Queen of Kings - Maria Dahvana Headley [64]
Augustus gazed out his window, his pale eyes squinting in the light. All the emperor could think of was darkness. It would come, no matter what he did to resist it.
He hoped Rome would be ready.
7
The port of Ostia teemed with activity, legions of soldiers arriving and reporting to the emperor’s forces, shipments of grain, cloth, and slaves, and groupings of sailors, soldiers, and whores conducting business.
A transport ship with a cargo of long-awaited animals, imported to celebrate the return of Rome’s first citizen, was being unloaded in the midst of this, the creatures harnessed, muzzled, and then prodded into the crowd.
The zebras descended the planks first, their hooves stamping so hard after long captivity that the wood splintered beneath them. The gazelles followed, their eyes rolling up to show white. Even in the chaos of the shipyard, the ostriches drew attention, with their high-stepping, with their long, wavering necks. Crocodiles, low and dry and scraping, heaved themselves slowly onto the stones, their tails lashing as they went, several sailors clinging to the ropes that bound each one. A set of jaws snapped and a feathered thing was gone.
The most dangerous creatures were the last off the vessel. First, the rhinoceros, its horn tipped with cork in a hopeful attempt to blunt it, and then the hippopotamus, which opened its jaws and bellowed, to the entertainment and awe of the crowd. There’d never been a hippopotamus in Rome before. Then, the tigers, each as long as two men, with their glossy, variegated pelts and flashing, dismissive eyes. Finally, the lions appeared on deck, sailors wrangling them into submission.
“One of the lions went wild and ate up all the slaves that ship was carrying,” a young sailor bragged to his whore. “I got it from the ship’s boy.”
“Which lion?” she asked.
“That one.” He pointed at the largest of the lions, a male with a twisted mane and rheumy eyes.
“That one looks old,” she replied.
The lion chose that moment to roar, revealing a gummy, toothless mouth. The whore looked at the sailor and smirked.
A slender woman wrapped entirely in a dark, hooded cloak and veil too heavy for the weather made her way down the Persephone’s plank. Her gloved hand was roped to that of a young and handsome man, who was draped in scholarly robes. His chin jutting, his other arm supporting a small child, the scholar pushed his way through the crowd.
As the trio of passengers moved alongside them, the lions and tigers began to roar, rearing up onto their haunches and struggling with their captors. It seemed that they were trying to follow her, though surely this was an illusion. The animals that had already been unloaded began to cry out as well, the ostriches looking about in alarm and flapping their useless wings, the gazelles and zebras bolting in terror to the ends of their ropes and then snapping backward. A crocodile broke his bonds and barreled forward, his teeth snapping, as sailors danced about him, trying to wrestle him back into servitude.
The woman in black looked over her shoulder as the scholar led her, and the whore caught a glimpse of her face. A dark-smeared eye, a flash of brightness. Something strange there. And beautiful, too. The whore was intrigued.
She tugged at the sailor’s arm and pointed in the woman’s direction.
“Who’s she? And the boy?”
“The only slaves the lion didn’t kill. The scholar bought them for a couple of coins. She’s bad luck. The captain wanted to be rid of her, and I don’t blame him.”
The whore craned her neck after the woman. What sort of thing might she be, that a slave-selling captain would throw away his prospect of profit? She took a half step in their direction, but the sailor who’d purchased her for the hour pulled her the opposite way, his hands already burrowing into the folds of her gown.
Marcus Agrippa and a small group of his soldiers, ragged after months of travel, marched past a moment later, agitated by the delay the animals had caused their vessel. They bore with them the seiðkona, her long white hair tangled