Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [38]
“Mine.”
17
They filled the room, arriving from beneath the floor, slipping through impossibly small cracks and portals. They came from above, nearly deafening Cleopatra with their shrill song.
She cringed, her rage gone as quickly as it had arrived. Now she was terrified of the pain that would surely come. They’d tear her skin, and she’d live. They would wound her flesh, and she would remain awake, feeling each ripping movement. Feeling each creature—and she knew them now, not birds but bats—diving toward her heart. Their tiny fangs, their scrabbling claws. Her body, though it was changed, was still hers. It was her only possession, and these were thieves coming to break it apart.
They would find her empty.
Something else was coming, though. She could smell a musky, dry odor. Snakes slithering across the stone, their sleek bodies blending into a rippling surface, roiling as a storming sea. And rats, their skeletons bending against the narrow passages, their fur glittering black, their eyes glowing.
Her subjects.
She laughed, the sound mixing with a sob. Queen of Egypt, in her lost, gilded robes. Naked before her true citizens, she must offer them her last words. Oh, the proclamations she might make, here in the dark.
“Save me,” she whispered. “Your queen commands you.”
She laughed again, feeling hysteria rising. Nothing to calm her here, no wines or potions, no Antony to press his fingertips against her lips. She felt the rasp of snakeskin on her ankle. The brush of leather wings on her face. The lash of a rat’s tail, whipping through her fingers.
This is how it would end, then. This is how it would be, from here until the end of time. The queen and her creatures. Eaten, but not consumed.
A snake pressed its skull beneath her breast, fitting its triangular head under the chain and then flowing over her skin. It slipped up her throat, and appeared before her, its eyes glittering in the dark, gazing at her with what seemed to be intention.
She was mad to think the snake might understand her. More were coming. She felt them writhing across her limbs like a living mantle.
The snake stared into her eyes, waiting for something. She tried to move but could not.
“Free me!” she shouted, giving in to the madness. “I am your queen! The queen of Egypt calls upon you!”
The snake slithered away, and Cleopatra laughed and cried at once. She was insane, and worse, she knew it. Her predictions had come true. She, who was the daughter of generations of kings, now thought that she could talk to animals.
The rats began to gnaw at something. Let it not be her bones. She couldn’t feel anything anymore, couldn’t tell where the animals were.
The chain shifted around her, burning, burning, but she didn’t care. Let it burn. Anything was better than this, these beasts of the night pressing against her body, the sounds of hissing and hungering. Another serpent slithered across her abdomen, pressing into the curve of her waist, where once a jeweled belt had hung, tempting kings, tempting warriors.
The chain shifted again.
She could hear the rats gnawing at the wood beneath her, furrowing its surface. She’d commissioned the pyre, just as she’d commissioned the box that held Antony’s ashes. Now the rats were turning it to dust. Everything would go to dust, everything but Cleopatra.
The chain loosened. She stretched her arm and touched a serpent. She moved her leg and felt another. The room was dark, but all around her was the sound of movement.
Bats rose through the dark, singing. A moth glowed in a sudden spark of light and was taken, struggling against claws.
The chain lifted from her skin and hung in the air above her.
She lay there for a moment, amazed, and then she felt the creatures waiting, all around her.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
The only reply she heard was the soft swishing of serpents making their way back to where they’d come from, bats singing their way back out into the sky, and rats channeling their bodies into the cracks in the walls. Like ghosts, they