21
The earth shook with the marching of
legions, all moving toward Avernus. Messengers flew, whispering to
centurions, whispering to generals, passing written instructions
along with well-embroidered rumors. Horses, frothing, fell at the
roadsides, shying at the strange snakes that coursed over the roads
even in daylight. Their riders leapt off and ran on. Men marched
onward, sweating and burning in the heat of summer’s end, their
armor heavy, their swords sheathed and sharpened, their feet
beating a deep track into the dust.
Usem rode unsaddled, his coral ornaments polished.
His dagger gleamed, its metal darker and stranger than anything the
Romans had seen before. All who looked on him felt uneasy. The
man’s skin shone in the sun, and nothing about him was Roman. He
wore something about his shoulders that sometimes was a leopard
skin and sometimes was the night sky, and beside him, around him, a
tornado traveled, cooling nothing.
The legionaries watched Usem talking with the
whirlwind, heard her talking back to him, whispers carried on the
breeze, pouring into their ears and eyes. The snake sorcerer rode
beside the emperor, protecting him from unknown enemies, and the
Romans, in spite of themselves, feared him.
With Usem and Augustus rode the emperor’s
historian, his armor rattling and ill-fitting. The soldiers had
expected Nicolaus to perform the role of a poet, reciting words of
war at night, singing songs of courage by day. Instead, the
Damascene was silent, and this made the Romans even more nervous
than they already were.
Their commander, Marcus Agrippa, wore bandages
around his calf, and his face showed pain as he rode. Those who
served nearest him saw him unwinding his bandages and redressing
his wound, and they reported that it festered, hot and red,
unhealing. He would not let servants touch it.
Only Augustus seemed himself, though his eyes were
bright with fever. He rode ferociously up and down the lines of
marching men, shouting encouragements to the army, asserting that
they would best an enemy they could not imagine.
At night, roaring could be heard, but it came from
no clear location. The earth shook and then was stable again. The
soldiers looked to the heavens, thinking of Zeus and wondering
which side he was on, that of the emperor of Rome or that of the
dead queen of Egypt.
The purses of old women and of augurs filled with
coins as they interpreted omens for the marching armies. Overhead,
eagles wheeled, and vultures, too, following the leavings of the
army.
Agrippa and Augustus, Nicolaus riding beside them,
arrived in Alba only to find that the legion that had been
garrisoned there had already marched south. Augustus was delighted
to see that the army had received their orders and traveled
responsively, but Agrippa was uneasy. Perhaps it was the pain of
his leg. Perhaps it was something more.
Their next station, Formiae, was similarly emptied
of men. Agrippa had sent the orders ahead himself, had written the
letters, and yet he mistrusted the quiet. The legion had traveled
too quickly. Their dust should still be in sight. Augustus, on the
other hand, was exuberant, sweating in the heat of the sun, singing
in the cool of the night, reminded once more of his boyhood beside
Agrippa, beside Julius Caesar, of the glorious times before he’d
become truly Glorious.
At night, the sky filled with stars, and Augustus
looked up at them, imagining himself stationed amongst the
constellations. He imagined his own gods looking down upon his
deeds, approving.
He would win this time. He would win. He had an
army behind him and Hercules’ bow upon his back. Who knew what Rome
would be when this battle was over?
Who knew what worlds existed to be conquered once
Rome had beaten such an enemy?
Selene, in her litter, rocked down the dusty Appian
behind the army, her eyes closed, her skin chilled. The seiðkona
traveled with her, trying to draw her own strength together. She
had so little now. Her time was nearly done.
As the legions marched into Avernus,
Cleopatra waited. It was sundown, and the moon rose in a yellow
crescent. She could smell the armies coming toward her. She could
feel their footsteps and hear their lust for battle. She could feel
Augustus and Agrippa.
She had not been in battle since Actium.
She missed Antony, their planning together, the
nights before the battle had taken place. She missed her lover, her
general, her partner.
She knew, though, that she would have to do this
alone. He was gone, and this was her fight, not his. She would
fight to save her children and Antony. She would fight to avenge
herself upon the man who had taken everything from her.
She thought of Augustus’s heart, and of how it
would feel in her hands. She could feel it beating, his excitement
as he approached. She could feel Chrysate, too, traveling somewhere
in the vicinity of the Romans.
She would finish her task. She would be damned
after tonight, if she had not been before. Her ka, if she
ever reclaimed it, would fall against Maat’s feather, and the Eater
of Souls would take it. She prayed to her own country’s gods, to
Isis, long-neglected goddess of mothers. To Thoth, for
knowledge.
She prayed not for herself, but for her children,
the one who was gone and the ones who still remained. Her hands,
when she spread them before her, were tipped with the claws of the
lioness. Her body rippled with muscles that were not human.
She could not feel Sekhmet, but she had become a
version of her. She could feel herself forfeiting the parts that
had been Cleopatra.
The whirlwind where her heart had been no longer
disturbed her.
At last, the queen rose to her feet and began to
climb the hill toward the crater’s mouth.
The armies of Rome had arrived.
She would meet them.
Chrysate had found a beautiful abandoned
cave, and though it smelled of felines, of bats, and of something
else as well, it would do. It went deep into the side of the rocks.
It was cool and ancient, and the cool soothed her skin, chapped and
burnt after days of travel. It had taken no small magic to conceal
herself and Cleopatra’s children in the litter of a senator’s
mistress, a woman she’d throttled just south of Rome. The elder
child had fought her, tearing her skin and wounding her delicate
flesh. Finally, after he’d managed to push the younger from the
litter, screaming at him to run, Chrysate had been obliged to drug
him. It had taken her a great deal of energy to lay hands on the
small one, who was well hidden in the bushes, and he had kicked her
and screamed that she was not his mother.
She found the entire thing wearing.
They’d left the slow-moving litter after a few days
and traveled in the bed of a wagon, Chrysate’s skin parching
beneath the cloth that covered her. By then her charges were heavy
and dull-witted with potions and disguised with the witch’s ebbing
magic. It had been no small labor keeping them with her, no small
labor keeping them hidden.
She ran her fingernails over Alexander and Ptolemy.
She did not care for children, particularly male children. There
was no point to them, none but this.
They were her only currency now, but it was not
time. Not yet.