A cascade of stones scattered down off the ceiling nearby. Didymus didn’t flinch, but he recognized the danger in an academic way. “We should go,” he said.
The Numidian had sat down on the pile of rubble beside him. He bowed his head. He was looking at his hands, as if he expected to see something more upon them than scrapes and dirt. “I think I killed men today,” Juba said quietly. “I don’t … remember clearly.” He sounded more tired than even Didymus felt.
The librarian took a deep breath, thinking about what to say. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “It all happened so quick. I don’t understand even what I think I saw.” It was true, he decided, after a fashion.
“And this man?” Juba asked.
Man? Didymus looked down at the ground and saw, after his eyes adjusted, first the torn and half-burnt clothes and then the shape of the man beneath them.
“Caesarion was here,” Juba said weakly. “I think we fought. Is it him?”
The librarian had to step around the body and kneel in order to get a look at the dead man’s face. It was an act that would have turned his stomach once, but it seemed a small thing after what he’d already seen this day.
Jacob was badly burned, his hair gone, but Didymus could still recognize him. And the blackened sword still protruding from his stomach was all the confirmation he needed.
“Is it Caesarion?” Juba asked again.
Didymus stared into Jacob’s lifeless eyes, but it wasn’t the dead Jew that he saw. It was his old friend, Titus Pullo, who’d given the last of his life to let Caesarion escape with the Shard. Pullo, the bravest, strongest man he’d ever met. Didymus felt tears upon his cheeks, tracing through the numbness of his emotions.
“Well?”
Didymus blinked up at Juba, who looked down through sunken eyes, his shoulders hunched with exhaustion. Didymus swallowed hard, stood, and then did the bravest thing he could think to do, just the sort of thing he thought Pullo would do if he were still alive: he lied. “It is,” he said, letting his emotions quake his voice. “Burned badly, but it’s him.”
Juba let out a sigh that seemed mixed with both relief and sadness. “I thought it was.”
The two of them stared down at the dead man in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. A minute passed, perhaps two. More rocks fell, splashing into the water not far away.
“We should move him,” Juba said at last. “Octavian will want to see—”
“No,” Didymus interrupted. “Leave him. Let the world remember him for what he was. Not this. Don’t let him be paraded in front of his family.”
“But he’ll want to know … to confirm it.”
“We’ll both tell him,” the librarian said. “There was a fire, in a building. The body burned.”
Juba opened his mouth to object, his eyes still downcast at the body, but no words came. After a few seconds he agreed tiredly. “We could do that,” he said. “We could lie.”
“I’ll keep the secret until the day I die,” Didymus said, meaning every word.
“Yes,” Juba finally said. “Died in a fire.”
More rocks fell, only a few feet from where they stood. Didymus reached out and pulled on what was left of the Numidian’s sleeve. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Juba lingered for a moment longer, then allowed the scholar to help him up and lead him from the wall and the body. Together the two men limped away slowly, each leaning on the other for support, up the pathway beside the canal, looking for a way up out of the darkness to the world of light above.
EPILOGUE
THE GIRL WHO WOULD FIGHT THE WORLD
ALEXANDRIA, 30 BCE
Cleopatra Selene, the ten-year-old daughter of the queen of Egypt and Mark Antony, stood on the steps of the royal palace on Antirhodos, holding a fruit basket and watching the lingering smoke rising up from the smoldering ashes of a funeral pyre on the pavement below. Servants and slaves were sweeping chalky dust off the stones, back toward the charred pile of burned wood. Here and there amid the gray and the black she caught glimpses of white, and she had to look away, over the waters of the harbor toward Alexandria.
Less than two weeks since Antony’s suicide, a few days since Octavian had formally declared his sovereignty over the city with a grand parade of his troops down the Canopic Way, and plumes of smoke still dotted Alexandria’s storied skyline. From more burning buildings, she supposed. Octavian had issued reprimands against his army’s looting, but he deemed most of the damage they caused unimportant. Dozens of civilians continued to be raped or beaten or murdered each day, but these as well were not considered great outrages. The official reports being sent back to Rome, she knew, spoke only of success and glory, nothing of the chaos and the death that spread in the Imperator’s wake.
Imperator. Already there was talk that he’d refuse to give up the title should the Senate ask it of him. There was talk that the self-proclaimed son of the god Caesar would follow in his adopted father’s footsteps and hold all the power of Rome—unified now, after so many years of war—in his hands. In private, the rumors said, he already called himself by a new name: Augustus Caesar, the greatest Caesar. And this month in which he conquered Egypt, they said, he would order renamed August, in his own honor.
From everything she’d come to know of Octavian, Selene expected that the whispers were all true.
Octavian. Imperator. Son of god. Augustus Caesar. Selene wasn’t going to rest until he was dead. It didn’t matter what his name was.
She looked down to the basket in her hands once again, taking a deep breath and trying not to think about the taste of the ashes in the air.
Then she began to climb the steps to the palace and her waiting mother.
* * *
The men guarding the door of Cleopatra’s chamber were adamant that they couldn’t allow Selene inside. “You can’t go in,” one of them kept repeating. Before Octavian had reached the royal island, her mother had sent Antony’s body to the priests with orders that it be embalmed like those of the pharaohs of old. She’d then moved the family’s finest treasures into her room in the palace, intending to barricade herself inside as she prepared for the end. Only the speed of Octavian’s arrival had prevented her from carrying out her plans to follow Antony into the embrace of death. Since then the queen had been kept under arrest in her own chamber, surrounded by now-useless gold.
“But I need to see her,” she insisted.
“Orders of the Imperator of Rome.”
Rather than spit, Selene looked sheepish and childlike. “I’m a girl with a fruit basket,” she said. “What harm could I be?”
“I’m sorry. You can’t go in.”
Selene pouted, pushed her weight to one hip. “I want to see my mother,” she said.
Before the guard could repeat his denial, another voice came from down the hall. “What’s this, legionnaire?”
The Roman guards came to attention and saluted, and Selene turned to see that Juba was walking toward them slowly, still limping from the wounds he’d sustained in the battle that had killed Caesarion. Her brother’s death had been an accident, Didymus told her, and the Numidian himself had never taken credit for his killing, despite the honors he might have received from Octavian for it. She still blamed him, though, and she hated him for it. She’d trusted him to get the Ark, to help her brother. Not lose them both.
“The lady Selene wishes admittance to deliver fruit to her mother,” one of the guards reported.
“I can see that,” the Numidian said. Selene noticed now that Juba was carrying a book. From the Great Library, she supposed. He’d been spending most of his time there since the fall of the city, his readings guided by Didymus himself. She’d often wondered if they were still looking for the Ark, which Didymus told her had been taken by the Jews. If such things were on his mind, he showed no indication of it now. “And why won’t you let her in?”