The Gates of Hell

by Michael Livingston

  She’d even told him her name. Lapis.

  Thrasyllus had never heard anything so beautiful as that word spilling from her full red lips. Lapis. A perfect name. A perfect match for her azure eyes.

  The astrologer sighed and peeled himself from her carefully and quietly, slowly rising from the bed. He’d paid for the whole night, but he suspected that one person’s definition of “night” might differ from another’s. He’d had such debates among the other scholars at the Library. While he’d always defined the end of night to be the rising of the sun, he imagined that for the girl the night might end when she awoke. And any sense that Lapis might have really wanted to be with him this night would no doubt be ruined if she was in haste to get up, to get away, to wash herself of him. That, Thrasyllus was certain, would very much break the spell.

  Still, even as the astrologer slipped on his simple garments, he found his gaze returning to the sleeping, azure-eyed girl, as if his mind still insisted on reminding itself that he really had spent the night with her. He’d certainly admired her for long enough, watching from the window of his little upper-story room as other men—and a few women, too—came to the corner and took her hand, leading her away after making their arrangements. Sometimes he thought that she had looked up to see him, too: watching him watching her. But he never thought he’d actually do it himself. He never thought he’d have the courage.

  Looking down at her sleeping there, knowing how much he wanted to wake her, to hope for another bout of passion—yet fearing the possibility that she’d only reject him without another batch of coin—Thrasyllus frowned. He still didn’t really have the courage, did he? It took knowing that he’d probably never see her again to get the strength to do it. It took this being his last night in Alexandria.

  Calm brought clarity.

  He was an astrologer. He was also a coward.

  Thrasyllus stared at her a minute longer, memorizing shapes, before he turned back to the bare room and gathered the last of his meager possessions into the old leather satchel that his mother had given him when he’d left Mendes so long ago. He wouldn’t be coming back here, he knew. And he wouldn’t be going back to that little Egyptian town. He’d settled all his accounts. He was meant for better things. All that was left now was the waiting boat. He’d sail for Rome. He’d find a new life there.

  Quietly he counted the promised coins out onto the bare table. Setting two extra down, he checked once more that he had enough left to cover the passage to Rome. Just enough, he decided, and he wouldn’t have to spend his lucky coin, the only one remaining of those his father had placed in this same satchel so long ago—more than his poor family made in a year of meager earnings.

  All for a chance at a better life.

  Thrasyllus glanced once more to the sleeping girl, wondering what they would think of him now.

  Then, taking one last breath of the night, he went out to meet the day.

  Instead, he met two men. One was a small and wiry man with dark, grease-slicked hair. He was leaning against the wall of the hallway, absently flipping a gold coin in his hand. The other was a much larger, broad-shouldered man, perhaps in his fifties, who was sitting down against the same wall of the hallway. He looked up when the astrologer came out, as if he had been sleeping, and the astrologer could see that he was heavily scarred, the wrinkles of his face crossed over with the jagged tracks of countless old injuries, like a doll that had been torn apart and sewn back together.

  Thrasyllus closed the door to his room as quietly as he could manage. “Pardon me,” he whispered to the men, pressing himself against the opposite wall to step past them.

  Instead of helping to get out of the way, the slick-haired man caught the coin he’d been flipping and then pushed off the wall to block the way. And behind him the older one stood, slowly and seemingly painfully lumbering up to his feet to tower over them both. When the smaller man smiled, he was missing one of his teeth. “Been waiting for you,” he said. His voice was rough with gravel, and there was the stench of smoke on his breath.

  Thrasyllus stepped back toward his closed door. “For … me?”

  The man nodded, and his smile broadened. He was missing two teeth now. “Have a good night?”

  Thrasyllus felt himself blush. “I … it’s—”

  “She’s good, this one,” the man rasped. Using the coin in his hand, he pointed toward the door.

  The astrologer blinked, almost gagged. “What do you—”

  “Money,” the man said. His smile disappeared and he took a single step closer. “I’ll need to be taking some now. Or this brute here will be taking some of your hide.”

  Thrasyllus looked between the two men. The slick-haired man’s eyes glinted with hunger, like a rat’s. The other one, whose shoulders reached from wall to wall, had something like anguish on his face, as if he was repulsed by his own behavior, but Thrasyllus was too frightened to think long upon it. Instead, he swallowed hard. “I … I don’t have any,” he managed to say.

  “You better be lying.”

  “No, I—”

  The little man’s eyes moved down to the astrologer’s satchel with a ravenous look. “Leaving town? Then you’ve definitely got some. Let’s see what’s in that bag of yours.”

  “Nothing,” Thrasyllus managed. He instinctively pulled the satchel from the front of his hip to his back. “Just books. Papers. Pen.”

  “Now I know he’s lying,” the rat-faced man said over his shoulder to the brute.

  The door behind Thrasyllus opened, and the astrologer smelled the girl even before he could turn to see her. “Lapis! Get back in—”

  The girl’s fingertips raised up to brush across his shoulder. “It’s okay, stargazer,” she said.

  “Lapis now, is it?” the little man said from the hallway. He laughed, a coughing, rasping sound. “Good name for a whore. I like it. Might fetch a higher price with a pretty name like that.”

  “What is—?”

  “It’s okay,” Lapis said. This time she was looking past Thrasyllus. She pulled the door shut behind her and stepped around the astrologer, smiling. The coins he’d left on the table were in her hand. She clinked them together. Thrasyllus, despite his confusion, noted that she was showing only the coins he’d owed, not the two extra. “He paid up,” she said.

  “He should have paid more,” the rat-faced man said. His laughter had subsided, and his voice now had a harsh edge of threat.

  “Come on,” the girl said. “He’s not enough to bother with. Let’s go.”

  The brute remained still, but the little man’s hands had balled into fists. “I want more.”

  The girl’s gentle fingers, the tips of which only a moment ago were upon the astrologer’s shoulder, now reached up to run across the man’s forearm. “He’s not worth it.” She smiled at the man, almost seductively.

  Thrasyllus stuttered. His heart was frightened and breaking all at once. “I paid what we agreed,” he finally managed to say. “Inside.”

  “I want more.”

  “I don’t understand, I—”

  The little man stepped up, his hand shooting forward in the same movement. It impacted the astrologer’s shoulder, throwing him back against the door.

  The world spun for a moment. Thrasyllus saw Lapis turning back. Saw her reaching out for him.

  The wiry little rat of a man caught her perfect arm in his hand, yanked her back toward him. Her perfect hair twirled in the air in slow motion, like a thousand dancing black threads.

  Thrasyllus saw Lapis struggle and start to cry out. Something in him broke.

  The astrologer shouted. Abruptly, an inner instinct—one he didn’t know he had—overrode his cowardice. Despite his own dizziness he lurched forward to try to protect the girl. “Lapis!”

  For a moment he saw her face as she rolled over in the rat-man’s grip. Their eyes met. Something like a smile began to form on her perfect lips.

  Then something heavy and hard struck Thrasyllus on the back of
the head, and he saw no more.

  * * *

  This time Thrasyllus awoke not to the scents of passion, but to the smells of the street: dust and sand, rock and piss. His mouth was filled with grit and the iron taste of blood, and his head pounded as if a horse had been trampling upon it.

  The astrologer groaned and lifted his face off the ground. His ears were ringing for a few seconds, but slowly he began to make out familiar sounds: hooves on paved stones, shopkeepers hawking their wares, children chasing balls, doors opening and closing, men laughing, women talking, and everywhere the din of footsteps in a world full of life.

  Thrasyllus managed to open his eyes through the thudding pain of it all.

  Light flooded in. Too much light, smashing against the back of his aching skull. He squinted, gritting his teeth, but he didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t give in to the pain.

  It appeared to be mid-morning. And he was sitting in the middle of a square in the city.

  He sat upright despite the wail of his head. His back was touching something solid, and he let himself lean back against it, allowing its feeling of permanence to settle the world into place. The pounding in his head began to grow dull, less urgent.

  He knew this place. It wasn’t far from his room: just down an alley from the corner where he’d met Lapis.

  Lapis!

  His eyes widened at the thought of her, and he leaned forward as if he might look around for the girl, but the thudding in his skull became a percussive scream and he once more had to settle himself into place.

  He hoped she was okay. She’d been kind to him, after all.

  And surely that greasy-haired rat of a man—her pimp, he decided on reflection—wouldn’t hurt her much. It wouldn’t be good for business.

  Business. Thrasyllus smiled despite the pain in his body and in his heart. That’s all he was for her in the end. Business. He’d been a fool to think differently.

  He turned his head to spit out the thick contents of his mouth. The act brought his tongue against the back of his teeth and so he ran it across them, counting.

  His smile returned. Whatever blows he’d received after he’d been knocked out—and from the feel of it there had been several—they hadn’t dislodged any teeth. That was a blessing, he supposed. The big brute must not have done much of the hitting. If he had, Thrasyllus was certain he’d be in far worse condition.

  He leaned back again, looking up at the white stone buildings with their red-tiled roofs. So much of Alexandria was planned—an exact arrangement of right angles squaring off the grid of wide streets, following the patterns established by Alexander the Great at the city’s founding—that the few areas where the plan broke down seemed chaotic by comparison. This part of the Old Quarter was one of them. Here the buildings appeared to pile up atop one another, an organic randomness that could seem a labyrinth to outsiders. But to those who lived here, it was part of the charm. It was teeming with its own kind of life, like a tiny village inside the city, complete with its own little markets and ways and means. It was one of the things that had drawn Thrasyllus to take rooms here: the Old Quarter was as close to home as he would ever get.

  At the thought of home Thrasyllus felt for the satchel at his side.

  Gone. The astrologer’s smile faded away. He wasn’t surprised to find that it was gone, though he’d hoped. It was all he had left of his mother.

  And with it, his passage to Rome.

  And even his lucky coin, all he had left of his father.

  Thrasyllus sighed and pulled himself to his feet. Only then, as he put out his hand upon it to steady himself, did he realize what he’d been leaning against: the carved sandstone pedestal on which was mounted the sundial that Eratosthenes had used to measure the Earth some two centuries earlier. The smooth white marble of the sundial’s flat surface was covered with thin dust, and some of the brass initials that were inlaid upon its top were missing, but the metal gnomon at its center, a thin spike almost five feet high, still stood straight and tall and sharp. For Eratosthenes its shadow, along with a man’s shadow cast down into the depths of a Nilometer on the island of Elephantine on the Great River, had allowed him to calculate the circumference of the round globe of the Earth. For Thrasyllus its shadow now confirmed that he’d been unconscious for much of the morning.

  And he had nothing. No room, no money, no position. Just the soiled clothes upon his back and the memory of a night that might be best forgotten.

  The astrologer looked back up at the gnomon of Eratosthenes stabbing like a needle into the blue Egyptian sky. It was a monument of enormous importance, yet most people simply passed it by. Even Thrasyllus, who knew the tale of Eratosthenes, hadn’t known that the sundial was so near his rooms until another scholar at the Great Library had pointed it out.

  The Great Library.

  The gnomon was, though the astrologer hardly wanted to admit it, another sign. He’d have to go back to the Great Library. He’d have to beg Didymus to get his old job back. He’d even have to humble himself to that damn Apion.

  Thrasyllus took another look at the gnomon, shook his head a little to clear it, and then sighed. He had no choice now, he supposed. The gods wished what the gods wished. He could only try to follow their signs.

  As he took his first step, his sandaled foot kicked something on the ground. It made a metallic sound as it rattled across the paving stones, and he looked down to see that it was a single coin, its glint just barely visible in the dust of the day.

  Thrasyllus bent down and picked it up. Even before he began turning it over in his fingers he knew it.

  His father’s coin.

  Another sign, the astrologer thought. If he’d not decided to walk in this direction, he never would have found it. Maybe, just maybe, his luck was changing.

  His mother’s satchel gone, Thrasyllus tucked his father’s coin into his fist. And then, with a limp that faded the farther he strode from the gnomon of Eratosthenes, he began the long walk to the Great Library of Alexandria.

  3

  THE PALLADIUM OF TROY

  CANTABRIA, 26 BCE

  Amid an open circle of trees, a whisper of wind rose from the earth. Even with the shadows of the coming dawn still long around it, there was light enough in that clear space to see how the wind gathered into the air in thin fingers made visible by the fine dust that they sucked up from the parched ground. It coiled back against itself, and little flares of its growing strength flicked out from its rising, spinning form, licking out into the world like the forked tongues of serpents. Still it grew. Tighter. Faster.

  And then, in a sudden rush, the wind tumbled forward as it was released into the half-light, unrolling its pent-up tide of energy into a chaotic cyclone that danced across the open ground and collided with its target on the other side of the clearing.

  The empty canvas bag, buffeted by the churning ghost, strained against the branch it was hung upon. Lingering night birds ceased their chatter and sprang out from the surrounding trees. Then the wind was spent, and the cloth shook itself into stillness.

  Sitting on a rock at the opposite side of the clearing, Cleopatra Selene took her hands away from the Shard in her lap. Through she was breathing heavily from the effort to engage the power of the artifact, she smiled. Her ability to control the Palladium was growing by the day.

  Her new husband, Juba, was standing behind her, and she could feel his joy even before she heard him clap and reach down to put his dark-skinned arms around her in a hug that squeezed her firmly but gently. He bent his head to her ear and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Wonderful, my love.”

  Selene turned her head to give him a quick kiss in return. “It’s getting easier,” she said as her breathing slowed. “Down and then out, just like you keep saying.”

  It had been more than a year since she’d stolen the Palladium of Troy from the sacred temple of the Vestal Virgins in Rome. That night Selene had triggered the Shard’s power accidentally, terrifying Augustus Caesar’s
stepson Tiberius and partially blinding his cousin Urbinia. Selene had refused to answer Tiberius’ confused questions about what had happened, and she had done her best to avoid him in the many months since, despite the fact that he was obviously infatuated with her—and that his feelings were further aroused by the new, supernatural mystery surrounding her. She’d also refused to touch the Shard again, for fear of what it might unleash through her, even if she still wished that she could harness its strength to somehow avenge the deaths of her parents—suicides to be blamed, without doubt, on Caesar and Rome.

  It was only with her marriage to Juba of Numidia, just weeks after she turned fifteen, and only weeks before he was summoned to join Caesar here in Cantabria, that she even spoke to anyone of her theft of the Palladium, and of what it really was. She’d done it on their wedding night, after they’d been blessed by the Roman gods of marriage and fertility and ceremoniously paraded into the room where they were meant to consummate the union that had been decreed for them by Caesar. Juba had known of the Shards of Heaven: he’d discovered the Trident of Poseidon, after all—he’d been forced by Caesar to use it to destroy Selene’s parents’ fleet at Actium—and they both knew how he had acquired the Aegis of Zeus by taking the armor from the tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria. He had saved Selene’s life then, and at every turn he had seemed a man she could believe in, a man she could trust. It was a test of that trust to tell him about the Palladium, and she was not surprised that he expressed no shock at the existence of another such object of power.

  She was surprised, however, that he’d responded to her crime—for a most grievous crime it was to violate the sanctity of the Temple of the Vestals as she had—with a smile and warm laughter. Taking her hand, he’d led her to a locked chest. Opening it up, he had carefully unpacked traveling clothes, old maps, and even a set of hardened leather armor. Then, staring at what seemed to be an empty trunk, he’d let out a long sigh and told her that he, too, had stolen something quite special. Then he had reached down, pulled off a false bottom to the trunk, and showed her the Aegis, which he’d managed to keep hidden from Caesar’s prying eyes.