Keeper of the Flame (30 page)

“The soldiers are panicking!” one centurion called out from the flower-lined path, and others murmured about him.

Caesar held up a hand for silence.

Bellus leaned to Metellus, a centurion who had once fought beside him in the Nineteenth. “What is going on? Why the fear?”

Metellus raised his eyebrows, then smirked. “Ah, yes, you’ve been shut up in that cursed lighthouse, right?” He poked a thumb over his shoulder toward the city. “Egyptians have salted the canals somehow. All the cisterns are brackish, undrinkable.”

Caesar spoke from the marble steps above them. “Men, this is not a time for weakness. We stand on the edge of victory here.”

Bellus watched Cleopatra with interest. Her eyes strayed to Caesar and narrowed, as though she objected to the term
victory
.

“Thirsty men can’t fight!” one of the centurions answered.

“Your men shame themselves, Portius. So the cisterns have gone bad. Yes. Does not every sea coast have fresh springs somewhere underneath? There is fresh water to be found, which we have only to locate.” He lifted a hand toward the harbor beyond the palace. “And should we not find it, we have only to board ships and sail down the coast, to either east or west, where water can be found in abundance. The enemy has no fleet.”

Beside Bellus, Metellus spoke up. “The men criticize your
delay here, General. They are saying that we should retreat, take to our ships.”

Caesar laughed. “And that is why I am general, men. Look at the city.” He pointed to the streets beyond the royal quarter. “If we come out from behind the defenses we have built here, we will never return. That mob of crazy Alexandrians will set upon us.” With this he wrapped an arm around Cleopatra, as if to soften his words. “And though we are trained and we are strong, we are also sorely outnumbered, at least until the Thirty-Seventh Legion arrives.” His voice was smooth, placating. “Let us not be foolish now, men.”

Caesar examined the group, and his gaze seemed to rest on Bellus.

Yes, even I am here, General.

“Bellus,” Caesar called, surprising him.

“General!” Bellus saluted and stood at attention.

“I am placing you in charge of the search for fresh water.”

“Yes, General,” Bellus kept his voice steady, in spite of the surging in his blood.

“Bring your centuria out of the lighthouse. Leave only a few to hold our position there. And the rest of you—all hands are to be devoted to the effort of digging fresh water. Bellus will tell you where to dig.”

He turned again to Bellus. “Put all that learning to use today, centurion. You have been given my trust. Do not disappoint me.”

“Yes, General.”

And with that, the two seemingly divine ones disappeared back into the palace, and the group of centurions looked to Bellus for direction.

He spent the following hour in a ground level chamber of
the palace, poring over maps of the city and peppering various soldiers with questions, those he had called in for their expertise in city planning and building. He sent word to the lighthouse and ordered his men to quit the place and march through the city to the royal quarter.

A decision was made as to location, and they were off. Three centuriae to three different locations, all two or three stadia from the sea and still in the royal quarter, where Bellus had made his best guess that water might be found. Bellus followed his own centuria to the first location.

The ground was rocky at first, but with a porous limestone that could be easily chipped away. Bellus strode through his troops, organized into work gangs that hacked at the ground with hoes and spades. They had shed their armor and worked in only their tunics like peasant farmers.

Sweat formed on the shoulders and necks of the soldiers who dug. Bellus watched their eyes, saw that they dug in fear, knowing that every swing of the spade sucked water from their pores, that everything depended on finding more. An army should never operate in fear.

“Courage, men!” he yelled through the troops. “Water in abundance is to be found. Before the morning is here we shall find it!”

Which may or may not be true.

He had brought the horse, and he mounted it now to oversee the digging in the second location along the coast.

Darkness fell as the animal carried him along the edge of the harbor with speed, and Bellus felt a familiar anger building in him with each hoof beat.

It was the anger that came before a battle. The rage that
carried him through, that made him able to ride into the enemy and wield a bloody sword through the sons of mothers who waited at home for their soldiers to return, just as his did.

Yes, this was the part of him that he needed to strengthen, to recognize, to feed.

Bellus sensed the lighthouse’s summit flame to life in the encroaching darkness, but he refused to pay it heed. There was nothing for him there.

He reached the second work site, dismounted, and yelled at the soldiers who seemed to be murmuring to each other more than they dug.

The hours passed in a haze of dirt. Dirt in his hair, in his nose, in his mouth. The anger swelled within him, too, and broke out onto the men as the night wore on, until they dug with a recklessness that comes of a commander who is harsh and unreasonable.

The flame of the lighthouse never wavered above them, and still Bellus refused to lift his eyes to it.

Instead, he dropped down into the deepening hole, feeling the dirt with his hands to assess its moisture.

“Almost there,” he said to himself, and the promise was carried to the men who dug and the men who hauled dirt to the top of the hole.

Do not disappoint me
. Caesar’s words. Father’s words. They echoed and urged him on with the promise of affirmation.

And then, just as clearly, there was Sophia’s face in his mind.

She was as far from him as she could be, in her tower high above the harbor, and him in a hole beneath the city. He raised his eyes then, to catch a glimpse of the lighthouse fire.

But he was too deep.

He dropped the hand he had lifted to her without thought, just as a gush of fresh water burst from the ground and surged around his sandals.

A shout went up from the men, and greedy hands were cupped and dipped from water to lips. Ropes were tossed down to aid their climb and they began to evacuate the hole. Bellus let them have their moment of glee, without reminding them that all of this distraction about the water had made them forget what mattered—that the Egyptian army surely planned to weaken them because they were waiting in the marshy delta beyond to swoop in and pick them off.

Bellus remained in the hole until the end, as though the water there anchored him beneath the ground, far below the city. And the lighthouse.

Caesar will be pleased. And that is all that matters.

Thirty-Four

O
ne day had seeped into another, and Sophia remained in her chambers, relying on Ares to bring her all she required.

Beside the dying flame of her small oil lamp, she huddled over the lighthouse’s accounts, adding and subtracting figures in her head.

She thought, perhaps, she should apologize to Bellus. But no, it was best to remain apart. To move on.

And so she gave her thoughts once again to the only purpose she had clung to for these many years since Kallias and her son were swept from her. The two places she gave herself for the protection of—the lighthouse, so that no ships would be lost on the shores of Alexandria, and the Museum, to press on with the legacy Kallias had left.

Something Sosigenes has said yesterday bubbled to the surface. “It is not the flame in the beacon chamber you guard with such vigilance, Sophia. It is the flame within you. But it is meant to be shared, and only God can keep it safe.”

She tossed aside her reed and sat back in her chair.

She had tried to dissolve the doubts about the gods by keeping busy, tried to answer her misgivings with the rhetoric of Greek philosophers. But Sosigenes’s words wore away at the barriers of her heart like gentle waves erode a stone wall. It seemed so clear now that the gods of the Egyptians and Greeks were man-made foolishness. But could she accept that there was One God . . . One alone who had existed since the beginning of time and who would love her just as she was?

Such thoughts were for another time. She needed to focus on the Proginosko and the Museum.

What would Sosigenes do with the Proginosko once he had finished the testing phase? Another tour of the centers of power, as they had undertaken twenty years ago? No, the sea was too dangerous a place for something so precious.

Those in power around the world would surely come to them, to see the Proginosko, to share in its knowledge, which should be available to all.

But she was not so naïve as that. The Proginosko must also be protected. And only royalty had the power to fully protect.

I will speak to Cleopatra.

But would she? The thought of entering the city made her neck damp with anxiety. Would Cleopatra come to her? She should write to her.

Sophia pushed aside the accounts and searched for a blank piece of papyrus on which to send a message. She looked in the writing case on her desk, on the floor where loose scrolls sometimes dropped, even on her shelves. She found none.

Sighing, she dropped back to her chair.

It was late. Tomorrow would be soon enough.

But an hour later she rolled from her bed and padded across the room to relight a lamp.

Her days had been too inactive to allow sleep to overtake her quickly. And her mind was more restless than her body, reliving moments in rose gardens that she would prefer to forget.

The night was too far gone to call down through the lighthouse for Ares to bring her more writing supplies. Besides, her stomach was also calling out for something. She’d wander to the kitchen, and then find more papyrus on her own.

In the South Wing, all was surprisingly quiet. The soldiers often continued their games and stories late into the night, but they seemed to have retired early.

She passed Ares’s chamber, located near the front entrance of the lighthouse where he could keep track of those who came and went. She had not intended to stop, but a low moan came from under the door and arrested her steps. She tilted her head, listening.

Another moan, this one louder.

Sophia pressed her lips together and frowned. She did not approve of staff liaisons. And though his mother’s morals had been questionable, Sophia had hoped that her own influence on the boy had been more effective than this.

She raised her hand to knock, then held her hand midair as the memory of Bellus’s face, so close to hers, played in her mind. She dropped her hand and continued.

But it came again, the sound from Ares’s room, and this time, it sounded more of pain than pleasure. She returned to his door, leaned her head against it.

Two voices. Both male.

She frowned again, wondering if she did not know Ares as well as she thought, but then the words filtered through the wooden door and she heard Ares cry out.

“I do not know anything!” The words came sharp and fearful.

Her hesitation fled. Sophia shoved the door open and pushed inside.

The room was dimly lit, long and narrow. She had never entered it before tonight. She took in the surprising clutter of books and the mural-painted walls, then focused on the two men at the far end of the chamber, who turned to her.

Ares sat in a chair, his arms lashed behind his back. Beside him, a gangly man dressed as a soldier of the Egyptian army held a knife.

And then she saw the blood. Pooling on the stone floor below Ares’s bound hands, running down his left arm, dripping from his palm.

“Ares!”

“Get out, Sophia!” Ares’s pain-laced voice thudded against her chest.

The soldier had another idea. Before Sophia could react, he leapt across the room, closed the door behind her, and leaned his back against it, a smug smile washing over his face.

He was all bones, like a skeleton thinly covered in flesh, but there was a lethal strength to him that sent a shudder down Sophia’s back.

“What do you want? What are you doing to Ares?” Her voice was softer than she desired. She glanced back to Ares. His only injury appeared to be the parallel slashes running down the inside of his arm, as though the knife were making deliberate progress toward his wrist.

“Two of you, now, have I?” the soldier said. “And the second more valuable than the first, I wager.” He circled around Sophia, bringing his face to hers, close enough to smell his foul breath. She closed her eyes.

“I’m wanting the contraption. And the old man with it.”

Sophia sucked in her breath but did not respond.

“That’s right,” he said, running a dirty fingernail down her own arm. “You thought you were so secretive. But there is people that knows. And them people want what you’ve got.”

“I have nothing here. I don’t know what you have been told—”

“Hah!”

The word was a puff of odor in her face, and she blinked against it, the cold fingers of fear dancing across her spine now.

“He said you might be a problem. Said if you was any trouble, I was to kill you.”

Sophia placed a hand against the cool stone of the wall, against the painted shoulder of a Egyptian treading corn that Ares must have created. “Who? Who told you to kill me?” She tried to draw strength from the stone.

“I don’t cut women, though.”

Sophia watched his eyes, which roamed over her and chilled her blood.

“I have other ways with the women.”

Behind them, Ares yelled and bucked in his chair, trying to reach them.

The soldier’s eyes flicked to Ares then back to Sophia, as though deciding which direction would be more effective.

“Leave her alone!” Ares roared. “Finish with me.”

“No!” Sophia said. “He doesn’t know anything. Haven’t you proven that already?” She pointed to the blood circle, widening on the stone floor.

The skeletal monster smiled. “Maybe the painter-boy is stupid, but it looks to me like you would talk to save him.”