Caesar turned to Juba. “For your knowledge, my brother, I give you the honor of accepting the weapon.”
Juba bowed slightly, then began to step around the table. Many of the officers, he noticed, were looking at him with jealousy or, in the case of Carisius, open confusion. The look on the face of Tiberius, he saw, was more akin to a brooding anger. Juba knew he’d need to deal with the young man at some point, somehow make amends for cutting him off in front of the other men, but now was hardly the time.
At last he came around the end of the table to stand before the big Cantabrian. The bearded man was even larger up close, and his eyes seemed to be ablaze, but he moved not a muscle while Juba quickly flipped his hands under the folds of the cloth sash that was wrapped over his shoulder. Covering his hands, Juba hoped, would prevent him from inadvertently using the Shard, yet it would appear to the other men in the room as a simple sign of respect. Then, moving slowly in reverence and in fear, he reached out with his covered hands and gripped the spear.
For the space of several heartbeats, Corocotta held fast, staring at him. Juba tried to return the determination, but in the end he had to blink. The Cantabrian gave a kind of satisfied grunt and then released the spear. He took one step backward before at last returning his gaze to Octavian. “A man of my word,” he said.
“So am I,” Caesar replied, and he immediately directed Tiberius to see to the reward, which was ordered to be ready by the dawn. Then he commanded a tent prepared for Corocotta and his slave, while Carisius and the remaining generals were once more sent to prepare the legions for battle.
Everyone snapped into motion, and in less than a minute Juba was alone in the tent, holding Corocotta’s spear in his cloth-covered hands and wondering what on earth he should do next.
10
BLOOD ON THE WATER
ALEXANDRIA, 26 BCE
The grains that Petosiris had carried into the city had been replaced by piles of textiles, and Vorenus and Khenti relaxed among them at the leading edge of the barge, the waters of the canal once more slipping beneath them. This time the barge was headed east, away from Alexandria and toward Schedia and the Nile. And it was not the breaking day that lay ahead, but the growing darkness of night, which was quickly rising before them in a yawning wall of black, only just beginning to show the pricks of a few scattered stars.
They were hardly more than an hour from the city walls, but the buildings that had crowded against the waterway had long since begun to thin, and the air was beginning to taste clean again. The noise of crowds that had been a constant buzzing din within Alexandria’s walls and its initial tumble-down suburbs had dissipated into the hush of the dark, broken only by the occasional barking of a dog or the steady, echoing clatter of a cart, homeward bound from the surrounding fields.
Getting out of the city had been much easier than getting in. Night had pushed most of the traffic from the waterway, and the guards had all gone to other posts. It had been at least half an hour since Vorenus had seen another soul on the canal.
Caesarion had been right about meeting with Didymus. The librarian had been more helpful than Vorenus had dared to hope, and it had simply been good to see him again—even if the joy of that reunion made the loss of Pullo that much harder to bear.
It seemed, too, that Vorenus’ fears of discovery had been largely unfounded. There was no sign that anyone had recognized him coming or going from the Great Library, and within the office of his old friend he’d felt safe and relaxed for the first time in many years.
Vorenus sighed and leaned his head back, looking up into the dark. This, too, was relaxing, he thought.
Behind them, at the rear of the barge, Petosiris and his young assistant were at the tiller, guiding the craft on its steady advance.
“I am glad you learned what you needed,” Khenti said from beside him.
For as long as Vorenus had known him, the only thing that ever seemed to matter to the Egyptian was the immediate mission. When they’d met to walk back to the harbor from the Great Library, he’d never even asked what was discussed. He only wanted to know if Vorenus had found what he was looking for and if they needed to go anywhere else before leaving Alexandria. There was something undoubtedly reassuring about his single-minded sense of purpose, but all the same he missed the company of Pullo, who could be stubborn and impetuous and a damnable fool, but was the only person Vorenus had ever truly loved.
“I am, too,” Vorenus said. “Seems I was wrong to have been so worried that we would be seen.”
“And it will be good to return home,” Khenti said.
Vorenus nodded. “Yes, it will,” he said. It took coming back to Alexandria to help him realize the truth of what home was to him. Long ago, campaigning with Julius Caesar in Gaul, he’d thought of home as nothing more than the seven hills and gleaming columns of Rome. Despite his many years in Alexandria he’d still been that Roman at heart: what fondness he’d had of the Egyptian city had been for its reminders of what he’d left behind. But the war had changed all that. He was a man without a country now, a man hunted by his countrymen, a man haunted by the place of his birth. If Alexandria had remained a foreign place even after so many years there, the little island of Elephantine they had fled to—perched as it was amid the wide waters of the Nile at the very edge of the old kingdoms of Egypt—was far stranger. But it really was his home now. It wasn’t the ancient sandstone buildings clustered upon it that made it so, nor was it the strangely forgotten Jewish temple where they’d hidden the Ark. It was the people. It was Khenti. It was Caesarion and Hannah, the beautiful Jewish girl that the young man had come to love. And it was Pullo, too, since hardly a day passed that Vorenus didn’t reflect on how his old friend would have laughed at something that was said or seen.
Vorenus let out a long breath in a sigh, turning to face his Egyptian companion. Khenti was sitting against a pile of packed cloths, but he still seemed more rigidly upright than Vorenus thought necessary since they’d escaped Alexandria. “Where are you from, Khenti?”
The Egyptian had been peering out into the night, but he turned to answer the Roman’s direct address. “From? What does this mean?”
Khenti’s native tongue was Egyptian, but he was thoroughly adept at the Greek that had been the standard tongue of Cleopatra’s court. It was this that they used to converse with each other, since his knowledge of Latin was sparse at best. But even with his excellent Greek, every now and then a word or phrase would cause him to stumble.
“I’m wondering where were you born?” Vorenus clarified.
Khenti shrugged, but there was something like the hint of a smile on his night-shadowed face. “I am an Egyptian, Roman.”
“No. I know that. I mean … Where did your parents live? In Alexandria?”
“Ah. Yes. I understand. I do not know the answer to that question, Lucius Vorenus, since I do not know the place of my birth.”
Vorenus blinked at him in the dark. “You don’t know?”
The Egyptian shook his head. “I do not.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I do not know why you would be so. My home is where I am.”
Vorenus thought about that as the barge drifted forward. Ahead he could see the small, decrepit dock of an old farm, just visible in the growing dark. Khenti was right, he decided. It didn’t really matter where you were from. It really only mattered where you were. And perhaps, he thought as he watched the water push against the wooden feet of the dock, where you were going.
“Home,” Vorenus said, and he felt the full satisfaction of the word.
The sound of a bird whistled to their left. The reeds rustled as if something was about to take flight, but then, for a frozen instant, nothing stirred.