Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [30]
Her body hummed with it, a ferocious, glorious sound, a song, a call to reenter the world. A call to feed. Cleopatra looked down at the girl’s body and felt as though an army had revealed itself. She was not what she had been, a woman, a mortal. No.
She was more.
The dark voice inside her cried out in triumph.
Her eyes turned to the corner, easily picking the other slave out of the shadows, where she hid, hands over her face, crying.
“Please,” Charmian whispered. “Please don’t. I won’t tell anyone. I should never have said those things. Mark Antony was a good king. You are my queen.”
Cleopatra heard her, but these things were unimportant. There was nothing but her body, still quivering with hunger, nothing but the blood that even now filled her, fed her. Her eyes swam with red. She could smell the girl’s terror radiating from her skin like perfume.
Her thirst was boundless, deeper than the sea that surrounded her city, and she felt she could drink until the world was empty.
She shook her head, trying to rid it of the image of blood-filled oceans, of corpses. Suddenly, her eyes opened wider. What was she doing?
Why should you be denied? the voice inside her purred. Why should we hunger?
“Don’t be afraid,” Cleopatra heard herself say, her voice soft, the blood soothing her throat. “I will not hurt you. I need you to do something for me.”
“What would you have me do?” the girl asked, still crying, trying to regain her composure. She would run, she was thinking, as soon as Cleopatra turned her back. She’d go to the country and never leave it again. She thought of her mother and her younger sister. She thought of the riverbank and the old temples, suddenly dear to her.
Cleopatra heard it all, and yet she could not find herself any longer. The voice inside her was too loud. It felt like her own heart speaking.
“Dress me,” said Cleopatra. She’d go into the world as she had planned. The beautiful, throbbing world, the dark, the songs and dances and brothels. She would not go out a peasant, though.
She would go out a queen, dressed in her finest gown, radiant, jeweled. She had not been a goddess in her previous life. She’d been a woman pretending to be divine, pretending to be immortal. She was a goddess now, and nothing could stop her. She felt the girl’s blood filling her, rushing through her, and the feeling was of pure, clean power.
“Dress me in my wedding robes,” she said. “And bring me my crown.”
When Charmian had tied every ribbon and fastened every clasp, washed her feet and fitted them into her sandals, and veiled her hair with cloth of gold, Cleopatra bent her head as though in modesty.
“How do I look?” she asked.
“Beautiful, my queen,” the girl said, a thrum of delicious hope moving through her now. She was to live. She would be free.
“I would pay you for your service,” said Cleopatra.
The girl was not accustomed to being paid. She stood on her toes, startled. Then she thought she would take what was offered. Gold, perhaps. Enough to keep her quiet, and certainly enough to make a life elsewhere.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for the honor.”
She held out her hands.
More, said Sekhmet’s voice, rising up from inside Cleopatra. More.
Deep inside the queen, a tiny human voice cried out in opposition, demanding to know what she was doing, ordering her to stop. She banished it. She was no one’s slave. She would not take orders, least of all from something so weak, so powerless.
“I pay you the greatest honor of all,” Cleopatra said to her slave. “You feed your queen.”
When she finished, she lay back upon her gilded couch, dizzy with pleasure. Her body was sated, and her eyelids felt heavy for the first time in days.
While drinking from the girl’s throat, something wonderful had occurred. A reward, perhaps, from the one she fed. Her heart, quiet all these days, began to beat. Slowly at first, and then more quickly.
She had not lost it after all, and with a heart, she could still enter heaven. If