“But you shouldn’t forget what I am,” she whispered, her voice bitterly sweet, her hair soft as silk as it wrapped about his fist. He tried to pull himself free, but he was already too weak.

She looked into his eyes just before her fangs sank into his throat.

23

Cleopatra emerged from the river near Thebes and lay on the bank of the Nile, her naked skin basking in the darkness. She’d left the vessel behind hours before, still shocked by the glory of her transformation. Traveling underwater, her body skimming the silted floor, absorbing stories from every creature she touched, from every droplet of water that had come to the river from elsewhere in the world, she’d felt the histories of the raindrops that had fallen from the sky to become the Nile, and of the grains of sand that had once been the shells of animals. She’d felt the stories of the crocodiles and the fish, the water snakes and the creatures that drank from the river.

She thought of the destruction she could wreak on the Romans in this new form. She could slip through underground passages, through places her human form could not travel. She could speak to animals, feel their needs and hungers. She could rise from beneath the Tiber, and the Romans would never know she was coming.

She thought of the power she now possessed.

Her mind had shifted while she was in the form of the serpent. The things that mattered to her human form suddenly meant little to her. It wasn’t until she surfaced at Thebes and her body became human again that she realized she’d left more than just her clothing and coins behind. She’d left Antony’s ashes as well.

She should have left him in the mausoleum, safely buried; she knew it now, but it was too late. She moaned, imagining him without her. He was dead, she knew, but holding him had comforted her. His body was still in Egypt, she realized at last, and thus his soul remained here. The silver box that contained him would surely sink to the bottom of the river and never be found. His soul would be safe. She tried to calm her unease.

She stood and walked toward the temple, a ghostly white skeleton perched on the horizon. As she walked closer, she could see that brush had grown up around it, and parts of the walls had crumbled. The temples to the old Egyptian gods were now largely abandoned, and Cleopatra knew that she herself was to blame. For twenty years, she’d largely ignored the native religions in favor of the Greek and Roman gods.

A sleek, black granite statue of the ibis-headed god, Thoth, still stood sentry. She looked at the statue for a moment. This was the Egyptian god of knowledge and resurrection, the god who’d given Isis the magic words to bring her husband, Osiris, back to life, uniting the pieces of his body that had been scattered from end to end of the world. Why had Cleopatra not summoned him?