Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [55]
Outside the temple, a lioness lowered her head to drink from the river. Cleopatra could see the blood on the animal’s mouth from here. She’d been hunting. A gazelle, perhaps. The lioness raised her head and looked toward the temple, yellow eyes ablaze.
So she had no will of her own? The priestess was wrong about that. Cleopatra was a queen of kings. She was stronger than any the goddess had taken in the past.
Caesarion, she thought. Antony.
Once she avenged herself upon the Romans, once she reclaimed her children and made certain that they were safe, she would find a way to separate from the goddess. She was going to Rome, and in Rome she would be born again. She could feel the human wonder that had been her own heart, filled now with teeth and claws.
She would use them.
She shrugged the red-bordered garment from her shoulders and stood for a moment naked beneath the million shining stars of her country. The woman she had been was gone, and in her place was something more.
Cleopatra dropped to her knees and placed her hands in the dirt, stretching her fingers, feeling the glory of her coming form, the grace, the power. Her back arched and her legs gathered beneath her. The tawny fur on her spine rose into a coarse ridge.
Her tail whipped back and forth, and she bounded into the night, across the desert and toward the sea.
BOOK OF DIVINATIONS
Alas, alas for thee, ill-wedded bride,
Thy royal power unto the Roman king shalt thou give,
And thou shalt repay all things which thou aforetime didst with masculine hands;
Thou shalt give thy whole land by way of dower,
As far as Libya and the dark-skinned men, to the resistless man.
And thou shalt be no more a widow,
But thou shalt cohabit with a man-eating lion, terrible, a furious warrior.
And then shalt thou be unhappy, and among all men unknown;
For thou shalt leave possessed of shameless soul;
And thee, the stately, shall the encircling tomb
Receive . . . is gone . . . living within.
—The Sibylline Oracles, circa 30 B.C.E.
Translated from the Greek
Milton S. Terry, 1899
Translator’s note regarding the last line: “The text is so mutilated at this point as to leave the exact sentiment of the writer quite unintelligible.”
1
In a tiny cave high on the rocky coast of Thessaly, a priestess of Hecate raised her gaze from the water she’d been using as a scry.
Ships were coming north from Africa. The scry showed blood, oceans of it, cities falling and corpses heaped in the streets. Ghosts and their grievances. Beasts and their hungers. The scry showed something tremendously powerful, risen.
Chrysate smiled. Her dilated eyes were as black as the sea below her cave, and her hair hung in a tangled nest of knotted plaits. Her mistress, Hecate, was a patroness to witches and drew her sacrifices from their activities, but they had reduced in number as Rome’s influence shifted the ways of the world. High on this cliffside in Greece, Chrysate was one of the few priestesses left, and her mistress had fallen from favor with the gods and with mortals alike. Hecate was an old god, a Titan who’d once held vast power over earth and sea. In protesting the abduction of Persephone, however, she’d gained an enemy in Persephone’s husband, Hades.
What was abduction became marriage, and now the Lord of the Dead kept Hecate chained near the entrance to the Underworld, presiding over hounds.
Chrysate had waited for this day.
The scry showed that the horizon was scarlet. Soldiers marched overland, searching not for battles but for those like Chrysate, who trafficked in dark magic. Rome sought allies, but the Romans had no notion of what Fates they tempted. No notion of what ancient things they drew.
In chaos, there was opportunity for change, opportunity for reversals of power. Hecate, who had been trapped for centuries, her influence limited, might be released. She’d lived far longer than the gods who now presided over Hades, and her powers were as simple and deep as those of the Earth herself, the scalding of