Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [161]
Her teeth were pointed.
His throat was closing. He could scarcely breathe. A name drifted up from out of his past, a name he should never have forgotten. He did not understand how he had.
“Cleopatra,” he said.
“Te teneo,” she told Augustus. “You are mine.”
She bent toward him, taking his body in her strong hands. She came closer, brushing her cold lips over his cold lips, and the emperor looked up into her eyes, seeing fires, seeing volcanoes, seeing destruction.
He watched Rome fall in a moment, watched the sky fill with metal wings, watched all he had built crumble.
He felt Cleopatra biting into his throat, and he struggled weakly. Her hand pressed down upon him, heavy as a coverlet, and he relaxed under her weight. It was a kiss.
Yes. They had once been lovers, he was sure. They were lovers again, it seemed. The kiss was sweet.
Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. Queen of Kings.
“You will live,” her voice said to him, and he was, in his last moments, a boy again, fevered in his bed. “You will live a long life.”
Then it was over.
Cleopatra stood, leaving the husk that had been the emperor of Rome on the ground, and walked away from the country that had been her unwilling home all these years.
Dying on the battlefield at Avernus, so many years before, she’d felt Sekhmet leave her heart, felt the hollow spaces fill again with her own ka. In memory, she glimpsed her death, the snowflakes falling upon her skin, her blood flowing slowly, cold and endless.
She’d found herself lying on a mossy bank beside a silver lake. The world was night, the pearl-round moon high in the sky, and yet it was also sunrise, the horizon all rose, gold, and coral. As far as she could see, there were rolling hills and valleys, the dewy green grasses and blooming wildflowers of midsummer, but this was not earth.
There were stars in the heavens, and she gazed up at them, the constellations showing familiar shapes, shapes she’d known in every land she’d lived in. On the grass about her, and on the smooth, silver water, she could see the shadows of the stars, and she was comforted by this, the tracery of her former life in the wildness of the waking world.
“You are in Elysium,” a voice said. “You died at my gates.”
“Where is Antony?” she asked, turning to see the god of the Dead before her. “I must go to where he is.”
Hades nodded his head ruefully.
“As you wish. You have done me a large favor. I owe you recompense.”
A flash of light, and she found herself transported again.
She saw the Island of Fire, with its scales for the weighing of her heart, the gleaming feather of Maat upon them. Antony and her sons stood before her, all of her beloved dead, Caesarion, Alexander Helios, and Ptolemy.
She walked toward them, overcome with joy, but then, without warning, she was torn from the Duat and pressed into her own broken body again.
The fate spinner had brought Cleopatra back from the death she’d longed for. Helpless, paralyzed on the battlefield, the queen felt Sekhmet reenter her heart.
I can see it all now, the seiðkona rasped, then, her hands on Cleopatra’s face. I can see everything.
Cleopatra walked on into her future. Her love was in the Duat, waiting for her, and she was on earth, dreaming of him. She would not see him yet.
It is your destiny to destroy the world, the seiðkona had whispered to her, all those years before. But you must also save it. They are the same fate.
Cleopatra walked into the darkness, the stars overhead glittering, the moon a pointed crescent, her body filled with blood, her mind filled with night. Sekhmet would rise again now that Cleopatra had finished her healing. The queen could feel her hunger. Sekhmet had been wounded, too, with the Hydra venom, but she still had six Slaughterers in her quiver: Famine, Earthquake, Flood, Drought, Madness, and Violence.
Though this was finished, Cleopatra was not done. She did not know when she would be. It was not her decision.
The emperor of Rome was dead.
Long live the queen.
ACTA EST FABULA.