With a burst of brightness, her love went up in flame.

Cleopatra tilted her chin and watched the rising cloud of smoke that had been her king. She wanted only to fall into the flames and join him, but the guards surrounding her kept her from moving.

The smoke obscured the stars, and Cleopatra thought of the gods that had failed her, the goddess that had tricked her. She lived, and he was dead. She lived, and she did not know why.

She stretched her fingers to feel the flames. Someone barked an order, and the Romans pulled her back. They let her —indeed, they made her— stay until the pyre went out. When everything was ash, she knelt miserably in the char and gathered what was left of her husband’s body. Her tears fell then, for the first time since the horror in the mausoleum.

As she touched the ash, her mind filled with a strange and roaring sequence of images: galleys saluting Rome, herself naked and sleeping in bed, the buckles of Antony’s armor as they were fastened, the sword he used to stab himself, the lighthouse shining pale in the sky, her own face, blurry and bloodless, grief-stricken. She heaved with suppressed sobs, but they let her hold him only for a moment.

A stone-faced centurion, a former soldier of Antony’s, took the ashes from her and placed them in a silver box, one Cleopatra recognized as having commissioned herself. Isis and Dionysus decorated its sides. She’d had it made as a wedding gift for Antony, and in her foolishness, ordered that the gods depicted on it have human faces. Dionysus had a cleft chin, and Isis a crown of cobras. Their hands were twined together, the marriage of Cleopatra’s gods and Antony’s.

She was no god. Why had she been so stupid as to declare herself one? All of this, everything, was her fault. She’d started things in motion and now she’d lost control. Her life was a cart careening down a hillside, horses shrieking and stumbling, unable to stop themselves from falling.

The box would be taken back to the mausoleum. The murderers would bury Antony in Egypt. They’d given her that much at least. The proper ceremonies, the rituals. Antony’s wishes would be granted. He’d renounced his Roman rites and declared himself a citizen of her country. As long as his ashes remained in Egypt, she hoped his soul would eventually travel to the Duat. Cleopatra would not be there to meet him.

She thought of him wandering alone through the caverns of the dead, making his way toward the Beautiful West without her. They’d planned their lives and deaths so carefully, and now it was all for naught.

She lived.

Still, with these ceremonies, he belonged to this country. Or so Cleopatra hoped. She realized that she knew nothing now, nothing true, nothing solid. Not since the thing that had happened in the mausoleum. Who knew which Underworld would claim him, or what the gods would do with him once they had him? Who knew whom she’d offended?