Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [2]
The scholar shuddered, feeling frost skittering over his bones. His scar throbbed. Fatale monstrum, the Romans had called her. “Fatal omen.” Or, if one were to think of the double meaning of the word, and this had certainly been the intention, “fatal monster.”
Mistress of the end of the world.
And yet he knew her. Her heart had not always been dark. Perhaps it was not wholly dark even now.
Nicolaus wished that he’d died years before, knowing nothing of the things he was bound to tell today. His life had been long, and his memory remained perfect. This was his particular punishment.
Now he was the only one left who knew the truth. The only one, save her. Though it was sacrilege, though it was foolhardy to set down the words, he had to give warning to the world to come. To leave this life without doing so would be an irredeemable act, and his soul was already weighted with sins. They’d know more in the future. They’d learn. Perhaps they would learn enough to save themselves from the monster that Nicolaus, in his idiotic youth, had helped release into the world.
He looked into the sky above Avernus for a moment. The sun hung at the horizon, a fiery orb, and above it, the gathering clouds glowed copper and violet. Lightning slashed through one of them. The moon rose, yellow and ominous, even as the sun fell, struggling against the night and thunder.
Everything was at stake.
The people of the future would not know what was coming for them, not unless Nicolaus told this story. They’d have no defense. He thought for a moment of that world, the world he’d never see. It was a future so distant that almost nothing would remain of the things he had loved. Augustus had told him of his visions: buildings crumbling, cities disappearing beneath the waves, wars and bloodshed. Strange and shining machines, and untongued masses, all speaking the languages of barbarians.
The emperor had seen the future, and she was in it.
Fatale monstrum, Nicolaus repeated silently. Her name and her destiny. He would be gone by the time it came to pass, and yet he had a part still to play.
The scholar lit his lamp and picked up the stylus and tablet. He drew in a deep breath. This would be his last work. He must get it right.
Let this be the true and accurate history of the falsified death of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, in the first year of the reign of the emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, and of the wondrous and terrible acts which followed thereafter.
Let this be the story of the rising of a queen and the falling of a world.
BOOK OF RITUALS
For they report also, that she had hidden poyson in a hollow raser which she carried in the heare of her head: and yet there was no marke seen of her bodie, or any signe discerned that she was poisoned, neither also did they finde this serpent in her tombe . . . Some say also, that they found two litle pretie bytings in her arme, scant to be discerned . . . And thus goeth the report of her death.
—Plutarch, translation by Sir Thomas North
Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
1
The boy sprinted down the cobbled streets, leaping and dodging, trying to make up for the delay the chaos in the city had caused him. Alexandria was filled with the bruised and bloodied soldiers of Mark Antony’s infantry, and the boy flung himself between their bodies, here slipping alongside the flat of a sword, here ducking to avoid a flailing fist. This was his own city, and he knew the secret pathways to his destination. He flung open a street-side door and bolted through the household within, hoisting himself out a window in the back and shouting his apologies to the old mother he’d disturbed. He somersaulted over the sill, landing on his feet and bouncing as he resumed his run, imagining himself at the head of a rushing army, a raider storming the gates of some exotic city.
No one pursued the boy, but he was employed today, a salaried messenger, and the