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

by Michael Livingston

  All he had that was truly his—all that he seemed to have left at all now—was tears.

  And worse, he hadn’t even known what to do. When it was over. When she was gone. He’d simply sat in the rising sunlight, holding the hands of the two girls who’d been as daughters to him in this life.

  Lapis had come then. And after her screams, after her shock, she’d helped him. She’d gotten him moving again, had made him take first one step and then another. Together, they’d moved the Ark. Together, they’d moved Miriam. Then together they’d taken Selene to a pyre of her own in the temple of Dushara. He’d not told the priests who she really was, but he’d paid well, and he’d been sure that they’d treated her with dignity. For a minute Pullo had stood watching while the Pharaoh’s daughter had gone to the torch. Lapis had cried. Heaven had swallowed the smoke. Then, as the flames were still feeding, still rising, he’d turned away and gone back to the home he’d once shared with the absent Vorenus. He’d turned back to the tasks of the living, to trying to save the life of Miriam, somehow kept from death by the power of the Aegis of Zeus.

  Wordlessly, Lapis had followed him. She had nowhere else to go. And she seemed to understand that her love of Selene meant a love for the young girl whose life the queen had given her own to save—and a love for the mysterious Shards of Heaven, which she’d helped bring from the tomb at the foot of the mountain to this little home in the city.

  It was hardly the best place for them, but Pullo simply didn’t know where else to go. He couldn’t move Miriam without killing her. The Shards couldn’t remain without losing them.

  Perhaps after Vorenus returned, he thought … perhaps together they could find a way out. They could buy the time they needed. They could find a new place to hide.

  Lapis was already dabbing Miriam’s brow with fresh water, so Pullo tiredly sat down in a chair beside the door and looked across the room to where the covered bulk of the Ark filled a hastily cleared space. Surrounded by the clutter of life, the Shard seemed both strangely out of place and entirely at home. The Palladium still rested in Selene’s satchel, which rested against the Ark’s base. He’d taken it from her broken body after she’d died.

  The other Shard, the Aegis, was still strapped to Miriam’s body, the breastplate once worn by Alexander the Great providing her fragile hold on life despite her terrible wounds.

  Her gut had been torn open by the demon. Pullo had seen it himself in a memory that refused to be stilled no matter how much he wanted it to stop. It was, without doubt, a mortal strike. He’d seen the strongest of men die from far less.

  But if not quite alive, neither was she dead, he reminded himself.

  It was a victory, he reminded himself. It didn’t feel like one, but it had to be.

  * * *

  Eight hours later, it was dark outside when Pullo took his turn with the buckets. The moon was a turned-up crescent in a cloudless sky above the sleeping city, and by its light the big man made his solitary way through the quiet and empty streets. There were cisterns dotted throughout the city, but one of the closest was uphill, on the slopes of the Mount of Moses—not far from the ruins of the now empty tomb where Selene had died.

  Pullo climbed to it, his tired feet carrying him thoughtlessly along a route he’d memorized years before. He went to the cistern, dipped his buckets to fill them, and then straightened his back and stood. Balancing the water, he turned and looked back out over Petra.

  Such was his exhaustion that he had stood there for several seconds before he realized that something had changed.

  The space west of the city, between its protective walls and the rising steps of its sustaining terraces, ought to have been an empty band of black. But it wasn’t. It was dotted with campfires and the illumined peaks of white tents.

  The Roman legion had returned.

  The buckets slid out of his grip and clattered across the stones, but Pullo was already moving. He was old. His body was broken. Yet he sped as fast as he could manage down the steps of the cistern and onto the paved streets. His feet knew the way back, and he ran with hope rising in his heart.

  If the legion was back, then Vorenus should be back, too.

  His old friend would know what to do. Together they could move the Shards. They could survive another day.

  Pullo—smiling, ready to wrap that little man in a crushing hug—lumbered around one last corner and saw the house ahead.

  All was as he’d left it. The door was still shut. The windows were still barred. But from within he could hear the muted sound of talking. He heard his old friend’s voice.

  “Vorenus!” Pullo shouted as he came up to the door. With a shove he had it opened, and he burst into the room.

  At first he was blinded by the light of the roaring fire, which was shockingly bright after the darkness outside. He blinked, his hand shielding his eyes, and after a moment he saw that Vorenus was indeed there. He was standing at the bedside of Miriam. He had turned in Pullo’s direction, but he made no move to come to him. His face, as Pullo blinked it into focus, was slack and unreadable.

  Lapis was seated in the chair beside the bed, right beside Vorenus. The rag in her hands was dripping water onto the floor, and she was staring off at the wall.

  “Vorenus?”

  Vorenus turned slightly, and Pullo saw that there was another figure in the room, standing in the shadows behind the two of them. It was a woman clad in black, her pale skin and perfect features just visible in the darkness of her drawn-up hood. She smiled at him, and her teeth reflected back the fire.

  Pullo gasped and reached for his sword. He felt his fingers wrapping themselves around the handle. He felt them tighten.

  Then he felt fingers on his own neck, and a piercing cold pulsed through his body, as if tendrils of ice were snaking through his veins.

  He wanted to scream out in shock. He wanted to throw himself back against whomever it was—whatever it was—behind him.

  Instead he just stood, locked in place, his arm still stretched across his body, his fingers still gripping the gladius at his side.

  “And this is Titus Pullo,” a voice said. Out from behind him, a figure came into view. He was a Roman, clearly, and he had thick black hair, streaked with threads of gray. He walked calmly in front of Pullo, who raged against the power that somehow held him frozen, willing himself to reach out and grab the man who’d killed Selene. He succeeded only in making the slightest of sounds in his clenched throat, a kind of whimper that made the man pause in his walk and turn to look at him with both disdain and pity. “Such a strong one,” he said. Then, staring at Pullo’s unblinking eyes, sneering with obvious superiority, the man who Pullo was certain must be Tiberius reached over and pushed the door shut.

  “You’ve certainly been busy,” Tiberius said, looking around the room in mock appreciation. “Not the grandest of accommodations, but I’d say it was well managed indeed given your status as wanted men. I honestly had expected you all to be hiding in a cave somewhere, like that tomb where you’d been keeping the Ark.”

  Inside, Pullo was at war. A foreign power had infiltrated his mind, gripped it and somehow severed it from his body. It was as if he were a prisoner within himself, straining in vain against unbreakable shackles of ice. But he refused to give up. The man who’d killed Selene was here. Despite the cold, all he could see in his mind were the flames.

  “I do need to thank you for gathering the Shards up for me. Earth, Air, and Life, too,” Tiberius continued. He pointed at each in turn before allowing his attention to linger on Miriam’s fevered form. “Such a lovely young girl. I’d say that it’s a pity her life is bound to the Shard, but just as you came in to join us we were discussing what an added benefit that could be. So all is well that ends well. I do wonder whose little bastard she is, though.”

  Tiberius, sneering, looked from Pullo to Vorenus, then settled back on Pullo. Though the big man couldn’t move, Tiberius seemed to recognize the struggle within him. “Let him speak for a
moment,” he said. “Just a few words.”

  He felt the grip on his mind loosen, and abruptly his fist clenched in his rage. He panted from a sudden exertion of the mind. “You killed Selene,” he gasped, and then the icy grip tightened upon him and stilled his tongue once more.

  The look of haughty disdain on the face of Tiberius vanished in sudden and hot rage. “Selene is dead because of you!” he shouted. “You fought and she died!”

  He spun on his heels, seething, gesturing wildly at the Shards. “She shouldn’t have even been here. She didn’t need to be here. It was that fool, Juba. I know. He pushed her to come, not man enough to come himself. Nothing but a simpering beast.” He paused, panting, and finally turned back toward Pullo as if he had some means of responding. His eyes were shockingly dark and hollow. “No, old man. I didn’t kill her. She was meant to be mine and you took her from me. You, Juba, my father … you all took her from me.”

  “Tiberius, it is time,” came a whispered voice from behind Pullo.

  The son of Caesar’s jaw flexed, and his shoulders shook, but after a moment he nodded and walked back to the door. Opening it, he called out. Seconds later, Pullo heard several pairs of footsteps crunching outside.

  Tiberius left the door open as he began to pace in the room, muttering to himself. One by one, three Romans entered and stood at attention beside the door. Two were centurions. The third was a rough-looking man with cruel malice in his eyes.

  “Orders, sir?” one of the centurions asked.

  Tiberius looked up abruptly, almost as if he had been startled. But his eyes focused quickly. “You’ll take the girl in the bed and this box here,” he said, pointing to the Ark. “Two carts. Don’t touch anything on the box but its poles. And if you touch the armor the girl is wearing I’ll feed your hands to dogs. Understood?”

  The Romans nodded as one. “And the others?” the first centurion asked.

  “Others?” Tiberius seemed confused, then looked around at Pullo, Vorenus, and Lapis. He shook his head as if clearing it. “Yes, of course. Kill them quietly. They’re of no use now.”

  “With pleasure,” the younger of the two centurions said. He seemed to be staring at Vorenus, and he slipped the blade from his side with genuine relish. The others did the same.

  Tiberius turned away, and Pullo saw the hot light of the fire glowing red on his skin. For a moment, it almost looked like he was crying. Then he blinked at the flames and his mouth creased upward. “No. Wait.”

  While the three Romans froze, the son of Caesar walked closer to the fire. He picked up the metal poker and shifted the wood there. The flames kicked higher as the fuel moved. “Send the others in to take the things we need. Then we’ll send a runner to the legion to attack the city.” He smiled to himself as the flames grew before his eyes. “You three, meanwhile, will bind our friends here and gag them tight. You’ll stay back, and burn it down behind us. Let the flames take them alive.”

  “Burn the house, my lord?” one of them asked.

  “The house. The city. Fire and battle and blood.”

  24

  THE SHARDS GATHERED

  PETRA, 4 BCE

  Far above Petra, Didymus stood beside Thrasyllus at the edge of a cliff. The crescent moon was high in an impossibly clear sky, its two horns glowing sharp upon the great dome of glittering lights that was slashed through by the glowing shape of the Milky Way. It was stunning and exhilarating, a sky that lifted the spirit of man even as it emphasized his smallness within the cosmos.

  But neither man was looking at any of that. They were staring down at Petra, down where the smoke was billowing from a house in the middle of the city.

  Didymus was no fool. He knew the portent of the smoke. The small company of Romans that Tiberius had extracted into his service had dragged him and Thrasyllus up here the moment they’d all arrived in Petra, but Vorenus, ever under the spell of the demon behind him, had led Tiberius and the other creature into the city itself. He’d taken them to find Pullo and those with him. He’d taken them to find the Shards.

  The smoke, he feared, was an outward sign of the truth he feared in his heart. Pullo would be no match for the demons. No one could be.

  “I could jump,” Thrasyllus whispered.

  Didymus nodded. The thought had occurred to him, too. Just one step, the moment of flight and the fall, and it would be done. Silence. A new and eternal dark.

  “I can’t decide if that’s courage or cowardice,” the astrologer said.

  Didymus couldn’t look away from the smoke. He was crying, he realized, and he suddenly found himself thinking of the fall of Alexandria. He’d had a chance to go with Caesarion and the others to find the Ark, to go out on an adventure of impossibilities, but he’d instead gone back to the Great Library, back to be with his books. He’d thought at the time that his was an act of bravery, an act of defiance against the looming threat of Rome. But had he truly thought he could stop such powers? Or had he gone there to die, to burn with his books if the Romans put them to the torch? And if that was so, how was he any different from Mark Antony, who’d fallen upon his sword that night?

  He took a deep breath to clear the cascade of questions from his own mind. “Why did you stay?” he asked Thrasyllus.

  “Stay?”

  “In Alexandria. When the Romans came. You stayed at the Library with me. Most of the others left, but you stayed. Why?”

  Thrasyllus sighed. “I had no place else to go. And I guess I felt like it was my duty.”

  “You were a good man,” Didymus said quietly. “I’m sorry if I didn’t really say that before.”

  The astrologer smiled. “That means a lot, teacher. Thank you.”

  “Seems too little to say.”

  “It’s enough.” Thrasyllus finally turned away from the city to look up at the sky. “Why did you stay?”

  “Me?”

  “You didn’t have to be there. I remember how you came back just as the Romans were marching in.”

  “I was just thinking about that. I remember being close to despair, and I remember thinking that they’d probably burn it all down, but I guess … well, I guess I came back because I had hope.”

  “Hope?”

  “That being there meant I had some chance of doing something right.”

  “You did do something right,” Thrasyllus said. “You met with Juba, I remember. And you saved the Library.”

  “But in doing so I helped set us on a course to this,” Didymus said, nodding down at the fires below. Had it all been his doing? Was there something he could have changed?

  Thrasyllus let out a hollow laugh in the night, and Didymus looked over to see him shaking his head with a grim smile on his face.

  “What is so funny?”

  “I was just thinking how important we can think ourselves to be, when in truth there is so much else in the world at work.”

  “That sounds a bit like the astrologer in you,” Didymus said, but he smiled, too, for it was the truth. Each of them had played their part to come to this moment. Each of them had to burden the blame.

  “I suppose some things are just true no matter who says them.”

  Didymus nodded, then nodded again more forcefully. “And you’re right on both accounts,” he said. He followed the gaze of Thrasyllus up toward the stunning sky. It was indeed beautiful. “And I think maybe I was wrong back then to mock your astrology, your reading of the stars. I’m sorry for that, too.”

  “Don’t be. There are no gods to appease, no maps to bind us to our fates. We both know that now.”

  “But perhaps we are still bound, all of us, person to person and sky to sky. Perhaps in that truth, in that interconnection, we can see in the stars a reflection of ourselves and what we can do. Perhaps that makes you more right to look up than any of the rest of us who keep our faces down in our books.”

  Thrasyllus looked over at him with genuine gratitude, and he offered his hand. “It takes us all,” he said. “If God is dead, we’re a
lone in this together, right?”

  Didymus took the hand and earnestly gripped it hard and well. Then he nodded back up to the stars. “So, astrologer, what do the stars tell you this night?”

  Thrasyllus smiled and he looked back up. “I stopped believing long ago,” he said. “I don’t remember everything I once knew.”

  Didymus pointed up at Jupiter, at Scorpio, and piece by piece they filled in the map of the heavens. “You remember enough. What do they say?”

  Thrasyllus looked down at the smoke of the city, now flicking little lights of flame, then at a sound from behind them he turned to look back toward the High Place of Sacrifice atop the Mount of Moses.

  Didymus looked, too. There were upturned stone bowls atop six stone pillars around the paved rectangle that stretched out before them on the summit, and the Romans who had dragged them up here had filled them with oil and lit them. By those hungry lights they could see through the dimming dark to the source of the bustle of movement they heard. Farther to the south, the ridge was cut off by a high stone wall. There was a professional gate in the middle of it, and it had been thrown open. Men were marching through it. Two of them carried a litter, with someone prone upon it. The two remaining demons were there, too, as was Tiberius. Behind them came four more men, and atop their shoulders they held the long wooden poles of the Ark of the Covenant. Pullo and Vorenus were nowhere to be seen, and the scholar felt the pit of his stomach begin to fall once more.

  But in that moment Thrasyllus reached over and gripped his shoulder. “The stars say there’s hope in a leap of faith.”

  “A leap of faith?” For a moment Didymus thought once more of despair and the cliff. “What does that mean?”

  “I guess it means there’s still something more we can do,” Thrasyllus said.

  Didymus sighed. Faith? A leap? “It’s so little to go on.”

  “But it’s not nothing,” Thrasyllus said. “And one of us will figure out what to do. I have faith in that, I guess.”

  * * *

  How the demons knew what to do, Didymus did not know, but it was clear that they had a plan. At the foot of the ancient altar on the west side of the paved space, a rectangle of stone protruded perhaps a handsbreadth above the paved floor. It was tiled carefully, and from their vantage point at the northern edge of the summit the scholars both recognized in its making the same kind of design as they had seen in the chamber beneath the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem: the cut tiles formed a black outline of a rectangle, enclosing a pattern of alternating red and white diamonds around a second, smaller black triangle. At the center of that, in the center of the stone, the tiles were made to form a six-pointed black star on a white stone background.