“We’re on the same side now,” said one of his men, jarring Agathocles from his reverie.
“What the hell do you mean?” he growled.
The man pointed at the bridge. “Us and the Athenians.”
“We’ve got the same enemy,” said Agathocles. “Don’t mean we’re on the same side.”
But he had to admit the man had a point. It would be best for all concerned if Alexander and his whole army drowned in the Mediterranean. Yet the truth of the matter was that Agathocles and his ragtag band could do nothing to stop that oncoming bridge from reaching their island. That was all up to the Athenians. Who so far had tried to no avail. Their ships had approached the bridge from both directions, only to be driven off by enormous stonethrowers that the Macedonians had built on the hills above the Straits. Two of the Athenian ships had been sunk by giant rocks before the rest pulled away out of range. They could still be seen there now, out toward the horizon, keeping carefully out of range. The harsh reality was that a land-based siege-engine could always be bigger—and thus reach further—than one based on a ship.
But soon the bridge would be out of range of the land-engines, and that was where things would get interesting. To be sure, the Athenian navy was understrength. Severely so, and Agathocles’s agents had given him the exact figures. Athens had lost a couple hundred ships in Egypt, and a couple hundred more trying to reinforce Carthage. And there had been another hundred ships at Massilia which no one had heard of since they’d sortied from the burning wreckage of that city. In other words, the navy had been getting its ass kicked, which was all the more disturbing since no one knew exactly what had happened to the ships in the western Mediterranean. There were stories that Poseidon himself had appeared and destroyed those boats, though Agathocles felt safe in dismissing such tales as the product of terrified men who had felt themselves to be invincible upon the water. But something was afoot. Something dire.
And that bridge to end all bridges was getting ever closer.
Eumenes stared up at the Pillars of Hercules as the ship sailed between them. As art, it was impressive; as engineering, it was downright scary. And Eumenes knew a thing or two about enginering: as Alexander’s chief of logistics, marshalling the resources for such projects was something he was quite familiar with. It seemed impossible that so much rock had been carved so high above the sea, on so precarious a series of precipices, using only iron tools. Then again, if some other set of tools had been used—well, that was the part that Eumenes really didn’t want to think about.
But now those Pillars were fading behind him as his ships surged out into the Ocean. For the first time in his life, he could see nothing to the west of him. Yet there was definitely something out there.
And he was going to be the one to get it for Alexander.
At first he’d been a little taken aback to be the one selected for this mission. Military operations in the Mediterranean were a long way from over, and he’d been in charge of organization and logistics for so long that his absence was going to be more than a little inconvenient for Alexander. But really, there was no other choice. What happened west of here was of paramount importance, yet Alexander couldn’t leave his army if he expected to get them across the Straits of Messina and lead them to victory. And as for Hephaestion, well, Alexander would never allow him to leave his side. Besides which—if one were brutally honest, which Eumenes was only within the privacy of his own skull—Alexander probably wouldn’t have trusted Hephaestion to carry out this operation anyway. It wasn’t that Hephaestion was incompetent—far from it. But as Alexander himself had acknowledged, his expertise lay in traditional modes of warfare, whether that meant facing Persian armies in pitched battle or rooting Afghan insurgents out of caves. Not in dealing with shit that wasn’t supposed to exist.
So that left Eumenes. He was in on all the secrets now, and his mind was flexible enough to engage with them. Though that didn’t mean he had to like it. He’d liked his world just fine before—he’d known where all the boundaries were, had known what made sense and what didn’t. Not anymore. The whole nature of the world was up for grabs. Because he’d passed beyond the boundaries of the known one.
In ships that were admirably suited for the task.
He had no idea where they had come from. Alexander had kept that one to himself. And Eumenes’ own inquiries had only turned up possibilities. Aristotle had built them… no, Aristotle had only designed it… nonsense, they’d been recovered wholesale—found at the source of the Nile. No, said someone else, wrong river: when Hephaestion’s agents had ventured into India, they’d explored the wreckage of a derelict civilization at the bottom of the Indus River, torn apart seals in dead languages, recovered the contraption in which Eumenes was now riding.
Kalyana wasn’t so sure about that one. The sorceror was from India, after all, and he’d never come across anything like these strange vessels. Then again, he was the first to admit that India was a big place, and contained a lot of “weird shit”—his exact words. Such directness was one more reason why he was accompanying Eumenes on this journey into the unknown. He was Eumenes’ official Weird Shit Consultant. From the looks of things, there was going to be a lot of it.
But ultimately, Eumenes was a pragmatist. He was less concerned as to his ships’ origin than their destination. He knew the twenty Macedonian commandos riding aboard each of them felt the same way—after all, those men believed their leader to be a god. The vessel in which they rode was evidence enough of that. Somewhere in front of them were the Carthaginian ships that had left their blockading position—Eumenes had thought he was going to have to either negotiate or fight his way through them, but they’d split for the west, hot on the trail of something important enough to make them all leave their position in front of the Pillars. That was a move that Eumenes understood. Pursuit was their way of staying in the game. They clearly intended that Carthage should be one of the players. The Persian witch—the one they were undoubtedly chasing—was another. Eumenes—on behalf of Alexander—was a third.
And Eumenes was willing to bet Philip would have something in the game too.
The ship several kilometers to the northeast was a design of Aristotle’s, though it was crewed by Byzantine sailors, all of them loyal to Macedonia. Ptolemy sat within, listened to the waters pound against the hull, took stock of the crew going about their tasks while he sat in his cabin and gazed at maps and contemplated possibilities. And prayed too, thanking Zeus for the chance to finally win everything he’d been denied all his life. He’d always known whose son he was, of course, just as he’d always known he had to keep that fact a secret, lest he burn for it. If it ever suited Philip to recognize him formally, then so be it—but Ptolemy had always figured his status would never be anything but an embarrassment to his father. So he learnt early on to hold his tongue.
But then the father had been greviously injured and—while he returned to Pella—his acknowledged son surpassed him in glory. The already strained relations between Philip and Alexander turned to shit. And Philip turned to Ptolemy and made him his spy in Alexander’s camp. The irony was that Ptolemy had long since reconciled himself to serving Alexander—after all, he’d grown up with the man, who even as a boy drew people to him with a natural magnetism. Dealing behind the back of someone he’d always idolized didn’t sit well with Ptolemy, and the nature of the promises which Philip was making only increased his discomfort. The war with Persia and then Athens placed many in awkward positions, but none more so than Ptolemy, who was caught between two rival rulers to whom he was deeply indebted—a conflict that finally culminated in Philip’s throne room.
So when Alexander struck him in that chamber, everything fell into place. Love became hatred before Ptolemy had even hit the floor: a shift that Philip was quick to turn to his advantage. In the wake of Alexander’s departure from Pella, he’d explained it all to Ptolemy—told him why he needed eyes and ears and hands in the far west, told him that what was at stake w
as far more than the fate of the Athenian Empire. This time there were no hints—it was altogether explicit. As was the reward for success—the chance to supplant Alexander as the heir to Macedonia. Sure, Alexander was invincible. Impossible to defeat. Unbeatable.
Until he was beaten.
Fate was a funny thing. When Alexander had returned to Babylon after withdrawing his army from Afghanistan, he’d been laid low with a debilitating fever. For three days he’d hovered on the verge of death. The doctors had despaired. The priests of the city’s ziggurats had wailed and offered up their prayers. The people had stopped in the middle of their labors and waited.
But to everybody’s surprise, Alexander had recovered.
Yet since that time, Ptolemy had had ample opportunity to contemplate how life and reputation were such fragile things, how the relationship between the two could be so complex. Say Alexander had died? He’d have perished at the height of his power—never having lost a battle, never having failed to conquer. He’d have gone to his grave untarnished. No, the longer Alexander lived, the more likely it was that he’d be handed his first setback. If that defeat came from magick too powerful for him to contend with… then it wouldn’t just be his defeat. It would be his death. His father would have to find another heir.
And the name of Ptolemy would live forever.
They were a cork tossed on the swell of Atlantic now, running steady before a rising sea. Lugorix had never seen waves so big. But they seemed to be par for the course out here, stretching up like green hills on all sides. The clouds overhead were so thick it felt like it was halfway to night, though it was still only morning. Still early in his shift.
“I can’t sleep,” said Matthias as he came on deck. His mood had gotten as black as the weather. This run into the unknown was affecting all of them in different ways. Eurydice most of all. Which had an all-too-predictable result on Matthias’ own temper.
“She won’t sleep with me anymore,” he said.
Lugorix shook his head. Greeks seemed to almost enjoy taking these things to heart. Gauls had a different outlook on things. If one woman refused you, find another. But that was the problem with being on a boat with only two of them. There weren’t that many choices. Leaving Lugorix with little choice but to listen to his friend.
“But you’re still sharing the same cabin,” he said.
“Doesn’t mean we’re doing anything exciting in there.”
That puzzled Lugorix. “Just flip her on her back and—”
“Get my teeth knocked out? All she does is sit in the middle of the cabin with her charts and instruments, scrawling out diagrams and equations that run off the parchment and onto the floor. I think she’s going nuts, personally.”
“She’s a sorceror,” said Lugorix. “They’re all nuts.”
“Even Barsine seems to be getting a little pissed off with her.”
“I noticed.”
It was hard not to. Barsine and Eurydice were barely talking now, and that was largely because the latter seemed to have nothing to say to or ask the former. Which made a kind of sense, Lugorix reflected. After all, she was the one who knew the science or magick or whatever the fuck it was. Whatever calculations she was making, there was only one person she was debating them with: herself. So Barsine did most of the piloting, and Eurydice occasionally took over from her, but generally just called out the occasional course-correction to her. Leaving Barsine largely in the dark, and the two men completely so.
“Did she tell you anything about those islands we saw?”
“No more than she told the rest of us—that they weren’t worth stopping for.”
Though the name made them sound otherwise. The Fortunate Islands—Lugorix remembered the librarian back at Carthage mentioning them. Tacking before favorable winds, the Xerxes had sailed between two of them, close enough to see hills and ruined buildings and… something else. With the farseeker, Lugorix had made out some details: a collection of megaliths more extensive than any he’d ever seen, great rocks arranged in some order that might have made sense to a druid. But whatever was on the Fortunate Islands, Eurydice didn’t feel it was going to assist them with their journey.
Either that, or she’d decided they couldn’t risk stopping. When they’d surfaced several kilometers west of the Pillars, there was no sign of the Phoenician ships. It was just them and the sea. But two days later, just as Lugorix and Matthias were exchanging watch duties on the cusp of evening, they’d caught a glimpse of two of those ships’ masts on the horizon. The Xerxes had submerged immediately, and when it resurfaced there was… nothing. Yet Eurydice still seemed to act as though they were being chased. Those Phoenician ships had looked like ordinary wooden warships—how she was thinking they could possibly still be tracking the Xerxes was beyond Lugorix. But perhaps they had their means. Perhaps they had sorcery.
And perhaps that sorcery had something to do with the hairy star.
It had appeared for the first time that very night that they’d resurfaced after seeing those masts. Hairy star was the only way to describe it—a large star with tresses of fire trailing behind it. A hairy star. But what was it? What did it signify? It had risen every night since then, ever larger, ever brighter. Eurydice said it meant that things were drawing to a close—that everything was converging. Lugorix had nodded as though she spoke wisdom.
When all she spoke was obvious.
Kometes: the hairy star. So said the astrologers. It lit up the sky to the point where the workers on the bridge no longer needed the light of the torches to labor through the night. But they kept those torches burning anyway. It wasn’t just work they needed to coordinate. It was defense. Again and again the Athenian navy had sortied from Syracuse and had tried to approach the bridge from both north and south, only to driven back again and again by unnaturally heavy storms. Many ships had sunk. But there were still enough of them out there to keep those on the bridge on perpetual alert.
The men accompanying Agathocles kept watch around the clock too. They’d retreated further into the hills, were now watching the scene from the woodlands that covered the heights above the Straits. It was actually a surprisingly good command post for Agathocles—he could stay in touch with events back in the city, but he wasn’t going to have to rely on messengers to tell him how the Macedonians were faring. Though so far it didn’t look like the Athenian navy was going to succeed. They were being kept at bay through all manner of magick. From the looks of things, he’d bet even money that the Macedonian sorcerors had discovered a way to mess with the weather. Which made no sense, but then again, what did these days? Way too many Athenian fleets had been hit by inclement weather to think otherwise. And the Straits themselves had experienced nothing but perfect conditions. Too perfect, really.
Yet even if some of Athens’ ships managed to get through, the bridge was practically its own fortress now. Every hundred meters was a platform on which was mounted all the latest siege technology, including long-range bolt throwers the equal of anything in the Athenian fleet. Not to mention flame-throwers for close-quarters work. So far those hadn’t been necessary. There seemed no way that Athens was going to be able to stop the oncoming bridge in the Straits.
So they would just have to stop it on the beaches.
Several thousand soldiers and mercenaries had been sent north from Syracuse and were even now assembling on the hills beneath Agathocles’ lookout post. Meanwhile stone-throwers of a range far more powerful than anything that could be mounted on a bridge or ship were under construction—or rather, had been stripped from the walls of Syracuse and reassembled a short distance behind the beach to start lacerating the bridge when it got within range. It was a calculated risk, to be sure, but whoever was directing Athenian strategy wasn’t an idiot. Even now, they stood a far better chance of stopping the Macedonians on the beaches of Sicily than at the walls of Syracuse. If you were dealing with the world’s most powerful land army, your only hope was to use water. The decisive moment was approachi
ng, and everything hung in the balance. Agathocles could see the soldiers of both sides—out on that bridge, down on that beach—pointing at the flaming star overhead, which was now visible in the daytime. A second sun: and Agathocles’ men kept asking him what it meant.
He thought about that for a while, and finally told them it heralded the coming liberation of their city. That cheered them to no end, but in his heart he knew that he was lying. He was no soothsayer, but one look at that kometos was enough to see its significance went beyond the fate of any one city. This was something cosmic. But if there was a chance amidst the maelstrom for Syracuse to seize its destiny, Agathocles intended to be the man to make it happen. The more Athens stripped its defenses in Syracuse, the better. Or so Agathocles kept telling himself—even as he kept looking at that ever-growing bridge, those swarms of men and soldiers upon it, that field of tents that covered every part of Italy he could see. Somewhere amidst those tents was the man who had become the greatest conqueror the world had ever known—the man who had never been stopped. Somehow he would have to be stopped. If the Athenians couldn’t do it, Agathocles would.
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