He raised his hand and plucked a fig from the tree. A soft thing, the fig, perfectly ripe. He preferred them green. There was danger in enjoyment.

A beautiful woman stepped from behind the fig tree and smiled at him. He felt himself smiling back, toothless and old. His hand, when he lifted it to his mouth, was spotted with age.

She was young and lovely. A servant, but too beautiful for a servant. A guest? A dignitary?

He should know her. Something in the back of his mind cried out like a child.

Augustus thought, but he could not place her. Her eyes were rimmed in kohl, and her arms were decked with coiled bracelets in the shape of serpents. Her body was curving and tightly wrapped in a white linen gown. Her mouth was plump and painted with something red.

He bit into the fig —honey sweet and seeded, nearly overripe— and it came to him. He had been her lover once, long ago. Or he had loved her.

“Do I know you?” he asked her.

“Octavian,” she said. She held her hand to her side, tightly pressing it against her waist.

“Are you injured?” he asked.

“I was,” she said. “I was injured once, and gravely. I’ve been a long time healing, and you have had a long life. I did not intend that, but I do not regret it. You suffered.”

Augustus felt indignant.

“I did not suffer,” he began, but even as he spoke the words, he remembered nights sleepless, insomniac, haunted. At the same time, he wondered at himself. He was not dressed for night, nor for company. He was nearly naked. He felt his skin prickling as he looked at her.

“Do you not know me, Octavian?” the woman before him asked.

“I do not,” he insisted. He felt his throat beginning to swell. The fig was scratching at his tongue. He coughed unhappily. He was chilled here in the night air. He wanted to go in, to his bed, to his sleep. He wanted to wake in the morning and watch the sun rise.

“I made a bargain once,” the woman told him. “With a powerful king, in a country not far from here.”

“A gamble?” Augustus asked. He thought of games played with bones and rocks, games played with coins. He thought, horribly, of placing a coin in Agrippa’s mouth, to pay the boatman of Hades. The cold of the tongue as it touched his fingers. The rotten hardness of the teeth. The damp of the tomb he’d placed his friend inside, with all the proper ceremony, with all the proper ritual.

A sudden memory of another tomb, and an empty slab therein. A silver box engraved with Isis. A serpent, a serpent. He cringed involuntarily.

“A gamble,” she agreed.

He coughed, and sat heavily on the dew-covered grass. A servant should bring him a cloak. He should not be out at night.

“It was a gamble over a soul,” she said.