Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [81]
“There is no enemy out there. There is only Rome,” Agrippa said, his voice terse. He’d spent an infuriating night, first walking the corridors and then consulting with a group of legionaries who reported a strange intruder in the Circus Maximus. The men were at a loss to describe what the intruder had done, insisting she had been able to run more quickly than they, that she’d leapt from street to rooftop with ease, that she’d seemed one moment an animal and the next a woman.
Agrippa accused the men of drunkenness, not unusual after a return from a long sea voyage, and sent them back to their quarters. But only moments after their departure, the screaming had started.
Augustus looked up, startled, as his general slammed the chamber door and threw his weapons down upon the stones.
“What exactly is it we seek to war against?” Agrippa roared. “Why do you have me dealing with the blackest creatures in the world? Why do you insist that such things stay in your own house? You will tell me what all this means or I will be gone from you.”
His friend looked up at him, and sighed. Agrippa noticed that Augustus’s face had developed new lines. His eyes were grimmer than Agrippa had ever seen them, the whites streaked with red. Though it was early morning, there was wine on Augustus’s breath. Wine and something else, something herbal and caustic. He’d lost weight in the past months, and his hair had the ragged look of a badly shorn sheep. In Alexandria, he had sent false messages. Now he called for witches. Perhaps the guilt over the sabotage of Mark Antony had made him ill.
“Cleopatra lives,” Augustus said. “I swear it. I should have told you long ago. What the Psylli said was true. She is not dead, Agrippa. She was here last night.”
Agrippa leaned closer to his friend. He would summon a physician discreetly, and immediately upon leaving this conference.
“She is certainly dead,” Agrippa said, attempting to soothe Augustus. “Look out that window, not at Romulus’s hut but at the Circus Maximus. Have you not noticed what is being erected there by your own army? An obelisk, taken from Alexandria. See the point, rising over the fence? Would we have such a thing had we not won the war?”
“She lives, and she is in Rome. I swear it. You think I’m mad,” Augustus said, his mouth twisting into a wry smile. “I am not. I saw her, just now. Selene saved me by screaming.”
“Such visions come of fever.” Agrippa brushed the emperor’s icy forehead with his hand, worried enough to defy all protocol. The room was strangely cold suddenly, though it had been warm enough when he entered. He would order a fire lit.
“I am as well as any man could be, knowing that his enemy stalked him, knowing that his enemy resisted death. There would be no witches in Rome if I were not desperate. She lives, and she is not human.”
The emperor brought forth a mound of rough fabric. A linen tunic. A cloak such as a peasant might wear. An agate goblet.
Agrippa looked at the objects, bewildered. He could see no meaning in them.
“I took this from the queen’s mausoleum in Alexandria,” Augustus said, picking up the goblet and holding it to the light. The sun glowed through it.
The residue of something dark lay in its well.
“Once, there was a queen of Egypt,” he began. “A queen who became through magic something else.”
When Augustus was done speaking, Agrippa pushed himself back from the table, furious.
“I passed her yesterday at the port,” he said, his voice hoarse with frustration. “She was just arriving in the city, and had you seen fit to inform me of all this earlier, I would have had her, and her scholar, too. A patrol of my men saw her an hour ago and gave chase, but they did not capture her, because you had not told me what we were looking for. Now she’s hidden under our noses. I thought I imagined things. A dead woman walking through Rome.”
“A dead woman walking through Rome,” Augustus echoed.
“You misunderstand me,” Agrippa said. “Cleopatra never