The Shards of Heaven (17 page)

The young man looked even older than Vorenus remembered. He'd always been mature for his age, but there was a fresh worldliness in his eyes now. And his movements were more self-assured, as if he were more comfortable in his own skin than he had been before. Vorenus wondered what else had happened since he'd been asleep. “My lord,” he said, trying again to rise.

It was the priest this time, rather than Pullo, who gently pushed him back into the sheets. “So I understand,” the priest said to the young pharaoh. He pushed his snake-wrapped staff out to brace himself as he bowed deeply.

“It is I who should give you such courtesy, dear priest,” Caesarion said, uncrossing his arms and coming forward to help the priest rise. “You've saved my friend.”

“Not my help. The help of the gods. But I don't think he needed much of it, at any rate.” The old man turned back to Vorenus. “I think he's a hard man to kill, this one.”

“He is that,” said Pullo from the corner.

“How long until he's up and about?” Caesarion asked.

The priest shrugged. “Another day or two and he should be moving. The worst of the danger has passed. It is only pain and the possibility of opening up his wounds now. A few weeks and he'll be fine.”

A few weeks? Vorenus groaned.

“Good,” Caesarion said. “That should be in time.”

In time?
Vorenus looked questioningly to Pullo, but the big man wasn't paying attention.

“I'll leave you, my lord,” the old priest said to Caesarion. He looked to Pullo as he headed toward the door. “Don't push him now,” he said, waggling a bony finger as if talking to an unruly child. “He still needs his rest.”

Pullo's smile dampened so slightly that few other than Vorenus would have noticed. “Of course.”

“Thank you, noble priest,” Caesarion said, stepping aside to let the old man pass. “We won't be long with him.”

The priest mumbled something as he hobbled out of the room, his staff clicking on the stone. When he was gone, Caesarion shut the door quietly. Pullo grabbed the two chairs and brought them up beside the bed, offering one to the son of Caesar as he took the other himself. Caesarion nodded to the big man gratefully and sat down, his shoulders slumping in tiredness. “Glad to see you up,” the young pharaoh said.

Vorenus managed to turn his body to better face the two men. “Me, too. Thank you, my lord.”

Caesarion sighed, but his smile was genuine. “Must everyone thank me when I owe them? First the priest, now you. We're all in
your
debt, Lucius Vorenus. If not for you … well, you did your work well.”

The image of Selene, cradled in Pullo's arms, staring as he prepared to kill her teacher, returned to Vorenus' mind. “So the children—?”

“There was only the one man, and you took care of him,” Pullo said.

“My sister is scared, but fine,” Caesarion added. Not for the first time Vorenus noted how easily the boy—the man—accepted Antony's children as his own family. He wondered why Octavian could not act the same.

“Was my fault,” Vorenus said. “Had a bad feeling about Laenas when I met him. I should've insisted on a return to the palace at Antirhodos.”

“Even if you had, my mother wouldn't have listened,” Caesarion said. “She wants no one back on the island until all the workmen have finished. Did you know she's raised a statue of me there now? Right beside hers, looking like Horus. Massive thing. She means to surprise me with it, but you can see it from the docks. The head alone is taller than my leg.”

“Quite an honor, Lord Pharaoh,” Vorenus said.

“No, it isn't, Vorenus. You know I'm not a god, no matter how many statues my mother puts up. No matter what headdress I wear or what scepter I hold. No matter what the people think. I'm not Horus.”

“What about Caesar?” Vorenus asked.

Pullo leaned forward, nodding. “He was deified, what, two years after his death? Makes you the son of god, does it not?”

“People like to think of the gods being like us,” Caesarion said. “That's all. That's why they made my father a god. It makes them comfortable.”

“Don't let your mother hear that,” Pullo said. “Isis … Venus … I think she likes being divine.”

“It's because she's afraid of growing old,” Caesarion said. “Of losing her beauty. Of dying.”

Vorenus shifted a little, felt the sharp pain of the wound in his side. “I'm afraid to die,” he said. “I don't think I'm a god.”

“No, but you worship them,” Caesarion said. “Dutifully. Always have.”

“The gods are not to be trifled with.”

“He's been saying that to me for years,” Pullo said, light laughter in his voice.

“Yes,” Vorenus said, trying but failing to sound stern. “And I hope one day you'll listen.”

“Bah!” Pullo pushed away at the air as if swatting away invisible bugs. “The gods have done little enough for me. I don't believe in them. Present company excluded, of course.”

Caesarion rolled his eyes. “The fact that I'm not a god has nothing to do with the existence of any other god. Look at Vorenus here, healed by the power of the priests.”

“Nonsense.” Pullo patted Vorenus' leg through the sheets, ignoring his friend's wincing. “He's simply too strong to go.”

“No,” Vorenus said. “When that priest prayed, when he waved that staff over me, I felt something. The gods have power, my brother. I hope you'll see it one day, before it's too late.” It was tiring to talk, but it also felt good. In some small way it helped to push the pain out of his mind.

Before Pullo could reply, Caesarion leaned forward toward the big man. “Look at it this way. You're alive, aren't you? After all your battles? All your fights? You're a good fighter, Titus Pullo, and a good teacher of the arts of war—for which I'm thankful—but skill alone will not serve in battle. You've told me as much. So how have you survived if not by the will of the gods?”

Pullo frowned. “Luck, I suppose.”

Caesarion wouldn't let it go. “Do you fear death?”

“I suppose so. But death is death.”

“For what, then, is the city of the dead here in Alexandria?”

“For the families left behind,” Pullo replied. “There's nothing else there but offerings to rotting corpses.”

“No crossings of the Nile? No Elysian Fields?”

“I've never seen them,” Pullo said, voice defiant. “Nor do I know any who has.”

“Must you see to believe?”

“Yes.”

Vorenus coughed a little, wincing, but the pain subsided quickly. “You believe nothing you can't see, touch, feel?”

“That's right,” Pullo said.

Vorenus smiled. “What of Britain, then?”

Pullo's brow furrowed. “What of it?”

“I think he's asking whether you believe in Britain,” Caesarion said. There was a mischievous light in his eyes.

“Of course I believe in Britain.”

“But you've never seen it, have you?” Caesarion smiled. “Never touched it?”

“No, but it's a place. It's there on the maps.”

“Didymus has shown me many maps that have the realms of the dead upon them.”

“And Alexander looked for them, I know,” Pullo said. “But look at him now, in that crystal coffin in the Mausoleum. Dead. I've known men who served in Britain. We were near enough to it ourselves, Vorenus and me. But I don't know anyone who's really lived after death, if you know what I mean.”

Vorenus closed his eyes to think, and the others fell silent until he opened them again. “Caesarion,” he finally said, looking over at the young ruler. “About Didymus … you need to know something.”

Caesarion held up his hand—a royal gesture, Vorenus noted. “I know. I read the assassin's letter.”

“You know?”

The tiredness, which had disappeared from the young man's shoulders as they'd bantered, was back. “Much has happened while you were asleep.”

Pullo agreed but said nothing.

“You said something about me getting better ‘in time,'” Vorenus said.

“So I did,” Caesarion said with a smile, but the look in his eyes was grim.

“In time for what?”

“To take a ship,” Caesarion replied.

“A ship?”

“A ship north,” Pullo said. Any trace of a smile on his face was gone.

North. That could mean only one thing. “War,” Vorenus said quietly. “And Egypt?”

“My mother is going herself,” Caesarion said. “I'm to stay here in Alexandria in her absence.”

“Cleopatra herself?”

“Antony didn't want her to go, you know,” Pullo said. “But Publius Canidius convinced him to let her. I think he must have owed her a favor or something, and she called it in. She's taking the whole fleet, Vorenus.”

The whole fleet? That would mean hundreds of vessels. Thousands of men. Tens of thousands.

“It's true, Vorenus,” Caesarion said. “And you'll need to go with her. You and Pullo both. Your first priority is the protection of my mother—and Antony, of course.”

Something in the young man's tone caught in Vorenus' ear. “You don't approve?”

Caesarion stood, paced in the small space behind his chair for a few moments. “I'm not the general Antony is,” he said.

“Experience isn't wisdom,” Vorenus said, trying hard to lock the young man's eyes with his own.

“That's truth enough,” Pullo muttered.

Caesarion took a deep breath, let it out as he sat back down. “He is Antony.”

“And you're pharaoh.”

“As is my mother. And Antony has her ear. I'm just a boy.” He rubbed tiredly at his eyes with his fingers, tried to stretch out his neck. “But to your question: no, I do not approve. I've told them so. Antony ignored me. Mother, well, she believes Antony is Osiris on earth, that he's invincible.”

“Our young king here thinks we're better off defending Alexandria,” Pullo said.

“It's far more secure than foreign Greece,” Caesarion said, rising once more to pace. “Let Octavian have Greece. Let him keep Rome. Let him have all the world. Without the grains of Egypt he will in the end have nothing. With Antony's legions and Egypt's armies here, Octavian cannot force us to trade. He would, in the end, have to negotiate. Victory lies in waiting for peace, not in rushing off for war.”

Vorenus smiled at the young man's logic, futile though it was. “Too long-term,” he said. “Antony thinks only in tomorrows.”

Caesarion stopped pacing. “I know. And that's why you both need to go with them to Greece. They won't listen to reason now, but perhaps they will when the need comes.” He seemed to gather himself. “And even if he won't, perhaps she will.”

Vorenus blinked. He looked to Pullo, saw that his face was blank as he stared at the young man. They were sworn legionnaires of Rome. Antony was their superior. “I don't—”

Caesarion met Vorenus' eyes. “I'm not asking you to betray him, not asking you to betray your oaths to the legion. I'm just asking you to think about all that's at stake. To think, like you said, long-term. And then to follow your good heart. That's all.”

Vorenus saw that Pullo was looking to him now, confusion on the big man's face. He felt a new pain in his hip and shifted again in the sheets, his mind racing. “We'll do what we can,” he finally said.

“It's all I can ask,” Caesarion said. He came back around to sit in his chair. “I'll take my sister and brothers to Antirhodos once the fleet has sailed, if we haven't moved there already. We'll be safer there in your absence. When Didymus needs—”

“He's not dead?”

“No.”

“I thought Antony…”

“If he knew, yes,” Pullo said, leaning forward in his chair. “He doesn't. Neither does Cleopatra or the kids. Only the two of us and little Horus here.”

Caesarion ignored the jab this time. “Once you were in the hands of the physicians, Didymus himself took me and Pullo back to his room. He produced the assassin's papers. He denied nothing and revealed everything.”

So that was where the new worldliness in Caesarion's eyes had come from, Vorenus thought. “You didn't tell,” he said to Pullo. It was bordering on treachery not to report it to their superior officer.

The big man's cheeks, already toned orange by the light of the lamps and stone, appeared to darken. “Antony would've killed him. You know that. And we both know Didymus. No matter what he did back then, he's a different man now.”

It was true. Vorenus had spared him, too, hadn't he?

“Besides,” Caesarion said, “we need Didymus alive. If this Juba is really seeking the Scrolls of Thoth, Didymus is our best shot at finding them first. We can't let them fall into their hands.”

Vorenus was getting tired, but he didn't want to stop talking. He needed to understand what was going on. “I heard Didymus say he didn't think they existed.”

Caesarion nodded. “So he told the assassin. But he is, nevertheless, unsure. He's already combing through the oldest records of the Library, looking for information.”

“All this for some scrolls?” Vorenus had been to the Great Library once. It was filled with scrolls. There were thousands of them. Perhaps thousands of thousands. Vorenus wondered if a man in one lifetime could count them all.

“You don't know what they are,” Caesarion said. “Thoth is the Egyptian god of wisdom, the mind of the gods themselves, you might say. Thoth gave us writing. He gave us civilization. Laws. Numbers. Thought. The calendar. He's said to have set the very stars in their places. When Osiris was dismembered, it was Thoth who taught Isis the incantations to raise him from the dead. Without his words, it's said, the gods themselves might not exist.”

“So he wrote a book?” Pullo, apparently, had not yet heard of this, either.