Selene blinked, the world slowing again as she looked away from the gathering combustion of the heavens to where Carisius, still somehow on horseback, was pointing off down the road leading away from the encampment. There were a dozen riders pounding up the road there. Cantabrian riders.
And another rider was in front of them: Juba. Beautiful Juba. In his hands he held the Trident of Poseidon. In his face he held agony and determination.
He twisted in the saddle, looking back at the pursuing riders even as the hooves of his steed kicked clods of earth into a kind of thick rain. He held the Trident out, facing them.
Selene felt the sonic pulse of the thunderous crash in nearly the same instant that she saw the bolt of lightning tear down from the clouds above. It impacted the Trident or Juba—or both—and then it ripped out and into the riders behind him. There was a flash and a crack of sound like the shattering of a stone, and the middle of the line of Cantabrian riders exploded.
The other riders fell back. Juba rode on, bearing down upon her, the look on his face a near match for the wild, mindless terror in the eyes of the horse beneath him.
Corocotta shouted out, and a blast of colder air rushed across Selene’s skin as the blazing fire of the Lance suddenly fell silent. The little slave was turning around now, following Corocotta’s instructions. The Shard in her hands was coming around, too, as she hobbled tiredly to face the other way. Toward Juba.
At last, Selene saw the Palladium. It was on the ground, fallen into the grass where she’d stood. She lunged for it, gripping it hard, leaping into the darkness within, pulling the power up as quickly as she could.
Faster! her mind screamed. Faster!
In her haste she couldn’t control it. Every time she tried to pull the power up, it slid out of her grip, like a fish fumbling back into the waters from which it had come.
She opened her eyes in the horrible realization that she wasn’t ready, that she wouldn’t be able to help. She saw the little slave girl unleash the power of the Lance once more, in a line of pure flame that shot out at her husband.
In an instant there was an explosion that knocked the Palladium from Selene’s grip and flung her backward into the grass.
Selene blinked up into the darkness of a stormy sky and saw that a torrent of rain was coming down like a stream, like a waterfall of slashing mist that descended down and down to the Trident in the hands of her beloved.
Juba had dismounted, and he was trudging forward, driving the rain before him through the Trident, where it impacted against the slave girl’s fire and sent both heavenward in a geyser of angry steam.
The slave girl made a sound like a long groan, and she staggered backward a step.
Juba strode forward, foot by agonizing foot.
And then he was there, almost beside Selene, nothing but the hot, wet smoke of fire and water in the air. He fell to his knees, face anguished. With one hand he reached out, straining to hold the Trident against the torrents of energy that were pounding into him, straining to reach her hand.
Their fingertips touched, skin to skin, and began to curl around the other. A lifeline. A way out.
A darkness beyond the storm rose up from behind her, and before she could cry out, Corocotta’s fist fell heavy against Juba’s cheek. The Trident fell from her husband’s suddenly limp hand. There was a mighty roar of air and water, fire and storm, all swallowed up into the heavens—and then the powers that had beaten down upon the hillside were gone.
The other Cantabrian riders were there, dismounting and running. Selene saw one take the slave girl up into his arms as she collapsed. Two grabbed Octavian and began binding his hands.
From somewhere came the sounds of shouts and blades striking one another, and a small part of her mind wondered if Carisius and the other generals were fighting to reach Caesar.
But she didn’t really care. What mattered was Juba.
She lifted herself to crawl forward, to cover him with her body, to somehow protect him in all this madness, but when she looked up she saw Corocotta looking down upon her, grinning. He barked something and two more of his men hurried up and began dragging Juba away. A third had a bundle of cloth and went for the Trident.
“No!” Selene screamed, scrambling to get up, to go to her love.
Something heavy struck her on the back of the skull. The world reeled, and she pitched forward.
She was vaguely aware of her body falling on something hard and round. Some strangely detached part of her mind wondered if it was a rock of some kind, but then all the voices of her mind fell silent and she drifted away into the dark.
13
THE ISLAND IN THE NILE
ELEPHANTINE, 26 BCE
As he stood at the railing of the boat ferrying them up the Nile, Vorenus was glad for many things. There was the sun rising on another day. There was the old friend at his side whom he’d long thought dead. There was the prospect of ending his long journey to Alexandria and back. There was the fact that the ferry would reach the island long before the heat of the day sent the cooler breeze that was moving over the waters into retreat.
But most of all, he was glad that his feet had finally stopped hurting. After surviving the ambush, he and Pullo had followed Khenti’s dying advice and left the canal, heading with all possible speed north to the road along the Mediterranean shore.
All possible speed wasn’t as fast as it used to be.
If they’d not stolen two horses from a farm on the second day, Vorenus feared that they would be out there still, trudging along in the dirt. He was fifty-two now, and while that didn’t seem to him to be a particularly lengthy age, Vorenus had to admit that he’d not been entirely kind to his body over those decades. And now he could hardly remember having felt so many pains in his feet and in his aching joints—except that he seemed to be thinking that very same thought more and more these days.
That’s what getting old was, he guessed. Each day more tired than the last.
Each day, perhaps, less useful than the last.
Yet whatever toll those years had taken on him, Vorenus knew that they’d done far worse to his friend.
Pullo had tried hard to be strong, to keep up with Vorenus, just as he had for so many decades of their serving together in the Roman legions—just as he had in their last posting in Alexandria, when they’d served the royal family of Cleopatra—but his body was simply too broken to do so.
Of course, it was a kind of miracle that he had lived at all.
Pullo had refused to tell the tale of his survival and his subsequent years—“I’ll only speak it once,” he’d said when they lay down to sleep that first night—but if he didn’t know better about the nonexistence of divinity, Vorenus would think it truly the work of a god that the man still breathed. He had seen with his own eyes the amount of rock that Pullo had brought down upon himself in order to secure their escape from Alexandria with the Ark. It was impossible to think any man could have lived through it.
Except here he was. Bent and battered. Scarred and sore. But breathing. And despite it all, still the man he’d always known: quick to laugh, loyal to the end.
Ahead of them, the wide, slow surface of the Nile split apart. Between the two arms of the river was the sandstone head of an island ringed by a shoreline of round rocks and thick water grasses. Palms and other green trees rose beyond them, adding their lighter scents to the heavier smells of the mud-laden river.
“Is that it?” Pullo asked.
Vorenus nodded, forcing himself to swallow down the instinctive smile he felt forming on his face whenever Pullo spoke. “It is. Elephantine Island.”
“It’s so close to Alexandria.”
“I suppose so.” Vorenus glanced over his shoulder. There were a dozen other passengers on the ferry, all of them native Egyptian laborers. Not one of them showed the slightest interest in the conversation between the two Romans in traveling clothes standing at the bow of the vessel. And even if they had been interested, from the looks of them, Vorenus was quite sure none would understand the Latin in which he conversed with Pullo. “The Ark had been housed here before, though. There was a temple for it already here. That was important to Hannah. And there were allies here. It was safe.”