Didymus brushed aside his hair to look Vorenus in the eyes. “He would have said the same of you.”
“He would have been wrong, then.”
“As he would have said, once more, of you.”
Vorenus couldn’t help but smile at that. It was true, after all. He knew it. Pullo would have clapped that big hand of his upon his friend’s back and laughed at how Vorenus was both the better man and the greater fool—as if such a paradox made all the sense in the world.
Didymus was smiling, too, but then a shadow once more seemed to fall over his face. “And both better men than I could ever be,” he said.
Years before they’d known each other, on the night after Julius Caesar was murdered, Didymus had helped an assassin infiltrate Caesar’s villa, where he’d nearly killed Caesarion, the son of Caesar and Cleopatra. Pullo had been the one to save the boy. But Didymus was a different man now. Vorenus knew it. Pullo had known it. Caesarion, too, had long since forgiven him. “It’s been so long, my friend. What’s done was done.”
“It isn’t just that,” Didymus said. “I brought Juba to the Ark. Selene convinced me that he would help us protect the Ark. He wanted to destroy Octavian.”
Vorenus thought on it for a moment. “You did what you thought was best,” he finally said. “You didn’t know what would happen.”
“No. I didn’t. And I don’t think he did either.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the weeks afterward I spent time with Juba. He came here to the Library, seeking out information about the Shards. He knew so much, Vorenus. And he was—is, I suppose—a brilliant young man. A voracious appetite for knowledge, and he remembers seemingly everything he reads. I could have made him a fine scholar.”
“High praise indeed.”
“So it is,” Didymus agreed. “Well, I got to know him. And he isn’t the wicked man we feared. He truly wanted the Shards, but not to make himself great.”
“He wanted to make Octavian great.”
“No. Not at all. That’s what I’m saying. To the contrary, my dear Vorenus, he wanted to kill him. I imagine he still does, but the experience of using the Aegis of Zeus affected him deeply. It took control of him. It changed him.”
Vorenus leaned forward. “How?”
“How did it control him? I don’t know. Neither of us did.” The frustration in the scholar’s voice was palpable. Didymus was a man who thrived on knowledge. Not knowing something clearly rankled him. “But when he attacked us it wasn’t really Juba. Not anymore. He didn’t even remember what happened later. It was like he was under a spell. And later he wanted to understand how.”
“You said he learned a lot.”
“Yes. But you can be sure that I endeavored to see that he never learned too much. Certain books I hid. Certain paths I never let him follow.”
“Did he still want the Ark?”
Didymus frowned at the question, thinking. “He did and did not. Were he offered its power, he would have taken it. But he would not seek it out. He may not have remembered everything he did when he was under the spell of the Aegis, but he knows that it had much to do with his desire to get the Ark. I do not think he wants to ever kill again. But if he was freely offered the Ark, if he had the chance to use it, just once, to gain his revenge, his thirst for revenge against Caesar remains unquenched.”
“So long as he’s no threat to us,” Vorenus said. He settled back into his chair, relaxing. “He can kill as many Caesars as he wants. He just can’t do it with the Ark.”
“I do believe you are safe from Juba, my friend,” Didymus reassured him. “But he isn’t the only threat. You’re still a wanted man here, Lucius Vorenus. I’m glad you’re here, but it isn’t safe.”
“I know it only too well. Caesar is not a man to forget.”
“Indeed so,” Didymus agreed. “He would pay a great deal for your head.”
Vorenus shrugged. “Flattering in its way,” he said.
“An interesting way to look at it,” Didymus said. “You might have a touch of the philosopher in you. But if you knew this, and you are still here, then it is not for friendship that you’ve come.”
Vorenus frowned, trying to appear disappointed. “Can that not be enough?”
“No, my friend. Friends or not, you were never a fool. You need something. Otherwise there’d be no reason to risk a journey so deep into the city.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “So. What is it, Lucius Vorenus? What brings you to Alexandria?”
Vorenus took a deep breath. “It’s about the Ark of the Covenant, Didymus. It’s about the Shards.”
5
THE CANTABRIAN WAR
CANTABRIA, 26 BCE
Selene was already gone when one of Caesar’s praetorian guards pushed aside the flap of Juba’s tent, bringing in the shock of morning light and the sounds of the vast Roman encampment.
“Sir, Caesar requests the presence of the king of Numidia. I am to escort you.”
Juba lifted himself up to his elbows and blinked into the light for a moment before resigning himself to closing his eyes and nodding firmly. “Thank you, praetorian.”
The guard stepped away, and in the darkness once again, Juba rose from the bed he shared with the beautiful young daughter of Antony and Cleopatra. He readied himself as quickly but as properly as he could, taking extra care to don the uniform of his station. The wording of the invitation, after all, meant that he was needed not just as the stepbrother of Octavian—Juba refused to think of him by the name Augustus—but in his more formal role as ruler of the land of his birth, the land that his father had ruled before Julius Caesar had destroyed him and made young Juba an orphan before adopting him in a display of that particularly Roman mix of arrogance and grace. Augustus Caesar had restored the title to Juba when he’d given him the hand of Cleopatra Selene, who was herself in title the queen of Egypt after her mother’s suicide. It was fitting, Octavian had said, that she be married to a king.
Not that either title held substance: the lands of their birth were entirely under Roman control now. Their grand names were nothing but decrees that befit the plans of the increasingly powerful Caesar. Juba wondered sometimes if he’d been made a king only to show how one more king answered to the emperor of Rome.
Just thinking about it made Juba want to spit.
Instead, he straightened the purple sash that marked him as a member of the royal family and then pulled aside the flap of the tent.
The first thing he noticed, as he blinked out of the darkness, was that part of the wooded hillside to the west was on fire.
The siege of Vellica, the Cantabrian hillfort perched there, had met with little success over the past weeks, so on this morning the Roman assault had begun with pots of oil and flame. Heaved by catapults into the smoke-scattered sky, the bundles rose and fell like a dark, scattered rain, exploding into the enemy fortifications in bursts of red and brilliant orange.
It wouldn’t work. Even the Roman legions, lined up in their rows at the foot of the hill of the encampment, ready to press an advantage across the little shallow valley should it appear, seemed to know it. Juba could see that many men hadn’t buckled their armaments, and even the standard of the golden eagle, emblem of the might of Rome, was held at the slightest angle, as if the bearer below was talking to another man in the ranks.
Juba knew enough of Rome to know that such an act ought to bring the whip, but Octavian didn’t seem to mind such things so long as he got what he wanted in the end. Besides which, it was in the nature of a siege that the besieged and the besiegers alike both suffered in the stalemate.
Not that you would know it for a stalemate based on the number of Romans that had been lost here. For all that he had seen of war in his twenty-three years—the great fleets clashing upon the stormy waves at Actium, the towering engines crashing against the gates of distant Alexandria—Juba had never seen anything quite like the horror that had welcomed the Romans in Hispania.