She told herself the kiss did not matter.
In her hand, she held the small device she had taken from the machine room, a glass ball attached to a metal frame shaped and colored like a jewel beetle. Oblong and green, it shimmered with the least hint of light. She had studied it through the night to ward off boredom and fear, but she still did not understand its purpose.
The light played against a tree, only inches away from where she hid. If the jewel beetle reacted so beautifully to the reflected and refracted light that reached her through the underbrush, how glorious would it be in a pure, white ray? She listened for the noises of the soldiers to move away. She ran through the locations of those she had identified and tracked. Minutes became an hour. A squirrel chattered nearby. She slipped out of her hiding place just enough to reach the ray of light and looked out across the quiet woodland. All night, the woods had never been this still. Her legs and back ached as if pain were their voice to say this was her chance. Move. She listened.
She had not gone far before she could see the movement of another soldier. The morning glare silhouetted him against the grasslands, and he only passed out of sight when the black smoke grew thick behind him. Amani crept closer to the edge of the lake. Steam puffed out of a rock chimney that, flush to the ground, looked like any other fissure. The steam obscured the bank and drifted across the lake. She moved uphill, again, to avoiding silhouetting herself against the steam’s feathered strands. She crept forward, watching and listening for those who hunted her, as she clutched the glass orb to her chest.
She moved off the hill into the flatlands on the west side of the lake and went as deep as she could into the woods while still being able to see glimpses of sunlight glittering off the lake’s surface. The light would keep her from getting lost.
I’ll know where I am, she thought, but am I brave enough to tell myself where I’m going? I cannot be running to Paphos. Rome’s rescue is only a deeper peril, but I’m going somewhere. I’ve chosen a direction whether or not I’ve admitted it to myself, and the direction my feet are taking me is Paphos--unless there’s something I’m missing, unless there’s something along the way.
She smiled to herself and thanked the wisdom of her feet. They were taking her to Bethzayith, and there she could talk to Malachi. He would help her sort her thoughts.
She saw movement ahead, most likely another soldier guarding the perimeter. She slipped deeper into the woods. The light of the lake vanished, but she told herself it would be okay. She would have left the lake behind soon enough, anyway. It could not have kept her safe forever.
She cradled the orb like a child and kept moving.
At first, she felt content to point her nose in the right direction and keep following it. An hour end, she stopped. She had walked as straight a line as possible, but she understood that would never be good enough. She imagined herself as an arrow halfway along its journey and now able to adjust its aim at the target. Although she began blind but pointed in the right direction, she could adjust, but nothing around her gave her any sign of which way to go. It was all woods; it all looked the same. As that arrow, if she was a little off to the left or the right in the beginning, she would need to make a larger correction now, but which way?
She thought of Telegonus lost at sea and washed ashore. Lines of the epic poem’s rejoicing heal-catcher recited themselves unbidden in her memory: Keep, keep, keep to the right. Rags and bones at midnight.
Telegonus stole the cattle of a stranger, not knowing him to be Odysseus, the father he left Circe to find, and, when confronted, he killed the man. Odyssey within odyssey, trouble within trouble; why did she ever believe any would have a fair end?
She adjusted her path to the right--while telling herself that, even within the poem, it had been poor advice--and continued walking. She had not yet cleared fifty paces when she saw the metal man. It stood still among the trees, unresponsive to her presence. She could barely breathe, but at last willed herself to take a step forward. It made no response.
She willed herself to courage and walked up to the machine. It remained motionless, looming over her with a barrel torso and monstrous limbs. She placed a hand upon its shell and jerked back, surprised. It was hot to the touch.
“You’re not after me, are you?” she asked.
As if in response, she heard the rustling of distant footsteps. A tune drifted through the air, my voice singing a song she had never heard before. Yet unable to see me, she continued, crouching low as she moved, but refusing to run. She went quietly and put as many trees as possible between us. A minute passed, and then two. She allowed herself to risk speed over stealth, careful at first and then at a full run.
As the distance grew between us, she allowed herself to believe she had escaped me, and she was right that I had neither seen her nor heard her departure. These were her only hopes, and she was justified to believe them true.
Ahead, she saw light through the trees, the promise of a break in the woods, a field, a farm, a river, something to let the light shine through. For a moment, that became her focus, and her concerns over me she left behind, lost in the woods.
Then the ground trembled. It shook with a sound like thunder. The rhythmic pounding of the metal man’s feet grew louder. Her own steps seemed slow in comparison, and her stride never felt so short. Branches shattered. The light awaited, but the machine drew nearer.
Amani burst free of the woods and onto the grass alongside a leaf-strewn road. It stretched on in either direction, straight and empty. She turned left and ran into the full light of the midday sun.
The thundering footfalls and splintering wood grew louder, ever louder, until she thought the trees would fall. The pace slowed, but the metal man still had not burst out onto the road. He sounded close, but was nowhere she could see.
At last, her lungs could take no more. She stopped, sucked in a breath, and, still grasping the glass globe, pressed her forearms into her aching sides.
In the woods, she saw the dull hint of metal. A few cubits shy of the clearing, the metal man stood, watching her. She limped a few steps down the road. It shadowed her but made no move to leave the woods. They stood facing each other, and she felt the heat that had slowly built up against her palms. She stared at the glass orb and saw the jewel beetle shifting colors in the sun, from green to red to purple, with a dazzling brilliance that reflected itself in the glass.
The glass grew too hot to hold. She jerked back as if bitten, but the device, instead of falling to the ground, hovered in the air. The jewel beetle clicked and buzzed. Wings slid out from its back and shimmered in the light. It flew in a slow loop, moving away from Amani only to arc back, pass her, and repeat the pattern.
She took a troubled breath and heard me call her name.
Papyrus 5.15
Amani backed away. The metal man in the woods followed as the jewel beetle flew lazy circles around her as she stumbled backward down the road. I stood where she had first emerged from the woods as a wind from the north blew through the break in the trees, and leaves skittered along the road from me to her. I called out to her. Stop.
As she moved, the metal man mimicked her movements, but came no closer. Amani’s fatigue-addled mind understood she had reached the machine’s programmed limits; it followed two directives now--pursue her and stay with its prescribed territory so as not to reveal itself to the world.
She realized she had beaten the metal man at the moment I had found her, and she flashed a sad, ironic smile.
“Why do you run?” I moved closer.
“Why do you follow?” She stood her ground.
“Is it some kind of weapon, flying about your head? Do you mean to fight me?”
“Why won’t you fight for me?”
“I’ve always fought for you.”
“Long ago, you fought to get me here, but now you cower, refusing to fight those who keep me out.”
I stood before her. The flying orb passed between us. “I fought to get the tr
uth for your people, never for you to be here. You were supposed to stay in Alexandria. You were supposed to wait.”
“You’re not the man I knew,” she said.
“People change,” I said.
“I haven’t.”
“No? The girl I knew would never betray her people to Rome.”
“I’ve betrayed no one, but Moira is the system that stole my people’s legacy and made it their own,” she said. “They kept us out then, and she keeps me out now. You do nothing because you’re the one to benefit. You return the hero, lauded in the Library and beyond, if the Library is even what you care about, anymore. Meanwhile, the truth of my people is at my fingertips, and you tell me to watch it burn, giving me orders like it’s yours. I’m the only one here by right. All those choices should be mine.”
I was quiet for a long time, and Amani squirmed. She hated the silence more than the fighting, but she saw a change in my posture that seemed familiar, less guarded. More me. Something she had said must have gotten through to me. She was her own master of rhetoric, now.
“Having a convincing argument does not make you right,” I said.
“But an immoral argument makes you wrong.”
The globe passed between us, and when I stepped back, she turned and walked away. She had won the debate and seen my fear of her flying globe. She had the upper hand and used it to leave, hoping I would not try to stop her.
She did not look back.
Amani reached a crossroads she recognized and turned west to Bethzayith. She wondered what to do with the jewel beetle still orbiting around her. It had only started flying when she stepped out into the sun. The woods fell back to fields, and she could see Andros’s house, lonely and hiding behind its olive tree. The road was empty, and it was empty still when she reached the gate.
She climbed the steps to the upper room and pushed open the door. The early afternoon sun could not reach in through the door and in the dim light, the artwork lost some of its power. She remembered how she had felt, sitting in the doorway and staring at its beauty, but those were just memories now. The feelings that stirred within her now were a dull imitation, nothing more.
She stepped into the room, and the beetle and its glass orb followed her. Without the direct light, its colors faded. The whir of the beetle’s wings faltered, went silent, and then retracted back into its shell. The globe hung suspended in space. It lost a little altitude and a little more until it drifted like a falling feather. Amani caught it in her hands and felt its heat fade.
As she explored how she might hide it in the folds of her tunic, she heard the not-too-distant sound of voices. On the road from Bethzayith, soldiers marched her way, close enough, perhaps, to see her if she fled, but if they had come looking for Philostratos (or Theodotus or herself) they would investigate the house. They would find her.
She shoved the orb into her tunic and crawled to the branches of the olive tree. A hundred men or more marched down the road, and Malachi walked with them. Amani lowered herself over the edge of the roof, amid the branches, and landed on the hard soil below.
She listened, but heard no cries of alarm.
The fields could not hide her, and the woods were too far away. The sounds of two hundred sandals slapping upon the earthen road grew louder. She had only one opportunity to hide. Only one. It was this, or let them take her. The easiest option would be to go to them and negotiate with Cato. He seemed a moral man among Romans. If she went of her own free will, she would have leverage to name her conditions. If she stood before him as his prisoner, she would have nothing.
She did not move. Going to Rome was no option, neither was letting Rome take her, no matter how unpleasant the hiding place. She crept to the door of the main house, opened it only enough to let her through, and closed herself inside among the flies and the stench of rotting dog.
The Romans would open the door. They would look inside, and if they saw her, the flies would not matter.
On the floor were the farming tools and the dog. She had to hide beneath one and make herself as much as the other as she could. If they could see no trace of her from the door, then perhaps they would come no farther. She would have to climb in against the maggots and the rot, tilt the carcass like a lean-to, and pull the farm tools over her. The horror of it screamed at her to run, but she held her tunic against her face and went to work.
Voices outside the gate.
Voices in the courtyard and movement at the door.
Bloating distended the dog’s flesh. Hair clung to her hand. Skin melted away. Flesh ruptured in a belching blast of putrid gas. Flies danced along her flesh. Maggots wriggled against her cheek and crawled down along her neck. She tucked herself into a trembling stillness and waited.
Voices in the room. Shouts of surprise and laughter. Voices at the door. A sound she did not recognize, did not want to recognize. The grating of wood against wood.
She rolled away from the dog and clawed at her flesh. Voices upstairs. Outside. In the fields. She vomited and fought back the cry her soul let free within her.
Voices at the gate. Voices in the street. Marching.
She pulled herself blindly to her feet and ran for the door. It held against her weight. She pushed. It would not budge.
In our artistic zeal, we had nailed shut the windows and built a brace for the door. She had noticed it upon her first arrival and thought it a strange choice; a beam to keep the door shut against something locked inside.
She slid to the floor weeping, pressed her lips to the crack beneath the door, and screamed.
The sound of wind, whistling.She screamed again. A dog barked.The creak of the gate. A voice at the door. The thud of the wood beam falling.
Amani clawed at the door and crawled out into the courtyard. Hands brushed the maggots from her face and plucked them from her tunic, and she went limp, like a mouse in the cat’s mouth. With eyes shut, she locked herself away, alone with her own voiceless scream.
Papyrus 5.16
Andros.
Amani said nothing. The moment lost itself in the steam of the world’s inner workings, the spinning of its gears, and the suspension of counter-weights that made life possible. He was part of it, present, with no particular meaning, and it was of no particular meaning that he was alone. The soldiers had not found her. She remained. The limp mouse in the cat’s jaws.
He gave her his cloak, and she washed at the well. When she took off her tunic, she found her glass globe had broken. She stared at the pieces, tinted with the stain of her blood.
“It represented rising above the horrors of war,” he said, and she thought he meant the orb. “I was working through my grief and purging all the things I felt for which there are no words, and now I fear I’ve poured them right into you.”
She looked up at him. Pretty. His face bloated. The skin slid off his cheek. Such a pretty man.
“Pompey didn’t breach the walls,” he said. “One of our people let him in, and not because of a love of the Romans but over which leader we would follow. A Jew, one of our own, against his own. Twelve thousand died.”
Alexandrian delegates dead in the streets of Rome. An Alexandrian, against Alexandrians, wielded Rome like a sword.
“I fear what I’ve done to you,” he said, “but you were brave and clever, everything Philostratos claimed.”
Only then, at the mention of my name, did the tears return.
Until she drifted, detached.
She was walking and felt she had been walking for a long time. She carried something, cradled to her bosom the broken pieces of the orb and its jewel beetle. Andros walked beside her along a path shaded and dappled by the woods. She knew this place. Soon the earth would shake.
The earth shook, and Andros put his hand on her shoulder. They stopped. The metal man burst out of the woods, and Amani screamed. Andros shouted orders, but the machine kept coming. He put his hand over her mouth until the scream rang only in her head.
The metal man stopped. Andros
removed his hand and looked her in the eye, asking if she was hurt. She said nothing.
He opened something on the back of the metal man’s head and promised Amani she would be safe. In her head, she screamed.
She slept by the fire in Theodotus’s camp, and, when she woke in the night, soldiers stirred, watching.
Theodotus sat down beside her. “Do you need anything?”
He offered her a skin of wine. She took it and drank.
Andros. “Where’s Andros?” she asked.
“Working.”
The soldiers still watched her. Theodotus tried to look kind. The world was quiet; the moon expanded its way toward full. No steam lingered over the lake, and the water was invisible, moonlight reflecting above dark grasses.
“Am I allowed to move?” Amani asked.
“You’re not a prisoner.”
“Can I go into the tunnels?” she asked.
He nodded. “Philostratos is eager to see you.”
Amani forced a smile.
She approached a library tunnel, not the one where we worked on the boats. Theodotus spoke.
“Are you well enough to make the descent?”
She promised she was and then took hold of the line to see if she had spoken the truth. She landed safely and passed between the statues of the Ogdoad and entered the second room, but it seemed not to be a room at all, but a passageway.
A fine, linear gap ran between stone walls on either side of the path and the floor, the ceiling, and the walls in front and back. She placed a hand against the wall to brace herself as she studied the gap. One wall moved away from her, and the other bumped her from behind, knocking her forward. The openings to the path disappeared and plunged her into darkness.
Frantically, she pushed at the wall that now covered the openings. The walls moved together, and she stood in the path's safety once more. The path here was not lit by gas. She had found no lever to light her path, but there were torch lamps of the sort she knew back home. Using the attached flint, she lit the lamps and pushed at the wall again.
Steampunk Cleopatra Page 15