Away, it said. Run.
7
THE SCROLLS OF THOTH
ALEXANDRIA, 32 BCE
The voice came from the shadows in the corner of the ransacked room. Didymus’ mind flashed through possibilities of escape, of alarm. He opted for none of them. Anything might put the girl at risk. “Who’s there?” he asked, trying to infuse his voice with a strength and authority that he knew he lacked. His eyes passed across the overturned chest, the scattered scrolls. Whoever it was had been searching for something, clearly. “What are you looking for?”
A scar-faced man, one of the Roman messengers Didymus had seen in the busy yard, stepped out of the dark. His hand held a short, bare dagger, and his gaze rested on Didymus with a kind of indifference—as if he were another object in the room rather than a human being. Didymus had seen such a look only once before, but he recognized the signs at once, in a flood of memory so sharp, so brutally painful, that he actually felt his stomach twist in revulsion.
“You,” the assassin said. “Please, come in. I’ve been expecting you.”
Didymus had to fight the urge to look to Selene, to scream at her to run. It would be foolish. If the man knew she was there she would never outrun him. The scholar’s right hand was still outside the door frame, though, so he motioned with it—once, twice—flicking his wrist as sharply as he could manage without moving the parts of his arm visible to the room, to the assassin. Get away, girl, he shouted in his mind, hoping to will her away. Go!
And then he stepped into the room, his hand reaching back for the door to shut it, to put one more barrier between the killer and the eight-year-old daughter of Cleopatra.
Selene was smarter than most people gave her credit for, he knew. Surely she understood. Surely she was already on her way down the hall. If not finding the nearest guard, at least sneaking back to her chambers, back to her room. Back to her innocent dreams of Rome.
“So,” Didymus said. “You come for me?” It surprised him how little concern he felt for himself as he asked the question. Even against the prospect of his own death, his greater concern was for the girl.
That he’d not always been so self-sacrificing, so caring for the children of Cleopatra, was the sickening thought he had to fight to keep at bay.
The assassin smiled, almost apologetically. “Not for you, no. Not for anyone unless it need be.” He pulled the blade back to a sheath at his side, tilted his head toward the simple wooden bench under the window. “Please, librarian. Sit.”
Didymus thought once more about whether he should raise the alarm—but he would be a dead man, he was sure, before help could possibly arrive. Most of the guards had been pulled away to the council chambers in the nearby royal court. Better, then, to find out whatever he could. Perhaps he could still be of use to his friends, even once-treacherous as he was.
Besides, he abruptly realized, the assassin hadn’t identified him as the children’s tutor. Perhaps it had nothing to do with them. “You called me ‘librarian,’” Didymus said, making his way over to the bench, trying not to step on the scattered contents of the room: his drafts of a volume on Aristarchus’ recension of Homer’s Iliad, which would take days to put back in order. What, he wondered, could the man have possibly been looking for? “And it looks as if you’re in search of something. A book, perhaps?”
“Yes. A book. And not just any book will do.”
“Of course.” Didymus allowed his voice to swing toward patronizing. He gestured toward the scattered debris as he sat down. “Though it seems you’re confused. I’m the librarian, but this isn’t the Great Library.”
The assassin’s smile was thin. “My mistake,” he said. “But I think only you know where it is. It’s an important book. Important enough I thought you might keep it here.”
The Greek’s mind raced, wondering what volume could be important enough for someone to send a killer to procure it. But it was useless. The Royal Library held countless volumes that could be priceless to someone. Nothing, after all, was more precious than knowledge. He sighed. “What book?”
The scar-faced Roman fished from the folds of his clothing a small sealed letter. “A scroll,” he said, handing it over to Didymus. “Maybe a set of them. Very important. Very unique.”
Didymus looked at the red-wax seal and felt his heart skip a beat. It was Octavian’s. The same as he’d seen on the letter from Varro some dozen years earlier, the letter promising him Senate support for the position of librarian if he aided the man sent by Octavian to kill Cleopatra—or so Didymus had foolishly thought.
All at once the memory of that night broke through the barriers of his mind, and he was there once more. Nineteen years old again. Walking the halls of Caesar’s villa as if in a dream. Certain it couldn’t be real. Certain he hadn’t just told Octavian’s assassin where to find the boy. Certain he’d wake up any moment. Half-driven to insanity by his youthful yearnings for Cleopatra—a yearning churned to anger at her clear lack of interest in the young Athenian scholar hired to tutor her children—he’d agreed to help the conspirators kill her. But not the boy. Not the innocent boy. Surely it was a dream. Surely he’d never spoken those words.
But then Cleopatra’s moans turned to screams, cutting through his daze. A banging began. A horrible, hollow banging that reverberated through the villa: the sound, he would soon discover, of a legionnaire named Vorenus pounding against the barred wooden door to Caesarion’s room. Didymus ran toward the sounds, the horror of what he’d done suddenly real. Quick as he was, Cleopatra and Antony were there already, the queen half-collapsed in her soon-to-be-lover’s arms. Vorenus, his face red, was throwing his shoulder, his body, again and again and again into the unyielding barrier. Against the wall, slumped like a discarded sack of wheat, lay one of Caesarion’s guards, his throat slit because Didymus had told the assassin where to find him. There were shouts and crashes from within, Cleopatra’s high-pitched wail from without. And then a moment of terrible, awful quiet before the door suddenly came open to reveal a massive veteran Roman legionnaire—Pullo—holding the frightened boy in his arms. And beyond him, bleeding out on the floor of the little bedroom that Didymus had almost made the child’s tomb, the assassin himself. They looked into each other’s eyes—assassin and traitor—and in that moment everything that Didymus had thought he’d wanted died. His desire for power. His foolish desire for Cleopatra. If Antony had pulled Didymus’ name from the lips of the dying assassin, he would have met his inevitable death without sorrow. More than that, he would have welcomed it.
Even now, sitting in his littered room, holding the sealed letter, he wondered if it would have been better if he had died that night. It would have been easier than living with the guilt of knowing that he’d been the one to betray the boy he’d taught for all these years. Far easier.
But, then, he’d grown to love the boy as his own. He’d done all he could for him, and for the other children, too, when they came along. That had to be worth something, didn’t it? Nothing could make up for what he’d done, nothing could make it right, but the world was a better place for him having been in it since then, wasn’t it?
“Librarian?”
Didymus blinked himself back to the present, smiled grimly at the assassin. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was just thinking it had been a long time since I’d seen the seal of Octavian.”
As soon as the name escaped his lips, Didymus heard a sound from the hallway outside the room. It was muted by the wood, but clear enough to the scholar: Selene had just choked off her own involuntary gasp.