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Octavian Caesar had stood on the steps of the mausoleum, looking over the crowd. Cleopatra could smell his fear still lingering there.

The queen is dead, Octavian told her people. She killed herself in grief for Mark Antony. It was an honorable death, though it went against the wishes of Rome.

Her people would have suspected her murdered but not dared challenge him. Cities that resisted the Romans ended in ashes. The people of Alexandria would have mourned instead, torn out their hair and knelt, processed about the mausoleum, singing and drinking. She could still hear the echoes of it.

The queen is dead. Long live the emperor. Hail Caesar!

This was a Roman city now.

She heard a man breaking into drunken song out on the street, the guards hushing him. She was suddenly filled with wrath. Would she be doomed to listen to the world forever, trapped away from it?

She screamed in fury, there in the dark, but all she heard was the echo of her voice, bouncing from the high ceiling, rattling against the walls.

Antony’s ashes shifted with her scream. She breathed him in, another gasp of betrayal and sorrow, of his blood on her hands. She’d be here forever, beside the ruined body of her beloved, unless she did something to escape.

“FREE ME!” she screamed, every muscle straining and crying out against the chains as she pushed herself up from the slab. She was not strong enough to break them. Her skin was seared, and she felt the metal slipping beneath it, slicing into flesh. Rage boiled inside her and she howled her order out to the ceiling. The guards would hear her. Someone would hear her. “Release me! Your queen lives, and you serve a monster!”

She heard a high call, a keening song. A pulse of sound from outside the building, and another sound, of something creeping, fluttering through a small space. A rustling.

Something was coming.

16

Octavian visited Alexander the Great’s grave, crippled with unease. He’d long looked forward to paying his respects at his hero’s burial place, nearby as it was to Alexandria. It was the heroic thing to do, after all, a scene that might be written about by the poets of Rome, the young emperor standing beside the tomb of his predecessor, inheriting his power. Augustus the Great, he’d thought secretly, tasting the name on his tongue.

The simpleton slaves and keepers of the necropolis insisted that he see the endless Ptolemaic tombs as well, and he was forced to descend an unpleasant stone staircase into a black pit, but he immediately turned and ran back up into the light, fearful of more creatures like Cleopatra, dead and yet not dead.

“I came to see a king,” he snapped, “not a pile of dead bodies.” This was to have been a reward for Cleopatra’s death after all, a final triumphant act in her city before departing for other places, other kingdoms, but what he’d seen in Cleopatra’s chamber had drastically changed the tone of the visit.

All he could think of now was her glowing eyes, her smiling lips. She lived, she lived, and he’d buried her that way. Too late, he realized that she would not stay buried. She would come for him. He must flee the country.

Before he could, though, he must do this or regret it forever.

“Open the sarcophagus,” he ordered. “I wish to see him.”

He sent the slaves away the moment the case was open, and then forced himself to look into the coffin. Alexander’s features, which Octavian had long venerated, dreamt of, were nothing but fragile leather. Nearly three hundred years had passed since Alexander’s death by poison at Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. His corpse had originally been transported from Babylon in a vat of honey, as though he were a queen bee. The sweetish smell still lingered, along with that of the cinnamon used in his embalming. The odor confused Octavian’s mind, twisting his memories. In Egypt, the precious inner bark of the cinnamon tree was used on the dead, but in Rome it was used on the living, as an ingredient in love potions.