Selene pulled their fingers apart and then moved her grip so that she held his hands in her own. She leaned forward and placed gentle kisses on the backs of each of them. “It’s what is inside that matters,” she said.
“I suppose that’s right.”
“You’re a good man, Juba.”
He smiled at that, and then he pulled his hands free and stood. Selene looked up at him, wondering how she’d once thought this man was her enemy. “I like to think so,” he said. “Though Caesar might disagree in the end. Shall we try again?”
Selene looked up at the brightening sky, then nodded. “Just one more. Then we should probably get back to the tent.”
Her husband, gentle man that he was, frowned. He didn’t understand. “A patrol isn’t due this way for another hour. And this morning’s war council won’t be for at least another hour beyond that.”
Selene grinned.
For a moment or two longer, Juba still frowned. Then recognition swept the confusion from his face and he gasped. “Oh!” He blushed. “Right. Just time for one more, then. Unless, I mean, if you wanted to stop now, we could—”
“No, no,” Selene said, still grinning as she waved him away behind her. “You said we had plenty of time.”
“As you wish, my lady,” he said. She heard him settle down into place behind her, to watch down the same line of sight that she had across the open ground toward the empty bag in the tree.
Selene took a deep, long breath. She flexed out her arms and then relaxed them down into her lap, her fingers touching the surface of the Shard.
Locked in the heart of the smoky quartz of the vaguely woman-shaped stone was the Shard itself: a deeply black pit that seemed to capture and hold the light. Lacing around it were black veins, rising to the surface most prominently where the eyes of the woman’s face ought to have been. It was here that Selene’s thumbs rested, her pads settling into the slight depressions as her fingers reached around to the back of the Palladium to hold it steady.
At once the sensation of a roiling fire began to shoot up through her hands and into her forearms. When first she’d felt it, back at the Temple of the Vestals, she’d feared it would consume her. From what Juba had now told her, the use of a Shard could do that to many people. Why the two of them were able to withstand the shock, able to begin to control it, Juba did not know.
It was enough for them that they could.
So when the shock erupted into her out of the Shard, Selene did not scream. She did not pull away. Instead, she closed her eyes and let it wash over and through her. She brought it into herself. She let herself become one with the power, let it swirl through her veins just as it swirled through those in the stone.
When she felt she had enough, when it seemed that it would wash her away, she swallowed and focused it, pushing it out of herself the same way that it had come: down through her arms, down through her hands, down through her fingers and into the stone she held there.
And then, opening her eyes, she pushed the power out of the stone like the exhalation of a long-held breath.
Amid the open circle of trees, a whisper of wind once more rose from the earth.
4
ALEXANDER’S CITY
ALEXANDRIA, 26 BCE
The heat in the barge’s hold had been so stifling, and the grain-heavy air so choking, that Lucius Vorenus had been certain he’d either suffocate or sneeze long before Petosiris had gotten them through the Roman customs officials and into the safety of the city.
Not that Alexandria was exactly safe for a man who had been sentenced to die by Caesar himself. Even now, quietly making his way north along the widest and most busiest avenue of the city he’d once called home, Vorenus was certain he’d be a dead man if he was recognized.
In that respect, he supposed, he was far safer under the deck of the canal barge. At least there, holding his breath and trying his best to stay silent as the vessel docked at the water gate, he had known the identity of the threat: the Roman soldiers who had stepped aboard to inspect its cargo and the captain’s papers.
Beside him in the narrow, shallow space, Khenti had lain with his eyes shut. If not for the steady rise and fall of the Egyptian’s chest, Vorenus might have thought him dead. As it was, the swordsman had been still enough that he might have been sleeping.
Peering up through the cracks in the decking above, Vorenus had seen the familiar hardened-leather soles of the sandals he knew so well from his many years spent as a legionnaire. And beyond them he had recognized the accents of Rome, of those he’d once called countrymen.
Petosiris, Vorenus now knew, was a man even more versed in smuggling than he had suspected. As the soldiers had poked long spears into the piles of grain and peppered him with questions, the barge captain had given only the simplest of replies, and he had stood with his hand on the ship’s tiller, directly beside the coil of ropes that concealed the hidden hatch.
When the soldiers were satisfied that all was in order, Vorenus had heard the quiet clink of coins being exchanged, and then the sandaled feet had stepped off the barge, the little deckhand jumping into action behind them. Vorenus heard the links of the chain across the canal rattling through a metal cleat as the chain was allowed to go slack. It fell into the water with a splash that rocked the barge beneath Vorenus’ back. Then they had unmoored from the dock, and once more they had traveled along the great canal, headed west over the sunken chain toward the lake harbor docks and, beyond them, the teeming city of Alexandria.
As Vorenus had watched through the cracks, the deckhand had then methodically re-coiled the rope, moving it off the hatch and into a new pile to the side. Only when it was done did Petosiris at last open the hatch and bring fresh air and the bright light of day into the hold. “You can sneeze now,” Petosiris had said with a smile.
Vorenus had indeed done so, and even now, two hours later, his nose itched.
They’d left the barge at the lake harbor, with reassurances to Petosiris that they would be making the return trip east when he left that evening. Then he and Khenti had entered the city from which they had been exiled.
It was Khenti who decided that the straightest route to the Museum would be the best one. From the west end of the lake harbor docks they needed only to make their way north across the breadth of the city by walking along the Sema Avenue.
It was a calculated risk. They would encounter far fewer people by making their way through the many side streets of Alexandria, but with fewer people around they would also stand out more if indeed they did encounter anyone who knew them. Amid the thousands of people pulsing along one of the central arteries of the city, they would be, they hoped, lost in the vast sea of faces.
And so, block by block, they made their way north through the thick crowds.
For all that the Roman seizure of Egypt had changed in his life, Vorenus was shocked at how little Alexandria had changed. It was still a city of white walls and red-tiled roofs, and at least the monumental buildings along the Sema Avenue showed not even the slightest scar. The city’s people, too, were just as he remembered them. Alexandria had long been a hub of trade between the riches of east and west, north and south, and its incorporation into the growing vastness of Caesar’s Rome had done nothing to slow the masses of people from across the world who lived upon or passed through its streets. Walking among them, Vorenus and Khenti were surrounded by a vibrancy of color and dress. They were surrounded, too, by the polyphony of language swirling into a thrum of humanity, punctuated by the squall of birds, the bray and cry of stock, and the clatter of wheels on stone streets. The city even smelled as Vorenus remembered: that bewildering mix of the people, their beasts, and scents of their foods drifting out from stalls and shops.