26
Augustus, rigid with horror, stood and took
a step toward his enemy’s body. She did not move. Blood flowed from
her side. She’d done something to him, something he did not
understand. His hands fumbled. A coin to pay her passage. He had
nothing.
He knelt beside Cleopatra, put out his shaking
hand, brushed the snow from her face and closed her eyes.
In the darkness of the crater, Augustus saw a
single ghostly spot of light, a shining, wavering thing rising to
the surface for a moment, its thousands of teeth, its watery
gleaming form, its razor-feathered body, before it, too, dove into
the depths, descending back to its home in the Underworld.
Something pulled at Augustus. Home. He wavered on the edge of the
crater, uncertain, and then looked around the battlefield, at the
devastation there.
He looked at the monsters that still walked the
earth, the lions and tigers stalking their prey, eating the
dead.
The Psylli eyed at him from across the
battlefield.
“We have won,” Usem said. “This is a victory. I
will not see you again.”
“No,” Augustus said.
“Nor Rome,” said Usem, and nodded at him, only
once. “May you live in peace, Emperor.”
The monsters of sand and wind surrounded him,
shrinking as he moved. Usem held out his hands to them, and they
converged into a single form. A woman, her hair flying behind her,
suddenly stood before the snake sorcerer, and Augustus watched her
kiss him. He watched as the Western Wind’s daughter took her
husband in her arms, watched as the air whirled around them,
watched as they rose into the sky and disappeared together into the
darkness beyond the hillside.
The morning was coming, gray and sickly at the
horizon. Augustus swayed, looking at the legions of Romans who
stood, awed and bleeding, mingled into a single dazzled pool of
men. There were senators dead before him, and loyal soldiers, too.
He saw Agrippa making his way among them, speaking to the wounded,
dedicating their shades to Hades, and the seiðkona, her distaff in
her hand, touching the men and taking their memories with
her.
By the time Auðr arrived before Augustus, he no
longer feared her. She lowered her distaff to his forehead, and
when it touched him, he felt his mind laced with a filigree of
frost. All the pain was gone for the moment, the memories of broken
things, the guilt.
For a glorious moment, he did not know who he was,
and he was grateful.
He did not want to know who he was. He did not want
to know what he had lost.
Auðr walked onward, and Augustus knelt on the
hilltop beside the dead woman, a woman he now only faintly
recognized. He stayed there, bewildered and uncertain for he knew
not how long. At last, Agrippa walked up the hillside behind him,
bloodied, his face scored with new lines.
“I found her among the wounded,” he said.
A small hand took Augustus’s fingers. He looked
down, startled. Selene, her face smeared with dirt, snow in her
eyelashes. He recognized her in a rush of sorrow.
“Rome has won,” she said, her voice wavering. “And
I am a Roman. I will go with you.”
And then, without looking at her mother’s body,
without looking down, she led Augustus down the hill and away from
the battlefield.
“We have won,” she said, and only then did Augustus
realize that he was crying.
When they had gone, Auðr bent over
Cleopatra’s body, coughing as she knelt. Her own thread, tangled
with all of these, was moments from completion. She could see its
tattered end in the light of dawn, shorn and frayed.
She looked at the queen’s face. Peaceful. Where did
she travel? the seiðkona wondered. Which of her gods had taken
her?
Auðr twisted her distaff, employing all her
remaining strength to wrap the queen’s thread about it. She groaned
as she tore at the fates, unraveling, her powers withering even as
she used them.
The universe shifted above her. A pattern in the
sky, a ripple in the gray as the sky began to roll, a shifting of
seasons, night to day and back again. The last stars peeled back to
reveal sun, and the last sun peeled back to reveal emptiness, and
still the seiðkona labored, weaving the pattern, the warp and weft
of the future, the edges of the universe in her hands.
At last, she rose and walked toward the
historian.
It was nearly finished. All of it.
Nicolaus could not move, even as he watched
Auðr approach him. Blood coursed from the ragged tear that ran from
his shoulder to his wrist. He was going to die, he knew, but he
could not bring himself to run.
He wanted to die.
The battlefield was covered in bodies, and the
waters ran red. Vultures wheeled high in the sky, and soon they
would land.
The seiðkona’s hair had come unbound, and it twined
in the air, a white nebula. Her lips curled as she assessed him.
She put out a hand and touched his mouth with icy, bluish fingers.
Her other hand gripped the distaff.
Nicolaus braced himself for its touch. He
discovered that he was crying. His tears froze on his face, and one
fell to the ground, shattering as it hit the earth. He bowed his
head toward her, giving himself over.
Let her touch him. Let her take away the things
he’d seen and done. Let her take his mind and thoughts. Let her
take him and all the words he’d clung to.
No, she said, her lips unmoving. You will
remember this.
He looked up and was caught, pinned by her silver
gaze.
You will remember all of this. You will tell
this story. You will write it.
The seiðkona lifted her distaff over her head, and
Nicolaus watched it move toward his brow.
As it touched him, his mind broke open, making room
for everything it must encompass. He felt his own memories splinter
and spin like marbles, rolling to the edges of his consciousness,
to be lost there.
The distaff touched him for only an instant, and
yet he was no longer only Nicolaus.
He knew. Everything. His mind swelled with
it, agonizing, horrifying, filled beyond its capacity, and then
filled more. Love and sorrow. Death and despair. Hunger. Bloodshed.
Armor being donned and swords being sharpened, children waking from
dreams, mothers holding their babies, lionesses hunting for prey.
All the stories of the dead. All the stories of the living. All the
memories she had taken from them were his to keep. He cried out,
pressing his hands to his forehead, feeling his skull splitting
open with the contents of the world. There could not be enough room
in him for all of this. But there was.
Now his history was the history of millions. He
knew everything, and there was no forgetting. He was the one who
would remember.
He ran from the battlefield, holding his injured
arm, tears running down his face. The skin began to heal as he ran,
and he knew she had twined his fate with something else. He knew
that he would not die tonight.
He had a purpose yet.
He was the keeper of the history of this day, and
of the days before it. He would tell the stories of the serpents
and the soldiers, of the gods and of the goddesses. He would tell
the story of the queen and of her love, of their children, and of
the shades who had come from below the earth.
All of it, all of everything and of everyone, was
within him.
He was a historian at last, wholly and
utterly.
He would tell the world.