and her skin paler, as though