Zenobia brushed his excuse aside with a delicate wrist flip. She levered herself up from the couch and took his hand. Her eyes met his and they were, for a moment, vulnerable and wholly human—not the distant imperious presence she had maintained throughout the night.
"Take me to my camp, Ahmet, and make me sleep. I cannot otherwise. I will pace and pace and scheme and plot until at last exhaustion overcomes me. Then I will sleep a dozen hours, when only a handful are wise to take."
She laid a hand on his cheek; it was cold as ice. Ahmet shivered at the touch but took her hand between his.
"You're warm," she said, smiling up at him, and leaned her head against his chest. Reflexively he gathered her into his arms. She nestled against him, warm and close, content in the day. Without hurry, he lifted her up and walked out of the temple house of the Romans. Outside, as he walked toward the gate, he began to sing in a soft voice that only she could hear.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
The Egyptian House, Outside of Rome
Thunder growled in a dark sky. Lightning flashed between clouds pregnant with rain. In the face of the storm, a cold wind gusted across the arcades of the veranda around the house, driving leaves and straw before it. The trees on the hill above the house bent in the wind, and the grass on the hillside below the garden rippled in long waves with each gust. Inside, a fire burned in every room—in bronze braziers, in grates built against the outer walls, in a deep brick-lined pit that had been excavated in the floor of the basement room. In the buried room, cylinders were suspended from the ceiling, holding captive a harsh white light that shone down upon smooth stone moist with blood and salty water. In the unseen world below the stones of the house, a river of power surged blue-black, grinding against the restraint of the earth.
Fierce tentacles of blue fire rippled against a glittering shield of rose-colored light that encompassed the house and the basement. Around the periphery of that invisible barrier, grass crisped and shriveled. Trees that had stood for two hundred years rotted away, leaving only a husk of bark and limb. Leaves that touched the ground smoked into ash, never bursting alight. Stones cracked to gravel and gravel ground to dust. Five miles away the inhabitants of the house of Junius Alpicius Niger were all struck dumb in their sleep and rose to find every animal—domesticated or not—within the grounds of their estate dead upon the ground. The sky, anguished, vomited lightning and rolling thunder against the house in the hills. The rose-colored shield held, turning aside the stabbing fingers of lightning that grasped and tore at it. The stones shuddered in time with the leaping blasts of light. In the front foyer, Alexander's face was constantly lit by the strobe of each strike. In that hellish light, it seemed that he smiled.
Maxian screamed aloud in torment, his fingers half buried in the chest of a small, thrashing body. Energy surged over his body like a second skin of pulsing red and deep purple. The muscles of his face, his chest, his legs twitched uncontrollably with each surge. A great triangle had been carefully cut into the stone of the floor and filled with aconite and silver. It was etched within a greater circle of worked gold. Maxian stood at one vertex, while Abdmachus and Gaius Julius shuddered in pain at the other two. Each had stripped to only pale-cotton loincloths, and each lay within a three-ringed circle of colored chalk and gold wire. Snakes of ultraviolet fire hissed from their bodies, crackling and snapping. The power flooded the air and sluiced into his body through a tattoo of an inverted pyramid that had been cut into Maxian's chest.
Within the mewling body of the tiny child, squirming in a pool of blood, urine, and feces, Maxian's fingers danced frantically. The power he drew from the earth, from the sky, and from the dead man and all that he represented warred inside that tiny frame with a bubbling black corruption that tore and gouged at the child's internal organs. Maxian's face was chalky and dry, he had sweated out all the water his body could yield sixty grains ago, but despite a nearly blinding headache that sent clouds of white sparks across his vision, he continued to battle the contagion. It would not die, no matter how thoroughly he tried to drive it out. He had rebuilt entire organs from the soup of bone, blood, and tissue that churned in the child's torso, but each one, no sooner than he had sketched it anew, began to corrupt and decay.
One hundred and sixteen grains after he had started, Maxian staggered back from a flash of black light, edged with corroded red, and collapsed to the ground. Falling, his body cut across the edge of the triangle and with a thunderclap that shook a great burst of dust from the stones of the room and broke every glass, jug, and plate in the house, the chain of ultraviolet fire collapsed into nothing. In the silence that followed even the raging storm above seemed muted and distant. Maxian moaned and rolled over, his body convulsing with the aftereffects of the procedure. On the table, the body of the infant corrupted with a slick sucking sound into a spreading pool of black-green bile. It puddled and then began to run off the edges of the table, spattering against the floor.
Still within his circle of protection, Abdmachus quivered, his mouth drooling and his eyes glazed over with pain. Gaius Julius twitched once like a gaffed river pike and then lay still. After a moment his eyes flickered open and cleared. The pain that had racked him like a lash was gone. Stiffly he sat up, his head turning jerkily from side to side. Dust puffed from his bare skin. Absently he brushed it off, leaving only clotted trails where his old wounds were damp with new blood. He looked carefully around, though he was having trouble seeing, and marked the position of the prince. The dead man considered the steps up to the house. His master was unconscious at least, perhaps dying. He could believe that the Persian was wrong, that he could have a life without the power flickering dimly in the young man, or he might collapse to dust and bones as he rode away over the hill.
Sighing, he gingerly crossed the circle and bent down over the Prince. The boy's left pupil was huge, filling his whole eye. His breathing was very shallow and intermittent. His hands and arms were red and cracked as if they had been plunged into a fire. The Prince's lips were blue and his pulse was thready. Gaius Julius sighed again and hoisted the boy up in his arms. When he turned toward the stairs, something sharp pricked his neck.
"An admirable choice, old man." Krista kept the spring-gun close to his neck. "Just take the boy Prince upstairs and I'll see to him. You get to clean up down here. Make sure the Easterner doesn't drown in his own vomit."
Gaius Julius grunted, his left eye twitching in suppressed anger. The girl, dressed now in a simple black tunic and a midlength gray skirt, slid past him and out of his line of sight. The razor-sharp iron tip of the spring-dart traced a line along the folds of skin at his neck. I never should have caught her that day, the dead man growled to himself. I should have let her go...
—|—
Upstairs, the rain had settled into a steady downpour, intermittently lit by the rumble and crack of lightning in the hills around the villa. The dead man carried the Prince to the north bedroom and lay him in a bed that had been carted up from the city a week before at Krista's command. Gaius Julius pulled heavy quilts over the trembling figure of the boy, while the girl relit the fires in the grate and the braziers near the windows. The heavy shutters had blown open; now she closed them again, securing bronze wheel latches shaped like asps. The sound of the storm receded and Gaius Julius suddenly felt weak himself. His hands shook as he sat down. The boy's color had grown worse.
Krista caught the dead man's eye and nodded.
"You will die as he dies," she said. "I saw you thinking, down there, that you might be free. You won't. If he dies, you go back to the worms. Do you want that?"
Gaius Julius did not answer. She met his gaze.
Finally he shook his head. "No. I want to live."
"Then go and bring strong wine, whatever broth or soup you can find, and more firewood."
Krista searched the other upstairs rooms while the dead man was gone, finding two more blankets and another brazier. She dragged the heavy thing, ornamented with legs carve
d like dolphins, their mouths holding up the corners of a fluted shell, back to the bedchamber. Her fingers were quick to sprinkle oil over the dead coals and then to strike flint. Little flames curled up and she blew gently on them. When Gaius Julius returned, laden with a stewpot, two amphorae, and three stout logs, the room was lit with a cheerful glow.
Krista broke the seal on the jugs of wine and poured the thick burgundy fluid into a shallow copper bowl placed over the nearest brazier. It steamed as it hit the hot metal. After a moment she lifted the bowl off the flames and poured it into a heavy mug of dark-green glass. A ladle of the soup broth followed. Crouching on the side of the bed, the girl peeled back the Prince's eyelids. His skin was chalky and his breath was very faint. To her delicate touch, his face was cold as stone. Hissing in despair, she pried his teeth apart and spilled the warm mixture into his mouth. He twitched and nearly knocked the glass from her hand, but she stroked the side of his throat with her fingers.
His throat muscles convulsed and he swallowed the broth. Krista held his head up, making sure that he could take it down without choking on it. This done, she poured more into his mouth. A faint blush began to tint his lips.
"Make more," she said to the dead man. "We give him as much as he can take." Gaius Julius nodded and began heating more wine in the copper bowl.
Outside, the mutter of the storm continued and the streams that flowed from the hills rose steadily toward their banks, clogged with the pale corpses of fish and frogs.
—|—
Krista and the dead man sat in the bedchamber. The girl was under the covers, holding the sleeping body of the Prince close. He was still cold, but the dreadful pall had left his face and hands. A small black cat with sleek fur was curled up next to her on the pillows. Gaius Julius was sitting next to the fire, feeding small sticks into the steady flame of logs. The twigs snapped and crackled as they were consumed. A light piney smoke drifted up from the lip of the grate. By a clever trick, the heat of the blaze radiated out into the room, warming the dead man's cold bones, while clay pipes took the smoke away and out of the roof of the house.
"Why haven't you left?" Gaius Julius' voice was quiet with exhaustion within the fragile peace that had settled over the firelit room. "There've been no lack of chances since that day I caught you on the stairs."
Krista considered for a moment, then said, "The day after you caught me and locked me back up, the Prince came down to see me in my cell. He told me that he and the Persian had discovered that a terrible curse lay upon everyone in the city. Only he and the Persian could know of it and live by their powers. He said that he would not tell anyone, even his brother, of what he had found unless he could lift the curse. I didn't understand, so he unlocked the door of the cell and took me upstairs.
"There was a wicker box on the garden porch with a pigeon in it. The Prince said it had come from the city just that day, from the palace. He wrote a little note on a scrap of paper and put it in a little tube on the pigeon's leg. The pigeon flew from his hands, out over the garden. Do you know what happened to it?"
Gaius Julius stood, his hands stretched out to the fire. The shutters rattled a little as thunder boomed over the dark hills.
"No," he said. "What happened to the pigeon?" Krista curled closer to the Prince, wrapping her arms around his shoulders. "When it flew out of the garden, there was a dark flash, like a great bird striking. Then there was nothing but a cloud of feathers falling out of the sky. I said that an owl must have seen it, but the Prince took me to the edge of the garden, where the Persian had put those piles of stones. The pigeon was there, or what was left of it. It was already rotten with worms and fly eggs.
"'See?' he said. 'Everything that knows this secret dies unless it is protected. The house is safe; you are safe if you are with me or with Abdmachus. There is no better cell than this knowledge.' So, old man, I stay here, because there is nowhere to go. It is the same for you, or for the servants."
Gaius Julius stood in the darkness by the window. He had feared as much. The confusion of plans and stratagems that had been fermenting in his mind for the last two weeks condensed, a dewdrop trickling down off a leaf to drop, a pure sphere, into a pool of still water. He turned toward her.
"There is only one thing to do, then," he said. "If either of us are to escape this, we must do everything we can to help the boy destroy this curse."
Krista opened one sleepy eye and peered at the old man. "Are you saying, confused old man, that we're not doing everything we could to help him?"
Gaius Julius smiled, the firelight throwing deep canyons onto his face. "No, child, we haven't done everything we could. If I understand this aright, we've only just started doing everything that we could do."
Krista sniffed and pulled the quilt over her head. It was very late and she was very tired.
The old man sat for a time thinking, feeding the last of the twigs into the fire. He realized that this was the first time that he could remember since he had been a boy that he had actually been alone, in as safe a place as he could reasonably expect, with the time to think. The first time in many years of his memory the pressure of his dreams did not trap him. He started and stood up suddenly.
He did not dream!
Gaius Julius grinned in the dark room, a wide smile, from ear to ear. He thought back to the first moment of his new life, sprung from the moldy earth of the tomb, and realized that he had not dreamed, not once. Weeks had passed and when he closed his tired eyes, only an abyssal blackness waited, free of voices and portents.
"I am free," he said aloud, but Krista was asleep and the small black cat only yawned, showing a pink tongue and white fangs before tucking its nose under its tail and going back to sleep.
—|—
The narrow valley led up onto a barren ridge. Wind whipped across the rocky summit and the Gothic bodyguards drew their cloaks tightly around them. Maxian wheeled his horse, staring out over a vast landscape of pinnacles and rounded, rocky mountains. Clouds and fog filled the canyons between the peaks, making them helmets of unseen soldiers rising from a sea of white froth. Maxian's father ignored the cold, though it blew his fine white hair into a faint halo around his head. He pointed west, across a valley filled with smoke. Maxian turned and saw, as he had as a boy, the citadel of Montsegur, aflame.
The fortress rose, a tumble of white stone and square towers above a vast granite plug that cut into the sky. The peak it crowned was rugged and steep-sided. Only one winding trail clawed its way up the southern face, and that trail was overhung at many points by the walls high above. Montsegur rode in the sky, seemingly inviolate, but on this day it was wrapped in flame. A great tower of black smoke rose above the burning castle, and even from where he stood, a good two and a half miles away, Maxian could see the tongues of flame roaring from the windows of the towers and the central basilica.
Between the bare ridge that they stood upon and the walls of the dying fortress the air was as clear as the finest glass. Maxian could see tiny figures, each wrapped in a yellow-red corona, leaping from the walls of the citadel. Trailing smoke, they plunged down into the bosom of the clouds that swirled around the mount, vanishing like sparks into the sea. The air above the inferno shimmered with waves of heat billowing off the limestone walls.
The elder Atreus grunted as one of the towers, outthrust from the southern wall, suddenly cracked at its base and slid, with dreadful majesty, off into the abyss. For a moment, as the entire seventy-foot structure fell, it held its shape, but then it struck the side of the cliff and exploded with a booming sound that could be heard clear across the valley. Maxian flinched back from the sound, for the volume of the noise it represented staggered him. The echoes came back a minute later from the walls of the canyons.
"Come, my son, and see the work of the Emperor." The elder Atreus urged his horse forward, and they descended a trail of stones that cut down the mountainside across a long slope of broken shale and small round boulders.
Under the clouds
the valley below Montsegur was a hive of activity. Thousands of men had hewn a sprawling encampment out of the poor soil and scrubby trees. Maxian followed his father through the camp and marveled at the standards he passed. Four of the Legions of the Army of the West were here, each with a camp placed equidistant around the base of the peak. A road had been built across the valley and then up the flank of the mountain. As they rode through rows of tents, gangs of workmen were raising tall posts by the side of the road, lining it on either side. Each post had a crossbar of rough-hewn pine across the top.
At the base of the peak, a raised ditch had been dug all the way around the mountain, with a parapet behind it. A palisade fence of pine logs marked the top of the earthen berm. It ran off into the rainy mist in either direction. Legionnaires manned watchtowers placed along its length. The soldiers in the towers that they rode past to reach the mountain road looked down upon them, eyes impassive in the shadows of their helmets.
As they neared the base of the mountain, now wholly hidden by the low-lying clouds, Maxian could hear a rumble of fire and cracking stone echo down from the heavens. Between the cliffs and the circumvallation was a stretch of barren soil and tufted grass. Bodies were strewn about it, some already pecked by crows. The inner face of the gate was adorned with the bodies of two men, each nailed up to the crossbars. Maxian turned his head, unable to stomach the sight of their decayed faces. The road rose up sharply on a long ramp of packed earth. The ramp cut past the first three switchbacks of the old road.
They rode up the ramp in silence. Maxian stared around in fear. The clouds were very low now, like a wavering gray roof above them. The elder Atreus rode on, though, and Maxian kicked his horse forward to follow. The passage through the clouds was strange—the mist clutched at them, leaving trails of water on their faces. Strange sounds echoed in it and Maxian's heart thudded with the sudden fear that he would never find his way out of the twilight world that he had ridden into. After a time the mist began to brighten, and they ascended the second switchback above the ramp. A moaning sound filled the air, and there was the rattle of metal.
The Shadow of Ararat Page 38