Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [8]
“I would rather die by the hand of a queen than by the hand of this goddess.”
She stared at him a moment, impressed by his bravado but disgusted by his resistance. She had him beheaded, and Nicolaus nervously translated the remainder of the scroll himself.
Now, as her blood filled the goblet, Cleopatra felt the dread she’d banished that morning rising again. She placed the goblet beside the icon and lit a pyramid of incense, breathing in deeply. The scent of death, she thought, and instantly corrected herself. No. It was the scent of victory.
Ayear had passed since the Battle of Actium, and Octavian, the man Cleopatra still thought of as the child general, had spent it mocking Egypt, while gathering his forces to invade it. The slight boy with the pale gray eyes was a child no longer.
It was sixteen years since she’d seen him last, during a visit to her then lover, Julius Caesar. She was twenty-one and the new mother of Caesarion, Caesar’s first and only son. Octavian was stretched across a sickbed, a reedy, fevered skeleton by the time Caesar and Cleopatra arrived at his mother’s house.
How she wished that she’d known then what she knew now: that the frail great-nephew of Rome’s imperator would one day besiege her city. She might have killed him and saved herself years of pain.
Instead, she sat beside him on the bed and smoothed his fine, curly hair from off his brow. Octavian had just turned seventeen, but he looked twelve. He opened his eyes to survey Cleopatra.
“Am I dying?” the boy asked her. “They will not tell me.”
“Certainly not. You will live a long life,” she promised, though she could see his heart racing beneath nearly translucent skin, and the edges of his bones protruding, birdlike, all over his body.
Poor little thing, she actually thought, tucking his coverlet more tightly around him before leaving the room.
Now that poor little thing wielded more power than anyone else in the world.
Cleopatra had spent every moment of the past year at his mercy, fruitlessly bribing and extracting promises of protection from her neighboring rulers, all the while comforting her husband. Antony was guilt-ridden, blaming himself for the defeat at Actium. Cleopatra did not blame her husband. She was the queen. She should have known better than to do what she’d done in that battle. Funds for the continuing war had seemed the most important thing, and so, when Actium began to look like a defeat, she fled for Alexandria with her gold. Her husband followed her, his ships shielding hers, and this armed Octavian with damning propaganda, painting Antony as loyal to a foreign queen instead of to his home country.
Antony’s Roman troops, some fifty thousand men betrayed by his departure, deserted him, leaving Egypt with a fraction of the legions it had previously commanded, and Octavian declared victory, shouting his triumph from end to end of the world.
Now he came nearly unopposed to the shores of Alexandria, held off only by Antony and his small remaining forces. He thought he’d already won the country.
He had not.
The ritual knife had been sharpened enough to kill without the victim noticing the wound. If the spell failed, however, it would not be Octavian who was killed. Cleopatra would never get close enough to him.
No. If the summoning failed, it would be she who died, and by her own hand. She could not let the Romans take her as their captive, a trophy to parade in the streets of Italy. She and Antony had long since agreed that if the city were taken, they’d both commit suicide. It would be the only honorable course of action left to them.
Where is he? Another jolt of panic ran through Cleopatra. It had been hours since the messenger was sent, hours since Antony should have returned.
She shook herself back to focus. She could not stop to worry. There was no time. Brilliant crimson filled the agate goblet, and Sekhmet would accept it.
She must, or Egypt would fall, and Cleopatra and Antony with her. The queen of Egypt was not ready to die.
Thus far, this war had been fought entirely