Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [137]
“Ride!” Usem shouted. “We cannot stay here!”
Agrippa stumbled and fell against Nicolaus, who dropped the box containing Hercules’ arrows. Agrippa grabbed the arrows and bow in his arms, smashing them back into their vessel.
Usem flung Nicolaus onto his horse, using strength he did not know he possessed. He took Augustus in his arms and pushed him atop his horse as well.
Agrippa started to mount. They must get away from here before the beast, whatever it was, noticed them. None of them were strong enough to fight it.
Agrippa’s eyes blurred suddenly, and he staggered.
The world went dark. Agrippa could hear shouting, feel hands pounding his shoulder, feel himself being dragged along the stones and heaved onto the back of a horse.
He could see nothing. He could hear running feet, the clashing of swords, shouting, and a searing heat overtook his body, beginning in his calf. He could smell metal. A naphtha firepot? The contents would attach to a soldier’s skin and ignite, not quenchable with water but only by smothering. Agrippa had seen them in the Circus Maximus. He’d spent a fortune to obtain the fire that had failed to burn the queen, but he’d never been touched by naphtha.
He prepared himself for the end, whispering what prayers he could remember, wishing only that he had been able to save Augustus. He felt himself beginning to detach from everything he’d been.
In Agrippa’s mind, the world was white and covered in snow.
Then the world was black and covered in raining ash.
Hades would take him. It was an honorable death for a soldier, to die protecting his commander. He tasted his own blood filling his mouth. He inhaled the scent of burning. A pyre, he thought. The rites were being performed for him. He would not wander the shores of Acheron, improperly buried.
Suddenly, though, the smell of burning was replaced by that of sea.
He opened his eyes and found himself tied to a saddle, seated, the ground bouncing beneath him. He thought in a flash of the many captives he had carried over his own saddle. He’d been captured by some invading, fire-wielding army. Were they Parthians? Warriors from Babylonia? He strained his ears for their language, flexed his muscles for any give in the ropes.
Agrippa gritted his teeth and began to twist in the saddle. Before him, he saw a dark, muscled arm, decked in war ornaments.
He became aware of a pain in his calf. It felt as though a red-hot ember had lodged beneath his muscles, as though he were caught in a million-toothed trap. He moaned.
“He wakes,” a voice said in Latin. The horse slowed, and Agrippa found himself looking into the gray eyes of his oldest friend. Augustus’s face showed deep concern.
“My leg,” Agrippa managed.
“You fell on one of the arrows,” Usem said grimly, from in front of Agrippa. The general discovered that he was riding on the Psylli’s horse.
“The temple,” Agrippa managed.
“Sekhmet’s Slaughterer hit it, just as we got you on the horse,” Nicolaus said.
Slaughterer? Agrippa felt himself writhe, his leg cramping and contracting. There was a piece of fabric tied tightly about his thigh. He looked down, expecting his leg to be grievously injured, but it was not. There was a tiny wound on his calf, its edges bright and swollen with inflammation. A clean wound made by a sharp arrow, but pain radiated out from it like lava from the mouth of an erupting volcano. He felt himself, shamefully, screaming in agony. A vial was pressed to his lips, and a caustic, sickly sweet liquid dripped into his mouth.
He knew nothing more.
16
The queen sprinted through the city, her bare feet scarcely touching the street. She fed on the first meat she saw, a fuller stumbling from a doorway, his robes reeking of his profession, his blood hot and sweet as she bit into his throat and drank of him. Feeding would make Sekhmet stronger, but it was necessary. Cleopatra could not function without it. She left the man, pale and withered, in another doorway, and felt the now familiar rushing of love, of power, of satisfaction.