Cleopatra’s Daughter: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

moment of terrified silence. Then Octavian exclaimed, “What does it mean?” He spun around. “Shall I send for the augurs?”
    “No,” Juba said.
    “But then what does it portend?”
    “That you will break the Conqueror’s hold on the world and reconquer it yourself,” Juba replied. His dark eyes gleamed, and though I thought he was being sarcastic, Agrippa nodded.
    “Yes, I agree.”
    But Octavian didn’t move, and his hand with the golden signet ring was frozen over the king’s body.
    “It can only be a good sign,” Agrippa repeated.
    Octavian nodded. “Yes…. Yes, a sign from the gods,” he suddenly declared, “that I am the successor of Alexander the Great.”
    The priest asked meekly if Octavian wished to visit the rest of our ancestors. But Octavian was too full of his prophecy.
    “I came to see a king, not a row of corpses.”
    I looked back at the shattered face of the great man who was responsible for the long reign of the Ptolemies, and wondered if Egypt would have a similar fate.

    Although Juba and Agrippa had proclaimed the breaking of Alexander’s nose a good portent, Octavian’s retinue fell into an uneasy silence as we made our way up the stairs through the Soma. But the throngs of people in the streets—soldiers, Alexandrians, foreign merchants, even slaves—were loud enough to wake the gods. The soldiers were rounding up every Alexandrian they could find.
    “What’s happening?” Ptolemy worried.
    “We’re going to the Gymnasium,” Alexander said.
    “Where Father gave me a crown?”
    Juba raised his brows. Although Ptolemy had only been two and could not have had many memories from that time, he clearly recalled the Donations of Alexandria, when our father had seated himself with our mother on a golden throne and proclaimed our brother Caesarion not just his heir, but the heir to Julius Caesar as well. That evening, he’d announced his marriage to our mother, even though Rome had refused to recognize it. Then he’d given Alexander the territories of Armenia, Media, and the unconquered empire of Parthia. I’d received Cyrenaica and the island of Crete, while Ptolemy became king of all the Syrian lands. Although the Ptolemies wore simple cloth diadems bedecked with tiny pearls, our father had presented us with gold-and-ruby crowns, and this was what had stayed in Ptolemy’s memory. Only now, those crowns were being melted to pay Octavian’s men, and we were the inheritors of dust.
    Alexander’s lips turned down at the corners, and I knew he was fighting back tears as well. “Yes, that is where Father made you a king.”
    We approached the Gymnasium, longer than two stadia, and a murmur of surprise passed among the soldiers. Surrounded by shaded groves, the porticoes had been carefully plastered with gypsum so that even in the moonlight they glittered. But Octavian didn’t stop to appreciate the beauty. He twisted the ends of his belt in his hands.
    “Repeat to me what I wrote,” he instructed.
    Agrippa quickly unfurled a scroll he had been keeping in his cloak. “First is the matter of the city itself,” he said.
    Octavian nodded. “And then?”
    “The matter of how many citizens will become slaves in Rome.”
    Octavian shook his head curtly. “None.”
    Agrippa frowned. “Your uncle took a hundred and fifty thousand men from Gaul. When Marius …”
    “And what did he get for it?”
    “Spartacus,” Juba broke in contemptuously. “An uprising of slaves who didn’t appreciate what Rome had given them.”
    “That’s right. There is enough gold in the queen’s mausoleum to pay every man who’s ever fought for me. This time, we don’t pay them in slaves.”
    “And the men who wish to take women?” Agrippa asked.
    “Let them pay for whores.”
    We reached the steps of the Gymnasium, and a phalanx of soldiers with heavy shields formed a wall between us and the people. Suddenly, I couldn’t go on.
    “What are you doing?” Alexander hissed.
    But I was too