Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [19]
Tentatively, she stretched her fingers back into the light, and they blistered as though doused in boiling oil. She snatched them back, cradling her hand to her breast. Her eyes watered and sparked with the sun. Hissing with pain, she slammed the shutters closed again.
Had she offended Ra as well as his daughter? Might she throw open the shutters and die in the sunlight?
No. As she watched, her hand healed with agonizing speed. Where the flesh had been burned, there was smooth skin again. Soon, it was as though the burning had never happened.
It seemed that even this pain would only cripple her, and that only temporarily. She tried to calm herself by counting her heartbeats, but she could not find them.
She checked again. Nothing. Silence where there had always been motion and song, emptiness where her soul had been.
The goddess had taken her heart, her soul, her ka.
Cleopatra curled in the corner of her chamber, shaking, her hands clasped to her breasts, feeling the place where the darkness had touched her. Even if she died, without a heart to be weighed she could never enter Egypt’s Underworld. She could not follow Antony. She imagined herself ferried across the water to the Island of Fire, Osiris standing on the shore waiting to judge her. What would she offer him? She had nothing.
She sat in darkness, listening to the sound of nothing, listening to the beat of nothing, feeling the hollow space within her breast.
At last, after days of Cleopatra’s solitude, Eiras and Charmian arrived to dress the queen’s hair and paint her face for her audience with the emperor. The maids held up a mirror of polished metal so that the queen could catch her reflection. In it, she was beautiful but for the sunken cheeks that no paint could hide, and the mark of Sekhmet’s fangs bright against the skin of her throat.
Cleopatra looked into her own eyes for the first time since Antony’s death and saw a stranger inhabiting her skin. She drew in her breath sharply.
This stranger hungered to kill everyone in the palace, she realized for the first time. Everyone in the city. Cleopatra’s fingers flexed, endowed with strange fire. The thing inside her, the thing she was not ready to accept as her own, hungered to kill everyone in the world, and perhaps it was capable of doing so.
Everyone except herself.
She felt a sound rising, humming behind her lips, a roar that might shatter glass, that might avalanche a city, and from deep inside her body, from deep inside her mind, something spoke to her.
You are mine, the voice said, dark and shining as any night.
Cleopatra shuddered, panicked. What thoughts were these? What voice had stolen Antony’s words? Flickering images paraded through her mind, lakes of blood, cities destroyed. Things she’d never seen. Things she would never have wished to see.
Charmian took her hand, concerned.
“Are you well, lady?” she asked. Cleopatra straightened her spine, feeling flickers of flame running down it, willing herself to stay seated. Madness. It was clearly madness. She must resist it. She touched her brow, expecting to find it burning, but it was as cold as marble.
Eiras dabbed at her eyelids, painting them the gleaming green of sacred insects, bordering her lashes with warmed kohl.
“Perfect,” said the girl, though her brow furrowed as she brushed her mistress’s strangely icy lips with carmine.
Together, Eiras and Charmian braided her hair, frowning at the thread of silver that had appeared in it since Antony’s death, a glittering ribbon.
She was no longer young, Cleopatra realized suddenly. The sun god had seen her face for thirty-eight years, though he saw it no more. She felt ancient, and yet she was no closer to the grave than these girls were. Death did not want her.
“He is yours, lady,” said Charmian, draping the fine linen gown lower on Cleopatra’s bosom, arranging the lapis pendants and diadem to better frame her face. “Your Caesar was this man’s kin. Surely, they share the same temptations. No man can resist you, if only you smile.”
“You’ll bewitch this man, as you have every other,