The Realms of God--A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Shards of Heaven, Book 3)

by Michael Livingston

  “An astrologer,” Antipater said to Tiberius. “I rarely find them of use.”

  “Not a believer?” Tiberius asked.

  “I believe in getting what I deserve,” Antipater said, his eyes glinting.

  “And you will, my greedy friend. Everyone will get what they deserve.”

  Behind them, Syllaeus bucked at his ropes. Antipater chuckled again, and he and Tiberius turned toward the bound man.

  “Well, almost everyone,” Tiberius continued. “I think you are innocent of the charges, Syllaeus. The old man probably died of his age. Or, even more likely, he was poisoned by his newly raised highness, King Aretas.”

  “The poisoning of kings seems to be going around these days,” Antipater added, clearly amused.

  The son of Caesar nodded. “And I imagine Aretas is framing you for the deed just to rid himself of competition from such an astute and loyal member of his predecessor’s court.” Tiberius suddenly turned to Thrasyllus as if he’d spoken. “Oh, yes. He was a good man for Petra, our friend here. A loyal Nabataean. You know, it was Syllaeus who guided our legions out of Egypt and out into the deserts of Arabia. My father paid him well on the assurance that he would show us the paths to the land of spices, would allow us to bypass the taxes of Petra … but he was a loyal Nabataean in the end. Led the legionnaires to their deaths. And somehow got out alive himself. With his coin, too! And even made it back to Nabataea, back to Petra, a hero and a humble servant. Quite extraordinary, I think.” He turned back to the bound man, then walked over to tap him gently on the cheek, as if the old man were a child. “It’s important to me that you know that what’s happening now has nothing to do with that, though. Because in an odd sense I’m proud of you. That bit of deceit might have been against Rome, but it was cleverly done. Truly. But in vengeance I’m certain they’ll throw you from the Tarpeian Rock just the same. Guilty or not, this poisoning is just an excuse to see if you can fly.”

  Thrasyllus cleared his suddenly parched throat. “Lord Tiberius, I have no knowledge of any of this. If this man has said differently—”

  “Nothing of the kind,” Tiberius said, once more cutting him off. He was smiling, almost kindly, as he turned back to the astrologer, yet there was a brooding darkness in his eyes. “Though he did hold a certain bit of information that concerns you. Information about something I’ve been seeking.”

  Something he was seeking? Thrasyllus concentrated on not shaking as the rumors of astrologers gone missing after meeting with Tiberius swirled in his mind. “I would be pleased to help, my lord, if I knew how.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it, Thrasyllus of Mendes. I am certain my friends feel the same.”

  Footsteps hushed on the stone behind him, and Lapis cried out for a moment before the sound was clamped off. Thrasyllus turned and saw that the guards at the passageway hadn’t moved, but three other figures in plain white togas had silently floated up upon them. One of them—the female—was holding Lapis from behind. A long-fingered hand, as pale and bloodless as if it had been carved of the purest alabaster, was clamped over her mouth. In the instant that Thrasyllus met the panicked gaze of his wife, before he could shout through his terror, her eyes rolled back white. Lapis fell limp into slender arms that started lowering her to the ground.

  The two male figures swept onward, moving toward Thrasyllus with smooth and soundless steps.

  At a glance Thrasyllus knew them, though he’d seen them only for mere minutes all those years earlier in Carthage. For twenty years, in the terrors that awoke him drenched in sweat, he’d seen their unnaturally perfect bodies. He’d seen their hauntingly beautiful faces. He’d seen their dead, black eyes.

  Demons. The very three that the Shards had possessed Juba to raise up from the depths of the underworld.

  Thrasyllus fell to his knees and in quaking fear retched the pit of his stomach onto the stone floor.

  The two male demons gracefully slid around the mess. In their wake, the inhuman creatures left the air chilled, like a moving frost. They floated on to stand behind Antipater, who turned to see them. “And speaking of poisons,” the heir of Herod said to one of them, “Antiphilus, my old friend, were you able to procure what we need? I was told it’s best to get it here rather than in Rome.”

  “Yes, my lord,” the demon replied. His voice was a song. The astrologer remembered that, too. “Bathyllus will carry it,” he went on to say, nodding toward the other demon beside him.

  “And the letters?” Antipater asked.

  “Acme will write them in Rome,” Antiphilus said.

  A wash of cold came across Thrasyllus once again, and then the third demon was floating past him to stand beside the son of Caesar. When she stopped moving the edge of her draped dress swung for a moment before it abruptly fell into place as if weighed down by an unseen hand. “I will make them at your mother’s house,” she said to Tiberius. “Empress Livia has the finest parchments. Everything I need for the task.”

  “Good,” Antipater said, looking back to Syllaeus.

  Tiberius, too, was nodding, though his eyes were even darker now.

  Thrasyllus could hear his wife’s steady breathing, and he wanted to get up and run to her, to protect her, but to his shame he couldn’t move. He could only stare as the three demons turned as one to look back at him with unblinking obsidian eyes. The one they’d called Bathyllus smiled, and his sculpted teeth were the color of bleached bones.

  How they were here, how they’d found him, Thrasyllus didn’t know. What it had to do with Antipater and poisons and letters, he couldn’t possibly imagine.

  But he knew what they wanted. It was the only thing he could possibly give them.

  The Shards.

  The demons wanted the Shards.

  PART I

  THE STONES OF MEMORY

  1

  THE ROSE-RED CITY

  PETRA, 5 BCE

  Squinting his eyes to watch the approaching Romans, Lucius Vorenus wearily settled himself down onto a rose-red rock outcropping. Behind him, its afternoon shadow leaving him in cool shade as it stretched out toward the acropolis of Petra, arose one of the rocky mountains that hemmed in and protected the ancient city of stone. In his first year here he’d climbed those greater heights, but he’d thankfully found that this lower vantage point, while still a scramble to reach along its cliff-framed ledge, was far easier to achieve. And the position was more than adequate: it was sheltered from the sun by the surrounding rocks, with clear views of both the main road north and the more secret path through the narrow chasm to the east. The perch had in time become as familiar to him as the aches and pains of a long life hard lived: he couldn’t count how many times he’d labored up here in the twenty years since he and his old friend Titus Pullo had come to Petra to hide themselves, the little orphaned girl they’d raised as their own, and the Ark of the Covenant.

  The mercantile caravan he was watching seemed to be crawling down the northern hillsides into the valley, its approach slowed by the winding of the road through the terraced farms and vineyards that seemed so out of place amid these arid mountains. The greenery was nothing compared to the gardens and fountains within the city’s walls, of course, but Vorenus well remembered his shock when he himself had first seen Petra and found it an oasis in bloom.

  No natural oasis, though. Petra, more than any place he’d ever seen, was a testament to human ingenuity. The rock walls that hemmed it in and protected it were cut through with channels that pulled the rains when they came off the rocks and down through larger and larger conduits into the hundreds of cisterns that dotted the growing city. The rainy season was short, but the Nabataeans of Petra made it last year round. It fed their crops, filled their cups, and made a city in the desert.

  The Romans were also being slowed by the rudimentary nature of the Nabataean road, and Vorenus allowed himself a smile. The Roman merchants, he was certain, would be cursing the lack of a properly wrought surface for the wheels of their carts and wagons. That was th
e Roman way, of course: build the road to reach the destination. He’d done it himself, back in the days when he was a legionnaire. Back when he thought of himself as Roman, too.

  Vorenus spat on the ground between his desert boots and watched for a moment as the moisture quickly sank into the parched dust that had gathered on the flat surface between stones. Though beneath his flowing linen robes he still kept his old gladius strapped to his side, there was little about him that felt Roman anymore. The men in the coming caravan weren’t countrymen to him. They didn’t speak with voices of home. They were foreigners. And like every other group of foreigners who approached the walls of this secretive city, Vorenus viewed them as a threat.

  Squinting into the distance again, he tried to count wagons, gauge armaments, and guess at the number of the guards as they crept closer.

  In his earlier years at Petra, Vorenus had worried at the threat such men could be to him personally—he did, after all, still have a price on his head, courtesy of Augustus Caesar himself—but as his stay in Petra lengthened to decades he had come to worry only for the threat that foreigners might represent to the Ark, the powerful Shard of Heaven that he and Pullo—and now young Miriam—had sworn to protect.

  His own life, Vorenus figured, was long since lived on borrowed time.

  Growing up in Rome, he had never expected to live to see much of his adulthood at all. He was born to be a fighter. His life would be the sword and the blood and the golden eagle standard of the legion beneath which he would surely die.

  But he had survived. Fighting the barbaric Nervii in Gaul under the direction of Julius Caesar, he had lived when so many died. At Actium, under Mark Antony, death had somehow missed him—though down the mauled skin of his right arm Vorenus still carried heavy scars of that fight. In Alexandria, when Augustus Caesar had ordered his execution, he’d lived. So, too, had he survived ambush on the Alexandrian canal and the Kushite attack on the island of Elephantine.

  Now, at the age of seventy-three, Vorenus knew that no matter what luck had bought him to this point, death would not forget him forever. No man was immortal, and there was no doubt for Vorenus that he had fewer days ahead than he had behind him. He’d had a good life.

  So these latest approaching Romans were only a worry insofar as they were a threat to the Shard.

  Vorenus turned to his right, looking across the southern reach of Petra to a narrow canyon that slashed southwest into the mountains, just beyond the city walls. There were beautiful tombs in that wadi, carved deep into the rock. The windows and doors cut into their facades stared back at him from the distance, black squares that reminded him too often of the open eyes and mouths of the dead.

  A fitting image for tombs, he supposed, but hardly a comforting one.

  Among them, not quite visible from this position, was the rock-cut tomb that he and Pullo had bought for the family they didn’t have. It had been originally designed for a wealthy family who had decided to bury their dead elsewhere: its face was framed by four half columns that seemed to melt out of the stony canyon wall, and between them were three large niches where statues of the deceased might stand watch over their mortal remains. The previous owners had left it unfinished—there were no statues when he and Pullo had bought it, and the walled courtyard that was meant to be built in front of it as a gathering place for the family was nothing but a paved square beside the path up the wadi into the mountains. They’d finished the courtyard immediately, of course, seeing it as another line of protection for the Ark since the Nabataeans treated such spaces as deeply private areas. Only then did they commission the two statues that had filled the niches to left and right. They were of Miriam’s parents—the secret pharaoh Caesarion and the Jewish girl Hannah, who had been the keeper of the Ark before they died in Egypt. The couple had been buried where they’d fallen, in the quiet ruins of a forgotten temple on Elephantine island. But they lived on, Vorenus often thought, in the precious girl that Vorenus himself had cut free of her dying mother. That Miriam had no memory of the faces of her parents made the statues important to him. It was cold stone, but he liked to think that the faces still had life when he and Pullo would sit with her in the quiet courtyard and tell her of the people they’d been.

  The third niche in the facade of the tomb was still empty, as if awaiting the face of the next person to be buried within. That was how the Nabataeans did things, and he and Pullo did their best to make their tomb seem the same as any other in the valleys. It wasn’t, of course. No one was buried there, and Vorenus couldn’t imagine anyone ever would be. The large stone sarcophagus that they’d placed inside held not a body but the precious Ark that had fallen into their keeping when Hannah and Caesarion had died defending it. And when he, Pullo, or Miriam was seen close to the tomb—and it was rare that one of them was not nearby—they were not meeting in prayers for the dead but in a watch for the living.

  He let his gaze fall to the temples and tombs that were gathered around the feet of the acropolis below him. The Nabataean priests were busy there, bringing offerings of songs and flesh to their pantheon of gods. Tallest among the buildings was the temple dedicated to Dushara, the lord of the mountains. Though adorned with tall columns at its front, from Vorenus’ view it seemed a massive block of stone, painted a white that shone in the sun, as if it had been set down amid the city like a gift from the heavens.

  The temple was, Vorenus had learned, meant to mimic the many stone blocks that the Nabataeans had carved to honor their deities: the blocks represented the mountains where the earth and heavens met, where men could reach up toward the divine. Once he knew what they were, Vorenus seemed to see the blocks—god-blocks, they were often called—almost everywhere he looked in Petra, but none were more prominent than the temple at the heart of the city.

  Before he died, Caesarion had come to believe that the Shard within the Ark had first come to this place, that it was here that the Jews had found it and built it, forgotten though that history now was. That was why Caesarion had wanted the Ark brought here, brought home. What the child of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra planned for it once here—how he hoped to find it a permanent home in this place—Vorenus did not know.

  But I got it here, he thought. I did my best.

  When they’d set out for Petra in the company of the Nabataean Syllaeus—their little company always just one step ahead of the Roman armies—getting the Ark to this ancient city had seemed like it would be accomplishment enough.

  Now, as Vorenus turned his tired eyes once again to the caravan that was nearing the gates, he felt more than ever that no place would ever be truly safe. Nothing was outside the reach of Rome.

  Vorenus sighed and stood, stretching his legs into vigor after having sat still for too long. Knowing the mission was without hope of victory didn’t mean he would stop fighting for it. That had never been his way.

  An agitation of movement down in the colonnade just inside the city gates caught the corner of his eyes, and Vorenus once more found himself squinting to make something out among the antlike people busily hurrying from one marketplace to another. Petra was built on trade, and during the day the markets and the public spaces between them were a constant hum of activity—an organized chaos that would grow even more frantic with word that a new caravan was arriving. The merchants always worked hard to front their stalls well when new traders came to the city.

  But this agitation was different. It felt wrong, almost like a panic.

  Vorenus peered at the open gates of the city, and almost at once he saw what it was.

  Cursing his old eyes, he stumbled back from the edge of the ledge and hurried for the thin scrap of a trail that would bring him down from his perch and into the bustle below.

  What he’d seen was unmistakable. The glint of gold flashed wildly when it passed out of the shadows of the city walls and into the full light of the sun. How he’d not seen it before, he didn’t know, but it was there now, as clear as the spots that freckled the backs of his weary ha
nds as they steadied his scramble along the face of the cliff.

  What he had seen was an eagle. An eagle of gold, perched on a staff draped in red, carried by a man riding ahead of the arriving mass of men.

  It meant that it wasn’t just a caravan that was coming to the secret city of Petra today. A legion was with it, too.

  2

  THE FALL OF A SCHOLAR

  ALEXANDRIA, 5 BCE

  Didymus Chalcenterus awoke at his desk, his cheek resting on a stack of papyrus that was—thankfully, surprisingly—free of his scribbles of ink. He was hardly a vain man, but he was vaguely aware that it wasn’t the finest idea to have the chief librarian of the Great Library of Alexandria walking about with strange jottings of ink staining his face.

  Didymus yawned and lifted his head from its chance pillow. His neck was tight—it usually was when he awkwardly fell asleep while writing—and so he habitually torqued it from one shoulder to another. He was pleased when the bones shifted in response with a gratifying crack.

  He didn’t need to gauge the wax on the little candle that burned at the corner of his desk to know that it was still the middle of the night. In the decades that he’d been the chief librarian he’d fallen asleep in his office far more often than he’d ever made it home. He knew the feel of the predawn darkness. He knew it in the tomblike silence of a building that in hours would hum with hushed whispers and soft footsteps as his fellow scholars came to work amid the wondrous collection of books under his control.

  With a sigh, Didymus pushed back his stool and stood. As he stretched his arms, his body waking at last, he resumed focus on the book he had been working on: a commentary on some of Pindar’s surviving poetry. Growing up in Greece he’d been fascinated by much of the ancient poet’s work, and he’d always wanted to write a book about them. That he’d never done so was a reflection of his sense that his meager skills as a writer were hardly adequate to the task of approaching such genius, but of late he’d begun to feel that humility was a luxury best afforded to younger men. He was fifty-eight years old this year, and while that hardly made him an old man it did give him a sense he should write the book sooner rather than later.