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King of Kings
Paperback
General FictionHistorical Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Nov 22 2024
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.29
Height: 0.30 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
He died at thirty-two. For two thousand years, the men who ruled the world came to Alexandria looking for him.
Julius Caesar is fifty-two when he goes down to the glass coffin, and the tomb's cold settles in his knees. He combs his thin hair forward over the bald crown, sets his palm on the glass, and the dead king's boyhood opens under it. At Pella, a boy of ten lays his hand on the marble chest of Achilles and waits for the stone to beat.
Emperors follow Caesar down the stair. One writes on a wax tablet what he means to say and never says it, and another brings the glass the terrible face he practices in his mirror. Each hand on the coffin opens a door into Alexander's life: the map at Pella, the smoke over Thebes, the night before Gaugamela, and a grove at Corinth where an old philosopher lies in the sun.
Napoleon comes last, at twenty-nine, and finds a green stone box in a mosque courtyard, full of warm water and carved with the name of a pharaoh nobody alive can read.
King of Kings is literary historical fiction for readers who know Alexander's story and come back for the man inside it. It is for readers of Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven, John Williams's Augustus, and Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian.
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