Cleopatra’s Daughter: A Novel by Michelle Moran Read Free Book Online

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    “So you send men to their deaths,” I said to Juba. “To prison.”
    “Only if they’re assassins. Why, you’re not planning to assassinate Caesar, are you?” His voice was mocking, but his dark eyes were serious.
    “What’s happening?” Agrippa asked.
    Juba’s eyes lingered on mine for a moment, then he turned and said pointedly, “I am simply warning the queen’s children that in Rome, many things will be different. I think they understand.” He smiled, but his words were directed at me.
    The augur raised his hands to the sky.
    “Well? What is it?” Octavian snapped.
    “The signs are favorable,” the priest announced, and Octavian exhaled audibly. “Neptune blesses this voyage.”
    Agrippa passed the augur a bag of coins. Then the three men escorted Octavian down the dock before I dared to whisper, “He’s heard
everything.”
    “There’s nothing we’ve said that’s been suspicious. Just questions.”
    But Juba had looked into my eyes and known what I wanted to do. Octavian had murdered Antyllus and Caesarion. He had given my mother and father no choice but to take their own lives. Even Charmion and Iras were dead. After eleven months, it still hurt to swallow when I thought of them all resting in their marble sarcophagi inside my mother’s mausoleum. Seven days after Octavian’s speech in the Gymnasium, their funeral processions had wound through the streets of Alexandria, collecting so many mourners that the Roman army had needed every last soldier to keep order in the city. Now everyone was gone. Everything but a few chests of silks had been taken from us. And when my brothers each turned fifteen, what would happen to them? Death was inevitable, perhaps preferable to what we would suffer in Rome. And if death was inevitable….
    We watched the soldiers as they tried to force a horse from the sand onto the wooden dock. The horse wouldn’t move. The men tried whistling to it. Octavian slapped its rear, and when one of the soldiers raised a whip to beat it, Ptolemy covered his eyes.
    “Stop!” Alexander shouted. He crossed the pier and approached the men. “He’s just afraid of the water,” Alexander told them.
    Some of the soldiers laughed. A fat soldier shouted to the one with the whip, “So beat the horse until it moves.”
    “No!” Alexander said angrily. “He still won’t move.”
    The man with the whip crossed his arms over his chest. “Why not?”
    The fat one sneered. “Are you going to listen to an eleven-year-old boy?”
    “He should,” I said quickly. “He knows horses better than anyone else.”
    “So why won’t the horse move?” Octavian demanded.
    Alexander’s hair was wet with sea spray, and in the bright summersun his skin had turned to bronze. He was handsome, and some of the soldiers were leering. “Because he isn’t the lead horse. My father trained the lead. If you bring
him
, he’ll board your ship, and if the others are watching, they will, too.”
    Agrippa turned to look at the herd of horses shifting nervously on the shore. “Which one is the leader?”
    My brother pointed to a large bay mount. “Heraclius.”
    Octavian glanced at my brother. “Fine. Then bring him up.”
    Alexander walked confidently toward the pack, and the soldiers’ murmuring died down. Upon seeing him, the horse immediately lowered his head, sniffing my brother’s outstretched hand for the treats he normally brought. My brother whispered something into Heraclius’s ear, stroking his wide flank with one hand as he took the horse’s reins in the other. Slowly, whispering all the time, he walked onto the dock, and Heraclius followed obediently.
    “You can bring the others now,” Alexander said, and when none of the horses put up a struggle, Octavian studied my brother.
    “I remember your father was a great man for horses,” he remarked.
    Alexander looked away. “Yes.”
    Octavian nodded. “Has everything been loaded from the mausoleum?” he asked Juba, and