It was the best way for the conqueror to die, her mother had told her once. The best way for any king or queen to die. Not bloody. Not hard. And poison left the body whole, so that it could reign in the afterlife among the gods.
Selene left the pillar and passed through the narrow portal between the great gallery and the central chamber of the mausoleum itself: a square space wrought of dark stone, sided by free-standing, life-size white marble statues of Alexander and the Ptolemaic dynasty he’d founded in Egypt, her ancestors. Three hallways, at the moment sealed shut by wood and iron, branched off from this four-sided chamber, leading to the tombs of those men and women. In the middle of the chamber, surrounded by the seemingly glowing figures, Alexander’s crystal coffin sat atop three polished white marble steps that gleamed in the light from the tiny arched windows that stood just beneath the pyramidal roof of the chamber. Selene noticed that this morning, in the bright light of a clear day, the light pouring through those arches blurred out the supports between them, giving the roof the appearance of floating. So, too, the marble dais seemed to be set apart: white marble on dark stone, with the clean crystal shape at its summit sending rainbows of color out against the walls and floor.
Alexander’s body hadn’t always been on display in such a coffin, she knew. For days after he’d died, the Egyptian priests whom he’d asked to tend to his remains had refused to work on the body. He was no mortal, they said. And indeed his body did not rot. But for his stilled chest, he appeared to be sleeping. Only when a week had passed did they reluctantly agree to perform their rites of death. And when they were done his corpse was placed in two nested sarcophagi made of thick gold. That’s how they had come to Alexandria from the far east. And that’s where they had stayed for generations. Until her great-grandfather, short on money, had melted them down to help pay for a mercenary army.
The people of Alexandria had killed him for that. His statue was around here somewhere. As her mother’s would be. And as Caesarion’s would be one day. Maybe even hers.
There were three other people in the chamber when she entered. One, a woman, knelt on one of the steps, paying respect to the body. And two men stood near one of the statues in the shadows, watching the woman and whispering to one another. Priests or quiet guards, she imagined. None of them paid Selene any mind. None of them knew that the little girl in the slave’s shawl might one day take her place among the statues in this sacred room.
For all the times she’d been in the mausoleum, paying her respects to the man who’d given their family the power that it now held, she’d never looked closely at the body. The thought of death disturbed her, more than she cared to admit, even if she was fascinated by adventurous stories of battle in strange lands.
But not today. Today she felt grown-up. Today she would look.
Selene pulled Kemse’s shawl close and tried to keep her breathing slow and even as she climbed the steps to approach the crystal coffin. The body, she saw, was smaller than she would have imagined. For all the stories of his power, Alexander was no giant. Probably no bigger than Vorenus, she thought. Pullo would have looked down on him.
Alexander’s body rested beneath the glass on luxurious pillows in his royal red cape, and she was surprised to see that the man looked, as the priests had observed hundreds of years before, like he was merely sleeping. At times she’d seen other corpses in this mausoleum—those of her ancestors in the extended hallways, occasionally ritually rewrapped in ceremonial fashion—and always those mummified remains had appeared dried up, shriveled and hollow, with skin like old leather when it appeared from beneath the linens. Not Alexander. His skin looked as she imagined it did on the battlefields of his life: if not soft at least strong and real. He still bore color in his cheeks, lashes on his closed eyes, and his muscles were taut, as if he were ready to rise for battle at a moment’s notice. The leather of his sandals and the wrappings winding up to the greaves on his lower legs appeared more aged than the dead man wearing them. And his hands, crossed over his chest, still seemed to grip the sword that lay vertical over his body. Taking it all in, Selene wondered if the priests who oversaw the tombs here opened the coffin to somehow maintain his appearance of preservation, or if his preservation was a sign that he was truly divine, despite the fact of his death. Certainly it was no wonder that the people still held him so, and that this room, even more than the street-formed plaza outside or the ornate palaces on Lochias, was the true heart of the city.
Not everything within the coffin was as well preserved as the conqueror, though. The sword in his hands bore spots of brown, and the exquisitely formed bronze breastplate under his crossed arms gleamed only dully where the sunlight danced across it. Strange, she thought, that the priests would not shine the metal. How it would shine and glow if they did! Like fire, she imagined. Like glorious fire.
Then, looking closer, she saw that parts of the breastplate still did appear to be freshly shined. Not much, but along the side, amid the shapes of muscle and images of beasts and battle cast into the metal, there were thin lines of burnished bronze visible, like thin, branching tendrils. Like vines.
No, she thought, tracing them with her eyes. Not vines. Veins.
His crossed arms and the sword obscured much of the armor, but she could see enough of it to tell where the veins were leading: to a single central spot in the middle of his chest. And visible there, right under his hands, was the edge of something dark. Something very dark and black, mounted into the metal: a flat stone the color of thick oil that seemed to swallow the light even as it fed the veins of still-polished bronze.
Selene shivered, feeling suddenly cold. She’d been leaning forward and she stood straight now on the step beside the body, pulling the shawl even closer.
It hadn’t felt cold when she came in here. She backed down a step, forced herself not to look at the other people in the chamber. It must have been warmer outside on the street, she decided. And she’d spent enough time in here as it was. She needed to get to the Library.
Moving away carefully, Selene turned her back to the crystal coffin only once she had reached the floor of the chamber, whose stones no longer seemed so dark.
14
THE TRAITOR
ACTIUM, 31 BCE
The starless, oppressive sky above Octavian’s encampment matched Juba’s mood as he sat on the uncomfortably squat wooden stool, pushing a stick through the dirt between his feet and generally trying to ignore the two praetorian guards on the other side of the fire. The praetorians, Octavian had insisted, were there to ensure Juba’s comfort—and indeed they did tend to such matters as the building of fires and the many chores of camp maintenance that were second nature to campaign veterans such as themselves but were acts quite foreign to a young man who’d grown up huddled among books in the household of Caesar. That’s not why they were there, though. Not really. He knew that. They were there to guard him.
The two men slept in shifts so that one was always awake to keep an eye on him, and they showed little interest in him beyond their duty of protecting him and keeping him ready to attend to Octavian and the real generals at a moment’s notice.
Even after months of working with the serious military men, Juba knew they didn’t respect him. He remained, in their eyes, a dark-skinned foreign upstart. He’d never fought in battle. He’d never even swung his sword outside of practice swings at wooden dummies. He had no wealth to his name, no men to bring to the fight, no reason at all to be in the camp. Yet he was. And he was not only allowed a sizable tent—small though it was in comparison to those of Octavian and the field generals themselves—but he was also allowed to attend the most high-level meetings, where his voice was held equal with any in the army.
No, not equal, Juba thought, actually allowing himself a smile as he drew a caricature of a large-breasted woman in the dirt. More than equal. His voice, more often than not, carried Octavian’s mind.
This protracted stalemate with Antony, for instance, was Juba’s idea. As
he’d told Octavian that day at sea—another day of many he was fast trying to forget—they would be foolish to engage Antony on land. That was Antony’s strength. Combining his own Roman legions with Cleopatra’s soldiers, he’d arrived in Greece with more men. And even Octavian, as ambitious and arrogant as he was, admitted that Antony was the finest general between their two camps—a finer general, perhaps, than even the now-divine Caesar had been. Octavian’s military generals had insisted on a fight nevertheless, especially as Antony began sending his letters attacking their personal honor in light of their refusal to fight.
That they had refused at all, that they’d instead done their best to contain Antony’s army without engaging it, was in complete accordance with Juba’s designs. “Choke him from a distance,” he’d said in one of their early councils, summing up his plan. And, despite the angry insistence of the generals, Octavian had agreed, correctly surmising that defection would further ravage Antony’s numbers as hunger and the disease that inevitably followed close quarters took their toll. Thus, the longer they waited, the more they swayed even the advantage of sheer numbers on land to their side.
It was a good plan. And there was no doubt it was working. What had begun as a trickle of men crossing the lines from Antony’s camp to Octavian’s had, in the past week, turned into a nearly constant flow. The defectors were often near to starving, and at times already succumbing to the illnesses that bred in the bad air of the surrounded Roman-Egyptian camp.
Scuttling his vulgar drawing to keep the praetorians from seeing it, Juba peered up and out over the perfect lines of tents in the encampment toward Antony’s forces. Antony’s main base was across the gulf of Ambracia at Actium, but after he’d built his bridge across the gulf’s opening he’d established an advance camp not a mile distant from their own. Looking out across the dark distance between them, Juba saw fewer watchfires on Antony’s side: yet one more sign of the flagging morale among his men. And one more sign, too, that it wouldn’t be long before the generals would again call for battle. Antony is weak, they’d say. Attack now, while there’s still honor to be had!
Juba frowned, returned to drawing shapes in the dirt. Battle was the last thing he wanted. And not just because he thought it tactically prudent to keep their forces out of the fray: more than once Octavian had made it clear that, if it came to a fight, Juba could be made to use the Trident. Octavian hadn’t managed to use it himself, but after their tests—Juba shuddered despite the warmth of the flickering fire—it was clear that Juba could use it effectively in a fight, whether sinking ships or maybe even freezing a line of men in their tracks.
Not that they wanted to use the Trident exclusively. It could detract from Octavian’s glory, after all. And Juba, despite his practice, could only manage so much use of it before his strength gave out.
And then there was the issue of the stone, the black stone so carefully embedded in the head of the Trident between the winding snakes along the shaft. Though he’d managed little research on the Trident before they left for this campaign—by the gods, he missed his books!—the strange stone was the obvious source of the object’s power. What it was, or how it worked, he didn’t know, but it was the stone that somehow generated the Trident’s power to move water. And using it—again, through means he did not yet understand—was draining that power. The stone had physically shrunk through its many uses in Juba’s hands. Not much, but enough to worry both adopted sons of the divine Caesar: Octavian because he viewed the Trident as a secret weapon in his fight to unify the Mediterranean under Rome’s control, and Juba because he viewed the Trident as his one secret weapon in his fight to avenge his father and his homeland—and not incidentally, as his one chance to stay alive.
As for Juba’s own, more personal plans, they were not going well. He didn’t have to look any farther than to the two praetorians across the fire to see that. He was, for all intents and purposes, under Octavian’s control, his every move watched. The Trident was under lock and key in Octavian’s tent. And Laenas, whom he’d dispatched to Alexandria to procure the Scrolls, which would lead to an even greater source of power—the Ark of the god of the Jews—had disappeared without a word. He could only be presumed dead, and any opportunity to send another man had long since disappeared, too.
Feeling a restless tiredness, Juba stood and tossed his stick into the fire. Though young, he’d increasingly felt a kind of weariness in his legs, something he’d begun noticing more and more since his return to Rome from Numidia. That this coincided with his increased usage of the Trident—of the black stone—had not been lost on his mind, hard though he tried not to think about it: whenever he did, he imagined leeches, grown fat on blood. The only thing that seemed to help was movement, so without direction he left the tent and began to walk, stretching his legs despite the uncertain looks of the other men in the camp. He didn’t have to look behind him to know that at least one of the praetorians had stood, too, and was following.
He’d left the main camp and was halfway down the road toward the busy harbor that Octavian’s admiral, Agrippa, had constructed along the coastline beaches, when a messenger arrived, panting. Though the young man appeared to be close to Juba’s own age, and Juba held no formal rank or command, he nevertheless bowed deep and stammered out apologies for disturbing him on his walk. Only then did he pass along the word that Octavian—“the Lord Caesar, Son of the God”—had requested his immediate presence in council.
Juba looked toward the sea with longing, then nodded, turned, and began to trudge back to the camp, wondering what was so important that it couldn’t wait until morning.
* * *
Even at this late hour, Octavian’s spacious tent was a hive of activity, with a nearly constant flow of messengers bringing in reports and taking out dispatches. It truly was the headquarters for the campaign: all activity in the army spread out from this one central location, just as the actions of a body grew out from the mind. So when Juba entered the tent to find a flurry of comings and goings, of snapped salutes and creased papers, with the indefatigable Octavian explaining three different things to four or five attentive men at once, his first thought was that nothing was out of the ordinary. Even the pockets of higher-ranking generals scattered through the space, focused on their engagement of myriad duties as they carried out the administration of the tens of thousands of men at their disposal, seemed no different than they had on any of the dozens of times Juba had been in the Imperator’s tent. Why, he wondered, had he been summoned?
It was only then, as he looked around the room for an explanation, that he found the obvious cause of his summons: a man standing at rigid attention not far from the tent’s flaps. He wore the full battle dress of a general, as if he intended to take the field immediately: his armor flashed in the lamplight, and his horsehair helm was tucked perfectly in the crook of his arm. Only the inevitable splashes of mud on his greaves marred the perfection of his presentation. He might well, Juba imagined, be standing before the people of Rome in a Triumph—except that there was, Juba noticed as he took the measure of the man, a hollowness to his eyes. A man standing not in triumph, Juba decided, but defeat.
Octavian at last noticed Juba’s entrance, and after a few final dispatches he ordered the tent cleared for council. In less than a minute, the only men remaining in the tent—and they were all men, of course, a fact that Juba knew was a point of pride for Octavian’s soldiers as they looked across the lines toward Antony and his Egyptian queen—were Octavian, five of his highest-ranking commanders, the brilliantly dressed general Juba didn’t recognize, and Juba himself, who tried to ignore the heated glares that three of Octavian’s commanders shot in his direction. Bad enough that he was allowed to be present, but clearly Octavian had held up the council until his arrival.
There was no throne as such in the tent: Octavian preferred to sit at a simple chair—not so simple as the stool in Juba’s tent, but simple nonetheless—that was positioned behind the central map table. The chair
s of his commanders stood along the sides of the table, so that their war councils had, to Juba’s eye, the appearance of a small dinner gathering. Octavian had been standing off to the side of the room when Juba had entered, and he let out his breath now in a long, tired sigh that seemed too dramatic to be real. Then he walked over to stand behind his place at the table, the rest of the men following suit. Juba’s place was, as ever, just to Octavian’s left. He walked to the spot without looking at the other generals and stood along with them in silence, waiting for Octavian’s next move. Juba hoped it was an order to sit down.
“I’m sorry we’ve kept you waiting, Delius,” Octavian said to the newcomer once everyone was in position. He gestured to the opposite end of the table, where a seat was left open.
Juba thought on the man’s name a moment before connecting all the threads: one of Antony’s top generals.
Delius approached the designated seat, but he did not sit down. His back straight, his chin raised in a sign of pride belied by his eyes, he thumped his free hand to his chest and then thrust it out in a formal salute. Octavian, his face serious, returned the salute crisply—another of the many small things he did for which the common men loved him.
“Thank you for receiving me so late, sir,” Delius said.
Octavian smiled warmly. “It’s no trouble at all.” He gestured toward the tent flaps. “As you can see, we were still quite awake and at work. There’s truly no better time. I regret only that our fires have already grown cold. All I can offer you is some fine Roman wine, fresh from the vineyards of home.”
It was a subtle aggression, Juba knew. Antony’s forces had been cut off from their supply lines for long enough that the thought of good drink ought to make the most self-controlled man salivate. A few of the other generals grinned. Juba just watched Delius.
The Shards of Heaven Page 16