The Shards of Heaven (25 page)

“I'm sorry,” Jacob said. “‘Bronze Guts'?”

“What? Oh, it's something we call him. He's tireless, you know. Works right through meals. Never takes breaks. We figure his bowels aren't real.”

“Ah. I see.” When the scholar looked away for a moment, Jacob made a disgusted face at Selene, causing her to suppress a giggle.

The entry hall took up an entire side of the six-sided building. There were offices here, and a few more guards visible in the shadows, but mostly Selene was focused on the five thick pillars on each side of the narrow reflecting pool that ran down its center. The ten pillars, she knew, represented the ten halls of knowledge within the structure itself: two to each wing on the remaining sides of the building, filled with scrolls. The scholar walked briskly, clearly intent on his duties, and soon they entered the main hall of the Library itself.

The six-sided main hall was open all the way to the high top of its dome, and Selene felt a cool chill to the air as she entered that reminded her unkindly of Alexander's mausoleum. But the similarities to that place of death ended there. The Library was light and open while the tomb had been dark and oppressive. Unlike the shadowed pyramid floating above a single line of small windows, here large portals for light dotted the top of the dome, streaming the sun into a space built of pleasantly bright stones. The sets of doors surrounding the sides were not locked barriers between tombs but held open to a steady flow of busy scholars and servants moving between the halls with scrolls and wax tablets in their hands. Three staircases rose around the walls in a kind of spiral, connecting the three tall levels of the main hall, and the chill of the air was due not to some silly feeling of fear, Selene knew, but from the gentle cascading of the entry hall's reflecting pool as it tumbled down three steps to the floor of the hall—the same elevation as the outside plaza, she surmised—where it entered a larger, round pool in the middle of the space. Men were sitting on curved stone benches around the rippling waters, chatting amicably, and she couldn't help but smile.

The scholar led them out to the edge of the pool and gestured to one of the benches. “Didymus is busy with another guest at the moment,” he said. “A gentleman named Nebi. We'll need to wait here until he sends a summons. My name is Cleomedes, and I can answer any questions in the meantime.”

Nebi? Wasn't Didymus supposed to be meeting with Caesarion? Nebi was an Egyptian name, Selene was sure. It meant “panther,” didn't it? Her shoulders slumped a little, not only because she wouldn't see Didymus right away, but also because she might have missed the chance to impress Caesarion with her ability to move through the city so freely.

Jacob's own attitude, she noticed, hadn't changed at all. She wondered if that look of pleasant satisfaction was frozen on his face. “Of course,” he said. “We understand.”

Cleomedes nodded politely then started to step toward the end of the bench. He didn't get two steps before Jacob caught his arm.

“So Didymus is in his office right now with his other meeting?” He gestured to one of the doors on the second floor above the entry hall behind them. “That's just up there, right?”

“No,” the scholar said. “The chief librarian's office is on the third floor. Those are the lecture rooms and the scriptorium.”

“That's right. I remember now,” Jacob said, shaking his head in embarrassment, the long locks of hair hanging from his temples bouncing. “I'd forgotten. End of the hall, right?”

“Yes, but we'll need to wait here,” Cleomedes repeated.

“Of course.” Then, before the scholar could sit down, Jacob had walked past him, gesturing toward the halls opposite the entry and Didymus' office. “I've always wondered why there are ten halls. Is it to sort the books somehow?”

Cleomedes stepped up to stand to Jacob's right. “Exactly. Based on Aristotle's divisions of knowledge. So that's Mathematics over there.”

“Ah, I see. Labeled above the doorway. So that's Medicine?” He pointed past the scholar, causing the man to turn his head away. As soon as he did, Jacob quickly caught Selene's eye and winked, nodding in a crisp gesture toward the stairs behind her.

Selene just stared. Was he telling her to go? Was that why he asked about the office?

Cleomedes confirmed the medicine hall, then started to look back to Selene. Jacob laughed a little, throwing his arm around the scholar's shoulder and sweeping his arm forward to distract his attention. “So many books, you'd need some organization like that! They say you've got a copy of everything ever written here. Is that true?”

“I don't know about everything,” Cleomedes said, nevertheless looking smug. “But close to it. Name something,” he dared.

Jacob's face screwed up in dramatic thought, keeping the scholar's attention. Selene took a step backward.

“Okay … well, how about Artapanus?”

Cleomedes almost laughed. “Artapanus? Wrote a history, right?
Concerning the Jews?
”

“That's right,” Jacob said, appearing impressed. Selene took another two tentative steps in the direction of the nearest stairway.

“You'll need to do better than that for a challenge,” Cleomedes said. “We have Artapanus' own copy. In fact, Didymus himself has been reading it of late.”

“Is that so? Artapanus' own copy?” Jacob started walking in the opposite direction from the retreating girl. “You have a lot of originals here, I imagine,” he was saying. “Do you have anything in Aristotle's hand?”

The young scholar was laughing again in his pride, but Selene stopped listening to their conversation. She turned, as quietly as she could, and hurried over to the wide stairwell. Three middle-aged scholars, engaged in deep conversation about circles and someone named Eratosthenes, were just starting to make their way up and she stepped into their wake, hiding as best she could manage behind them, keeping her head low and trying not to bring attention to herself.

The scholars departed the stairway on the second floor, leaving the stairway clear to the third floor, so Selene pulled her linen dress away from her ankles to run up the rest of the way. At the top she glanced down to the floor of the main hall one last time—just catching a glimpse of Jacob as he led the young scholar over and into one of the open doorways—before she turned and headed through her own double set of doors, into the hall where she hoped to find Didymus.

The third-floor main hallway, like the entry hallway two floors below it, was lined with pillars. Between them were a series of doors, a few half open to reveal tables and piles of scrolls with the occasional scholar or priest in concentration among them. A single door stood at the end of the hall, shut. Selene stepped up to it lightly, hearing voices from within. She leaned forward to listen, trying to make them out.

“How long, then?” It was her Greek teacher's voice, no doubt. She smiled.

“Not long at all,” she heard Caesarion reply. “The battle may already be done. And not for the best, I fear.”

Selene's smile grew. Caesarion must be going by the name Nebi, she decided, to keep his visit quiet. He thought he was so clever. Wouldn't he be surprised to find out she could—

“Selene,” said a familiar deep voice behind her.

A part of her instinct told her to run, but it was the other half of her instinct—the royal one—that she obeyed. She withdrew from the door and stood straight, head held high and face controlled as she turned to face Khenti. The dark-skinned head of the guards stepped out from the shadows behind the nearest pillar, his face impassive. She silently cursed herself for not being more careful. He'd gone out with Caesarion this morning, so she should have expected that he would be around. She should have looked. “Guardchief,” she said with a curt nod. “Pleasant to see you here.”

Khenti's eyes narrowed and he frowned slightly. “I imagine so,” he said. Then, before she could reply, he looked over his shoulder down the line of pillars toward the main hall and spoke something in Egyptian. She wasn't as comfortable in the language as Caesarion was, so it took her a moment to translate it to Greek in her mind. “I'll watch her from here,” he'd said.

Silently, like ghosts, two more Egyptian palace guards melted out from the shadows behind pillars and bowed first to her, then to him. Selene just stared. Palace guards? Had they been following her this whole time? How long—?

“If you will, Shushu,” Khenti said to one of them, still in Egyptian, “inform Kemse that the young queen is safe and sound.” Khenti's gaze returned to Selene. “And that she's looking forward to returning the shawl she stole. She's quite sorry for the trouble she's caused this morning.”

Selene smiled politely, the best she could manage in her shock. The other guards bowed once more to the two of them before they filed out in silence.

“So you've been busy,” Khenti said quietly, returning to addressing her in Greek.

Selene shrugged. What business was it of his?

“The world is an unfriendly place,” he said. “You shouldn't be out alone.”

Selene considered a few curses before settling on the proper thing to say. “I wasn't alone,” she said, eyes flicking to where the guards had departed.

Khenti's frown broke into a hint of a smile. “That's true,” he said. “Still, in the future, it would make our lives much easier if Your Majesty would follow directions, impressed though we are by your obvious ingenuity. One of the supply ferries?”

“Of course,” she said, as if it were the most obvious thing to have done. How did he know that?

“Clever,” he said. “But, please, no more. I'll ask Lord Horus to give you and your brothers more liberty. Just please don't sneak off, my lady. There are too many people who want you dead.”

Dead?
“Why would anyone want—”

“Dead, Selene,” he repeated. “It seems the world is coming—the war is coming—whether we're ready or not. Perhaps it's time you understood that.”

Before she could reply, Khenti had stepped forward and was reaching past her to knock on the door.

 

16

T
HE
S
TORM
OF
W
AR

ACTIUM, 31 BCE

Dawn on the day of the attack had brought dark clouds, a bad omen made worse when they began to burn the ships whose rowers were either dead in the burial pits or had defected across the lines. Watching the thick black plumes of smoke rising to meet the storm-promising sky, Vorenus had felt a sorrowful resignation to death that had surprised him. Death didn't frighten him overmuch—he had done his due diligence to honor the gods, even on this gods-doomed day—but he was accustomed to feeling a kind of bloodlust take over his mind when battle approached. It was something he and Pullo, even when they were young and thought themselves rivals, always knew they had in common.

But not today.

Perhaps he was just getting old. Or perhaps he was too close to the truth to convince himself that they stood any chance of victory. Whatever the cause, he'd been certain as he'd watched the sun rise that it was the last dawn he'd see.

Though he had lived to see noon, nothing in the half-day of slaughter had yet convinced him that anything but death awaited him today.

Keeping his stance wide on the salt-slick, heaving deck of Antony's flagship, Vorenus peered north through the sheeting rain, trying to ascertain the status of Octavian's vessels. There were close to a thousand ships on the water today. The numbers were on Octavian's side, though not by much. And his fleet was mostly biremes and triremes, smaller ships than their own flotilla of four hundred or so heavy quad- and quinqueremes. The size difference was substantial: it would take little more than a single strike from the triple-beaked bronze ram at the head of one of their massive ships to sink a trireme. The even smaller biremes would likely be blown into splinters.

If only they could catch them.

Octavian, as he had on land, was refusing to give fight. He'd begun the morning far off from the shoreline, not moving in for the battle. Then, when at last Antony gave the frustrated order around noon to head forward into the storm, into Octavian's lines, Caesar's adopted son had given way, backrowing out of reach of their wave-plowing rams.

Not out of reach of each side's ranged weapons, though: the blood of the day so far—and there had been much of it—had been wrought through the air. Archers' volleys that pinned men to the decks and made pincushions of their side-curved shields. Great iron bolts shot across the waters that could cut through two men at a time. Skull-size stones launched from deck-mounted ballistae that could blow men to pieces. Greased firepots of oil that made a mockery of the rain, vaulting through the air to explode on the decks in infernal heat. Even now Vorenus could see, like parodies of lighthouses on the water, ships burning on both sides—though there were more among their own lines. Bigger ships made for bigger targets. It was astonishing luck that the flagship had suffered only minor burns about the deck.