And still more: there was an even greater weapon of the gods out there to be found, a weapon of the Jews that might give him the power to accomplish the revenge he’d long hoped to achieve. An ark.
The wooden door to the temple squeaked open and shut. Quintus tentatively shuffled up behind him. “Juba?”
The sixteen-year-old focused his eyes on the distant horizon, where the darkening sea met the darkening sky. Lightning flashed there, silent but threatening.
Syphax didn’t have all the answers, but the old priest knew who did. “Thoth knows,” he’d said, again and again. The source of the Trident’s power, the nature of its strange black stone, the whereabouts of the wondrous ark … Thoth knows.
At first, Juba had thought it was no answer at all. Thoth was an Egyptian god, like the Roman Mercury, a figure who moved between the world of gods and the world of men. A deity of so many faces he seemed to be everything and nothing all at once: god of magic and medicine, god of the dead, god of the moon, god of writing and wisdom, even the founder of civilization itself.
Thoth would naturally know the answers to questions. Yet Syphax had spoken with a pragmatic earnestness, as if Juba could easily get information from Thoth.
“So where is Thoth?” Juba had asked the priest of Astarte.
And, after some final persuasion, Syphax had answered: “Thoth was in Sais.”
Sais, Juba knew, was the cult center for the goddess Neith, the Egyptian counterpart of Astarte, which explained the priest’s knowledge. Perhaps it even explained how he’d come to have the Trident. Then he’d caught the nuance in the priest’s words. “Was?”
The old priest had smiled grimly, his pale teeth smeared with red. “The Scrolls are in Alexandria.”
The truth at last. It wasn’t Thoth himself who had the answers, but the legendary Scrolls of Thoth, in which all knowledge, it was said, could be found. And the Scrolls were in Egypt, in the Great Library. Find them and he’d have the power, and the vengeance, that he sought.
“Juba?”
The lightning pulsed again, and beyond the wind and the breaking of waves Juba heard a quiet rumble. Was it from the earlier flashes? Or was it the deep of the sea, calling out for its master? Juba swallowed hard, resisting the temptation to touch the metal head of the Trident in its canvas bundle, to see if it was warmer now. Instead he took a deep breath to clear his mind, to focus on the tasks immediately at hand. He needed to do more research. More than that, he needed money. Getting the Scrolls of Thoth from the Great Library and destroying Rome wasn’t going to come cheap, after all, with or without a weapon of the gods. And there was surely no better time to strike than now, with war between Rome and Alexandria threatening to turn the world to chaos.
“We’re returning to Rome,” he said over his shoulder. “As soon as possible. There are things I need to do there.”
“Of course,” Quintus said, his voice uncertain. “Laenas wants to know, sir, what about the priest?”
Juba blinked away the beads of salty water that were starting to cling to his eyelashes. What to do about the priest? He was a loyal Numidian, after all, one of the very people Juba was going to save from Rome. Yet he’d abandoned the promise made to Juba’s father, no matter his reasons. And, truth be told, he knew far too many things that were best kept secret, even if Juba didn’t yet know the fullness of his course. Viewed through the lens of logic, the decision was easy, even if saying it was hard. Juba wondered if his Numidian father had ever felt the same. No doubt his adopted Roman one never had. “Tell Laenas to kill him,” he finally managed to say. As the words escaped his lips Juba knew for certain that he would not sleep well this night. He wondered how he would ever sleep soundly again. “Tell him he’ll get his thirty coins if he does it quickly.”
Quintus hesitated for a moment, a slight stammer his only response. Then Juba heard the sound of the temple door opening and closing again, leaving him alone.
Well, perhaps not alone, Juba corrected himself, watching the approaching storm and wondering whether the gods were real.
2
THE LAST QUIET MOMENTS
ALEXANDRIA, 32 BCE
Lucius Vorenus, feeling a familiar tiredness in his forty-five-year-old bones, leaned against the sun-bleached stonework atop the old palace wall and peered down into the cleared square of one of the inner courtyards, where Caesarion was practicing his sword work in the fading light of the day. Working against Vorenus’ old friend Titus Pullo, the fifteen-year-old co-regent of Egypt had stripped to his loincloth to reveal a body filled out with lean muscle that flexed beneath a sheen of thick sweat—a fact that Vorenus could see did not go unnoticed by the small gathering of the remaining servant girls in the shadows, who whispered between giggling smiles as they watched the young man training. A few months ago there might have been dozens more spectators even in this most private of spaces within the sprawling expanse of red-roofed buildings, pillared arcades, and daunting towers that made up the royal palace, but the threat of Rome had changed all that. For the safety of the royal family, the inner wards of the palace were far emptier these days, even as the city continued to teem with busy life around them.
Vorenus and Pullo had long disagreed about whether it was appropriate to teach Caesarion how to fight in this way. After all, as pharaoh of Egypt, Caesarion was, according to Egyptian rite, the earthly embodiment of the god Horus, and Vorenus thought it might appear inappropriate that a god be trained in the mortal ways of men. While the uneasy peace with Octavian had lasted, Vorenus’ opinion had carried the day. But now war seemed increasingly inevitable.
The clash of steel echoed loudly in the little courtyard as Caesarion overreached on a thrust and was promptly disarmed by the experienced Pullo. Vorenus had never known the big man to be patient with anything in his life, but he was loyally so with Caesarion, stooping to pick up the pharaoh’s weapon from where it had clattered down amid the red and white tiles. He handed it back to the young man even as he quietly told him where he’d gone wrong.
Though he still felt uneasiness about such martial training for the pharaoh, Vorenus could hardly deny its effectiveness. Caesarion was a gifted and able student, qualities that extended, according to the chief librarian who acted as his tutor, into the intellectual realms as well. Indeed, the Greek Didymus often compared the boy’s wide-ranging capabilities to those of his father Julius, who was at once one of Rome’s finest generals, orators, politicians, and warriors. Of course, all those involved with the child’s upbringing had kept such comparisons out of Caesarion’s earshot by mutual and long-standing agreement. He was already the boy who could inherit the world, after all. No sense in giving him even more self-importance.
In the sunny courtyard the two men were in melee once again, dancing across the patterned tiles, and Vorenus turned away from the wall, thinking he might make a surprise inspection of the barracks. This was certainly no time to allow anyone to get complacent, the Roman guardsmen least of all. He didn’t get two steps, however, before one of the native guardsmen appeared, hurrying up the stairs from the depths of the palace. “Messengers at the gate, sir,” the Egyptian said once he was close. “Requesting entry into the palace.”
“So?” Messengers arrived daily, if not hourly, these days—all part of Antony and Cleopatra’s efforts to have the most up-to-date information of the events happening around the Mediterranean. War was, after all, in the air, which was also the reason that messengers were never allowed in the palace itself, not unless … “Wait. Messengers from where?”