Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [53]
The odor overwhelmed him as he stepped aboard the felucca at Damanhur, covering his nose and mouth with a cloth. The sickly sweet smell of rot was everywhere. The sun blazed down upon the emperor’s head, but even the bright daylight did not improve his nerves.
A hot breeze stirred the air, shifting the deck and causing Octavian to temporarily lose his footing. He leaned against a table to recover and planted his weight on something that gave beneath his hand. It hissed, and there was a high-pitched howl of fury.
The emperor flung himself to the opposite rail, willing himself not to vomit. It was a cat, that was all.
A cat that had been making a meal of a corpse.
“The crew did not abandon ship,” he announced to Agrippa, carefully averting his eyes from the body. He would not look at the mess the cat had made of the man’s face. “Determine what killed them.”
The cat looked up from the body with shining yellow eyes and licked its lips. The emperor had always hated cats, but he dared not injure this one. In Egypt, the vile carrion eaters were worshipped as gods.
He was being ridiculous. It was a ship’s cat. Every vessel had one. He swatted at it, he hoped surreptitiously. Still, he was the ruler of this place now, he reminded himself. If he banished cats, it was his business.
The cat skittered up into the rigging, where it looked down upon the emperor as though it knew his deepest secrets. It opened its eyes wide, flattened its ears, and then, very deliberately, showing all of its needlesharp fangs, it hissed.
Octavian’s face had broken out in a cold sweat, and he mopped his brow with one of the purple-embroidered handkerchiefs from his barge.
The other body lay pale and strangely withered on the deck, just behind the first. The cat had not seen fit to eat from this one, so it was possible to view him. Octavian knelt, breathing through his mouth. He and Agrippa would be an example to his troops, all of whom were showing signs of superstition and fear.
He put out a hand—now gloved—to prod the flesh and found it as stiff and unyielding as he’d expected. The man’s head was turned to the side, and the cause of his death was clearly visible, though the withered flesh was peculiar.
“Snakebite,” Octavian announced.
“This one was crushed,” Agrippa commented. Agrippa pushed at the corpse and all assembled watched in disgust as it shifted. It was as though the body were a cloth sack filled with small stones. Every bone seemed to have been broken.
A large—a very large—snake had slithered aboard the vessel, bitten one man and smashed the other in its coils. Octavian swallowed hard. It was too much coincidence.
He noticed something on the snakebitten man’s arm. There was another mark, this one clearly that of the cat, but there was something odd about it.
“Open the corpse,” he said, and Agrippa pulled out a small blade and slit the corpse’s belly.
Octavian was horribly reminded of a sacrifice. Everything inside the body cavity was pale. The emperor had seen enough battles, attended enough deathbed rites, to know that this was not a side effect of death. This was something else.
The man had been drained of his blood.
“Gods,” murmured Agrippa.
The day after Caesarion’s execution, the body of the boy’s tutor, Rhodon, had been discovered in the Museion. It had surely been the action of thieves, nothing unusual in a port city, but the man who reported the death had been terrified. He claimed the body was strange. Shriveled. Octavian shuddered as he remembered. He had not connected it with the queen, not then.
One of Agrippa’s men shouted, beckoning them to view a heap of women’s clothing he’d found on the deck. A rough cape and a linen gown. The emperor caught a whiff of a familiar scent, perfume emanating from the fabric.
He suddenly realized that he was trapped. He looked frantically around. Would she come from the river or the sky?
Another legionary directed Octavian to the small pile of gold coins on the table. They were marked with Cleopatra’s face. Octavian felt