He rolled and tucked himself up against the wall and wiped his face, staring up in awe while the beast went on bellowing and thrashing from side to side above, gouts of flame spilling from its jaws. Blood was jetting from the ragged tear in its side like a fountain, buckets of it, running in a thick black stream through the ravine dust. Even as he watched, the dragon’s head started to sag in jerks: down and pulled back up, down again, and down, and then its hindquarters gave out under it. It crashed slowly to the ground with a last long hiss of air squeezing out of its lungs, and the head fell to the ground with a thump and lolled away.
Antony lay there staring at it a while. Then he shoved away most of the rocks on him and dragged up to his feet, swaying, and limped to stand over the gaping, cloudy-eyed head. A little smoke still trailed from its jaws, a quenched fire.
“Sweet, most-gracious, blessed, gentle Venus,” he said, looking up, “I’ll never doubt your love again.”
He picked up his spear and staggered down the ravine in his bloodsoaked clothing and found the guards all standing and frozen, clutching their swords. They stared at him as if he were a demon. “No need to worry,” Antony said cheerfully. “None of it’s mine. Any of you have a drink? My mouth is unspeakably foul.”
“What in stinking Hades is that?” Secundus said, as the third of the guards came out of the cave staggering under an enormous load: a smooth-sided oval boulder.
“It’s an egg, you bleeding capupeditum,” Addo said. “Bash it into a bloody rock.”
“Stop there, you damned fools, it stands to reason it’s worth something,” Antony said. “Put it in the cart.”
They’d salvaged the cart from the wreckage of the village and lined it with torn sacking, and to prove the gods loved him, even found a couple of sealed wine jars in a cellar. “Fellows,” Antony said, spilling a libation to Venus while the guards loaded up the last of the treasure, “pull some cups out of that. Tomorrow we’re going to buy every whore in Rome. But tonight, we’re going to drink ourselves blind.”
They cheered him, grinning, and didn’t look too long at the heap of coin and jewels in the cart. He wasn’t fooled; they’d have cut his throat and been halfway to Gaul by now, if they hadn’t been worried about the spear he’d kept securely in his hand, the one stained black with dragon blood.
That was all right. He could drink any eight men under the table in unwatered wine.
He left the three of them snoring in the dirt and whistled as the mules plodded down the road quickly: they were all too happy to be leaving the dragon-corpse behind. Or most of it, anyway: he’d spent the afternoon hacking off the dragon’s head. It sat on top of the mound of treasure now, teeth overlapping the lower jaw as it gradually sagged in on itself. It stank, but it made an excellent moral impression when he drove into the next town over.
The really astonishing thing was that now, when he had more gold than water, he didn’t need to pay for anything. Men quarreled for the right to buy him a drink and whores let him have it for free. He couldn’t even lose it gambling: every time he sat down at the tables, his dice always came up winners.
He bought a house in the best part of the city, right next to that pompous windbag Cato on one side and Claudius’s uncle on the other, and threw parties that ran dusk until dawn. For the daylight hours, he filled the courtyard with a menagerie of wild animals: a lion and a giraffe that growled and snorted at each other from the opposite ends where they were chained up, and even a hippopotamus that some Nubian dealer brought him.
He had the dragon skull mounted in the center of the yard and set the egg in front of it. No one would buy the damn thing, so that was all he could do with it. “Fifty sesterces to take it off your hands,” the arena manager said, after one look at the egg and the skull together.
“What?” Antony said. “I’m not going to pay you. I could just smash the thing.”
The manager shrugged. “You don’t know how far along it is. Could be it’s old enough to live a while. They come out ready to fight,” he added. “Last time we did a hatching, it killed six men.”
“And how many damned tickets did it sell?” Antony said, but the bastard was unmoved.
It made a good centerpiece, anyway, and it was always entertaining to mention the arena manager’s story to one of his guests when they were leaning against the egg and patting the shell, and watching how quickly they scuttled away. Personally, Antony thought it was just as likely the thing was dead; it had been sitting there nearly six months now, and not a sign of cracking.
He, on the other hand, was starting to feel a little – well. Nonsensical to miss the days after he’d walked out of his stepfather’s house for good, when some unlucky nights he’d had to wrestle three men in a street game for the coin to eat – since no one would give him so much as the end of a loaf of bread on credit – or even the handful of times he’d let some fat rich lecher paw at him just to get a bed for the night.
But there just wasn’t any juice in it anymore. A stolen jar of wine, after running through the streets ahead of the city cohorts for an hour, had tasted ten times as sweet as any he drank now, and all his old friends had turned into toadying dogs, who flattered him clumsily. The lion got loose and ate the giraffe, and then he had to get rid of the hippo after it started spraying shit everywhere, which began to feel like an omen. He’d actually picked up a book the other day: sure sign of desperation.
He tried even more dissipation: an orgy of two days and nights where no one was allowed to sleep, but it turned out even he had limits, and sometime in the second night he had found them. He spent the next three days lying in a dark room with his head pounding fit to burst. It was August, and the house felt like a baking-oven. His sheets were soaked through with sweat and he still couldn’t bear to move.
He finally crawled out of his bed and let his slaves scrub and scrape him and put him into a robe – of Persian silk embroidered with gold, because he didn’t own anything less gaudy anymore – and then he went out into the courtyard and collapsed on a divan underneath some orange trees. “No, Jupiter smite you all, get away from me and be quiet,” he snarled at the slaves.
The lion lifted its head and snarled at him, in turn. Antony threw the wine jug at the animal and let himself collapse back against the divan, throwing an arm up over his eyes.
He slept again a while, and woke to someone nudging his leg. “I told you mange-ridden dogs to leave me the hell alone,” he muttered.
The nudging withdrew for a moment. Then it came back again. “Sons of Dis, I’m going to have you flogged until you—” Antony began, rearing up, and stopped.
“Is there anything more to eat?” the dragon asked.
He stared at it. Its head was about level with his, and it blinked at him with enormous green eyes, slit-pupilled. It was mostly green, like the last one, except with blue spines. He looked past it into the courtyard. Bits and chunks of shell were littering the courtyard all over, and the lion— “Where the hell is the lion?” Antony said.
“I was hungry,” the dragon said unapologetically.
“You ate the lion?” Antony said, still half dazed, and then he stared at the dragon again. “You ate the lion,” he repeated, in dawning wonder.
“Yes, and I would like some more food now,” the dragon said.
“Hecate’s teats, you can have anything you want,” Antony said, already imagining the glorious spectacle of his next party. “Maracles!” he yelled. “Damn you, you lazy sodding bastard of a slave, fetch me some goats here! How the hell can you talk?” he demanded of the dragon.