Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [22]
And there was something disgusting about Octavian. He smelt of nothing. What was he, this thing adopted into emperor?
“Libations?” she offered.
“I do not drink,” he replied.
“I suppose you don’t eat, either,” she said.
“Not while a queen starves before me,” he said, and smiled, revealing small and somewhat crooked teeth. He drew the gilded chair toward her couch.
“Such courtesy is unusual in a barbarian,” she commented.
“I am a family man. My daughter Julia is my chief joy. I would not have your children lose a mother,” he said. “Bastards though they are.”
Her skin prickled with fury. “They are not bastards,” she replied. “Their mother is a queen. I doubt the Romans would understand.”
Octavian leaned forward, his elbow on his knee.
“Unless you dine with me,” he said, his voice and smile unchanged, “I will be forced to slit your bastards’ throats.”
She inhaled deeply, scenting this nothing man. She would rip out what heart he had, and she would drink his watery blood.
“What would you have me eat?” she asked, her tone savagely polite. “I see no emperor’s banquet here. Shall I dine upon you?”
She laughed, but something twisted inside her.
It was a joke. Barbed words, that was all. She was not well, she was not well. Her skin chilled. Her robes were drenched. Could he not see it? How could she be expected to sit here and listen while he talked of slitting her babies’ throats? The barbarian.
Why hadn’t she killed him when she’d first met him? He’d been so weak, that reedy, feverish boy in the bed. So vulnerable.
No, she was not a killer, not in those days; she knew it even as she thought it.
She’d changed.
“I am ill—” she managed, and then gagged, covering her mouth with her veil.
The conqueror waved his hand, signaling his men to bring in trays.
“You are weak with hunger,” he said, pressing into her fingers a piece of roasted meat dripping with oils and rubbed with spices.
She felt muscles clenching in her back and arms, clenching against her will. Her thighs tightened. She would spring at him—
She pressed herself back against the hard metal frame of the couch.
No. She’d eat the food he offered. If it bought her children’s lives, it was no price. Those dying of hunger, she knew, often hallucinated. Perhaps that was all this was, the voice in her head, the strange desires. She took the meat between her teeth.
Oozing juices. Foul, rotting flesh. Her throat closed against it, and she spat it out.
“You would not allow me to kill myself, yet you try to kill me with poisons? You’ve already seen me die when my husband was taken from me. You are dining with the dead, even now.”
He sliced a piece of meat from the same platter, put it into his mouth, and chewed it.
“It is not poisoned,” he said. “And you are a stubborn fool. Is my food not fine enough for you, lady?”
He beckoned to his men, and they approached Cleopatra. One of them came from behind, bringing a chain from beneath his cloak, and before the queen knew what was happening, he’d wrapped it about her wrists.
The metal burned her skin, and she cried out at the unexpected pain.
“Behold, a chain fit for a queen,” Octavian said. “Did you not put Mark Antony on a silver throne while you sat above him, on the gold? And he thought you were naming him king instead of slave, the fool. This chain is forged of that throne.”
“He was never my slave,” Cleopatra whispered, curling into her couch, willing the pain away. “He is my husband. Summon a physician. I tell you, I am not well.”
Octavian gazed at her, impassive.
“Look at the whore’s false tears. I know them, lady, just as I know a whore’s false cries of pleasure. Force the food down her throat if she will not eat it herself,” he said as he left the room. “I will not be seen to starve the queen of Egypt.”
8
In the corridor outside Cleopatra’s chamber, Octavian leaned against the