Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [67]
You will be her slave.
Half through the voyage, she’d found herself crouched with the cats in the hold, running her fingers over a tiger’s coat, certain she could read the markings on it. The future, she’d thought, believing, if only for a few hours, that her own acts were written here, her own hopes, her own solutions. The tiger’s stripes were hieroglyphs, she’d thought, as she’d sat in the dark, reading in the language of the gods. It was only now, walking through the streets of Rome, that she saw the madness in this.
Her future, whatever it was, was written nowhere but in her own body, and the writing was unclear. All she knew was that she had arrived in the city of her enemies, and that they were all around her.
Nicolaus placed the ship’s child in apprenticeship to a scribe he had known in Damascus, and at last, they arrived at their destination.
“No one will look for us here,” he said as he pried the lock from the door. He hid her in a library, the home of a poet, Virgil, a great favorite of the emperor. Nicolaus had encountered him in Alexandria months before and learned that he planned to be in Campania for some time.
She tried to study Virgil’s library instead of dreaming of fire and bloodshed. The scholar brought incense to the room, and she burned the resin, but it gave her none of the pleasure it once had. It reminded her of Alexandria, the smell of the cedar planks imported from Cyprus. Those same dockyard planks had caught fire and ignited the library filled with the knowledge of every traveler, every scholar, medicines and magic, maps and death songs, in all the languages of man. Now all that true understanding was lost, dispersed as ashes into the air of Egypt and settled into the sand. Cleopatra had inhaled the ashes herself—she remembered walking the city as it burned, the smoke low and black—and they had not taught her anything.
Nicolaus went out into the city to glean the location of her children. This was what a queen should do, she knew. Wait for her servants to get her the information she could not herself obtain. She knew that Rome was traitorous, that assassins could appear out of nowhere. She knew she should be reasonable. She would resist Sekhmet’s voice. She could not take revenge until she knew where her children were. She would not run the risk of hurting them more than she already had.
Cleopatra opened the scrolls, spreading them on the marble floor before her. Studying them as once she had studied her language lessons. Poems and histories, books of myth, romance, and medicines. Words were the things that had made her a true queen of Egypt. They were her power. No longer. The vellum of certain, more precious texts radiated nothing but the lives of dead things. She could scarcely pay attention long enough to absorb the stories in the scrolls.
Even in this windowless room, Cleopatra could feel the moon crossing the sky. She thought of Ra, an ancient with bones of silver, flesh of gold, and hair the pure blue of lapis, traveling the waters of the sky in his day boat, creating the stars and constellations so that when night came, and he traveled into the Underworld, his path would be lit.
Now endless night was what she desired. Night was best for murder, and her enemy, like all men, surely slept when the sun was gone. She could feel Sekhmet surging through the world, fueled by Cleopatra’s rampage aboard the ship.
She bent again over the book before her, searching for distraction. She happened instead upon an unpublished poem about her own marriage. Virgil had obscured it somewhat, and grafted a new and terrible ending onto the story. She was gossip now.
Virgil had disguised Cleopatra as Dido, the foreign queen of Carthage, in love with Aeneas, who left her behind to return to his own people. In this poem, the queen’s suicide was successful. Aeneas