The Gate of Fire (75 page)

The desert chieftain moved his hand across the blue-tinted map. "Control of the
Mare Internum
is the key. At Caesarea Maritima are both an Imperial naval base and a fleet. We will seize that fleet, recrewing the ships with our own men, and wrest Rome's monopoly of the sea from them. Then, Lord Prince, then we will see about the cities of the plain."

"A bold plan." Zoë's voice broke in, cold and formal. The men started, for they had not heard her approach. Odenathus rose and offered her his chair, sweeping his cloak behind him as he made a slight bow. Zoë met his eyes and summoned a smile, though her own were cold and bleak. She settled in the chair, her dark gray cloak falling around her like a thundercloud. She had pulled her hair back from her face in a severe manner, and the heavy clink of iron rings came as she arranged herself. Odenathus stood at the back of the chair, worried that she had taken to wearing armor under her linen blouse. "What do you intend after that?"

Mohammed sat again, his face grave, and he waited a moment, watching the face of the young woman opposite him. Odenathus could see that the desert chieftain was troubled by the pain and sorrow etched so clearly on the young woman's face.

"Lady Zoë, I intend to seek out Emperor Heraclius and put him to death for the murders he had caused and the destruction he has wreaked. I hope he will come against us, as is his wont, with an army. Then I shall face him on the field of battle and the Merciful and Compassionate One will judge. But should he hide in his city of stone, then I will dig him out. For that, I need a fleet."

Zoë smiled, though there was no warmth in it.

"You would storm the walls of Constantinople with this rabble?"

Zamanes flinched at the scorn in her voice, but Odenathus put a gentling hand on the Prince's shoulder.

Zoë ignored the motion. "I served, of late, in the army of the Empire," Zoë said. "You would face not thirty thousand men, or even fifty thousand, but upward of a hundred thousand trained men. Your enemy commands fleets, he commands thaumaturges, he commands an empire. You are a desert bandit with only the men at your back to support you."

Mohammed nodded, then said, "And you, my lady, what are you? You have taken up the same cause, to repay the death of your beloved Queen. How will you take vengeance?"

Zoë stiffened, and her pale face became ashy. She rose from the chair, her hands curling into fists.

"The Queen," she rasped, "is not dead! She sleeps, waiting for her time to return. She will lead us to victory. Can your great and merciful God say the same?"

Mohammed blanched and put his hands on the arms of his chair, willing them to lie still. "The voice that speaks from the clear air has told me what I must do. My men and I will stand against the dark powers that threaten the earth. I have seen them with my own eyes. We submit to the will of the Loving and Compassionate One, and we will be delivered."

"Will you?" Zoë sneered down at the desert chieftain. "Can your God of the Wasteland restore strength to the weak limbs of my Queen? Can He raise her up, that she might walk among us once again, hale and strong? Can He?"

Mohammed matched gazes with the young woman, seeing horror and pain and madness there. He slowly shook his head. "The God passes judgment upon all men. If He wills that she rise again, she will. And if not, it is not our place to question His will."

"I have no use for your God, bandit! May He rot and burn in His own fire." Zoë wrapped her cloak around her with a snap and strode away, leaving her angry words ringing in the air.

Odenathus made to follow her, but then stopped himself and turned back to the table. "My apologies, Lord Mohammed. As you see, my cousin took the loss of the Queen badly."

The Quraysh nodded, looking after Zoë as she walked away down the terrace. His face was sad. "She is not alone in that."

A centipede, long and glistening, a deep burnished red highlighted by glossy black chitin, rippled across a floor of fitted stone. A shaft of light, sparkling with slow-falling dust, fell across the vestibule of the grave house. In the midday sun, even attenuated by its fall from the window high above, it burned like fire as it crossed the doorway. Within, past the threshold, cool darkness held sway. The air was a little thick, filled with dust, and it tickled the throat. The centipede slithered down the steps and disappeared between the stone feet of a statue standing at the side of the door.

"Where are the gods and their divine justice?"

The voice was raspy with exhaustion. A young woman, her thin shoulders marked by the sun, and half clad in a grimy black robe, crouched against the wheel of a wagon. Her hair fell in a tangle around her face. The wagon sat in the center of an old tomb, one of many cut from the soft sandstone walls of the canyons that ringed Petra. The doorway, broad and imposing, had been just wide enough to allow it entrance. The Queen's servants had sweated and groaned in the darkness to place it here, but now they were gone, leaving the woman and her burden behind.

"Where are the Furies and their whips? Does not Zeus Ammon look down from on high and see the sins of men? Where is his wrath?"

The sides of the wagon had been etched and carved by the soldiers. An echo of a city filled with prosperous families and gardens and high, arching colonnades peered out of the wood. The work was not done, only two sides of the wagon were finished. The other surfaces were marked with lines and curves in bits of chalk and cut with the tip of a knife. Slim, fluted wooden posts had been erected at each corner. These held up a canvas awning. The top was rough and unfinished, but hidden beneath, where it could have been seen only by the passenger, was a painted sun of many rays.

The woman stood, shakily, and leaned on the side of the wagon, pressing her forehead to the smooth wood. She spoke, but did not know that the words flowed, aloud, from her mouth.

"This man, this Heraclius, should be driven into the field with invisible whips and stings! His flesh should run red with the blood of a thousand cuts. Madness should be his reward."

Within the wagon, laid on a soft bed of cloths and dried flower petals, the withered corpse of a woman of middle height and age lay, half curled. Robes of silk and linen had been placed upon her with care. Her flesh was dry and brittle, and broke easily, cracking into a slippery dust with mishandling.

"Why do the gods not strike him down? Why does he rule the land in glory and splendor? Why is his name praised to the heavens?"

Zoë ground her fist against the stone of the tomb wall. Blood seeped from her knuckles. There was a heat in her mind, a fury and a rage, and it seeped out of her, smoking from her fingertips. It washed over the stones, cracking and discoloring the old worn surface. The spots of blood slid down the wall, hissing like a snake. Black scoring marked their passage.

Daughter, do not despair
.

Zoë turned, her eyes wide, the world wheeling around her. The tomb seemed both infinitely vast and crushingly close. She fell to her knees, mindless of the pain. Something rustled in the wagon, the sound of garments shifting. There was a skittering sound, and the
click-clack
of beetles. The sound filled the space, enormously loud, and Zoë pressed her hands against her ears, crying out.

You are the child of my heart,
said a voice from the wagon, echoing in her mind.
I bore no child of my own flesh, yet you came to me and filled those empty places. You are my daughter of spirit. In you, I live. In your memories and thoughts, I am still alive.

The sound died, leaving a great stillness. Zoë crawled to the edge of the wagon and gripped the planks for support. The rustling came again, and something moved at the lip of the panel. Zoë pressed her forehead against the smooth wood again, her eyes smarting with tears.

"Auntie, what should I do? This chieftain, this Mohammed, he desires to strive against Rome, yet the Persians who murdered you are still alive and loose in the world. How can I let you go unavenged? Fate pushes me west, yet my heart tells me otherwise..."

Dear child, life would remain in my breast and we would be sitting in my garden, laughing and talking, were it not for the perfidy of Rome. All those things that are lost to us would be restored... You must go west, and strike down the Roman. Let that be my vengeance.

Zoë nodded, tears streaming from her face, and made to rise. There was a soft touch on her hair and she froze, trembling. Fingertips stroked her hair, and the side of her head, soft and warm, and the air was filled with the subtle fragrance of orange and myrrh.

Maxian dozed on the short, springy grass that covered the floor of the grotto. He lay in sunshine, warm and comfortable, and above him the bowl of the sky was a fine rich blue. Individual clouds, each fluffy and white, drifted across his vision. Hawks and eagles soared on the updraft off the mountain slopes. Somewhere among the mossy stones, frogs peeped from a hidden spring. The Prince felt almost content, lulled by the sleepy rumble of the mountain. Respite from the crawling insidious attack of the curse drew him here each day, and he spent long hours sleeping or reading, his back against one of the boulders. He missed Krista dreadfully, particularly when he thought of the lunch hamper she could pack.

Often he looked up suddenly, expecting to see her walking out from the shade of the overhanging trees.

It had taken him three days to mark her absence, and he still felt ashamed by that. The hurly-burly of setting up his library and cleaning out the buildings at the villa had occupied him, but she had been such a constant presence for the past year that he should have known immediately when she was gone. Gaius Julius and Alexandros, for their part, had not seemed to care at all. The Walach boys had moped around for a day or two before the Prince had given them leave to hunt for their dinner on the estate grounds. Then they were rarely seen at all, though there was a fine fresh supply of venison, quail, rabbit, and pheasant for the dinner table.
What we lack
, he thought sourly,
is a cook to make good of it
. "No," he said suddenly aloud, and he rolled over and stood up. "That is the least of what I miss about her."

Maxian looked around and brushed his hands clean of the rich black dirt that lay under the grass. "Galen was right," he mused to himself. "With some sleep and rest, my mind is much the clearer."

Despite seeming indolent, he had been thinking hard the past day. He was sure that Krista had left him because she had come to view his quest as a mad obsession. He could not fault her, for twice it had nearly cost her life. To his mind, he reasoned that she had come to the conclusion that the Oath could not be overturned and to remain with him would mean—in short order—her death. To preserve her life, she had gone away. Likewise, he was confident that she would not attempt to interfere with him once she had found safety.

The puzzle that racked him now revolved around what he should do next. He was greatly troubled by what he had done and condoned in the last year. A man he thought of as a good friend—the little old Persian wizard Abdmachus—had been tortured, killed, and then raised as his thrall
by his own command
. Before even that had happened, men and children had been abducted by his servants and subjected to heinous torments and experiments in the cellars under the Egyptian House.

"These are not the acts of a man in his right mind!"

Maxian pressed his palms against one of the big glassy black boulders that surrounded the grotto. He felt a curious sense of detachment from all that had occurred before he came to this place. The fire and darkness and blood all seemed part of another life, one lived by another man, one that had replaced the young healer Maxian when he had entered a boat workshop in Ostia. He rubbed his face, feeling stubble on his chin.
What must my brothers think? Galen seemed so odd when I saw him last—but if he knows what I have been about, then he, too, thinks me mad
.

The Prince thought of his mother, whose dowry had included this villa, and her kind face silhouetted by the light from the kitchen windows in their old house in Narbo. Would she approve of what he had done?
Surely not!
Maxian felt sick, and he sat down, the full import of all that he had done washing over him.
Gods! I am a monster
.

A memory intruded, breaking out of the waves of his guilt. It was his old teacher, Tarsus, speaking in the gallery of the school near Pergamum. The deep basso voice had thundered off the vaulted ceiling, sounding like the pronouncement of Zeus on high Olympus.

Each of you possesses a great power, highly prized and respected, that gift of the loving God that lets you bind and heal, restoring the withered limb and the sightless eye. Men will look upon you as a demigod, serene and without reproach. But you are not gods; you are men and prone to men's failings. This is the first law of our order—bring no harm to others by our actions
.

Maxian shook his head, but the memory that came upon him was strong, and he recited aloud what he had first learned that day:

"I swear by Apollo the physician, and Asklepius the teacher, and all the gods and goddesses, that, according to my ability and judgment, I will keep this Oath and this stipulation to reckon he who taught me this Art equally dear to me as my parents, to share my substance with him, and relieve his necessities if required; to look upon his offspring in the same footing as my own brothers, and to teach them this art, if they shall wish to learn it, without fee or stipulation. I swear that by precept, lecture, and every other mode of instruction, I will impart a knowledge of the Art to my own sons, and those of my teachers, and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according to the law of medicine, but to none others."

His voice shook, but he continued. "I will follow that system of regimen which, according to my ability and judgment, I consider for the benefit of my patients, and abstain from whatever is deleterious and mischievous. I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel. With purity and with holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick and no other reason. Whatever, in connection with my professional practice or not, in connection with it, I see or hear, in the lives of men, which ought not to be spoken of abroad, I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret. While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the Art, respected by all men, in all times! But should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot!"