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 in the life before him.

He had dallied in the city, wondering if indeed it was necessary to leave, until he heard nervous whispers in the streets that Octavian had searched the queen’s mausoleum for her body, and that she’d disappeared without a trace. Quickly thereafter, he heard that the Romans were looking for a scholar, one Nicolaus of Damascus, tutor to the royal children.

The walls outside the Museion were papered with his name and a reward, and he knew the other scholars would as easily turn him in as hide him. Everyone’s purse was empty now that Alexandria was occupied. He had to leave Egypt, and leave it now.

The port was closed and under guard. Nicolaus smuggled himself out of town in the company of a bribed musician, hidden inside a drum. When he finally got free of the city walls, it took him more than two months of dangerous travel to make his way to an open port. He backtracked through villages, fearful he was being watched. Roman patrols were everywhere, and Marcus Agrippa’s men were particularly tenacious. He heard about the missing Damascene scholar in every village he passed through. It was good fortune that his pursuits had taught him languages far beyond his own. Nicolaus very quickly learned to say that he’d never been to Damascus. No. And scholarship? He was apprenticed to a baker.

In his unhappy journey, he was witness to thousands of statues and engravings of Cleopatra being smashed and then covered over with stone. They were all being destroyed, all but the few the emperor had sanctioned.

The workers who were laboring over those images reported strange requests from the conquerors. The emperor had ordered completion on a temple the queen had begun, the outside of which was decorated with a depiction of Cleopatra and her son Caesarion making an offering to Isis.

The temple and its decoration were traditional, the boy depicted with a miniaturized version of himself traveling behind him. The souls of royalty were always portrayed this way.

The depiction of Caesarion was traditional, but that of the queen was not.

At the temple of Dendera, Octavian had ordered that the queen be depicted unaccompanied by her ka, her soul.

Most imagined it to be an act of libel, a mockery of the woman Rome had conquered. Cleopatra, robbed symbolically of her soul, no longer royal. It was an elegant metaphoric insult.

Nicolaus the Damascene suspected otherwise.

What did Octavian know?

When, at long last, he arrived at an open port, he was so desperate to get out of Egypt that he leapt aboard the first vessel he saw, Persephone, a Greek transport full of slaves and animals, destined, he assumed, for Athens. He bought his passage with coins marked in the queen’s image, paying more than he’d expected.

“Those are being melted down now,” the captain told him. It had been nearly two months since the queen’s death. The coins were the easiest portraits to obliterate, stirred into a slurry of metal and then recast. The new ones had Octavian and his general, Marcus Agrippa, on the front. The reverse was marked with a chained crocodile.

“Then have them all,” the scholar said. “They are of no use to me.”

They’d been at sea for a week before it occurred to Nicolaus to ask what exactly their destination was.

“We travel to Rome. The animals are to celebrate the emperor’s triumph over Egypt.”

Nicolaus would have laughed had it not been so idiotic. Of course. He’d placed himself aboard a ship sailing into the arms of those who hunted him.

Now he stood aboard this ship of animals, watching the vessel breach the waves and wondering if, despite all his fleeing, despite all his planning, his end was coming. He’d seen things as the ship tilted, visions in the green depths, and none of them were bright. Sharks, with their dull, gray eyes, and more. Tentacled things, nothing beautiful. None of the sirens of the great epics. He thought for a moment of his idol, Homer, who had simply lived a poet and died a poet. He had not been a fool, as Nicolaus had. He hadn’t trafficked in magic he didn’t understand.

Nicolaus sighed and rubbed at his eyes. He could have disappeared into the desert or returned to the court of King Herod, from whence he’d come.

Instead—

The Fates had arranged things differently. He was following her to Italy, however against his will. She’d pursue her enemy and her remaining children. He had no doubt that if she lived, that was where she was headed.

Nicolaus ran his fingers through his long hair, tugging at it in an attempt to galvanize his mind and keep himself awake. Here he sat, on a rocking ship, on a tossing sea, helpless to stop the thing he’d unleashed. Somewhere in the depths of his knowledge, surely there was a solution. Somewhere, there was the right story, a story of triumph, of mortals conquering the gods. Years of reading, years of learning, and yet he couldn’t think of what he should have done.

Suddenly, he sat up straight, listening.

From somewhere below, he heard it again. A wailing cry. A moan. A scream.

Somewhere, deep below him, someone was dying.