Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [56]
Chrysate worked her opal ring, engraved with the face of the goddess she served, over her twisted knuckle and dropped it into the basin, breaking the scry. She’d seen enough.
She glanced quickly about her cave, her gaze flicking over the heap of bones in the corner. She took only a few things in tiny leather pouches, balms made of rare ingredients, some beeswax, a knife so ancient and well used that its blade was a mere whisper of metal.
Murmuring to herself in Greek, she walked barefoot down the rocky trail and toward the soldiers.
As she made her way into their path, the knots in her hair untangled themselves. Her slender body became curvaceous, her crumpled skin silken, and her eyes greener and more glimmering.
By the time she reached the legionaries sent by Marcus Agrippa, she looked almost human.
2
The ship tossed in the storm, the wood singing and creaking, salt water seeping through the cracks. This was a transport bringing goods and slaves from Africa to Italy, and beneath the deck, wild animals destined for combat at the Circus Maximus could be heard howling and shifting. Once they were delivered to Rome, they’d be housed in tunnels beneath the city, and the sounds of beasts would be heard, faintly, by pedestrians walking above them, as though Africa had become Rome’s Underworld.
The sailors trod the deck, uneasy, trimming the sailcloth and swarming the ropes, peering out into the night, suspicious of omens. Swallows had nested in the rigging, and a monster had been sighted off the stern. Its dark shadow and sharp fin trailed the vessel, not deep enough in the water to be harmless. The sailors had felt unsafe since they’d left port, what with their shrieking, roaring cargo. And those whose duty it was to feed and tend the animals felt more nervous still.
Something was not right in the darkness there, and lanterns were not enough to illuminate the corners.
A goat skittered across the deck, its white fur standing out in wet tufts.
A swallow wheeled and twisted in the air.
The smell of heated fur and trampled grain, the smell of hungering.
Something was not right.
A lion roared. A rattling, rippling sound, and then a tiger answered. Plaintive bleating of captive goats. The sound of large wings, rising, catching the still air, and then collapsing. Hooves clipping across wood, the jangle of chains. Six lions. Six tigers. Gazelles. Zebras. Crocodiles. Ostriches. A rhinoceros and a hippopotamus, the last captured with extreme difficulty. The Egyptians both revered and dreaded the animals as earthly embodiments of the evil god Seth, and even caged, the hippopotamus was dangerous to everything that came near it.
Elsewhere in the hold, slaves claimed in battle were being transported, the men into the fighting trade, the women into laundries and brothels and kitchens. All of the passengers traveled as one flesh, humans beside beasts, beasts beside humans. Soon, their blood would entertain Rome, red ink pouring out and writing a tale in the dust.
A forlorn strand of song spiraled up from the slave quarters below, and the ship’s boy shinnied farther up the mast.
In his miserable cabin, Nicolaus the Damascene sat huddled, moaning with seasickness.
He’d been delayed getting out of Egypt. Three months had passed since the night he’d stood outside the palaces ready to flee.
“The queen is dead,” criers had suddenly called in the streets, and Nicolaus was flooded with guilty relief. She’d killed herself. His problems were solved. Eventually, he’d ended up in a brothel, grieving and celebrating at once. The woman he bought was neither young nor lovely, but she was glorious flesh and bone, nothing of the spirit world about her. Wide hips and round breasts, perfumed and veiled in cheap fabric. He pressed his face into her hair, inhaling her smell, reveling