The end of the party is always such a dreary time of night — spilling over into morning, if the lamps hold out long enough, but always the same. People start looking for the belongings they’ve set aside, or suddenly remember their spouses, or they begin uttering vague remarks on the time and the weather outside and where their sandals have gotten to. The dining-rooms and bedrooms have grown stale, but the trip home doesn’t seem so inviting either. If for Antony the charm of Egypt is waning, then he has no greater desire to return to Rome for it.

What is there for him in Rome? All of his friends are dead, and his lovers are impossible. Without Caesar in it, there should be no Rome at all — if these are blasphemous words, then Jupiter can come collect him in person for his chastisement.

“I won’t ask if you loved him terribly,” Antony says. He could die like this, shipwrecked between this woman’s legs; his head rests against her naked thigh, and her arms rest on him like a wreath. “He’s a god now, no matter what we do. I won’t ask if you miss him — that’s a damned silly question.”

Cleopatra cups her hand to his stubbled cheek “Then I won’t ask the same of you.”

“He did have a way, you know. He was charming — rooms seemed bigger when he was in them, wounds hurt less. He could have fucked anyone and anything if he put his mind to it — no offense to you, of course, he had impeccable taste.”

“I know he did, darling. I imagine he had a taste for power.”

It would be harder to find a more expensive aphrodisiac than that. Between all three, they must have tasted most of them — lettuces and figs, saffron and oysters. Once he had dined on some very good sea-urchins at one of Caesar’s country houses in the hills, and after that, they’d had three bouts of fucking in quick succession. Caesar had been terrifically gracious about it, for an older man, and Antony came away from it with a sprained tongue.

Cleopatra doesn’t need to know about that. Her small neat hands rub at Antony’s shoulders, tracing a scar there — one he’d gotten in Gaul, and that brings him back to the old man again, how it had been simply to share his company. The man’s charm had been intoxicating, worse than wine, and then you woke up in the morning with a headache wondering where the hell you’d agreed to go next and how much loot you’d get for killing the locals. Caesar made it all seem neat and orderly.

Antony sighs, and leans back. “He was a marvelous old beast.”

“He had a beautiful body. Not like yours, of course, but beautiful in its way.” Her hands play over the swell of Antony’s chest, tracing his dark nipples. “My husband was a strong man. He fathered strong sons.”

“Indeed he did. I’ve seen him march for days and never tire.”

“He had a cock like a prize stallion.”

Antony grins. “The man could fuck like a drill.”

“Did you ever let him fuck you?”

“Mmm. That’s a complicated question.”

That from a woman he hadn’t expected — in Rome, the ladies turned a blind eye to buggery by and large, unless the soft-cheeked boy being buggered was a rival for a lover’s affections or threatening to steal away a whore’s clients.

Cleopatra’s manner is very nice indeed. “I know it is the fashion in Rome these days, and you must have been a very pretty boy once. If I were a man and not Queen of Egypt, I wouldn’t have been able to resist you.”

“If you were a man, I’d have bent over for you.”

Cleopatra leans down and nuzzles the top of his head. His eyes are smarting, and his mouth has the taste of sour wine in it, ordinarily, circumstances in which he’d prefer his bedfellows to roll over and shove off, but Cleopatra’s small soft hands are clever enough to unravel any troubling knot. She caresses his face, tracking down the line of his nose to trace his upper lip — Antony lets his lips part, gazing up with drowsy aching eyes. What a wonder she is, a perfect little monster, a perfect queen.

If Cleopatra were a man, she’d be a terror. She’d have Octavian on his knees in a heartbeat. Antony kisses her hands, kisses each finger — she has dyed the crescents of her fingernails scarlet, and her pulse-points carry the scent of myrrh and balsam.

“I did love Caesar. No woman could ask for a better husband.”

“Well.”

Antony rolls over and kisses her, making a steady incursion from the smooth soft pit of her knee to the tender expanse of her naked leg. He kisses the softness of her thighs and relishes her with bites until she squeaks. What a joy it is, to make women make their noises.

When he slides his arms on either side of her hips, Cleopatra parts her knees nicely, as if she is permitting him in. He mouths at the hot apex of her, worshipping at the delta made by the creases at the top of each thigh and the sweet plump hill of her cunt — she is warm and ready, always, and he kisses the sensitive stiffness of her clitoris until she cries out and grabs fistfuls of his hair. She knows where she wants him, and he knows how to please her — a world away, in Greece, he’d made a study of this.

She likes to be worshipped, and why shouldn’t she? He likes to lose himself in her body and to press across the line dividing pleasure from subjection — working into her with steady strokes of the tongue until she lifts her hips against his mouth, and then easing off to torment her until she in return torments him into continuing. His three day’s worth of stubble rasps her inner thighs red, making her gasp and laugh — when she comes he can feel her quiver, as every delicate muscle of her seems to tremble with a thin fire. It can only be Antony she thinks of.

Afterward, Antony lies against her. Her fingers play against his wet chin, and he takes each fingertip into his mouth one at a time, artlessly lewd.

He is thinking again of someone else. Talking of Caesar is easier here, outside the gloomy haunted confines of Rome, and he is talking to one who knew him. Not as well as Antony himself, naturally, but enough.

“I must have followed Caesar on campaign for ten years — it feels like half my life. I’d have jumped off the Tarpeian Rock if he gave the order. He meant the world to me, the mad old philanderer. I would have taken a blade for him.”

“Where were you when they killed him?”

Antony grimaces, sitting up sharply. “Where the hell were you that day? Sitting on silk cushions and smoking hemp, in your villa?”

Caesar had put up a statue of the girl in the old family temple, in the house of Venus Genetrix — his foreign wife, done up all in gold like the old girl herself, bare-breasted and wigged. That must have tickled her pride. There are no statues of Antony in the temple of Venus Genetrix.

“I was safeguarding the life of his only son. If you’d have loved Caesar as much as you say you do, you would have had a thought for his wife and child.”

The comforting soft-edged fuzziness of sex has vanished, and it is only Antony’s temper that surges now, hard enough to put a dent in any lingering arousal. They have argued before, but never in bed.

“What do you know about it? You weren’t there. I saw his body, I counted the bloody holes they put in him. You sleep with a man once or twice and you declare he’s your husband. I must be married to more people than I can count.”

This seems to sting her, more than anything — he can feel her muscles tense as if she is already planning a decisive withdrawal from his bed, but she remains still as a stone. With a family like hers, she must be intimately familiar with the technique of holding one’s outward temper while bottling up cold spleen until it vomits forth at the most inopportune time. Antony would rather have it out with her outright.

After a blood-cooling pause, Cleopatra says, “I know several things.”

“Fuck me, really.”

“I know that if Caesar were alive, you and I wouldn’t be troubled by a pack of young boys.”

Antony groans.

“Juno’s cunt, woman, you think I don’t know that? When I think of the men who murdered him I want to tear them apart with my teeth. I wish I could burn them alive.”

“So why didn’t you? You’re a man, aren’t you? You didn’t love him half so much as I did, how I wept for him—”

Antony rolls over with a grunt of annoyance, dragging up the bedsheets in both hands.

“You’re giving me a headache, woman.”

Caesar is dead, and his killers have gone to the underworld in ignominy, not as liberators but as a pack of vicious snobs and false friends. Caesar’s heirs all squabble and claw one another for their father’s estate, like a pack of heartless sons-in-law quibbling over a dead man’s will. Who loved him more, who knew him best, who the people ought to thank for avenging him — every day it is a fresh bloodbath, and Antony wants none of it, not any more.

Cleopatra settles on him, planting a cruel sharp elbow in the middle of his back. She brings up her hips against his flank as if to pin him, like a nasty little wrestler. Antony reaches back for her in what can only be surrender.

“Don’t swear by Juno’s cunt. We’re not in Rome. You ought to swear by me.”