“Must have been an interesting childhood,” said Matthias, grimacing as he pulled himself to his feet.
“Growing up at the court of Macedonia was a little too interesting for my taste.”
“See much of Alexander?” asked Lugorix.
“See him? He wouldn’t leave me alone.”
“He made advances on you?”
“No, I don’t think he likes girls much. But he idolized my father, so he was constantly bugging me to figure out my father’s ‘secrets.’ He always thought my father was holding stuff back from him.”
“Well, wasn’t he?” asked Matthias.
“Fuck I hope so.” She frowned. “What’s that on the horizon?”
They followed the direction of her gaze, saw what she’d just noticed. Faint flashes sparkling along the horizon. Which could only be—
“Lightning,” said Lugorix.
“I’ve never seen lightning like that.”
It was a little peculiar, Lugorix had to admit. Purple flared, illuminated huge clouds strung along the horizon—turned to green and then to yellow before fading to dark. It was too far away to hear any thunder.
“Must be a big storm,” said Matthias.
“At least we’re heading south of it,” said Lugorix. “Far away.”
“Very far away,” said Eurydice. She seemed to be lost in thought. “If we can’t hear the thunder, that’s being reflected over the horizon. Must be some kind of atmospherics. Hard to tell how far.”
“What’s north of here?” said Matthias.
“Not much. Just ocean, all the way to Gaul.”
Matthias mulled that over. “Didn’t Barsine say Alexander had captured Massilia?”
“I don’t know if captured was the precise word,” said Eurydice. Her face was grave. “It was a massacre. Ordered by Alexander himself.” She stared off at those flickering lights. “My father… he thought he could shape the boy’s character. Guide his actions. But the prince fell prey to the dreams of his own glory. He has a way of captivating all who listen—himself most of all. And now he’s king in defiance of his father.”
“Barsine said the same,” said Lugorix. “But how is it that a kingdom can have two kings?”
“It can’t,” said Eurydice. “One of them must make way for the other, or else there’ll be two kingdoms.” She paused. “Which may yet happen, of course. If Alexander’s campaigns in the west are successful, Macedonia will stretch from the Pillars of Hercules all the way to the plateaus of Iran. And perhaps no one man could rule so vast a domain.”
“But a god could.”
Eurydice gave Lugorix a strange look. “That’s precisely his problem. He thinks he possesses superhuman abilities, and the world has yet to show him otherwise.” As she spoke, she took the astrolabe out again, began taking more measurements of the stars around Polaris. It seemed as much a nervous gesture as anything. But Lugorix was still fascinated by it.
“So what are they anyway?” said Lugorix.
“What are what?”
“Stars.”
“Oh,” said Eurydice. “Most likely other suns.”
“Just like ours?”
“Maybe smaller. Definitely further away, but like the Sun, revolving around the center.”
“That center…you mean us?”
“You have to start from first principles,” said Eurydice. “Trace the movements of those stars, and you’ll see that the stars wheel through the heavens around us. They move and we do not. Meaning the position of the stars is so predictable we can steer ships by them. So we use the celestial globe overhead to navigate our way across the globe on which we sail.”
“Globe?” Another term Lugorix had never heard of.
“The sphere of the world.”
“Damitra told me the world is flat.”
Laughter: “She’s wrong.” Then, correcting herself even as the laughter stopped: “Was wrong.”
“What does Barsine think?”
“She thinks it’s flat too. But my father said it’s round.”
“Why?”
“He developed several proofs. The first of those was elephants.”
“Elephants,” said Lugorix, wondering if he was being made fun of again.
“If you travel to the west, to Africa, you find elephants. If you travel to the east, to India, you find elephants too. But there aren’t any elephants in between. So these creatures must come from the same land, on the other side of the world.”
Lugorix thought that one over.
“But he didn’t stop there,” said Eurydice. “Look at the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during an eclipse. It’s circular. Naturally, his detractors said that that didn’t mean shit, that the Earth could still be a flat disc. They persist in the error of their ways, though at least it shut up the disciples of Anaximander, who maintained that Earth was a rectangle.” Her voice took on a scornful tone. “His ideas were among the most absurd ever proposed. Do you know, he thought the stars are just pinpricks in the sheet of night, with a great fire beyond them! At any rate, the final proof of the Earth’s spherical nature will have to be left to me.” She gazed at the sky overhead. “My father left a lot of unfinished business.”
“Fathers often do,” said Lugorix. When she didn’t reply: “What does Barsine say to all this?”
“She said if the the Earth was round, then ships sailing away from us would eventually disappear over the horizon.”
“They do disappear,” said a confused Lugorix.
“She says that’s just because they fade away because of distance—that if the Earth were round, they’d be fading quicker.” A pause, then: “The ultimate proof will be showing how the stars change positions in the sky depending on where one is on the Earth. But there isn’t enough data on that. Travellers lie, instruments are unreliable—at least until now. But I hope to make the proof during our journey. Given how much ground we’ll be covering.”
“Travelling to Carthage will show you that?”
“Um. Yes, exactly. Carthage.” But there was something weird about her tone—and Lugorix wasn’t reassured when she changed the subject. “Mathematics and astronomy can be very tricky things. Did you know that there is a number that isn’t a number?”
Lugorix wasn’t in the mood to argue with such obvious absurdity. “No.”
“There is. It’s nothing. Which is its own number. We call it the zero.”
“Crazy,” said Lugorix.
“Numbers are!” she said with the enthuasiasm of one who had successfully ditched a line of conversation that she didn’t like. “Same with words. That’s why my father’s teacher’s teacher—Socrates—never wrote anything down. He thought his work was purer that way. There’s a reason the Egyptian god Thoth was not only the god of writing, he was the god of trickery.” She had yet to notice that Lugorix had stopped paying attention. “Perhaps it’s because there’s such power in words and equations.” She gestured at the stars: “Just because you’re far away from something doesn’t mean you can’t make it a basis for logical questions.”
Lugorix cleared his throat. “Like that of who killed your father?”
Afterwards, he wondered why he said that. Perhaps he was getting tired of this young woman who was so smart and yet so troubled. Or maybe it was because he was sick of her avoiding the one subject that mattered most to her. But for a moment he really did think that she was about to try to hit him. She raised her hand—but he just stood there, not even moving to defend himself. He could afford to be complacent: he stood a full two feet taller than Matthias, and his prowess at close-quarters combat was something that the Greek could only dream of. The truth was that he was perfectly prepared to let her strike him for what he’d just said. Perhaps recognizing this, she restrained herself.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” was all she said.
“You’re probably right.”
“Why are you trying to make me revisit this?”
“His death was a little too convenient.�
�
“Zeus almighty,” she said. “Do you think I’m blind?”
“Who do you think did it?”
Her lips quivered. Her face was white. “Someone who’s going to pay,” she muttered.
Chapter Thirteen
Cleon woke with a start. He’d been dreaming of that woman again. Wondering how in the name of all the gods she’d slipped from his grasp. He was master of all Syracuse—he could have done whatever he wanted with that wayward daughter of a dead sorceror, and she’d slipped through his fingers. That fact galled at him more than a little. It would have been sweet to have her join him in this bed he lay in now, at the top of his personal tower in the Ortygia. Sweet—but stupid. There was no use dwelling in dreams. He opened his eyes.
And froze.
Someone was in the room with him. He couldn’t see them in the dark, but somehow he knew it all the same. Someone was standing there, right at the foot of his bed. Someone who was convinced he was helpless, who only needed another moment to kill him—or who was waiting for him to wake in order to gloat or make some pointless demand. Cleon didn’t care which; his response was the same regardless. The paranoid slept with knives under their pillows, but Cleon had something better. Very slowly he reached out along the edge of the bed and grasped the miniature crossbow-pistol that hung concealed there. He slid it toward him, raised it up to point at where he thought the intruder was.
Only then did he speak.
“I’m awake,” he said. For a long moment there was silence. But then—
“I realize that,” said a voice.
“Have you come to kill me?”
“I came to bring you a message.”
“You could have just sent it.”
“I’m not sure you would have listened.”
“I’m listening now.”
“Good,” said the figure. There was the sound of iron striking flint; a lantern flared into view. The man who held it had a sword in his other hand. He was of medium height, with a thick black beard, an aquiline nose, and a wolfish grin. He put the lantern on the floor and drew a second sword.
“Don’t you think one will be enough?” said Cleon.
“Is this the part where you try to assure me you’re unarmed?”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” He probably thinks I have a blade. “Who are you?”
“I’m Ptolemy,” said the man. “Son of Philip.”
“You mean the bastard son of Philip,” said Cleon. Ptolemy looked surprised—Cleon laughed, enjoying the man’s discomfiture. “You Macedonians have your spies in Syracuse. We Athenians have ours in Pella.”
“Then they must have told you how unhappy Philip is with you.”
“Why should he be unhappy?”
“Because you took our gold.”
“In return for which I killed the old man.”
“But not his daughter.”
“She knew nothing.”
“You must think I know nothing if you expect me to believe that.”
Cleon forced his voice to sound casual. “She escaped.”
“How could you be so careless?”
“I was distracted by her tits,” said Cleon sarcastically.
“Precisely why I thought I might find them right here beside you.”
“One of my many mistakes.”
“Not killing her was the worst of them.” He paused. “You really didn’t even fuck her?”
“Only with my eyes.”
Ptolemy spat on the floor. “But why did you try to fuck us?”
“I’ll admit I was hoping you were less informed.” His mind was racing furiously. “How many of my guards did you kill?”
“Just the ones outside your door. The rest I simply avoided. But let’s talk about the girl. She has at least half the knowledge of her father. She’s smart enough to figure out the rest. So why the hell didn’t you kill her?”
Cleon took a deep breath. The only way out of this was to get Ptolemy off balance. The Macedonian would be seeing him merely as a fat old man in bed. But the angrier Cleon could make him, the better. The truth was the best vehicle for that. “I was trying to sell her to Alexander,” he said.
There was a moment’s pause. “You’re shitting me,” said Ptolemy.
“Nice to see you can be surprised.”
“He was bidding against his own father?”
“Doesn’t the one serve the other?” asked Cleon disingenuously.
“If you really do have decent spies in Pella, they’ll have disabused you of that notion.”
“So the old man isn’t too happy about his son proclaiming himself king?” Cleon grinned at the look that flashed across Ptolemy’s face. “I mean his real son, of course.” For a moment he thought Ptolemy was going to attack him there and then. But instead the Macedonian noble took a deep breath.
“Let Alexander adorn himself with titles,” he said. “Let him heap his head with crowns. What does it matter? He may stand at the head of the largest army in the Mediteranean, but it’s his father that really pulls the strings.”
“You sure about that?”
“All the more so since Alexander doesn’t even realize it.”
“I guess when you’re the commander of eighty thousand hardened veterans that might be hard to spot,” said Cleon.
“Your sarcasm is duly noted.”
“And here I was thinking that Macedonians were too thick to register it.”
“But not too bereft of clue to follow your schemes. So: you thought to play the father and the son against each other, and in so doing maybe draw out the schemes of both. But irony of ironies—the one who stole your prize out from under you turns out to be a prize all her own. Especially to Alexander.”
“The Persian? I never saw her.”
“No,” said Ptolemy. “You didn’t. She just struck a deal with outlaw scum and organized a little fishing expedition. Which makes me merely the latest person to underscore just how pathetic your defenses are. What happened to the contents of the old man’s laboratories?”
“I heard he left most of those in Pella,” said Cleon.
“I can assure you he brought the best ones here. And it’s a safe bet she took them west with her when she split.”
Cleon tightened his finger on the crossbow’s trigger. “Perhaps she’ll even find what she’s looking for out there.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” snarled Ptolemy. “Do you even realize what’s at stake?”
“Does anyone know exactly?”
“We have our suspicions.”
“You mean your fantasies,” said Cleon.
Ptolemy’s face darkened. “I mean our knowledge. You who had Aristotle at your beck and call should know better than to indulge in such mockery. The superstitious think the gods used to walk the earth. The skeptics think it’s all just horseshit. The elect know they’re both wrong. These were people, same as us—”
“No,” said Cleon. He’d seen the reports prepared by Athenian intelligence, the reports that had been suppressed by the archons upon pain of death. “Not the same. Not the same at all.”
But Ptolemy was just talking right over him. “—who unravelled the secrets of the universe. A mere fraction of those secrets would conquer all the armies that ever existed. All of Alexander’s strategic genius—all the armies of the warring powers—all of it would be as nothing compared to the magick of the ancients.”
“And if that magick falls into your hands, you’ll build a Macedonian Empire that will last forever.”
“No one builds an empire intending it should last for less.”
“I’m sure the ancients said the same thing. And look where they are now.”
“Yes,” said Ptolemy. “Where. Exactly. That’s the fucking question.”
Cleon laughed. “And how does Philip plan to answer it? Your half-brother already has two armies in the western Mediterranean. Your father has none.” Ptolemy’s hands tightened on his swords. “No one loyal to him for a thousand miles sav
e you.” Cleon smiled, met Ptolemy’s smoldering eyes. “I knew Philip was past his prime, but I never dreamt for a moment that the cripple would be so foolish as to send the bastard to run his errands—”
The combination of those two words did it. Ptolemy was already leaping forward at Cleon, charging over the bed, both swords out.
Which made him a sitting duck.
Cleon raised his crossbow. Ptolemy started to hurl himself aside, but not fast enough. The bolt flew straight at him—
And glanced off one of Ptolemy’s blades, shooting up and burying itself in the ceiling.
For a moment all was still.
Then Ptolemy picked himself off the floor.
“Would that I could make this slower,” he said, walking toward Cleon.
“Wait,” said the viceroy. “I have gold.”
“That which we gave you,” snarled Ptolemy.
The last thing Cleon saw was that blade coming at him.
“Dying was the best thing that asshole ever did.”
It wasn’t the most tactful of eulogies, but it might just be the most accurate, Leosthenes reflected. Though to be sure, not everyone in the room shared the opinion. In particular Phocion, whose patron Cleon had been, was looking less than pleased with Hypereides’ judgment. The death—and by all accounts, the abject failure—of Cleon would mean that the advantage passed to Hypereides on the council. And that man was going to try to make the most of it. Hypereides met Phocion’s eyes, smiled broadly.
“You don’t look too happy,” he added.
“How can I be happy?” said Phocion in that rumbling voice of his. It sounded like Zeus himself; the fact that the man who possessed it was so much less impressive was merely one of life’s little ironies. “A servant of Athens is dead. His faults notwithstanding—”
“His faults are precisely the issue here,” shot back Hypereides.
“We don’t know the details,” said Phocion mildly.
“We know enough of them,” said Leosthenes. All the other archons looked at him, and there were more than a few eyebrows raised. Was Leosthenes at last committing himself in the ongoing struggle between Hypereides and Phocion? Or was this just his perpetual tacking back and forth, throwing support to first one, then the other? “The situation in Syracuse is a disaster,” Leosthenes added. “For all we know, Agathocles and his rebels are—”
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