The Gates of Hell

by Michael Livingston

  Lapis nodded. “Very much so.”

  “But how—?”

  “Trade secrets.”

  “But really, how did you—”

  “She’s married to a wine trader,” Lapis said. “As it happens, he’s friends with the man who supplies the palace. She said she shouldn’t have any problem getting you an audience.”

  Thrasyllus just stared for a moment. “What did you tell her about me?”

  Lapis pulled away and turned to look him up and down. “Only the truth: that you were one of the finest scholars in the world. Well, that and the fact that you have a message from the Great Library of Alexandria, which is a little true.”

  Meeting with Juba and Selene had indeed been his plan, and he’d made no secret of that with Lapis. Caesarea could be a fresh start for them both, he’d told her. It was a chance for a new life, far away from what they had been in Alexandria, far away from what they had done and seen. And he had information that he’d learned at the Library that could help him find favor with the new king and queen. They could use the last of the precious few coins they had to get there, to find a room, to find work. Then he’d find a way to meet with the young royalty. So this was indeed the plan. He just hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. “How long?”

  “A few days at most. I was very charming.”

  Thrasyllus felt like laughing at the perfection of it, at the perfection of her. It would work. He’d lie and tell them he had a message for them from Didymus. Not really a lie, he supposed. What he’d learned about the Shards did come from the old man in the end. So of course they would want to see him. Then he could tell them what he’d overheard about the strength of these items being greater in sacred places. And they’d reward him, give him a chance to start a new life. Maybe even let him start his own library here.

  “I … I hope that was all right,” Lapis said, her voice suddenly uncertain.

  Thrasyllus shook himself from his thoughts and smiled at her. “Of course it is. I’m just … amazed at you, that’s all.”

  Lapis smiled back, and he continued to be astonished that her warmth felt so genuine. “Do you remember what I told you, my stargazer? After I woke up. After I’d come to your room because I didn’t know where else to go and you were one of the only ones who’d ever been nice to me. After you saved me. Do you remember what I said?”

  Thrasyllus had to look away from the intensity of her azure eyes. He blinked out across the water at the growing city of Caesarea. “You said I could have you. All of you. That you owed me your life.”

  “And that I would repay you with whatever was left of the life you gave me. So I am. My old life is done. Seker left me, and I don’t know what became of him. There’s only you. And if you want to see the king and queen of Mauretania, then by all the gods of heaven and earth I will see it done.”

  Not for the first time, Thrasyllus thought about telling her that he’d killed Seker, that he’d bought her this freedom—but then he knew he’d have to tell her that in so doing he’d taken away her protection, that he’d left her alone in the streets to be taken and beaten.

  Without meaning to do so, he found that he had pulled his father’s coin out and that he was rubbing it between his fingers as he thought.

  “What are you thinking, stargazer?”

  Thrasyllus caught up the coin in his hand and squeezed it hard. “I’m thinking that I adore you, Lapis. Opening the door that night was the best thing I’ve ever done. And I’m thinking that I need to get better clothes. I can’t meet the king and queen of this place dressed as a simple traveler.”

  “Truly so.”

  “But we hardly have anything left. We still need to find a room. Food. Work. Not to mention—”

  One of her thin fingers came up and rested gently upon his lips, stilling his speech. She smiled in a look that was at once proud and mischievous. “I thought about that.” She pulled her finger away and her hand slipped into the fold of her robe for a moment. When it came out, she was holding a small coin purse that he did not recognize.

  He started to ask where she’d gotten it, but then he realized he already knew. The wine trader’s wife. Lapis hadn’t just been talking to her.

  Thrasyllus reached out and enfolded her in a hug.

  The gods indeed worked in mysterious ways, he reminded himself. And no way was more mysterious than love.

  22

  THE TEMPLE OF THE ARK

  ELEPHANTINE, 25 BCE

  The night was heavy with a thick fog, and the twisting earthen path between buildings of mud-brick and stone could be confusing enough in clear daylight, but Vorenus wasn’t the slightest bit worried he would get lost. Even if he hadn’t walked the meandering route a thousand times before, Vorenus would have known he was getting closer to the temples by the unmistakable whisper of frankincense that floated ever stronger in the cool, pre-dawn air. Over the smell of the sporadic torches and oil lamps hanging beside doorways that gave a feeble push against the cloudy shadows upon the island, that sweet lemony-pine aroma drew him onward into the night.

  Pullo, limping at his side, yawned in the dark. “Do you think they got any sleep at all?”

  Vorenus didn’t need to ask who he was referring to. Caesarion had been staying up for far too many nights this past year, working with the information that Vorenus had brought to him, trying to better understand the functioning of the Ark of the Covenant. As ever, Hannah had been by his side through it all. “I doubt it.”

  “Seems like she should be getting more sleep, even if he doesn’t.”

  Vorenus shrugged. Caesarion and Hannah had been married for only two months when she had announced the happy news that she was pregnant. But rather than slow down their work, it seemed to have only intensified it, as if they were in a race with the coming of the child. When Vorenus had asked about it, Caesarion would only say that the child made it all the more urgent that they understand how to use the Ark and how to keep it safe. “I suspect they know best.”

  “I hope so.” Pullo looked around, as if he’d just noticed the shadowy cloud pressing about them. “Heavy fog tonight.”

  “The time of year for that.”

  “Can’t hardly see but ten feet.” Pullo sniffed. “But I can smell it now,” he said, smiling.

  Vorenus smiled, too, glad that he wasn’t the only one who recognized the scent.

  Truth be told, despite all that he had learned, the aroma of incense still thrilled him. Vorenus had visited more temples than he could count in his life, and for many years he’d believed that they brought him closer to the gods. A temple might not be the home of a god, but it was nevertheless a kind of access point to the divine. It was a sacred space, and being there had always made him feel less insignificant for the connection with powers greater than himself, as if a little slice of the divinity of the place could be carried with him.

  It didn’t feel quite like that anymore, of course. None of those gods had been real. And the one God, the one real God, had died giving life to creation. The prayers being chanted, the songs being sung, they were just whispers to old stones. No one was listening. The stone gods did not make a sound.

  But he still liked the fragrance. It warmed his heart, in the same way that the smell of certain meats on a cook fire could remind him of his mother and home. It was a memory. It meant something. Even after all this time.

  “You know, I never thought much about that smell,” Pullo said. “What made it, I mean.”

  “It’s frankincense.”

  “I know.” Pullo yawned again. “I mean to say that I never thought about it being something people bought and traded. It was just something that was always there in all the temples.”

  “I hadn’t thought about it either,” Vorenus admitted. “When I was younger I think some part of me just assumed it was the aroma of the gods themselves. That’s probably the point of it for the priests, anyway. The sweetness of the air is meant to mimic the sweetness of the gods themselves.”

 
“Funny. I’ve never heard of the gods being sweet at all.” Pullo spit into the fog. “Mostly in the stories they’re every bit as rotten as the rest of us.”

  Years ago, Vorenus would have chided him for his words, would have told him it was dangerous to wrong the sacred powers, but to his chagrin the sacrilegious old bastard had been right to doubt and disbelieve. The gods were made of men’s fears, men’s desires.

  “Anyway,” Vorenus said, returning to the earlier subject, “I hadn’t thought about where it comes from, either. Until all this mess with Petra it seems like none of us ever did. Except Caesar, I suppose.”

  There was no denying it: the man whose oversized bronze statue stood watching the harbor not far away was proving to be a stunningly capable leader. Augustus had a grand vision for himself and for the empire, but he also had a practical sense of what needed to be done to make that vision a reality. Everyone knew that the Nabataeans, hidden away in Petra, their secret city carved deep into the mountains, were growing rich from the spice trade, but they were doing so largely by geographic good fortune. As middlemen, they received the incense and other spices from the growers in Arabia Felix and then sold them at great profit to the traders of Rome. Vorenus could easily imagine how this practice would anger someone like Augustus, who wanted not only all the roads of the earth to lead to Rome, but all its coins to flow there, too. Worse still, the Nabataeans, with an effective monopoly on the trade, were holding Rome hostage to higher and higher prices. The incense was a necessity, after all. The temples needed it, and the last thing any shrewd leader desired was to anger the priests. Other leaders would have perhaps negotiated with the people of Petra, but Augustus had instead decided to circumvent them: he ordered Aelius Gallus, the prefect of Egypt, to find a direct trade route to the lands of Arabia Felix, the source of the frankincense. If Gallus could establish a Roman route, Petra could be cut out altogether.

  “Truth be told,” Pullo said, “Caesar really is doing some good.”

  “Some.” Augustus Caesar had also ordered Vorenus killed, after all. And he’d torn Egypt apart. “Though hiring the Nabataeans themselves to guide Gallus through Arabia was foolish.”

  Pullo let out a chuckle and shook his head as if in disbelief at the notion. “I can’t imagine it ending well.”

  “Nor I. And maybe it’s already ended. Gallus left … what? Six months ago? And not a message since. If I were a betting man, I’d wager the Nabataean guide didn’t exactly show him the straightest route. Probably just took him out into the desert to die.”

  “Well, it certainly makes things easier around here for now.” Pullo waved his arm vaguely in the direction of the east, toward the Roman garrison town of Syene, just across the Nile. Though several Roman cohorts remained there, it was nothing like the military presence before Gallus had drawn men away for his expedition. “I don’t like being so close to the legions, so the fewer the better.”

  “Agreed.”

  Coming around the last turn of the path, they emptied out onto the King’s Street, one of the main roads through the town. The pair followed it south in silence for less than a minute before they found it narrowing as it was hemmed in by the large Temple of Khnum looming up on their left and what remained of the ancient temple of the Jews on their right.

  The Temple of Khnum, ram-headed god of the Nile’s cataracts, was a sprawling and magnificent place: columned and open, with colored tiles and statuary. It was, like most temples Vorenus had known, meant to invite the eye and impress with its grandeur. The incense burned alongside the fires there night and day, and the priests were ever-busy tending to their prayers and to the constant watch they kept upon the level of the Nile, as did the priests of the nearby Temple of Satis, goddess of the flood. Measuring the water level on the stone walls of what they called a Nilometer, a flight of steps that ran like a corridor down into the water, the priests at Elephantine would be the first to detect the yearly flood upon which so much of the kingdom’s crops depended.

  From Vorenus’ point of view, the ancient temple of the Jews was everything that the Khnum temple was not. Sitting across the narrow King’s Street from that ornate complex, the Jewish temple seemed more like a warehouse than a place to honor God. The walls of the building were not much taller than two men—far shorter than the grand pillars dedicated to Khnum that in daylight would shadow the walls—and they were squat and thick, built of featureless mud-brick that was unbroken by windows or adornments of any kind. Neither a sign nor any other marker indicated the presence of the temple beyond its simple, heavy wood doors.

  Stopping in the cramped street, Vorenus pulled open one of the old temple’s doors for his friend and then followed him through, carefully shutting it behind him.

  Within the outer walls was a rectangular courtyard that had once been holy ground. Centuries earlier, though, the Jews had been forced to leave the temple, and the Khnum priests had taken it over for use as stables—an act, Hannah was sure, of deliberate desecration. The animal pens were thankfully unused now—they lay in wooden ruins to either side of a cleared, rough path through the courtyard—and the lingering stench of the animal inhabitants was largely overpowered by the incense that floated over the wall the courtyard shared with the larger temple. Yet, the memory of the desecration of the place still persisted—a fact that the Jews had used to their advantage in hiding the Ark here.

  Stepping around a pile of rubble in the middle of the courtyard that Hannah said had once been a sacrificial altar, Pullo and Vorenus came to the door of the inner building, the sacred shrine itself. Like the rest of the temple, it was unimpressive from the outside: the same functional brick, with no ornamentation or great artistry upon it. The roof was made of simple cedar beams.

  It was what was inside, Vorenus knew, that was so important.

  Pullo knocked at the door of the shrine, and they had to wait nearly a minute before latches were unhooked and the door swung open on its bronze hinges.

  Hannah was there, smiling with a bright-eyed kindness that contrasted with the dark circles under her eyes. One arm was casually draped across her round belly as if she was resting it there. With her other arm she gestured inward. “Please, do come inside.”

  Vorenus gave a slight bow of acknowledgment, and then he and Pullo stepped inside, and the door shut behind them.

  The building had once been split into two parts: the initial room that they had just entered, and then an inner sanctum farther on. The dividing wall between the two spaces had been broken away over the centuries, however, so that in the middle of the room it remained only as a kind of low bench between the two spaces. The side in which they all stood had been taken up by Hannah and Caesarion’s shared bed and the rudimentary makings of a home, including a long table stacked with scrolls and books, among which Caesarion sat, on the bench, with his face hidden in a leather-bound codex. On the other side of the low dividing wall stood the Ark.

  It didn’t matter how many times he’d seen it, Vorenus still felt a sense of awe and wonder to be near the ancient artifact. Though he’d never seen it used—he’d only heard stories of what it had done in the past—he was nevertheless certain he could sense the raw power of it, like a low thrum filling the room that he could sense in his bones even when his ears could not hear it.

  It also never ceased to amaze him how new it looked. It was, quite obviously, a kind of box, wrought of rich acacia wood that was so highly polished that it shimmered in the reflected light of the four lamps in the first room. The bottom was slightly larger than the top, so the sides angled inward, drawing the eye up the thin lines of metal that formed intricate designs of vines and leaves over the wood. On the broad side of the Ark that faced them, those metallic lines twisted into a symbol like an inverted pyramid set within a circle, a horizontal line cutting across its bottom third. Hannah had worn just such a symbol on a pendant on the night Vorenus had first met her. Caesarion wore one now.

  The top was trimmed with gold, and two small statues crowned
it, one gold, one silver. They were, Hannah had once explained, meant to be angels, kneeling toward each other, heads bowed, their wings swept forward as if they were reaching for one another. And between them, flat against the surface of the Ark’s top, was a pitch-black disk, perhaps the breadth of Vorenus’ forearm.

  “Thank you for coming, despite the foggy night,” Hannah said. Her voice was quiet, almost a whisper.

  The Ark seemed to have that effect on them all: though for years Vorenus had been coming to this place, he’d found that their mutual sense of reverence never wavered. “Of course,” he replied.

  Hannah smiled, her face beaming with the unmistakable vibrant beauty of pregnancy, and then she turned toward her husband at the table. The young man still didn’t seem to have noticed their arrival. “He gets like this.”

  “I’ve not been that focused in a long time,” Pullo replied.

  “Perhaps never,” Vorenus whispered.

  Hannah grinned and quietly walked over to stand behind Caesarion. She bent over and kissed the top of his head. “My love, they’re here.”

  Caesarion startled, and at last blinked away from his book to look up at her and then Pullo and Vorenus. His face softened with genuine relief, though his eyes gleamed with excitement. “My friends, please, come and sit.”

  There was another bench on the opposite side of the table, and the two legionnaires found places that were clear enough to sit down upon it. Hannah carefully lowered herself beside her husband, who smiled at her and reached over to place his hand upon her stomach.

  Hannah’s smile was deeply warm. “She’s been active today. I think she’s excited.”

  “It could be a boy,” Vorenus said.

  “I still think it’s a girl,” Pullo said.

  Caesarion looked adoringly at his wife. “The mother always knows best.”

  “And my mother said that girls are carried low,” Pullo said. “And look, she’s carrying the baby low.”

  “Actually, the saying is that girls are carried high,” Vorenus pointed out.