Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [139]
In an untended orchard, far from where Cleopatra ran, a beady, black eye flickered. An ivory horn, its tip lethally sharpened, its protective cap of cork long since disappeared, shone slightly in the moonlight. The dark and scaly creature turned its armored head quickly and lumbered to its feet. Horses whinnied around it, bewildered by their companion.
The rhinoceros stood, and pushed its way through a gap in the fencing.
Three crocodiles slipped into the Tiber, fitting their reptilian forms through the gutters and into the river.
The snakes of Rome slithered into their tunnels, their burrows, their underground passages.
A tiger crouched and leapt, silently, to the top of the Temple of Apollo, on the Palatine, where a peacock was roosting.
A wild-eyed gazelle looked frantically about her, hearing something, hearing everything, before there was a swift flurry of wind, and her breast was pierced by an arrow. She was slung over a set of broad shoulders and brought home by an ambitious hunter for dinner.
Feathers fell from the sky, and blood pooled in the street, and the rhinoceros trotted through the darkness of the city, far from his home, shaking the dreams of every house he passed.
He followed behind his queen.
As night fell, Cleopatra arrived in Krimissa at the Temple of Apollo, following the trail of the Slaughterer. In twilight, she examined the fallen bodies of Romans from the Praetorian Guard and of priests from the temple’s order.
For a moment, she was sure she smelled the scent of the emperor. Surely, that was impossible, though. He could not have been here. It was shadowed with something else, an herbal scent, and that with horseflesh and metal.
Upon the statue of a centaur, an inscription informed the reader that Chiron had died accidentally, pricked by a Hydra arrow when Hercules fired it in a display of prowess, and that, though he was a master of medicines, Chiron had not been able to cure himself.
The centaur had been an immortal, and the pain of the wound had caused him so much suffering that he had given up his immortality in order to die.
Hail Prometheus, said the inscription engraved below the wounded centaur’s hooves, who took willingly the gift of Chiron’s immortal life, and who then suffered the endless punishment of Zeus. Hail Prometheus, who gave mankind fire and offended the gods.
The chained man’s liver was plucked out nightly in Hades. Cleopatra knew the story. Immortality sometimes had a steep and awful price.
She had known that already.
After a time, she moved on from the scarred place and back into the night, following behind the Slaughterer.
17
The road back to Rome was long and hard. On the rear of the emperor’s horse, the bundle containing the poisoned arrows was tied, dangerously shifting and jolting, even within its metal case. Augustus feared it, irrationally. It was not as though the arrows could strike him without being fired from a bow. He had seen them only for a moment, when the case had spilled, but the knowledge of what the venom had done to Agrippa scared him.
Poisoned arrows were not the Roman way, or, at least, not a way of honor. There had been tales of poison since the beginning of Rome, however. Augustus knew it as well as anyone. He did not desire to be a poisoner, known in the annals as a man who employed such methods.
Still, the arrows tempted him.
With a poison such as they contained, a man might be the master of all he saw.
The effects of the poison were so great that Agrippa, famously stoic, moaned in his sleeping and waking, his face flushed with suffering. The last of Augustus’s theriac had been given to Agrippa to take away his pain, but once it was gone, the pain dispensed with any hunger. At last, on the third day, Augustus was able to put food into his friend’s mouth, and Agrippa looked at him with clear eyes.
“What happened?” he asked. “Where are we?”
“He is improving,” Augustus said. He hoped this was true.
Augustus was convinced that the world was coming to an end. They’d not seen the fireball again, but he expected they