"We will speak again, Cleopatra; depend on it. But now you are exhausted. Rufus, take this Queen to her private quarters, and post guards nearby, to ensure her uninterrupted repose."
"But... but..." I was sputtering again.
"If harm comes to her, by her hand or someone else's, or if she slips away and disappears, you will answer personally for it."
"But... but..." I repeated myself.
Caesar turned away then. "Hurry along, Rufus."

Tears - real ones this time - blinded me as I was summarily dismissed and escorted from our unscheduled meeting. Flanked on either side by a hulking cadre of the pratorean persuasion, I was practically raced to the palace. In the marketplace, Romans were everywhere, like biting flies. They buzzed the stalls, hoovered over fruit and vegetables, crowded the porticos, argued and made nuisances of themselves as far as the eye could see.

Woofie, behind me, walked with an air of uncharacteristic composure, nodding and greeting various shoppers and tradesmen. I saw her pluck a fig from a cart, and wink at the stall-keeper. It might have been amusing under different cirsumstances. Those who knew her haggard former self had no clue as to the identity of this familiar yet strangely oblique female.

As we turned onto Ank'hum Way, a wide thoroughfare and the city's main parade route, I felt the sting of public embarrassment. Try as I might to appear in charge of this hasty processional, it was all too apparant who was directing whom. Still, I held my head aloft, and heaped visual scorn upon all bystanders.

Drapers, priests, herdsman, quiant peasants from the countryside witnessed on that terrible day the subjugation of their Goddess Queen. Gamblers, theives, whores and fighting cock trainers observed the comeuppance of Cleopatra! It was a devestating setback delivered me by the gods, an humbling experience which would would burn itself into my memory and be with until the day my soul left its shapely shell. It was Fate's cruelest trick, and Rome's fatal mistake.