She screamed wordlessly from the ground, pushing herself up, rising, rising.

Her son threw his hands into the air and shouted a desperate proclamation.

“Hear me!” he cried, his voice cracking, speaking in Greek. “Hear me! I am your king! I am son of the Ptolemies! I will rule over you! I will keep you safe from the Romans! They will enslave Egypt! I will keep you free!”

He repeated his declaration in Latin and then in Egyptian, to prove that he was a man of the people, but his voice was drowned by the sounds of rioting. His words were exactly the wrong ones.

“I AM YOUR KING!” the boy shouted again, and Cleopatra struggled to her knees, the sun still searing her flesh, her eyelids blistering, glimpsing her son mere lengths from her now, almost within reach.

Just as her fingers touched him, a centurion appeared behind her child, raised his hands to Caesarion’s throat, and placed them on his perfect skin.

“Kill him!” the crowd screamed, and she tore at the centurion’s tunic, desperate to get to her son before he did. This could not happen. Not this. Not while she watched.

Someone kicked her in the face, throwing her back to the ground, and her eldest child disappeared, dragged into a sea of hungering, murderous bodies as she was dragged in the opposite direction.

She could not reach him.

She saw, fleetingly, pale gray eyes, light hair, a laurel crown, as the emperor fled the platform. He would not even watch what he had set in motion.

She heard the sound of bones giving way as the centurion wrapped his fingers around Caesarion’s throat. She heard her son’s last breath as the Roman broke his neck.

Her howl of agony shook the buildings of the agora, calling the crows in chaos down from the sky, but it did not stop what was happening. It did not stop anything.

20

The boy died quietly, gracefully, in the manner of a king. Octavian was able to watch only a moment of it before he was forced to turn away. It had taken twenty-three thrusts of his betrayers’ daggers to bring Caesarion’s father down, and Caesarion was more a man than Octavian himself, who vomited from the platform as he heard the bones in the boy’s neck shatter.

Then, there was that sound, that unearthly, animal howl, which came from no discernible place, from no discernible person. The crowd boiled before him, and crows filled the sky, circling and shrieking.

Octavian was suddenly aware of how exposed he was.

The crowd erupted before Octavian, rushing toward the body of the boy, and the centurions pulled their leader away, pressed him into a litter, drew the curtains. There was blood on Octavian’s white toga; he could see it, scarlet droplets standing out from the ivory linen.

The queen had not appeared. Where could she be? What army might she be raising against him? Octavian secured an extra slave to taste his food, in case she thought to poison him. It was a faint protection. She could be anywhere. She could be part of his own army, hidden in the guise of a man. He called his troops to order and had them inspected. Agrippa, his only trusted general, tore their tunics from their bodies, revealing all their scars and puckered battle wounds.