Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [28]
The guards, the secretary, and Octavian retreated from her chamber, and that, at least, was a blessing. She was no longer cursed with the smell of their flesh. Eiras and Charmian tended her, dressing her hair and washing the wound on her throat, but she heard her maids murmuring outside the chamber door.
“The queen is mad,” Eiras whispered to Charmian.
Cleopatra reclined in her chamber, pretending to sleep, but her senses were acute. She could hear every word said in the palaces, from the kitchen depths to the upper towers. She could hear falcons landing on the roof, and men stamping their feet in the courtyard. She could hear rats wending their way through secret passages, and moths chewing at silks. She could hear bats fluttering from the dark, hidden corners, departing for a night of hunting. These women were fools to think she could not hear them talking.
“We must show our allegiance to the emperor if we are to have any hope of outliving her,” Eiras continued, her voice a hoarse whisper.
“He plans to kill her?” asked Charmian. There was a note of regret in her voice. Cleopatra had only to listen below the surface of the words, and everything the girl thought was revealed.
The girl had worked her way from village to palace, and now it was all for nothing. She was planning to make off with some of the queen’s robes at least, some cloth of gold, and perhaps a piece of jewelry or two, and then offer herself to the emperor’s wife as a lady’s maid. Cleopatra saw a vision of Rome in the girl’s head: glorious spires, handsome men, ripe fruit. She believed she’d no longer be a slave. Cleopatra smiled bitterly at that. The girl was wrong.
Cleopatra herself, a new-crowned queen, had been as good as a slave in Rome in the time she’d spent there as Julius Caesar’s mistress. The city assumed her to be whoring herself out to Caesar to buy his sponsorship of her throne. The senators treated her not as a queen but as a simple woman, good only for childbearing. When they met with her, they looked over her shoulder, directing their requests to Caesar. She’d concocted a fantasy that she controlled them, even with her hair unbound and her baby at her breast, but in Rome, only the vestal virgins had public power separated from the fruit of their wombs. Cleopatra was certainly not one of their kind. This girl would not be, either. A slave she was, and a slave she would remain.
“The humiliation will kill her, if he does not. The men say that he plans to take her to Italy in three days, she and her children. I was told to pack their clothing. As though I were a common maid,” Eiras said.
“What will they do in Rome?”
“He’ll parade them in chains, and us with them.”
“Might he not take her to wife?”
“To wife? To bed, maybe, but never to wife.”
The women laughed at this. They did not understand her love for Antony, nor her sorrow, Cleopatra could feel it now. What was love to them?
“She’s poxed, likely,” said Charmian. “I heard her husband wooed the kitchen slaves.”
Cleopatra hissed under her breath. They should fear her, they should tremble, and instead, they chirped outside her door. Hunger gnawed at her stomach.
“I wouldn’t mind warming the emperor’s bed,” said Eiras, preening. “He’s a handsome man, even if he is a bit short. He looked at me. Did you notice?”
Somehow the queen could see her, even though a door stood between them. Eiras’s hair draped like black silk over her smooth shoulders. In her own village, she’d been known for her beauty. Not so since she’d come to work for the queen. Here, she was forced to unstyle her hair, to simplify her dress so as not to compete. Here, she was no one. Cleopatra could smell her history, even through the stone. The smell was not unpleasant, and beneath it, there was heat, the girl’s life thrumming under her skin, like the juicy meat of a grape contained by only the thinnest of coverings.
Cleopatra felt dizzy with starvation and strange knowledge. She could feel every corner of Alexandria, like a creature seeing through the