She’d slipped into the dirty water only out of desperation, used to the pure, rain-filled cisterns beneath the city of Alexandria, but now she stretched in pleasure. She had not recognized the life that filled the Nile, the tiny creatures and the large, the plants and sands and scents of faraway places. She began to silently raise her head above the level of the water to take a breath, but the boat rocked with legionaries boarding it, and the wooden hull struck her skull. She was driven downward, inhaling burning fluid, her lungs protesting, gagging, but as she sank, something began to change in her body.

Her eyes widened under the water, and she felt her nostrils close. She felt her spine thrash and elongate, her throat stretch endlessly. Within moments, her shape was that of the river itself, long and narrow, limbless and yet pliant. Her bones fit together like a perfect necklace, an articulated chain, and each motion heralded the next.

She slithered past the legs of a legionary who’d entered the water to hold the rope detaining the felucca.

She let her midsection appear above the surface, lashed her tail for a moment, and felt them nervously wielding their swords, trying to predict her next position.

“Serpent!” they shouted. “Serpent! Onto the bank!”

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.”