“What was that?” they asked one another.

None of them had an answer. They sat quietly in their beds, wide-eyed in the darkness, waiting, without knowing that they were waiting, for the queen to come for them.

Cleopatra knew that she would not kill them, but Sekhmet did not.

Sekhmet was convinced that her slave hungered for the citizens of Rome. She did not know that Cleopatra had set herself on killing one of Sekhmet’s children.

Cleopatra lifted her chin and scented the air, the pungent, bloody odor of the killing arrow. The Slaughterer. She looked up, her throat vibrating like that of a cat stalking a bird.

High above her, she could see what seemed to be a tremendous star crossing the heavens, and she followed it, bounding over the land, out of the city and into the countryside.

In an untended orchard, far from where Cleopatra ran, a beady, black eye flickered. An ivory horn, its tip lethally sharpened, its protective cap of cork long since disappeared, shone slightly in the moonlight. The dark and scaly creature turned its armored head quickly and lumbered to its feet. Horses whinnied around it, bewildered by their companion.

The rhinoceros stood, and pushed its way through a gap in the fencing.

Three crocodiles slipped into the Tiber, fitting their reptilian forms through the gutters and into the river.

The snakes of Rome slithered into their tunnels, their burrows, their underground passages.

A tiger crouched and leapt, silently, to the top of the Temple of Apollo, on the Palatine, where a peacock was roosting.

A wild-eyed gazelle looked frantically about her, hearing something, hearing everything, before there was a swift flurry of wind, and her breast was pierced by an arrow. She was slung over a set of broad shoulders and brought home by an ambitious hunter for dinner.

Feathers fell from the sky, and blood pooled in the street, and the rhinoceros trotted through the darkness of the city, far from his home, shaking the dreams of every house he passed.

He followed behind his queen.

As night fell, Cleopatra arrived in Krimissa at the Temple of Apollo, following the trail of the Slaughterer. In twilight, she examined the fallen bodies of Romans from the Praetorian Guard and of priests from the temple’s order.

For a moment, she was sure she smelled the scent of the emperor. Surely, that was impossible, though. He could not have been here. It was shadowed with something else, an herbal scent, and that with horseflesh and metal.

Upon the statue of a centaur, an inscription informed the reader that Chiron had died accidentally, pricked by a Hydra arrow when Hercules fired it in a display of prowess, and that, though he was a master of medicines, Chiron had not been able to cure himself.

The centaur had been an immortal, and the pain of the wound had caused him so much suffering that he had given up his immortality in order to die.

Hail Prometheus, said the inscription engraved below the wounded centaur’s hooves, who took willingly the gift of Chiron’s immortal life, and who then suffered the endless punishment of Zeus. Hail Prometheus, who gave mankind fire and offended the gods.