And so he burned the plays, burned the verses, burned the histories, burned the biographies. He stood on the steps of the Palatine, a torch in his hand, and set the pages afire. He did not know what he was hiding. He burned everything, even his own writings.

He left the Sibylline prophecies, but he censored them, cutting offensive words from them with his own knife. Whole sentences and passages. Augustus remembered one of them, shivering with the memory.

“And thou shalt be no more a widow, but thou shalt cohabit with a man-eating lion, terrible, a furious warrior. And then shalt thou be happy, and among all men known; And thee, the stately, shall the encircling tomb receive, for he, the Roman king, shall place thee there, though thee be still amongst the living. Though thy life is gone, there will be something immortal living within thee. Though thy soul is gone, thy anger will remain, and thy vengeance will rise and destroy the cities of the Roman king.”

He slashed away at that section, bewildered by it, making additions and subtractions, changing what it said. It was all familiar, and yet he couldn’t grasp exactly what it was that so angered him. At last, he walked away from the tablet, his skin flushing with mad wrath. He had not understood why he felt so. He still did not. Augustus fretted now. He suddenly remembered only the horrible things.

He thought of Marcus Agrippa, dead at fifty-five of blood poisoning, the legacy of a long-ago wound. He’d been on a campaign, and soaked his leg in vinegar in an attempt to relieve the pain of his old injury. By the time Augustus arrived, he was dead of it.

Augustus could almost remember the getting of that wound. Something about an arrow, something about a poison, something about a mistake, something about a flash of light.

The emperor’s teeth felt loose in his mouth. He ran his tongue over the space where, long ago, he’d lost a tooth on a ship journey. He’d thrown it into the sea between Egypt and Italy. Now it might be a pearl. He was so old that his bones might by now be golden. His hair lapis. His teeth pearls. Somewhere in his memory, there was a god whose body was made of precious stones. A god who crossed the sky in a boat.

Augustus thought longingly of that. He himself was cold in the heat of the sun, and now, in the moonlight, he froze.

He turned his face toward the heavens, squinting to see more clearly. His spine protested as he moved his head, but still, there was beauty here, this night, this orchard, the trees hanging heavy with ripe figs, the smell of the grass, the perfection of the place. His father’s orchard. He had not been here in years. His father had died in this very place, long ago, when the emperor was only a child. It was all so familiar, and yet, when he tried to grasp it, it flew.