She was mad to think the snake might understand her. More were coming. She felt them writhing across her limbs like a living mantle.

The snake stared into her eyes, waiting for something. She tried to move but could not.

“Free me!” she shouted, giving in to the madness. “I am your queen! The queen of Egypt calls upon you!”

The snake slithered away, and Cleopatra laughed and cried at once. She was insane, and worse, she knew it. Her predictions had come true. She, who was the daughter of generations of kings, now thought that she could talk to animals.

The rats began to gnaw at something. Let it not be her bones. She couldn’t feel anything anymore, couldn’t tell where the animals were.

The chain shifted around her, burning, burning, but she didn’t care. Let it burn. Anything was better than this, these beasts of the night pressing against her body, the sounds of hissing and hungering. Another serpent slithered across her abdomen, pressing into the curve of her waist, where once a jeweled belt had hung, tempting kings, tempting warriors.

The chain shifted again.

She could hear the rats gnawing at the wood beneath her, furrowing its surface. She’d commissioned the pyre, just as she’d commissioned the box that held Antony’s ashes. Now the rats were turning it to dust. Everything would go to dust, everything but Cleopatra.

The chain loosened. She stretched her arm and touched a serpent. She moved her leg and felt another. The room was dark, but all around her was the sound of movement.

Bats rose through the dark, singing. A moth glowed in a sudden spark of light and was taken, struggling against claws.

The chain lifted from her skin and hung in the air above her.

She lay there for a moment, amazed, and then she felt the creatures waiting, all around her.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

The only reply she heard was the soft swishing of serpents making their way back to where they’d come from, bats singing their way back out into the sky, and rats channeling their bodies into the cracks in the walls. Like ghosts, they returned invisibly to the waking world, populating the hidden spaces, filling the shadows. She realized that she was as good as a ghost herself, and as she listened to the departure of her saviors, she learned from their quiet. There were secret places in her city, places the Romans would not think to look for her.

She eased herself up from the slab, naked and exultant. Whatever it meant, whatever it would mean, she was free.

It was a simple matter to leave the mausoleum, pressing the stone with her fingers and waiting for the hidden tunnel to the palace to open. How had they imagined she’d gotten into the place to begin with? All the tombs were connected to the palaces, and had been for centuries.

She slipped back in through the slave’s quarters, taking only the silver box that contained Antony’s ashes, wrapped in a cloth to protect her fingers from the strange, scalding pain the metal caused her skin. She hid in a cellar. It was daylight, and she could not go out into the sun, particularly not as she was. She would need dark clothing, and something to swath her face.