The Seven Hills (15 page)

He folded his hands and leaned forward earnestly. "You do understand, don't you, that you people are quite insane?"

"If so, it's what our god requires of us. And these prophets are raising the people, haranguing them to rise against you and against Jonathan."

"And the king permits this? They are probably agents sent by Manasseh. He should have them killed."

"Prophets are sacrosanct," she said, sighing. "No matter how troublesome they may be."

"Oh. Like tribunes of the people?" He thought for a minute. "Why don't I just send some of my men to kill
them? Jonathan can hold me responsible. And keep his own
hands clean."

"That would be a good thing, but there would be a riot anyway."

"Then we could just massacre the rioters and peace
would be restored. Jerusalem can easily spare a mob or two."

"Or you could just leave. Then they'd have nothing to complain about."

"Oh, please don't run him off so soon," said a voice behind Norbanus. He did not need to turn around. One of the twins had spoken. He knew that both would be there. He
had yet to see the two of them separated by more than a few
feet.

"Please join us, ladies," Tamar said, smiling without af
fection.

The twins drifted into Norbanus's field of vision. It was the only way he could think of to describe their motion:
They
drifted.
They seemed as languid and boneless as a pair
of somnolent eels, and as difficult to distinguish. Like Tamar they wore modest gowns, but their curly black hair
was uncovered and they wore elaborate jewelry. Their faces
were high cheekboned and full-lipped, their eyes emphasized with kohl. They looked, Norbanus thought, exactly like what they were: the final, decadent offspring of an ancient and corrupt civilization. Glorious Babylon had long disappeared, crushed beneath the boots of a succession of
conquerors, but her wickedness seemed to be imperishable.
Even in the rather relaxed court of Jonathan, the two were tolerated mainly for their mastery of Babylon's gift to the world: astrology. Their mother had been a star reader much valued by Jonathan and Manasseh's father.

"Are you going to tell us what the stars have to say about our guest's future?" Tamar asked warily. Norbanus knew that Tamar despised the twins, but like everyone else she was in
timidated by their command of the arcane art. It surprised him that, despite their incredibly exclusive religion, almost
all of these people had faith in Babylonian star augury.

The twins were attended by their own women, and as they sat, slaves slid a chair beneath each. "But of course," Glaphyra said. At least, Norbanus assumed it was Glaphyra. Her bracelets and other jewelry were studded with coral, and Glaphyra favored red stones: coral, carnelian, ruby. Roxana preferred blue: lapis lazuli, sapphire, amethyst. Of course, he realized, there was nothing to keep them from swapping jewelry to confuse people. Roxana raised her hand and a woman placed a scroll in her palm. She unrolled it with a flourish. "Our friend is a man of glorious promise, it seems," she announced. Her voice was identical to her sister's.

"What does your art tell you?" Norbanus asked, perhaps
a little more eagerly than he wished. In Egypt, he had toured
the splendid Temple of Hathor at Dendera and had been shown the Babylonian zodiac carved upon its ceiling in the days when the foreign art had penetrated even to the priesthood of that unthinkably ancient land. The priest had explained to him the significance of its signs and constellations.

This was an art very different from the auguries and haruspices of the Romans, and from the various divining arts of Norbanus's Celtic-Germanic ancestors. These only determined the momentary whims of the gods at a given time, and provided no long-range forecasts nor predictions of individual destiny. He was interested to hear what the twins had found.

"Titus Norbanus was most fortunate in the day and hour of his birth," Roxana said, "since it is not the custom of his people to take note of such things, being ignorant as they are in celestial matters. But he was born upon the night a certain comet appeared just above the rising crescent moon—"

"Itself a circumstance of greatest significance," Glaphyra
interjected smoothly.

"—and this was noted by the Roman augurs," Roxana went on, "who usually take omens through lightning, thunder and the flight of birds, but who also note extraordinary
phenomena such as comets and showers of falling stars."

"With this intelligence," Glaphyra said, "we were able to
discern with great precision the stars and planets governing our guest's destiny. We think they are the most propitious
to be seen since those of Alexander, almost two and one half
centuries ago."

Norbanus's cup hand remained steady, but the other tightened its grip on the chair arm. This was what he wanted to hear, but he cautioned himself against credulity. These two were schemers from the womb they had shared, but the king and nobles of this court put much faith in their craft, so it could not all be trickery.

Roxana spread the scroll upon the table. The papyrus was
covered with symbols and lettering that meant nothing to him. The two pointed out each, naming planets, signs, stars. They spoke of ascendancy, of declination, of precedents and fabled conjunctions, each twin taking up her sister's narration in a bewildering rhythm that kept him looking back and forth from one to the other until he was dizzy. Their presentation, he understood, was an art as polished as that of any Forum politician's.

"These are the signs of conquest, of mastery," Roxana said.

"But there is another," said Glaphyra, sweeping a gilded fingernail over a line of symbols that he thought resembled Egyptian picture writing and might as well have been, for all he could make of them.

"Another?" Norbanus said.

"Yes," Glaphyra informed him. "There is another, lesser
person, born near you, with signs that are similar but not as propitious. He bears the attributes of envy and jealousy. He will be your enemy all your days."

"But you are the greater," Roxana assured him. "You will
always prevail."

Scipio, he thought. It must be Marcus Scipio.

"You see," Glaphyra said, "how your sign entered the House of the Lion. Alexander's did the same. It meant that he was to take mastery of a foreign civilization and make it greater than ever before. Born in barbarous Macedon, he took up the cause of glorious Greece and spread its culture throughout the world."

And my forbears were Gauls and Germans, he thought.
But it is my destiny to make Rome master of the world. It is
true. It all fits. They are not frauds. How could they know this otherwise?

"What do the stars say of Manasseh?" Tamar asked. "A battle of kings is in the offing. Surely there are signs."

"The squabbling of petty monarchs are little noted in the stars," Glaphyra said, smiling. "Not like the fortunes of one such as Titus Norbanus."

"Indeed," Tamar said through gritted teeth.

Norbanus decided that he would have to keep these two close to him from now on. He would need to consult with them frequently. No doubt he could work something out with Jonathan, along with the business of Manasseh's horses.

Never forgetting, he reminded himself, that they were still a pair of scheming bitches.

The walls of Syracuse were formidable but,
Scaeva thought, they could have been a far more daunt
ing prospect. Carthage had seized the city almost one hun
dred years previously in. a siege of great brutality, concluded with massacres and mass crucifixions. With the city and its
harbor in their hands, they had repaired the walls but had done nothing since to improve the fortifications. Rome had been eliminated as a foe several years before the siege and there was no enemy left in the western sea to threaten the primacy of Carthage. More powerful walls might only
tempt what was left of the native population to rise against
their masters in a future generation.

From his command tower, erected at the northern end of the island in the Great Harbor, Scaeva surveyed the works being erected against the southern wall of the city. There the bulk of the Carthaginian garrison had been concen
trated in a massive fort built directly into the wall in the ap
proved fashion developed by Carthage's military engineers.

"It's a tough one," said Fabius, his praefect of the camp.
"Walls inside walls, forts inside forts, that's their style. Crack one nut, and there's another nut inside to be cracked. It's a lot of work."

"It suits me," Scaeva said. "It means that they've lost
their taste for battle. They think only of defense now. It
means a great deal of labor, but we're good at that. A Ro
man soldier is as handy with his spade and pickaxe as he is
with sword and pilum."

Not that the Romans were doing all the digging and pounding. Over against the great wall, men swarmed like ants, digging trenches, erecting shelters for the workers, pounding heavy pilings into the marshy ground on the west side of the city, making an artificial island to support the great rams and catapults that soon would pound the walls. But many of these workers were locals rounded up by the Romans in the surrounding countryside. Some were mercenaries captured when the Romans took the smaller cities and forts of the island. Men working directly beneath the walls of a besieged city took awful casualties, and the Romans preferred that somebody else do the suffering.

Titus Scaeva was the proconsul sent by the Senate to re
duce the island of Sicily, and he took great satisfaction in knowing that he had done a superb job of it. Against a con
servative bloc of senators who had wanted to attack Syracuse
at the outset of the campaign, he had insisted on a strategy of encirclement, snapping up the smaller forts and cities, seizing all the ports and fortifying them against the inevitable Carthaginian attempt to retake the island. By taking the most productive land and grabbing all the storehouses, he had made his campaign self-sustaining, so that all his shipping could be used to bring in more men and necessary military supplies instead of using precious cargo space for food, for man and beast.

He had left Syracuse till the last. True, it had given the Carthaginian commander time to improve the defenses somewhat, and concentrate his forces within, but that would work against him in the long run. More men inside
would strain his resources, and Scaeva had cut him off from
any hope of resupply.

"Still," Fabius said, "I wish they'd come out and fight. We'd crush them handily then."

"That's exactly why they won't opt for open battle. They think that Hamilcar will be here soon, to relieve them. If they can just hold out long enough."

The capture of Syracuse would make him the most distinguished military man in Rome, he thought with great satisfaction. He had been a famous soldier all his life, having won the Civic Crown at the age of sixteen, at the siege
of Mogantum. He had risen in rank and honor up the
cursus honorem,
holding each civil office and military command in
approved fashion, and had had the great good fortune to be a serving consul when the auguries had shown that the gods wanted Roma Noricum to retake Rome of the Seven Hills.

Taking the nearly demilitarized Italian peninsula had
been a walkover for a few veteran Roman legions, but every
one knew that the war against Carthage itself would be another matter entirely. He had pushed for the immediate seizure of Sicily, and the command had fallen to him naturally. Already he had earned the right to petition the Senate for a triumph: the ultimate vindication for a military man. His supply ships returned to Italy with endless cargoes of
loot.
Just take Syracuse,
he reminded himself,
and your name
will live forever.

This meant much to him. Like all Romans, he was ambi
tious for personal fame and prestige, but in his case he
wanted glory for his family as well. The Scaevae were among
the new families: clans of German and Gallic descent whose
ancestors had helped the Roman refugees to found Roma Noricum. There was great rivalry between the old families and the new. With such a campaign to his credit, capped with the capture of Syracuse and a grand triumph in Rome
of the Seven Hills, no one could claim that the new families
were less patriotic, less Roman, than the old.

"Do you think they can?" Fabius asked. "Hold out long enough for Hamilcar to get here, I mean?"

"Not a chance," Scaeva said. "Those boys we sent to spy
out Carthage did their job well. We know more about the
capabilities of his military than Hamilcar does himself. He's under the impression that he's Hannibal come again, but we know better." Both men chuckled, but Scaeva knew well the
worry that gnawed at his subordinate: Hamilcar or his designated commander would appear by sea, with an immense navy. The Roman navy was new and untried, all but untrained. The Carthaginian navy was the most powerful in
the world. Scaeva had to take Syracuse before the navy could
appear.