Keeper of the Flame (26 page)

Ares’s silence spoke much. She turned and frowned. “Yes?”

He shrugged. “I like him.”

She went back to the charts and tore a piece of barley bread from the small loaf. “Who?”

“You know who. The Roman.”

“Yes, you’ve mentioned that.”

“You were going along well there for awhile, reading together in the evenings—”

“Ares!” She stood, arms crossed. “My evenings are of no concern—”

“I have been talking to the old man.”

She sighed. “Now what?”

“He tells me that you were not always this way.”

“You weary me, Ares.” Sophia dropped to her chair again.

“He tells me that when you were young, you were carefree, happy. He said that you could always make him laugh.”

Sophia scowled. “I’m sure you found this quite astounding.”

“No. I asked him what would make you happy again.”

Sophia brushed crumbs across her chart with careful fingers, amassing a tiny pile. “And what did he say?”

“He said that you must believe that you are loved, even if you do not deserve it.”

“Ha!” She flicked the crumbs to the floor. “Sosigenes believes his god of love should spread his sentiments to everyone else. A pretty notion, but wholly untenable.”

“He says that you have been under the curse of sorrow for so long, you have forgotten how to be happy.”

Sophia eyed him narrowly. “Sosigenes should focus on his calculations and numbers and leave my heart to the physicians.”

Ares shrugged. “He seems wise to me.”

“He talks too much.”

“Still,” Ares said, and Sophia huffed. “Still, I see how the Roman speaks to you, how he watches you when you walk across the Base or attend to matters in the kitchen.”

Sophia rubbed at an invisible spot on her chitôn. “Does he? Watch me, I mean?”

“Always.” She could hear the smile in Ares’s voice.

“Then the Roman should be instructed in appropriate behavior.” She waved Ares away, then stared at the closed door when he had left.

They would be drilling in the courtyard. She waited until Ares would have reached the Base and moved on to other duties,
then crept from her room and descended to the first south-facing room.

The small space was overfilled with old pots, many cracked and tipped. Sophia twisted through the mess to the blurry window and pressed her forehead hard against the pane.

Indeed, in the courtyard below, eighty soldiers formed ten tight lines of eight. A solid block of belonging, far below her lonely perch. And in front, one man whom she would have recognized even if he hadn’t stood apart.

It had been days since he had left her with the scholars. They had passed each other, been courteous. That was all. Their camaraderie had been lost that day, and she did not understand the reason.

Enough.

She picked her way out of the room, ran lightly down the rest of the ramp, and emerged in the courtyard, blinking against the sun and panting. The troops stood in their formation with their backs to her. Bellus still commanded from the front, but too many bodies blocked her view of him.

The courtyard smelled of the peculiar soldiers’ odor of leather and sweat, which she was coming to recognize, and seemed almost as familiar as the scent of sand and salt and fish she knew so well.

Bellus yelled out
“Incedo dextro!”
The men yelled
“Dextro!”
in response, and then the block swung right and marched, their sandals kicking up dry sand in the courtyard.

When the area before her had cleared, Sophia crossed to the other side. Bellus’s back was to her as he marched along with his troops. She watched him march, and the
V
of muscles in his calves looked as solid as his shield. The centuria reached the
other end of the courtyard, Bellus gave a shout of
“Incedo sinistro!”
and they pivoted and faced her.

Sophia lifted her chin to the oncoming horde, though she noticed no one but Bellus, whose face betrayed his surprise.

Still they marched.

Sophia held her ground. When he was only a few inches from her, Bellus shouted
“Desino!”
and the group took two more solid steps and ceased their movement as one.

“Did you come to witness the finest army in the world, mistress?” Bellus asked. “Or was there something else?”

Sophia smiled serenely, and hoped it communicated a certain haughtiness. “Your men spend much time in the sand. And then track it all over my lighthouse on the bottoms of their sandals. Unless you have servants of your own to clean up after them, I will thank you to have them clean their shoes before entering the Base.”

It was a minor irritation, one she had settled on as she ran down the ramp. Her heart beat a little unevenly at the contrived complaint. “Or perhaps,” she added, raising her voice, “you would like one of my servants to show
you
how to sweep out the corridors?”

The ripple of amusement that ran through the men did not go unnoticed by Bellus. His face darkened. “I apologize most sincerely for the carelessness of my men. In the future I will instruct them to leave every grain of sand in the courtyard where they found it.”

Sophia rubbed the back of her neck, frustrated with his composure. “I would not want to tax the men unduly, knowing how accustomed to leisure you have allowed them to become.”

Bellus’s eyes went from dark to stormy then, and she silently
congratulated herself. He grabbed her arm without a word and dragged her to the courtyard entrance.

She said nothing as he pulled her. His fingers were hot on her skin. He yanked her through the doorway, and several feet down the stone corridor, then spun and faced her.

“What do you think you are doing?” His voice was low and threatening, and a sheen of sweat had broken over his brow, dampening the curl that always teased at his right eye. He still held her, and his fingers dug into her arm like bands of iron. He stepped closer. “Not in front of my men, Sophia. Never in front of my men.”

Sophia tried to pull away. He gripped her a moment longer, then shoved her from him. She smoothed her chitôn. “Why are you angry with me?”

“Why?” He paced before her. “You parade across our drills, accuse me—”

“Not today. Since—since I showed you—”

He held up a hand. “I have not been angry. But I am here with a mission, Sophia. It was foolish of me to get caught up in books and conversation.”

“Conversation with me.”

“Yes, with you! Who else?”

She turned away, wrapped her arms across her chest. “You would not feel that way if I were young and beautiful.” The words spilled out, and then she hated herself for them.

Behind her, Bellus groaned. “What kind of madness is this?”

She did not turn.

“Women,” he muttered, “I am through with you all.” She heard the crispness of papyrus pulled from his tunic and faced him again.

He used the back of his hand to swipe the dark curl from his eye.

She would trim that curl if he asked.

“There,” he said, and threw a flattened roll of papyrus to the stone between them. “Read that if you want to see how a beautiful woman behaves!”

He stared at her for one long moment, then brushed past her to the courtyard doorway.

“And then, by Jupiter, let me do what I came here to do!”

Twenty-Eight

S
ophia read his letter. She read it once, with a hasty desperation, then again with deliberate focus, scraping every bit of meaning from its loopy flourishes.

Hours later, the letter still rested on her desk in her darkening chambers. Sophia did not bother to dress the lamps around the room. A tiny wick in alabaster pooled light in a lonely circle on her desk, bleeding onto the edge of Bellus’s letter. Sophia sat before it, no longer needing to study the words. They had burned across her mind hours ago.

She touched the papyrus with a fingertip.

See, I have written to you on your Egyptian papyrus, Lucius. Is this piece not lovely? You would laugh to hear the story of my finding it in the marketplace. I had gone that morning to search out the newest fabrics from the East . . .

Valeria. She talked of fine robes, of glittering jewelry, of feasting and dancing in the triclinium of her father’s house.

A beautiful woman, Bellus had said. Yes, and it radiated from every line, written in her own hand, in large and confident letters.

The oil lamp sputtered and nearly died. The circle of light shrank, leaving the letter in darkness. And Sophia as well.

A pervasive and heavy silence weighted her chambers tonight. Though it was earlier than her usual time, she stirred, thinking to continue her worthless vigil in her bed, with the coverlet drawn over her head. The two months of the Proginosko’s
testing were beginning to seem a lifetime, and with the constant threat of Roman violence hanging above the city, even the air seemed weary with waiting.

But the door burst inward without warning.

Sophia swung in her chair, then stood. She could not mistake the figure outlined in the doorway, even in the darkness.

“Cleopatra!”

The queen of Egypt paused, panting.

“Why do you insist on keeping yourself so far above the city, Sophia? I am ready to collapse from merely reaching your door.”

Sophia crossed the room and led the woman to her couches. When Cleopatra dropped herself heavily onto one of them, Sophia used a reed to light a low brazier near the wall. The bowl flamed to life and a hazy smoke wafted upward.

Cleopatra wore robes of scarlet tonight, and she lay like a red gash against Sophia’s white couch. She had belted her robe with gold, and a string of gold pieces was woven through her abundant hair, in the Greek fashion. But around her neck she wore the royal pectoral of gold links that had graced the throats of Egyptian Pharaohs through the millennia.

Sophia was struck once again by the strength and beauty she exuded and glanced in the direction of Bellus’s letter. Her own tunic seemed a dirty gray, and her hair too short to braid anything.

She dropped to her knees beside Cleo’s couch and laid her head on the young woman’s arm.

“Sophia,” Cleopatra said, “are you ill?”

“In my spirit only.”

Cleopatra sighed. “As am I. There has been word from the army.”

Sophia lifted her head. “In Pelusium?”

“No longer, I am afraid. They march this way.”

“Achillas will attack the city?”

Cleopatra laid her head onto the cushions and rested the back of her hand on her forehead. “Achillas is dead. My sister Arsinôe had him murdered and has placed her tutor Ganymedes as general. But Pothinus has convinced them to join with those loyal to my brother, and the whole army marches toward Alexandria to reinstate Ptolemy on the throne.”

“And Caesar still holds Ptolemy?”

“Yes, the brat is being ‘protected’ in the palace, under guard.” She closed her eyes. “Sophia, I am afraid.”

Sophia stroked the girl’s arm. “Caesar will not allow you any harm.”

“I hope you are right.” Her eyes flicked open and she caught Sophia’s gaze. “I carry his child.”

Sophia exhaled, as though the breath had been struck from her chest.

Cleopatra smiled. “Nothing to say, my teacher?”

“I am certain you act as you see best.” Sophia moved to another couch and reclined.

Cleopatra swung her legs to the floor. “Yes, I do. My father’s foolishness left Egypt too indebted to Rome to ignore, and too weak to fight her off. We must ally ourselves with the Romans. Caesar will be their ruler when he has finished his campaigns, I know it. And what better way to ally Egypt to Rome than to bear a child who will have one foot in each of the two great kingdoms?”

Sophia watched Cleo’s eyes, could see the shrewd calculations that ran behind her expression. “You think this child will rule both?”

Cleo lay back again, licked her lips and smiled, like a satisfied cat. “Perhaps.”

Sophia glanced at Bellus’s letter on her desk, remembered the wedding plans that Valeria had detailed, gushing with the effusive silliness of youth. “Does Caesar not have a wife in Rome?”

Cleopatra waved her hand as if the truth were only a gnat buzzing about her head. “I will convince him to divorce her. She is nothing to him but a strategic alliance of two families.”

Was Valeria merely a strategic alliance?

“I wish that I had your confidence.” Sophia picked at a thread that frayed the cushion where she lay.

Cleo sniffed. “What need have you of confidence? You sit in your tower here, watching the deeds of the city from far above. No one has challenged Sophia of the Lighthouse for many years.” Cleopatra ran a hand through her hair and loosened it from its gold combs. Sophia followed the long fingers that raked through curls. “Would that my life were so simple,” Cleopatra said.

“Your Caesar has complicated my life.”

“Your life? Ah yes, the centuria. I had forgotten.”

Sophia shifted on the couch. In all these years, she had rarely spoken to Cleo of her own heart. They were both much too occupied with Cleopatra herself. She tried to keep her voice light. “Their leader does not think much of me, I fear.”

Cleopatra laughed. “That much is quite clear. I was present in the palace hall when the centurion made his report to Caesar.” She grinned at Sophia. “But he does have the most winning smile, does he not?”

You already have Caesar, Cleopatra.

“And you are correct,” she continued. “He is quite passionate
in his distaste for you. ‘Beastly’ I believe is the word he used. You must have made your mind clear to him, I daresay.”

Sophia felt her eyes flutter and let them close.

“Take care not to be too harsh toward him, though, my Sophia. The centurion suggested to Caesar that you might need to be removed if you stood in their way. And I do not believe he implied relocation.”

Sophia felt she could not breathe, so great was the pressure that fell upon her chest in that moment. She forced air into her lungs and found her voice.

“You believe he would have me killed? And yet you sent no word of warning to me?”

Cleopatra made a little pouting sound that Sophia well-recognized. “I have been quite occupied, Sophia. Do not forget that I am the ruler of an entire country. I cannot concern myself with every centurion that marches about.”