“He’s not here,” Hannah said, looking out at the empty water.
Pullo had come up behind them. “He will be,” the big man said. “I know Vorenus. He’ll be here. He will.”
Caesarion shielded his eyes to look back across the waves toward the Lochian palace and the royal harbor at its base. There were many ships moving in the early light, and his heart sunk to see their Roman colors. With Antony dead, Octavian hadn’t hesitated to order the city overrun. All Caesarion’s defensive planning—the new walls to the west, these explosives here—had been useless in the end. Alexandria had given herself over to Rome, her citizens too tired to continue the fight. With luck, the capitulation would at least save her from the torch. There would be panic, and there would be killings, Caesarion knew, especially in the first hours as the pent-up rage of the conquering Romans was released in vile and horrific acts—he’d read enough of sieges to know the way of things—but Octavian would see that most of the city’s people would go unharmed. What good, after all, was a great city without her people?
Not all would be so lucky, though. For all his mercy, there were those whom Octavian could not allow to live.
Let Vorenus have found the children, he thought. Please.
Just as Caesarion began wondering to whom he was directing his prayer—if it was a prayer—there was a rumble like thunder from beneath them, and the waters of the canal stirred and shook as a whirlpool formed where the passage leading up to the Ark opened into the canal.
The platform, too, shook, the wooden bridge above straining, and it knocked Hannah off balance. She fell into Caesarion, her head coming down against his chest, and strands of her hair brushing up against his face. She looked up, her eyes searching and, Caesarion thought for a moment, hopeful. Her face tilted back as it raised, her lips parting only slightly as she breathed.
Roses, Caesarion thought as the scent and the feel of her filled his world. Red, red roses.
And then, just as her face approached his, the platform shook again, and from the direction of the Ark chamber they heard—unmistakably—the sound of shouting from the other guardians of the Ark.
27
ONE FATAL MISTAKE
ALEXANDRIA, 30 BCE
Juba had long since grown to despise the presence of the two praetorian guards that Octavian had assigned to him for his supposed protection, but on this early morning, in the confined space of the dark passageway they’d been following from Alexander’s tomb, he was glad for the way in which they went about their business. The square-shaped passage was surprisingly free of traps—or any markings whatsoever—but alone he would have still moved more cautiously than the praetorians did. Despite the fiery desire for vengeance that burned in his chest, an instinct for self-preservation would have seen him walking carefully into the dark. Not so these men. They hurried into the unknown with supreme confidence, one in front and one in back of him and Didymus, the little oil lamps in their hands feebly pushing back the shadows with a warm orange glow and the swords at their hips seemingly ready for use. The detachment of six other Roman legionnaires moved swiftly in their wake, no doubt wondering what they were doing rushing through a tunnel underground rather than pillaging the buildings above them.
Good Romans, though, they’d not voiced their displeasure when Juba had ordered them to accompany him. Nor had they shown anything but quiet, businesslike patience as they followed the tunnel through its twists and turns and occasional stairs.
Not so with Didymus. The Greek scholar was anxious with both concern and excitement. With Juba’s assurances that the Library would be spared, and that Selene would immediately be returned to Antirhodos under the most secure guard to prevent anything from happening to her—and that the same guard would take control of her siblings, as well, in order to keep them safe—Didymus had revealed everything he knew about the tunnel on one more condition: that he be allowed to accompany their mission to recover the Ark. Knowing that the scholar was no physical threat to that effort—and that he could, in fact, be of some use either as a hostage or as a source of further information—Juba agreed at once.
It was a decision Juba was glad he’d made, as the scholar had been useful not long after they entered the hidden passage, when they’d encountered another passageway heading off to their left, a branch that Didymus had insisted must lead to the distant Serapeum. And now, as the praetorian in front signaled for a halt in a room with three passageways leading forward, Juba was once more glad he could turn to the man who’d figured out so many of the world’s greatest secrets.
“I thought you said this was a single tunnel leading to the Ark.”
The librarian’s face was part frown and part fascination. “I did,” he said. “That’s what we were told. Two of these paths must be false leads.”
“I’ll break up the men, then,” Juba said, thinking a simultaneous search would be fast, efficient.
“No, wait.” Didymus closed his eyes for a moment in thought. “Two-thirds of them will die.”
A quiet murmur passed over the men behind them, but Juba ignored it. “Why?”
“The Ark’s guardians would have tried to keep it well protected. Two of these paths are surely traps.”
Juba felt impatience rise like heat in his chest, thinking what a small sacrifice two-thirds of these strangers would be when weighed against the destruction of Octavian, but he quickly shook such thoughts away. It was Octavian’s kind of thinking, the very thing he wanted to destroy. Such impulses had been coming to him more and more since he had donned the armor of Alexander, the Aegis of Zeus. He resisted the urge to pull away the cloak hiding the armor, the urge to reach out with his mind and embrace the warmth of the black stone mounted at the center of his chest. “Then what do you suggest?” he asked.
The scholar walked forward, past the lead praetorian, and he paced back and forth in front of the three passageways, now and again pausing to look up at the ceiling above one of them, or at the floor at his feet. He wasn’t, Juba was certain, looking for signs of the Jews’ passage: they’d already learned that the sealed doors to these passages had prevented even the faintest traces of dust from collecting on its floors. What then, Juba wondered, was he looking for?
Didymus abruptly stopped pacing, his head whipping up to nod at each of the passages as if counting them. “How many steps have we gone down?” he asked over his shoulder.
“Steps?” the praetorian asked from behind Juba. “We were supposed to be counting steps?”
The librarian shook his head impatiently as he turned around to face them. “No, no. Not individual steps. Those occasional little sets of stairs. How many? Five? Six?”
Juba had balled his fists to keep them from tearing at his cloak, but the scholar’s question allowed him to relax them as he thought back. “Five, I think.”
The praetorian who’d been leading agreed, the light cast by his lantern bobbing over the scholar in front of them. Didymus grinned like a little boy. “Then we go left,” he said as he started to walk in that direction, his pace fast with resolution. “Always left.”
Juba and the others hurried to catch up to him, the praetorian stepping around him to once more take the lead. “How do you know?” Juba asked. They were quickly moving past a turn in the new passageway. “Are you sure?”
Didymus shrugged, but his face was still beaming as they walked. “It’s the Nile. The whole passageway is a model of the river. This must be the start of the delta.”
“But how do you know we go left?”
“The Ark is here in Alexandria, and Alexandria is off the Canopic branch of the Nile. The farthest west,” the librarian answered.
Juba was starting to ask how he could be so certain that the passageway had anything to do with Egypt’s great river when the praetorian in front raised his arm to signal for silence. Juba strained his ears as they crept forward, feet making soft noises on the smooth stone. Another turn, and at last he could hear what the praetorian already had: voices, faintly echoed from the rock around them, too dim to discern their words but clearly near at hand. And then, at the far reach of the light of their lamps, they saw a large wooden entryway at the end of the passage, bolstered with iron.