Page 37 of Cleopatra

My blood ran cold. “How?”

“A new acolyte joined the temple two days before our lord’s death. The day the bull died, the student disappeared.”

I raised a questioning eyebrow.

“Every acolyte’s first duty is to maintain the water trough of the Buchis. I suspect she poisoned the water,” my aunt explained.

“Why would anyone wish to poison Montu’s manifestation? Why risk the wrath of the gods?”

“Money,” Neferu said calmly. “Taxes are high, crop yield is low.” She didn’t say it with any hint of blame, but still I felt ashamed.

“What do you know of this acolyte?”

She shook her head. “We searched her rooms after she left—discreetly, of course—and there was very little to find.”

I made a sound of frustration and Neferu gave me a look that would have silenced a schoolyard of children.

“I said very little, I didn’t say nothing.” She pulled something out of her pocket. “I found this behind her pallet. Part of her blood money, I am sure.”

My aunt handed me a coin. It was a simple drachma. Nothing entirely out of the ordinary, but as I looked at it more closely, my hands began to prickle.

The two-sided coins minted during my reign were embossed with my profile on one side, and Theos’s on the other.

But when I turned the coin over—the side wet with my sweat—I found my face had been replaced with an eagle, a symbol of royalty. At first, I thought it an old coin left in circulation from my father’s reign. But there was no mistaking the young Theos, his eyes wise and unblinking.

An error at the minting press, that is all, I reasoned with myself, though I knew I had last sent Pothinus to the press. He had been instructed to change the valuation of the bronze coin.

What if he had done something else entirely? Something treasonous?

Neferu seemed unaware of the coin’s defect. It wasn’t unusual for the king of the realm to feature as the sole ruler on currency, but I had changed this within the first season of my rule. I also imagined it was rare that Neferu handled money.

I closed my fist over the drachma and slipped it beneath my dress, where the binding of my undergarments tightened around my chest. Against my beating heart.

“Thank you for telling me this.”

Neferu’s eyes narrowed. She could sense something had shifted in me, but I was not able to vocalise what. Especially when I wasn’t sure why this defective coin had left me so unsettled.

“We should return to the others,” I said.

“Yes.” Then she reached for my hand and squeezed it so hard the pressure bordered on pain. “I sense something coming. Like a storm on the horizon, it draws ever near.”

I shivered as my skin turned to the texture of gooseflesh. But despite my sense of foreboding, I straightened my shoulders and met my aunt’s eyes steadily. “A storm will bring rain, and rain grows crops. I do not fear it.”

Neferu looked at me with an expression that said, You should, before sweeping up her cowl to hide her features once more.

She waited for me to leave the room first, and as we crossed the threshold we were once again strangers to each other, not aunt and niece, but high priestess and Pharaoh.

Arsinoe glared at me as I rejoined the procession. Neferu was her aunt too and I trusted Arsinoe, but our aunt’s news on the acolyte was for my ears only.

I followed the path that I had last ventured down with my father, three years prior, when we’d selected the last Buchis bull. It led me to the pens on the outskirts of the temple.

Nine bulls snorted and paced within, separated from each other by stone bricks, some of which had suffered under their large horns. Every bull had a white hide with black patterning across its face.

“They are smaller this year,” I noted. One looked barely out of calfhood.

“Without the Nile floods, many of our fields have fallen barren,” Neferu said quietly.

Choosing to ignore her comment, I scrutinised each of the bulls in turn and waited for a feeling of clarity to come over me. The bulls snorted and shifted in their pens as I walked past. I could feel their aggression in the bulk of muscle that corded above their shoulders. Some of them feinted a charge at me, others scuffed their hooves, but none of them seemed anything other than a bull.