“They must be on the other side of the door,” the praetorian whispered.
At a motion from Juba, the second praetorian joined his fellow in front of the door. They both drew their swords.
For all his experience at war, Juba had been fortunate to take part in few fights. Feeling close to it now, his heart thrilled in both anticipation and fright. He signaled four of the legionnaires to move up front, confident that there was little danger from behind.
He didn’t desire a fight. He’d made that order clear enough, he hoped. But if the Jews didn’t quickly agree to terms, if they didn’t quickly surrender the Ark, Juba knew he wouldn’t let them stand in the way of his vengeance. As he’d told Didymus back at the Library, the need for it burned in his veins, burned with a smoldering rage that threatened at any moment to consume him.
The men ahead exchanged nods of readiness as one of the praetorians gripped the door handle. Juba took a deep breath and pulled his own sword. Then he turned to Didymus.
The scholar, he saw, wasn’t paying attention to the assault about to happen. He was fingering something on the wall beside him, an indentation just the size of a man’s hand, and he was looking at the ground beneath his feet, where faint sweeps of chalky dust—glaringly apparent against the otherwise spotless tunnel—showed that something heavy had recently moved there.
Juba’s gaze traced the lines on the ground, and he saw it all for what it was. He reached past Didymus to the stone, gripped what he could see now was a hidden handle in the rock, and began to pull the secret door open. He turned to whisper a warning not to open the wooden door, but his realization had come to him too late.
Time seemed to slow, as if he were moving through thick sand. He saw, in terrible clarity, the handle of the wooden door lifting in the praetorian’s hands. He saw him turn to his fellow with a look of final satisfaction as he pulled.
Then time lurched forward, actions speeding into sudden fast motion. Juba found his voice, only to have it drowned out by the splintering boom of the wooden door blasting inward. The world seemed to scream.
The next moments came to Juba in flashes. Blood flinging into the air. A plank hitting the Roman in front of him, grotesquely doubling the man over. Shadows reeling as lanterns flew and clattered. And then the shock of bitter cold as a pent-up tide of water roared forth from the doorway, flooding the passage.
Parts of the door and the men in front of it swept down through the passage, knocking down those still standing and driving them back. Juba felt his own legs being pushed out from beneath him as he fought to hold on to the handle in the stone door. Didymus slammed into him, the older man somehow catching into the folds of Juba’s cloak.
The full weight of the water crashed into them then, a buffeting blow that struck like a great hammer in the hands of an unseen and very angry god. The wall of water drove them off the floor, Didymus clinging desperately to Juba, whose grip on the door was the only thing keeping them both from being swept away. Juba’s body swung in the passing wave, his eyes closing against the cold and the spin as everything in his being concentrated on holding his straining grip. He felt his body slam up against the scholar’s, then the wall, but neither of them let go. For a heartbeat his face found air. Then a second wall descended and they were surrounded by water.
Juba opened his eyes to see only the slightest haze of shapes through the rush of water in the flooding passage. The lamps had all been extinguished by the onslaught, but a dim light reflected down from somewhere beyond the exploded door. It was, Juba thought, a way out.
But there was no way to swim against such a current. And it was not the way to the Ark.
He looked toward his grip, saw that the stone door was already partially ajar. Water was streaming into the crack that he had opened. Willful determination shook him into action. He pulled himself against the current, kicking to pivot his legs against the stone near his hands. His lungs burned, and his mind wailed at the horror of drowning. He fought the emotion down, only to have it replaced by the terrible doubt that he wouldn’t be able to open the door further. He would be too weak, or it would be frozen in place, or …
He pulled. His surroundings grew dimmer, becoming a narrowing circle of light.
He pulled.
In his tunneling vision Juba saw that Didymus had swung himself around, too, to join him. The Greek planted his feet beside Juba’s. Juba thought that the stone beneath his grip moved, and he didn’t know if it was from the scholar’s help or if the rush of the water was actually pushing the crack open.
Together they pulled, straining against oblivion.
The door came free, the current catching it and pulling it wide even as the water slammed them, one after the other, into the void behind it.
Once more he spun and rolled as they rode through churning waves. Juba felt himself pop free of the water into the air and he inhaled instinctively, but just as he did so his ribs crashed against an edge of stone and the air in his lungs was coughed out again. His body bounced upward, vision fading to black, before he at last bobbed out for good, gasping for air.
Juba kicked with what little energy he had left, keeping atop the rising surface. When it ceased pushing him upward, his feet found purchase on the stone of a stair and he scrambled up out of the water in an exhausted push. Didymus came up out of the water beside him, somehow alive. Juba helped pull him up onto the stairs, where the scholar collapsed facedown, coughing.
Juba’s ears rung, his vision sparkled with flashes of light, and his lungs felt like they were torn and raw, but he’d made it. He was alive. And the Ark was near. His vengeance was near.
Need pushed him on. He crawled upward, step by agonized step, light growing around him, until he reached the end of the stair and heaved himself over the top onto the floor of a large chamber. He lay there for a few seconds, panting and spitting what he hoped was water, before he managed the strength to force himself to his knees. He raised his head, water pressing his hair flat against his forehead, and centered his swimming sight on the object of his dreams.
It was there. More beautiful than he would ever have imagined: shining like a new thing, all burnished gold and glory. Twin wooden poles had already been mounted to its sides, preparing it for transport. His heart soared, and for a moment he felt like singing.
Then he saw the four men standing around him. They wore dark hooded cloaks, pulled back from their shoulders to give freedom to their arms as they held notched arrows to their tightened bows, deadly points taking slow and careful aim at the intruder.
“Wait,” he croaked, but then the strings were loosed and four arrows buried themselves in his body, finding openings around his armor.
Juba slumped forward, arrows snapping and metal ringing as he struck the stone floor, and silent darkness overtook him.
* * *
No.
The thought was so clear, so present in Juba’s floating mind that it startled him into a single, strong, undeniable realization. He wasn’t dead.
He should be. Juba knew that. He’d very nearly drowned. He’d been shot through with four iron-pointed shafts—any one of which would have killed a man.
But he was alive. Somehow, someway, he was alive. How?
The answer came to him as if from another voice. The breastplate, it said. Alexander’s breastplate.