Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [63]
Octavian thought for an unpleasant moment about queens. He’d been awake every night since Alexandria, pacing his rooms, troubled by the visions he saw in Cleopatra’s eyes. Flying creatures and lightning sticks, heaps of bodies shoveled into ditches, children fighting, women fighting, men fighting. He might doze for an hour, but then he’d jolt out of bed, screaming himself awake. He employed storytellers and musicians to sit beside his bed and sing, to spin tales of heroes and victories, anything to keep him from falling fully into sleep. Even in daylight, carried in his litter, he feared the nightmares that might overtake him if he leaned too heavily against the cushions and napped.
He wondered now if he’d been mad to send his chief defender seeking something that might not even exist. Witches. Sorcerers. Saviors.
He tried to calm himself. Agrippa and his men would find what Octavian needed. Marcus Agrippa had neither approved of Octavian’s instructions nor understood them, but Agrippa was not in charge. If this was to be war, Octavian must be prepared, just as Alexander the Great would have been. And if his methods were unusual? There could be no shame in fighting an unnatural creature that way. Rome had legions, yes, a hundred and fifty thousand men at the ready, and over three hundred fifty thousand if he added the soldiers stationed in his client states, but what good would legions be against her? He needed something more. He himself had banned witchcraft in Rome, but this was a special situation.
At the conclusion of the procession, Octavian stood before his people to be given his new name. It was the moment he’d imagined for years, and yet he took no pleasure in it. He’d chosen the name Augustus for augury, suggesting that augurs had seen his reign in the signs, and today he renamed Sextilis, the month in which he’d conquered Egypt, after himself. August, he thought, would yearly remind the people of Egypt’s submission to him.
Now he regretted everything about this. Egypt had not submitted.
Instead, Egypt was on the move.
The throngs before him cheered, waving banners and scarves, throwing flowers, singing his new name in the sunlit streets of Rome. The last time he’d been so exposed before so many people had been at Caesarion’s execution. Today, he took the name of Caesarion’s father for his own.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus.
His skin prickled and his stomach shifted uneasily. On the voyage out of Egypt, he’d felt his hair turning gray, strand by strand, and during dinner on the seventh night at sea, he’d experienced a disastrous sensation, lifted his hand to his mouth, and pulled out an entire tooth.
A horrifically bad omen. He shook himself. He did not believe in omens.
He rushed back to the Palatine when the ceremonies were finished, sprinting up the marble steps and into his study, waving off advisors and pouring himself a cup of unwatered wine, pausing to remove the top of a small vial of something his physicians assured him was an antidote to every sort of potential poison. It was theriac, made from Julius Caesar’s own recipe, which had protected Octavian’s benefactor from everything but the treachery of his friends. The potion contained, among other rare and distasteful substances, cinnamon, frankincense, scarab beetle dung, acacia and rhododendron, aconite and iris, anise and turpentine, pulverized bones of kings, viper venom, and, most important, tears from the poppies that bloomed on the great glacial fields of Italy. As a final addition, the emperor had provided his physicians with the powdery piece of cloth stolen from the mummy of Alexander.
The resultant potion smelled like a battlefield after three days’ decay, but Augustus eased a few drops of it down anyway, drained his cup and poured another.
One could never be too