“If she is here, the battle will begin soon,” Usem said, looking at the position of the moon in the sky, and the emperor shuddered. “Do you remember my price?”

There was a light in the man’s eyes, an amber glow, and his teeth seemed sharper than they had before. The Psylli’s snakes twisted about his limbs, hissing at Augustus, their eyes, all of their eyes, directed at him. The wind twisted about him as well, passing over his sweating skin, and it chilled him.

“I do,” Augustus said. Peace for the Roman Empire would not be too great a price for this, he knew now. To be free of Cleopatra. To be free of witches and sorcerers.

“Then my family is at the ready,” Usem said, pointing to the horizon. “Remember. We must kill her. Not trap her.” The clouds were massed there, dark and full of lightning. As the Psylli pointed, Augustus watched horns appear on a cloudy skull, a cloudy tail lashing, a cloudy maw open in a roar. His warriors.

Augustus looked appreciatively at the lines, so measured, so plotted. What could resist the Roman army? Nothing.

The men were silent, watchful. Overhead, Augustus saw a bird flit across the sky, and the wind began to rise, touching each section of the battlefield.

A faint sound of drumming began to echo over the crater, and Usem’s head whipped around, searching the dark for the source. Nothing.

From far across the battlefield, there was a single sound, a roar, long and hoarse and primal. The legionaries shifted uneasily, looking blindly into the dark. Whatever it was, it was nearby.

Suddenly, though, all around the Romans, the night was alive with sparks of light. Augustus drew in his breath. What was happening? He felt surrounded, but he could not see what surrounded him. The light was cold and seemed unattached to any army. The sparks moved, slowly, encroaching.

On the crest of the hilltop, the darkness stretched into silhouettes, and the Romans gasped as one, disbelieving the shape of what they saw.

The moon came out from behind a cloud and revealed Cleopatra’s army.

Augustus was speechless.

The sparks of light were thousands of eyes reflecting like jewels. Cleopatra shone at the center of the line and the sound Augustus had thought was drumming, was not.

It was footsteps.

The earth vibrated with their coming. The queen was flanked by an army of animals. They covered the hillside like a carpet, no space between them. There were as many of them as there were Romans. Tigers and leopards and lions. A bull elephant, its tusks long and yellow. A rhinoceros. Everything the Romans had ever seen in the arenas, in marketplaces, in dreams, and in nightmares. Animals who had been captured and pressed into service. Animals who’d danced at dinners, fought with gladiators, and hungered for revenge from deep beneath the streets of Rome. They walked with one rhythm, and Cleopatra’s hands lay on the backs of two leopards, white beneath the moonlight, their coats spotted with darkness, their teeth bared. The ground swarmed, alive with rats and snakes.

“PREPARE FOR BATTLE!” Agrippa bellowed, and within moments, all the men were running, to their stations, running for their lives.

“You will give me my children!” Cleopatra shouted. “Give them to me, and I will spare Rome its army. Keep them, and you will all die.”

Her voice echoed unnaturally, amplified. Augustus could see the details of his enemy from his position. Her bracelets. Her tight linen gown unspoiled by these months, this year since she had been buried. He could see her curving body beneath the sheer fabric. She was a demon, he knew. He knew.

He could see the accursed silver box she carried in her hands. He could feel her breathing across the battlefield. Not human. Nothing human about her.

Augustus suppressed a sound as he caught sight of a crocodile clambering out of the water. Another. And another after it. The water roiled with their tails. Above the crater, the animals continued to come, eerily silent. No roars, no singing. They came as though they were ghosts, but they were not. Augustus could smell their hunger, the rich scent of the cats and the musky scent of the snakes. The moonlit sky grew dark with birds and bats.

“My children,” Cleopatra repeated. “You took my husband from me, and I will have my children back.”

“I will not give them to you!” Augustus shouted, finding his voice at last. “You are not fit to have them. Who are you to demand sacrifices of Rome? What you lost, you lost in war!”

Augustus felt all his men beginning to panic. He looked to Agrippa, and saw him making frantic gestures, instructing the men to hold their positions.

She was still too far from him to touch him. He was grateful for that. Not afraid, no. She was only an enemy, and there had been many enemies. His head wore the crown, and he knew that it was desired by every man who had ever walked the earth. And every woman, too. There was no one alive who did not want to rule the world.

She tilted her head, noticing for the first time the man beside the emperor.

“Nicolaus,” she said, and the emperor heard sorrow in her tone. Beside him, the historian moved uncomfortably closer to Agrippa. Augustus pushed him back into the shelter of the pavilion. He was derailing the negotiation.

“You lost your husband and your children when you lost your city, and you lost your city because you were not strong enough to keep it. You will surrender to me!” Augustus continued, looking into her dark eyes. He would kill her. He held the bow of Hercules behind his back, with its deathly poisoned arrow.

“Do you believe your own words?” Cleopatra asked him, her tone warning. “Do I look weak to you, Octavian? I am not the woman who lost a war in Alexandria. I am no longer Cleopatra.”

Augustus stood his ground. “You are nothing!” Augustus shouted. “You are a slave to this empire!”

Agrippa shouted a command, and the men of the Roman army marched forward around the rim of the crater in perfect formation, though their feet slipped and dislodged boulders at the crater’s edge. A man fell screaming into space, tumbling into the dark and sinking beneath the lake’s waters, weighed down by his armor.

The others of his line maintained their spacing. Their shields were raised to form a wall of metal before them.

Cleopatra merely raised her hands, and the sounds of her animals, heretofore silenced, ripped through the air. There was no line, and this was no normal battle formation.

Instead, the Romans were faced with a mass of beasts, sleek and rough, fanged and tremendous. The lions and tigers roared, and gathered themselves into shining masses of violence, and the Romans felt their bodies liquefy in fear. What sort of war was this? They were not bestiarii. They had not been trained to fight animals, and their commander had not warned them that this would be the case. Still, they stayed in their lines. They looked neither to the left nor to the right. They kept their positions. They marched forward, their heads protected by their shields, hiding their fear. As long as they kept to their lines, nothing could touch them. They were warriors.

Several men whispered prayers.

The elephant, fled from an arena, trumpeted and reared onto its hind legs, silhouetted against the starry sky. A tremendous bear rose over the crest of the hill, looking into the midst of the army with dark, intelligent eyes. It tossed its head and bellowed, each fang as long as a finger.

A leopard, lean and bloodthirsty, lifted its lip and snarled as it came.

The queen marched toward the Roman line, her animals following her, their bodies moving as though powered by a single soul. Her eyes glowed with an unearthly light, and from his position, Augustus watched her, raging. What right had she to bring animals against him?

Augustus nodded at Agrippa.

“Archers!” shouted the general.

The archers, positioned behind the infantry, pulled their bows from their backs and fit the special silver-tipped arrows into them. Each man had been provided with a rich quiver full.

“Fool,” said Cleopatra quietly, as if to herself.

“Fire!” shouted Agrippa.

The men moved to draw back their bowstrings, but then stared at them, bewildered at the lack of tension in the strings, some sort of sabotage of their weaponry.

A rat leapt out of a Roman arrow case. Another. Soon, a swarm of rats covered the ground, and each of the Roman archers stood appalled, their gnawed bowstrings in their fingers, their bows useless.

The rats seethed about Roman feet, climbing Roman bodies, biting and scratching, and the Romans were, for a moment, in total disarray, their archers incapacitated.

“Infantry!” Agrippa screamed, signaling the lines.

“Kill them,” Cleopatra whispered, and every animal on the battlefield heard her command.

Her cats, leopards, lions, and tigers, drew back on their haunches and leapt over the shields and into the legionaries, claws shredding the unprepared men, teeth rending their flesh. No shield could save them. A tiger died, impaled on a short sword, and as it fell, its body crushed the astonished soldier who had slain it.

The world rang with screams, with shouting and moaning, with ululations in the face of foes, and Cleopatra pushed forward, the emperor still her focus. Augustus kept the precious bow behind his back. He felt a trickle of sweat run down his side. Agrippa stood beside him, shouting orders.

Surely the Romans must outnumber the beasts, Augustus thought. They would win. They had the advantage of order in the face of chaos. Chaos could not possibly prevail. A guard surrounded Agrippa and Augustus, tightly spaced, shields raised.

Lightning flashed in the sky, and thunder shook the earth. High above, the heavens echoed with the sound of something enormous, roaring. The hairs rose on Augustus’s neck, and he felt the air charged with the presence of the divine.

Beside him, Auðr’s hands twisted frantically in the air, her distaff spinning threads, trying to balance the dead with the living. The goddess and Cleopatra were both present, but the thread of the Slaughterer was a frayed end in the Underworld, and Sekhmet’s strand, where it had been braided to her child’s, was ragged.

Cleopatra had injured the goddess.

She had pulled a part of her soul away from Sekhmet, and yet she continued to war. Auðr still could not see the entire pattern. Her eyes flickered over the darkness, a swooning miasma. Her lungs were tight. She was not strong enough to hold the two fates, that of the queen and of the goddess, apart from each other for long, and she knew it.

Sekhmet is here, the seiðkona said, and Augustus heard it in his mind. She hungers for Rome. I cannot keep her from you. She will have you.

A bolt of lightning struck the earth just before Augustus’s pavilion, and he leapt backward, his skin singed. Agrippa stayed firm, fearless, devoted. Augustus shook off the terror and shouted orders at his guard.

The men looked toward the sky and panicked, as bats swooped down from above, into their faces. Shields began to flail. Swords lashed out at the creatures, who came diving downward on their thin wings, blacking out the stars. With them came the birds of night, their claws outstretched for eyes, their wings flapping into faces, their beaks spearing, their shrieks deafening.

The lines began to break down.

Men gasped, slashing at their feet as serpents flooded the ground, twining about their ankles and up their thighs, biting and coiling, tripping and tangling. A viper’s head, chopped off by a blade, rolled into the crater, staining the waters and leaving the serpent’s body, writhing headless, still strangling a dying man on the battlefield above. A mass of crocodiles, their bodies nearly invisible in the darkness of the rocky ground, lumbered out of the water, snatching soldiers’ legs and soldiers’ arms, dragging men into Avernus.

Augustus watched, horrified. Could he be losing this battle? No. Certainly not. Where were the rest of the legions that had come before them? Agrippa had sworn they would be there. Thousands of men. Agrippa had sent the orders himself. Augustus felt frantic, seeing his own Romans tiring, watching them slain and battling, falling to the ground and being trampled, killing one another inadvertently.

Usem fought before Augustus, his own sword flashing in the moonlight, bloodied, guarding the emperor’s position.

Cleopatra was still too far from him to shoot, but as he watched, the Romans gained slight traction. The lines were broken and men were fighting blindly, but the animals, though savage, were not strategists. He watched three men heave a screaming lion into the crater, watched his army clutching poisonous snakes and throwing them back at the other side. They were brave, even in the face of an unprecedented melee. Augustus felt a strange pride along with his terror at the monstrous scene before him. This was not Rome, nor was it empire. This was a battle from the lands of myth, a story.

Everything is true, the priest of Apollo had said. Everything.

This was a story told to him in darkness, a story to bring sleep, and at the end of stories like this, the Romans conquered the savages.

Yet it was here before him. Blood flew through the air, and the screams of the dying and the raging echoed over the water. Augustus moved his hand where it clutched the bow of Hercules, feeling the smoothness of the wood and metal, the place worn in the weapon where it had been held by heroes far greater than himself.

He was a hero. He swore it to himself. If he was not a hero, then what was he?

He would save Rome from this monstrous thing, from this woman. Despoina, the sibyls had called her, but she would not be mistress of the end of the world. Augustus would stop her.

Cleopatra kept moving toward him, her face calm and collected, her hands rising in the air and commanding her creatures.

The sound of marching was suddenly upon them, and with the marching, a chanting cry.

“Thank the gods,” Augustus breathed, and Agrippa nodded tightly at him.

Augustus looked up to greet his relief armies cresting the hill and instead saw an army at odds with his own. They held a flag, and it was not emblazoned with Rome’s eagle but with a snake.

A group of elderly senators, with their bald pates and white togas fresh from the fullers, marched onto the hilltop with their army and massed with Cleopatra and her army of wild animals. Augustus looked up and saw a senator across the battlefield, smiling directly, triumphantly into his face.

Augustus felt Agrippa seize with fury beside him.

“Romans!” he shouted. “I am Marcus Agrippa, your commander! I am he who summoned you here!”

Augustus straightened the laurels on his head and leapt atop a rock to address the crowd.

“I am your emperor!” he screamed. “You will serve Rome or you will be declared traitors!”

This was his empire, his world. The senators would not win against him, and he would have them killed when this was finished. He would save Rome from all these traitors. He would save his people.

“Surrender!” Cleopatra yelled back from across the battlefield. A loyal soldier ran at her, his sword poised to slice through her body.

Cleopatra grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him into the air, breaking his body in her hands. She dropped him like a discarded toy.

In the crowd before the boulder, Augustus watched an ivory horn tossing a legionary into the air, piercing his kidneys and heaving him up and into his fellows. A glittering black eye, and dark, scaled skin trickled with tarry blood.

Usem ran forward and slashed at the rhinoceros and it retreated, bellowing, even as Augustus’s own Romans, his own soldiers, marched forward at their counterparts, the men still loyal to Rome. Augustus watched, his breath catching in his chest, as the soldiers just before him, the men guarding him, began to cave in.

Usem shouted, and the beasts of the Western Wind were released against the betraying Romans. They snarled, their bodies created of dust and light, of dark and chill, of tornado and hurricane, of lightning and thunder. Their bodies contained uprooted trees and boulders, ships and creatures. The betraying Romans and the senators who commanded them wavered.

“I would never give you your children!” Augustus shouted. “Why would I give them to such a mother?”

She need only come a little closer. Behind his back, he positioned the bow. The arrow was already placed in it. Only the string remained to be pulled taut, and it could be fired.

“You must kill her,” Usem hissed. “That is the only way this will end. Wait for me. I will give you room.”