Return (Matt Turner Series Book 3) (39 page)

She sighed. “We’ve many religions within these walls. For some, to be left unburned or unburied is to be cursed to the dark abyss.”

“So you’re going to help out all those disciples that happened to die in the Library? You going to drag up all the other bodies lying everywhere else, too?”

He was too smart.

“Please just let me by. The Army will see us any second now.”

He picked her up by the waist, set her on the top of the staircase, and pushed her inside the gate. “It’s too late for either of us to run off that way now. I’ll venture you know where this supposed secret exit is?”

“I do. It’s the exit I’ll take once I’ve set the fires.”

Barbillus sniffed. “You know what’s interesting? Plato said wars are occasioned by the love of money, and that’s been true of every real war I’ve seen or know of. Until now.” With one firm hand still clutching her arm, he jabbed the other thumb over his shoulder toward the booming parade outside. “There are safer things than war for a
muse
to inspire, but it’s impressive, nonetheless.”

Her hands now quaked, unsure if legionaries would at any moment surge through the gate beside them. She stared into Barbillus’s eyes. His reservations appeared genuinely rooted in concern for her, but it’d be impossible to make him understand, or care, and so she fumed helplessly and glared.

A soft, rhythmic ticking neared the gate, and a scruffy gray head emerged at knee height. A wandering city dog. It snapped its attention to the pair of unexpected observers. Patra and Barbillus stared at the appraising eyes.

Barbillus stomped a foot. “Hyah!”

The dog balked and retreated a step. It watched a moment and, determining no immediate threat, continued inside and sniffed the closest city guard’s bloody face. A couple tentative licks preceded a full face cleaning.

Barbillus scoffed. “No taste for foul meat.”

The dog raised its head to look around, and Patra’s repulsed expression turned to one of disbelief. “I
know
him … The guard …”

“Apologies … I didn’t … We had to-”

“No need to apologize,” she said coldly. “He was not a good man.”

The dog tramped across the sheet of blood expanding from the city guard’s gashed neck, laid down on a dry patch of pavement. It then set its chin on the ground at the edge of the red pool, and proceeded to lazily lap at the blood. An instant later, two more gangly dogs entered the gate—these less cautious than the first—sniffing about for an instant before slurping desperately at another spreading puddle.

“Thirstier than they are hungry,” he finally said, and turned to her. “I don’t plan to be here when they’re ready for the meat. I’ll set your damned fires.”

Before she could reply, he pulled her to the east wall’s recessed stairway. Practically carrying her by one wrist, they scaled the flights to the Library level.

He sat her down on a secluded landing behind a hedge. “I venture you won’t leave with only my word that it’ll be done?”

“If we both go, it’ll be faster.”

“Not so,” he said. “Stay here. Don’t move. They’re gathering in front, preparing for something. Could enter the gate any second now.”

Huddling low, he scrambled up one more flight to cut across the green beside the Library. Once she’d lost sight of him, she counted five, and edged up the low wall, peeking beneath the bushes down to the front gate. Indeed, soldiers were amassing on the road at the base of the stairs.

Focusing over the wall to the harbor, Patra observed the Imperial Palace, its facing walls aflicker. At each of the Palace’s corners, spiring flames danced high over long-dormant torch pots. Prudently, Zenobia had never taken up residence there, wary of provoking a response from Rome. The Emperor’s sensitivity (and reactions) to affronts was legendary long before a farcical performance brought him across the sea.

Kaleb…

Her heavy eyes drifted over the Palace’s private marina, past the royal wharf, and froze on another collection of quivering flames. While the bodies were too small to discern at this distance, it was clear from the moving torches and glinting helmets that a cluster of soldiers had assembled where the beach met the main dock. They appeared to be celebrating.

And then a previously dark patch lit up bright with fire, and Patra spotted the pole rising from the sand. They’d set someone on fire. Though she knew it was Kaleb, it couldn’t be Kaleb. The torches scattered, and someone doused the fire with a basin of water, and then the torches reassembled beneath the pole. They were still torturing Kaleb. But it wasn’t Kaleb. Her heart couldn’t allow it to be Kaleb.

Without even the tiniest spark of a plan, Patra dashed up the stairs, past the Library level, past the main level to the arboretum. Ensuring the area was clear, she went to the small grove of plum trees—an orchard set right up against the east wall—and she dropped to her knees, poking her fingers into the soil. She found the hidden door, slid it aside, climbed down into the dark, shallow tube, and slid the hatch back over—but stopped halfway. Barbillus would still need an exit. The side gates had all been barricaded from the inside and out, and he’d never find the other secret exit on the southwest terrace.

She pressed her shoulder to the hatch’s underside, and lifted with her legs. Straining to the very end, she raised it until it leant against the wall, then pulled her palla from around her neck, draping it from the corner as a flag.

Sitting down at the bottom of the vertical tube, she slid feet-first through the darkness, reaching the small tunnel’s end a moment later. The circular door rolled aside, and she eased out, rolling the camouflaged disk back to its recessed seat. Concealed by a low wall and dense foliage, she rushed to the terrace’s high point where the retaining wall met a walking path through the Musaeum’s tiered garden.

Now able to view the Canopic Road, the mass of legionaries in front of the Musaeum appeared to be lining up, facing away. Centurions called orders to their units, indeed preparing for a formal event. Patra expected this would be Antonius riding in a chariot to the Musaeum’s steps, followed by a delegation of torch-bearing aides.

Reminded of the Library, Patra glanced back and looked to the sky. Her chest welled with prickly relief. She held there a moment, watching the thin stream of smoke billowing from beyond the wall, and then tramped down the path to the empty Street of the Sema, running across to the darkened neighborhood ahead.

The following intersection revealed the Army’s apparent tail end, so she continued to the next transversal road, turning left toward the harbor, and sprinting as fast as her knees could bear. What would she do when she reached Kaleb? If his tormenters had bored of their depraved sport, and if air still filled his lungs, she’d find a way to end his suffering. Sickeningly, that’d be the best case. She entertained no more fantasies of rescue. Or perhaps he’d achieved death much earlier, and the fiends had had to relegate their sadistic appetites to desecrating a corpse.

* * *

Patra suddenly realized she’d blindly crossed the hundred-foot-wide Canopic Road, oblivious to the gathered Legionary. She hoped the reverse was true, as well, but if she were honest with herself, by entering the heart of the Palace District, had she not just surrendered any hope of escape? She’d followed Kaleb directly into agony, humiliation, and death, and yet she somehow continued on without hesitation, and with zero expectation of a favorable ending.

Because she didn’t love him as she loved Philip, or Wahbi, or Zenobia, or her scribes, students, Unza. She was
in
love with him, and his presence in a room produced the same warmth in her as simply knowing he was nearby, and it felt the same today as it had a decade ago. With her life’s work over, and her life’s one love stolen, what worth did life now hold?

Gasping, she staggered across the small bridge to the Poseidium’s rear wall. Roman soldiers were everywhere—walking about, carrying crates from the docks, guiding horses into the city, and all with a euphoric air. Laughter rose from the torch-lit Palace District as much as it had during Kaleb and Philip’s performance.

None seemed particularly mindful of her presence (slaves, too, moved about the area, also bearing a heavy burden of cartons), but with empty hands, this neglect wouldn’t last.

She slid along the thin ledge that followed the temple’s back wall. Only half a step from the wall flowed the Poseidium’s surrounding moat, and though only waist-deep, a clumsy splash, or even the resultant ripples around front, would not go unnoticed. Fortunately, the paths along the temple’s west side remained unlit, and therefore untraveled. Patra kept on the ledge—heel to toe—until reaching the open peristyle at the front where the enormous columns had been carved into statues of the Sea God.

No one stood inside the peristyle; however, Patra could see between columns a small group of legionaries kneeling before the reflecting pools in front—gratitude and prayers for this and future safe voyages.

Centurions’ urgent calls to join formations grew more insistent, and the divided troops scrambled to their units on the temple’s opposite side. Patra overheard garbled questions from legionaries, but fragments of a leader’s answer revealed enough: “City Guards already lit the building … displeased but the ceremony commences shortly.”

Unobscured by nearby hand torches, the main dock slowly materialized in the night’s blue glow, and with the Lighthouse rekindled beyond, a ghastly silhouette gained focus. It was the thick wooden pole, rising up from the shallows beside the dock, and attached to it a shrunken, crooked figure.

The soldiers’ cadence faded behind her and, after a quick scan of the area, Patra bolted through the peristyle, past the towering stone deity surging from the reflecting pool, and down the loading path to the dock.

Just as her first sandal hit the dock—such that she momentarily thought it her own doing—a sudden
pop
preceded an abrupt tearing, like that of fibrous, charred meat, and Kaleb’s body fell hard upon the concrete ramp. The sound recalled a taut roll of branches more than human being. He’d been suspended by rope, and his overlapped hands had been nailed to the post. The knot had apparently burned away, placing his full weight on the spike. It’d torn up through both hands.

Unwary of potential ears catching her startled whoop, she resumed to the blackened form ahead.

Her legs buckled as she came upon him, and she crumpled to the unforgiving surface. They had not stripped Kaleb entirely, as Barbillus’s man had recounted. Kaleb’s distinctive ornate sleeves had bonded to his arms and shoulder, and his frayed Kushmen’s tunic clung to his jutting sternum, all begrimed with dark soot.

Though she couldn’t bear to look, and her eyes blurred with relentless, stinging tears, she glimpsed his gaping, lipless mouth, where browned teeth held frozen in a pleading wail. With her face in her hands, she moaned and clutched her cheeks, wishing to claw out her own eyes. Kaleb’s beaming face flashed in her mind as he gloated about his superbly white teeth, countering someone’s suggestion that his grooming time could be better spent, since “
… we’ll all be bones or ashes in a few turns of the sphere,
” to which Kaleb quipped, “
But my skull will boast the purest, whitest gnashers around … The envy of the catacombs.
”

Patra wished to curl into him, or at least to caress him, but her horror acted as a barrier, repulsing her floating hand. She swiped away her tears and rocked with fury, murmuring over and over, “Kaleb … Kaleb … Kaleb …” What purpose had this served? Who would be saved or pardoned by his irrational act?

His chest caught her eye once more, and she noticed the oddly sharp edge of his breast bone.

Not a sternum!

She broke through her dread, wrapped her hands in her stola’s draping material, and grabbed it—seared cloth and burnt flesh flaking away as she pried it from his chest. The flax neck cord resisted two yanks before the scorched end snapped at the key’s loophole. Tunic material and thin patches of other matter remained glued to the surface, and she brushed the key wildly between stola folds until most of it was gone.

With his Library key cradled in her lap, she experienced an odd new relief, or perhaps peace, or vision of future peace. With this token that he’d kept on his person as often as she with her own key, she’d take him with her wherever she went. There’d linger only the memory of today’s agony that she’d need to overcome—and it would always be there, a flaming shield guarding a lifetime of beautiful memories.

* * *

Across the placid marina, rollicking laughter roared from the Imperial Palace as Patra crept from the beach. She’d plan to escape eastward, through the Jewish Quarter, but didn’t realize Romans still occupied the Palace, or any other structures along the curved shore.

She dropped to the grassy sand and peered past the water. A group of highly decorated Romans streamed out onto the flickering veranda, along with apparent non-soldiers in embroidered tunics.

The group—a dozen or more—swigged the remains of their wine as they edged toward the bridge leading down to the path. The very path from which Patra lay an arm’s length away. They had to be heading to the Emperor’s ceremony, where the entire Army presumably still waited. As if on cue, a grand Centurion helmet rose from the pack, its polished iron and brass gleaming in the torchlight. Spread wide above, a searing red crest of horse hair stood angled front to back. Little helping hands emerged from some unseen servant below, raising a molded bronze facemask, and affixing it at the helmet’s sides. While Patra couldn’t make out the mask’s details, it was well known that Antonius fancied himself the embodiment of a fierce wolf, and at such a ceremony as this, with the Emperor in attendance, no one but him would present themselves in such a way.

Patra needed to find quick shelter before they exited the torches’ cloaking shroud. She hopped to her feet, crossed the wide walkway, and ran into the floral orchard that lined the path. An array of thorns greeted her upon entrance, slicing one arm at various heights. With the joyous voices growing louder, she stifled a wince, and tiptoed alongside a decorative wall. If her memory and sense of direction were correct, the orchard continued to a subcottage of the Palace, and the wall ended at a gate leading to the Caesarium.