Queen of Kings

There’s more than one path to immortality…

A thrilling, chilling reimagining of the story of the most famous woman in history.

Once there was a queen of Egypt… a queen who became through magic something else…

The year is 30 BC. Octavian Caesar and his massed legions are poised to enter Alexandria. A messenger informs Egypt’s queen, Cleopatra, that her beloved Mark Antony has died by his own hand. Desperate to save her kingdom, resurrect her husband and protect all she holds dear, Cleopatra turns to the gods for help. Ignoring the warnings of those around her, she summons Sekhmet, goddess of death and destruction, and strikes a mortal bargain. And not even the wisest of Egypt’s scholars could have predicted what would follow…

For, in return for Antony’s soul, Sekhmet demands something in return: Cleopatra herself. And so Egypt’s queen is possessed. She becomes an immortal, shape-shifting, not-quite-human manifestation of a deity who seeks to destroy the world. Fighting to preserve something of her humanity, Cleopatra pursues Octavian back to Rome: she desires revenge, she yearns for her children… and she craves human blood.

It is a journey that will take her from the tombs of the Pharaohs to the great amphitheatres of imperial Rome and on, to Hell itself where, it seems, the fate of the world will finally be decided.

Blending authentic historical fiction and the darkest of fantasy, Queen of Kings is a spectacular and spellbinding feat of the imagination that fans of Neil Gaiman, Diana Gabaldon, George R.R. Martin, Patricia Briggs, Philippa Gregory, and Ridley Scott’s Gladiator won’t want to miss.

Maria Dahvana Headley

Queen of Kings

ePub r1.0

Morwen 13.08.14

Original Title: Queen of Kings

Maria Dahvana Headley, 2011

Cover retouch: Morwen

Digital editor: Morwen

ePub base r1.1

For Robert Schenkkan
Chief Wonder of My World,
On whose behalf I’d gladly negotiate with any Gods,
And battle any monsters.

Prologue

I, Nicolaus the Damascene, once philosopher to a king, once tutor to the children of a queen, once biographer to an emperor, now live in exile. I move toward the tomb, whether to journey into Hades or to wander as a spirit lamenting on the shores of Acheron. I cannot say which gods will claim me, for I left behind Damascus and her gods long ago for those of Egypt and of Rome. My body will end its days here at Avernus, unmourned.

The one thing I know with certainty is that she will come for me.

By virtue of position, I have been witness to more than any other man. I have seen rooms filled with gold, and streets stacked with bones. I have seen lakes turn to blood. I have watched the moon dance on the fingertips of witches, and stars extinguishing their lights at the behest of immortals. I have seen the beasts of the wilderness commanded into war by a woman. I have seen a lioness become a queen, and a queen become a monster.

I have seen things I cannot say aloud, though I am bound to write them here.

I will recount the story the emperor forbade me to tell. I will write the truth as far as I know it, in desperate hope that this may be enough. I cannot fight alone. All I have are words.

May these words be enough to save you.

The old scholar paused in his writing, tracing his fingers over the twisting branch of scar that ran from his palm to his shoulder and down across his back. It had been there so long that it seemed an original part of him, but it gave him pain still, particularly when the thunder came. Outside the sibyl’s cave, the air smelled of storms, and Nicolaus’s scar lit with knowledge of the weather. There was a tremor in his hand that nearly obliterated his writing, and when he drew breath, it was with difficulty. He’d delayed almost too long. She walked the earth, and there was nothing he could do to stop her now, nothing but this.

He willed his thoughts back to the Egypt of his youth. The pale, marble-paved passageways of Alexandria, the flashing-eyed women, the feel of his sandaled feet against the road. The gilded barges and shining faces. He’d come to the center of the world. All these things, in memory, held a sweetness, a tenderness that he knew would flee him as he wrote. That far-off past was a clear pool, and his subsequent history was a measure of dark ink fouling the waters. Or blood, perhaps. His memories were stained with red.

He’d been an innocent back then, convinced of immortality, if not of the flesh, then of the words. He’d thought himself a writer of great truths, imagining his histories held in the hands of young scholars, his name inscribed on monuments, his tomb garlanded.

Those dreams were long gone. Nicolaus had seen the future, and it was not a place for poets.

He thought of the Museion, where he’d studied with his friends, working, so arrogantly, on what he believed would be the first and only true history of the universe. He’d finished it, a hundred and forty-four books of it, only to watch them burn. He’d written too much of the truth, where he ought to have written lies. He’d imagined himself a friend of the emperor and therefore untouchable, and he had been wrong.

Nicolaus was lucky. The Romans had never found his real work, and for this he was thankful. It was this work he held in his hands now, as he tried to summon the courage to finish writing what was necessary.

He thought of her, of the graceful beckoning of her jeweled hand, when she’d set him the task that would ruin his life as well as her own.

“Find me a spell,” she whispered, as alive in his memory as though she stood before him. He smelled the spicy perfume of her skin, the honey on her breath. “A spell for a summoning.”

It was not even a question that he would help her. She smiled at him, and he looked into her beautiful, dark eyes, seeing her hope, seeing her need.

The last time he’d seen her, her eyes had been changed into something quite different.

He promised then to do her bidding, and he did it willingly. How could he not? Nicolaus hadn’t been the first man to sacrifice his own life for hers, but he had also sacrificed the lives of countless others. For more than fifty years now, he’d watched helplessly as the prophecies came to pass, knowing she’d scarcely begun.

He’d seen the future in his emperor’s eyes. The ruler, in delirium, sleepless and haunted, had confided his visions to Nicolaus, swearing him to secrecy, but there was no point in it now. The emperor Augustus, he who had controlled the world, or thought he had, was dead, and Nicolaus was soon to follow.

The scholar shuddered, feeling frost skittering over his bones. His scar throbbed. Fatale monstrum, the Romans had called her. “Fatal omen.” Or, if one were to think of the double meaning of the word, and this had certainly been the intention, “fatal monster.”

Mistress of the end of the world.

And yet he knew her. Her heart had not always been dark. Perhaps it was not wholly dark even now.

Nicolaus wished that he’d died years before, knowing nothing of the things he was bound to tell today. His life had been long, and his memory remained perfect. This was his particular punishment.

Now he was the only one left who knew the truth. The only one, save her. Though it was sacrilege, though it was foolhardy to set down the words, he had to give warning to the world to come. To leave this life without doing so would be an irredeemable act, and his soul was already weighted with sins. They’d know more in the future. They’d learn. Perhaps they would learn enough to save themselves from the monster that Nicolaus, in his idiotic youth, had helped release into the world.

He looked into the sky above Avernus for a moment. The sun hung at the horizon, a fiery orb, and above it, the gathering clouds glowed copper and violet. Lightning slashed through one of them. The moon rose, yellow and ominous, even as the sun fell, struggling against the night and thunder.

Everything was at stake.

The people of the future would not know what was coming for them, not unless Nicolaus told this story. They’d have no defense. He thought for a moment of that world, the world he’d never see. It was a future so distant that almost nothing would remain of the things he had loved. Augustus had told him of his visions: buildings crumbling, cities disappearing beneath the waves, wars and bloodshed. Strange and shining machines, and untongued masses, all speaking the languages of barbarians.

The emperor had seen the future, and she was in it.

Fatale monstrum, Nicolaus repeated silently. Her name and her destiny. He would be gone by the time it came to pass, and yet he had a part still to play.

The scholar lit his lamp and picked up the stylus and tablet. He drew in a deep breath. This would be his last work. He must get it right.

Let this be the true and accurate history of the falsified death of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, in the first year of the reign of the emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, and of the wondrous and terrible acts which followed thereafter.

Let this be the story of the rising of a queen and the falling of a world.

BOOK OF RITUALS

For they report also, that she had hidden poyson in a hollow raser which she carried in the heare of her head: and yet there was no marke seen of her bodie, or any signe discerned that she was poisoned, neither also did they finde this serpent in her tombe… Some say also, that they found two litle pretie bytings in her arme, scant to be discerned… And thus goeth the report of her death.

—Plutarch, translation by Sir Thomas North

Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

1

The boy sprinted down the cobbled streets, leaping and dodging, trying to make up for the delay the chaos in the city had caused him. Alexandria was filled with the bruised and bloodied soldiers of Mark Antony’s infantry, and the boy flung himself between their bodies, here slipping alongside the flat of a sword, here ducking to avoid a flailing fist. This was his own city, and he knew the secret pathways to his destination. He flung open a street-side door and bolted through the household within, hoisting himself out a window in the back and shouting his apologies to the old mother he’d disturbed. He somersaulted over the sill, landing on his feet and bouncing as he resumed his run, imagining himself at the head of a rushing army, a raider storming the gates of some exotic city.

No one pursued the boy, but he was employed today, a salaried messenger, and the man who hired him had emphasized that speed was necessary.

His heart swelled with pride as he felt the small purse clenched in his fist. He’d receive the other half of his fee when the message he carried was delivered. The assignment had been pure luck. They’d grabbed him by the shoulder as he was returning from the countryside, where he’d been visiting a friend without his mother’s knowledge.

Outside the city walls near the hippodrome, the Romans waited in their tents, and inside the city, the soldiers who still served Antony milled about, drunk with defeat, crowding themselves against all of the other civilians.

It was all the boy could do to keep from being trampled as he made his rushing way through the Jewish quarter near Cleopatra’s Palaces and into the Greek portion of Alexandria. He flew past the Museion, where the scholars could be seen bending over scrolls, still at their work despite the fall of the city. There was the scholar who tutored the queen’s children, standing in the middle of the courtyard, arguing with one of his cohorts, both of them red-faced and waving their hands in the air. The boy wondered if the physicians were still working in the Museion’s buildings. He’d heard glorious stories of dissections, corpses smuggled in through hidden doorways, blood pooling in the stones of the streets. It was a thrilling thought.

The boy made his way through the center of Alexandria, where the markets were transacting business, as though this were not a city under siege. There was money to be made on warfare, and soldiers, even in defeat, thirsted. The boy dashed past the tempting stalls, the soothsayers and the makers of toys, the sellers of toasted nuts and the dancers stamping their feet and flinging colored scarves in the air.

He gazed longingly into a brothel, pushing his chin into the doorway and inhaling the scent of perfume.

“You’re bad for business, boy,” said a scowling courtesan, and smacked him smartly on the ear, escorting him back out into the street.

The lighthouse still shone on Pharos island just offshore, and the boy grinned up at the glowing white limestone facade of Alexandria’s marvel. It was said that the light harnessed the power of the sun, that it could be directed to shine onto enemy vessels far out on the water, causing them to burst spontaneously into flame. The boy wondered why the lighthouse had not been directed to destroy the Roman ships that way. Perhaps there had been too many of them.

At last, the boy arrived at the alley in the Old City that would lead him to his destination. It was easily recognized, guarded as it was by armed legionaries, the only soldiers in the city who were not drunk, and the only people in the area who were not Egyptian.

A legionary appeared in front of the boy, his arms crossed over his chest. The boy looked up to meet the man’s eyes.

“I have an urgent message,” he said.

“What message?” the soldier asked.

“I cannot speak with anyone but the general, Mark Antony,” the boy said.

“Who sent you?” another soldier asked.

“I come on behalf of the queen,” the boy replied, reciting the words exactly as he’d been instructed. “I serve Cleopatra.”

2

Twelve hours earlier, Mark Antony poured wine for all his servants and soldiers, toasting their bravery and bidding them good fortune if they chose to leave him, and a good fight if they chose to stay for the final battle.

As the whores arrived to comfort those who had wartime wages, Antony walked the streets of Alexandria, making his way back to the palace, past the guards and slaves, past the sad-faced statues of former rulers, kings and queens, princes and conquerors. Past the bedchambers where his children slept, innocent of the coming fall. Antony looked in at their faces, those of the twins and of his youngest son. The two eldest children, one his and one his wife’s, had already been sent from the city. What would become of them? He dared not think of it. It was not the Roman way, to kill royal children, or at least it had not been thus far. He did not wish to think that things had changed since his departure from Rome’s service. Still, this was war. He’d been the conqueror in the past. It was strange to suddenly be the conquered.