Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [42]
Odd. She caught a glimpse of someone she knew, close to the platform. It couldn’t be he, though. Rhodon the tutor was long gone, to Myos Hormos with her son Caesarion. She was mistaken.
Drink, her body called, urging her onward.
Octavian was somewhere up there, and even if she could not see him, she could smell his strange absence of odor. The smooth grayness of him, like a gap in all the other scents and thoughts. Ahead.
She pressed forward, her mouth filling with saliva.
Feed.
A shaven-headed centurion appeared on the platform, his short toga newly white. Bleached in urine, and then rinsed in water until it passed for clean. Cleopatra wrinkled her nose, sniffing the foul Roman odor from where she stood, even if no one else in the crowd could smell it. The centurion leapt off the platform in pursuit of the victim, and then, suddenly, through a gap in the crowd, Cleopatra caught a glimpse of her son.
Caesarion.
His panicked face, his slender brown limbs scrabbling as he ran from his executioner. Cleopatra staggered with shock even as she shoved herself deeper into the crowd, toward him, toward him. It could not be.
Why had he returned to Alexandria? He’d been safe, taken from the city by Rhodon. How had they found Caesarion? Who had betrayed him? It came to her, in a devastating realization.
She had.
“I am a family man,” Octavian had sworn, and she’d trusted him, thinking to save her other children, thinking to bargain with a fiend.
She’d led the Romans to her son.
“KILL HIM!” the crowd screamed, pummeling one another in their desire to snatch at Caesarion’s garments. Cleopatra saw knives flashing out of concealment and smelled blood being shed all around her.
With the bloodshed, everything came rushing back to her, all that she had done, her maid arching backward, struggling to free herself from Cleopatra’s clutches. The other girl, paling quietly, as her body dropped like a shed garment to the floor of the queen’s chamber. Cleopatra gasped, convulsing with the memories, but she could not afford to let them stop her.
She threw herself forward, clawing her way closer to her child, her voice drowned by the rioting around her.
“CAESARION!” she screamed, fighting the crowd. The last rays of sun shot through a gap in the buildings, and light flared off the raised shields of the legionaries, momentarily blinding Cleopatra and amplifying the heat. She lost her balance and stumbled to the ground, stunned and weakened, her clothing in disarray, her veil sliding off to bare her face to the glare, blistering her skin instantly.
Fingers tore at her clothes, and sandaled feet kicked her trapped body. Her bones shifted in her skin, crushed and then repaired. Her cheekbone shattered under a heel. She felt her arms break and then knit themselves back together.
She knew the mind of the crowd then, with that horrible knowing. They hated her, hated the royal family for their neglect, for their distance, for their scandal, for their Greek ancestry. They hated her for losing their city to Rome. It was her fault that they were inflamed now against her child. They demanded a sacrifice.
She screamed wordlessly from the ground, pushing herself up, rising, rising.
Her son threw his hands into the air and shouted a desperate proclamation.
“Hear me!” he cried, his voice cracking, speaking in Greek. “Hear me! I am your king! I am son of the Ptolemies! I will rule over you! I will keep you safe from the Romans! They will enslave Egypt! I will keep you free!”
He repeated his declaration in Latin and then in Egyptian, to prove that he was a man of the people, but his voice was drowned by the sounds of rioting. His words were exactly the wrong ones.
“I AM YOUR KING!” the boy shouted again, and Cleopatra struggled to her knees, the sun still searing