For a moment he saw her face as she rolled over in the rat-man’s grip. Their eyes met. Something like a smile began to form on her perfect lips.
Then something heavy and hard struck Thrasyllus on the back of the head, and he saw no more.
* * *
This time Thrasyllus awoke not to the scents of passion, but to the smells of the street: dust and sand, rock and piss. His mouth was filled with grit and the iron taste of blood, and his head pounded as if a horse had been trampling upon it.
The astrologer groaned and lifted his face off the ground. His ears were ringing for a few seconds, but slowly he began to make out familiar sounds: hooves on paved stones, shopkeepers hawking their wares, children chasing balls, doors opening and closing, men laughing, women talking, and everywhere the din of footsteps in a world full of life.
Thrasyllus managed to open his eyes through the thudding pain of it all.
Light flooded in. Too much light, smashing against the back of his aching skull. He squinted, gritting his teeth, but he didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t give in to the pain.
It appeared to be mid-morning. And he was sitting in the middle of a square in the city.
He sat upright despite the wail of his head. His back was touching something solid, and he let himself lean back against it, allowing its feeling of permanence to settle the world into place. The pounding in his head began to grow dull, less urgent.
He knew this place. It wasn’t far from his room: just down an alley from the corner where he’d met Lapis.
Lapis!
His eyes widened at the thought of her, and he leaned forward as if he might look around for the girl, but the thudding in his skull became a percussive scream and he once more had to settle himself into place.
He hoped she was okay. She’d been kind to him, after all.
And surely that greasy-haired rat of a man—her pimp, he decided on reflection—wouldn’t hurt her much. It wouldn’t be good for business.
Business. Thrasyllus smiled despite the pain in his body and in his heart. That’s all he was for her in the end. Business. He’d been a fool to think differently.
He turned his head to spit out the thick contents of his mouth. The act brought his tongue against the back of his teeth and so he ran it across them, counting.
His smile returned. Whatever blows he’d received after he’d been knocked out—and from the feel of it there had been several—they hadn’t dislodged any teeth. That was a blessing, he supposed. The big brute must not have done much of the hitting. If he had, Thrasyllus was certain he’d be in far worse condition.
He leaned back again, looking up at the white stone buildings with their red-tiled roofs. So much of Alexandria was planned—an exact arrangement of right angles squaring off the grid of wide streets, following the patterns established by Alexander the Great at the city’s founding—that the few areas where the plan broke down seemed chaotic by comparison. This part of the Old Quarter was one of them. Here the buildings appeared to pile up atop one another, an organic randomness that could seem a labyrinth to outsiders. But to those who lived here, it was part of the charm. It was teeming with its own kind of life, like a tiny village inside the city, complete with its own little markets and ways and means. It was one of the things that had drawn Thrasyllus to take rooms here: the Old Quarter was as close to home as he would ever get.
At the thought of home Thrasyllus felt for the satchel at his side.
Gone. The astrologer’s smile faded away. He wasn’t surprised to find that it was gone, though he’d hoped. It was all he had left of his mother.
And with it, his passage to Rome.
And even his lucky coin, all he had left of his father.
Thrasyllus sighed and pulled himself to his feet. Only then, as he put out his hand upon it to steady himself, did he realize what he’d been leaning against: the carved sandstone pedestal on which was mounted the sundial that Eratosthenes had used to measure the Earth some two centuries earlier. The smooth white marble of the sundial’s flat surface was covered with thin dust, and some of the brass initials that were inlaid upon its top were missing, but the metal gnomon at its center, a thin spike almost five feet high, still stood straight and tall and sharp. For Eratosthenes its shadow, along with a man’s shadow cast down into the depths of a Nilometer on the island of Elephantine on the Great River, had allowed him to calculate the circumference of the round globe of the Earth. For Thrasyllus its shadow now confirmed that he’d been unconscious for much of the morning.
And he had nothing. No room, no money, no position. Just the soiled clothes upon his back and the memory of a night that might be best forgotten.
The astrologer looked back up at the gnomon of Eratosthenes stabbing like a needle into the blue Egyptian sky. It was a monument of enormous importance, yet most people simply passed it by. Even Thrasyllus, who knew the tale of Eratosthenes, hadn’t known that the sundial was so near his rooms until another scholar at the Great Library had pointed it out.
The Great Library.
The gnomon was, though the astrologer hardly wanted to admit it, another sign. He’d have to go back to the Great Library. He’d have to beg Didymus to get his old job back. He’d even have to humble himself to that damn Apion.
Thrasyllus took another look at the gnomon, shook his head a little to clear it, and then sighed. He had no choice now, he supposed. The gods wished what the gods wished. He could only try to follow their signs.
As he took his first step, his sandaled foot kicked something on the ground. It made a metallic sound as it rattled across the paving stones, and he looked down to see that it was a single coin, its glint just barely visible in the dust of the day.
Thrasyllus bent down and picked it up. Even before he began turning it over in his fingers he knew it.
His father’s coin.
Another sign, the astrologer thought. If he’d not decided to walk in this direction, he never would have found it. Maybe, just maybe, his luck was changing.
His mother’s satchel gone, Thrasyllus tucked his father’s coin into his fist. And then, with a limp that faded the farther he strode from the gnomon of Eratosthenes, he began the long walk to the Great Library of Alexandria.
3
THE PALLADIUM OF TROY
CANTABRIA, 26 BCE
Amid an open circle of trees, a whisper of wind rose from the earth. Even with the shadows of the coming dawn still long around it, there was light enough in that clear space to see how the wind gathered into the air in thin fingers made visible by the fine dust that they sucked up from the parched ground. It coiled back against itself, and little flares of its growing strength flicked out from its rising, spinning form, licking out into the world like the forked tongues of serpents. Still it grew. Tighter. Faster.
And then, in a sudden rush, the wind tumbled forward as it was released into the half-light, unrolling its pent-up tide of energy into a chaotic cyclone that danced across the open ground and collided with its target on the other side of the clearing.
The empty canvas bag, buffeted by the churning ghost, strained against the branch it was hung upon. Lingering night birds ceased their chatter and sprang out from the surrounding trees. Then the wind was spent, and the cloth shook itself into stillness.
Sitting on a rock at the opposite side of the clearing, Cleopatra Selene took her hands away from the Shard in her lap. Through she was breathing heavily from the effort to engage the power of the artifact, she smiled. Her ability to control the Palladium was growing by the day.
Her new husband, Juba, was standing behind her, and she could feel his joy even before she heard him clap and reach down to put his dark-skinned arms around her in a hug that squeezed her firmly but gently. He bent his head to her ear and kissed her lightly on the cheek. “Wonderful, my love.”