“I hope so.” Pullo looked around, as if he’d just noticed the shadowy cloud pressing about them. “Heavy fog tonight.”
“The time of year for that.”
“Can’t hardly see but ten feet.” Pullo sniffed. “But I can smell it now,” he said, smiling.
Vorenus smiled, too, glad that he wasn’t the only one who recognized the scent.
Truth be told, despite all that he had learned, the aroma of incense still thrilled him. Vorenus had visited more temples than he could count in his life, and for many years he’d believed that they brought him closer to the gods. A temple might not be the home of a god, but it was nevertheless a kind of access point to the divine. It was a sacred space, and being there had always made him feel less insignificant for the connection with powers greater than himself, as if a little slice of the divinity of the place could be carried with him.
It didn’t feel quite like that anymore, of course. None of those gods had been real. And the one God, the one real God, had died giving life to creation. The prayers being chanted, the songs being sung, they were just whispers to old stones. No one was listening. The stone gods did not make a sound.
But he still liked the fragrance. It warmed his heart, in the same way that the smell of certain meats on a cook fire could remind him of his mother and home. It was a memory. It meant something. Even after all this time.
“You know, I never thought much about that smell,” Pullo said. “What made it, I mean.”
“It’s frankincense.”
“I know.” Pullo yawned again. “I mean to say that I never thought about it being something people bought and traded. It was just something that was always there in all the temples.”
“I hadn’t thought about it either,” Vorenus admitted. “When I was younger I think some part of me just assumed it was the aroma of the gods themselves. That’s probably the point of it for the priests, anyway. The sweetness of the air is meant to mimic the sweetness of the gods themselves.”
“Funny. I’ve never heard of the gods being sweet at all.” Pullo spit into the fog. “Mostly in the stories they’re every bit as rotten as the rest of us.”
Years ago, Vorenus would have chided him for his words, would have told him it was dangerous to wrong the sacred powers, but to his chagrin the sacrilegious old bastard had been right to doubt and disbelieve. The gods were made of men’s fears, men’s desires.
“Anyway,” Vorenus said, returning to the earlier subject, “I hadn’t thought about where it comes from, either. Until all this mess with Petra it seems like none of us ever did. Except Caesar, I suppose.”
There was no denying it: the man whose oversized bronze statue stood watching the harbor not far away was proving to be a stunningly capable leader. Augustus had a grand vision for himself and for the empire, but he also had a practical sense of what needed to be done to make that vision a reality. Everyone knew that the Nabataeans, hidden away in Petra, their secret city carved deep into the mountains, were growing rich from the spice trade, but they were doing so largely by geographic good fortune. As middlemen, they received the incense and other spices from the growers in Arabia Felix and then sold them at great profit to the traders of Rome. Vorenus could easily imagine how this practice would anger someone like Augustus, who wanted not only all the roads of the earth to lead to Rome, but all its coins to flow there, too. Worse still, the Nabataeans, with an effective monopoly on the trade, were holding Rome hostage to higher and higher prices. The incense was a necessity, after all. The temples needed it, and the last thing any shrewd leader desired was to anger the priests. Other leaders would have perhaps negotiated with the people of Petra, but Augustus had instead decided to circumvent them: he ordered Aelius Gallus, the prefect of Egypt, to find a direct trade route to the lands of Arabia Felix, the source of the frankincense. If Gallus could establish a Roman route, Petra could be cut out altogether.
“Truth be told,” Pullo said, “Caesar really is doing some good.”
“Some.” Augustus Caesar had also ordered Vorenus killed, after all. And he’d torn Egypt apart. “Though hiring the Nabataeans themselves to guide Gallus through Arabia was foolish.”
Pullo let out a chuckle and shook his head as if in disbelief at the notion. “I can’t imagine it ending well.”
“Nor I. And maybe it’s already ended. Gallus left … what? Six months ago? And not a message since. If I were a betting man, I’d wager the Nabataean guide didn’t exactly show him the straightest route. Probably just took him out into the desert to die.”
“Well, it certainly makes things easier around here for now.” Pullo waved his arm vaguely in the direction of the east, toward the Roman garrison town of Syene, just across the Nile. Though several Roman cohorts remained there, it was nothing like the military presence before Gallus had drawn men away for his expedition. “I don’t like being so close to the legions, so the fewer the better.”
“Agreed.”
Coming around the last turn of the path, they emptied out onto the King’s Street, one of the main roads through the town. The pair followed it south in silence for less than a minute before they found it narrowing as it was hemmed in by the large Temple of Khnum looming up on their left and what remained of the ancient temple of the Jews on their right.
The Temple of Khnum, ram-headed god of the Nile’s cataracts, was a sprawling and magnificent place: columned and open, with colored tiles and statuary. It was, like most temples Vorenus had known, meant to invite the eye and impress with its grandeur. The incense burned alongside the fires there night and day, and the priests were ever-busy tending to their prayers and to the constant watch they kept upon the level of the Nile, as did the priests of the nearby Temple of Satis, goddess of the flood. Measuring the water level on the stone walls of what they called a Nilometer, a flight of steps that ran like a corridor down into the water, the priests at Elephantine would be the first to detect the yearly flood upon which so much of the kingdom’s crops depended.
From Vorenus’ point of view, the ancient temple of the Jews was everything that the Khnum temple was not. Sitting across the narrow King’s Street from that ornate complex, the Jewish temple seemed more like a warehouse than a place to honor God. The walls of the building were not much taller than two men—far shorter than the grand pillars dedicated to Khnum that in daylight would shadow the walls—and they were squat and thick, built of featureless mud-brick that was unbroken by windows or adornments of any kind. Neither a sign nor any other marker indicated the presence of the temple beyond its simple, heavy wood doors.
Stopping in the cramped street, Vorenus pulled open one of the old temple’s doors for his friend and then followed him through, carefully shutting it behind him.
Within the outer walls was a rectangular courtyard that had once been holy ground. Centuries earlier, though, the Jews had been forced to leave the temple, and the Khnum priests had taken it over for use as stables—an act, Hannah was sure, of deliberate desecration. The animal pens were thankfully unused now—they lay in wooden ruins to either side of a cleared, rough path through the courtyard—and the lingering stench of the animal inhabitants was largely overpowered by the incense that floated over the wall the courtyard shared with the larger temple. Yet, the memory of the desecration of the place still persisted—a fact that the Jews had used to their advantage in hiding the Ark here.
Stepping around a pile of rubble in the middle of the courtyard that Hannah said had once been a sacrificial altar, Pullo and Vorenus came to the door of the inner building, the sacred shrine itself. Like the rest of the temple, it was unimpressive from the outside: the same functional brick, with no ornamentation or great artistry upon it. The roof was made of simple cedar beams.