Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [49]
The crewman, with startling presence of mind, laid hands on an axe normally used for rope cutting. He heaved it high in the air and swung it with all his strength toward her throat.
Her tail whipped up out of the water and lashed around him, crushing him in its coils just as the blade touched her skin. The creature arced gracefully onto the deck, her body slithering from the depths, an endless serpentine length.
The terrified captain pushed the pile of coins across the table, but she paid them no attention. He fell to his knees to beg for mercy. Surely, this was a deity he’d failed to ferry, and now he would die for his offense. She was a monster with the face of a goddess, scales catching the darkness and turning it to light.
She rose up on her coils, high above him, and looked down upon him without benevolence. Her body writhed, nearly covering the entire deck. He felt her tail twist around his ankles, an icy strength.
Would no one save him? There were no villages nearby. Out there in the dark, all that would hear him would be crocodiles and lions, bats and snakes.
She wrapped about him, and his last thought was that she felt like a woman still, a strong and lovely woman, clutching his entire body as a woman would clutch him between her thighs. Her beautiful face was inches from his. He could almost forget what she was.
“But you shouldn’t forget what I am,” she whispered, her voice bitterly sweet, her hair soft as silk as it wrapped about his fist. He tried to pull himself free, but he was already too weak.
She looked into his eyes just before her fangs sank into his throat.
23
Cleopatra emerged from the river near Thebes and lay on the bank of the Nile, her naked skin basking in the darkness. She’d left the vessel behind hours before, still shocked by the glory of her transformation. Traveling underwater, her body skimming the silted floor, absorbing stories from every creature she touched, from every droplet of water that had come to the river from elsewhere in the world, she’d felt the histories of the raindrops that had fallen from the sky to become the Nile, and of the grains of sand that had once been the shells of animals. She’d felt the stories of the crocodiles and the fish, the water snakes and the creatures that drank from the river.
She thought of the destruction she could wreak on the Romans in this new form. She could slip through underground passages, through places her human form could not travel. She could speak to animals, feel their needs and hungers. She could rise from beneath the Tiber, and the Romans would never know she was coming.
She thought of the power she now possessed.
Her mind had shifted while she was in the form of the serpent. The things that mattered to her human form suddenly meant little to her. It wasn’t until she surfaced at Thebes and her body became human again that she realized she’d left more than just her clothing and coins behind. She’d left Antony’s ashes as well.
She should have left him in the mausoleum, safely buried; she knew it now, but it was too late. She moaned, imagining him without her. He was dead, she knew, but holding him had comforted her. His body was still in Egypt, she realized at last, and thus his soul remained here. The silver box that contained him would surely sink to the bottom of the river and never be found. His soul would be safe. She tried to calm her unease.
She stood and walked toward the temple, a ghostly white skeleton perched on the horizon. As she walked closer, she could see that brush had grown up around it, and parts of the walls had crumbled. The temples to the old Egyptian gods were now largely abandoned, and Cleopatra knew that she herself was to blame. For twenty years, she’d largely ignored the native religions in favor of the Greek and Roman gods.
A sleek, black granite statue of the ibis-headed god, Thoth, still stood sentry. She looked at the statue for a moment. This was the Egyptian god of knowledge and resurrection, the god who’d given Isis the magic words to bring her