The Shards of Heaven (22 page)

Somehow, Alexander had recovered. He always did. Despite his many wounds, despite his insistence on being at the front of the line in so many battles, he was invincible. Like a living Achilles, Didymus had once told her and Helios, certainly not unable to be wounded, but just as surely incapable of dying from his wounds. It took poison to kill him in the end.

It was the best way for the conqueror to die, her mother had told her once. The best way for any king or queen to die. Not bloody. Not hard. And poison left the body whole, so that it could reign in the afterlife among the gods.

Selene left the pillar and passed through the narrow portal between the great gallery and the central chamber of the mausoleum itself: a square space wrought of dark stone, sided by free-standing, life-size white marble statues of Alexander and the Ptolemaic dynasty he'd founded in Egypt, her ancestors. Three hallways, at the moment sealed shut by wood and iron, branched off from this four-sided chamber, leading to the tombs of those men and women. In the middle of the chamber, surrounded by the seemingly glowing figures, Alexander's crystal coffin sat atop three polished white marble steps that gleamed in the light from the tiny arched windows that stood just beneath the pyramidal roof of the chamber. Selene noticed that this morning, in the bright light of a clear day, the light pouring through those arches blurred out the supports between them, giving the roof the appearance of floating. So, too, the marble dais seemed to be set apart: white marble on dark stone, with the clean crystal shape at its summit sending rainbows of color out against the walls and floor.

Alexander's body hadn't always been on display in such a coffin, she knew. For days after he'd died, the Egyptian priests whom he'd asked to tend to his remains had refused to work on the body. He was no mortal, they said. And indeed his body did not rot. But for his stilled chest, he appeared to be sleeping. Only when a week had passed did they reluctantly agree to perform their rites of death. And when they were done his corpse was placed in two nested sarcophagi made of thick gold. That's how they had come to Alexandria from the far east. And that's where they had stayed for generations. Until her great-grandfather, short on money, had melted them down to help pay for a mercenary army.

The people of Alexandria had killed him for that. His statue was around here somewhere. As her mother's would be. And as Caesarion's would be one day. Maybe even hers.

There were three other people in the chamber when she entered. One, a woman, knelt on one of the steps, paying respect to the body. And two men stood near one of the statues in the shadows, watching the woman and whispering to one another. Priests or quiet guards, she imagined. None of them paid Selene any mind. None of them knew that the little girl in the slave's shawl might one day take her place among the statues in this sacred room.

For all the times she'd been in the mausoleum, paying her respects to the man who'd given their family the power that it now held, she'd never looked closely at the body. The thought of death disturbed her, more than she cared to admit, even if she was fascinated by adventurous stories of battle in strange lands.

But not today. Today she felt grown-up. Today she would look.

Selene pulled Kemse's shawl close and tried to keep her breathing slow and even as she climbed the steps to approach the crystal coffin. The body, she saw, was smaller than she would have imagined. For all the stories of his power, Alexander was no giant. Probably no bigger than Vorenus, she thought. Pullo would have looked down on him.

Alexander's body rested beneath the glass on luxurious pillows in his royal red cape, and she was surprised to see that the man looked, as the priests had observed hundreds of years before, like he was merely sleeping. At times she'd seen other corpses in this mausoleum—those of her ancestors in the extended hallways, occasionally ritually rewrapped in ceremonial fashion—and always those mummified remains had appeared dried up, shriveled and hollow, with skin like old leather when it appeared from beneath the linens. Not Alexander. His skin looked as she imagined it did on the battlefields of his life: if not soft at least strong and real. He still bore color in his cheeks, lashes on his closed eyes, and his muscles were taut, as if he were ready to rise for battle at a moment's notice. The leather of his sandals and the wrappings winding up to the greaves on his lower legs appeared more aged than the dead man wearing them. And his hands, crossed over his chest, still seemed to grip the sword that lay vertical over his body. Taking it all in, Selene wondered if the priests who oversaw the tombs here opened the coffin to somehow maintain his appearance of preservation, or if his preservation was a sign that he was truly divine, despite the fact of his death. Certainly it was no wonder that the people still held him so, and that this room, even more than the street-formed plaza outside or the ornate palaces on Lochias, was the true heart of the city.

Not everything within the coffin was as well preserved as the conqueror, though. The sword in his hands bore spots of brown, and the exquisitely formed bronze breastplate under his crossed arms gleamed only dully where the sunlight danced across it. Strange, she thought, that the priests would not shine the metal. How it would shine and glow if they did! Like fire, she imagined. Like glorious fire.

Then, looking closer, she saw that parts of the breastplate still
did
appear to be freshly shined. Not much, but along the side, amid the shapes of muscle and images of beasts and battle cast into the metal, there were thin lines of burnished bronze visible, like thin, branching tendrils. Like vines.

No, she thought, tracing them with her eyes. Not vines. Veins.

His crossed arms and the sword obscured much of the armor, but she could see enough of it to tell where the veins were leading: to a single central spot in the middle of his chest. And visible there, right under his hands, was the edge of something dark. Something very dark and black, mounted into the metal: a flat stone the color of thick oil that seemed to swallow the light even as it fed the veins of still-polished bronze.

Selene shivered, feeling suddenly cold. She'd been leaning forward and she stood straight now on the step beside the body, pulling the shawl even closer.

It hadn't felt cold when she came in here. She backed down a step, forced herself not to look at the other people in the chamber. It must have been warmer outside on the street, she decided. And she'd spent enough time in here as it was. She needed to get to the Library.

Moving away carefully, Selene turned her back to the crystal coffin only once she had reached the floor of the chamber, whose stones no longer seemed so dark.

 

14

T
HE
T
RAITOR

ACTIUM, 31 BCE

The starless, oppressive sky above Octavian's encampment matched Juba's mood as he sat on the uncomfortably squat wooden stool, pushing a stick through the dirt between his feet and generally trying to ignore the two praetorian guards on the other side of the fire. The praetorians, Octavian had insisted, were there to ensure Juba's comfort—and indeed they did tend to such matters as the building of fires and the many chores of camp maintenance that were second nature to campaign veterans such as themselves but were acts quite foreign to a young man who'd grown up huddled among books in the household of Caesar. That's not why they were there, though. Not really. He knew that. They were there to guard him.

The two men slept in shifts so that one was always awake to keep an eye on him, and they showed little interest in him beyond their duty of protecting him and keeping him ready to attend to Octavian and the real generals at a moment's notice.

Even after months of working with the serious military men, Juba knew they didn't respect him. He remained, in their eyes, a dark-skinned foreign upstart. He'd never fought in battle. He'd never even swung his sword outside of practice swings at wooden dummies. He had no wealth to his name, no men to bring to the fight, no reason at all to be in the camp. Yet he was. And he was not only allowed a sizable tent—small though it was in comparison to those of Octavian and the field generals themselves—but he was also allowed to attend the most high-level meetings, where his voice was held equal with any in the army.

No, not equal, Juba thought, actually allowing himself a smile as he drew a caricature of a large-breasted woman in the dirt. More than equal. His voice, more often than not, carried Octavian's mind.

This protracted stalemate with Antony, for instance, was Juba's idea. As he'd told Octavian that day at sea—another day of many he was fast trying to forget—they would be foolish to engage Antony on land. That was Antony's strength. Combining his own Roman legions with Cleopatra's soldiers, he'd arrived in Greece with more men. And even Octavian, as ambitious and arrogant as he was, admitted that Antony was the finest general between their two camps—a finer general, perhaps, than even the now-divine Caesar had been. Octavian's military generals had insisted on a fight nevertheless, especially as Antony began sending his letters attacking their personal honor in light of their refusal to fight.

That they had refused at all, that they'd instead done their best to contain Antony's army without engaging it, was in complete accordance with Juba's designs. “Choke him from a distance,” he'd said in one of their early councils, summing up his plan. And, despite the angry insistence of the generals, Octavian had agreed, correctly surmising that defection would further ravage Antony's numbers as hunger and the disease that inevitably followed close quarters took their toll. Thus, the longer they waited, the more they swayed even the advantage of sheer numbers on land to their side.

It was a good plan. And there was no doubt it was working. What had begun as a trickle of men crossing the lines from Antony's camp to Octavian's had, in the past week, turned into a nearly constant flow. The defectors were often near to starving, and at times already succumbing to the illnesses that bred in the bad air of the surrounded Roman-Egyptian camp.

Scuttling his vulgar drawing to keep the praetorians from seeing it, Juba peered up and out over the perfect lines of tents in the encampment toward Antony's forces. Antony's main base was across the gulf of Ambracia at Actium, but after he'd built his bridge across the gulf's opening he'd established an advance camp not a mile distant from their own. Looking out across the dark distance between them, Juba saw fewer watchfires on Antony's side: yet one more sign of the flagging morale among his men. And one more sign, too, that it wouldn't be long before the generals would again call for battle. Antony is weak, they'd say. Attack now, while there's still honor to be had!

Juba frowned, returned to drawing shapes in the dirt. Battle was the last thing he wanted. And not just because he thought it tactically prudent to keep their forces out of the fray: more than once Octavian had made it clear that, if it came to a fight, Juba could be made to use the Trident. Octavian hadn't managed to use it himself, but after their tests—Juba shuddered despite the warmth of the flickering fire—it was clear that Juba could use it effectively in a fight, whether sinking ships or maybe even freezing a line of men in their tracks.

Not that they wanted to use the Trident exclusively. It could detract from Octavian's glory, after all. And Juba, despite his practice, could only manage so much use of it before his strength gave out.

And then there was the issue of the stone, the black stone so carefully embedded in the head of the Trident between the winding snakes along the shaft. Though he'd managed little research on the Trident before they left for this campaign—by the gods, he missed his books!—the strange stone was the obvious source of the object's power. What it was, or how it worked, he didn't know, but it was the stone that somehow generated the Trident's power to move water. And using it—again, through means he did not yet understand—was draining that power. The stone had physically shrunk through its many uses in Juba's hands. Not much, but enough to worry both adopted sons of the divine Caesar: Octavian because he viewed the Trident as a secret weapon in his fight to unify the Mediterranean under Rome's control, and Juba because he viewed the Trident as his one secret weapon in his fight to avenge his father and his homeland—and not incidentally, as his one chance to stay alive.

As for Juba's own, more personal plans, they were not going well. He didn't have to look any farther than to the two praetorians across the fire to see that. He was, for all intents and purposes, under Octavian's control, his every move watched. The Trident was under lock and key in Octavian's tent. And Laenas, whom he'd dispatched to Alexandria to procure the Scrolls, which would lead to an even greater source of power—the Ark of the god of the Jews—had disappeared without a word. He could only be presumed dead, and any opportunity to send another man had long since disappeared, too.