“Is there not a poison?” said Cleopatra, desperate. There must be something that would separate her. Something that would kill her. Her revenge must be done, but she could not live this way forever, hungering. Murdering.

Alone and enslaved.

“You are past poisons,” said the priestess, and her face shifted into what might have been a smile. “I am not.”

The rekhet indicated her goblet, drained of the liquid it had contained, and then closed her eyes and leaned back against the pillar. She was ancient, Cleopatra saw now. The power that had filled her had made her look younger, but now her skin was wizened.

“I, and my sisters, have sacrificed at this temple for thousands of years, to keep the goddess at peace, to keep her at rest,” the rekhet whispered, her voice ragged, as the poison began to take effect. “You have undone our work. She is released to do her will, and you with her, hand in hand, heart in heart, soul in soul. You belong to her.”

Cleopatra leaned forward to hear her final, rasping words.

“I will not stay to see the world you make.”

24

The ghost ship drifted near Damanhur for two days before Octavian’s men brought it to his attention. The villagers refused to approach it. There’d been sounds on the night the ship appeared, screams and struggling. One of the children of the village had seen something tremendous and dark lashing in the water.

“No doubt the captain fell overboard and was eaten by crocodiles,” Octavian said, disgusted anew at the notion of governing this superstitious, illogical country, even from afar, but his messenger, having visited the villagers, disagreed.

“They say it was something else,” he insisted. “Something they’ve never seen before.”

One of Octavian’s legions encountered something in the area as well, some sort of serpent. He felt mildly curious upon hearing the report, though the incident clearly had nothing to do with the missing Cleopatra. A snake, not a woman.

As the hours and days wore on, however, with no sign of either the queen or Nicolaus the Damascene anywhere in Alexandria, he began to feel a disquieting sense of something familiar about descriptions of that snake.

When he looked into Cleopatra’s eyes, had he not seen some sort of serpent thrashing? In memory, it appeared to him again, its mouth stretched wide and filled with sharpened teeth. Venom dripped from them. The beast in the vision had risen up from an arena, which now he realized he knew all too well.

The Circus Maximus. He’d seen Rome.

Octavian cursed. He would go himself. His men could clearly not be trusted to find her. They did not know what they were looking for. He ordered his barge prepared and filled with armed soldiers. At least shipboard he’d be safe from her. There was no way to sneak onto a ship unnoticed, not unless one could walk on water. And this barge, repossessed from the queen’s personal fleet, was a glorious thing, shining in the sun as if it were made of pure gold, silver oars flashing, a royal purple canopy awaiting the emperor as though it had been made for him.