Pullo caught her, lowering her to the ground beside the Ark. “Hannah,” he was saying, “oh, gods, Hannah…”
Vorenus started to ask what it was, but the moment he had rushed around to her side of the Ark and saw the way she was holding her belly and the horrified look on her face he knew that there was no need. “No,” he gasped. “Oh, please no.”
Hannah’s body tensed, and when she opened her mouth the scream that tore from her was as if her very soul were being torn apart.
Vorenus wanted to weep. He wanted to cry out at the injustice of it all.
But none of that would help.
A second of the barred doors to the temple was shaking now. The shouting was very loud, and the smoke was thicker than the fog. Vorenus let out his breath, and once more his gladius was in his hand. The battle calm fell over him, that eerie sense of peace he’d known at Actium, at Gaul, at those moments when all hope of survival had left him and he had resigned himself to his fate, freed himself from fear, freed himself to simply do what needed to be done.
“Madhukar,” he said. “You need to go. Now.” He nodded toward the last door, the one they’d intended to take the Ark through. “I’ll bar it behind you.”
The monk had crouched down beside Hannah, and he was holding her hand. When he looked up, his eyes were wide and wet, but there was a peace behind them as he shook his head. Then, with a kind of regretful smile, he stood and hurried across the courtyard to the door, which he began to bar.
Pullo was feeling Hannah’s belly as she gasped in uneven breaths. “She is bleeding badly, Vorenus. I think the child may be coming, but it is not good.”
“So is the enemy.” Vorenus said. “Let the monk do what he can. I need you, Pullo. I can’t do this alone.”
The monk came back and once more knelt beside the agonized young woman. He and Pullo whispered urgently. Around them the doors were crashing against the bars as they were rammed from the outside. Vorenus turned toward the nearest of them, and he absently gauged the familiar weight and balance of the blade in his hand. For all the twists his life’s story had taken, he never would have expected that his end might be in blood upon the sands of Egypt.
So be it, he thought.
Pullo walked up to stand beside him. He used the shining tip of his own sword to point toward the second door that was likely to fall. “I’ll take this side.”
Vorenus looked at his old friend, so battered and broken. He couldn’t imagine they would last long, but he knew there was nothing else to be done. And while Caesarion lived there was still hope. Time was all they could offer him, all they could offer Hannah and Madhukar and the child to come. It was all they had left to give to the Ark.
Titus Pullo swept his blade back and forth in the air, stretching his tired muscles. “It’s been too long.”
Vorenus smiled. Then the first door finally gave way, and it began.
26
THE CITADEL OF CARTHAGE
CARTHAGE, 25 BCE
Walking up the hill in the darkness of Carthage, carrying the cloth-wrapped Trident before him like a sacred offering, Juba thought of many things. He thought, first and foremost, of his beloved Selene, who strode behind him, her hands wrapped protectively around the satchel in which she held the Palladium, the Shard that could control wind. He’d long known that he loved her, but the clarity of his resolve since he’d learned of her rape had made clear to him the desperate nature of his passion for her.
And his fear of what Tiberius had taken from her.
Looking back, it still shocked him how quickly he had abandoned his desire to live in peace and to come here instead, to unlock even greater power from the four Shards of Heaven in their possession—shocked him, though never for a moment had he regretted the decision. It was, he was still certain, the right thing to do. It was the only way he knew to end the suffering that she had borne for so long in silence. It was the only way he could destroy the haunting memories of Cantabria: her rape, his destruction of all those men.
Truth be told, Juba knew that he had never fully abandoned his desire for vengeance upon Rome for what had been done to his family. Like Selene, he might have made his peace with Caesar, peace with Rome itself, but he had in so doing found a new face to hate, a new enemy that needed to be destroyed.
They had to kill Tiberius. How else could Selene find comfort in the night, knowing that he had raped her and yet lived? And how else could Juba find comfort, knowing of her pain?
The streets of Carthage were quiet as they passed between homes and buildings: Thrasyllus and Isidora walked ahead, Juba and Selene following, and the shadows only furthered the oppressive silence between them. Each of them, Juba supposed, was wrapped in private thoughts.
He’d ordered the guards to stay behind with the ship, along with Lapis, the wife that Thrasyllus had insisted be brought with them. The captain in particular had been deeply concerned about the king and queen journeying through the city on foot in the night, but orders were orders, and he obeyed, leaving the four of them to make the trek up to the summit at the center of the city alone.
Juba had been a little surprised when Thrasyllus had told them how Carthage was among those sacred places where the full powers of the Shards might be better accessed. At first, Juba had thought of sacred places as being only the ancient temples in Rome and Greece, or the distant holy city of Jerusalem. Yet the more he’d thought of it, the more he’d come to recognize that this was only a reflection of his own experience, the bias of his Roman upbringing and what he’d learned about the truth of the one God. If sacredness wasn’t about the gods themselves—and how could it be, if none of them was real?—then it was about the belief of the people in their gods. And for that, Carthage was a sacred place indeed.
Juba knew his history, after all. He knew how Carthage had fought Rome over the centuries, vying for supremacy of the Mediterranean Sea. He knew the brilliance of Hannibal, who’d driven a Carthaginian army from the Iberian peninsula across the Pyrenees, across the Alps, to bring them down upon Rome. He knew how even today the cry of “Hannibal at the gates” meant a message of disaster to a Roman.
He knew, too, how because of all this Cato the Elder had stood up before the Roman Senate and declared that ultimate victory over their enemy across the sea had to be achieved at all costs, that Carthage had to be utterly destroyed. “Carthago delenda est,” he’d said. Carthage must be erased.
And so they tried.
It never was, though. Sacked, yes. Left in waves of devastation and disrepair when the Romans finally seized the city and sold its inhabitants into slavery 120 years earlier, but hardly erased.
It was simply too grand a place. Built on a natural peninsula, it was easily defended from land, and formidable seawalls held back incursion from the water. It commanded fertile lands. And its seaport was one of the most magnificent structures Juba had ever laid eyes upon: there was a long and deep rectangular harbor that extended away from the sea, the daily docking point for hundreds of ships from lands far and wide, and at its head a short canal led to a second harbor, round this time, and filled with the naval might of the city.
He’d first seen that harbor as a child, after the death of his father, when he was being transported to Rome in chains, to stand in his father’s stead through the triumph of Julius Caesar. He was too young to remember it in anything but hazy flashes, impressions of its bewildering size. When he’d come back as a young man, this time leaving for Rome as an adopted member of Caesar’s family, secretly carrying with him the Trident of Poseidon, he had half-expected Carthage and its seaport to be less impressive, that its immensity would be so much the lesser because he was no longer a small child seeing it through a child’s shocked, naive eyes.