“No,” Juba managed to say. It had only been two months since Juba had knelt, at last, beside the unmarked grave of the true father Caesar had never let him know. His hands gripped the rough wood of the table at his back. “You cannot have.”
“I watched them fight at the end,” Syphax said. There was no pride in his voice. No power. Only old sorrow. “Petreius was still alive when it was done. As my duty, I ran a blade into his heart.”
Juba closed his eyes, tried to imagine the scene as he had so many times in his young life. As ever, his father’s face was a blur. Only the darkness of his skin was familiar. But he could picture a younger Syphax there, too, waiting, with a shined and sharpened sword, for either of them to fall. “Yet here you live,” Juba said, opening his eyelids to glare fiercely at the priest. “A slave … you killed your master but didn’t follow him.”
The priest’s jaw quivered, his eyes red and sunk deep into tired sockets. “You’re right. I didn’t. I promised to fall upon my own sword after it was done. Promised them both. But I didn’t.”
Juba was just Roman enough to know the depth of Syphax’s dishonor on principle. He was just Numidian enough to think the offense against his true father’s memory worthy of death. And he was just young enough to act on the impulse of rage that washed over him.
He opened his mouth to call for Laenas.
“But for good reason, Juba!” Syphax cried out in a ragged voice. “I couldn’t let them get it. I couldn’t!”
The old priest’s eyes had a trance-like glaze now, riveted on the bundle of cloth on the table. Juba, despite his rage, decided not to call Laenas just yet. “Tell me of it,” he said. “Tell me everything.”
* * *
Juba stepped around the altar to Astarte, canvas bundle under his arm, and found Quintus and Laenas in the temple’s main room, sitting on one of the primitive stone benches. The old slave looked anxious. Laenas just looked sullen. Juba ignored them both for now, walking past them and through the antechamber out into the wind and the smells of the sea, his head too full of thoughts to speak just yet.
Syphax had indeed told him all that he knew. Juba was certain of that. The old man’s despair was too great to hold back to the son and heir of Numidia, especially once he knew the secret Juba had kept from everyone but Quintus: that he hated Rome, that he hated his adopted father. He hated them for his real father’s death. For the disgrace of the Triumph that was his earliest memory. For everything that Rome had done to his country.
Syphax had told him everything then. He’d told him far more than he could ever have imagined.
The Trident in his hands was indeed the weapon of gods. Poseidon. Neptune. But more than that, it was a weapon of the Jews, whose strange religion Juba knew little about—a fact he intended to remedy as soon as possible with the help of every book he could get his hands on.
And still more: there was an even greater weapon of the gods out there to be found, a weapon of the Jews that might give him the power to accomplish the revenge he’d long hoped to achieve. An ark.
The wooden door to the temple squeaked open and shut. Quintus tentatively shuffled up behind him. “Juba?”
The sixteen-year-old focused his eyes on the distant horizon, where the darkening sea met the darkening sky. Lightning flashed there, silent but threatening.
Syphax didn’t have all the answers, but the old priest knew who did. “Thoth knows,” he’d said, again and again. The source of the Trident’s power, the nature of its strange black stone, the whereabouts of the wondrous ark … Thoth knows.
At first, Juba had thought it was no answer at all. Thoth was an Egyptian god, like the Roman Mercury, a figure who moved between the world of gods and the world of men. A deity of so many faces he seemed to be everything and nothing all at once: god of magic and medicine, god of the dead, god of the moon, god of writing and wisdom, even the founder of civilization itself.
Thoth would naturally know the answers to questions. Yet Syphax had spoken with a pragmatic earnestness, as if Juba could easily get information from Thoth.
“So where is Thoth?” Juba had asked the priest of Astarte.
And, after some final persuasion, Syphax had answered: “Thoth was in Sais.”
Sais, Juba knew, was the cult center for the goddess Neith, the Egyptian counterpart of Astarte, which explained the priest’s knowledge. Perhaps it even explained how he’d come to have the Trident. Then he’d caught the nuance in the priest’s words. “Was?”
The old priest had smiled grimly, his pale teeth smeared with red. “The Scrolls are in Alexandria.”
The truth at last. It wasn’t Thoth himself who had the answers, but the legendary Scrolls of Thoth, in which all knowledge, it was said, could be found. And the Scrolls were in Egypt, in the Great Library. Find them and he’d have the power, and the vengeance, that he sought.
“Juba?”
The lightning pulsed again, and beyond the wind and the breaking of waves Juba heard a quiet rumble. Was it from the earlier flashes? Or was it the deep of the sea, calling out for its master? Juba swallowed hard, resisting the temptation to touch the metal head of the Trident in its canvas bundle, to see if it was warmer now. Instead he took a deep breath to clear his mind, to focus on the tasks immediately at hand. He needed to do more research. More than that, he needed money. Getting the Scrolls of Thoth from the Great Library and destroying Rome wasn’t going to come cheap, after all, with or without a weapon of the gods. And there was surely no better time to strike than now, with war between Rome and Alexandria threatening to turn the world to chaos.
“We’re returning to Rome,” he said over his shoulder. “As soon as possible. There are things I need to do there.”
“Of course,” Quintus said, his voice uncertain. “Laenas wants to know, sir, what about the priest?”
Juba blinked away the beads of salty water that were starting to cling to his eyelashes. What to do about the priest? He was a loyal Numidian, after all, one of the very people Juba was going to save from Rome. Yet he’d abandoned the promise made to Juba’s father, no matter his reasons. And, truth be told, he knew far too many things that were best kept secret, even if Juba didn’t yet know the fullness of his course. Viewed through the lens of logic, the decision was easy, even if saying it was hard. Juba wondered if his Numidian father had ever felt the same. No doubt his adopted Roman one never had. “Tell Laenas to kill him,” he finally managed to say. As the words escaped his lips Juba knew for certain that he would not sleep well this night. He wondered how he would ever sleep soundly again. “Tell him he’ll get his thirty coins if he does it quickly.”
Quintus hesitated for a moment, a slight stammer his only response. Then Juba heard the sound of the temple door opening and closing again, leaving him alone.
Well, perhaps not alone, Juba corrected himself, watching the approaching storm and wondering whether the gods were real.
2
THE LAST QUIET MOMENTS
ALEXANDRIA, 32 BCE
Lucius Vorenus, feeling a familiar tiredness in his forty-five-year-old bones, leaned against the sun-bleached stonework atop the old palace wall and peered down into the cleared square of one of the inner courtyards, where Caesarion was practicing his sword work in the fading light of the day. Working against Vorenus’ old friend Titus Pullo, the fifteen-year-old co-regent of Egypt had stripped to his loincloth to reveal a body filled out with lean muscle that flexed beneath a sheen of thick sweat—a fact that Vorenus could see did not go unnoticed by the small gathering of the remaining servant girls in the shadows, who whispered between giggling smiles as they watched the young man training. A few months ago there might have been dozens more spectators even in this most private of spaces within the sprawling expanse of red-roofed buildings, pillared arcades, and daunting towers that made up the royal palace, but the threat of Rome had changed all that. For the safety of the royal family, the inner wards of the palace were far emptier these days, even as the city continued to te
em with busy life around them.
Vorenus and Pullo had long disagreed about whether it was appropriate to teach Caesarion how to fight in this way. After all, as pharaoh of Egypt, Caesarion was, according to Egyptian rite, the earthly embodiment of the god Horus, and Vorenus thought it might appear inappropriate that a god be trained in the mortal ways of men. While the uneasy peace with Octavian had lasted, Vorenus’ opinion had carried the day. But now war seemed increasingly inevitable.
The clash of steel echoed loudly in the little courtyard as Caesarion overreached on a thrust and was promptly disarmed by the experienced Pullo. Vorenus had never known the big man to be patient with anything in his life, but he was loyally so with Caesarion, stooping to pick up the pharaoh’s weapon from where it had clattered down amid the red and white tiles. He handed it back to the young man even as he quietly told him where he’d gone wrong.
Though he still felt uneasiness about such martial training for the pharaoh, Vorenus could hardly deny its effectiveness. Caesarion was a gifted and able student, qualities that extended, according to the chief librarian who acted as his tutor, into the intellectual realms as well. Indeed, the Greek Didymus often compared the boy’s wide-ranging capabilities to those of his father Julius, who was at once one of Rome’s finest generals, orators, politicians, and warriors. Of course, all those involved with the child’s upbringing had kept such comparisons out of Caesarion’s earshot by mutual and long-standing agreement. He was already the boy who could inherit the world, after all. No sense in giving him even more self-importance.
In the sunny courtyard the two men were in melee once again, dancing across the patterned tiles, and Vorenus turned away from the wall, thinking he might make a surprise inspection of the barracks. This was certainly no time to allow anyone to get complacent, the Roman guardsmen least of all. He didn’t get two steps, however, before one of the native guardsmen appeared, hurrying up the stairs from the depths of the palace. “Messengers at the gate, sir,” the Egyptian said once he was close. “Requesting entry into the palace.”
“So?” Messengers arrived daily, if not hourly, these days—all part of Antony and Cleopatra’s efforts to have the most up-to-date information of the events happening around the Mediterranean. War was, after all, in the air, which was also the reason that messengers were never allowed in the palace itself, not unless … “Wait. Messengers from where?”
The guardsman nodded even as he was starting to beg leave for the disturbance. “Out of Rome, sir. Bearing dispatches for Lord Antony. We thought you’d want to be informed.”
Vorenus felt his stomach drop. Such messages could only mean that the whispers of war in the air would soon be the heavy footfalls of war on the ground. “Yes. Thank you. Keep them at the inner gate. I’ll be along shortly.”
After the Egyptian hastened back down the stairs, Vorenus instinctively raised his head to gaze out across the glittering waters of Alexandria’s Great Harbor, toward distant Rome, as if some reflection of the impending doom might be found there. Only the massive height of the Great Lighthouse on Pharos, and the slow-curling smoke of its distant fire, met his eye.
The sound of happy children brought Vorenus’ attention once more to the square below. Cleopatra’s three youngest—the eight-year-old twins Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios, and the littlest one, four-year-old Ptolemy Philadelphus, all fathered by Antony—had appeared from the halls of the bright-stoned palace to cheer their older half-brother as he finished the last of his lessons. Behind them swept Cleopatra herself, her thin gown draped close to her sleek body, the cloth whispering to the steady sway of hips that, even as she neared the age of forty, could still drive men to madness. Her raven-black wig fell in perfect straight drapes against the muscles of her back, its sheen matched only by the oiled, rich tan of her smooth skin. She tousled her eldest son’s close-cropped dark hair as the other children gathered around him, then spoke to Pullo.
Pullo, predictably but almost pathetically, still found it difficult to talk in her presence, so it was no surprise that when the queen finished speaking he only gestured, raising an arm to point up to where Vorenus leaned against the wall, watching.
Cleopatra turned, her dark eyes glinting with a promise of unbridled seduction that was, for her, a look of natural habit. Her red-painted lips parted in a weary but thrilling smile. “I’m going to call a council,” she said, her voice strong despite the breathless sound of it. “No matter the word from Rome. Antony fears the worst.”
No, Vorenus thought: Antony didn’t fear the worst, he expected it. For all Vorenus knew of the man, Antony feared nothing. “I’m going now to see to the messengers,” he called down. “Pullo can oversee the council preparations.”
Cleopatra glanced over to the uncomfortable Pullo, nodded ever so slightly in the sunlight, then floated off into the shadows, children in tow. Caesarion lingered for a moment, uncertain, before a word from Pullo sent him hurrying after her.
Satisfied that Pullo could handle things for at least a little while, Vorenus took a deep breath and strode off to greet the men who might be bringing doom to the doorstep of Egypt.
* * *
When Vorenus arrived, the two messengers were dismounting from their horses in the large yard between the massive stone facades of the main hall of the palace and the walls of the royal residences, a public space that remained relatively untouched by the threat of war. Six Egyptian guardsmen stood in a loose ring a respectful distance around the outsiders, and the typical tumult of the yard—a buzzing, dizzying chaos of servants and soldiers, priests and politicians coming and going seemingly everywhere at once—was parting around them with barely a second glance.
The two men, Vorenus saw at once, were unquestionably Roman: their legionnaire uniforms differed from his own only in the amount of road dust upon them. Vorenus therefore greeted them properly as fellow soldiers of Rome, thumping his fist to his chest before bringing it forward in a traditional salute. One man returned the gesture immediately, as if from reflexive instinct. The other man, shorter and stouter than his companion, his right cheek marked with a long, finger-width scar, hesitated for a moment before clumsily returning it.
Vorenus stifled the urge to correct the scar-faced man, reminding himself of how long a road the two men had no doubt just taken. In his early years, long before he and Pullo caught Caesar’s eye in Gaul, he, too, had carried dispatches. He could still remember the bone-tiredness of arrival, when all a man wanted was a bath and a bed. “Lucius Vorenus,” he said by way of introduction. “Senior centurion of the Sixth Legion of Rome. Welcome to Alexandria.”
“Thank you,” the first said, apparently the man of rank between them. “We bring news from Rome.”
“For Mark Antony, I understand.” Vorenus paused while a noisy cart rambled by. “A council is already being gathered to hear it, at the call of Cleopatra.”
The messenger swallowed hard, looked down at his filthy traveling gear. “I don’t suppose there’ll be time…”
“I doubt it,” Vorenus said. “They’ll not want to wait. We’ll see to the horses. And afterward a good meal and a bed.”
The man’s eyes were tired by more than travel, Vorenus could see. The news they brought was clearly ill. “I understand. Thank you.”
“Now,” Vorenus said, trying to keep his tone lighter than the sinking feeling in his heart. “Your orders, please.”
“Of course,” the messenger said, retrieving a small cylinder from his saddlebag.
Vorenus pulled the small slip of parchment from inside the case, taking note of the signatures and seals upon it. “Stertinius of the Seventh Legion,” he said, looking up from his reading. The man he’d been talking to nodded and stood a little straighter. “Then that must make you,” Vorenus said, glancing back to the paper before turning to the second man, “Laenas.”
“That’s right.” The scarred man’s voice had a rough, almost angry quality to it. Parched from the road.
“Not of the Seventh
?”
Laenas’ brow furrowed for a moment before he simply shook his head.
“You don’t talk much.”
“Don’t have much to say,” Laenas growled.
“Just a messenger, then?”
When Laenas only nodded, it was Stertinius who spoke. “Laenas is with Octavian’s household,” he said. “He was, ah, personally assigned to accompany me, to see the message delivered.”
Vorenus felt his face start to frown but forced himself to keep up a professional appearance as he rolled up the orders and pocketed them. “Very well. You’ll both need to surrender arms to the guard. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that you’ll be under close watch in the council.”
“Of course,” Stertinius said tiredly. “Though I might attend alone.”
“Oh?” Vorenus turned to Laenas. “I thought you were personally assigned?”
“To get the message here,” he said. “Job’s done.”
Vorenus was opening his mouth to ask another question—about how such a lazy man got to be so well regarded by Octavian—when he saw the scholar Didymus walking past, characteristically oblivious to the hectic commotion of the yard moving around him. Vorenus and Pullo had grown to be firm companions with the children’s tutor over the years; despite his near-lifetime of service in Egypt, the last dozen years as head of the Great Library in Alexandria, the Greek man shared their sense of outsider status in the ever-bewildering court of Egypt. Vorenus was glad for the friendly face. “A bit far from your books, aren’t you, Didymus?” he called.
Out of the corner of his eye, Vorenus thought he saw Laenas’ head jerk up at the mention of the Greek scholar’s name, but when he turned to look the Roman was only unlashing one of his small saddlebags.
For his part, the scholar turned his direction of travel and approached, pushing back his haphazard, prematurely gray hair to reveal a half-guilty grin. “Difficult to leave my dear Homer behind, but I’ve time to spend with the children before an early bed.”
The Shards of Heaven Page 3
