16
The queen sprinted through the city, her
bare feet scarcely touching the street. She fed on the first meat
she saw, a fuller stumbling from a doorway, his robes reeking of
his profession, his blood hot and sweet as she bit into his throat
and drank of him. Feeding would make Sekhmet stronger, but it was
necessary. Cleopatra could not function without it. She left the
man, pale and withered, in another doorway, and felt the now
familiar rushing of love, of power, of satisfaction. Somewhere in
her mind was the sound of singing, ancient temple songs, and
priestesses worshipping her.
Worshipping Sekhmet. She could become the ruler of
everything—
Cleopatra shook her head frantically, trying to
clear it of the visions.
What had happened? How had she come to be here? Her
body had been dragged suddenly up from Hades and Persephone’s
throne room, and still she did not know who’d opened the box that
had contained her. She’d woken in the air, returned to her body,
sensing her daughter in the house somewhere, and witches, but who
had released her? In the chaos, she’d been unable to tell what was
happening. The smell of blood was everywhere, but she ran from it.
No time.
Her bargain weighed on her, and it was her first
focus. She sought the Slaughterer first. The Slaughterer, she
understood. She and Sekhmet’s child had things in common. The
priestess of Thessaly was a different sort of creature.
The wound her dreaming self had sustained in the
Underworld burned her, though it was not visible here. Her body was
perfect, unscarred, unbroken, no matter the pain she felt. The
silver box she clutched in her fingers burned her, too, but it was
a distraction from her arm. It was also a distraction from the pain
in the place her heart had been. She’d done the right thing. She
knew she had, but Antony was gone.
She shook off the pain and ran on. She had to
accomplish the task or she would fail Antony, fail her children,
fail everyone she loved.
The voice of the goddess was instantly back in her
head. She ignored it as she ran, trying to keep it from
understanding her purpose.
Kill, Sekhmet told her.
The Slaughterer had served the goddess well in the
queen’s absence, Cleopatra could feel. It had sacrificed so many
that Sekhmet felt nearly blissful. Nearly happy.
Blood ran through the streets of villages. Corpses
rotted. Now Plague traveled, hungering always, and Cleopatra could
feel its work as it moved through the country, through the world,
from island to island, from mountain to mountain.
The temples, Sekhmet directed the
queen.
Cleopatra considered. Surely, Plague was traveling
with the same directions.
Cleopatra imagined she could see Ra’s boat
traveling through the caverns of the Duat. Imagined she could see
the Island of Fire. Imagined she could see Ra himself, the
brilliance of his skin, the light of his face, the place on his
forehead where Sekhmet had once lived.
She felt Sekhmet, her strength and her weaknesses.
It took a great deal of bloodshed to release the Slaughterers. Six
Arrows still waited in her quiver: Famine, Earthquake, Flood,
Drought, Madness, and Violence. They hummed their deathly songs,
desiring, wanting, while the seventh traveled the earth.
Cleopatra killed another man near the imperial
residence. The taste of the blood flowed through the goddess, and
the queen felt the blood placate her mistress.
Cleopatra killed others, several more in quick
succession, and then she ran faster through the city, trying to
avoid the populated areas, the smell of people, the hunger that
would destroy her resistance. She was traveling nearly as quickly
as Sekhmet herself, and the goddess roared, her voice echoing
through the heavens as thunder, jolting Romans from their sleep and
making them shake in their beds.
“What was that?” they asked one another.
None of them had an answer. They sat quietly in
their beds, wide-eyed in the darkness, waiting, without knowing
that they were waiting, for the queen to come for them.
Cleopatra knew that she would not kill them, but
Sekhmet did not.
Sekhmet was convinced that her slave hungered for
the citizens of Rome. She did not know that Cleopatra had set
herself on killing one of Sekhmet’s children.
Cleopatra lifted her chin and scented the air, the
pungent, bloody odor of the killing arrow. The Slaughterer. She
looked up, her throat vibrating like that of a cat stalking a
bird.
High above her, she could see what seemed to be a
tremendous star crossing the heavens, and she followed it, bounding
over the land, out of the city and into the countryside.
In an untended orchard, far from where
Cleopatra ran, a beady, black eye flickered. An ivory horn, its tip
lethally sharpened, its protective cap of cork long since
disappeared, shone slightly in the moonlight. The dark and scaly
creature turned its armored head quickly and lumbered to its feet.
Horses whinnied around it, bewildered by their companion.
The rhinoceros stood, and pushed its way through a
gap in the fencing.
Three crocodiles slipped into the Tiber, fitting
their reptilian forms through the gutters and into the river.
The snakes of Rome slithered into their tunnels,
their burrows, their underground passages.
A tiger crouched and leapt, silently, to the top of
the Temple of Apollo, on the Palatine, where a peacock was
roosting.
A wild-eyed gazelle looked frantically about her,
hearing something, hearing everything, before there was a swift
flurry of wind, and her breast was pierced by an arrow. She was
slung over a set of broad shoulders and brought home by an
ambitious hunter for dinner.
Feathers fell from the sky, and blood pooled in the
street, and the rhinoceros trotted through the darkness of the
city, far from his home, shaking the dreams of every house he
passed.
He followed behind his queen.
As night fell, Cleopatra arrived in
Krimissa at the Temple of Apollo, following the trail of the
Slaughterer. In twilight, she examined the fallen bodies of Romans
from the Praetorian Guard and of priests from the temple’s
order.
For a moment, she was sure she smelled the scent of
the emperor. Surely, that was impossible, though. He could not have
been here. It was shadowed with something else, an herbal scent,
and that with horseflesh and metal.
Upon the statue of a centaur, an inscription
informed the reader that Chiron had died accidentally, pricked by a
Hydra arrow when Hercules fired it in a display of prowess, and
that, though he was a master of medicines, Chiron had not been able
to cure himself.
The centaur had been an immortal, and the pain of
the wound had caused him so much suffering that he had given up his
immortality in order to die.
Hail Prometheus, said the inscription
engraved below the wounded centaur’s hooves, who took willingly
the gift of Chiron’s immortal life, and who then suffered the
endless punishment of Zeus. Hail Prometheus, who gave mankind fire
and offended the gods.
The chained man’s liver was plucked out nightly in
Hades. Cleopatra knew the story. Immortality sometimes had a steep
and awful price.
She had known that already.
After a time, she moved on from the scarred place
and back into the night, following behind the Slaughterer.