“I see,” Juba intoned when the man paused. “I, uh … please, go on, ow!”
Selene turned to the perplexed overseer with her most benevolent smile. “Our dear king wishes to say that your work sounds most impressive,” she said. “Thank you for your report, and please see to it that construction remains on schedule. We want to interrupt the trade routes as little as possible.”
“Of course, my lady,” the man said, bowing low.
“Selene,” Juba started to say, “the wall, ow!”
“Ah, yes. Also, we have had reports that some of your work has disturbed the foundation of one of the temples in the area. The goddess Tanit, wasn’t it?”
Juba had plucked his son over onto his back and was tickling the boy mercilessly. “It was,” he said, as little Ptolemy’s peals of glee reverberated around the hall. Even the old herald at the door couldn’t help but smile in amusement.
“See to it that any disturbance is rectified and the temple restored,” Selene said.
“I will, your majesties,” the man said. He bowed to them both and retreated.
Once he was gone, Juba at last released the squealing boy, who jumped down the dais and crossed the hall squealing with delight as his father chased him with bounding but slow steps, always just out of reach behind him. The boy darted and turned, weaving through pillars, before crossing the hall and running up the dais again. Selene opened her arms to him and caught him as he leaped up into her embrace.
Juba groaned, playfully heaving his breaths as he mounted the steps in mock pain. “I’m too old,” he said. “The boy runs me to ground.”
“My old man,” Selene said, smiling and winking as Juba reached the top and leaned over to kiss her.
Ptolemy rolled his eyes and squirmed in her grip, which only made his father kiss him, too.
“Who is next?” Juba bellowed over his shoulder.
“A librarian from Alexandria,” the herald said from the door.
Juba straightened up, his eyes confused but worried. “Thrasyllus, you mean?”
“No, my lord,” the herald replied. “But he says he bears a sealed letter from him. The man’s name is Apion. He says he has only come to deliver this letter to you. He does not know what it contains, but he says that he was instructed to deliver it most urgently.”
Selene felt a knot in her stomach, but she smiled as if nothing could possibly be wrong—both for Ptolemy’s sake, and theirs. “Then send him in,” she called out. “Let’s see this letter of his.”
* * *
The midmorning sun was streaming its warmth down upon the stone balcony as Selene and Juba stood along the railing, looking out over the bustling city that they’d built into one of the richest ports of the Mediterranean. It was a glorious achievement, and on any other day she would be gazing down upon Caesarea with both pride in what they had done and hopes of what they still might do.
But not now. Now, all she could think about was the letter from Thrasyllus in Juba’s hands and what it meant for them. What it meant for everyone.
“Read it again,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I don’t know what more you hope to hear.”
“Just read it again. Please.”
Her husband nodded tiredly, and for a moment he seemed far older than his forty-three years. “‘The demons of Carthage are with Tiberius. Lapis is a prisoner in Rhodes, and I am forced to help them recover the Shards they do not have. I fought them, but they learned what they needed to know. A demon is sent to take them from you, to bring them to Jerusalem. You must not let this happen. I cannot write more.’”
“A demon,” Selene whispered. She remembered the night in Carthage. She remembered their faces, their pitiless, dead eyes. “A demon coming here.”
Juba nodded as he lowered the letter and joined her in looking out over the city.
Selene’s mind was a rush of confusion and questions, shot through with a sharp fear. “Are they safe?” she managed to ask.
“Locked away,” her husband replied.
“You’re sure?” There was no need to ask, but she felt compelled to do it anyway.
“I’m sure. I checked this morning. As I always do.”
“It could come at any time,” Selene said, disturbed at the way her voice shook.
“It will come at night.”
It made sense that any attempt to seize the Shards in their vault would come in the dark, when it was easier to move between shadows, but Juba had said it with a surety. “You know this?”
“In Carthage,” he whispered, “when the gate … when I held them all, I didn’t know what I was doing, Selene. I didn’t know.”
One of his hands had let go of the letter and was gripping the rail as if to steady himself against the memory. Selene reached over and put her own hand upon his, though she didn’t know which of them she meant to comfort. “I know, my love.”
“It’s my fault this is happening,” he said. “I should never have sought out the Trident. I should never have been a part of any of this. I started it.”
“We share the guilt,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“I just want to be rid of them.” With his other hand he lifted up the letter in front of him and crumpled it in frustration and quiet rage.
Selene let go of his hand on the rail and reached up to gently take the letter from his balled fist. She could feel the tremble in his bones as he relaxed the muscles and let go. He leaned into the railing and sighed. He looked as if he might weep in his despair.
Juba had been the rock upon which she had remade her life. He was a good man and a great king. He was a wonderful father and a loving, devoted husband. To see him defeated by his guilt was almost more than she could bear.
In a flash the memory came to her of the night in Alexandria that she and her now-dead brothers had been called to the room of their mother, Cleopatra. The armies of Rome had encircled the city, and night brought deeper shadows to a world that was already dark with foreboding. Selene remembered how her mother held her dead father in her arms, her bedclothes bestrewn with the smears of his blood. Mark Antony’s face was slack, his eyes sunken by the despair that had led him to fall upon his own sword. Her mother had smiled at them in that moment. She had praised him and begged her children to join her in following him to the afterlife. Looking back, she could see how so much had hinged upon that moment, that choice. Selene had betrayed her mother by refusing her. And instead she had run away, run off to seek the vengeance that would fuel her life until the day her vengeance died in Carthage.
Selene smoothed the letter in her hands. In so many ways that horrible night in Alexandria that her father died, that horrifying choice she was forced to make, had determined everything to come. Juba had already found the Trident in Numidia, but until that night little else was known about the whereabouts of the Shards. Within a day of her father’s death, she had met Juba at the tomb of Alexander the Great, and there he had found the Aegis of Zeus. Years later in Rome, still seeking her vengeance, she’d stolen the Palladium of Troy, and together she and Juba had taken the Lance of Olyndicus from Corocotta in Cantabria. And she and Juba had stood on this very balcony, twenty years ago, and made the fateful decision to take all of them together—four of the fabled Shards of Heaven—to Carthage, to try to unlock their full power with the help of Thrasyllus. All of it for vengeance. For their parents who’d died because of Rome, for what Juba had been made to do with the Trident, for her rape at the hands of Tiberius … and when Juba had tried to harness the powers of the Shards they had somehow possessed him, used him, and he’d opened a gate to the underworld, to Hell itself.
She didn’t blame him, but looking over at his tired shoulders she knew that he blamed himself. Whatever had happened to him when he held the four Shards in his arms, it had scarred him to his very soul. He would never forgive himself. Not while the Shards were still a threat. Not while demons walked the earth.
“We share the guilt,” she said again, her
voice stronger in its conviction. In her mind she saw how the three demons arose in their terrible glory, before the sacrifice of her friend Isidora shut the gate and gave her the chance to escape with Juba and Thrasyllus. The demons that held Lapis, which were even now working through Tiberius, were only here because of both her and Juba, because of their blind pursuit of vengeance no matter how deserving they believed it to have been. The demons had the Trident and the Lance—the Shards of Water and of Fire—only because of their failures. What they could accomplish with such powerful artifacts and such a powerful ally as Tiberius, she did not want to imagine. What they could accomplish if they possessed even more, if they had the ability to once more open the gate to Hell, she did not even want to contemplate.
“But it’s done,” she said. It was true, and it was the only way forward. All else was despair, her father falling on his sword, her mother drawing forth the asp. “Regrets help nothing.”
“It’s my fault,” Juba repeated. He looked down at his hands. “I couldn’t control it.”
Selene carefully refolded the letter and slipped it into the hidden pocket of her dress. “We cannot change what’s done yesterday,” she said. “What are we to do today?”
“What can we do?”
“You say the Shards are safe for now, and that the demon will come only at night.”
Juba nodded, slowly. “When I had the Shards, I felt the darkness behind them. I don’t understand what it is, but it made me open the gate. It came from the shadows. I think that means they’re stronger at night.”
It wasn’t much, but it was something. “We have to assume the worst, that the demon will come tonight.” What could it do? What was it capable of? Selene shook the questions away and looked up at the sun, rising toward noon. “So we have the day.”
“I should double the guards,” Juba said.
Selene nodded. It was a commanding act, but if the demon came—when the demon came—would doubling the guards only double the deaths at their door? And if they stopped it this night, what would come of the next? Or the next after that? Thrasyllus said that Tiberius was with the demons now. What would happen if he could bring Roman armies to field? How many lives would be lost before the end finally came? “It’s not enough,” she said. “It buys us time. Little else.”
“We should get Ptolemy out of the palace,” he said, nodding as if in agreement with her. “Take him some place safe.”
“Aren’t you listening?” Selene grabbed his arms and turned him to face her. “It’s not enough, Juba. No place will be safe if they gather the Shards. There will be nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. They will reopen the gate. Not on accident as we did. They’ll mean to do it, and they’ll bring more and more through it. It’s the end, Juba. The end for us, the end for Ptolemy.” The thought of her beautiful child almost broke something in her, but she shook the pain away by waving a hand out toward the busy city below. “It’s the end for all of this, all of it, if we let them get the Shards. We can’t let that happen.”
Selene’s voice was fervent with determination, but all she saw in his eyes was the despair, the familiar memory of her parents choosing to die rather than fight. Tears were filling his eyes. “Isn’t time enough?” he asked.
She knew it then. He wasn’t ready to fight. He wasn’t prepared to do what needed to be done. But it had to be done. She was as sure of it as she’d been about the choice to run from that room of death in Alexandria. Only this choice wasn’t about vengeance. It wasn’t about herself. It was about survival—not for her, but for her beloved Ptolemy, and for Juba, whom she adored more than life itself even if he couldn’t take this final journey with her. It was, in the end, about love.
She hoped he would see that in time.
Selene stepped back from him, still holding his hands in hers. She smiled, though the tears were beginning to roll upon her face. She gripped his hands when she saw the confusion and pain upon his own. “Listen,” she said. “There’s so much I want to say, but there’s far more that needs to be done. And we don’t have much time.”
“Time for what?”
Selene brought a finger up to his mouth, then drew herself up to replace it with her lips. They kissed, and she felt his love run through her and give her strength. She prayed that her love would do the same for him. It would have to be enough.
She pulled away from his lips and let herself fall against his chest. After a moment his arms enwrapped her in a familiar embrace, and she closed her eyes. For a minute she lost herself there, letting his breath rise and fall against her, etching this memory into her soul.
“I’m going to leave,” she finally said. It seared a hole through her heart to say it, and she wondered how she would possibly say goodbye to Ptolemy.
Selene felt his arms tense. “Leave?”
She opened her eyes and pulled just far enough away to meet his eyes—but not so far that she left his arms. “Today. Within hours. I’ll find some place safe for Ptolemy, somewhere away from the palace. And you’ll book me passage on the next boat to Rome.”
Juba blinked. “Rome?”
Selene nodded even as she worked it through in her mind. “We’ll make it known that I’ve gone. That I went in haste. You’ll order the guards away if anyone comes for the vault. No one needs to die.”
“I don’t understand. You just said we can’t let the demon get the Shards.”
“No, my love. We can’t.”
“But if we leave the vault—” His voice cut off as at last he realized what she meant to do. “You intend to take them with you, don’t you? And you want the demon to know you’ve gone. You mean to run. To Rome.”
“I’ll take them with me,” she said.
“I’m coming with you to Rome, Selene. I helped start this, I’ll help end it.”
Selene shook her head. “I know you would, my love. But you can’t. You’re the king of Mauretania. You cannot leave your kingdom.”
“And you’re the queen,” he said, his eyes pleading.
She smiled at his bravery, at his willingness to try again despite all that the Shards had taken from him. He was a good man, a great man. The world needed more leaders like him. “I’m a queen, yes. But we both know the place of queens in this world. I could leave, you could take another, it wouldn’t matter.”
Juba’s eyes widened in shock, and he began to protest.
“To us it would matter,” Selene said quickly. She kissed him, then let him hold her in his arms once more. She thought of how her mother had fought to be respected in a world of men, and she thought of her own struggles to become the queen that she was. A good queen, she told herself. She’d been that. And it hadn’t been for nothing. But it was still true: Juba was more important as a king than she was as a queen. Perhaps the world would not always be that way, but it was the way the world was for now. She couldn’t leave their kingdom in chaos … or their son without a father.
She pulled herself back from him again. “You know it’s true,” she said. “You know there’s no other way.”
Her husband’s body still seemed tense with defiance, but she could see in his damp eyes his resignation, his realization that there was no other choice. “So you’ll take the Shards to Rome,” he finally said.
She squeezed his hands in reassurance, hoping she would one day recall the feel of his skin against hers. “Rome is only a stop on the way.”
“Then where?”
“To where they least expect it,” Selene said. “To Rhodes, Juba. I’ll save Lapis. And then, by the gods, I’ll take them to Jerusalem.”
“Jerusalem? That’s what Tiberius wants. Thrasyllus said—”
“They want the Shards. And I’m not bringing them there to give them up.” She took a deep breath. “I’m bringing them to fight.”
6
THE MOUNT OF AARON
PETRA, 5 BCE
In the first days after the legion had come to Petra, Miriam had made many excuses not to take her turn watching the tomb of the Ark. S
he had volunteered to cook and clean, she had volunteered to be the one to get water from the town cisterns every day, and she had even volunteered to wash clothes, a chore she hated. Pullo had said nothing, though Vorenus had finally raised an eyebrow at her when she suggested that she probably ought to spend the next day scrubbing the chimney of the little two-room house they shared.
It was difficult for her to admit to herself, but the Romans unnerved her. She’d lived her whole life thinking of them as enemies, thinking them the biggest threat to the Ark, the reason that she would never meet her parents. And now they were here, camped close beside the tomb hiding the Shard for which her parents had died.
Worse, Miriam could not stop thinking about the one Roman she’d met: Abdes Pantera, who’d shown her how better to shoot with her bow, and given her an arrow besides.
Some moments she chided herself for not shooting him when she had the chance. No one would have known, after all. Other moments she hated herself for thinking such thoughts.
One way or another, though, she’d thought often of the lopsided smile on his face. And the more she’d thought of it, the more she wanted to see him again, and the more she felt foolish for being so afraid to go near the Roman camp. Pantera was not a bad man, she was certain. Neither were Pullo and Vorenus, who’d been great legionnaires in their day.
So late one day, after all her chores were done, with Pullo and Vorenus away at the tomb keeping watch on the Ark, Miriam picked up her waterskin, her bow, and her arrows—including the one Pantera had given her—and set off for the southern gate of the city and the Roman encampment that lay beyond it.
Pullo and Vorenus had explained to her more than once that the walls of Petra were not nearly as massive as those in the great cities of the world. There simply was no need for enormous man-made fortifications when those of nature were so profoundly adequate: the foreboding mountains that surrounded the city, and the stretching wastelands of deserts that surrounded the mountains in turn, were more than enough to deter a true invader army. So Petra’s walls needed only to be able to repel the smaller bands of raiders who lived off the prey they could scavenge along the edges of the city’s immediate control.
The Realms of God--A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Shards of Heaven, Book 3) Page 6
