Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [24]
None of it mattered in the least.
9
The soldiers pressed meat into Cleopatra’s mouth as though she were a fattening fowl, and then left her, still chained. She vomited again and again, her maid tending her, bathing her face and throat with cool water.
Hours passed, and with each of them, Cleopatra’s fury grew stronger. Her wrists burned where the chain rubbed against them, her body revolting against the metal. The voice in her head now sounded like her own. No matter how she struggled with the metal, it did not give, and her skin tore and mended, seared invisibly, scalded and wounded. She howled with exhaustion and rage as dawn came, as the night birds took themselves back to their nests, as the cocks crowed and the city began to speak.
“I will say I have eaten,” she growled when the soldiers returned. “I’ll swear to it. Release me from these chains. Your master will not know.”
One soldier eyed the other and shrugged.
“Some of the food must have gone in,” he said. “She swallowed it, at least.”
Cleopatra looked into the soldier’s eyes. So slender, a boy. A virgin yet.
“Release me,” she whispered, and the soldier came toward her. She could smell him now, his sweet flesh, the nick in his skin where the blood had come to the razor’s edge. His home, a small structure made of trees his father had felled, high on a hill. The village girl he loved, a cobbler’s daughter, and the taste of her lips on his, only once, the day before he left for war. The two of them had lain in a meadow of wildflowers, watching the clouds drift across the sky, just as Cleopatra had once done, long ago, with Antony at her side—
No. She would not think of Antony.
The soldier came closer still, looking at her, his face open as a child’s. He reached out a hand.
The other boy swallowed nervously.
“We’re not to converse with the prisoner,” he reminded his companion. “She’s clever, this one. She snared Mark Antony, wrapped her legs around his waist and took him to her bed. You saw what happened at Actium. She deserted him and fled with her own ships, leaving him to die. And what did he do? He left his men and followed her back here. It was no wonder he killed himself.”
Cleopatra bit her lip to keep from screaming at him. He was wrong. Everyone was wrong.
“I only want to touch her,” stammered the first soldier. “Just to see what a queen feels like.”
Cleopatra laughed her most seductive laugh, but from afar, she watched herself, horrified by her own actions. What was she trying to do? Surely not.
“Free my wrists,” she cooed. “And see if the stories you’ve heard are true.”
He bent closer, closer still. She felt her lips parting, as she inhaled the smell of his skin.
“She’s supposed to be beautiful, but she doesn’t look beautiful to me,” the other soldier complained.
Her wrists were free. She spread her hands and readied herself. The boy’s pale throat was inches from her mouth. His sweet smell was in her nostrils. She pressed her fingers against his chest and leaned toward the glorious, pulsing vein in his neck.
At that moment, the other soldier drew the curtain back, and the newborn sun came in, a blinding rise as it broke over the horizon.
“There,” he said. “Now we’ll get a look at her.”
But the queen was cringing away from the burning light, stunned by what she had almost done. She threw her body into the shadows and turned her face to the wall. Her hands trembled, and with effort, she forced her muscles to be still. She was salivating, and her tongue felt rough, like that of a cat.
“Leave me,” she said, and when they hesitated, she screamed the words again. “LEAVE ME!”
They left, disgruntled. Changeable things, women. One moment ready for love, the next for war, and men never knew which was coming. They muttered their way down the corridor, their long bodies banging against the tapestries, the smell of their histories fading.
The queen drew a breath. The danger was over.
In the window, a bird appeared, and before Cleopatra knew