Epilogue
The emperor hobbled through an orchard at
the foot of Vesuvius, the wind pressing against his robes, chilling
his thin skin, ruffling his sparse hair. Something was familiar to
him here. The pattern of the stars against the sky, perhaps, was
like a tattoo he’d seen once on a woman’s back. Augustus searched
his memory for the details, but it was no use. It was only a
fleeting recognition, maybe something he’d dreamt long ago. He
laughed quietly, a rasping cough of dark amusement. His mind had
become like Oceanus, and all the places he’d once known were
drowned in salt sea, peopled with ghosts. He could no longer tell
truth from fiction, nor his own recollections from things he’d
invented.
Augustus was seventy-six years old. He’d reigned
over Rome, over his empire, for nearly forty-four years. It was the
nineteenth of August, the month he’d named after himself. Other
Augusts crowded his memory, one spent in Alexandria. He thought
suddenly of Antony. Augustus had long outlived his old enemy, his
old friend, his old idol, but he did not know why he thought of him
now. He remembered walking into the cool depths of a mausoleum
and—
No, no. He would not think of that.
A flash of memory, another August, this one on a
battlefield. Tigers roaring and an emptiness where his heart had
been, snow falling down upon him from the heavens. A god screaming
from the sky, and his enemy, his beautiful enemy, bleeding in the
snow. What had she done with his heart? What was the strangeness he
felt? His soul—
He did not know.
He remembered an ancient woman with silver eyes,
tapping him on the forehead with her distaff, emptying his history
and replacing it with unknowns.
He had run back to Rome, served the empire,
served the people. Dazed, he’d closed the Gates of Janus and
brought peace to his realm. A price owed to a warrior, a price he
knew he must pay, but his own life had not been peaceful.
Rome was his only daughter now. Julia, his sole
blood heir, had betrayed him, conducting an affair with the last
surviving son of Mark Antony, sacrificing to old religions, dancing
naked in the city’s temples, offering herself to anyone who desired
the emperor’s daughter. On her finger, she’d worn a ring engraved
with Hecate’s face, something she claimed she’d found in Augustus’s
own house.
Augustus had banished her from Rome and ordered
her lover killed, but these punishments did not ease his pain. Just
hours before arriving at this orchard, he’d given the order for the
execution of his final grandson, the youngest son of Julia. The boy
was a child of an unknown father, and the emperor could not take
the chance of Rome being inherited by a descendant of his old
enemy. No. He must pass Rome to Tiberius, his stepson, a man he
disliked and distrusted. There was no other option. All his other
heirs were dead, and his line was broken.
The emperor felt a grasping seizure in his chest,
where his heart should have been.
He’d banished his friends as well. Nicolaus of
Damascus, his biographer, he’d sent away when he’d given the
emperor a copy of his history of the universe. It rankled. Even the
sections pertaining to Augustus, which he’d dictated himself,
seemed strange, filled with untruths. Had he talked in his sleep?
He could not say.
He had Ovid sent to the Black Sea because
something in his stories, in those Metamorphoses, those
women transforming into beasts, those beasts transforming into
women, those gods walking amongst men, reminded Augustus of—
What?
Something in them made Augustus believe that
someone had gotten to the poet, whispered in his ear, told him all
the secret things, initiated him into mysteries the emperor himself
did not recollect.
And so he burned the plays, burned the verses,
burned the histories, burned the biographies. He stood on the steps
of the Palatine, a torch in his hand, and set the pages afire. He
did not know what he was hiding. He burned everything, even his own
writings.
He left the Sibylline prophecies, but he censored
them, cutting offensive words from them with his own knife. Whole
sentences and passages. Augustus remembered one of them, shivering
with the memory.
“And thou shalt be no more a widow, but thou
shalt cohabit with a man-eating lion, terrible, a furious warrior.
And then shalt thou be happy, and among all men known; And thee,
the stately, shall the encircling tomb receive, for he, the Roman
king, shall place thee there, though thee be still amongst the
living. Though thy life is gone, there will be something immortal
living within thee. Though thy soul is gone, thy anger will remain,
and thy vengeance will rise and destroy the cities of the Roman
king.”
He slashed away at that section, bewildered by
it, making additions and subtractions, changing what it said. It
was all familiar, and yet he couldn’t grasp exactly what it was
that so angered him. At last, he walked away from the tablet, his
skin flushing with mad wrath. He had not understood why he felt so.
He still did not.
Augustus fretted now. He suddenly remembered only
the horrible things.
He thought of Marcus Agrippa, dead at fifty-five
of blood poisoning, the legacy of a long-ago wound. He’d been on a
campaign, and soaked his leg in vinegar in an attempt to relieve
the pain of his old injury. By the time Augustus arrived, he was
dead of it.
Augustus could almost remember the getting of
that wound. Something about an arrow, something about a poison,
something about a mistake, something about a flash of light.
The emperor’s teeth felt loose in his mouth. He
ran his tongue over the space where, long ago, he’d lost a tooth on
a ship journey. He’d thrown it into the sea between Egypt and
Italy. Now it might be a pearl. He was so old that his bones might
by now be golden. His hair lapis. His teeth pearls. Somewhere in
his memory, there was a god whose body was made of precious stones.
A god who crossed the sky in a boat.
Augustus thought longingly of that. He himself
was cold in the heat of the sun, and now, in the moonlight, he
froze.
He turned his face toward the heavens, squinting
to see more clearly. His spine protested as he moved his head, but
still, there was beauty here, this night, this orchard, the trees
hanging heavy with ripe figs, the smell of the grass, the
perfection of the place. His father’s orchard. He had not been here
in years. His father had died in this very place, long ago, when
the emperor was only a child. It was all so familiar, and yet, when
he tried to grasp it, it flew.
He raised his hand and plucked a fig from the
tree. A soft thing, the fig, perfectly ripe. He preferred them
green. There was danger in enjoyment.
A beautiful woman stepped from behind the fig
tree and smiled at him. He felt himself smiling back, toothless and
old. His hand, when he lifted it to his mouth, was spotted with
age.
She was young and lovely. A servant, but too
beautiful for a servant. A guest? A dignitary?
He should know her. Something in the back of his
mind cried out like a child.
Augustus thought, but he could not place her. Her
eyes were rimmed in kohl, and her arms were decked with coiled
bracelets in the shape of serpents. Her body was curving and
tightly wrapped in a white linen gown. Her mouth was plump and
painted with something red.
He bit into the fig—honey sweet and seeded,
nearly overripe—and it came to him. He had been her lover once,
long ago. Or he had loved her.
“Do I know you?” he asked her.
“Octavian,” she said. She held her hand to her
side, tightly pressing it against her waist.
“Are you injured?” he asked.
“I was,” she said. “I was injured once, and
gravely. I’ve been a long time healing, and you have had a long
life. I did not intend that, but I do not regret it. You
suffered.”
Augustus felt indignant.
“I did not suffer,” he began, but even as he
spoke the words, he remembered nights sleepless, insomniac,
haunted. At the same time, he wondered at himself. He was not
dressed for night, nor for company. He was nearly naked. He felt
his skin prickling as he looked at her.
“Do you not know me, Octavian?” the woman before
him asked.
“I do not,” he insisted. He felt his throat
beginning to swell. The fig was scratching at his tongue. He
coughed unhappily. He was chilled here in the night air. He wanted
to go in, to his bed, to his sleep. He wanted to wake in the
morning and watch the sun rise.
“I made a bargain once,” the woman told him.
“With a powerful king, in a country not far from here.”
“A gamble?” Augustus asked. He thought of games
played with bones and rocks, games played with coins. He thought,
horribly, of placing a coin in Agrippa’s mouth, to pay the boatman
of Hades. The cold of the tongue as it touched his fingers. The
rotten hardness of the teeth. The damp of the tomb he’d placed his
friend inside, with all the proper ceremony, with all the proper
ritual.
A sudden memory of another tomb, and an empty
slab therein. A silver box engraved with Isis. A serpent, a
serpent. He cringed involuntarily.
“A gamble,” she agreed.
He coughed, and sat heavily on the dew-covered
grass. A servant should bring him a cloak. He should not be out at
night.
“It was a gamble over a soul,” she said.
Augustus lay carefully back, anticipating a story
and fearing it at the same time. In his life, he’d hired many
tellers, heard many tales, and he had slept little. He found
himself nearly looking forward to it. Sleep. Rest.
The woman looked steadily at him.
He thought suddenly of two little boys, lost long
ago on a battlefield. He’d brought the last of the Egyptian
children, Selene, back to Rome and married her to the king of
Mauretania, giving her a dowry of gold as though she were his own
daughter. He owed her something, though even then he could not
remember why. Selene was dead eight years past. He’d commissioned a
Greek poet to eulogize her. A good daughter. The only good daughter
he’d had, and she was not even his own.
“The moon herself grew dark, rising at
sunset,” Augustus whispered. It was a lovely epitaph, the
eulogy, and somehow it reminded him of the woman before him. Selene
had looked like her, perhaps that was it. “Covering her
suffering in the night, because she saw her beautiful namesake,
Selene, breathless, descending to Hades. With her, she’d had the
beauty of her light in common, and mingled her own darkness with
her death.”
The woman before him smiled. He thought he saw
her eyes shining with tears, though it might have been the
moonlight.
He regretted everything on earth.
“A soul?” he asked. “Whose soul? Yours?”
“Not my own,” she said. “I had already sold my
own soul when I made this bargain. No, Octavian. I did not act to
save my soul but that of my love. Your soul has been with me all
these years, since the battle at Avernus. You’ve lived without it,
as I have lived without mine. Did you never notice its absence?
Tell me, Octavian, was it a glorious life? Did you love? Did you
find joy?”
Augustus looked at her miserably. She was so
beautiful. Her lips were bright, even in the darkness.
She seemed taller now, somehow, and her skin
paler, as though she had absorbed the moonlight. She smiled
indulgently upon him.
Her teeth were pointed.
His throat was closing. He could scarcely
breathe. A name drifted up from out of his past, a name he should
never have forgotten. He did not understand how he had.
“Cleopatra,” he said.
“Te teneo,” she told Augustus. “You are
mine.”
She bent toward him, taking his body in her
strong hands. She came closer, brushing her cold lips over his cold
lips, and the emperor looked up into her eyes, seeing fires, seeing
volcanoes, seeing destruction.
He watched Rome fall in a moment, watched the sky
fill with metal wings, watched all he had built crumble.
He felt Cleopatra biting into his throat, and he
struggled weakly. Her hand pressed down upon him, heavy as a
coverlet, and he relaxed under her weight. It was a kiss.
Yes. They had once been lovers, he was sure. They
were lovers again, it seemed. The kiss was sweet.
Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. Queen of Kings.
“You will live,” her voice said to him, and he
was, in his last moments, a boy again, fevered in his bed. “You
will live a long life.”
Then it was over.
Cleopatra stood, leaving the husk that
had been the emperor of Rome on the ground, and walked away from
the country that had been her unwilling home all these years.
Dying on the battlefield at Avernus, so many
years before, she’d felt Sekhmet leave her heart, felt the hollow
spaces fill again with her own ka. In memory, she glimpsed
her death, the snowflakes falling upon her skin, her blood flowing
slowly, cold and endless.
She’d found herself lying on a mossy bank beside
a silver lake. The world was night, the pearl-round moon high in
the sky, and yet it was also sunrise, the horizon all rose, gold,
and coral. As far as she could see, there were rolling hills and
valleys, the dewy green grasses and blooming wildflowers of
midsummer, but this was not earth.
There were stars in the heavens, and she gazed up
at them, the constellations showing familiar shapes, shapes she’d
known in every land she’d lived in. On the grass about her, and on
the smooth, silver water, she could see the shadows of the stars,
and she was comforted by this, the tracery of her former life in
the wildness of the waking world.
“You are in Elysium,” a voice said. “You died at
my gates.”
“Where is Antony?” she asked, turning to see the
god of the Dead before her. “I must go to where he is.”
Hades nodded his head ruefully.
“As you wish. You have done me a large favor. I
owe you recompense.”
A flash of light, and she found herself
transported again.
She saw the Island of Fire, with its scales for
the weighing of her heart, the gleaming feather of Maat upon them.
Antony and her sons stood before her, all of her beloved dead,
Caesarion, Alexander Helios, and Ptolemy.
She walked toward them, overcome with joy, but
then, without warning, she was torn from the Duat and pressed into
her own broken body again.
The fate spinner had brought Cleopatra back from
the death she’d longed for. Helpless, paralyzed on the battlefield,
the queen felt Sekhmet reenter her heart.
I can see it all now, the seiðkona rasped,
then, her hands on Cleopatra’s face. I can see
everything.
Cleopatra walked on into her future. Her love was
in the Duat, waiting for her, and she was on earth, dreaming of
him. She would not see him yet.
It is your destiny to destroy the world,
the seiðkona had whispered to her, all those years before. But
you must also save it. They are the same fate.
Cleopatra walked into the darkness, the stars
overhead glittering, the moon a pointed crescent, her body filled
with blood, her mind filled with night. Sekhmet would rise again
now that Cleopatra had finished her healing. The queen could feel
her hunger. Sekhmet had been wounded, too, with the Hydra venom,
but she still had six Slaughterers in her quiver: Famine,
Earthquake, Flood, Drought, Madness, and Violence.
Though this was finished, Cleopatra was not done.
She did not know when she would be. It was not her decision.
The emperor of Rome was dead.
Long live the queen.
ACTA EST FABULA.