Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [60]
A lion, tawny, amber-eyed, enormous, stretched on the floor, his mane streaked in gore. The beast regarded Nicolaus calmly for a moment, and then, just as casually, lifted his lip and bared his long teeth. The historian felt his bowels liquefy. There were bars between them, though. This lion had not escaped.
There was a sound behind him. The sound of air displaced in a silent leap.
Nicolaus whirled, the lantern swinging, catching a glimpse of golden fur before it disappeared into the shadows. He smelled the silk of the creature, the sleek fur, the musk.
He turned his head slowly, counting them. There were six lions in the cage.
But there had been seven lions in the room.
He suddenly heard the muffled sobbing of a woman. Nicolaus walked cautiously toward the door that led to the slave quarters. His lantern went out as he entered the room, and then he could see nothing at all. His other senses compensated, attempting to draw understanding from invisibility.
The pungent, smothering smell of bodies kept too close, sweat and salt, feces and blood.
The dripping heat, radiating from the walls and floor.
The sound of sobbing. Only one voice. A female voice.
He could see light coming in from somewhere, a fissure in the side of the ship. He walked toward it, stepping carefully, his feet slipping on something he chose not to think about.
He could not find her at first. The ground was covered in straw and—
His feet nudged against solid objects, strangely frail. His eyes began to adjust, and he recoiled.
Bodies.
The sobbing continued, softer now.
Nicolaus pressed his hand over his mouth, swallowing bile. The lion had killed all the slaves. All but one, and here she was, crying in the darkness. Every nerve in the historian screamed for his departure, demanding that he bolt up the ladder and into the light.
But where was the beast?
Something moved quickly in front of him in the dim light, a form barely visible and impossible to define. He pressed his sword out before him, slicing the air. Nothing there.
“You will not be able to kill me that way,” someone whispered from close behind him. He felt breath on his ear.
He whirled, the blade cutting through the place the sound had come from. His shoulders clenched. His heart pounded, and he suddenly realized that—
He knew the voice.
It was ravaged, changed from the silvery thing it had been, but he knew it. He’d listened to her tell tales, listened to her sing, listened to her call to her children. He’d listened to her spell chanting, teaching her the pronunciation of the words.
“Shall I kill you, too?” the voice asked him, and then there was another choked sound of pure misery. “I cannot stop myself. Leave me if you want to live.”
He moved toward her. There she was, curled in a coil of rope.
“How can you be here?” he managed to ask. An inadequate question.
She looked up at him, and he saw, in the dim light, her eyes glittering, her expression weary. Her face was streaked with misery, her mouth with blood.
“You do not know me,” she said. “I am nothing that lives in light.”
What had his life become? Here he was, on a slave ship in the middle of the sea, with the creature who had been the queen of Egypt.
“Queen Cleopatra, I am Nicolaus of Damascus. I was tutor to your children,” Nicolaus said. He could not lift his voice above a whisper. “I know you.”
She made a sound that was a cross between laughter and sobbing.
“Knew,” she replied. “You knew me. You know me no longer.”
She lifted her hand toward him. Her long limbs, her delicate fingers, all of it smeared with red. She cradled something covered in cloth.
“What have you done?” he asked, his voice strangely high and sharp. He was near to swooning, and yet anger tripped up from within him, triumphing over fear. “There were a hundred slaves aboard this ship.”
“Did you think they were people?” she asked. She raised her chin, and there was a trace of the old pride. “They were not treated as people. They were animals on this