The Shards of Heaven (45 page)

Octavian said nothing, but he stared at the girl for long seconds, seeming deep in thought. “What is his life worth to you?” he finally asked.

“Whatever mine is worth to you,” Selene replied. “He is as my father. If I'm to be spared, let him be so.” She bowed at last, graceful and smooth, and held herself low and humble before him.

Vorenus saw Octavian swallow hard. “You're as interesting as you are beautiful,” the Imperator said. The smile that spread across his face seemed to Vorenus both victorious and devious. “I'll offer you a bargain. A gift to show my goodwill to Egypt and Rome's loyal subjects.”

Cleopatra's hand twitched again, but instead of reaching out to her daughter she bowed alongside her.

“I offer Lucius Vorenus of the old Sixth Legion free passage from this room as a wedding gift.”

Cleopatra knelt on one knee, then raised her head to address the man upon her throne. “A wedding gift?”

Octavian's face flashed to malice for a moment before it returned to something that might have been kindness. “Yes, my lady. For your daughter, who I will give to a truly loyal man, Juba the Numidian.”

“Numidian?” The word was gasped out of Cleopatra's throat.

“A man of my own family,” Octavian said, an edge in his voice. He stood from the chair, came down the steps to stand before Selene. “Well? I give you a place in my family, lady Selene. And so to these your brothers.”

Selene had remained bowing, but now she raised herself up. “If Juba will have me,” she said in a quiet voice.

“He will.”

The leering look in Octavian's eyes as he stood so close to the girl and passed his gaze over her body made a heat rise in Vorenus that brushed aside his pains and focused his awareness. His fingers stretched and balled into fists. I can get to him, he told himself. I can do it.

But then Selene was turning toward him. Her eyes shone with dampness, but the smile on her face seemed genuinely happy. Her mouth shaped in silent speech.
Go,
she seemed to say.
It'll be fine.

Vorenus felt her love, her devotion, her kindness. He relaxed his fists and returned her smile with his own
. Be strong,
he tried to tell her.
Be strong and live.

Hands were pulling him away, out of the chamber. He nodded to the girl who thought she'd saved his life, and then he turned and let Galbus lead him out of the palace and into the sunlight. For Selene's sake, he walked as if he had no care in the world.

Three legionnaires formed around him and Galbus. None of them returned his weapons to him. None said a word.

Not that anything needed to be said. Vorenus knew Octavian could never let him live. He'd only promised free passage from the throne room, not from the island. Selene would learn such nuances in time. She'd learn to play the game. And she'd be good at it in the end. Vorenus was certain of that, too. She was stronger than anyone ever gave her credit for. And she and her brothers would live. That was the important thing now. If it took his death to ensure that, he couldn't complain.

Vorenus took a deep breath of the salty air, feeling the shadow and light pass over his face as they walked beside the palm trees that grew along the promenade. They were taking him to the end of the long dock, past the ships. The better to dispose of his body, he supposed. Let him float to the deep with whatever was left of Khenti.

They passed the royal barge and then, as Vorenus expected, the smaller trireme that he'd arrived on. There were, he saw, a handful of Roman guards on its deck, keeping an eye on the trap that led to the oarsmen below. Vorenus could hear that the Egyptians he and Khenti had conscripted to that duty were still inside the boat, their fate yet to be determined.

Not far beyond, the paved quay ended at the southern point of Antirhodos, an area that couldn't be seen from the rest of the island, hidden behind piles of crates and barrels. The channel separating them from the city was deep and fast with strong current. All the better to kill him quietly and have him swept away.

Galbus stepped aside, motioning Vorenus toward the edge. Vorenus sensed the other three legionnaires slowing and taking positions behind him. Their movements were so scripted, executed so silently, that a part of him wondered how many men they'd executed as a group. Not that it mattered. Not now.

The waves moved up and back among the rocks below him. Instead of looking down at them, he looked off at the sea and tried to remember his mother.

He could see a body rising out there, floating up with the tide before falling away again amid the waves. Khenti, Vorenus thought. I failed him, too.

“You'll meet your Egyptian friend in the afterlife,” Galbus said.

Vorenus doubted that was so. “Be quick,” he said. It seemed the sort of thing he ought to say, though he didn't really know if it mattered.

Vorenus fixed his gaze on that faraway body. He heard, for the second time in minutes, the sound of a blade being pulled from its scabbard. The body on the water rose on a high wave, rolling over. Vorenus, through his tired eyes, at last saw it clearly. Blond-haired, wearing the uniform of a legionnaire.

A gladius, still in its sheath, suddenly flew up from the shoreline rocks below him, hanging for a moment point down in the air before him. Only in that moment did his mind catch up to the reality of what was going on.

Though no longer the young man that he'd once been, Vorenus could still move with speed when it was necessary. He reached out and snapped his hand around the grip of the gladius even as he spun on his toes and brought the weapon around in an arc. For a fleeting instant he saw the dark shape of Khenti leaping up over the wall, swoop-bladed Egyptian sword in hand, but then Vorenus lost sight of him as he came around and his swing landed solidly against the edge of the blade that had been meant for his neck.

Galbus' eyes widened in shock as his blade sank into Vorenus' sheathed gladius. Their arms reverberated for a second, and then Vorenus lunged forward, slamming his forehead into the Roman's nose.

Vorenus felt wet splatter his face as he drove into the man. Galbus fell backward, dropping his sword as his hands flew to his broken face, and Vorenus scrambled over him, skittering to stay on his feet and turn toward the legionnaries even as he unsheathed the gladius in his hand.

Khenti had two of the remaining legionnaires engaged, his curved blade already dripping with blood from the third, who was down on the ground, the hilt of a dagger protruding from beneath his jaw. The man's legs were jerking in short spasms.

The Egyptian danced around to his left, face dispassionate, almost curious as he kept their attention. Vorenus took the opportunity to rush at the back of the Romans, his arm rocking backward and forward in a perfect gladius thrust, the kind he'd tried to teach Caesarion when the boy was younger. He aimed the strike for the open side in one legionnaire's armor, and it slipped just below the man's ribs and into his body with fluid, seamless ease, right down into the man's pelvis.

The dying man slid off his blade, and Vorenus turned to see Khenti dispatch the one remaining soldier with a flash of metal that passed across his neck. The Egyptian twirled his sword and sheathed it, face as still as stone, before another dead Roman fell to the pavement.

Khenti motioned to the sprawled and gasping Galbus before Vorenus could say anything. “I can finish him quickly,” the Egyptian said.

Vorenus looked down at the man. His face was smashed and bloodied, his eyes wild. “Let him be,” Vorenus said.

The Egyptian just looked up, as if the answer didn't matter one way or another. “Then we should leave,” he said.

Vorenus strapped on the gladius belt with practiced speed before they ran back to the trireme. The alarm had not yet been raised, and they had no difficulty dispatching the few Roman guards and readying the ship for sail based on Manu's hand signals.

The oarsmen below were only too happy to set their backs into their strokes, and they'd already pulled them away from the dock and against the current by the time Romans began to spill out of the palace. They ran down the docks, sprinting up planks and onto Octavian's bigger royal barge. Oars began to appear through the holes in its sides, extending out like hundreds of thin legs. With so many experienced men below its decks, the royal barge would easily overtake their poorly crewed boat.

“They'll catch us,” Vorenus said, pointing out the obvious.

“Yes, they will,” Khenti replied.

The deck beneath them shook slightly as the oarsmen ceased rowing backward and began to drive forward with the current through the channel. Manu's bearing was the fastest way to escape the island and would carry them directly toward the Heptastadion, but it would also take them right past the royal barge as it readied for the water. Already Vorenus could see legionnaires pulling bows on its deck. “We won't even reach the bridge,” he said.

“I think perhaps we will,” Khenti said. Vorenus looked over at him, and he saw that the Egyptian was looking back toward Manu, who was just completing a series of signs. The captain's face was beaming like a kid's.

The trireme began to drive hard through the water, the oarsmen stroking with everything they had. Vorenus felt the current rolling beneath them, pushing them faster and faster. Manu turned the tiller slightly, grinning, and pointed forward.

Vorenus turned, saw the surprise on the Roman faces even before he realized what was happening. A few of them hurriedly released their drawn arrows before they dropped their bows and began to brace for impact. Most did not.

The thick metal ram at the head of their trireme, which had once split the side of Antony's flagship at Actium, now slammed into the keel of Octavian's barge, shuddering the full length of the bigger ship as it broke through the back end of it. Vorenus, who'd had no time to brace himself, rolled forward across the trireme's deck amid a hail of fractured planks.

A few oarsmen and two legionnaires fell down onto their deck from the impact, which cut a gaping wound into the barge, as the trireme's momentum barreled them onward and they tore the hole open even further. Vorenus heard the telltale roar of water beginning to rush into the larger ship's hold even as he watched Khenti dancing through the rain of debris, sword spinning, efficiently dispatching the Romans who'd fallen onto the trireme's deck and didn't dive overboard fast enough.

By the time Vorenus had staggered to his feet, the decks were cleared and the barge was starting to sink in their wake. A few desperate arrows were falling into the water behind them, but the oarsmen already had them out of range. Khenti was walking toward him, sword put away, as calm as a man out for a stroll.

Vorenus smiled, feeling at last like maybe, just maybe, they might pull this off. Then he turned toward the first bridge of the Heptastadion looming ahead, just in time to see their destination erupt upward into the morning sky in a fiery roar of black-billowing smoke, broken wood, and shattered stone.

 

29

T
HE
P
OWER
OF
A
S
HARD

ALEXANDRIA, 30 BCE

Out on the water ships were moving in so many directions it was dizzying. But none of them, for the moment, appeared to be heading toward the Heptastadion and the eight men and one woman huddled around the Ark of the Covenant in the quiet beneath its first bridge.

Caesarion watched it all with anxious anticipation. “He'll come,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. “I know Vorenus. He won't fail.”

“Aye,” Pullo said. Caesarion looked over his shoulder at the big man, who was standing with Jacob and Didymus on the other side of the Ark, just inside the gate to the underground canal. “I'd bet my life on him.”

“We don't doubt your friend, but faster would be better,” Jacob said, a touch of his typical amusement in his voice.

“Oh, I don't deny that,” Pullo said with a grin.

“We can only wait so long,” one of the four guards ringing the edge of the platform whispered to Hannah. Like his fellows, he had an arrow nocked on his bow as he scanned the water and turned to aim at every sound.

“Oh, I don't think we've anything to fear at the moment,” Pullo said. “No one knows we're here.”

“Meaning no disrespect, Titus Pullo, but that's what we thought before,” Hannah said. “Before Didymus and his friend showed up.”

“He wasn't my friend,” Didymus said.

“As you told us,” said the guard.

“You—you don't think I'm lying, do you?”

“We do not,” Hannah said before the guard could respond. “But you did say that there were more Romans with you. Though I doubt anyone could have survived the trap, we'd rather not take the chance that someone got away and is bringing more Romans to find us. So haste would be best.”