Looking down at the papers strewn on his desk he saw the last poem he’d been examining. It was one of Pindar’s victory odes:
Momentary creatures. What is a man?
What is he not? Man is a dream of shadows.
But when the splendor of Zeus is come down,
A shining light’s upon him, and blessed are his days.
Didymus smiled. When he’d first heard those words as a young boy, he’d thought them an exultant testament of the wonders that could come from faith in the gods. Man, he thought Pindar was saying, is nothing without the blessing of Zeus, but such a blessing could provide an eternity of glory. Later, after he’d learned of the Shards of Heaven, after he thought he knew the secret truth of the world—that Zeus had never been, that in fact the one God, the only God who’d ever been, was dead—Didymus had seen Pindar’s words as sorrowful: no matter a man’s triumphs and joys, his pleasures and possibilities, he would amount to nothing but shadows and dust. Man was a creature of the moment, a flash upon a world that was gone as quickly as he’d come.
Now? Didymus tapped the page thoughtfully.
Now he thought neither way of reading it was quite right. Pindar’s words were neither wholly joyous nor completely sorrowful. They were the truth, of course: a man’s life was a temporary thing, and all but a few would go unmarked upon the earth. But even those who would be remembered beyond their friends and family would not survive with their name.
Didymus turned from his desk to face the window behind him. One of the shutters was partially open to the night air, and through it he could see the grounds of the Museum stretching away from the Great Library, the paths and gardens lit by the stars. Beyond them were the wide streets of Alexandria, where Roman guards on patrol moved in silent groups through the darkness between the flickering fires atop street posts. There was little other movement in the city so early, though as the librarian watched he saw a few hooded figures—priests, likely—drift out of the dark and up the lamp-lit steps of the Sema, where rested the body of Alexander the Great, preserved in a crystal tomb.
Yes, he thought. Even Alexander the Great, who had accomplished more in his lifetime than any man before him, died in the end. It wasn’t sorrowful to admit that truth. To admit to the fleeting chances of lives was simply to acknowledge the true nature of human existence. It needn’t mean despair. Indeed, the longer Didymus had read Pindar, the more he was certain that the old poet had intended that all along: the impermanence of life was the source of its joys. The poet imagined joy as the blessing of Zeus, but that was really just a metaphor of the enduring strength of the human spirit. To be truly human was to recognize how transient life was, and in so doing to be the more grateful for whatever time you were given. A sun that shone without clouds, without night, would never be appreciated at the dawn.
“We need shadows,” Didymus said, giving voice to his thoughts. “We need the shadow, if only to recognize the light.”
“I agree.”
Didymus jumped at the sound of another voice behind him, and he spun to see that a man was stepping forward into the light of the feeble candle on his desk. The man did not seem to be armed, and he had a kind of regretful smile upon his face. The man was younger than himself, Didymus could see, and he was wearing a dark tunic fit for travel. He wasn’t one of the librarians, and no one else was supposed to be in the Library so late. The doors ought to have been locked.
“How did you—?”
“Good Apion dutifully locked the doors, if that’s what you’re wondering. But I know my way in. I didn’t forget.”
Didymus blinked, uncertain if he should shout for the guards out on the streets. How did this man know his assistant would have been the last man to leave? And what did he mean he hadn’t forgot?
“You don’t remember me, I think,” the man said. “It’s fine. I didn’t expect you to. But I did know you, and you knew me. That’s the only reason they let me come in here alone.”
“They?”
The man nodded, and something like fear passed over his face. “Please, do not cry out. Do not try to flee or fight. Please.”
Didymus blinked, half wondering if he still slept, if this was some strange dream. He didn’t know the man, though now that he stared at him he could catch glimpses of a younger face he might recognize beneath the masks of time. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not sure I remember you. Who are you? And what do you want?”
The man sighed tiredly and gestured to the only chair in front of the scholar’s desk that wasn’t cluttered with books and scrolls. “May I sit?”
Didymus swallowed hard as he worked over the distance to the nearest guards he’d seen. How long would they take to reach him?
Minutes, he decided. Far too many minutes. And with a drop of three stories outside the window, he wasn’t about to jump and run.
Instead, he motioned toward the one seat as calmly as he could manage, then sat back down in his own. For a moment he thought of covering up his work, but the idea was almost laughable. Whatever the intruder wanted, it was surely not an old man’s musings on Pindar.
The man looked around the office as he settled himself in the chair. “You know, I once imagined I’d make this room my own one day. Wasn’t to be. So much has come and gone.”
At once, Didymus knew him: the boy who’d come to them so young, who’d risen so far, but who’d left the Library when he’d instead chosen Apion to be the next in line to succeed him as head of the Great Library. “Thrasyllus?”
Thrasyllus nodded once more. “It’s been a long time.”
“Gods,” Didymus whispered. “How long has it been? Twenty years?”
“Or more,” Thrasyllus agreed. “I’m sorry I stormed away back then. I was … young. Impetuous. Stubborn. You made the right choice. My anger only proved your wisdom.”
Didymus tried to imagine the younger man in the older one. The young man had been an astrologer, a branch of learning that Didymus had always thought unworthy of the boy’s clear intellect. Apion had seemed to be the more sensible choice, his scholarship more traditional. But while Apion had done well—and would ably carry on the work of the Great Library many years after Didymus was dead and buried—the truth was that he was not as driven as young Thrasyllus had been, and more than once Didymus had wondered if he’d made the right choice. The Thrasyllus that he’d known had been a deeply dedicated man, passionate about his work. He’d been a good and loyal helper, and only much later did Didymus come to understand how much being passed over had surely wounded him. And all because he could not look beyond his prejudice against the young man’s field of study.
“I, too, was stubborn,” Didymus managed to say. “I’m not sure I would choose the same if given the choice again.”
Thrasyllus appeared to smile, but there remained a troubled sorrow that darkened his eyes. “What was it Heraclitus wrote? ‘No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.’”
“So he did,” Didymus agreed. “And, as Pericles once said, ‘Time is the wisest counselor of all.’”
“I always liked Pericles.”
“I remember.”
“It’s good to see you again.”
“And you, too. Where have you been all these years?”
“I had to leave. Things happened, things I could neither undo nor forget. In the end I went west, to Mauretania. A new land. A fresh start. I found employ with King Juba and Queen Cleopatra Selene.”
Didymus could not have hidden the lightness in his heart at the sound of her name if he had tried. “I remember her so fondly. How is she?” His face brightened. “Do you have a message from her?”
“She is very well,” Thrasyllus said. “She has often spoken of you, Didymus, though I’m sorry to say that she did not send me with a message for you.” The astrologer’s eyes went to a wooden tray at the corner of the desk. “Is that still where you keep the letters going out and coming in? Where Apion now checks for such t
hings?”
Didymus followed the man’s gaze and sighed—both from the disappointment that Selene had sent no message and from the memory of a much younger Thrasyllus coming and retrieving his letters so many years ago. “It is. And I’m sorry that she sent nothing. I would have liked to hear from her.”
For a moment Thrasyllus continued to stare at the tray, as if he was lost in thought. Then, abruptly, he looked up. “In truth,” he said, “I don’t come to you on her behalf at all. I have a … well, another employer now.”
Didymus had to force down a sudden urge to scream out for the guards. “I see,” he said, trying to remain calm. “So why have you come, Thrasyllus? Why were you sent? It was surely not to trade old wisdoms, no matter how fine they are. Surely not at this hour, at any rate.”
“Ever astute,” Thrasyllus said. “My employer needs something. Information.”
“There is much of that in our holdings.”
“Not of the kind we need.”
“We?”
“What my employer wants is what I want. At least for now.”
“I see,” Didymus said. For a moment he was reminded of another time that someone had found him at night, seeking information. But that had been an assassin seeking the Book of Thoth, the sacred book that held the secrets of all things. The book was legend and myth, but discovering that had been the first step on a journey that would carry Didymus and his friends to learn about the Shards of Heaven and all the very real powers those artifacts possessed.
Thrasyllus reached into the folds of his clothing and retrieved a small scrap of papyrus. He slid it faceup across the desk between them. “Do you recognize this?”
Didymus looked and saw that a single symbol had been drawn upon it: a six-pointed star over-scribed with a circle. It was a simple design, but Didymus knew enough to recognize it at once. He swallowed hard and felt a sudden chill wash over him. “What of it?”
The astrologer’s eyes narrowed. “Do you recognize it?”
The air was bitingly cold. Didymus fought to keep from shivering. “Thrasyllus, I … whatever you’ve heard, I don’t—”
“Do you recognize it?”
So very cold. “I don’t—”
Didymus was ready to lie, to fight any effort Thrasyllus might make to pull the truth from him, when a voice came from the open window that was behind him, cutting off any attempt he might have made at speech. “He knows,” it said.
Didymus jolted in his seat even as the cold peaked, flung through him like a wash of ice through his veins. He pushed his hands into the arms of his chair to keep them from shaking, and he closed his eyes to try to calm his startled heart.
A second later, when he opened them, Didymus saw that he and Thrasyllus were no longer alone in the room. From behind him floated the source of the voice, a figure whose black tunic and hooded cloak were nearly motionless as he moved around the desk in perfect silence to stand behind the astrologer. For a moment Didymus felt the urge to jump from his seat and leap away through the open window, but it would be certain death to do so. No man could survive such a fall.
And no man could make such a climb.
As if in reply, the stranger raised hands whose ivory-pale skin seemed a dull glow in contrast to his black clothing. The hood of the cloak was pushed back with long fingers, revealing the most beautifully perfect face the librarian had ever seen. The man looked like a white marble statue come to life: not a great bearded deity like Zeus, but the slender, beardless, almost androgynous figure of Dionysius, the god whose embodiment even now surely stood his stony watch over his temple across the city.
Only this was no statue, and it was no god. The stranger stared at him with white-less black eyes that knew no love and no laughter. And when Didymus looked into those unblinking orbs he sensed a yawning abyss looking back. The librarian who had come to be called “Bronze-guts” felt his stomach twist and lurch.
“The feeling lessens over time,” Thrasyllus said.
Didymus fought the urge to throw up, to scream, to curl himself up into a childish ball. He squeezed his eyes shut against it all, refusing to look further into those eyes, his scholar’s mind stepping through facts to make sense of the world.
A demon. It could be nothing else.
And the only thing it could want would be the Shards, the fragments of God’s power, weapons to be used in a conflict waged far beyond the mortals of this world.
“Speak,” the demon-thing said, and its voice was winter’s breath stirring a field of snow—soft, but deadly cold.
Didymus clenched his teeth together, stilled his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
“Speak,” it commanded, and this time its voice was the wind through icy rocks—hard and unrelenting. It was, Didymus knew in his heart of hearts, the voice of death.
“Please,” Thrasyllus whispered. “Please, I know what he can do. He’ll kill you. He’ll kill me. He’ll kill my Lapis. And he’ll kill Selene, Didymus.”
In an instant, Didymus remembered again the night that the assassin came for the fabled Book of Thoth, the night that his old friend Lucius Vorenus had learned how he’d once betrayed Caesarion and nearly caused the child’s death. He’d made a promise that night, a promise that had spared him the tip of Vorenus’ sword. He’d told him the one thing that in that moment he knew to be true: Didymus would die for Selene. He would do anything to keep her safe.
“Please,” Thrasyllus urged. “He’ll kill her and Juba both.”
Didymus let out a long breath and opened his eyes. “It’s the Seal of Solomon,” he said.
The demon cocked its head. “Where is it?”
“You’ll never get it. It would take an army.”
“Where?” Thrasyllus asked, leaning forward.
Didymus held the astrologer’s gaze for a moment. “It’s in Jerusalem. It’s hidden in the great temple of the Jews.”
“We already know,” Thrasyllus whispered. He licked his lips for a moment. “But do you know where?”
“He does,” the demon hushed. “Bring him. Then burn the books.”
“My lord!” The astrologer’s eyes went wide in shock, as if he was stunned by the order and his own response. He looked around the room as if casting about for something. “But … there may be books of use to finding this Seal. If it is truly hidden, we may need keys.”
Thrasyllus looked to Didymus with wild desperation, and at last the scholar nodded. “It is true. I’ll find the books and bring them. Leave this place unharmed and I’ll go with you. But if you destroy even a single jot in this Library I swear to you that I will never help you and you will never, ever reach what you desire.”
The demon’s blank eyes stared at him, and Didymus did his best to stare back while fighting the revulsion in the pit of his stomach. Finally, the corner of the creature’s mouth curled up in what might have passed for a smile. “That, librarian, is a truth I do believe. Gather what is needed and come.”
The demon turned and soundlessly moved to the door. Its pale fingers wrapped around the handle and pulled it open. Thrasyllus, clearly relieved, stood.
Didymus let out a long breath. He couldn’t let them reach the Seal, but he couldn’t let them harm those he loved. And while going with them wasn’t a solution, it at least saved the books. And it bought time.
The demon’s back was, for a heartbeat, turned as it began to float through the doorway. And in that moment, Thrasyllus silently and smoothly reached into the folds of his own garments. If Didymus had been looking anywhere else, he would not have seen it, but he’d been looking at the man, and he saw it clear as the dawning day: Thrasyllus reached into his clothes with a stabbing dart of his hand and retrieved a letter. Then, as he spun around to follow the unnatural being out into the Library, he dropped it in the tray on the librarian’s desk.
The letter made the slightest of sounds, and the creature turned back to look in their direction, but Didymus was already standing, carelessly shuffling the pages of his commentary on
Pindar in covering sounds. “The books I need are on the second level,” he said to Thrasyllus, trying to remain calm.
The astrologer smiled in genuine relief and gratitude, then he gestured for him to follow the demon.
Passing around the side of his desk, Didymus didn’t dare look again at the tray, though every part of his ever-curious mind begged him to do it.
Not that there was more for him to learn. In the flash of time that it took for the letter to fall from the astrologer’s fingers into the tray, Didymus had already seen what was written upon it.
It was a sealed letter, and it was addressed to Apion.
Ανοίξτε μου, it read on the outside.
Open me.
3
WATER FROM THE ROCK
PETRA, 5 BCE
As evening approached, Miriam took her stance on a farming terrace in the west wadi, between two long rows of grapevines that webbed together like living walls. The last of the blooms were fading off the vines, but the fragrance of pollen was still heavy in the cool, shadowed air of the narrow canyon around her. At her back the little waters from the spring of Moses bounced and twisted their meandering way through the rocks, churning heedlessly downhill to where the narrow wadi cart path and the little stream’s mostly dry riverbed both ended at a cliff’s edge. The waters fell away then, sparkling in a cooling mist, down into deeper and deeper pools as they descended toward the dry desert farther to the west.
All of this she knew, for she’d known no other home.
And all of it she let drift away from her mind as she took in her breath and steadily drew the bowstring back to her cheek.
Miriam was a child no older than ten when she had first picked up a bow and tried to use it. Her uncle Vorenus—though even then she’d known he wasn’t really her uncle—had frowned, but he’d done nothing to stop the scarred giant Pullo from enfolding his wide hands over her own as he showed her how to grip the weapon so she could properly lock her wrists as she pressed into the pull. He didn’t know much about the bow, he said, but he knew that.
The Realms of God--A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Shards of Heaven, Book 3) Page 3
