Cleopatra opened the scrolls, spreading them on the marble floor before her. Studying them as once she had studied her language lessons. Poems and histories, books of myth, romance, and medicines. Words were the things that had made her a true queen of Egypt. They were her power. No longer. The vellum of certain, more precious texts radiated nothing but the lives of dead things. She could scarcely pay attention long enough to absorb the stories in the scrolls.

Even in this windowless room, Cleopatra could feel the moon crossing the sky. She thought of Ra, an ancient with bones of silver, flesh of gold, and hair the pure blue of lapis, traveling the waters of the sky in his day boat, creating the stars and constellations so that when night came, and he traveled into the Underworld, his path would be lit.

Now endless night was what she desired. Night was best for murder, and her enemy, like all men, surely slept when the sun was gone. She could feel Sekhmet surging through the world, fueled by Cleopatra’s rampage aboard the ship.

She bent again over the book before her, searching for distraction. She happened instead upon an unpublished poem about her own marriage. Virgil had obscured it somewhat, and grafted a new and terrible ending onto the story. She was gossip now.

Virgil had disguised Cleopatra as Dido, the foreign queen of Carthage, in love with Aeneas, who left her behind to return to his own people. In this poem, the queen’s suicide was successful. Aeneas watched the smoke of her pyre from the deck of his homebound ship.

It was as though Antony had fled her at Actium and gone back to Rome, leaving her to burn.

Cleopatra threw the pages to the ground, furious. She would not wait here, in this library, in this poet’s house, no matter what Nicolaus said.

An old city filled with temples. A city filled with people. Her children and her enemy awaited.

9

Augustus spilled his drink, startled by the sound of someone in the hallway. He’d raised his glass as a weapon, thinking to smash it in the face of the intruder, when Marcus Agrippa’s face, grim as ever, appeared in the doorway. Augustus leapt to his feet and embraced the man.

“It’s been six months since Thebes,” he said, nearly overcome with relief. “I thought you were dead, or worse.”

“What would be worse than death?” Agrippa looked at him irritably. “My men have been from end to end of the world on your orders, and I still do not know why. I have three magicians for you. I might have recruited three legions of warriors in the same amount of time.”

“Magicians?” Augustus grimaced. “I can find magicians in Rome.”

“Witches,” Agrippa amended. “Sorcerers. Whatever you call them, they are all the same kind of creature, and nothing I trust.”

“I wish you’d brought them more quickly,” Augustus said.

Agrippa sat down opposite him and leaned over the table.