“And the Egyptian, sir?” asked the legionnaire holding Khenti’s weapons.
Galbus looked the guardchief up and down. Disgust twisted his face. “No better than beasts, these Egyptians.” His face brightened slightly. “Take him down to the end of the dock and gut him like one.”
Vorenus jumped forward, the instinct to save Khenti overriding the logic of the odds, but something hard struck the back of his skull and he instead crumpled forward to the flat blocks of stone paving the promenade along the dock.
The last thing he heard before he passed out was Galbus laughing.
* * *
He awoke to surges of pain that pounded his skull with every heartbeat. He groaned involuntarily, and someone’s fist immediately impacted his ribs. “Quiet, you,” a voice growled.
Vorenus coughed air back into his lungs, but he managed not to groan again. And the new input of pain from his side somehow cleared his head enough for him to blink the scene before him into focus.
He was in the throne room of the small royal palace on Antirhodos. Dozens of braziers were lit in and around the pillars supporting the roof, and the air was thick with rich incense that tickled at his nose. Large rectangles of sunlight draped across the floors and walls, the angles of the light revealing that little time had passed: it was still early morning. He’d been here often at this time of day, making one report or another to the throne of Egypt.
Only this time it was not Cleopatra upon the orange-stone chair raised up at the head of the room. It was not the incarnation of the goddess Isis who looked down upon them all, enjoying the breeze from waving palm fronds in the hands of collared slaves on either side of the kingdom’s seat. It was Octavian. Older than he was when Vorenus saw him last, and more confident, stronger in shoulder, but undoubtedly the adopted son of Julius Caesar. As Vorenus looked up, the younger man smiled.
“Welcome, Lucius Vorenus,” he said. “I’m sorry for your treatment. It seems unfitting for a hero known to my divine father. Then again, it seems too kind for a traitor both to Rome and to his memory.”
Vorenus worked to fight down the rising gorge in his throat while trying to formulate a reply, but the sound of a woman struggling in one of the side halls turned Octavian’s attention elsewhere.
A moment later, Cleopatra appeared, half-dragged from the family’s living chambers between two Roman soldiers. She was wearing what appeared to be her nightclothes, and they were bloodstained and partially rent, leaving the luscious olive skin of one shoulder bare and allowing peeking glimpses of her voluptuous body as she was thrown forward to her knees in front of the throne. Behind her came her two boys, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus. There was blood on their nightclothes, too. More than on their mother’s, Vorenus noted. Then, with horror, he saw that no one else was coming from the hallway. Where was Selene?
As if in response, a contingent of Roman soldiers on the other side of the throne room parted, and the young Selene appeared. Unlike the rest of her family, she wore a royal gown. Not the most elaborate dress he’d ever seen her wear, but clearly more formal than anything the others had on. And where their faces were freshly damp with tears and stained with the red of emotion and blood, Selene’s was clean and she wore the countenance of a person who was finished with tears. She walked deliberately across the stone floor, her head high and her hips moving in careful rhythm, womanly despite her young age.
She reached her arms out to her brothers, thin bracelets of gold dangling from her wrists, and they came to her as they perhaps had once come to the mother who knelt unmoving, head down against her chest and shoulders rising and falling in slow breaths, in front of them.
“Selene,” the young Philadelphus croaked as he embraced his older sister. “Kemse. She’s … they—” The little boy’s voice broke and he sobbed into her breast.
“She tried to stop them,” Helios managed to say, and then he began to cough in violent, phlegmatic hacks.
Selene just held them, cooing softly. Her gaze, Vorenus saw at last, was fixed not on her brothers, nor on her mother, but past them all. She was staring at Octavian. And Octavian was staring back.
Vorenus stared, too, wondering what was happening. The fact that his head was ringing like an anvil was not helping him figure it out.
“Lord of Rome,” Cleopatra said.
Heads turned to the woman who had seduced two of Rome’s greatest generals, the woman who had ruled Egypt and, for a moment, almost held the whole of the world in her hand. It was a testament to the striking appearance of her daughter that anyone’s eyes had ever left her. She was still, after all, even at the age of forty, the most beautiful woman Vorenus, at least, had ever seen. And if anyone in the room were to say differently, Vorenus would know him a liar.
Octavian’s head turned slower than the others, but at last he, too, looked at the queen on her knees before him. “Cleopatra,” he said. “I’ve dreamed of this moment.”
Cleopatra rose from her knees slowly, her head still bowed. Vorenus didn’t doubt that the top of her gown was hanging open to Octavian’s view as she did so. “Antony is dead,” she said, as if his death explained everything that needed explaining.
“By his own hand, I know. And from what I’ve been told you were planning to do the same to yourself and your beautiful, innocent children.”
Cleopatra at last straightened her back to look up at him. “You are Rome, and I would do only what Rome wishes.”
“Is that so? You were barricaded in that room to do your hair, then?”
Many of the Romans in the room snickered. Cleopatra ignored them. “I was mourning, my lord.”
“Ah, yes. For that pig, Antony. A traitor to Rome. I should think you’d be glad to be rid of him.”
“Egypt has ever been a friend to Rome,” Cleopatra said. Her voice, Vorenus noted, betrayed nothing of the cold hatred that he knew must be in her heart. She increasingly sounded, quite to the contrary, playful and flirtatious.
“And so it will remain,” Octavian replied. “Indeed, I think Egypt will be under the direct rule of Rome from now on. The time of the Ptolemies is done. You’ll be the last of your family to see the throne.”
Cleopatra gasped despite her attempts to keep her calm. She knew, as did they all, the import behind Octavian’s words: Caesarion would never rule Egypt. He was a man marked for death, if death hadn’t reached him already.
Please let it not have, Vorenus thought.
“I think you should return with me to Rome,” Octavian continued. “As a sign of … the friendship between us.”
Something like a shiver made Cleopatra’s shoulders tremble, but her voice betrayed nothing as she bowed—longer and lower than necessary—to the throne. “I serve your will, of course,” she said.
“Very good,” said the Imperator of Rome. Then his gaze turned to Vorenus again. “And so to you, my once-Roman friend. What are we to do with such as you?”
It wasn’t really a question, and Vorenus did not treat it as one. He tried only to stand as straight and proud as his throbbing head and aching ribs would allow.
“You were a good man, Vorenus. I even remember you from my youth, if you can believe that. I thought you were a loyal man, then. I’m sad to see I was wrong.”
Vorenus thought about replying, about declaring his undying, unceasing devotion to the true spirit of Rome, the Rome that he and Pullo had fought and bled for, the Rome that Julius Caesar had promised them once. But it would serve nothing. He’d fought against Octavian’s armies, and Octavian wasn’t his adopted father. He was a man of more ambition, of more calculation. And for Octavian, Vorenus knew, he was only a man to be used for an example. He looked over to Selene and her brothers, and he saw the many Roman soldiers around them, how easily Octavian could kill them all. He imagined Caesarion waiting for a ship that would never come, running through the streets of his home like a hunted rabbit.