Fatebreaker

Chapter 1: Cleopatra

Cleopatra Philopater, Matriarch of House Ptolemy, Pharaoh of the Godsland, Master of the Lower Kingdom and Shepard to the Upper Kingdom, stood beside her apartment window with arms wrapped protectively around her naked torso. The lights of Alexandria, the great capital of the Godsland, burnt through the dark, reflecting in her pupils.

The labourers of her city were wakening. She was looking down at a cascade of lamp-lit fire that plunged in waves across the terraced slope of the city and spilled over the lip of the earth into the great harbour of Alexandria. The sky above was empty. The stars had returned to their mortal bodies – to living Priests and the mummified dead. They would sleep until the day was done and then rise once more to the heavens. Re, Light Bringer, was drawing close. The coldest part of night had descended.

As Cleopatra stared at the city, her mind conjured the war camp in the bay at Actium. The terraced houses of Alexandria looked like the siege lines behind which she and Marcus Antony had sheltered, their warriors hunkered down and exhausted from the day's fighting, waiting for Octavian's next foray. Too spent to resist the wolves of Rome.

She imagined the sea of campfires burning through the darkness. The fragile crescent between earth and sky filled with the low, terrified voices of dying men. She had lain listening to the laments of those bloated with disease and shattered by iron. At first she prayed for each one. Soon, though, she came to hate the vocal ones that called out relentlessly, sharing their pain with the world. She preferred the stoic ones that stared quietly into the black eyes of Anubis. They remained still and let their flesh cool into rigour without disturbing her rest. In the morning the living heaped the dead into mounds and burnt them.

Cleopatra shivered and turned her gaze to the palace forecourt. She wanted to draw the curtain – hanging invitingly near her elbow – and hide from the horrible memories of the recent past. Nevertheless, she was compelled to remain where she was, watching, her hands pressed tightly into one another. All of her eyes – mortal and spiritual – were straining for a glimpse of her precious daughter departing the palace.

It was a performance, an empty one at that. Watching for a phantom she herself had banished, never to return. Still, the Pharaoh stood sentinel telling herself it was maternal duty that kept her firm. Insisting it was love rather than guilt.

"Where is my young one?" she whispered to all the Gods. "Show my daughter Dedi to me."

There was no answer: not from the sky, or the fiery city, or the coming day.

At moments like this, scrutinising herself from afar, from the darkened audience stalls of her mind, Cleopatra was fully aware of her vanity. If only she had felt this intensity towards her daughter before, when she might have acted upon it –

Cleopatra's handmaiden, Iras, approached and upended a pitcher of icy water over the Pharaoh's shoulders.

Cleopatra gasped. Her skin stung and her toes stood up involuntarily from the smooth marble of her standing-bath. Charmion, her other handmaiden, brought another pitcher and poured it from on high directly over the Pharaoh's perfectly bald, aquiline skull.

Cleopatra peered out from beneath the cascade, searching unblinkingly for movement in the palace forecourt. She would not be swayed from her self-appointed task. She had not played this character – the bereaved mother – before. There was some pleasure in a performance executed well, for its own sake. Were she not a Pharaoh without peer she would have been an actress without equal.

"The princess left a quarter span ago, my Pharaoh," said Sihathor, breaking her fixation. His old, dry, eunuch voice echoed in the cavernous room. It often seemed the Vizier could read her thoughts at will.