Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [9]
Things were about to change.
Cleopatra threw her hands into the air as she’d practiced, spinning like the desert winds, calling up the forces that lay stored in the sand. The guttural syllables of the spell twisted, clicking and melting from her mouth, her tongue tasting the bitter words and then flinging them out into the heavens.
The door shook with a frantic pounding. Cleopatra stopped midphrase, the goblet poised over the bared teeth of the icon. Who was brave enough to interrupt the queen? She could think of only one person who would dare, and only one person who also knew how to access the secret passageway that led from the palaces to the mausoleum.
“Antony?” she called, relief flooding her body. She stepped out of the sacred circle and ran to the door.
It was not Antony but Cleopatra’s maid, Charmian, her eyes wild. She looked at Cleopatra’s bleeding hand and made a sound of dismay.
“Where is Antony?” the queen asked her, and when the maid did not answer, she shook the girl by her shoulders. “Where is he? Why has he not responded to my messenger?”
“They say he’s retreated into the Old City.” The girl paused. “Perhaps your message did not reach him.”
“And?” Cleopatra prompted, her skin prickling with fear. Something had happened.
“They say he came through the gates mad with rage. His men joined with Rome and abandoned him in the battle. He swears that you betrayed him.”
Cleopatra felt the air in the room humming, the spell half complete.
Why was this happening? What had she done wrong? She was a goddess. The New Isis. And Antony was her Osiris and Dionysus. Yet here she was, barricaded in her own half-finished mausoleum, caged with her treasure. Everything would be worthless without his love, everything broken.
She looked down at the knife in her hand, at her blood already staining the blade. She felt the power in the room crackling in the air. She had not yet finished the spell, but it was begun.
There was no turning back.
4
Mark Antony sat with his head in his hands, alternately raging and despairing. His mind flashed to the night before, to Cleopatra’s body in his arms, to her lips on his, and he shook his head, trying to rid it of the image. They’d pledged to die rather than surrender, and now—
If she’d gone over to the side of Octavian, there was nothing left for Antony in heaven or on earth.
In the days since the beginning of the invasion, he’d watched four legions of soldiers, once his loyal forces, assaulting Alexandria from the west. The enemy’s trumpets (and oh, what pain to call Rome his enemy, the place that had birthed him, the city that had been his mother and his love) drowned his speeches, and the men had no desire to listen.
They hated him for Actium, and they were right to do so.
He’d chosen Cleopatra over them, over everything.
“Cleopatra belongs to Rome,” the head of the cavalry had said. To Rome, and not to Antony. How could he have been so stupid? She had never belonged to him.
When he’d first met her, twelve years before, she’d only recently ceased belonging to Julius Caesar. Antony had summoned the queen to Tarsus to answer charges that she had financially assisted Cassius, the enemy of Rome who’d conspired in Caesar’s assassination.
At the time, Rome was poor in the wake of several years of civil war. Egypt and her queen, the scion of generations of Ptolemaic royalty, were wealthy, not just in treasure but in grain. Antony needed her support, and if he had to prod her with allegations in order to get it, he was more than willing to do so.
She sailed to him in a gilded barge with purple sails, beneath a canopy made of cloth of gold. Antony, apparently the only person in Tarsus who had not received knowledge of Cleopatra’s arrival, was left alone just as he was readying himself to address a crowd. He was bewildered by the sudden exodus of merchants and customers, but as he departed the marketplace, he caught the scent of eastern perfumes on the air and found himself drawn toward the water.
Squinting into the sun, he finally detected a glittering