Indeed, the only thing that had changed were the occasional squads of Roman soldiers marching upon the streets. The people moved around them like currents of water passing around rocks, and Vorenus and Khenti were happy to do likewise, taking care to be as far from Roman eyes as possible.
No one recognized them, and they made good speed despite the crowds. It was only mid-morning when Khenti pointed ahead of them through the crowds. “Vorenus,” he said. “The square.”
There were two streets in the city of Alexandria that were known far and wide. One was the Sema Avenue, along which they walked, running roughly south to north from the busy docks of the lake harbor to the sprawling Emporium along the shores of the Great Harbor on the sea, at the mouth of which stood the Great Lighthouse itself. The other was the Canopic Way, running from the Sun Gate in the east to the Moon Gate in the west. The royal palaces were on the peninsula of Lochias in the northeast quadrant of the city, but even the royal family—when there had been a royal family—had known that the real center of Alexandria, the true, beating heart of its proud people, was the confluence of those two broad streets. Rare it was for a traveler to come to Alexandria and not walk one of those paths, following it to the wide, open square where they met.
Upon each corner of that square stood a massive building. To the northeast, in the direction of the royal palaces, was the temple to Isis, the Egyptian goddess-queen. To the southeast, fronted by high pillars, was the Sema, from which the avenue they walked had gotten its name. Burial place of kings and pharaohs, it was there, in a statue-lined chamber beneath a pyramidal roof, that Alexander the Great’s body rested in its crystal tomb. It had been almost three hundred years since the Macedonian king had conquered Egypt and been declared the son of both the Egyptian god Ammon and the Greek god Zeus, almost three hundred years since he’d stood on the barren shores of a stormy sea and proclaimed that it was here that he would build the city that would take his name, the city of Alexandria, wonder of the world.
That it was built, too, in order to house the Ark of the Covenant, perhaps the most powerful of the Shards of Heaven, was a secret known to few men. For all that he had seen and experienced, Vorenus had difficulty believing it himself. But, truly, there were days he had difficulty believing that the fall of Alexandria to Rome had meant that he himself had become one of the keepers of that secret, one of the keepers of the Ark.
To the southwest, across from Alexander’s mausoleum, perhaps fittingly, was the Temple of Ammon. And at the fourth corner, to the northwest, lay the beautiful, green grounds of the Museum. Their destination this day lay at the center of that vast complex dedicated to the Muses: the Great Library itself, built of white marble and stone, whose magnificent dome was crowned by a golden statue of a man holding a scroll open to the sky.
As they crossed the Canopic Way and entered the Museum grounds, Vorenus wondered at the fact that the Great Library had not been put to the torch when Octavian—Augustus Caesar now, he had to remind himself—had seized the city. When Julius Caesar had come to Alexandria, the first time that Vorenus had come to this place in service of Rome, part of the Great Library had indeed burned. An accident, so it was said, though there were whispers in the legion that Caesar had been concerned about the power of the growing intellectual elite of the librarians. So he had fully expected the new Caesar to burn it to the ground.
He hadn’t, though, and Vorenus was glad for it. He was never one for books and letters himself, but it was a beautiful building, and he had grown to appreciate the knowledge of men like his friend Didymus, who had become the head of the Great Library not long after Caesar’s death. Didymus, he was sure, knew more than any other man in the world.
If anyone knew why the Ark seemed to have lost some of its powers since leaving this city, it would be Didymus.
* * *
Before the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Didymus had been a personal tutor to the royal children—to Caesarion and his stepsiblings—and so the librarian had kept an apartment in the palace. It was there that he had become such good friends with Pullo and Vorenus, the three of them sharing the often bewildering experience of being foreigners within the inner circles of Egyptian power. The two Roman legionnaires and the Greek intellectual had spent many nights laughing under the quiet of an Egyptian sky. Fortunately, the fact that those nights were spent in the palace rather than the Great Library meant that there was unlikely to be anyone there who would recognize Lucius Vorenus.
Khenti, however, had come to the office of Didymus more than once, usually in the company of Caesarion himself. So when they approached the doors of the Great Library, the Egyptian swordsman slipped into the shadows of a stand of trees while Vorenus walked on, approaching the dark mouth of the building alone.
There was a librarian standing just outside the door—Khenti had told Vorenus to expect this—and the young man asked him his business. “I’ve just arrived by boat from Macedonia,” Vorenus said in his best Greek. “I bear a message to be personally delivered to the chief librarian himself.”
The man blinked and looked him up and down. Whether he was wondering how he could possibly be from Macedonia or he was simply taken aback by the request to see Didymus, Vorenus could not tell. “And may I ask your name?” the librarian asked.
Before embarking on this trip, Khenti and Vorenus had agreed that they could not use their real names near Alexandria. It would simply be too dangerous. “Philip,” Vorenus replied.
The librarian disappeared into the building, and Vorenus turned back toward the trees to see if he could locate Khenti. It was no surprise that he could not. Besides being the best swordsman he’d ever met, the Egyptian, he was sure, could disappear on an empty street at midday.
It was several minutes before the door of the Library opened once more. The first librarian had returned, accompanied by an older man who was clearly a man in charge: he appeared both flustered and exhausted, as if he’d already had his fill of a hard day, even though it wasn’t even noon.
“Can I help you?”
“My name is Philip,” Vorenus repeated. “I’ve come from Macedonia with a message for the chief librarian.”
The man sighed. “And I am Apion, his assistant. Give me the message and I’ll see that he gets it.”
“Apologies, sir,” Vorenus said, trying to be deferential even though he was much the elder man. “My instructions are very explicit about giving the message directly to Didymus himself.”
Apion sighed again, and he rubbed at his temples while shielding his eyes from the bright sun. “Philip,” he repeated. “From Macedonia?”
The tone of the librarian’s voice was filled with doubt, but it was also scratchy. Vorenus recognized the signs. He’d seen them often enough when Pullo had been too long at the cups. “That’s right,” he said, his voice suddenly far louder than it needed to be.
Apion winced. Then, after a moment, his shoulders relaxed in a kind of defeat. Whatever doubts he had, he seemed to think that the old man posed no greater threat than the morning sun. “Very well,” he said. “Follow me. And please keep your voice down. So you don’t disturb the scholars, you know.”
Inside, Vorenus found himself being led through a long entry hall lined with five pillars on each side of a long, narrow reflecting pool. He could see offices between the pillars, and there was a buzz of work coming from within them. As men came and went through the doors he saw into two of them, and he recognized them as scriptoria: lines of scribes hunched over desks, quills in hand, carefully copying old books onto new pages.