Cleopatra's Secret: Keepers of the LIght (44 page)

Caesarion turned and caught Akil’s eye.

Who would ride through this storm tonight?

As the cloaked riders emerged from the haze of sand, the royal party reined in their horses.

“There must be a hundred of them,” called out Chigaru through the roar of the winds.

Caesarion looked behind him from the direction they had come. If these horsemen were not friends, they would never escape. Even on the swiftest horses Lochias Palace could provide, Caesarion and his party were heavy cargo with two children and the bags of gold, and they had been traveling for too many days. The horses were on their last legs.

Caesarion held his little sister close and the guards closed ranks to flank him on either side.

As the riders approached, another bolt of lighting lit up the desert. In the flash, Caesarion saw the bright golden hair and merciless cold eyes of his enemy—Octavian.

The others saw him too. Akil slid from his horse, leaving the dumbstruck Alexander perched by himself.

As suddenly as the windstorm had begun, the gusts died down and the air went unnaturally dead but for the electricity still crackling in the angry purple sky.

Octavian’s henchmen flung themselves from their saddles, and in an instant Akil and Chigaru leaped forward with their naked blades poised to defend the royal children.

Octavian nodded, and before they even had a chance, the Egyptian guards were attacked by three times their number.

Selene held her breath as she watched her guards fight desperately to save her, but they were outnumbered. She screamed as the short sword of a Roman legionnaire sliced through Akil’s thigh, forcing him to fall helpless to the ground where another soldier caught him squarely in the back of his neck with his sharp blade. In a moment Akil too was pierced through the belly and sunk to the desert floor in defeat.

Placing her carefully back on his saddle, Caesarion leaped down from his horse to face the Romans.

The soldiers swarmed around him. Caesarion fought with all his heart, but four burly legionaries disarmed him, roughly pinning his arms behind his back.

The young prince stood glaring up at Octavian as the Roman Emperor slid from his horse, a dagger gripped in his hand.

“So you are the boy your whore of a mother claims is Caesar’s son.” Octavian studied Caesarion with fascinated hatred.

“I am Caesar’s true son and heir,” spat Caesarion struggling to break free of the soldier’s grasp.

“Too many Caesars are not a good thing,” replied Octavian, as he raised his dagger to strike at Caesarion’s heart.

Caesarion closed his eyes, waiting for the blade. Behind his lids, he saw the flash of lightening, and for a split second his father’s face stood out clear and proud, the laurel wreath of a general crowing his short hair.

Caesarion's hands burned.

Instinctively, he opened his eyes and held out his palms as a surge of energy shot from his fingertips with some power he did not even know he possessed. He pointed to the blade aimed at his heart.

Octavian cried out in pain as the dagger fell from his grasp onto the sand. He stared at his fingers is if he’d been bitten, then looked up at Caesarion, fear and hatred sizzling in his pale eyes. “Viper!” He turned to his legionnaires. “Cut him down!”

But Caesarion raised his hands again. All the power he had suppressed throughout a lifetime surged through him now, and as he waved his palms across the cracking air, a wall of fire burst up between him and the Romans.

The legionnaires jumped back, some falling to their knees. “It’s true! He is a God!”

Sweat poured down the prince’s face as he held the scorching wall against his enemies. Turning to the twins, he cried, “Ride away!”

The children stared at him with wide blank eyes.

“Go!” He blasted a lick of flame under Alexander’s mount and the horse reared up, then shot like an arrow across the sand.

Selene’s terrified eyes met Caesarion’s for a flash and then she gathered her reins in her small hands and kicked her horse hard, sending it pounding after her brother.

The confused guards began to ride after the children, but Octavian called, “We’ll deal with them later! Here is our greatest enemy!”

The soldiers turned their mounts back. Octavian took a step closer to the wall of fire separating him from Caesarion.

With a burst of rage, the young pharaoh willed the flames to shoot higher and burn with a blazing intensity that forced Octavian back.

“Bastard!” cried Octavian. “You cannot hold us forever with your demonic powers!”

And it was true. Already Caesarion could feel the power draining away, draining him of every ounce of life. He fought to hold the wall of flames, if only for long enough to allow the twins to escape. He was lightheaded and shaking with the effort as he turned back and saw the children’s swift horses disappear over a distant sand dune.

The power was gone. He dropped his hands and sank into the shifting sand, exhausted to the core.

Octavian’s shrill voice buzzed from somewhere near. “Kill him!”

The Jackal God stood over him, silently holding out his hand. His father was waiting in the mists beyond the veil….

With his last effort, Caesarion reached out and his fingertips brushed the Dark Guide’s hand.

The lightning smashed through the heavens, ripping the sky apart with jagged, skeletal claws as a legionnaires’ blade slashed Caesarion’s throat and his blood poured a crimson stain upon the earth. His body fall back into the sand and he lay motionless as the flicker of lightening lit up his lifeless face.

Everyone stood still for a moment as the rumbling black thunderclouds rolled away leaving an unnatural vacuum of silence in the twilight desert.

Cautiously, Octavian leaned down to examine the fallen prince more closely. The glint of gold caught his eye. He picked up Caesarian’s limp hand and pulled the heavy signet from his finger. Octavian held up the ring in the fading light and recognized the face of his beloved mentor.

“This belongs to me.”

Deliberately, Octavian slipped the signet onto his hand. It hung loose on his slender finger but the prize made his heart glow with the triumph of a long held ambition satisfied. He turned to his soldiers. “Now let’s dispatch with the rest of Cleopatra’s brats.”

His soldiers slung Caesarion’s body across the back of Octavian’s saddle, then mounting his horse, the Emperor and the legionaries charged off in the direction of the escaped prince and princess.

Selene rode with all her heart just a breath behind her brother. They galloped wildly into the approaching darkness, blindly with no idea where they were headed. Only that they must escape!

The sliver of a moon was rising above the sand dunes. Fixing her gaze on the crescent, Selene steered her horse in that direction, her twin automatically following her lead.

Then she heard them, the sound of horses and soldiers calling out, coming up quickly behind her. She kicked her stallion but he could go no faster.

“They’re coming!” Alexander called in panic.

Selene clung to her horse, riding, riding but not fast enough as a flood of Roman legionnaires surged around them, one grasping her horse’s reins, forcing her to stop. Her brother was screaming and thrashing as his mount was also secured.

Octavian, breathing hard from the vigorous chase, rode to her side.

Selene sat staring in shocked horror as she took in the fallen figure of her older brother slung across Octavian’s saddle, his blood dripping onto the sand, and her body shook in its tiny frame as Octavian reached out his grasping blood-soaked fingers for Alexander.

She hardly noticed as two more horsemen burst over the sand hill to the west charging towards her. But Octavian paused and looked up, narrowing his eyes.

As the cloaked riders drew closer his lips went white, all the color draining from his rosy cheeks as the riders came into plain view.

Octavia, her hair streaming down her back in a golden tangle, scorch marks from the hot whipping wind turning her delicate complexion bright pink slid from her mare with the assistance of a cloaked attendant. Never taking her eyes from Octavian, she marched forward and firmly took hold of little Alexander’s shoulders. Then, still clutching the prince, she moved to Selene and grasped her hand tightly in her own.

“Octavia…” her brother’s voice was barely a whisper as he gaped at her.

Then, recovering from his shock enough to speak, he demanded, “What are you doing?”

His sister faced him squarely. “From this moment on these children are under my protection. I will raise Antony’s son and daughter with their half sister in my villa in Rome.”

Octavian was momentarily lost for words again. Was this some apparition or desert mirage playing tricks on him? Octavia in Egypt? But as he looked into her eye, he knew this was no trick.

“You have overstepped your bounds, sister.”

He moved to grasp the little prince again, but now, swift as lightning, her companion placed the sharp point of a sword at his throat. In his sudden action, the swordsman’s hood fell back to reveal the lean weathered face of Germanicus.

“If you wish to murder Antony’s children, you must kill us both first,” said Octavia.

Cool, even with a blade at his throat, Octavian looked at the pair, measuring their resolve. “They are
Cleopatra’s
children too,” he reminded her.

“They will cause neither you, nor Rome, any trouble,” Octavia promised. “I will swear it by any Gods you wish.”

Octavian looked at the two terrified children, both staring at him unnervingly with Antony’s large dark blue eyes, then back at Octavia. “And what if I execute the Prince and Princes of Egypt and do not kill you?”

“In that case you had better kill me,” she replied her face as cold and threatening as his had ever been. “If you think I cannot match wits with you and destroy your power in Rome, you underestimate me. If you murder these innocents, I will know you are beyond redemption, and you give me no choice but to plot your destruction and bring the curses and vengeance of all Rome upon you. By Diana, I swear it!”

Her eyes flamed frigid like the lightning still blazing through the sky and the tip of Germanicus's sword pressed a little harder against his throat.

He stood perfectly still for a moment looking at his sister. Octavian, who could run his sword through the two helpless children whimpering at his sister’s side, could not raise a hand against the enemy who gazed at him with his own eyes.

He looked down at Caesarion’s corpse. “I suppose I have what I wanted. Take the Egyptian brats. But mind I never lay eyes on them in Rome, or I may decide not to be so merciful.”

Fingering his new gold ring, Octavian backed away from Germanicus’s sword. Mounting his horse, he issued a sharp command to his legionairs and rode off with his men in the direction of Alexandria to claim the prize he had waited for all his life.

Cleopatra in chains.

Night was falling as Antony rode through the city gates. An uneasy feeling came over him as he beheld Alexandria silent and empty. The chaos which reigned earlier this morning had been replaced by a city which more resembled the somber Valley of the Kings, where the tombs of the ancient pharaohs were housed, than the bustling metropolis he had come to love. The sound of his horse clomping along the wide limestone boulevard echoed eerily against abandoned buildings.

They couldn’t all be gone?

He passed through the bazaar, the empty stalls cleaned out of their wares with only a slinking cat darting across the great square to show life had existed here at all. A terrible fear crept into his heart.

Cleopatra had not abandoned Alexandria?

He halted his weary stallion at the gates of Lochias Palace. No attendant groom stood waiting to take his mount and open the wide doors. Tentatively, he pushed the gate and it swung open to reveal an empty courtyard. Not a light or a sound came from the palace complex.

With the unnerving sensation of walking in a dream, Antony looked around at the beautiful white marble towers and jasmine covered walls and he knew she was not inside. If Cleopatra remained in the palace, her servants and courtiers would never have abandoned her, no matter what she said to them.

He spun helplessly around, looking for signs of life, but the only sound he heard was the tinkling of the myriad fountains which decorated the gardens of the palace complex.

Where could she have gone? How could she have left without telling him where to find her? But then the soft tones of chanted prayers rose up from the quiet. Antony strained to hear where they came from. The playful sea breeze blew around him, making it difficult to detect the direction of the music. He closed his eyes and now he recognized the familiar voices and notes. It was a hymn to Isis, the kind performed by her priesthood in her temple. Of course, that was where Cleopatra would go.

He took off at a gallop, nothing mattering anymore but to find her and carry her away from this place of death. To Hades with empires and thrones. Let them steal away to some quiet corner of the world where they could bring their children and grow old together in peace. Antony had done his best for Egypt and empires, even sought the penance of an honorable Roman death on the battlefield, but the Gods had denied him even that.