Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [66]
“It was quick thinking on my part. Agrippa’s men would have captured us. I saved you.”
She was not something to be saved, the voice of Sekhmet whispered. She was something to be worshipped.
Did she need him, truly?
Yes, Cleopatra reminded herself. He could go out in the day when she could not. He could seek her children where she could not. Her face was too easily recognized in this ugly city.
“I wanted him to see me,” she said, rebelling against her own thoughts. “I would confront him. Agrippa was the leader of the army in Alexandria. It is because of him that Antony is dead. And he was there when they killed my son, standing beside Octavian. He gave the order.”
“Confront? You do not mean confront. You mean kill. You would have fought him there, in the port? There were citizens everywhere.”
“Roman citizens,” Cleopatra said. What if a Roman was hurt? Did it matter so much?
“And your own people, perhaps,” Nicolaus reminded her. “There was another boatload of slaves coming in, and who knows where they were seized? The emperor’s men have been all over Africa.”
The scholar touched her hand, and she pulled away from him, barely suppressing a hiss. Was this what it would be from now on? No one to touch her? No one to love her?
It did not matter. Antony was dead.
She should be entering the city with her ancestral crown atop her head, and instead she’d climbed up from the slave quarters and into the dirt. Rome was a colorless city, somber in comparison with Alexandria’s brilliance. At home, everything was draped in silks, every surface ornamented. Here, decoration was seen as weakness. The last time she’d walked off a ship and into this country, she’d had Caesarion in her arms, newborn and perfect, and Julius Caesar beside her. Caesar, at least, had respected Cleopatra. He believed that women were as capable as men, and when, in the course of his long career, his foes had mocked him as being “womanlike,” he’d retorted that the Amazons had once ruled over Asia, and Semiramis had reigned supreme and ferocious over Babylon for a hundred years. If this was womanlike, let him be a woman. Caring nothing for gossips, disregarding his betrayed wife, and scoffing at the way the senators talked, he’d installed his mistress in his own garden house on the Tiber, and there she’d walked, surrounded by roses that reminded her of home.
They passed those same gardens now, given to the people at Caesar’s death.
“I am a queen,” she told Nicolaus finally. “You are a servant. You will not touch me.”
“Keep quiet. We do not need to be captured just as we arrive,” said Nicolaus without looking at her. He pulled her into a doorway as a patrol of legionaries marched past.
In the shadows, Cleopatra shifted her veil. Her eyes were dilated, she knew. Beneath the veil, she examined her fingers. The nails were long and curving, the claws of a lion. As she watched, they receded.
Antony, she thought. What have I become?
Talking to him was the only thing that kept her human. She thought of their marriage ceremony, their hands entwined, all the lamps lit, peacocks parading, their children seated around them, his shaggy mane of hair, the feeling of his muscles beneath his skin as she held his arm. Cleopatra was not gone when she thought of her husband. She had not lost herself entirely, she kept trying to remind herself. Part of her was still human.
But she feared this was untrue.
Amongst the cats, she’d stayed quiet enough, forgetting her history, forgetting everything. Vengeance and Rome had seemed far away. She slept curled around the lions and tigers, soothed by the sound of their purring. In the cat’s body, she scarcely noticed what she was doing, and the slaves seemed to expect what was coming for them. They hardly resisted.
Only slaves, Cleopatra thought, still troubled by what had happened aboard the ship, but it was no comfort. She hadn’t known about the child as she took the mother, as she took the father, as she took everyone, frenzied, glorying in hunger and satisfaction. She’d nearly killed the child,