The simpleton slaves and keepers of the necropolis insisted that he see the endless Ptolemaic tombs as well, and he was forced to descend an unpleasant stone staircase into a black pit, but he immediately turned and ran back up into the light, fearful of more creatures like Cleopatra, dead and yet not dead.

“I came to see a king,” he snapped, “not a pile of dead bodies.” This was to have been a reward for Cleopatra’s death after all, a final triumphant act in her city before departing for other places, other kingdoms, but what he’d seen in Cleopatra’s chamber had drastically changed the tone of the visit.

All he could think of now was her glowing eyes, her smiling lips. She lived, she lived, and he’d buried her that way. Too late, he realized that she would not stay buried. She would come for him. He must flee the country.

Before he could, though, he must do this or regret it forever.

“Open the sarcophagus,” he ordered. “I wish to see him.”

He sent the slaves away the moment the case was open, and then forced himself to look into the coffin. Alexander’s features, which Octavian had long venerated, dreamt of, were nothing but fragile leather. Nearly three hundred years had passed since Alexander’s death by poison at Nebuchadnezzar’s palace. His corpse had originally been transported from Babylon in a vat of honey, as though he were a queen bee. The sweetish smell still lingered, along with that of the cinnamon used in his embalming. The odor confused Octavian’s mind, twisting his memories. In Egypt, the precious inner bark of the cinnamon tree was used on the dead, but in Rome it was used on the living, as an ingredient in love potions. Octavian himself had wandered the darkest alleys of his own city, sniffing out magic in the corridors, witches brewing potions for hire.

A flash of fury blasted through Octavian’s center. His problems here in Egypt were certainly the result of a witch. Were it not for her, he would not be looking at a corpse and wondering if it lived.

“Great Alexander,” he shouted, the walls echoing around him. “I pay you tribute.”

He’d brought with him a golden diadem, discovered in the queen’s treasure, and flowers to fill the sarcophagus, but first, he must make certain that Alexander was truly dead. Octavian put out a tentative finger, breathing unhappily through his mouth, icy sweat breaking out over his body. The hand shook so gravely that it knocked against the corpse’s face, and with a faint, dusty sound, the flesh gave way.

Octavian jumped away, horrified. The nose hung crookedly now. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the awful sound that would herald the rising of a wounded god, but no sound came.

The eyes of the corpse were closed. No black depths, no shining end of the world there. No life inside the body of his hero. Thank the gods.

Octavian permitted himself a small sigh of relief. He would not have wished to contend with both Alexander and Cleopatra. She was more than enough.

“What should I do?” he whispered to his hero, praying for a revelation, though now he knew there would be no answer. “What should I do with her?”

Alexander the Great would never have trembled in the face of magic. He would have attacked Cleopatra, living corpse or no, monster or no, ferocious with his sword. He would have summoned sorcerers to plot against her, researched potions and poisons. He would have done whatever was necessary to conquer her.

Octavian ran his fingers over the great man’s burial garments. He tore off a small section of fabric and hid it on his person, hoping to absorb some of Alexander’s godlike courage.

Octavian was himself the son of a god, or so his mother, Atia, had always claimed, swearing Apollo had come down from Olympus in the form of a snake and impregnated her. According to legend, Alexander the Great had also been fathered by a god in snake form, the Egyptian king and magician Nectanebo, and so Octavian had never seen reason to dispute Atia’s politically useful story. It made Alexander and Octavian the same sort of hero, the same sort of man.

Octavian did not feel heroic at present. He felt queasy, thinking of Cleopatra’s chamber and the missing asp. Might the snake have been a god? What else could explain the queen living and dead at once?

No.

Surely the opening of her eyes had been an aftereffect of the snake’s—the mortal snake’s—poison. Did not dead men’s members stand erect on the gallows? Did not the beheaded stare in wonder? Surely, were he to look into Cleopatra’s mausoleum now, he’d find her decaying, just as Alexander was.

And if not—

He’d do as his hero would have done. Alexander had won the world through bravery and perseverance, through resourceful actions, and Octavian would follow his lead. He would not flee.

He was the man who controlled Rome, and Rome controlled the world. His enemies were dead, all but her. He had the power in his hands. He would run her through with his sword. Either that, or he’d burn her, a thought that seemed more and more attractive. He’d been childish, imagining that she would set the world aflame. It was his own fears controlling him. What witch could survive a burning? He’d turn her to ash, and let her try to rise from that.

Octavian stood up from Alexander’s tomb and looked down one last time at the shriveled figure lying within. Alexander had been killed at twenty-nine, long before he’d reached his full potential. Octavian was thirty-three. He did not plan to die this day.

“There is more world out there than you knew,” he told Alexander, testing a certainty he did not wholly feel. “More things than you ever dreamt of. I’ve seen the world, and it belongs to me. All of it is mine.”

He turned to march up the stairs. The room echoed with his last exhalation, the dust of empires rising and falling behind him.