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

by Michael Livingston

  The current and the weight of the other man spun Didymus around. His feet had held on something—the broken edge of the first hole, he realized—and so for a moment he stood there. The water was pounding into his back, but less viciously than it had been moments earlier. Thrasyllus was in his arms, his body stretching out in line with the current. And before him, huddled against the far wall of the Cave of Souls, were the three demons and Tiberius, who still held his lamp high.

  Acme was holding the Shard of Water, and Bathyllus had the Shard of Fire in his hands. Both of them were smiling, their bone-white teeth shining in the lamplight.

  Antiphilus stood between them. He was smiling, too. In one hand he held the Seal of Solomon, the Shard of Aether. His other hand gripped the back of the neck of Tiberius. The son of Caesar was crying, but the demons showed no notice. One by one they placed their hands on the Seal. Tiberius, at a whisper from Antiphilus, reached up with a trembling hand and did the same. For a moment Didymus saw his dark eyes shoot open with horror and revulsion.

  Then all four of them, in a bright flash of twisting light, seemed to fold in on themselves. There was a pop of air rushing into and out of the chamber all at once.

  And they were gone.

  For several heartbeats, Didymus stood in stunned silence within the sudden darkness.

  Nothing could stop them now, could it? Not with such power. Not with so many Shards.

  The water had ceased to rush into the Cave of Souls. It was only a trickle now, draining down out of the Temple above.

  Light grew in the air behind him, casting his faint shadow against the empty chamber. The storm was gone, he supposed. The sun was coming out.

  No, he reminded himself. They didn’t have all the Shards. Not yet.

  So there was still hope.

  He just had to get to Petra. Somehow beat them there. Somehow save the Ark.

  The prospect daunted him. He had no idea how to do it. But every journey, no matter how long, began with a single step.

  He’d heard that somewhere. Or read it. He couldn’t remember now.

  But it was true, he supposed. Start with a single step.

  Thrasyllus coughed in his arms, and Didymus shook himself into movement. “Come on,” he said, more to himself than the still unconscious astrologer. “Let’s start with getting out of here.”

  16

  NEW POWERS

  PETRA, 4 BCE

  The horizon had the faintest hint of dawn beneath a sky still strewn with stars as Selene stood with Pullo beside one of the obelisks atop the Mount of Moses.

  “There she is,” the big man said. “On the wall of the High Place.”

  Following the line of his outstretched finger, Selene saw the shape of a young woman outlined in the predawn darkness ahead of them, standing atop what appeared to be a wall across the plateau. Miriam appeared to be staring down at the lights of Petra, settled like fireflies in the valley below, but Selene was certain that the young woman she’d just met wasn’t looking at the twinkling stars of the still-sleeping city. No. Her eyes would be beyond it, to the turn of the road that extended east out of the valley, where the last lights of the departing legion were disappearing in the distance—and Vorenus and the young Roman archer with them. “The High Place?” she asked.

  Pullo’s arm lowered. “It’s an open-air temple. A place of sacrifice to their gods. She climbs up here a lot, I think.” He let out a quiet and knowing laugh. “She climbs just about everywhere in these mountains.”

  “She is a strong young woman,” Selene said.

  “She’s had to be.”

  Selene looked up at the big man. She’d grown to be strong herself in their years apart—grown from a child to a queen—and still she felt the urge to be small with the mighty Titus Pullo. His voice was a comfort that brought back a childhood of peace that often felt like another lifetime. And his face, familiar despite the crisscrossing of weathered scars, still made her feel safe and protected. There was such strength in him, as there was in Vorenus, and yet they both had such deep warmth and love. “I could hardly imagine two better men for her to grow up with,” she said.

  Pullo blinked in the starlight. “We have tried. But we’re just a couple of soldiers, Selene. She should have been with family.”

  “Family isn’t always blood. You and Vorenus are family. Always have been.”

  “Maybe. But maybe it’s something more. Blood matters. And you’re the closest family she has now. The closest she’s ever met. You should talk to her.”

  Selene wanted to do so, she desperately yearned to do so, but she also didn’t know what to say. “And so … talk to her about what? About how Caesarion used to ruffle my hair?”

  Pullo smiled. “Maybe. Sure. Tell her about how her father was a real person, not just the stories of the two old men she calls her uncles.”

  “She calls you ‘Uncle’?”

  “It was the best we could come up with. Less conspicuous than having her call us ‘Father.’”

  Selene allowed herself to smile. “I like that. Uncle Vorenus and Uncle Pullo.”

  The big man shrugged. “I’ve been called far worse,” he said, and he turned to start back down the path toward the valley of the tomb.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m on watch tonight,” he replied, lumbering down the steps with a tired and halting gait that seemed almost obscene against her memories of the vigorous man of her youth.

  “And what if she doesn’t want to talk to me?”

  “You’ll think of something,” he said over his shoulder. “You were always a clever girl.”

  And then he was gone, and Selene was left alone. After a few moments she realized her hand had fallen into the satchel she still had around her shoulders. Her fingers were running across the cool outer stone of the broken Palladium of Troy. She drew them back and sighed, at once wishing she was back home with Juba and also feeling certain that this moment here was exactly where she was meant to be.

  Her eyes flicked back up to Miriam with sudden realization, and she began to walk in her direction. She knew what she wanted to say.

  By the time Selene had followed the path up to the processional archway that split the wall across the plateau in two, Miriam had jumped down to the other side. Dawn was growing closer, and in the thin light Selene found that the door in the archway was locked. And she was, she was certain, too old and too much a queen to be climbing the stone after the younger woman.

  Frowning for only a moment, she calmly moved her hand back into her satchel, and this time gripped not the Palladium, but the Shard of Air exposed by its broken top.

  She expected power to rise to her command. As often as she had used the Shard, she knew its ebbs and flows as surely as she knew the freckles of age upon the backs of her hands.

  Yet what arose when she touched the Shard was far more than what she expected. It was a torrent of energies, the roar of a tornado when she’d expected the shift of a breeze. It was a pulse of power that threatened to consume her all at once, like an oncoming wall of water that would seize her and drag her under its weight.

  She gasped, choked, and with a force of will managed to let go of the Shard.

  She’d closed her eyes against the shock of it, and when she opened her eyes she could still feel the power of the air.

  Selene stood beside the wall for almost a minute, catching her breath and collecting her thoughts. She’d gripped the blacker-than-black stone in her satchel for only a heartbeat, but in that brief second the energies that had gathered around her were unlike anything she’d felt before. It was greater than Carthage, and it had coiled around her like an invisible serpent.

  The power of that serpent was enough to strike out and obliterate the wall before her with only a moment’s thought. But she hadn’t been ready for it. And so she knew if she’d held on to it any longer that serpent would have tightened its coils and crushed her.

  She hadn’t been ready for it.

  But i
f she was …

  Selene straightened her back, adjusting her shoulders and raising her chin with the pride of the daughter of Cleopatra. She took a deep breath of the cool air. And then once more she reached into her satchel and gripped the Shard.

  The power erupted once more, but in her mind she held a shield, and she set herself behind it, driving back the power step by step until she had pushed it back into the stone and held it at bay beneath her straining grip.

  So much power. So much more.

  If Carthage had been a place sanctified by men, this mountain was sanctified by something much greater indeed.

  Still taking deep breaths to steady herself, Selene pulled forth a strand of the power that surrounded her. She let it run through her and then let it fall to coil itself in tongues of dust about her legs and feet.

  And then, trembling but a little, she floated up into the air, over the wall, and down onto the temple summit above the ancient city of Petra.

  * * *

  Child of Egypt, queen of Mauretania, Cleopatra Selene had seen many temples in her life. In Alexandria there had been temples to dozens of deities, large and small: from the forested hill of the Paneum, where they honored the goat-man god of the wild, to the great temple precinct of Serapis, the divine protector of the city. In Rome she had seen the Temple of the Greatest Jupiter high upon the Capitoline Hill. In Caesarea Mauretania she and Juba had restored and built their own great temples to gods they didn’t believe in. In Carthage, in flashes of memory she’d rather forget, they had seen the dark pit at the temple of Ba’al Hammon, where the ashes of sacrificed children fell.

  The High Place of Petra was like and not like anything she’d ever seen. As with so many other sacred places, it was high upon a mountain, but while most others were enclosed, the High Place was open to the sky and the wind and the rain. In that respect, she thought, it was a lot like the obelisks she’d left behind on the other side of the wall. They were similar to the many obelisks she’d seen growing up in Alexandria, but they also had an antiquity, a feeling of natural belonging—as if they’d always been a part of the mountain, not made by human hands. And they were exposed directly to the heavens above, almost as if they pointed there.

  The summit stretching out before her now had been cleared to a largely flat surface. There was a small square ritual pool not far away from where she stood, filled with clean rainwater that Selene could see shimmering darkly in the predawn light. And beyond it was a space that she assumed to be a sacred court: a rectangular area cut down a step into the mountain’s exposed rock core, perfectly leveled and covered over with what looked like pale white stones. At each of its four corners, and midway along its eastern side, were five waist-high stone slabs of various sizes. And between them around the paved courtyard, with two on the west side, were six thin stone pedestals—their crowning, upturned bowls meant, Selene suspected, to be filled with oil and set alight. Between the two pedestals on the west side, just at the point where the mountain gave way to the cliffs that dropped down toward the canyons and the city far below, the natural stone rose free of the white pavings in a stepped altar, with a raised stone fire pit beside it. Miriam, she saw, was standing before those darker shapes, in the middle of the paved court.

  Selene made no attempt to silence her footsteps, preferring that the girl hear her coming before she announced herself.

  Sure enough, she saw Miriam turn at her approach, see her, and then look back down the valley.

  Selene walked up until she stood beside the only child of her dead brother. In doing so, she saw now that the lowered court area wasn’t completely paved. Right in front of the two altars, right at Miriam’s feet, was a short rectangle of stone raised up a few inches from the flat surface. It was covered with carefully cut tile: a black rectangle traced its edge, encasing red and white diamonds that, in turn, enclosed a second black rectangle. At the center of that, unmistakably, was a six-pointed black star on a white stone background.

  “I didn’t expect to see anyone here,” Miriam said. Her voice was quiet, though whether it was from the clear sanctity of the site or to still her emotions, Selene didn’t know.

  “I can go,” Selene said. “If you want.”

  Miriam didn’t reply, and Selene looked out to see that the younger woman was, indeed, watching where the legion had disappeared. The lights were all gone. There was nothing to see there but empty canyons.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  Miriam pursed her lips. “No, it’s fine,” she said.

  “I miss my husband,” Selene said. “We had to be apart. Duty. I know that. But I still wish it wasn’t so.”

  Miriam said nothing, but Selene saw that the younger woman’s face seemed to relax a little. That was a start at least.

  “What was his name?” Selene asked. “The archer.”

  Miriam’s jaw clenched for a moment, and she froze, as if she was trying to decide whether to burst out in anger at the question. At last, she only let out a long and tired breath. “Abdes Pantera,” she said. “He was from Sidon.”

  “A strong name. I won’t ask if he’s a good man. He must be.”

  Miriam smiled at that, and she at last released her gaze from the distance and looked down at the oddly tiled stone at her feet. “He is. But I wasn’t thinking about him. I don’t know if that’s wrong or not.”

  “You were thinking of Vorenus,” Selene whispered.

  Miriam nodded, her gaze still focused on the rocks. “He knew how I felt. He offered himself to go with the legion because of that. He’s a good man. I knew that, but…”

  Her voice cracked as it trailed off, and Selene’s smile was sad. “Knowing he loves you is one thing. Seeing it is something else entirely.”

  “I just—I have this terrible feeling I won’t see him again.” Miriam was crying now, and when her head leaned toward Selene the older woman quickly leaned into it herself, allowing Miriam to rock over sideways against her. It was, Selene thought, the closest thing to a hug she was likely to get.

  “It’s just a show of force,” Selene said, patting the younger woman on the opposite arm as their shoulders leaned into one another. “Vorenus says it’s just a show of force, and I’m sure he’s right. This kind of thing happens a lot. Doubtful to be any fighting. And if there is, you know Vorenus will see him safe.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I know so.”

  They stood for a minute leaning into each other, the faint glow of a coming dawn growing around them, until Miriam pulled away and straightened her back. “This is an altar,” she said, looking up at the taller outcropping of stone before them. “They make sacrifices here.”

  “Of what?” Selene asked, unable to keep the image of the pit at Carthage out of her mind.

  “Animals mostly, I think. I’m not actually allowed here.”

  “Yet here you are.”

  Miriam smiled a little at that. “And so are you.”

  Selene allowed herself a quiet chuckle, and was glad for the feeling of lightness it brought to her heart. “I can’t say that I was ever one to do what I was told. Your father once said I was too smart for my own good.”

  Miriam’s gaze was upon the brightness of the eastern horizon, and for a moment she seemed lost in thought. “You’ve become a queen. So I think it turned out good.”

  The memory of Tiberius throwing her down upon her marriage bed at Vellica flashed through her mind, and Selene had to physically shake the recalled sensations away. Miriam looked over at the sudden movement, and Selene tried to smile it away. “Not every rule is meant to be broken, but some certainly are. Caesarion knew that.”

  Miriam’s face tightened, and she again turned her eyes to the east. “What was he like? My father, I mean. I … he died the night I was born.”

  Selene wondered whether she should reach out to embrace the young woman, to share the pain of his loss, but it seemed too much, too soon. “Your father?” She took a long, deep breath, picturing him in her mind. “Y
ou know, in one of my earliest memories of him he was practicing swordplay with Titus Pullo in one of the yards of the palace in Alexandria. It was right before the war started, I think. He was young and handsome and strong. Always was. I remember that word had come from some Roman messenger. My parents had to go to the court and make plans. Everyone in the palace was on edge and scared. And even then, young as he was, Caesarion was there for us. He was the older brother, but in truth he was like a father to me through many of those years. Pullo and Vorenus, too, I suppose. But Caesarion was always there. He always knew what needed to be done.”

  “Vorenus says he gave his life to save the Ark.”

  There was a hurt in Miriam’s voice, a pain like a persistent thorn, and Selene reached out to touch the girl’s arm. “He did and he didn’t, Miriam.” Earlier, before he’d departed to join the legion, Vorenus had told Selene about their years apart, and about the tragic night when he’d been lost. She’d seen it through the Roman’s eyes, but when she’d closed her own she could see it through the eyes of her dead half-brother, too. “He wanted to save the Ark, of course. He knew how important that was for all of us, but he also knew how important it was for your mother. He loved her, and she must have been an extraordinary woman for him to feel such devotion. So he did it for her.” Selene took a deep breath to control her own emotions and steady her voice. “But I can tell you that it wasn’t the Ark, or your mother, or the whole world that he was thinking of in the end. It was you, Miriam. With his dying breath he was trying to save you, to give you a chance. And seeing the woman you are becoming, he did the right thing. Right to the end. He loved you then, and he loves you now.”

  Miriam shuddered, and then she turned, tears flowing down her cheeks as she fell into Selene’s embrace. “I miss him,” she managed to say. “Both of them.”

  Selene pictured Caesarion. Her other brothers, Alexander Helios and Ptolemy Philadelphus. Her parents, Antony and Cleopatra. And the others who’d died to get her to this place, like Isidora. “I miss them all, too,” she whispered, and she let herself weep.