The Shards of Heaven (16 page)

Juba nodded dumbly, forcing his mind to cease inserting other words into his stepbrother's list.
Quintus. Man. Body. Blood.

“Neptune is the god of the sea. This, his domain. This, his Trident.” Octavian chuckled quietly, as if thinking of an old joke. “Assuming he doesn't appear to snatch it away, let's see what it can do, shall we?”

Juba looked from the gleaming metal Trident to the long stretches of surrounding sea, littered with rowing vessels like so many insects crawling upon the water. His feeling of dread, though he would not have believed it possible, grew deeper. “I don't—”

Octavian clapped him on the back, forcing him to square up to the railing and the sea beyond. The little bireme bobbed in front of them. “So coy,” he said. “Yet so keen on the best strategies of war. It's a strange mix, brother.”

Juba feigned ignorance of his meaning, wondering if he'd really felt the Trident wiggle in anticipation beneath his hands.

Octavian leaned over his shoulder, arm outstretched as if they were on the hunt and he was eyeing a hare in the brush. His finger lined up perfectly with the exact center of the bireme, causing Juba to swallow hard. “Let's see you sink it,” he said. His voice was calm, as if the bireme, with its six dozen rowers working belowdecks and its forty-odd legionary marines atop it, were just another barrel. “A rising wave, perhaps? Or the opening of the sea? It's up to you.”

Juba locked his eyes on the bireme to avoid looking at Octavian, to avoid glancing around at the entrapping praetorian guard. Even so, he tried to keep his eyes unfocused, to keep from seeing the individual men moving on the distant deck, the faces as they talked and laughed under the warm Mediterranean sun.
No,
his mind screamed.
No.

Octavian had leaned back, was watching with sharp interest. “Use your imagination, lad. I'm sure you've thought about it.”

Juba's fists tightened on the wooden staff to keep from shaking. That he had indeed thought about it was something he still couldn't admit to himself. How could Octavian have known? “I—”

“We need to know if it works. As a matter of strategy. Imagine being able to drown Antony and that Egyptian whore Cleopatra,” Octavian said, almost spitting the names of his enemies. “Imagine ending it all at once, in one wall of your power. Saving Rome. Saving the lives of these thousands of other men. Perhaps my own. Perhaps
your
own.”

Juba wasn't sure if it was a threat or not, but everything in his being told him to treat it as one. “But, Octavian, I don't think—”

“Oh, but I think you can,” Octavian said. “And you will. Now.”

Juba swallowed hard, felt his head nodding agreement over the cries of his conscience. His hands, too, seemed to be moving of their own accord—turning the wooden staff until the head of the Trident was square to his shoulders and he could see, between the coils of the entwined snakes, the rhythmically surging bireme. And its men.

Dear gods, Juba thought, for a moment forgetting his own doubts about their existence. Its men. With wives and children. With dreams. Men looking to the blue sky. Men laughing with their friends. Men who couldn't imagine that the sixteen-year-old standing at the prow of Octavian's quinquereme held the power to end it all.

Juba's hands moved out to hold the weapon by the undulating snakes. He swallowed, whispered something without breath—not nonsense this time, but a silent prayer for their souls. For his own.

His muscles flexed. His jaw clenched. He closed his eyes. He felt the warming metal scales beneath his fingers and palms.

Down, deep down within himself, he found the stillness, the darkness. He opened himself to it, pulling it up and up and out until he felt the power like his own pulse, heavy in his chest, pressing against his ears.

Breathing carefully to keep his mind still, to keep the world and the thoughts away, he slowly opened his eyes and focused on the water between the vessels. He imagined his hands dipping into it, like a water-filled basin. He imagined lifting the water up and forward. He
willed
it.

The water rose, almost imperceptibly at first. But Juba felt it. In his mind, in his arms. In his soul. But not enough. He needed more. More power.

He dug deeper into the black, deeper into the stillness. The water rose, just out beyond the sweeping oars, like the wake of an unseen vessel: a rolling ridge easily keeping pace with their passage.

Still more.

Juba's knuckles grew white. His arms quaked. His throat constricted as if he gagged on something.

Then, all at once, the ocean before them erupted in a geyser wall. The sound of the sea ripping apart and up broke like thunder across the sky, a sound like the roar of Triton sounding his conch-shell horn. Many men dropped instinctively to the wooden decks of their ships, fearful that the wrath of Juno was upon them. Others only stared as the angry hand of a god pulled the frothing sea above the empty masts of Octavian's quinquereme and then slapped it away with a second crack of terrible noise.

A wind rushed against Octavian's ship, rocking it backward and forward like a child's toy. The few men still standing scattered, gripping what they could while the decks bucked and rocked.

Juba, lost in the darkness of his power, fell backward, his head hitting something hard that was not wood. The impact rattled him back up and into himself, into a world of screams beneath the still-blue sky, of angry waves fluttering out across the sea.

Juba's face was wet—seawater? tears? blood?—but it was the shaking of his body that concerned him. He could feel it like a distant thing, as if the whole of him was numb. One of the praetorians, he realized, had broken his fall. He could feel the man moving beneath his head.

A face appeared over his own. A face mixed with concern and elation. Octavian's face.

“Get him below,” he said. “Blankets. Wine. Wait.”

Something tugged at Juba's distant arms, and he realized it was Octavian, pulling at the Trident that must still be in his hands. He blinked his eyes into movement and saw Octavian pry open his still-clenching fingers and pull the Trident away. As he did so, the black stone rattled.

Octavian froze. Then, just as strong arms began to lift Juba into the air, the Imperator shook the Trident again. The stone was clearly moving in the spaces between it and its metal casing. Octavian's eyes went wide, moved to fix his gaze upon Juba's.

But then the world was moving, too, and Octavian fell away from Juba's sight. All he could see was the ragged sea beyond the rail, and the scattered fragments of the shattered bireme floating amid the bodies.

Juba closed his eyes.

 

10

C
ALM
B
EFORE
THE
S
TORM

ALEXANDRIA, 32 BCE

Even before Vorenus opened his eyes, one thought was clear in his waking mind: everything hurt. His head, his shoulders, his ribs, his legs. By the gods, even his toes hurt.

His eyes came open slowly—because the right one felt swollen and tender, because he hadn't the energy to open them fast—and his surroundings blurred into focus.

It wasn't much. A little room of desert stone, scarred black here and there from the flames of lamps that even now glowed quietly. There were two chests against the wall, two simple chairs, a few hooks for clothes, and two beds, including his own, crammed into the space. The other bed was empty. Everything was cast in the half-dark orange of the lamps. The air was heavy with spicy incense.

Noise came to him then. Voices beyond the door, too distant to make out. Footsteps marching somewhere far away.

The sound of footsteps closer to the door made a kind of dull echo through the stone, and Vorenus looked over to see the door creak open. The sounds of the outside world grew louder for a moment—the moans of Egyptian priests, the ringing of iron—before the door shut once again and Pullo was standing there, his huge form filling the little room, a smile on his face.

“Ah, good,” the big man said. “You're awake. I feared you a dead man. Thought they'd put you in wrappings, make a mummy of you.”

Vorenus instinctively tried to rise, to show his good health, but at once his body rebelled. He moaned, laid back down flat.

“Not so fast,” Pullo said. He leaned over in the dim and flickering light, pressing a big hand to Vorenus' less-bandaged shoulder. “You're only out of the fever, my brother, not out of the woods.”

Vorenus squinted against the pain, was glad to feel it recede enough for him to talk. “Where—?”

Pullo let go of his shoulder, but he didn't move away. “Temple of Asclepius.”

“Priests of healing?”

“Aye. Cleopatra's own.”

Vorenus tried to take in a deep breath and cringed as his ribs rejected the notion. While he resorted to shallow breaths, he occupied his mind with sorting out what was going on. “How long?”

“A little over a day. Not long.”

Vorenus was glad the fever hadn't gone longer. He'd seen men in a fever for days at a time. Sometimes, even if it broke, they were not the men they'd once been. “Good,” he said. He stretched his legs out a bit, felt a warm ache in his muscles. “When can I go?”

“Not for me to say. Perhaps—” Pullo broke off and stood straight, looking to the door.

As if in response, the door came open again. The old man who stepped through was not one Vorenus recognized. A Greek, almost certainly, wearing the same kind of linen wrappings as Didymus usually did—

“Didymus!” Vorenus gasped, his eyes wide in remembrance. He tried to raise his hands to get Pullo's attention. The pain was searing. “Didymus worked—”

Pullo looked down, once more placed his big hand on Vorenus' shoulder, to keep him from rising. “For Octavian. I know,” he whispered.

Hearing Pullo say it somehow made it more real than it had been in his fevered dreams, and Vorenus felt raw emotion bubbling in his chest. Didymus, their old friend. All these years. He'd sold Caesarion—young, innocent Caesarion—to Octavian. For money. For power. For
books
. The reason they'd spent these many years in Egypt. The reason they were now outcast by Rome, the very thing they'd bled for all this time. Didymus, by the gods. Didymus.

Vorenus realized he was clenching his teeth, so he forced himself to relax. “Is he dead?”

“Not now, brother,” Pullo said. He looked back to the slow-moving old man, who'd managed to close the door and was shuffling to the bedside, leaning heavily on a staff. Pullo bowed his head slightly, a proud and boyish smile on his face. “Told you he'd be fine, priest,” he said.

The old man grunted, pushed himself past the massive man. “Awake, then?” he asked Vorenus.

Vorenus nodded. “Yes, sir. Can I go?”

“You may not,” the priest said.

“He looks fine,” Pullo said. “Believe me, I've seen the ugly bastard much—”

“One of us is the high priest of the god of healing, Titus Pullo,” the old man said, his voice surprisingly strong and firm as he cut him off. “Is it you?”

“Well, no. I was just saying that—”

“One of us knows the rites of Imhotep and the ancient ways of Asclepius. Is it you?”

“No.”

“Then be quiet.”

The priest leaned over Vorenus. One of his wrinkled hands came up to pull at the skin around Vorenus' eyes. Then he held the back of his hand to the younger man's forehead. Vorenus noticed that he smelled of fertile earth.

The old man mumbled something in a language Vorenus could not understand, then he lifted his staff over the bed. It was a straight rod of wood, entwined with a solitary serpent—it looked to Vorenus' eye like a rat snake—cast of bronze. Moving the snake-wrapped staff back and forth above the sheets, the priest closed his eyes and recited more prayers. Vorenus closed his own eyes, too, trying to hear the words in his mind, to take them in as if they were the healing power of the gods themselves. Even if he couldn't understand them, they felt comforting. They made the pain feel less real.

When the priest's intonations were finished, Vorenus opened his eyes to see that the old man had returned the staff to his side and was looking at him plainly. “So. The fever is broken. Good. How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Sore. But alive,” Vorenus said. “Thanks to Asclepius, I take it.”

Pullo, who put little stock in such things as gods and priests and healers, made a quiet scoffing sound, but the old man ignored it. “Or Imhotep, if you prefer,” he said. “We accept either name here. You've tired us all out in our labors to speed your recovery, though, Lucius Vorenus.”

“I thank you, priest,” Vorenus said. “I can offer—”

“There'll be no payment,” said another voice in the room. Vorenus hadn't heard the door open, but as his eyes followed the old man's turning he saw Caesarion, leaning against the open door frame, arms folded across his chest. “It's taken care of,” he said.