The reader continued to chant the verse as Lycon and Vonones approached. The eyes of both the reader and the secretary waiting to take notes began to track the newcomers over the top of the palanquin. The palace servants were obviously afraid to indicate Lycon and Vonones to their master, but afraid as well of what would happen to them if they did not do so.
There were six guards in the immediate vicinity of the palanquin as well. Their officer, an Italian shorter by eight inches than any of his German troops—that would be Lacerta, Lycon guessed—solved the reader’s problem by shouting: “Halt right there, you!” when Lycon had come within six feet of the litter. The curtained window of the palanquin quivered as the occupant turned from one side to the other. The curtains were of black silk in several layers, opaque from the outside. Nonetheless, Lycon felt himself become the object of cold appraisal. A similar impression in the darkness had once kept him from climbing into a hammock in which lamps later revealed the coils of a green mamba. This time there was no option of turning away. The reader fell silent with evident relief.
“You will be the beastcatcher Lycon,” said a voice from within the palanquin. It was high-pitched to be a man’s, and it spoke Latin with a casual elegance that must be inbred rather than learned.
“Yes, my lord and god,” Lycon said, as he knelt and bowed his forehead to the dust. He was a free citizen of Arcadia, but a hungry lion would not be impressed by that fact, nor would Domitian be if he decided to send Lycon to that beast. Vonones, lagging a pace behind his comrade, threw himself down as well.
“Rise,” the voice said languidly. The door of the palanquin opened.
Lycon straightened, keeping his gaze carefully downcast, as the Emperor stepped out in full view before him. Lycon concentrated on his first close-up view of Domitian, and while he realized that a personal audience with the Emperor was a rare honor, Lycon almost would have traded places with one of those on the barge. They, at least, were already dead and beyond even Domitian’s power.
Domitian was of a height considerable in any company save that of his German guards. He wore the simple outer garment of a conservative aristocrat, a woolen toga with a broad stripe of dark russet—”purple”—along one border. The undertunic was of silk, however, and more in keeping with the titles of “lord and god” which the Emperor had assumed in the recent past.
Words and titles did not matter to Lycon. What mattered was that Lycon faced a man whose capricious sadism and uncertain moods would have made him dangerous, even if he were not Titus Flavius Domitianus, Emperor, Lord and God to every land washed by the Mediterranean and many other lands beyond.
“And you’ve seen the sauropithecus that escaped,” Domitian said. “You’ve seen it kill a tiger.”
The Emperor bent his head slightly toward Lycon. The beastcatcher had seen such an attitude of anticipation often enough, as spectators pressed forward on their benches to drink in the slaughter being played for them on the floor of the arena. There was nothing about the faces on the ivory chairs in the first circle to differentiate them from the common mob in the higher tiers. There was no difference in this face, either.
Domitian was not an unpleasant man to look at. He was bald and ruddy enough to pass for a jovial man, the best sort of dinner companion. The bulk of the toga could have counterfeited powerful shoulders, but the thick wrists suggested that the shoulder muscles were real as well. The upper torso’s appearance of health and strength was belied by a bulging belly and calves that would have been spindly on a man three decades older than the Emperor’s forty years. Part of Lycon’s mind wondered about disease and the possibility that sickness, like the festering wounds that can turn an ordinary predator into a man-eater, had affected Domitian’s personality as well.
But that, like a storm at sea, was a danger to be accepted, since it was beyond present cure. Aloud Lycon said, “Lord and god, I did see the lizard-ape fight a tiger. It was very quick, even quicker than the tiger, and strong enough to endure the tiger’s battering until it succeeded in ripping apart the tiger’s throat. If your divine excellency wishes, I will set off at once for Africa to trap another one for your divine excellency’s personal pleasure.”