“You are not alive, and you are not dead, either,” Antony answered, his face unreadable. “Your body is above us, trapped in Chrysate’s hands, and your soul—”
“I sold my ka,” Cleopatra whispered. “I sold it to Sekhmet to bring you back.”
Antony looked at her, his eyes filled with sorrow.
“When I first came to Hades, I could still taste the wine you gave me in our mausoleum. Who are you? the dead asked me. ‘Mark Antony,’ I answered. No longer. You are no one here, they said. ‘Where is my wife?’ I asked. She belongs to another, they answered.”
“They lied to you!” Cleopatra shouted, infuriated. “I am yours,” she said more quietly. “I swear it. Octavian sent a false messenger to you and bribed my army.”
“They were not wrong,” Antony said quietly. “I saw you in Rome.”
Cleopatra felt as though part of her mind had been left behind with her body. Of course he’d seen her, in the arena.
“I saw you kill a servant in the street. I saw you drink from him until he was dead.”
Cleopatra had a fleeting thought of throwing herself into the river. She started to stand, but he took her hand and held it tightly in his.
“Then why did you bring me with you?” Cleopatra managed. If he did not want her, she should be in that silver box. She should be in Rome, a captive.
Antony touched her chest, the place where her heart had been.
“Te teneo,” Antony said simply. “No matter what you are, no matter what has happened to you. I love you. That was my pledge. I tried to keep you safe in the living world, but I did not understand what you were. I was a fool. I thought soldiers could protect you. We go to Hades and Persephone, the lord and lady of this realm. They will know how to help you.”
Cleopatra looked quickly at him.
“You risk yourself,” she said.
She knew enough about his Underworld to know that the throne room of its gods was not a place for lowly spirits to visit. There was no petitioning in Hades. The gods were not sympathetic.
“Then I risk myself,” Antony told her. “I am not afraid.”
She could see thousands of other spirits now, in the gray light, making their way about the terrain, dark and dusty, hungry, bewildered. She couldn’t hear their thoughts, if they had thoughts at all, and this was a blessing. They smelled of nothing, and their histories were unknowns. There was no blood here, and it was endlessly dusk.
She thought of her own Underworld, and the sun that shone there for one glorious hour each night, waking the dead from sleep. From the Duat, the blessed dead could go forth amongst the living during the day. The dead flew through the clouds as hawks and basked in the sun as cats. The dead swooped as owls and trotted across the sand as dogs and jackals. At night, they went back to the realm of Osiris, fulfilled. Had she and Antony both died, they would have been together in the Duat, and perhaps, had their souls been judged happily, in the Beautiful West.
Home.
Now her only home was Antony.
Her husband laced his cold fingers together with hers and drew her to her feet. They walked on, into the mists of Hades.
4
The walls of the prison oozed filthy water, and there was no food but thin, weevil-ridden mash. Nicolaus comforted himself. At least he still lived. It was a miracle he had not been crucified.
A group of legionaries had caught him breaking into the emperor’s chambers at the Palatine, and he had been arrested immediately. He demanded to see the emperor or Marcus Agrippa, but the legionaries took him to the prison without hearing anything he had to say.
He’d languished here for days, surrounded by madmen.
The prisoners, mainly soldiers who had collapsed or betrayed Rome by serving Antony in the battle at the Circus Maximus, compared visions of the queen’s transformation, gibbering and wailing from their cells. They told one another tales of Mark Antony, once their fellow, walking as a shade and hiring them to defend his queen, and of wild animals slavering. They spoke of serpents that swarmed through the streets of Rome.
They spoke of the queen dancing in the center of an endless fire, undamaged.
He had to get to the emperor. His life was already ruined, and if he did not wish to spend the rest of it rotting belowground, he must tell his story to the Romans. He must get access to other materials, other libraries. Something to find a way to defeat Sekhmet. It must exist. They did not understand that though they had Cleopatra, they did not contain her. Sekhmet still walked, and she was the daughter of the sun. It was very likely that the burning had made her stronger.
He was tormented by a scrap of memory, something he’d read in the Museion about Sekhmet’s Slaughterers, seven ferocious children in the form of monstrous arrows, who served as bringers of chaos, plague, and destruction. They had been punished along with Sekhmet, and if she was free, they were, too.
In desperation, he begged a guard for writing materials, hoping to craft a letter to the emperor, and when they scoffed at him, he mentioned Virgil’s name.
Days later, a visitor arrived. He was a head taller than any of the guards, draped in a dark, hooded cloak. Nicolaus watched hopelessly as the man passed coins to the guard. He expected this was some assassin buying his way into the cell, but when the man took off his hood, Nicolaus recognized the poet’s face, long and grim.
“You should not have used my name,” Virgil said. “Augustus does not know I am in Rome. Someone else summoned me here, but the emperor wrote me in Campania, begging me to come to his bedside as a storyteller. He is having difficulty sleeping.”
“As well he should,” said Nicolaus. “A monster sleeps in his house.”
“I heard that,” said Virgil. “The emperor’s servants leak secrets. A miracle, is it not? They captured a shape-shifting creature. A wonder.”
“It is not a wonder,” Nicolaus said. “It is horrifying. You are fortunate that you have not seen what I have seen. You must get me out of this prison. I have to speak to Augustus.”
Virgil looked at Nicolaus for a moment, measuring him. “I’ve brought you writing materials, at considerable risk to myself.”
Nicolaus reached out to grasp the scroll, but Virgil held it back.
“I have a price.”
“I have no money,” Nicolaus said, frustrated. “Perhaps you misunderstand my position here.”
“There is a request for a forgery, from high up in Rome, and if I value my life, I cannot do it.”
“Why should I be capable of something you are not?”
“You are dead already,” Virgil said simply.
The Sibylline Books, Virgil explained, were a complicated fiction: The original texts, purchased by Tarquinius from the Cumaean Sibyl, had been destroyed in a fire at the Temple of Jupiter fifty years before, and since then, Rome had searched the world to replace them with copies. Naturally, it had quickly become clear that the copies might be edited to reflect favorable omens for Rome. The Sibylline prophecies were now largely, albeit secretly, the work of hired scholars pretending to be longdead prophetic priestesses. They were consulted whenever Rome’s rulers wished to justify something with an ancient prophecy. This forgery, however, was a delicate assignment.
“A group of senators desire a doomsday prophecy relating to the rise of Cleopatra and the fall of Augustus’s Rome. They wish to sway the public’s opinion of Augustus. It seems that the facts support them,” said Virgil.
“To what end?”
“The story you will write might aid them in restoring the republic. It might create a revolution against Augustus. It might merely make for entertaining reading. I cannot tell the future, Nicolaus, but a story like this is difficult to resist, even for a man like me. Sometimes, I miss the days when I wrote what I pleased.”
“You do not miss those days much,” Nicolaus said, snorting. It felt as though they were scholars debating in a courtyard, and for a moment, Nicolaus forgot that he was behind bars in a dungeon and that Virgil stood at liberty, the ric
hest poet in Rome.
“True,” said Virgil, and smiled. “I will visit Augustus when I am finished here. I have become the emperor’s lullaby singer, but he pays me in Egyptian gold.”
“What am I to write?” Nicolaus asked.
“And you were once such a promising scholar,” Virgil said. “Can you not guess? The texts are kept under key in the Temple of Apollo, and everyone claims they’re incorrupt, but every leader has commissioned his own version of the prophecies, dependent on what he needed the world to believe. The Sibylline prophecies are a creation of convenience and full of lies. You, on the other hand, will write the truth. The emperor has employed some sort of witch to steal the memories of those who witnessed the chaos in the Circus Maximus, and the senators fear that the stories will not travel as easily as they need them to.”
“I want to write to Augustus,” Nicolaus insisted.
“He reads the prophecies,” Virgil said.
“Augustus has put Rome in danger. He has put the world at risk by capturing her.”
“Then write that,” Virgil said. “Terrify him. Terrify Rome. Make them think their doomsday is coming, and all because of what Augustus has done. Is that not what you believe? This is an opportunity. Didn’t you dream of becoming a historian? This is a history, though it claims to be prophecy. Tell them what they have done, and if it serves the senators, it serves you, too.”
Thus it was that Nicolaus the Damascene began to write prophecy, passing each page to a bribed guard as he finished it. His mind was vague and scattered, but writing kept him from falling over the edge of sanity. He wrote the truth, or at least as much of it as he could, in the guise of a sibyl, thinking back on the various books he’d scanned in Virgil’s library and the tone of the prophets’ voices.
“Then shall all declare that I am a true prophetess, oracle-singing, and yet a messenger with maddened soul. And when thou shalt come forward to the Books, thou shalt not tremble, and all things to come and things that were, ye shall know from our words,” he wrote, pretending that these same words had been written centuries before.
The prophecies would be published as newly discovered, unearthed from an ancient ruin, scrolls found rolled into an amphora or entombed with some hero. They would be read aloud in the Forum and all across the country, drawing support away from Augustus and toward his foes. If the emperor would not deal rationally with Cleopatra, if he would not understand that he caged an immortal, then perhaps someone else would. She must be destroyed, and though Nicolaus did not know how to destroy her, he hoped that someone who read his words might. As for Sekhmet, Nicolaus could only hope that if Cleopatra were killed, the goddess would go back into oblivion, back to where she had been before they summoned her.
Nicolaus was not permitted to use Cleopatra’s name—even oracles could not know everything—and so he named her “the widow.”
He was not permitted to speak directly of Augustus, so he referred to him obliquely. “And then shall come inexorable wrath upon Latin men. Three shall, by piteous fate, endamage Rome. And perish shall all men with their own houses, when from heaven shall flow a fiery cataract.”
Three men and the eye of Ra. Augustus, Antony, and Agrippa, he meant, though he might as well add himself amongst that group. Sekhmet, a flaming vengeance making her way across the heavens. They all would perish, and it was all of their fault. Antony for inciting Cleopatra into trading herself for his life, Augustus for warring against her in the first place, and Agrippa for serving as his general.
As he wrote, his mind chewed over the possibilities. Somewhere in his reading, somewhere in his books, there was an answer.
Immortals had been killed before, he knew it, though their deaths were portrayed only in myth. Hercules had used his sword to chop off forty-nine of the heads of his enemy, the Hydra, and then cauterized the wounds with fire to keep them from renewing. He’d buried the furiously immortal head deep below the ground on the road to Lerna, and placed a boulder over the spot. Poison seeped from it and into the darkness, but the Hydra lived now only in Hades. It had not come back to the surface. Thus far.
The thought of the Hydra spurred some memory deep within the historian’s mind. He pressed his hands to his temples, searching for the connection. Some fragment read in Virgil’s library, something in the tasks of Hercules. Deaths of immortals. The Hydra’s venom.
Nicolaus looked down at his task and discovered that he had heedlessly signed the prophecy he’d been writing with his own name. He swore, dropping it on the floor. He would have to begin again.
He paused, still thinking, and at last, the idea he’d been searching for came swimming into the light of his consciousness.
He knew how to defeat the queen. Immortal to immortal. Chaos to chaos. There was a way.
5
The queen lives” went the refrain whispered in the streets of Rome.
“Cleopatra has returned from the dead to kill the emperor.”
The scrolls said as much. A newly published set of oracular texts informed the public that the fall of Rome was imminent, that Despoina had risen from her imprisonment, and that her anger at Augustus would destroy everything in the world.
A centurion read from the text, sitting beside a campfire on the shores of the Black Sea. “And thou shalt be no more a widow,” he said, and one of his young legionaries laughed.
“They only mean Cleopatra was a whore who went to our leader’s bed after her husband killed himself,” he said. “Trying to buy freedom for Egypt. Augustus likes a conquered woman, too, just like Caesar did before him. I was in Alexandria. I guarded the queen in her private chambers.”
“How did you guard her?” another legionary snorted. “From your knees?”
“She was the one kneeling,” the first legionary boasted.
The centurion looked sharply at them.
“These are ancient prophecies, god-given. Have some respect. Listen. ‘But thy soul shalt cohabit with a man-eating lion, terrible, a furious warrior. And then shalt thou be happy, and among all men known; for thou shalt leave possessed of shameless soul.’”
“What do you make of that?” another legionary asked, a feeling of unease creeping through his belly.
“Cleopatra is not a mortal woman, if she ever was. Some say she was a witch and that was how she got Mark Antony to do her bidding.”
The company made a sign against witchcraft. Antony had been their idol, and then he had betrayed them. It would be a comfort if that had not been his fault. It would be a comfort if, in fact, Augustus, who was known to be no warrior, who had fled several battlefields, turned out to be a liar. Stranger things had happened in the history of Rome.
The commander read the rest of the prophecy.
“And thee, the stately, shall the encircling tomb receive, for he, the Roman king, shall place thee there, though thee be still amongst the living. Though thy life is gone, there will be something immortal living within thee. Though thy soul is gone, thy anger will remain, and thy vengeance will rise and destroy the cities of the Roman king.”
He put the scroll down, his face grim.
“In Alexandria, I was with the emperor when we went into the mausoleum. The queen’s body was not there, though we had carried it to the pyre and chained it in place three days earlier. We thought it had been stolen, but the emperor went pale. This prophecy says she lives, and I believe it. The prophecy says that Augustus has inflamed her wrath—”
“It doesn’t say Augustus,” one of the men interrupted.
“Destroy the cities of the Roman king,” the commander said. “There is a plague, or haven’t you heard? Everywhere but Rome. She is saving Rome for last.”
The men stared into their campfire, sobered.
“Perhaps she saves Rome for something worse than plague,” said the young legionary who had guarded Cleopatra.
Elsewhere in the new texts, the oracles implied that a return to the republic would save Rome. Messages began to be exchanged, from end to end of the count
ry, from legion to legion, from commander to commander. Soon, the senators and their emissaries traveled to these distant legions, soliciting their support, working their way through country villages and ports, where the rumor of the emperor’s misdeeds had already spread.
The new Sibylline prophecies did as the senators hoped they would.
An army constructed of legions that had once been loyal to Antony, and of legions that were commanded by allies of the seceding senators, began to rise.
6
Augustus sat in his chamber, staring out the window at the strange glow that remained on the horizon even in the dark. The night was live with shooting stars, and watching them cross the sky, and cross again, Augustus felt an irrational terror. He had been awake too long, sitting at the window too long. Marcus Agrippa had stayed away from his chambers since the battle at the Circus Maximus, and lately, his only company had been the priestess.
Chrysate practiced spells of binding, spells which, she told him, would serve to keep the queen under her power, but for now, it was best to keep the box under Roman guard, in the silver-lined room.
Augustus trusted Chrysate. Though perhaps not entirely. Strangely scented smoke trailed down the hallway, and when Chrysate kissed him, her hair smelled of burning balsam and damp sand, of honey and cinnamon. The smell reminded him of Egypt’s tombs.
They had won, he told himself, but Augustus still could not sleep. He thought of Cleopatra slithering inside the silver box, twisting and looping around herself, and Antony, his eyes burning embers. Every night, he stared at the paintings on his ceiling, fearful of things he could not name. The fireball he’d seen streaking across the heavens, perhaps. The roars that still shook Rome. His servants called them thunder, but he knew better.
There were petitioners and senators, armies and advisors, and all of them demanded his attention. On the table beside him was a tall stack of oracular prophecies, discovered in a cave and newly unrolled from amphorae, along with a message from Agrippa stating that they must be read.