Her husband cupped her hand against his cheek, and he closed his eyes. “It was wrong.”
“But don’t you see? You had no choice.” She swallowed hard, nodding at her own argument as it unfolded in her mind. “But what if you did have a choice, my love? What if you could use that power not to destroy, but to create something new?”
After a moment his eyes opened. They were hurt and angry, but they were longing, too.
Selene half-turned to take in Caesarea with a sweep of her arm. “We just heard about the troubles with the aqueduct, how desperate parts of this city—our city, Juba—are for something as small as clean water. And you can give it to them. You. The Trident. You can use it to give your people what they need.”
Her words seemed to chase away in the air, and there was silence between them for a moment. “That’s not what you really want.”
“It is.”
He swallowed hard. “Then it’s not all you really want. I know you, Selene.”
It was true, and it was pointless to deny it. He knew her as well as she knew him. Almost. “He says that according to Didymus, the power of the Shards is greater in some places than others. We saw part of what they were capable of in Cantabria. But what more can we unlock?”
Juba looked down at the stones beneath their feet, and he spoke in the faintest whisper. “I’m scared to find out.”
“And I’m scared not to try and find out. When I had on the Aegis, when I flew with the Palladium, I felt something. My mother.” Selene reached up and put her hands on his shoulders. “I felt her as if she was so close that I could reach and touch her as easily as I’m touching you. I think it was because I was using two of the Shards at once. They amplified each other somehow. Do you remember how Didymus explained what they were?”
He finally looked up and met her eye. “Fragments of the Throne of God, broken when the angels tried to use it to bring God back.”
“Don’t you see? Bringing the pieces together, we can recover the power of the Throne. If it could be used to find God, couldn’t some smaller part of that power enable us to reach things that are still closer?”
He sighed, long and low. “Your mother is dead, Selene. There’s no bringing her back.”
“And your father, too. But what if we could speak to them, even for a moment? A chance to tell them how much we missed them, how much we loved them. And even if we cannot achieve that, my love, imagine what else we might do with what we have in our hands. We’ve been given an extraordinary gift, a chance even Alexander did not have. Four Shards are within our control. Brought together in the right place, in the right moment, what limits could there be?”
“I’ve told you before, Selene: I’m no conqueror. This land is all that I need. I’ve made my peace with Rome. I thought we both had.”
Since Thrasyllus had been speaking with them she’d felt a crack had been forming in the wall that she had built up inside of her. Now, at last, she let it break and give way. She saw again the face of Tiberius, felt once more his hands upon her. The memories, held so long at bay, began to surge forward one after another, and she had to turn away to look at the city, to not let Juba see the despair on her face. “I have,” she managed to croak out. “With Augustus Caesar.” Her breath caught in her lungs, and once again she placed her hands on the railing—this time to keep from falling.
Juba’s arms came around her, starting to pull her into an embrace. “Selene, what are you not telling me?”
“He raped me.”
His arms froze. “What?”
“Tiberius,” she whispered. Now that the words were unbottled, they started to flow. “While you and Caesar were prisoners. Tiberius came to our tent. He took me.” Her tears broke free completely and she spun around, sobbing out of control. “Oh please, my love. Forgive me for not telling you. I wanted to tell you so many times, but I wanted to try to leave it behind, just like you said. You wanted to come here and make a fresh start. Please, Juba, I—”
He held her close. “You should have told me. But I understand. You need no pardon from me. But Tiberius … Tiberius…”
She stopped sobbing long enough to catch her breath. “There is more.”
He looked incredulous. “What more could there possibly be?”
It took her a moment to find the words. “He left me with child.”
“He what?”
“It was his. I am almost certain of—”
She felt a tremor of rage go through him. They’d tried for so long to have a child themselves. “Almost certain?”
She looked up into his eyes. “Could we have borne it if it were otherwise? Could I have carried it in my womb, nurtured it, given it life, only to look down and see the eyes of the man who’d taken me, who’d ripped me apart upon our bed? Oh gods, Juba. And now we’ve not been able to have our own. All because of him. What I’ve done—”
There was silence for a moment. She could feel the struggle within him: his rage at Tiberius, his love of her, his need for his own vengeance, his awareness that her decision to abort the child might be the reason that they’d had none themselves. She buried her face into his chest, gripping him hard.
For a long minute they stood. His arms tensed, released, and tensed again. “It’s not your doing,” he finally said. His voice was calm, but it was the calm of the eye of a storm. “It’s his.”
She nodded against him.
“What would you have us do?”
Selene swallowed hard. Vengeance. Power. Maybe even a chance to see her mother again. “Carthage isn’t far. We go there.” She took a deep breath. “We bring the Shards together. We see what power we have.”
“Tiberius isn’t in Carthage.”
“No, but there are many sacred spaces in Rome. We can use those when the time comes.”
“Take the Shards to Carthage. See what we have.” She felt him nodding above her, working it out in his mind. “What of our parents? Your mother? My father? Do you think they can really be reached? Can the Shards break through death itself? Can we reach the other side?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. My mother felt so close in Vellica. With just a little more power…” She squeezed him again. “But we can find out together. In Carthage. And if not, we’ll find what we need to put their souls at peace. To put our souls at peace. We have to make him pay.”
“And he will pay,” Juba said. “We can make him pay.”
“I just want to be at peace.”
“We will be. There’s a peace on the other side of war.”
Selene looked up at him, saw that he was gazing out to the bay. He looked back down at her and smiled, his love undiminished, but with something steely and hard in his eyes. They kissed, and she wanted it to last forever.
When he finally pulled away, it was to turn back down the walk. “Isidora!”
Selene’s handmaiden was never far away, and she appeared within moments, hobbling out into the light from one of the doorways. “Yes, Your Majesty?”
“The young man who just left the palace. Send the order to have him brought back. We would speak with him more.”
Isidora bowed as best she could on her crutch and began to turn.
“Wait,” Juba called out. He squeezed Selene in his arms. “Then tell the steward I want preparations made for our most able ship to head to sea with us aboard.”
“Shall I tell him where?”
Juba looked back to his wife. “To Carthage. We sail for Carthage.”
24
FIRE ON THE WATER
ELEPHANTINE, 25 BCE
The plans to move the Ark to Petra finally done, Pullo and Vorenus stepped outside to stand watch in the courtyard while Caesarion helped Hannah lie down in their bed. She’d put up a good show during the planning, but he could tell how very exhausted she was. Neither of them had slept much while they considered what to do to keep the Ark safe, but of course she was needing to sleep for two now. Thinking of the unborn child, Caesarion ran his hand across the fabric over her belly.
Resting it there, he felt the baby kick. Boy or girl, he thought with a proud smile, it was going to be a fighter.
Hannah lifted her hand to touch his face, and he looked up to meet her eyes. “Must you really go now?”
He nodded. “You know I don’t want to, but the sun will be up in an hour. I would like to be in Syene as soon as the port is waking up. The sooner I can start making the arrangements, the better.”
She nodded and yawned as she settled back into the cushions. “I know. But surely Vorenus could do it.”
“Vorenus can’t speak Coptic, and it may well be that the captain least likely to ask questions will be a native.” He didn’t point out that Vorenus might be recognized as the man who had hired the last captain they’d needed—who had died in their service on the canal east of Alexandria.
“Just be careful,” she whispered, but already her eyes were closing.
Caesarion pulled the covers tight around her. He kissed her forehead, eliciting a happy sigh from her, and then he stood and put a few coins into his pouch for the day. Just enough to get to Syene and back, plus a little extra advance for whichever captain he hired to come to Elephantine, load up the crate that would hold the Ark, and then ferry it and its four companions down the Nile to Gebtu, where they could join one of the many caravans that trekked across the Nile to the Red Sea port of Myos Hormos. From there, they would need only to arrange passage across the waters that Moses had once used to drown a pharaoh, sailing up the gulf to Aila, where further caravan travel up the King’s Highway would take them to the fabled city of Petra.
Simple enough, Caesarion thought, shaking his head and smiling to himself. If not for Hannah’s sleeping he might even have laughed at the absurdity of the plan—though he was nevertheless certain it was the best chance they had. Elephantine had been a sanctuary, and a welcome one. What he had learned from the Therapeutae had given him a peace he could not have imagined. But it couldn’t last forever. In Petra, that secluded mountain stronghold of the Nabataeans, there was a chance they could quietly hide the Ark in a place where it might never be found. And, if it ever was, it was the sort of sacred space where the fullness of its power could be used.
Caesarion took one last look at the artifact in the other room, wondering at the strange workings of history. Yes, he thought, it would find a home there. After all, unless he was wrong, Petra was where it was born.
* * *
Outside, Pullo and Vorenus were standing beside the altar in the courtyard, talking. Caesarion never tired of seeing the two of them together once more. Were it not for the ruins in which they stood, the Egyptian robes that covered their familiar Roman swords, and the scars of mind and body they all carried now, he might have thought he was back in Alexandria again.
Aside from the fog, that is. He couldn’t ever remember seeing a fog so thick upon the city.
“So,” Vorenus said, looking up at his approach, “we will expect you by nightfall?”
“If not sooner. Hannah’s asleep.”
Vorenus smiled, but it was Pullo who answered. “We’ll see that she gets her rest.”
“Thanks.”
Caesarion grasped each of their forearms in turn, then was starting to walk away when Pullo called out to him. “I still think it’s a girl,” the big man said. “We’re placing bets.”
“And I’m down for a boy,” Vorenus said.
Caesarion frowned in mock concentration. “Put me down for a boy, then,” he said. “Keeps the sides even.”
The two old legionnaires nodded, smiling, and Caesarion bowed to them in Therapeutan fashion before he turned and made his way out into the fog.
Leaving the temple by the side door, Caesarion entered into the narrower stretch of the King’s Road as it ran between the temple of the Jews and that dedicated to Khnum. After a moment of thought about which way to go, he decided to make his way through the larger temple: the path was better lighted that way.
The walls of the Khnum temple were higher than those of the Jewish temple, its broad doors perpetually open. Caesarion stepped through and began walking along a long, stone-crowned colonnade that stretched across the side of the complex. Oil lamps set upon the square-shaped columns marked the path, drawing pools of clouded light against the darkness, and he followed them with quiet steps. A handful of souls moved in the shadows, but the world was at peace for the moment, and he was glad for it. Around him the smooth walls of the inner shrines moved in and out of view, the figures and hieroglyphs painted upon them seeming at times alive in the shifting mix of lamplight and clouded air.
A new infusion of Roman coin had spurred building projects across the empire, and Elephantine was no exception. There was the mighty bronze statue of Augustus at the harbor, of course, but even temples like this one were gaining new markers of success as Caesar tried to quell resentment of the removal of the pharaohs by supporting local priests where they were useful to the administration of the conquered territories. The priests of Khnum and of Satis—the goddess celebrated in an adjacent, smaller temple—were very much among those. At the far end of the complex, Caesarion had to step around the tower of scaffolding that surrounded a pair of new obelisks that were being raised where they could be seen from the river below, dominating the skyline of the island as viewed by anyone who passed on the Nile. When it was finished, the sight would be impressive, he was sure.
Exiting the Khnum temple, he turned northward, following the wide, paved walkway that extended above the shoreline toward the harbor, separated from the rocky drop by a low defensive wall. The temple of Satis immediately arose to his left, and he passed the entrance to the all-important Nilometer on his right, which was little more than a wall around the stepped gash that had been driven down like a channel into the waters below.
The sky was less dark now, the fog slowly starting to thin as dawn approached. Men would be beginning to stir at the harbor. His timing could hardly be more perfect.
A few minutes later Caesarion came down the last set of steps to the inner market area of the harbor. The oversized statue of Augustus was there, looming over the docks that extended out before him and disappeared into the fog that still hung heavy upon the Nile. The docks were otherwise abandoned, and Caesarion was surprised that he didn’t even see any movement from the harbor’s little lighthouse: the light at its top was lit, as it always was, but there was no sign of movement inside or around it. The night harbormaster ought to have been there, keeping watch over the docks when he wasn’t walking them, but Caesarion could see even in the dim light that the lighthouse’s door was open to the night and not even a candle was burning inside. Perhaps, he thought, the harbormaster had gone off to the far end of one of the docks, invisible for now in the fog. Rather than call out, Caesarion just stood for a time staring up at the big bronze man with his piercing eyes.
For all that they had been at war with each other, Caesarion had never actually met the man who’d conquered Egypt. This wasn’t really surprising, he supposed. When it came to warring states, it was their men, not the men who led them, who met face-to-face, shed blood to shed blood. History would surely be written differently if it were otherwise.
Still, a part of Caesarion would have liked to have met Octavian. He had to be an impressive man to command armies as he had. He’d drawn great men to his side, and he’d achieved great things. That one of those things was the conquest of Egypt and the stripping away of everything Caesarion had known was a point of personal issue, but in truth he couldn’t fault the Roman emperor for many of his decisions. Meeting him, he thought, would indeed be interesting.
Looking around the docks again, Caesarion suddenly saw a man sitting upon some crates a little ways down one of the closer docks. Chiding himself for not seeing him before—whether from the shadows or the fog—he began walking in his direction.
The man didn’t move, though Caesarion’s footsteps were certainly loud enough on the wooden dock. Nor did he move when he was hailed in greeting.
Nois
e came over the water then. Muted by fog and distance, the sounds were indistinct, moving in and out like waves. But they sounded, he thought, like screams. Like battle.
Still walking, he turned his eyes in their direction, looking south and east across the great river in the direction of Syene, the little town on the eastern bank of the Nile. There was light there in the darkness, and it wasn’t the light of the dawn.
It was the light of fires.
A chill ran up the back of Caesarion’s neck as he crossed the last stretch of wood to where the harbormaster sat upon the crates.
In the darkness he could see no blood, but the shafts of the two arrows sticking out from his body—one in his gut and one centered upon his chest—were evidence enough of his fate.
Caesarion instinctively dropped low, squeezing himself behind the man and the crates, away from the dark water from which the killing shafts had sailed.
Almost in the instant that he did so, thin whistles of wind pierced the fog, and two more arrows impacted where he’d been standing. One thudded into wood, while another plunged into the harbormaster’s corpse with a wet, meaty sound. Out in the dark, someone cursed.
Caesarion panted for a moment, trying to decide what to do. Staying was hardly an option: sooner or later whatever ship was on the water would get an angle to reach him. And if Elephantine was under attack, he had to raise the alarm. He had to try to warn Hannah and the others. They had to protect the Ark.
Crying out would do little good. What he needed, he decided, was to ring the harbor bell. And that meant getting to the lighthouse.
He crouched. He took one deep breath, then another. And then he flung himself away from the crates, keeping as low as he could while he launched himself into a sprint.
Arrows shot out from his left, and he heard them nipping through the air, somehow missing him. He heard muffled commands in a language he did not know, and the voices were fearfully close. Without breaking stride, he chanced a single look in that direction. There were black boats gliding through the water, boats full of men, and they were going to come ashore between him and the Ark.
The Gates of Hell Page 26
