The Gates of Hell

by Michael Livingston

  They’d embraced then, not as politically bound titles, but as unexpectedly kindred souls. She’d cried purely and honestly and openly for the first time since she could remember: cried for her dead parents, Mark Antony and Cleopatra. She cried for her dead brothers: her twin, Alexander Helios, who had died in the prison in Rome, and little Ptolemy Philadelphus, who she later learned had died before he ever made it that far. She cried for her dead half-brother, Caesarion, who was the best of men. She cried for her vanquished homeland of Egypt, and for the horror of living as the adopted daughter of the man who’d taken it all away from her.

  Juba had understood. She’d known that he would, even from the first moment they’d met in Alexandria, when he helped to save her from the bloodthirst of Rome. But even as they were engaged to be married, even as they came together in tentative, too-formal hugs and greetings, she’d never opened herself to him. Not like this.

  Through all of it—the sorrow, the rage, the guilt—Juba had simply embraced her. And then, standing over the Shard of Heaven of Alexander’s breastplate, the very Aegis of Zeus, he had sworn that he would support her quest for vengeance, which so closely mirrored his own. And he swore, too, that he would teach her to control the Palladium of Troy, to no longer need to fear the Shard’s power. It was, she’d thought as he held her, the most wondrous thing she could have imagined.

  How little she knew. They made love that night, but as the months had passed it was clear that their bond was just beginning. They were genuinely and truly in love. And that was surely the most unbelievable wonder of all.

  It was that same love that she saw sparkling in his eyes as he stepped around from behind her and eyed the path of the little torrent of wind that she’d unleashed with the power of the Shard. “You’ll be better than I am soon enough,” he said. “You control it so effortlessly.”

  “Still tiring,” she said. She frowned a little at the bag on the tree. “It’s not enough.”

  “You’re getting stronger, though,” he said. “You have to start small. You have to build up to it. To learn the Trident I started with a cup of wine.”

  Selene saw something dark pass over his face. Memories, she knew. Juba was nearly eight years older than she was, but more than once she’d had to comfort him when he woke up screaming from the nightmares of remembering what he had been made to do with the Shard that Caesar did know about: the Trident of Poseidon, which controlled water. “Of course,” she said. Selene made her voice quiet and demure, aimed at bringing his attention out of the past. “I couldn’t do this without you.”

  To her relief, when Juba shook his head she could almost see the ill memories fall away. “No, I think you could. Maybe not as fast, but you’d still do it. Strongest person I’ve ever known. And the most beautiful.”

  He’d said it to her many times now, but she didn’t like hearing it. Somehow it reminded her too much of her mother and her pursuit of power through lovers. None of that interested Selene. She would hold power between her hands, not between her sheets.

  At the thought, she looked down at the Shard, which indeed sat in her lap between her hands. It remained an unimpressive-looking thing: a crystalline rock, vaguely the shape of a woman in robes. In Troy they had associated it with Pallas Athena. It protected them. For years it kept them safe. Only after it was stolen from them did the city fall. If the stories were to be believed, the thief Odysseus had paid for that crime—and his failure to control its power—with a wandering journey of years spent away from his beloved homeland.

  She was a thief, too, Selene supposed. Only, she would control the Shard. She would succeed where Odysseus had failed. And rather than spiriting her away from her homeland, the Shard would be the key to bringing her back to it.

  “Do you think we can really do it?” she asked.

  “What’s that?” Juba had turned and was looking at the empty bag again. He seemed to be calculating something.

  “Destroy Rome,” Selene replied, her voice unintentionally small this time.

  Juba turned back around. He knelt before her, just as he had on the night he’d sworn his support for her dream of vengeance. He took her hands in his, the Palladium untouched between them. “You know I do,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. I believe in you, Selene. I believe in us.”

  Selene examined how their fingers enmeshed, his darker skin alternating with hers in a perfect grip that felt complete. “And the Shards?”

  “What do you mean? I believe they’re real enough.” He seemed about to laugh at the object of power between them, but the seriousness on her face gave him pause.

  “No,” Selene said. She squeezed his beautiful fingers more tightly. “I mean, you say you believe in us. But is that only—?”

  “Only because of the Shards?”

  Selene nodded, biting her lip.

  “No,” Juba said. He squeezed her hands in response. “I told you: I believe in us. The Shards are only a means to an end. They are tools. Nothing more. And like all tools each requires a user, one who understands how to use it. That’s what Octavian didn’t understand. That’s what he still doesn’t understand, and it’s why he can’t use the Trident.”

  Selene pulled their fingers apart and then moved her grip so that she held his hands in her own. She leaned forward and placed gentle kisses on the backs of each of them. “It’s what is inside that matters,” she said.

  “I suppose that’s right.”

  “You’re a good man, Juba.”

  He smiled at that, and then he pulled his hands free and stood. Selene looked up at him, wondering how she’d once thought this man was her enemy. “I like to think so,” he said. “Though Caesar might disagree in the end. Shall we try again?”

  Selene looked up at the brightening sky, then nodded. “Just one more. Then we should probably get back to the tent.”

  Her husband, gentle man that he was, frowned. He didn’t understand. “A patrol isn’t due this way for another hour. And this morning’s war council won’t be for at least another hour beyond that.”

  Selene grinned.

  For a moment or two longer, Juba still frowned. Then recognition swept the confusion from his face and he gasped. “Oh!” He blushed. “Right. Just time for one more, then. Unless, I mean, if you wanted to stop now, we could—”

  “No, no,” Selene said, still grinning as she waved him away behind her. “You said we had plenty of time.”

  “As you wish, my lady,” he said. She heard him settle down into place behind her, to watch down the same line of sight that she had across the open ground toward the empty bag in the tree.

  Selene took a deep, long breath. She flexed out her arms and then relaxed them down into her lap, her fingers touching the surface of the Shard.

  Locked in the heart of the smoky quartz of the vaguely woman-shaped stone was the Shard itself: a deeply black pit that seemed to capture and hold the light. Lacing around it were black veins, rising to the surface most prominently where the eyes of the woman’s face ought to have been. It was here that Selene’s thumbs rested, her pads settling into the slight depressions as her fingers reached around to the back of the Palladium to hold it steady.

  At once the sensation of a roiling fire began to shoot up through her hands and into her forearms. When first she’d felt it, back at the Temple of the Vestals, she’d feared it would consume her. From what Juba had now told her, the use of a Shard could do that to many people. Why the two of them were able to withstand the shock, able to begin to control it, Juba did not know.

  It was enough for them that they could.

  So when the shock erupted into her out of the Shard, Selene did not scream. She did not pull away. Instead, she closed her eyes and let it wash over and through her. She brought it into herself. She let herself become one with the power, let it swirl through her veins just as it swirled through those in the stone.

  When she felt she had enough, when it seemed that it would wash her away, she swallowed an
d focused it, pushing it out of herself the same way that it had come: down through her arms, down through her hands, down through her fingers and into the stone she held there.

  And then, opening her eyes, she pushed the power out of the stone like the exhalation of a long-held breath.

  Amid the open circle of trees, a whisper of wind once more rose from the earth.

  4

  ALEXANDER’S CITY

  ALEXANDRIA, 26 BCE

  The heat in the barge’s hold had been so stifling, and the grain-heavy air so choking, that Lucius Vorenus had been certain he’d either suffocate or sneeze long before Petosiris had gotten them through the Roman customs officials and into the safety of the city.

  Not that Alexandria was exactly safe for a man who had been sentenced to die by Caesar himself. Even now, quietly making his way north along the widest and most busiest avenue of the city he’d once called home, Vorenus was certain he’d be a dead man if he was recognized.

  In that respect, he supposed, he was far safer under the deck of the canal barge. At least there, holding his breath and trying his best to stay silent as the vessel docked at the water gate, he had known the identity of the threat: the Roman soldiers who had stepped aboard to inspect its cargo and the captain’s papers.

  Beside him in the narrow, shallow space, Khenti had lain with his eyes shut. If not for the steady rise and fall of the Egyptian’s chest, Vorenus might have thought him dead. As it was, the swordsman had been still enough that he might have been sleeping.

  Peering up through the cracks in the decking above, Vorenus had seen the familiar hardened-leather soles of the sandals he knew so well from his many years spent as a legionnaire. And beyond them he had recognized the accents of Rome, of those he’d once called countrymen.

  Petosiris, Vorenus now knew, was a man even more versed in smuggling than he had suspected. As the soldiers had poked long spears into the piles of grain and peppered him with questions, the barge captain had given only the simplest of replies, and he had stood with his hand on the ship’s tiller, directly beside the coil of ropes that concealed the hidden hatch.

  When the soldiers were satisfied that all was in order, Vorenus had heard the quiet clink of coins being exchanged, and then the sandaled feet had stepped off the barge, the little deckhand jumping into action behind them. Vorenus heard the links of the chain across the canal rattling through a metal cleat as the chain was allowed to go slack. It fell into the water with a splash that rocked the barge beneath Vorenus’ back. Then they had unmoored from the dock, and once more they had traveled along the great canal, headed west over the sunken chain toward the lake harbor docks and, beyond them, the teeming city of Alexandria.

  As Vorenus had watched through the cracks, the deckhand had then methodically re-coiled the rope, moving it off the hatch and into a new pile to the side. Only when it was done did Petosiris at last open the hatch and bring fresh air and the bright light of day into the hold. “You can sneeze now,” Petosiris had said with a smile.

  Vorenus had indeed done so, and even now, two hours later, his nose itched.

  They’d left the barge at the lake harbor, with reassurances to Petosiris that they would be making the return trip east when he left that evening. Then he and Khenti had entered the city from which they had been exiled.

  It was Khenti who decided that the straightest route to the Museum would be the best one. From the west end of the lake harbor docks they needed only to make their way north across the breadth of the city by walking along the Sema Avenue.

  It was a calculated risk. They would encounter far fewer people by making their way through the many side streets of Alexandria, but with fewer people around they would also stand out more if indeed they did encounter anyone who knew them. Amid the thousands of people pulsing along one of the central arteries of the city, they would be, they hoped, lost in the vast sea of faces.

  And so, block by block, they made their way north through the thick crowds.

  For all that the Roman seizure of Egypt had changed in his life, Vorenus was shocked at how little Alexandria had changed. It was still a city of white walls and red-tiled roofs, and at least the monumental buildings along the Sema Avenue showed not even the slightest scar. The city’s people, too, were just as he remembered them. Alexandria had long been a hub of trade between the riches of east and west, north and south, and its incorporation into the growing vastness of Caesar’s Rome had done nothing to slow the masses of people from across the world who lived upon or passed through its streets. Walking among them, Vorenus and Khenti were surrounded by a vibrancy of color and dress. They were surrounded, too, by the polyphony of language swirling into a thrum of humanity, punctuated by the squall of birds, the bray and cry of stock, and the clatter of wheels on stone streets. The city even smelled as Vorenus remembered: that bewildering mix of the people, their beasts, and scents of their foods drifting out from stalls and shops.

  Indeed, the only thing that had changed were the occasional squads of Roman soldiers marching upon the streets. The people moved around them like currents of water passing around rocks, and Vorenus and Khenti were happy to do likewise, taking care to be as far from Roman eyes as possible.

  No one recognized them, and they made good speed despite the crowds. It was only mid-morning when Khenti pointed ahead of them through the crowds. “Vorenus,” he said. “The square.”

  There were two streets in the city of Alexandria that were known far and wide. One was the Sema Avenue, along which they walked, running roughly south to north from the busy docks of the lake harbor to the sprawling Emporium along the shores of the Great Harbor on the sea, at the mouth of which stood the Great Lighthouse itself. The other was the Canopic Way, running from the Sun Gate in the east to the Moon Gate in the west. The royal palaces were on the peninsula of Lochias in the northeast quadrant of the city, but even the royal family—when there had been a royal family—had known that the real center of Alexandria, the true, beating heart of its proud people, was the confluence of those two broad streets. Rare it was for a traveler to come to Alexandria and not walk one of those paths, following it to the wide, open square where they met.

  Upon each corner of that square stood a massive building. To the northeast, in the direction of the royal palaces, was the temple to Isis, the Egyptian goddess-queen. To the southeast, fronted by high pillars, was the Sema, from which the avenue they walked had gotten its name. Burial place of kings and pharaohs, it was there, in a statue-lined chamber beneath a pyramidal roof, that Alexander the Great’s body rested in its crystal tomb. It had been almost three hundred years since the Macedonian king had conquered Egypt and been declared the son of both the Egyptian god Ammon and the Greek god Zeus, almost three hundred years since he’d stood on the barren shores of a stormy sea and proclaimed that it was here that he would build the city that would take his name, the city of Alexandria, wonder of the world.

  That it was built, too, in order to house the Ark of the Covenant, perhaps the most powerful of the Shards of Heaven, was a secret known to few men. For all that he had seen and experienced, Vorenus had difficulty believing it himself. But, truly, there were days he had difficulty believing that the fall of Alexandria to Rome had meant that he himself had become one of the keepers of that secret, one of the keepers of the Ark.

  To the southwest, across from Alexander’s mausoleum, perhaps fittingly, was the Temple of Ammon. And at the fourth corner, to the northwest, lay the beautiful, green grounds of the Museum. Their destination this day lay at the center of that vast complex dedicated to the Muses: the Great Library itself, built of white marble and stone, whose magnificent dome was crowned by a golden statue of a man holding a scroll open to the sky.

  As they crossed the Canopic Way and entered the Museum grounds, Vorenus wondered at the fact that the Great Library had not been put to the torch when Octavian—Augustus Caesar now, he had to remind himself—had seized the city. When Julius Caesar had come to Alexandria, the first
time that Vorenus had come to this place in service of Rome, part of the Great Library had indeed burned. An accident, so it was said, though there were whispers in the legion that Caesar had been concerned about the power of the growing intellectual elite of the librarians. So he had fully expected the new Caesar to burn it to the ground.

  He hadn’t, though, and Vorenus was glad for it. He was never one for books and letters himself, but it was a beautiful building, and he had grown to appreciate the knowledge of men like his friend Didymus, who had become the head of the Great Library not long after Caesar’s death. Didymus, he was sure, knew more than any other man in the world.

  If anyone knew why the Ark seemed to have lost some of its powers since leaving this city, it would be Didymus.

  * * *

  Before the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Didymus had been a personal tutor to the royal children—to Caesarion and his stepsiblings—and so the librarian had kept an apartment in the palace. It was there that he had become such good friends with Pullo and Vorenus, the three of them sharing the often bewildering experience of being foreigners within the inner circles of Egyptian power. The two Roman legionnaires and the Greek intellectual had spent many nights laughing under the quiet of an Egyptian sky. Fortunately, the fact that those nights were spent in the palace rather than the Great Library meant that there was unlikely to be anyone there who would recognize Lucius Vorenus.

  Khenti, however, had come to the office of Didymus more than once, usually in the company of Caesarion himself. So when they approached the doors of the Great Library, the Egyptian swordsman slipped into the shadows of a stand of trees while Vorenus walked on, approaching the dark mouth of the building alone.

  There was a librarian standing just outside the door—Khenti had told Vorenus to expect this—and the young man asked him his business. “I’ve just arrived by boat from Macedonia,” Vorenus said in his best Greek. “I bear a message to be personally delivered to the chief librarian himself.”