The scholar lit his lamp and picked up the stylus and tablet. He drew in a deep breath. This would be his last work. He must get it right.

Let this be the true and accurate history of the falsified death of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, in the first year of the reign of the emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus, and of the wondrous and terrible acts which followed thereafter.

Let this be the story of the rising of a queen and the falling of a world.

BOOK OF RITUALS

For they report also, that she had hidden poyson in a hollow raser which she carried in the heare of her head: and yet there was no marke seen of her bodie, or any signe discerned that she was poisoned, neither also did they finde this serpent in her tombe… Some say also, that they found two litle pretie bytings in her arme, scant to be discerned… And thus goeth the report of her death.

—Plutarch, translation by Sir Thomas North

Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans

1

The boy sprinted down the cobbled streets, leaping and dodging, trying to make up for the delay the chaos in the city had caused him. Alexandria was filled with the bruised and bloodied soldiers of Mark Antony’s infantry, and the boy flung himself between their bodies, here slipping alongside the flat of a sword, here ducking to avoid a flailing fist. This was his own city, and he knew the secret pathways to his destination. He flung open a street-side door and bolted through the household within, hoisting himself out a window in the back and shouting his apologies to the old mother he’d disturbed. He somersaulted over the sill, landing on his feet and bouncing as he resumed his run, imagining himself at the head of a rushing army, a raider storming the gates of some exotic city.

No one pursued the boy, but he was employed today, a salaried messenger, and the man who hired him had emphasized that speed was necessary.

His heart swelled with pride as he felt the small purse clenched in his fist. He’d receive the other half of his fee when the message he carried was delivered. The assignment had been pure luck. They’d grabbed him by the shoulder as he was returning from the countryside, where he’d been visiting a friend without his mother’s knowledge.

Outside the city walls near the hippodrome, the Romans waited in their tents, and inside the city, the soldiers who still served Antony milled about, drunk with defeat, crowding themselves against all of the other civilians.

It was all the boy could do to keep from being trampled as he made his rushing way through the Jewish quarter near Cleopatra’s Palaces and into the Greek portion of Alexandria. He flew past the Museion, where the scholars could be seen bending over scrolls, still at their work despite the fall of the city. There was the scholar who tutored the queen’s children, standing in the middle of the courtyard, arguing with one of his cohorts, both of them red-faced and waving their hands in the air. The boy wondered if the physicians were still working in the Museion’s buildings. He’d heard glorious stories of dissections, corpses smuggled in through hidden doorways, blood pooling in the stones of the streets. It was a thrilling thought.