A flash of fury blasted through Octavian’s center. His problems here in Egypt were certainly the result of a witch. Were it not for her, he would not be looking at a corpse and wondering if it lived.

“Great Alexander,” he shouted, the walls echoing around him. “I pay you tribute.”

He’d brought with him a golden diadem, discovered in the queen’s treasure, and flowers to fill the sarcophagus, but first, he must make certain that Alexander was truly dead. Octavian put out a tentative finger, breathing unhappily through his mouth, icy sweat breaking out over his body. The hand shook so gravely that it knocked against the corpse’s face, and with a faint, dusty sound, the flesh gave way.

Octavian jumped away, horrified. The nose hung crookedly now. He squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the awful sound that would herald the rising of a wounded god, but no sound came.

The eyes of the corpse were closed. No black depths, no shining end of the world there. No life inside the body of his hero. Thank the gods.

Octavian permitted himself a small sigh of relief. He would not have wished to contend with both Alexander and Cleopatra. She was more than enough.

“What should I do?” he whispered to his hero, praying for a revelation, though now he knew there would be no answer. “What should I do with her?”

Alexander the Great would never have trembled in the face of magic. He would have attacked Cleopatra, living corpse or no, monster or no, ferocious with his sword. He would have summoned sorcerers to plot against her, researched potions and poisons. He would have done whatever was necessary to conquer her.

Octavian ran his fingers over the great man’s burial garments. He tore off a small section of fabric and hid it on his person, hoping to absorb some of Alexander’s godlike courage.

Octavian was himself the son of a god, or so his mother, Atia, had always claimed, swearing Apollo had come down from Olympus in the form of a snake and impregnated her. According to legend, Alexander the Great had also been fathered by a god in snake form, the Egyptian king and magician Nectanebo, and so Octavian had never seen reason to dispute Atia’s politically useful story. It made Alexander and Octavian the same sort of hero, the same sort of man.

Octavian did not feel heroic at present. He felt queasy, thinking of Cleopatra’s chamber and the missing asp. Might the snake have been a god? What else could explain the queen living and dead at once?

No.

Surely the opening of her eyes had been an aftereffect of the snake’s —the mortal snake’s— poison. Did not dead men’s members stand erect on the gallows? Did not the beheaded stare in wonder? Surely, were he to look into Cleopatra’s mausoleum now, he’d find her decaying, just as Alexander was.

And if not —

He’d do as his hero would have done. Alexander had won the world through bravery and perseverance, through resourceful actions, and Octavian would follow his lead. He would not flee.