Cleopatra’s sorrow grew at the thought of Caesarion wandering alone through this Roman Underworld. Perhaps this was wrong, she thought with a flash of hopefulness. Perhaps he was in the Duat. He had died in Egypt. His mother was Egyptian. Perhaps it had worked the way it should have. Perhaps his pure heart had been weighed. Perhaps he was in the Beautiful West, safe there.

And so they went from the infants, and through the nameless suicides, through the court of Minos, where innocents executed on the testimony of liars were tried and tried again by juries of their dead fellows.

After days and nights of walking, Cleopatra and Antony passed into the fields of mourning, arranged like beautiful gardens with paths paved in tiny fragments of bone and blooming black roses and myrtle trees. Those who had died of love wandered here, brokenhearted and betrayed still, drowning in tears and inflamed by lust despite the blankness on their faces.

“Is this where you live?” Cleopatra asked Antony, and he shook his head, though his eyes, when she looked into them, seemed to slant away from her.

“We must go farther,” he said.

Cleopatra wondered how long they had been walking through the Underworld, and how long her body had been caged in the silver box above. She wondered what would happen to them when all this was finished. She could think of no happy ending.

He brushed his ghostly fingers over her skin.

“When the dead are called from Hades,” he said, “the living pound their hands on the earth so that we may hear them grieving us. When the dead are called from Hades, the living pour blood into the soil, so that we may drink of life. We thirst. We hunger. We are too far from the living in this place. The longer we stay, the more I fade, and the less I am Antony.”

He brushed his lips over her hand, and she felt a chill.

“You are still Cleopatra,” he said. “Still my wife, but I am of Hades now.”

Cleopatra looked at him, feeling her universe collapsing all over again. The gods of the dead held their citizens tightly. His skin, which had been brown with sun, was paler the longer she looked on him. She could see the trees through his breastplate.

“Then we must leave here together,” she told him. “Hurry. We must travel to the chamber where the gods dwell, is that not what you told me?”

“To Persephone,” he said, and his voice wavered. “We are running out of time.”

Cleopatra took his hand in hers and held it as best she could.

Together they ran through the ghostly battlefields of the improperly buried dead, where some men saluted him and other men cursed him.

Together they ran across roads of bone, and all around them, the world was winter, though in Rome the sun beat down on the city, and outside Rome, the countryside sweltered, the Slaughterer traveling from village to village, from temple to temple, killing and sending endless shades down from the summer and into the snow.