Madhukar chuckled a little. Pullo still had a kind of frown on his face. “Flower?”
“Ah, yes.” Madhukar waved his hand to a patch of leafy green growing a little ways down the path among the rocks. “Imagine for a moment a seed. Placed in fertile earth it will take root. Care for it, and it will grow. Tend to it, and it will bloom. But only so long. In time the caterpillar will gnaw upon its leaves. The wind will sweep away its soft petals. The frost will kill its roots. The flower will die, and it will fade back into the earth from whence it came. Perhaps a new flower will grow in its place, rising from the very dust of the old one, rising in birth in the moment of death. It, too, will take root and grow. It, too, will live and die. So it is for most of us. We live. We die. We live again. And each time the value of our being sows the ground of our new life for good or ill. What we are matters very much for what we will be.”
“In other words,” Vorenus said, “after death, Madhukar thinks Khenti probably took on a new life.”
Madhukar shrugged. “It is what the Teacher taught.”
Pullo’s face had softened. “So you live a good life in order to live a better one again? And that’s the release you seek?”
“It is a noble and proper thing to live well,” Madhukar agreed. “But rebirth is not release. The flower that returns must suffer again. The caterpillar. The wind. The frost. No, release is to no longer be the flower. To be a new thing now: the butterfly, the air, the chill itself. To become one with the very fabric of creation.”
“To know the mind of God,” Caesarion said.
Everyone turned to where the young man was walking up the path, holding hands with Hannah. Rishi and the other monks were nowhere to be seen.
“Welcome,” Madhukar said, exchanging acknowledgments with them both. Then he looked around at them all and opened his arms in a gesture of completion. “I am glad you are all come together at last. I do not doubt that you have much of which to speak, and I have work to tend to elsewhere. The bees won’t keep themselves. May you all find solace and peace in this place.”
The little monk bowed once more to them all, quickly embraced Caesarion in a joyous hug, and then retreated back down the path.
“I’m really glad you were here for this,” Caesarion said. “And especially you, Titus Pullo. Thinking you dead and now seeing you alive … well, it’s amazing.”
Pullo smiled, and without leaving his seat on the rocks he reached out and grabbed the younger man with one big paw and pulled him in for a hug that was at once playful and fatherly. “I did miss you, little pharaoh,” he grumbled.
And I missed this, Vorenus thought, recalling the shared memories of a time before war and the Shards of Heaven entered into their lives.
Pullo let Caesarion go, tousling his damp hair with one hand while with his other he quickly wiped at his own eyes. Seeing them smiling suddenly brought back the memory of another day in Alexandria, when they’d first learned that Juba the Numidian was trying to attain the fabled Scrolls of Thoth, thought to hold all the secrets of the gods.
“Is everything all right, Vorenus?”
Vorenus opened his eyes when Caesarion spoke, not having realized that he’d closed them. “All is well.” He blinked back dampness as he looked at his old friend, so beaten by the world, and the boy they’d come to view like a son, so ready to enter the next stage of life with the young woman he loved. “I was simply thinking how it is that things can stay the same even as they change.”
“Time passes,” Hannah said. “All things change.”
Vorenus nodded respectfully. “So it does.”
Hannah’s eyes twinkled as they so often did when she saw to the clear truth of things. “But you were thinking of something specific, Lucius Vorenus.”
Vorenus couldn’t help but smile at how he was exposed before her. Even from the first time they’d met her, the young Jewish girl had read them all like a book. It was one of the first things, he suspected, that drew young Caesarion to her. Wise and wise again, he thought to himself. “I was thinking of the house of Asclepius,” he admitted. “After the assassin’s attack in Alexandria. Do you remember it?”
“I do,” Caesarion said. “You saved many lives that day, Vorenus.”
Vorenus nodded, though he didn’t feel the least bit heroic for what he’d had to do. “I remember we talked about the Scrolls of Thoth, how they were said to hold all the knowledge of the gods. You told us that if we actually found them you would destroy them. You said you had no desire to know the mind of God.”
“I remember it well.” Caesarion smiled. “And that’s still true to a point. But remember that back then I guess I thought God was alive. But He’s dead, remember?”
Vorenus shivered despite the warm morning air. It still bothered him to hear it said so plainly. No matter how much it made sense of the world, he didn’t want to believe that God was dead.
“Dead,” Pullo said. “But you still do believe there was a God?”
“How could I not?” Caesarion exchanged a smile with Hannah and squeezed her hand. “I know that the monks here say that their Teacher didn’t speak of a god, but I do think there was one. Nothing else explains the Shards. At the same time, it’s like I told Didymus back in Alexandria: no just God could allow such injustice in the world. So it makes sense, as Hannah and her people believe, that for God to give His creation the free will to live on its own, He had to unmake Himself. His death was His greatest gift.”
“But the monks say life is suffering,” Pullo said.
“The gift indeed comes with a price,” Hannah replied. “But remember that we prefer to dwell on what lies within ourselves, not that which dwells without. As the monks here say, through right wisdom, right conduct, and right focus, we can achieve release.”
“To be unmade ourselves,” Vorenus whispered. The stark truth of it struck him so suddenly, so abruptly, that he couldn’t help but speak the words out loud. It was as if they had been spoken into his very soul.
The smile with which Caesarion met him was kindly, almost paternal. “And so to know the mind of God.”
“A hard thing to understand,” Vorenus said, looking at the ground.
Caesarion stepped forward and put his hand on Vorenus’ shoulder. “An even harder thing for many to accept.”
For a moment there was silence amid the gathering on the rocks. And for all that Vorenus might have thought he would hear next, it was not the voice of his old friend.
“I accept it,” Pullo said. “But I know it’s not everything.”
Vorenus looked up, but it was Hannah who spoke first. “How do you know?”
“Well,” Pullo said, a smile creasing the ragged lines of his scarred face, “I know there’s more, because I died.”
17
THE MOON TAKES FLIGHT
CANTABRIA, 26 BCE
In the dark before the dawn, Selene left Tiberius sleeping. Pulling her shawl close about her as she left, she pretended to be unhurried. Not one of the praetorians outlined by the watch fires around the tent stopped her as she turned toward the baths on the far side of the encampment and began to walk. Not one of them even looked at her.
She tried not to limp, though she ached from the bruising and the strains of muscles and joints that had been twisted in the rape. She tried to walk tall and proud, like the queen that she should have been.
She didn’t need to try not to cry, though. She had had enough of tears. This night had seen the end of them. Only vengeance was left. Vengeance and her love for her husband, stronger than ever.
Juba. Beautiful, kind Juba. She wasn’t sure whether she would tell him what had happened. She wasn’t sure if she could.