The Gates of Hell

by Michael Livingston

  “I heard the boys died,” Pullo said, his voice tightening up. “I assume he knows?”

  Vorenus nodded, remembering Caesarion’s younger half-siblings, the children Cleopatra had born to Mark Antony. “He does. Ptolemy Philadelphus died not long after they reached Rome. Just an illness, we heard. Bad luck. Alexander Helios died only a little later.”

  “He was always so sickly.”

  “His sister is well, though,” Vorenus said, forcing himself to focus on happier thoughts. “I was actually there when our little Cleopatra Selene stood up to Octavian. It was extraordinary.”

  Pullo raised an eyebrow. “Oh? I would have liked to see that. Always hated that devious prick.”

  “She was made to marry Juba the Numidian as a result. The one who used the Trident against us at Actium.”

  “He’s the one who cut my legs,” Pullo interrupted. “The one Caesarion fought off.”

  Vorenus looked over at him, surprised at the sudden sharp hostility in his friend’s voice, and the unexpected disclosure of what had happened while they were apart. He wondered if he should press him about it, despite Pullo’s insistence on only telling the tale once.

  Pullo said nothing more, though, and Vorenus decided to leave it alone. The ferry was turning into Elephantine’s little harbor. They could see workers moving about the docks as they brought in the catches of the early morning and directed cargo from one place to another. “Well, I have a hard time believing it myself, after Actium and all,” Vorenus finally said, “but every report we’ve had seems to be that they’re happy.”

  Pullo grunted.

  “Anyway, they’re bound to be king and queen of Mauretania, from what I hear. And I’m just glad she’s well. She’s a good person in her soul. They all were.”

  Pullo nodded, and then his eyes widened as he looked out over the water at Elephantine. “Well, speaking of the prick, there he is.”

  There was a small square at the head of the docks, and standing there, more than twice as tall as a man, was a bronze statue of Augustus Caesar, shining in the early morning light, his eyes of glass and stone turned to look down upon the water with a look of calm, penetrating authority.

  “Our emperor is rather fond of himself.” Vorenus sighed. “The idea, I think, is that anyone who even passes by the island knows they’ve entered the territory of Rome.”

  Pullo chewed the inside of his lip. “Caesarion has to see this every day?”

  “He doesn’t come down here much, I suppose. Our rooms are on the other side of the island, and he and Hannah don’t much leave the temple where the Ark is, anyway.”

  Behind the massive statue of Augustus there was a low wall that had been put up for defense in a long-ago era, ringing what was clearly a motley assemblage of stone buildings. Among the many gray threads of morning fires weaving their way through the sky were a few thicker columns of smoke rising from the town: the fires, Vorenus knew, that were burning in the courtyards of the several temples on the island. One to Khnum, the ram-headed god of the river’s dangerous cataracts. Another was to Satis, the gazelle-horned goddess of the river’s life-giving floods. And amid still others, there was a dilapidated temple built to honor the one true God of the Jews—once real, but now as equally gone as his counterparts on the island. It was there that the Ark had found its temporary home.

  “Someone ought to tear it down,” Pullo said.

  “What?”

  “The statue.” Pullo was staring at the bronze statue of Caesar as if he might strike it down himself. “These are Caesarion’s lands. It isn’t right.”

  Vorenus patted the big man on the back. “I know. But Caesarion doesn’t care. Not really. He cares for the safety of the Ark, Pullo. And his love of Hannah. Nothing else matters, bless him.”

  Pullo sighed, but he nodded. “You said allies.”

  “What?”

  “You said before that Hannah wanted the Ark here because it had allies. Are there more keepers here? More Jews?”

  Vorenus smiled. “More keepers? No. More Jews? Well, that’s a trickier question.”

  “You’re hiding something. You’ve always been a bit of a scholar like that, you know.”

  “Being smarter than you hardly makes a man a scholar,” Vorenus said.

  Pullo laughed again. “True enough. By that measure there’d be a dog or two in Didymus’ care.”

  The ferry slid up against the dock, and the river water that rolled off its wake sloshed against the wooden pilings. Two crewmen jumped over to the dock boards, carrying lines that they pulled tight and hastily tied off to cleats. One or two of their fellow passengers stood to disembark at midship. Together, Pullo and Vorenus began to move in that direction.

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself, my friend,” Vorenus said as they walked. “I’ve never met a dog who could out-think you. Though one or two of these holy cats that the Egyptians like might give you a run for your money. But anyway, I don’t mean to be tricky. Not really. It’s just that our allies here call themselves Jews, but I don’t think most Jews would agree that they are.”

  The other passengers who were leaving had already reached the dock, and Pullo motioned for Vorenus to go first. “I don’t understand.”

  “Neither did I,” Vorenus admitted. “They’re called the Therapeutae.”

  Pullo just stared. “Thera—”

  “Don’t worry. You’ll learn soon enough.” Vorenus stepped out onto the dock with his left foot, keeping his right on board the ferry as he offered his crippled friend a hand to help limp up and out of the boat. “Suffice it to say, my dear Titus Pullo, that you’re about to find out that the world is a far bigger and stranger place than you or I ever knew.”

  14

  THE OUTLAW KING

  CANTABRIA, 26 BCE

  Juba awoke with a headache that throbbed like a hammer inside his skull. Eyes still shut, he groaned.

  “Thank the gods,” said a familiar voice.

  Juba squeezed his eyes shut even harder against the pulsing behind them, but he couldn’t squeeze out the pain. He took a deep breath and found the air thick with humidity and the scents of human waste. He shook back a stomach-curdle of revulsion and released the breath in a long exhale that came out as an anguished sigh. Then he willed his eyes open.

  Octavian was kneeling beside him, his features lit by a dim candle. There was a look of honest relief upon his face. “I thought you were dead.”

  Juba closed his eyes again and raised a hand to his forehead. His fingers were rougher than he remembered, and his arm ached with a bone-deep exhaustion he’d never experienced before, but it still felt good to rub his forehead. “I’m alive,” he rasped. His throat was drier than it ought to have been, too.

  His jaw had hurt when he flexed it, and when he brought his fingers down against it they found his face swollen and bruised, hot and painful to the touch. Trying to think back through the throbbing in his forehead, he remembered Corocotta punching him. Right when he was reaching for Selene—

  “Selene!” He gasped, flinching from the pain of it.

  He started to rise up, the need to see her overwhelming the pain of his body, but Octavian’s hands caught him at the shoulders and kept him from moving too far. “Go easy, brother. She’s not here. They didn’t take her.”

  Juba panted for a few seconds in a horrible mix of pain and fear as his panic subsided. Then he nodded and allowed himself to fall back down again. He lay for a while, eyes closed, swallowing the angry pains, hoping the throbbing would abate. When it showed no signs of doing so, he tried to focus on questions. Why was he so tired? And what had happened? Octavian said Selene wasn’t taken. Which meant they had been?

  He found himself instinctively starting to grit his teeth, so he forced himself to relax.

  Start simple, he told himself. Where am I?

  He opened his eyes again, and he looked around.

  They were in a room. A very small one.

  A windowless room, he saw as he slowly st
retched his neck to peer into the half-light. Two simple cots, a clay pot for the voiding of bowels, a single tallow candle burning beside it, and a heavy wooden door.

  Not a room, Juba realized. A cell.

  “I need to get up,” he said.

  It took his stepbrother a few moments to respond, and Juba could see him frowning in thought. But when he did reply, it was in a kind and agreeable tone. “Okay,” he said. “Just go slow.”

  This time Octavian’s hands helped to lift him as Juba rolled into a sitting position. He grunted, groaned, and then swung his feet off the cot on which he’d been stretched out. The leather soles beneath his feet scuffled on a floor that might have been hardened clay. He flexed his legs against the resistance of the earth, and he was rewarded with fresh pains in his muscles to compete with the throbbing in his head.

  Octavian let him go and shuffled backward to sit down on his own cot. The eyes of the emperor of Rome, the man who had been proclaimed Augustus Caesar, were dark with exhaustion, and he moved with the weariness of one who had been broken.

  “How long?” Juba asked.

  “I think it is only a day after the battle. Perhaps two. It’s hard to tell the night from the day here.”

  Juba coughed, wincing at the strain of his rib cage. His head still throbbed.

  “You don’t look well,” Octavian said.

  Juba looked up and grinned weakly. “Nor do you. Are you hurt?”

  Octavian shook his head. “I thought for a while that … well, I didn’t think you would recover.”

  “I’m fine. Just weak. Where are we?”

  “In Vellica.” Octavian’s voice was flat as he told Juba how the battle had begun, how they had been surprised by the opening of the gates of Vellica, and how Corocotta’s slave had then surprised them further by attacking the Roman leaders with the Lance while a hidden Cantabrian cavalry force had swept in to carry them away.

  Juba nodded. It was, he thought, a beautiful plan on the part of the Cantabrians. Then he frowned. “Why did they need to open the gates, though? Why risk that engagement if their plan was to capture you?”

  “I think they wanted to be prepared to charge and wipe out all of us if the legions went into disarray.”

  “They didn’t?”

  Octavian actually managed a slight smile despite his tiredness. “They brought you and I around the battlefield and through those gates. Already the legions were advancing and the Cantabrians were preparing to fall in and close the gates.”

  “That’s good,” Juba said, then wondered why he should care for the fate of the Roman legions. He stared down at the hard earthen floor between them, lost in thought.

  Footsteps marked the approach of men beyond the door, and Juba looked up to see Octavian stand and straighten himself. For a man who had lost a battle and been living in a cell for a day or more, shitting in a pot, he managed to look remarkably regal.

  There was a sound of a bar being moved, a lock turning free, and then the door swung inward in a wash of the light of a torch.

  Juba, squinting through both the pain of his aching head and the shocking brightness of the flame, saw that two Cantabrian men had entered the room. He first looked at Octavian, who stood with his back straight and chin high. One of the men smirked, then looked over at Juba. “Awake,” he said in rough Latin. “Good. The king requests your presence now.”

  The man turned to his companion and said something to him in their barbarian tongue. An order, Juba guessed, as the man approached to help him stand and walk.

  Juba thought for a moment about refusing to go. He thought about demanding to know where it was that they were being taken. But then he realized that it didn’t really matter. He was too tired to object. Too broken to fight. So instead he simply nodded when the man stepped over to him, and together they began the painful labor of lifting him to his feet and getting him to walk again.

  * * *

  Their prison had been underground, housed beneath a small building that had been built for this purpose. And while every movement brought fresh hurt to his aching body, Juba decided that for now stairs were his greatest enemy: to reach the top he had to be held upright between Octavian and one of the Cantabrians as they struggled to make their way up and out of the stench-laden hole.

  When they finally got him outside the building, Juba asked them to stop while he tried to straighten his back and stand on his own. There was still a trace of the sun’s fading glow in the sky, he could see, but stars were already beginning to light the firmament. The air was cool and crisp on his skin, and it tasted of the wood-burning cook fires that were so familiar from the Roman camp across the valley.

  His stomach rumbled.

  Now that the flatter ground of the fort lay before him, Juba insisted that they let him walk on his own. It was painful, but it was, he thought, a good pain. Blood was moving back into his limbs, and whatever it was that the Trident had taken from him, he felt like moving would begin to get it back.

  The two guards shrugged, seemingly happy not to help him further, and then they led Juba and Octavian through the winding labyrinth of buildings that were crowded inside the hillfort. There was movement and noise seemingly everywhere. Juba saw hundreds of men and women, their faces lit by torchlight, but none jeered or spoke to them as they passed. Only a little boy reacted—making a gesture like his stomach was bursting out. What it meant among these people, Juba did not know.

  Around another building, they found themselves facing a wooden stairway that climbed up the wall of the fort. Juba’s mind wailed, but he resolutely began climbing the steps one by one, leaning against the wall for support. In the end, Octavian once more had to get his shoulder under Juba’s to help him make the climb.

  The stair ended at the walkway that ran along the inside of the top of the wall. Torches set at intervals along this battlement hungrily licked the night air, and beyond them, in the distance across the valley, Juba saw the lights of the Roman encampment. His heart ached in his chest, and he longed to shout Selene’s name—but of course no voice could carry so far. For all that he could reach her, his wife might as well be in distant Rome.

  The hulking figure of Corocotta stood with a small gathering of other Cantabrians not far away upon the battlement, above what Juba recognized as the gate that Octavian had hoped to breach during the battle. When they got closer, Juba saw that the little slave girl stood beside Corocotta, leaning tiredly upon a simple wooden walking stick. Like everyone else, she had her back to them as she stared out into the night.

  When the guards stopped short and announced themselves, Corocotta and a few of the others turned and looked at them appraisingly. “Hail, Caesar,” Corocotta said, smirking.

  Juba blinked in surprise, but Octavian appeared unfazed. “No interpreters this time?”

  Of course he speaks Latin, Juba realized, kicking himself for underestimating the man. He had only pretended not to do so in order to have his slave with him as an interpreter.

  “I am not as uncivilized as you think,” the big man said. He nodded to the guards and then turned back to what lay beyond the wall.

  The two guards pushed Juba and Octavian forward toward the wooden parapet, and at last they saw what held the attention of the Cantabrians. Seven thick stakes had been set into the ground there in a row. Two were empty, but Roman legionnaires were tied upon the remaining five. Or what was left of the legionnaires, at least. Only the man on the last of the stakes was still alive, and he was weeping in a panicked horror. The man on the opposite end of the row, Juba saw, was charred and blackened, his face frozen in the same kind of contorted scream that Juba recognized from the ambush of the Roman supply train. The three dead between them weren’t burned, but they were covered in sheets of blood that had streamed from their eyes, their noses, their gaping mouths. Their red-stained corpses were recognizably Roman only by the garments that still clung whole to what was left of their blood-drained bodies.

  Juba had seen this sight, too. He had
done this to a man once, moving his blood, tearing him apart from the inside, pushing the life from him in torrents as he writhed and choked. He had held the Trident in his own two hands and willed it to happen, murdering his slave, Quintus, upon Octavian’s order.

  For his silence. And so that Octavian could see if it could be done.

  Juba’s stomach lurched and he hunched over, dry-heaving the emptiness of his belly.

  Corocotta made a rumbling sound that might have been a laugh. “You would prefer your Roman crucifixion, I am sure,” he said. “But we do not have the skill for that art here. And I am not uncivilized. I give them a choice. More than you would do for my people, I am sure.” He nodded toward the empty stakes. “Two have chosen life.”

  Juba got control of his heaving. Octavian, he saw, had not seemed to react to the terrible scene. “Your people,” he said, his voice as calm as if they were speaking of the pleasantly cool night air. “You’re no outlaw. You’re king of the Cantabrians.”

  Corocotta smiled behind his thick beard. “And king of you, Caesar. Does that make me king of Rome?”

  “Rome is greater than one man. The legions pressed on without me.”

  “This is true,” Corocotta said. His arm swept out into the darkness of the valley. Juba tried not to imagine the corpses that probably still rotted there, the feasting of the wolves and carrion fowl. “I had expected them to run. I brought out my army so that they could charge into the rout. I expected to destroy three legions yesterday, I expected three golden eagles in my hands. It is a credit to your men, but it disappoints me that we failed in this.”

  “Rome is greater than one man,” Octavian repeated.

  “So you say. And we shall see. But whatever my disappointment, it is nothing against what else I did not expect.” He looked over to Juba, who tried to stand straight despite his show of weakness. “When you spoke of the Lance of Olyndicus, I was surprised that you knew so much. I now see why.”