The door shook again, someone throwing himself at it.

“The queen requests that Mark Antony join her at their mausoleum! She informs him that all is not lost!” the messenger shouted from outside the room.

“The queen is dead, you fool,” his soldier shouted in return. “The queen has killed herself.”

“She has not!” said the messenger. “I have just left her company. I was delayed in the city!”

The door burst open, and a horrified soldier stumbled over Eros’s body and to Antony’s side.

“He’s wounded!” the legionary cried to the other guards outside the door, and they crowded into the room.

“No,” said Antony, calm now, feeling his life running out. “I am dead.”

“But I recognize the man,” the soldier said. “He is the queen’s secretary, Diomedes, and he says that the queen lives! The first messenger lied. She calls you to come to her.”

Antony took a shuddering breath, trying to bring himself back to consciousness. It was too much to make sense of this. A false message? She lived?

“Carry me to Cleopatra,” he ordered, and when he noted the hesitation on the men’s faces, he used a stronger voice. “You will take me to the queen. This will be your last duty in my service. Perform it well.”

They dressed the wound as best they could, covered Antony to protect him from the eyes of enemies, and then lifted the pallet carefully onto their shoulders, and proceeded into the street.

The mattress was a boat, and there was a stormy sea beneath him. Antony laid his hand over his eyes to shield them from the sun. The lighthouse rose into his vision, smooth and white, a perfect thing. He’d lived on Pharos island for a time, in a small house away from the city, at the foot of the great stone tower. It was just after his return from Actium, when his sorrow at his own betrayals was too much to bear in company.

At the top of the tower, so high it could scarcely be seen, a golden statue of Zeus glittered in the sun. Antony smiled, seeing it still shining there even as he passed through the city, a witness to his own funerary procession.

The only sounds he’d heard while he stayed in that house were those of waves crashing up against the shore. There was no Rome, no legions, no love. He’d never felt so peaceful. He might have stayed forever in that little house, like a philosopher in his cave, but he craved company, drink, and jokes, and he dreamed of his wife. He walked back across the causeway and found everything at the palace as though he’d never left. Back into her arms he went then, and back to them he would go now. If he had died for her, let her see it done. Let there be an end.

An Egyptian soldier, drunken and disheveled, bowed his head as Antony was carried past, thinking him dead already.