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 said, too calmly, “and you left
me.”
The crewman, with startling presence of mind, laid
hands on an axe normally used for rope cutting. He heaved it high
in the air and swung it with all his strength toward her
throat.
Her tail whipped up out of the water and lashed
around him, crushing him in its coils just as the blade touched her
skin. The creature arced gracefully onto the deck, her body
slithering from the depths, an endless serpentine length.
The terrified captain pushed the pile of coins
across the table, but she paid them no attention. He fell to his
knees to beg for mercy. Surely, this was a deity he’d failed to
ferry, and now he would die for his offense. She was a monster with
the face of a goddess, scales catching the darkness and turning it
to light.
She rose up on her coils, high above him, and
looked down upon him without benevolence. Her body writhed, nearly
covering the entire deck. He felt her tail twist around his ankles,
an icy strength.
Would no one save him? There were no villages
nearby. Out there in the dark, all that would hear him would be
crocodiles and lions, bats and snakes.
She wrapped about him, and his last thought was
that she felt like a woman still, a strong and lovely woman,
clutching his entire body as a woman would clutch him between her
thighs. Her beautiful face was inches from his. He could almost
forget what she was.
“But you shouldn’t forget what I am,” she
whispered, her voice bitterly sweet, her hair soft as silk as it
wrapped about his fist. He tried to pull himself free, but he was
already too weak.
She looked into his eyes just before her fangs sank
into his throat.