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

by Michael Livingston

  Judaea, almost overnight, had erupted in madness.

  Herod’s will called for Caesar to divide his kingdom, and Augustus was reportedly planning to do just that, but it was a process that would take months to complete. Meanwhile, the king’s daughter and his surviving sons were busy seeking to establish control of various parts of the kingdom. At the same time, the spark of revolution that Tiberius had set at the Temple Mount the previous year was now lit into burning flame. From nearly every corner of the realm, sensing in the death of the king an opportunity, men were declaring themselves Messiahs, the promised deliverers who would free Judaea from foreign control. From Idumea came whispers of an insurrection. In the town of Sepphoris, a man named Judas had gathered hundreds to his banner and seized the royal armory there. Closer, a shepherd named Athrongeus had crowned himself king of the Jews and was slaughtering Roman troops wherever he found them. And not two days had passed since one of Herod’s own slaves, Simon, had declared himself a Messiah ordained by Gabriel. He’d stolen Herod’s crown from the palace and headed toward Jericho seeking supporters eager to evict the Romans.

  Worried about chaos in the very heart of the Roman client-kingdom, the meager number of Roman troops in Jerusalem had made a plea for reinforcements to Varus, their general, who was with his legions in distant Damascus. Word had returned that he would begin marching south in their direction, reestablishing control as he went, and a Roman contingent in Petra, strengthened with a Nabataean force, would be marching northward doing the same. As conditions had rapidly deteriorated in Jerusalem, however, the Romans there had become increasingly fearful of their own safety. They were more than ready when Tiberius—spurred by whatever news Acme had brought him—had suggested to the Roman commander that Herod’s fortress would not withstand the siege that the Jews were rumored to be preparing. Far better, he suggested, was the fortified high ground of the Temple Mount.

  Though it had taken him longer than he had planned, everything had fallen into place for Tiberius. If Didymus hadn’t despised the man, he might have been impressed.

  Ahead, the Temple loomed.

  Didymus had not been on the streets since the day that they’d gone to witness the placing of Rome’s golden eagle upon its soreg gate, but he could not count the hours he’d stood upon their distant palace balcony and stared at the magnificent complex. Between his experience and his observation, approaching the Temple felt familiar.

  But still dangerous. Intimately and innately dangerous.

  Blood would be spilled by their coming. Didymus was certain of it.

  Whatever plans the citizens of Jerusalem might have been preparing, they were not ready to face the company of armed Romans as they made their way through the city. No one resisted. No one stood in their way, even as they reached the Temple Mount, climbed its wide steps, and filed through the stoa onto the wide expanse of the Court of Gentiles.

  As before, the men marched toward the soreg gate, where the golden eagle had been mounted before the rioters had torn it down, smashed it, and ripped apart the Roman guards who’d affixed it there.

  It would be different this time, Didymus knew. The men carried no symbol of Rome. They were Rome: enough men to fill a garrison, resolute in aim and armed for battle.

  And they wouldn’t be stopping at the soreg, that wall meant to divide the holy place of the Jews from heathen Gentiles like the Romans. It was time, Tiberius had said.

  They were going inside.

  People fled before the marching men, scattering in panic. Most ran for the porticoes around the perimeter of the Temple Mount. They’d run the news to the city below that Rome had seized the beating heart of Jerusalem. The reaction would be swift, Didymus knew. Thousands would die because of what Tiberius was doing this day.

  A smaller number of Jews fled into the confines of the soreg, into the Temple itself. The priests were there. It was their holiest of sites. God, they surely thought, would protect them. God would strike His enemies down.

  Didymus wanted to weep, wanted to be sick, wanted to cry out to them. God wouldn’t turn aside the Roman blades. God wasn’t listening to their prayers.

  If any god was coming to the Temple Mount today, it was coming to bathe it in blood. God was Tiberius now. God was the demons. God was death.

  And Didymus, to his shame, could do nothing more to stop it.

  The priests inside had shut the soreg gate and barred it, but the gate was no point of fortification. It was a symbolic act, and the priests knew it. As soon as the bars were in place, they were hastening into the taller, thicker walls of the Temple.

  The main body of the Romans halted, but the first line hardly hesitated. In perfect coordination they approached the low wall in pairs, one man boosting another up and over the top. The gate was unbarred. The remaining soldiers parted, and the three demons floated forward, with Tiberius leading the two scholars behind them.

  No one, Didymus thought, seemed to recognize what blasphemy they were committing.

  The Roman commander was a man named Sabinus, and through some unspoken agreement he separated from his men and approached Tiberius. After a brief exchange that Didymus could not hear, Sabinus gave his fellow Roman a quick nod of acknowledgment and then began to bark orders to his men to secure the complex.

  As the legionnaires hurried off, Tiberius looked up at the golden walls of the Temple. Beneath his dark eyes a smile was creasing his face.

  The main gate of the Temple before them was glorious, but Didymus knew that Tiberius had no intention of forcing it. All he wanted was the Seal of Solomon. It would be found—if the Shard was here at all—within the inner Holy Temple where only the priests were meant to go. Going directly through the complex would mean struggling through multiple fortified gates as they fought their way through the Court of the Women before reaching the Court of the Israelites where the Holy Temple stood.

  Instead, Tiberius motioned their tiny party along the southern wall. There were more doors there, smaller entrances for the priests and other members of the Jewish elite to access the chambers lining the most holy places. Tiberius pointed to the third set of doors, which stood almost even with the high, golden front of the Holy Temple farther inside. The water gate, Didymus knew. Beyond it was the chamber where the priests prepared themselves for ritual cleansing. They’d avoid the Court of the Women altogether.

  “Come, scholar,” Tiberius said. “It’s time.”

  For a moment, Didymus stood confused. Then Thrasyllus stepped forward. The astrologer’s arms were shaking.

  “Don’t be frightened,” Tiberius reassured him. “They’ll see to it that you’ll survive.”

  Didymus felt cold wash over him, like the breaking of a wave in winter. A moment later, the demon they called Bathyllus was floating up to stand beside the younger scholar. “All is well,” the demon whispered in its perfect voice. “The mortal speaks truth. You’re useless dead.”

  Didymus stared. “Thrasyllus?”

  “I … I’m sorry,” Thrasyllus whispered. “They have Lapis.”

  Before he could say more, the demon’s hand was sliding silently up to rest against the back of his neck. Its fingers were thin, its nails sharp. Thrasyllus stood in petrified fear.

  With its free hand, the demon pulled free from a pocket of its robes what looked like a heavy medallion on a thick silver chain. The medallion was a casing of twisted metal—silver, copper, and gold—and at its center, nestled within the snaking metallic vines, was a stone the size of a child’s fist. The stone was jet black, somehow shining like oil even as it seemed to swallow the light around it.

  It was, the scholar knew, a Shard of Heaven, mounted in what was clearly a new and easily hidden setting.

  Didymus had seen its like only once: when Alexandria fell, he’d seen such a black stone upon the armor of Alexander the Great. And later that fateful day, he’d seen an even larger disk of such darkness upon the surface of the Ark of the Covenant.

  And now here. Another Shard. In the
hands of a demon.

  When Bathyllus held the chain of the medallion out to him, Thrasyllus reached to take hold of it with shaking hands. The scholar stared at it as if it were a thing possessed.

  It might be, Didymus thought.

  From behind them came shouts and the clashing of metal. Didymus looked back, and he could see by the commotion that the citizens of the city had begun their attack on the stoa to the south. In almost the same moment, shouts arose from the porticoes of the Temple Mount to the east and west.

  The people of Jerusalem were encircling the Temple Mount.

  Thrasyllus, too, had turned at the noise, but Acme drifted up to stand on the other side of him now. Her hand arose to his cheek in a balance of gentleness and seduction. “The door,” she said. Her words moved over him like a whispered song, and her perfect fingers brushed his face, turning him back toward the inner Temple and the door to the baths of purification.

  Almost as if he were in a trance, his shaking quelled, the astrologer lifted the medallion between himself and the water gate door. Acme began to drift away, back toward Didymus, but her fingertips lingered for a last moment on his flesh. Thrasyllus shivered as the connection at last was broken. Then the fingers of Bathyllus squeezed in on the back of his neck, and the demon whispered something in his ear. Thrasyllus, nodding, reached forward to wrap his hand around the black stone before him.

  Mortal and demon screamed as one, and a line of roiling fire lanced out from the Shard and slammed into the door before them.

  Didymus yelled, too, shielding his eyes from the searing light and the shock of debris as the door erupted with a roar.

  When the flash of heat was gone, Didymus blinked up and saw that the door had been reduced to splinters on shattered hinges. Nothing else remained but smoke.

  An icy hand suddenly gripped his neck, and Didymus felt another presence within him. It was Acme. He felt her inside of his mind even before he saw that she was standing beside him, her black eyes alight with the promise of his mind’s imaginings. Her grip on his neck was firm and sure. Her presence within him seemed to be whispering instructions into his mind, as if he were a puppet and she was gripping the strings. He felt his foot rise, unbidden by him, as his body began walking forward, following Bathyllus and the puppet of Thrasyllus into the smoking hole in the Temple.

  14

  THE HOLY OF HOLIES

  JERUSALEM, 4 BCE

  The priests burned last.

  Jews had holed themselves up within the Temple when the Romans marched upon the Temple Mount. The women could go no farther than the Court of the Women, but dozens of men had gone through the thick gates into the courtyard before the golden-fronted Holy Temple itself. There the men had begun to prepare themselves to fight to prevent anyone opening the sacred doors and the secrets within.

  They died first.

  Didymus could do nothing but witness in horror. The men inside were armed, and they were willing to fight to the death. But there was no fight against the Shard that the demons made Thrasyllus use against them.

  Beside him, Didymus listened to the demon Acme laugh—a sound high and pure and beautiful—as the dozens gathered before them, armed with blades and cudgels and Temple implements now turned to weapons. She laughed, and because she gripped his neck, gripped his mind, Didymus laughed, too. His stomach heaved as his own mind revolted, but still his laughter came, ripped out of him in an act far more intimate, far more violating, than anything she could have done to his body.

  As they laughed from behind, Bathyllus focused through the astrologer’s being and unleashed from the Shard a wave of horrible liquid flame that passed across and through the men who’d gathered to stop them.

  The screams rose and just as quickly fell. The throats that cried out were silenced, the lives that gave them voice turned to ash by the sheeting flame.

  When it was over, all that remained was dust and smoke and the horrific sound of wailing from the women on the other side of the gate to the east in the Court of the Women that they’d avoided. Then a wind arose from the west, and the clouded dust of the destruction was swept away.

  The demons were not done. Bathyllus led Thrasyllus up the steps toward the massive doors of the Holy Temple. The powers of the Shard in the astrologer’s grip broke them open, and the priests on the other side were borne into flame by the light of a second sun, their prayers to God choked off into an echoing silence.

  Thrasyllus, gasping for air like a fish yearning to be returned to the sea, now stood between the broken doors of the Temple, which gaped like an obscene maw. Bathyllus whispered something more, and only then did the astrologer release the Shard that the demon held before him. And Bathyllus released his grip on the astrologer’s neck in return.

  The demon staggered for a moment, the source of his energies seemingly spent, but then the one they called Antiphilus was there, steadying his companion, who put the Shard back in his pocket.

  Thrasyllus simply fell. Exhaustion dropped him to his knees. Despair made him fall to all fours as he retched through a wailing sound that seemed to have been ripped from his very soul.

  It was only then that Acme released her grip on Didymus and pulled the icy tentacles of her mind out of his own.

  The weight of his own body buckled his knees, but the librarian steadied himself enough to stagger forward up the steps and kneel beside Thrasyllus.

  “Oh gods,” Thrasyllus whispered. “Oh gods.”

  Didymus placed his hand on the younger man’s back. “Breathe, my friend. Breathe.”

  The astrologer shook his head between heaves. “Oh gods. What I did … what I felt.”

  “You didn’t do it,” he said. “They did.”

  But even as he said the words he knew they weren’t true. He’d felt that horrible and mocking laughter. He hadn’t willed it, but it was his body. It was his soul.

  “Now you’ve dirtied the tiles,” Tiberius said from behind them.

  The son of Caesar strode up the steps into the temple with his back straight, his hands folded behind him as if he had no cares in the world. He stepped around the two men on the ground, gingerly stepping past the mess in front of Thrasyllus.

  There was a fine mist of dust in the air, and Didymus watched in horror as it settled to the ground in tiny drifts of gray and sooty black.

  Ash, he realized. All that was left of the priests who’d come here to honor their God, to seek their protection, to yearn for their comfort.

  All dust now. Swept aside by the steps of the living.

  The Holy Temple to which they’d devoted themselves was a testament to the love they had for their God. High above them the ceiling was a gold sheet between gleaming wood beams. The columns that held it up were smooth pillars of turning white marble so pure it seemed to glow. The floor was cut stones that had been fitted together so close that Didymus doubted a knife blade could slip between them. The marble rows of blue, white, and green, intricately patterned to stars and squares, rolled out before them, flanked by a magnificent seven-branched golden lampstand and a small acacia wood table overlaid with gold upon which stood twelve loaves of fine bread. At the head of the chamber was a linen curtain that descended from the ceiling. Colors swirled upon it—blues, purples, and scarlets—an image of fires that rose into golden threads of angelic beings rising up toward the arching heavens and an unseen God.

  Behind that veil, Didymus knew, was the Holy of Holies, the most sacred space of the Temple. It was there that the Ark ought to have been, had it not been taken away generations earlier to be saved from the Babylonians. It was there, no matter whether the Ark was there or not, that the Jews who’d died this day believed their God lived and breathed.

  Tiberius clapped his hands together, and the sound echoed up through the cavernous space of the Temple, emphasizing its emptiness. He turned to Didymus, who was still on the floor beside a weeping Thrasyllus. “So, scholar, we come to it. This is the reason I let you live. The Seal of Solomon. It’s here in this pla
ce.”

  Didymus said nothing. He looked to Thrasyllus, who was at last calming himself enough to nod.

  The demons were circling close. “You’re here for a reason,” Antiphilus said.

  The astrologer managed to nod. His breathing was coming in more regular movements.

  “Well?” Tiberius asked.

  Didymus took a deep breath of his own and tiredly rose to his feet. “We shouldn’t be here,” he said. “This is a holy place. It’s wrong.”

  Tiberius spread his arms to the walls of the building and smirked. “Do you believe in the God of this place?”

  Didymus opened his mouth but didn’t know what he should say. He hadn’t believed in God, but then he had. Now, after what he’d seen today … what God could allow such terror?

  “The Seal,” Tiberius said. “It’s here. Where?”

  Didymus stared at the man. What could he say? What could he do?

  “How many more need I kill?” Tiberius waved his hand into the air, gesturing absently to the fine particles of ash that still floated there. “I don’t want all this death. But I’ll kill as many as I need. I’ll burn this Temple to the ground if I need. Man, woman, and child—”

  At the librarian’s feet, Thrasyllus shuddered. “Beneath us,” he croaked. “The chamber.”

  Tiberius grinned. His gaze bored into Didymus. “Show me.”

  Didymus looked around. The chamber was indeed beneath them. The Cave of Souls, some called it. A hidden chamber cut into the solid rock beneath the exquisite tiles of the Holy of Holies, the very spot where Abraham had nearly slain his own son in honor of their God. It was there, in the hidden and secret place, that the Seal of Solomon was kept.

  He didn’t dare show them where it was. But did he dare not?

  “Show me!” Tiberius yelled. “Now!”

  Didymus flinched. “Inside,” he heard himself saying. “It’s inside.”

  Tiberius followed the scholar’s gaze toward the great veil of the linen curtain. “I see,” he said. And then, as if it meant nothing at all, he walked across the exquisite stone floor of the Temple and pulled aside the veil.