Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [79]
Thus is Egypt Conquered, said the inscription. The statue was decked with laurel garlands and, below that, covered in graffiti. It stood in a pile of refuse.
Her entire body recoiled, her throat convulsing. This was their triumph, this frozen thing. They had carried her through the streets and shown her nakedness to everyone.
She rocked the statue on its base and pushed it until it fell to the earth, unbroken. Only the serpent’s tail was cracked. The rest remained. Her voice betrayed her, and a wail became a roar.
It took only moments to ascend the Palatine and arrive, panting, outside the emperor’s residence, her skin icy, her rage cloaked in darkness. She pressed her hands to the stone of the outer wall, feeling the fractures within it. It was vulnerable.
She might slip in, take the form of the snake, and pass through the hall, silent as death, sleekly moving over the paving stones. To Octavian’s bedchamber. To Octavian’s bed. She would strangle him there.
Feed, Sekhmet whispered. Cleopatra jolted.
Her children were inside the house as well. She could feel them dreaming. Alexander Helios playing at weapons in his sleep. Ptolemy, little Ptolemy, dreaming about her. She saw her own face in his mind, her own arms holding him. He dreamt of his mother, but not as she was now. The mother he remembered was dead.
Where was Selene? Cleopatra could not hear her dreams, and after a moment, she realized that it was because the girl was awake, somewhere in the house. Awake, or not quite. She seemed to be in a waking dream, her thoughts drifting out of the residence as birds and flowers, and the face of a woman Cleopatra did not recognize, a green-eyed girl with braids to her knees.
Cleopatra realized with a start that Selene was dreaming of a new mother.
She slipped around the outer wall, searching for Selene’s room. She could not face her sons, but the thought of her daughter had sustained her aboard the ship. She was so like Cleopatra, and the rejections she’d shouted in Alexandria were exactly what Cleopatra herself would have said had their places been switched. Selene was ambitious, truly royal. She might understand why her mother had done as she had, even if her brothers could not. Cleopatra suddenly wanted desperately to explain, to woo her child back to her side. Her daughter was near. She moved silently along the building, ever closer.
She imagined herself as she was, bounding into Selene’s room. The girl would rise from bed, and run to the windows, and—
She halted in confusion, scenting something she recognized. A musky smell, mint and night, wine and sweat, blood and metal. She turned slowly, looking into the dark.
“Antony?” she whispered, her body straining for a reply. But there was nothing. After a moment, she realized she was a fool. With her heightened senses, she must have caught an echo of long ago. This was Antony’s city, after all.
Whose bedchamber was it coming from? She looked up to the second floor of the residence.
The shutters stood open, and from them she could hear the emperor’s nightmares. He dreamt of Cleopatra. She saw her own face in his sleeping thoughts. Her dead face, like the statue he’d had made in her image. All thoughts of her children forgotten, Cleopatra fit her fingertips into a crack in the stones, and began to climb, her claws scraping against the rock. It took only a few moments before she was in the window itself, and there he was. Her enemy in his bed, his pale hair lit with moonlight, the lines in his face deep and contorted. Tears ran down his face. He cried in his sleep.
She thought of the taste of tears.
She stepped over the sill, her feet silent. She dropped to the floor, her body shifting as she moved toward Augustus.
She could hear the legionaries coming up the hillside, resolved to tell Marcus Agrippa what they had seen. She could hear them pounding on his door. They had no idea where she was.
She undulated across the silken carpet, the sound of her passage a mere whisper. She fit her pointed jaw beneath the counterpane and