And then what?
“Reports are back.” Ganymedes stared over the water, but his smug smile was too large to miss. “The cisterns are failing. The soldiers are in a panic.”
Pothinus pressed his lips together, felt his jaw muscles tighten. “You are a fool, Ganymedes.”
“We shall see.”
Arsinôe laughed. “You two are much alike. Two old dogs fighting over the same scraps.”
Pothinus bowed slightly to the naïve girl. “Alexandria is much more than a scrap, my lady. Perhaps in a few years you will better understand—”
The flash of hatred in her eyes stopped him.
“Do not underestimate me, Pothinus.”
“It is you who overestimates your teacher, here,” he said, thumbing Ganymedes. “He knows nothing of warfare and has only succeeded in weakening your greatest ally.”
She frowned. “What ally?”
Pothinus laughed. “I see that he does not even inform you of any opinions contrary to his own. The people, my lady. The people of Alexandria are your greatest ally.”
Arsinôe gazed out to the coastline. “The water.”
“Yes, the water. In tainting the cisterns with salt Ganymedes weakens the Roman troops, it is true. But we could have defeated them, coming in from the sea, and with the army marching from the east and all of the city formed into volunteer militias at the Romans’ backs. But now, as the soldiers dehydrate, so does the city.”
Ganymedes put his hand on Arsinôe’s arm. “We do not need them. The army is enough.”
Pothinus snorted. “Perhaps. But when you subdue this one Roman legion, what people will you rule? And who will rise to your aid when the rest of Rome descends upon us? The people will not soon forget.”
Ganymedes spoke only to Arsinôe. “Ignore him and his weak-willed fears, my lady. He has been a woman longer than he has been a man.”
Pothinus locked his arms behind his back and tried to focus on a gull that circled the ship. He had long endured the insult of being a eunuch. He would not allow a man such as Ganymedes to bait him into useless scrabbling in the dirt. Not when the Proginosko was so close.
Arsinôe giggled at Ganymedes’s joke. Pothinus swallowed and lifted his chin, following the flight of the gull.
The two were gone moments later. Pothinus reached to the case at his feet, lifted it to the rail, and rested it there. It was the size he remembered of Kallias’s Proginosko. He held it between his hands, imagining the new device.
In the sea ahead, he watched the water stream alongside the rope that held the next ship at anchor. The ship strained at the rope, anxious to move forward just as he was.
Almost unconsciously he stroked the case in his hands, remembering the beauty of the Proginosko, its gears and dials whirring with the knowledge of the heavens.
Shadin was at his side again. Pothinus placed his case at his feet. “You will wait until nightfall. I will make certain those on watch are paid well enough to not raise an alarm. Take one of the smaller sloops and row with haste to the lighthouse.”
Quickly Pothinus whispered to Shadin a description of the Proginosko he was to retrieve, and the old man who must come with it. He struggled to keep his voice even and low as the reality of having the Proginosko in his hands gripped him. With it, he would no longer suffer insults from Ganymedes or anyone.
“Do whatever you must to gain the box. I chose you because I am told you are skilled in such matters.”
Shadin grinned. “Most know nothing but the sword to get what they want. They kill first and seek answers second.” He waggled an eyebrow. “I have other ways. If there is people with answers, those answers will be mine.”
Pothinus nodded, satisfied. He had engaged such services many times before. Though they bobbed in the water in a ship smaller than the palace’s royal court, the ship was only a scaled-down version of the palace, filled with secret plotting, betrayal, and in-fighting, in which Pothinus was well-skilled.
“He must be kept alive,” Pothinus said, hating the admittance. “The scholar, Sosigenes. I need him. But the woman—” He lifted his eyes to the lighthouse that he felt certain held his treasure. He felt almost a physical hunger for it now. Soon. Soon it would be his.
“If she gets in the way, kill her.”
Thirty-Three
The afternoon dragged in the Base of the lighthouse. In his cramped quarters, Bellus tried to keep his eyes from blurring over the lines of ink on the papyrus before him.
High above him, he knew, Sophia hid in her chambers, unwilling to emerge.
So much the better. He did not need to see her now.
He rubbed his eyes and traced the scrawl again, but the words of the Jews’ Septuagint were lost on him. He shoved the book to the side of his small table. Then shoved it again and watched it fall to the stone floor.
A soldier does not concern himself with religion and philosophy. Not a real soldier, at least. His father’s words.
Many times since he had earned the rank of centurion he wished his soldier father would have lived to see it. But not today. What would he think of Bellus now, trapped in this lighthouse, with no other task but to study the history of an archaic people? Even if that history did whisper something to the part of him he had long denied.
He pushed away from the table and went to seek out more fitting company.
Hours later, he sprawled in the sand of the central courtyard, cup in hand, with some of his men, attempting to join in the coarse jokes and stories of blood and glory. They sat in the shade of the lighthouse, their backs against its granite wall.
When a messenger appeared beside him with a smart salute, Bellus barely looked up from his wine.
“Caesar requests your presence,” the young soldier said.
Bellus snapped to his feet. “When?”
“Immediately.” The boy peered down his nose at the rest of the soldiers who still lounged in the sand. “And you are to ready your troops. Without delay.”
“Ready for what?” Around him, the men slowly lifted their attention to the news.
The soldier shrugged. “Ready to move. That is all I know. But Caesar wants Lucius Aurelius Bellus to appear in the palace.”
Bellus swung to his men. “Spread the word. Pack up. We are at last getting out of this prison.”
The men scrambled to their feet, then dispersed.
Bellus pivoted and nodded to the soldier. “I will dress and come at once.”
Within minutes he had procured a horse from the lighthouse’s small stable. It did not cross his mind to ask Sophia’s permission. As the horse’s hooves pounded across the heptastadion, Bellus did not look back.
With any luck, he would not have to. It appeared that his exile had ended. He kicked at the horse’s flank, urging him to fly.
In the royal quarter of the city, soldiers congregated in tight groups in the hot streets, and the citizens were notably absent. Bellus slowed to a canter and scanned the clusters of men. There was a tension in the air. Something was happening.
The Egyptian army?
But it did not appear that the city was under attack. In the distance, the siege works built by the Alexandrians stood in place, and Bellus could see the makeshift stone barricades erected in the wide avenues. But no Egyptian soldiers flowed through the streets, and the Roman army had not formed for battle.
What is it?
Soon enough he was dismounting in the palace courtyard, with a nod to the young groom who relieved him of his horse. He slapped the boy’s shoulder and crossed the garden to the wide steps of the palace, where a group of fellow centurions clustered.
Caesar appeared on the steps above them as Bellus reached the group. At his side was the enigmatic Cleopatra, and they looked down upon the soldiers like deities from on high.
“The soldiers are panicking!” one centurion called out from the flower-lined path, and others murmured about him.
Caesar held up a hand for silence.
Bellus leaned to Mete
llus, a centurion who had once fought beside him in the Nineteenth. “What is going on? Why the fear?”
Metellus raised his eyebrows, then smirked. “Ah, yes, you’ve been shut up in that cursed lighthouse, right?” He poked a thumb over his shoulder toward the city. “Egyptians have salted the canals somehow. All the cisterns are brackish, undrinkable.”
Caesar spoke from the marble steps above them. “Men, this is not a time for weakness. We stand on the edge of victory here.”
Bellus watched Cleopatra with interest. Her eyes strayed to Caesar and narrowed, as though she objected to the term victory.
“Thirsty men can’t fight!” one of the centurions answered.
“Your men shame themselves, Portius. So the cisterns have gone bad. Yes. Does not every sea coast have fresh springs somewhere underneath? There is fresh water to be found, which we have only to locate.” He lifted a hand toward the harbor beyond the palace. “And should we not find it, we have only to board ships and sail down the coast, to either east or west, where water can be found in abundance. The enemy has no fleet.”
Beside Bellus, Metellus spoke up. “The men criticize your delay here, General. They are saying that we should retreat, take to our ships.”
Caesar laughed. “And that is why I am general, men. Look at the city.” He pointed to the streets beyond the royal quarter. “If we come out from behind the defenses we have built here, we will never return. That mob of crazy Alexandrians will set upon us.” With this he wrapped an arm around Cleopatra, as if to soften his words. “And though we are trained and we are strong, we are also sorely outnumbered, at least until the Thirty-Seventh Legion arrives.” His voice was smooth, placating. “Let us not be foolish now, men.”
Caesar examined the group, and his gaze seemed to rest on Bellus.
Yes, even I am here, General.
“Bellus,” Caesar called, surprising him.
“General!” Bellus saluted and stood at attention.
“I am placing you in charge of the search for fresh water.”
“Yes, General,” Bellus kept his voice steady, in spite of the surging in his blood.
“Bring your centuria out of the lighthouse. Leave only a few to hold our position there. And the rest of you—all hands are to be devoted to the effort of digging fresh water. Bellus will tell you where to dig.”
He turned again to Bellus. “Put all that learning to use today, centurion. You have been given my trust. Do not disappoint me.”
“Yes, General.”
And with that, the two seemingly divine ones disappeared back into the palace, and the group of centurions looked to Bellus for direction.
He spent the following hour in a ground level chamber of the palace, poring over maps of the city and peppering various soldiers with questions, those he had called in for their expertise in city planning and building. He sent word to the lighthouse and ordered his men to quit the place and march through the city to the royal quarter.
A decision was made as to location, and they were off. Three centuriae to three different locations, all two or three stadia from the sea and still in the royal quarter, where Bellus had made his best guess that water might be found. Bellus followed his own centuria to the first location.
The ground was rocky at first, but with a porous limestone that could be easily chipped away. Bellus strode through his troops, organized into work gangs that hacked at the ground with hoes and spades. They had shed their armor and worked in only their tunics like peasant farmers.
Sweat formed on the shoulders and necks of the soldiers who dug. Bellus watched their eyes, saw that they dug in fear, knowing that every swing of the spade sucked water from their pores, that everything depended on finding more. An army should never operate in fear.
“Courage, men!” he yelled through the troops. “Water in abundance is to be found. Before the morning is here we shall find it!”
Which may or may not be true.
He had brought the horse, and he mounted it now to oversee the digging in the second location along the coast.
Darkness fell as the animal carried him along the edge of the harbor with speed, and Bellus felt a familiar anger building in him with each hoof beat.
It was the anger that came before a battle. The rage that carried him through, that made him able to ride into the enemy and wield a bloody sword through the sons of mothers who waited at home for their soldiers to return, just as his did.
Yes, this was the part of him that he needed to strengthen, to recognize, to feed.
Bellus sensed the lighthouse’s summit flame to life in the encroaching darkness, but he refused to pay it heed. There was nothing for him there.
He reached the second work site, dismounted, and yelled at the soldiers who seemed to be murmuring to each other more than they dug.
The hours passed in a haze of dirt. Dirt in his hair, in his nose, in his mouth. The anger swelled within him, too, and broke out onto the men as the night wore on, until they dug with a recklessness that comes of a commander who is harsh and unreasonable.
The flame of the lighthouse never wavered above them, and still Bellus refused to lift his eyes to it.
Instead, he dropped down into the deepening hole, feeling the dirt with his hands to assess its moisture.
“Almost there,” he said to himself, and the promise was carried to the men who dug and the men who hauled dirt to the top of the hole.
Do not disappoint me. Caesar’s words. Father’s words. They echoed and urged him on with the promise of affirmation.
And then, just as clearly, there was Sophia’s face in his mind.
She was as far from him as she could be, in her tower high above the harbor, and him in a hole beneath the city. He raised his eyes then, to catch a glimpse of the lighthouse fire.
But he was too deep.
He dropped the hand he had lifted to her without thought, just as a gush of fresh water burst from the ground and surged around his sandals.
A shout went up from the men, and greedy hands were cupped and dipped from water to lips. Ropes were tossed down to aid their climb and they began to evacuate the hole. Bellus let them have their moment of glee, without reminding them that all of this distraction about the water had made them forget what mattered—that the Egyptian army surely planned to weaken them because they were waiting in the marshy delta beyond to swoop in and pick them off.
Bellus remained in the hole until the end, as though the water there anchored him beneath the ground, far below the city. And the lighthouse.
Caesar will be pleased. And that is all that matters.
Thirty-Four
One day had seeped into another, and Sophia remained in her chambers, relying on Ares to bring her all she required.
Beside the dying flame of her small oil lamp, she huddled over the lighthouse’s accounts, adding and subtracting figures in her head.
She thought, perhaps, she should apologize to Bellus. But no, it was best to remain apart. To move on.
And so she gave her thoughts once again to the only purpose she had clung to for these many years since Kallias and her son were swept from her. The two places she gave herself for the protection of—the lighthouse, so that no ships would be lost on the shores of Alexandria, and the Museum, to press on with the legacy Kallias had left.
Something Sosigenes has said yesterday bubbled to the surface. “It is not the flame in the beacon chamber you guard with such vigilance, Sophia. It is the flame within you. But it is meant to be shared, and only God can keep it safe.”
She tossed aside her reed and sat back in her chair.
She had tried to dissolve the doubts about the gods by keeping busy, tried to answer her misgivings with the rhetoric of Greek philosophers. But Sosigenes’s words wore away at the barriers of her heart like gentle waves erode a stone wall. It seemed so clear now that the gods of the Egyptians and Greeks were man-made foolishness. But could she accept that there was One God . . . One alone who had existed since the
beginning of time and who would love her just as she was?
Such thoughts were for another time. She needed to focus on the Proginosko and the Museum.
What would Sosigenes do with the Proginosko once he had finished the testing phase? Another tour of the centers of power, as they had undertaken twenty years ago? No, the sea was too dangerous a place for something so precious.
Those in power around the world would surely come to them, to see the Proginosko, to share in its knowledge, which should be available to all.
But she was not so naïve as that. The Proginosko must also be protected. And only royalty had the power to fully protect.
I will speak to Cleopatra.
But would she? The thought of entering the city made her neck damp with anxiety. Would Cleopatra come to her? She should write to her.
Sophia pushed aside the accounts and searched for a blank piece of papyrus on which to send a message. She looked in the writing case on her desk, on the floor where loose scrolls sometimes dropped, even on her shelves. She found none.
Sighing, she dropped back to her chair.
It was late. Tomorrow would be soon enough.
But an hour later she rolled from her bed and padded across the room to relight a lamp.
Her days had been too inactive to allow sleep to overtake her quickly. And her mind was more restless than her body, reliving moments in rose gardens that she would prefer to forget.
The night was too far gone to call down through the lighthouse for Ares to bring her more writing supplies. Besides, her stomach was also calling out for something. She’d wander to the kitchen, and then find more papyrus on her own.
In the South Wing, all was surprisingly quiet. The soldiers often continued their games and stories late into the night, but they seemed to have retired early.
She passed Ares’s chamber, located near the front entrance of the lighthouse where he could keep track of those who came and went. She had not intended to stop, but a low moan came from under the door and arrested her steps. She tilted her head, listening.
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