Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [48]
Her eyes widened under the water, and she felt her nostrils close. She felt her spine thrash and elongate, her throat stretch endlessly. Within moments, her shape was that of the river itself, long and narrow, limbless and yet pliant. Her bones fit together like a perfect necklace, an articulated chain, and each motion heralded the next.
She slithered past the legs of a legionary who’d entered the water to hold the rope detaining the felucca.
She let her midsection appear above the surface, lashed her tail for a moment, and felt them nervously wielding their swords, trying to predict her next position.
“Serpent!” they shouted. “Serpent! Onto the bank!”
22
Two hours later, the felucca’s captain and his crewman hunched over a table in the captain’s quarters, counting the coins they’d gained from their missing passenger. She must have leapt from the ship and been eaten by a crocodile, stupid thing. She’d have been better off staying aboard. The Romans had been too fearful of the water to reboard the vessel after seeing the serpent, and so they’d waved it on. Now the felucca was on its way past Damanhur. No matter what the captain had planned to do with the woman, it would have been better than jumping into the Nile. Who knew what she’d been running from? The legionaries weren’t seeking her, surely. They were looking for a dead body, and there were certainly no corpses aboard the felucca.
“That, or any oddity,” the leader of the legionaries had muttered. “Any feminine oddity.” They did not seem to have any more specific description than that.
The felucca drifted lazily in the current. The captain had decided to press on to Naukratis and visit the whorehouses there, spend some of their Cleopatra-marked currency on women before the new emperor declared it worthless and demanded that it be reminted into coins in his own image. A warm breeze propelled the ship down the river at a reasonable speed, and the moon rose high in the sky.
“I hear the redheaded whore came back,” the captain said.
“I don’t know about her,” his crewman replied warily. “The last time I saw that woman, I had to visit a physician and drink something made of moths and frankincense. Cost me half my wages.”
The captain laughed.
“There’s always another whore. Five more, each one better than the last.”
The seaman nodded in agreement and then looked up, the expression on his face changing. The captain glanced at him, curious. The pox must have been a terrible one to warrant such horror.
“Look,” the crewman whispered, pointing over the captain’s shoulder.
The captain spun lazily in his seat and then leapt to his feet.
There she was, shining in the moonlight, their passenger, naked to the waist.
“Lady,” the captain began. Where had she come from? She balanced her arms on the rail, her body still partially in the water. Was she injured? “We did not mean to leave you behind.”
Something in her eyes transfixed him. They glowed, that was it. Even her short black hair seemed to shine. Her breasts hung heavy over the rail, the smooth skin glittering with droplets of water. She smiled.
The captain smiled back, nervous. She was angry, he could feel it. It would be better to throw her off the vessel now, put her back into the waters and leave her to die. There was no explanation for her appearance here, two hours after she had fallen overboard. Surely, she could not swim as quickly as the felucca could sail.
She shifted on the rail, pushing herself up higher, the better to climb aboard. The captain admired the rosettes of the woman’s nipples, the precise curve of her waist, her navel. It was most unusual to see a naked woman outside of a whorehouse. His gaze roved downward and then stopped, unbelieving.
His passenger undulated her hips to push herself over the rail, and the captain jumped backward, feeling his gorge rising. He opened his mouth to scream, but the sound died. Impossible.
The woman was half snake.
“I hired you,” she