The Shards of Heaven (4 page)

“I'll not help Rome,” the old man croaked.

Juba heard only the briefest rush of movement before the priest gasped, a sound that reminded the young man of a cook tenderizing meat. Juba spun around and saw the old man slumped sideways, grimacing. “Laenas!” he cried out, his voice cracking with the sudden start.

The rugged Roman straightened, his fist coming back from the priest's side and something like a smirk momentarily passing over his face. “Wasn't having him spitting about Rome,” he said.

As if in reply, the priest did, in fact, cough and spit. The blood ran dark streaks into his matted beard.

Whatever else Juba might have expected the priest to utter then—that the Trident wasn't real, that the gods weren't real, maybe that he had money hidden away under a rock somewhere—it wasn't what the old man finally managed to say. “You've your father's eyes.”

Juba stared at him, unblinking, his mind and heart racing. The old man held his gaze for a long moment before shutting his own eyes in a grimace of pain. Juba still stared at him, feeling the attention of Quintus and Laenas upon him even as he dared not look at them.

“Lord Juba—” Quintus started.

“Leave us,” Juba commanded, cutting off the slave. He flicked his gaze at Laenas just long enough to note the familiar look of disdain on the rough man's face, the same twist of jealousy and disgust he'd seen so often while growing up in Rome as the foreign-born adopted son of Caesar. “Both of you.”

“My lord, I—” Quintus said.

Juba silenced him with a wave of his hand. “I said go. Now.”

“Very well,” Quintus said, bowing deep as he backed toward the doorway. Laenas followed with a predictably dissatisfied grunt.

In seconds, Juba stood alone in the little room with the sagging priest. He took long, deep breaths to steady himself. “You speak the language of Rome well for a Numidian,” he said when the sounds of Laenas and Quintus had grown faint.

The old priest licked his lips and swallowed before responding. “I was a slave to Rome, too, once.”

“What's your name?”

“Syphax,” the old priest said.

“So you knew my father.”

Syphax nodded slowly. “I knew the king, yes.”

The king, Juba thought. Could it truly be that the old priest, hidden away out here on this lonesome spit of land, was a loyalist to the royal family of Numidia? The lineage of which he alone remained?

“I saw him die,” Syphax said.

“What?”

The old priest coughed twice painfully before he regained his composure. “Saw him die on the blade of my master, Marcus Petreius.”

Juba staggered backward into the ragged table behind him as if physically struck by the sheer weight of memory and history that flooded into his mind. He'd read the books, sought out every shred of detail he could find on his real father's inglorious end. After Caesar had defeated the Numidian army at Thapsus, Juba's father had fled with the general Petreius, only to be trapped. The histories spoke of how the two men dueled to the death, opting for an honorable end rather than the wrath of Caesar and the horrible, dishonorable Triumph that he would have put them through back in Rome—the Triumph that had thus fallen to his infant son, Prince Juba, first seized and then later adopted by the very man who'd driven his royal father to such a doom.

“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

T
HE
L
AST
Q
UIET
M
OMENTS

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 teem 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.