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.