Keeper of the Flame

by Tracy L. Higley

  “We must hurry,” she hissed to the men, and they responded, following her hasty steps toward the Library.

  But it was too late to reach the magnificent building unaccosted. Peasants flowed through the city like water breaking through a dam. They rushed toward Sophia and her escorts, armed with clubs, with knives, with rocks and even swords. Her mouth went dry and she bit her lip to keep from crying out.

  Self-protection pushed them all against the walls of the nearest shop, to wait out the first deluge of angry citizens.

  When it had passed, they continued, and Sophia felt sweat build along her spine.

  The Library and Museum emerged ahead, and Sophia urged them on, through the widening street, up the marble steps, under the portico.

  They spread into the Great Hall of the Library like a stain bleeding onto the white floor. The sudden echoing silence of the Library sucked Sophia’s breath away after the chaos of the street.

  “Remember,” she said to the men, “he is old. Take good care of him. The other one—do whatever must be done.”

  The twelve men dispersed into the ten halls, as though she had tossed a handful of grain to the birds. Sophia kept her place, as the Great Hall seemed the best place to supervise their mission.

  She could hear their slapping sandals on the marble floors, an occasional shout as they searched the halls and alcoves. But none appeared with Sosigenes in tow, or with Pothinus in their grasp.

  She feared she had been wrong.

  What if he has killed him already? Too foolish to wait until the Proginosko was perfected?

  Or perhaps Pothinus had taken Sosigenes elsewhere. The Library was an obvious place to station himself. Too clear a target for anyone who wished to assassinate him.

  Stupid, Sophia. And the time grows short.

  She turned to the wide doorway and peered across the city to the harbor. The Egyptians had waited until nightfall to attack, knowing they would have the advantage in their own harbor.

  Wooden towers on wheels were being dragged through the streets by horses, and peasants clambered up them with quivers of arrows slung across their backs. All around the city, torches flamed to life and charged through the streets.

  Pothinus would have heard all of this. Known that he was not safe.

  Where would he have gone?

  Years ago, when she had been a young woman and in love with a scholar who made the Library his second home, there had been a room, just a storage room, in the bowels of the Library. She had met Kallias there sometimes, when he could sneak away from his work.

  Sophia found the small door to the steps as though it had been only weeks ago that she had used it last. It opened easily, revealing shabby steps descending into darkness. But at the bottom . . . there! She could see some light. There was something down there. Someone.

  She looked over her shoulder, hoping to find a few of her hired pirates. But the Great Hall was empty.

  A sound drifted up from the lower level. A cry, perhaps?

  And then again. Yes, a cry of pain.

  Sophia felt a tingling in her fingers that spread up her arms, but she hesitated only a moment, then plunged downward, her eyes on the yellow glow that barely reached the base of the steps.

  She hit the bottom on silent feet. The murmur of voices reached around the corner. She pressed her face against the stone, then slid enough to allow one eye to peer into the room.

  In the tiny storage room that held many fond memories, Pothinus stood with a knife held to Sosigenes’s throat and a wicked smile on his face.

  Forty

  All the fight had gone out of Bellus. The day of battle was upon them, the day they had waited and prepared for since coming to this city on the sea. Caesar had given again his respect and new orders, and Bellus found that all he could think of was a woman and her books, closeted in a lighthouse high above the city.

  But he had his orders, and no matter his emotions, he would not forsake his post. And so he marched his centuria to the Eunostos Harbor, west of the lighthouse, to secure the docks as he had been commanded.

  In the Great Harbor to their right, past the heptastadion that led out to Sophia, the Roman fleet, including the ships of the newly arrived Thirty-Seventh Legion, floated in the bowl formed by the crescent-shaped harbor. Farther out, past the shallow reefs that endangered any passing into the harbor, the Egyptian ships blocked any escape, and certainly made ready to attack.

  Somewhere to the east, the Egyptian army marched upon them as well.

  In the smaller Eunostos Harbor, though, five more quiriremes floated, lashed to the docks. Egyptian ships, but they must not be allowed to join their fellows in the Great Sea.

  Bellus had mounted his horse and now crossed back and forth behind his lines, the measured slap of their sandals carrying them forward to the docks.

  Once the docks are secured, I will cross to the lighthouse and find her.

  He glanced over his shoulder, to the royal quarter. Somewhere on the roof of Ptolemy XII’s palace, Caesar surely watched the city, watched them all fall into position like pieces of a child’s puzzle. What would he think if Bellus broke from his centuria to seek out the Keeper of the lighthouse?

  I will do my duty. Nothing less. And nothing more.

  But duty proved to be a burden greater than expected. They were met at the docks, not by a gaggle of fishermen mending nets after the night’s take, nor even by the band of pirates that made the harbor famous. Instead, as they marched downward to the sea and then along the stone dock, they were set upon by a horde of furious sailors, both Greek and Egyptian.

  The sailors charged, erupting from water, from warehouses, from ships like a swarm of screaming monkeys. They brandished weapons of iron and wood.

  Bellus jerked his horse to the left and thrust through the centuria to its flank. The ranks broke immediately. The attack was unexpected.

  He assessed with lightning speed. They were equally matched in number. But certainly not in skill.

  The sailors rushed the centuria with a frenzy borne of rights perceived trampled, of national fear.

  His soldiers weathered the first blow. Then pushed back, their training taking over.

  But emotions can be a strong ally, and the Alexandrians had waged a war of propaganda long before today’s battle began. Without training, without armor, without the razor edged blades of the Romans, still they held the centuria.

  Bellus found himself beside his horse, in the thick of the battle, regretting every sword thrust that found purchase in the gut of a sailor. He dodged wooden clubs, knocked daggers from tight-fisted grips, brought the flat side of his sword down on sun-browned necks.

  The familiar slow motion of the battle came over him, with every parry and thrust seen in sharp detail against the blue sky, every groan of pain and grunt of effort like a single sound in a silent hall.

  His leather-wrapped hands grew slick, and sweat flung from his brow, ran in rivers from his temples until he tasted the salt of it.

  Men staggered and fell alongside him, sailors and soldiers alike. Still the Roman standard snapped in the wind, the gold and sapphire blue like jewels flung to the sky above them. Bellus’s shoulders tightened like a bowstring, and a powerful thirst scraped at his throat.

  He fought with his arms, his legs, his chest, and yet his mind functioned apart. It climbed the circular ramp to find Sophia. He could see her there, leaning over her books at her desk, turning as he entered, her slow smile breaking like an early dawn.

  His breath rasped under his helmet. The sailors were falling back. Those who remained were taking to one of the ships.

  “The quirireme!” Bellus yelled to his troops. The soldiers shifted and pushed. That ship could not be allowed to sail.

  Three sailors worked frantically at the ropes lashed to the iron cleat.

  Bellus kept one eye on the sailor who lunged at him, one eye on the contingent of men that broke off to take the sailors at the cleat.

  There were enough sailors
to take the boat out, but not enough to hold the centuria. The Roman troops broke through and rushed the ship.

  Bellus pulled up, and a break in the fighting afforded him a brief glance at the lighthouse.

  Focus, Lucius.

  And then, there were more. Another mob of Alexandrians armed with nothing more than homemade weapons and pent-up fury.

  Bellus located his horse, mounted, and rode back thirty paces to take stock of his own personal battle.

  We need reinforcements.

  He grabbed the first soldier to run past him. “To the second centuria, the other harbor. Bring them here.”

  The soldier gave him a quick nod, then sprinted eastward to the Great Harbor, where flames were beginning to consume ships.

  Bellus crossed behind his troops again and recalled all but a few from the ship, now secured, to fight the new wave of Alexandrians, crazed and bloodthirsty.

  The messenger he’d sent must have flown to the Great Harbor and back, for it seemed to Bellus only a few moments until he reappeared, breathless and soaked with sweat.

  “The Second,” he panted, looking up to Bellus on his mount. “They have moved.”

  Bellus stilled his fretful horse. “Where?”

  “The lighthouse,” the boy said, doubling over a bit.

  Bellus jerked his eyes to Sophia’s tower, outlined in black relief against the orange sky of the dying sun. “What goes on there?”

  Three soldiers ran past and his messenger jumped closer to avoid them. “All our ships are in the harbor now. Caesar has given orders that the light up there be extinguished, to give no aid to Egyptian ships that might attack.”

  The news fell like a stone into Bellus’s heart. His gaze shot again to the summit of the lighthouse, Poseidon with his trident atop the uppermost tier. Though the mirror was positioned away from him now, Bellus had no doubt that it caught the last rays of the sun and projected them outward, just as it had done every day without fail for all of Sophia’s life.

  And when the sun had dropped into the sea, the fires would be lit. She had never let it fail, for it was through the fire that she tried to earn her redemption. It was the fire that led ships and their passengers to safety. A safety not given to her family twenty years ago.

  To extinguish the light would be to extinguish something within Sophia’s soul. She would rather die than see it quenched.

  This he knew with a certainty.

  The second centuria, charged with storming the lighthouse and dousing its light, would have to go through Sophia to do it.

  And he had no doubt they would.

  Forty-One

  Sophia pressed herself against the stone wall at the bottom of the Library’s steps and listened to the raspy breathing around the corner.

  There came a small laugh, a sound of sick amusement that even after all the intervening years since they had worked together, Sophia recognized as Pothinus. She swallowed and closed her lips. Tried to control her labored breathing.

  “Do not even think of trying that again, old man,” Pothinus said beyond the wall where she stood. “They will not hear you down here anyway. You are buried in stone already. Do not give me reason to make it permanent yet.”

  “She will not give up.”

  Pothinus laughed again. “I fear you may be right. But we shall wait, all the same. And after all, we have only to wait until the moon rises this night, correct? Once the Proginosko proves itself this last night . . .”

  “You think Sophia searches for me. But it is the Proginosko. And she will not let you have it.”

  Sophia bit her lip and closed her eyes.

  “Hmm,” Pothinus said. “She is a hard woman, that I know. Many women have lost husbands, but I have never known one to give herself so fully to her grief.”

  “She lost more than a husband in that storm.”

  “Yes, we all did, didn’t we?”

  Sosigenes cried out again, and Sophia held herself back, knowing that Pothinus had a painful grip on the man.

  “But now,” Pothinus said, “now we have it back again, thanks to you.”

  Sophia took a step backward, found the edge of the bottom step with her foot, and slid upward.

  One careful step at a time, she retreated back to the main level. She was not foolish enough to confront Pothinus alone.

  The door at the top of the steps creaked painfully, and she held it half-open, her body wedged between door and frame, breath caught in her throat. Below her all was silent, whether because they had heard something or because they were too far off, she could not tell.

  In the Great Hall, Sophia stood with her hands on her hips, her feet apart, looking to the Rhetoric Hall, the Astronomy, the Mathematics.

  Her pirates, wherever they were, had melted into the Library, like water over dry sand.

  A movement in an alcove caught her eye. The leader, Biti, wiggled three fingers in her direction, a silent salute.

  She crossed the Hall. “I have found them. Gather the others.”

  Within minutes the group massed at the cellar door. “He has a weapon,” she whispered. “And Sosigenes must not be harmed.”

  Biti flexed his shoulders. “How will we know him?”

  “Keep the older man safe. The arrogant one, my age, he is the one we have come to defeat.”

  Sophia realized a strategic error the moment she opened the door. Only one of them could fit in the stairwell at a time. They could not overwhelm Pothinus as a group, taking him down before he had a chance to react.

  Nevertheless, they started down, and Sophia prayed that Pothinus’s need for Sosigenes’s intellect, and his need for something to bargain for his life, would keep her friend safe.

  Six before and six behind. She slapped down the steps in the center of her pirates, comforted in part by the sense of safety they afforded, but still with wooden legs, stiff with fear.

  She rounded the corner at the bottom, surrounded by her men.

  They stood at a face-off with Pothinus. He held Sosigenes as a shield, with his arm around the older man’s bony shoulders. A small dagger flashed in the torchlight, held at Sosigenes’s throat.

  “No farther!” Pothinus yelled, his voice strained and tight. He caught sight of Sophia and his eyes flashed. “I will kill him, Sophia, you know I will.”

  Sophia took stock of the small room, unchanged since the days she had stolen time here with Kallias. It had been hewn out of rock under the Library and smelled of musty decay. The group of them filled the dark room, with unmarked wooden crates stacked at its perimeter and a low stone shelf carved into the wall to her right. Her eye caught a flash of something metallic on the shelf and she looked again.

  The Proginosko.

  She glanced at Pothinus. He had followed her gaze to the shelf, and now his attention flicked back to her, a flash of uncertainty in his eyes. “Take it, and I will have no reason to keep him,” Pothinus said, edging the knife closer to Sosigenes’s neck.

  Sophia looked to Sosigenes, unwilling to see the fear on his face, but unable to ignore him.

  He smiled and nodded as much as the knife would allow, his expression filled with a peace that he seemed to want to pour into her.

  Pothinus’s face, in contrast, was twisted with a greedy hate that stretched across the years.

  Sophia took a step toward Pothinus. “You have been jealous of him, even of Kallias, for all these years, haven’t you?”

  Pothinus chuckled. “It would seem that jealousy, when cultivated at length, gives a man all he desires.”

  He watched her, and she couldn’t keep her eyes from straying to the Proginosko. She had only to take a few steps to her right, reach out, and she would hold it in her hands. True, she would not have Sosigenes. But could not Hesiod, or another of the twelve left back in the lighthouse, make any final adjustments if needed?

  Untold benefits awaited the world with the advent of the Proginosko. In the hands of only one, however, great destruction could be wreaked. Would not Sosigenes be the
first to say that the sacrifice of one man was a small price to pay for the safety of the knowledge?

  Had Kallias been a small price to pay?

  Her emotions warred within her, while the blood in her veins seemed to flow to her feet and root her to the floor.

  She had worked so hard to never attach herself to someone again. It was too difficult to let people go, once they held part of your heart.

  And yet, she had failed. She knew that now.

  Sophia thought of Ares, his bleeding arm. Her choice to trick the sadistic soldier Pothinus had sent to retrieve the Proginosko. She had nearly cost Ares his life in her quest to preserve the technology of the Proginosko.

  She would not make the same mistake again.

  Around her, she felt the tension of the pirate mob she had brought. They held steady, like a quiver full of arrows nocked and aimed, ready to fly.

  He will not kill Sosigenes. He cannot afford to.

  She reached out slowly with both her hands, grasped the arms of the men on either side of her in a silent message she knew they would understand.

  And then she shot her arm toward Pothinus, finger pointed, and gave the command, strong and clear. “Take him!”

  They rushed as one. Flowed around her like a mighty wave.

  She saw Pothinus’s eyes widen. Saw the knife point prick Sosigenes’s throat. Hesitate. He drew blood but could not finish it.

  They were on him like a pack of wolves on a wounded rabbit.

  The knife flew upward in a metallic arc, then clattered to the floor. Sosigenes fell away from Pothinus, bloody fingers held to his neck. Pothinus fell beneath the blows of three or four of the men.

  “Do not kill him,” Sophia said. “We will leave justice to others who have the right to wield it.”

  She pulled Sosigenes to her side. “Let me see,” she said and peeled his fingers from his throat.

  It was a deep cut, but it had not struck a vein. It bled, but slowly. “We are a matching pair now,” he said with a weak smile.

  Pothinus was jerked to his feet. One eye had already begun to swell shut. His lip was split and blood trickled down his chin. He tried to smile. “You surprise me, Sophia, I will admit.”