Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [32]
He’d bring her corpse to Rome with him. Those mummies of the ancient days were impressive things, in their gilded wooden cases. Octavian’s hero, Alexander the Great, had been treated so, and his grave, near Cleopatra’s palaces, contained his body, glittering in a sarcophagus. That was an old tradition, though. Not Roman, not Greek. And he wouldn’t do Cleopatra such honors. To be worshipped long after her death.
Octavian would have her corpse draped with plain linen, and he’d place her atop a rolling cart surrounded with flowers, a parade spectacle with her children in chains behind her. They’d all know it to be her that way. There would be no rumors of an empty coffin.
When that was finished, he’d scatter Cleopatra’s ashes in Italy, do it himself, make a public ceremony of it. She, who had stolen Mark Antony from Rome, would feed the soil of his country with her dust.
Tensing his jaw, Octavian stepped closer to the queen’s corpse, dodging around Agrippa, who stood, ridiculously, with his sword still drawn.
There she was, wrapped in a cloth of sheer, spun gold with a royal purple border. She reclined on a gilded dais, her body as supple and curving as it had been in life, and—
He would not look at her body.
“You will have a long life,” she’d said sixteen years before, and now she was dead, and he stood over her corpse.
She was still wearing the same perfume.
Disgusted with himself, Octavian shook the past from his mind.
He would melt this entire palace into money and thank the gods for it. Rome would be rich again, as it was meant to be. He’d pay his soldiers. It had been a near thing, bringing them here unpaid, with all her treasure hidden in that mausoleum, and her threatening to set the place on fire, but Egypt was conquered at last.
Cleopatra’s breasts were clearly visible through the cloth, he noticed, one completely bare, the nipple erect, as though recently touched. Or kissed. Her arm was thrown back, the better to display the indecency.
Octavian—no, Augustus; that was the name he’d chosen and by which he would soon be known—snorted in revulsion. Whatever poison the queen had consumed, it had treated her as a lover. She was a changed woman from their last meeting a few days earlier, when she’d inexplicably revealed the location of Caesarion. He could only assume she’d been delirious with grief. Why else would she have been so foolish? Gray and gaunt, her eyes blackened, she’d certainly looked ill. Nothing about her had attracted him then. It had been a relief.
In death, however, Cleopatra nearly glowed, and a sheen of perspiration covered her skin. Her position was appalling, one knee bent, the other leg dangling off the edge of the couch. Her back had arched, seizing in her last moments, no doubt.
It was too quiet in this room, far from the noise of the city.
He’d won. His enemies were dead. It puzzled Octavian that he did not feel peaceful.
He moved toward Cleopatra to adjust her draperies, he told himself, to protect her from prying eyes, but in fact, he wanted to run his fingers over her skin, press his lips to her throat. He wanted to—
“Summon doctors,” he said, jolting away from her. “Let them determine how she fell.”
Agrippa bent over the queen, pulling aside the scarf twined about her neck.
“There’s no need,” he said. “It was an asp. Here’s the mark of its bite.”
Octavian leapt back.
“Kill it,” he ordered, suppressing the tremor in his voice.
“It has gone already,” Agrippa replied. Octavian glanced suspiciously about the throne room. It could be hiding anywhere: in the queen’s garments or those of her maids. Beneath the furnishings. How had it gotten into the room in the first place? Smuggled in, no doubt. The queen was sly. He approached her again, willing himself to breathe normally.
“Show us the marks,” he ordered. “And summon the Psylli. We will do everything