The Triumphant, page 24
“I found the richest pearl of all there . . .” Caesar continued. “Your sister.”
I thought about Sorcha’s pearl-studded breastplate, which Caesar had enshrined in his temple of Venus. She’d been wearing it when she’d ridden out from Durovernum to meet the legions on the field of battle. The night she didn’t come home. Spoils of war.
He laughed when I mentioned it and said, “Yes, well. The real ones were lovely too.”
“You know you never actually conquered us,” I said, comfortable with making such a statement to the ghost of a man when I never would have dared with the man himself. “You know that . . .”
He shrugged noncommittally.
“But you could have returned,” I pressed. “Planted your golden eagles in the soil of Prydain and left them there.”
He nodded. “Aye. I could have.”
I looked at him through narrowed eyes, hearing in the tone of his voice something I would have never suspected of mighty Caesar. Reluctance. “You could have,” I said, “but you didn’t.”
He shook his head and rose to his feet, picking up the poker to stoke the brazier coals to brighter fire. “No, Fallon,” he said. “I didn’t. And I wouldn’t have, even if I’d lived to be an old man. I made the decision to leave that destiny for another. For one who comes after me.”
“Why?”
He held the poker out in front of him like a sword and grinned at me. “Because there need always be worlds left to conquer.”
“Even for you?”
“For me. For Rome.” He sat down on the step again, his gaze drifting past me, past the marble columns that ringed us round. His eyes searched the distance beyond the temple. “There must always be that which is beyond one’s grasp. Else what is there to strive for?”
This from a man who had put the stamp of his foot down on the soil of countries I hadn’t even known existed growing up. I shook my head and sighed. “I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand the Roman mind.”
He laughed. “That’s because you don’t need to. And it would poison your own mind if you did. You are a pure creature, Fallon. A pearl of great price. I envy you that. And I wonder sometimes . . .”
“Wonder what, my lord?”
“What you would have become had you stayed where you were, running wild through your forests and fields.”
“I would have become what I am still, Caesar,” I said. “What I have always been. A Cantii warrior.”
“Indeed . . .”
He looked at me with almost fatherly affection, and I felt a twist in my heart that he was dead and I’d been able to do absolutely nothing to alter that fact. And then I felt another, sharper twist that I should feel that way for him.
“A remarkable girl from a remarkable people,” he said. “It would not surprise me if one day your little island became an empire to be reckoned with all on its own.”
My little island? With my father, the king. Ruling—just like all the other kings back home—from the hearth of a stone hut, lord over herds of cows and squabbling chieftains. I shook my head. I had seen Rome now, and I had seen Aegypt, and I had seen the magnificent cities and the bustling towns in between. A Prydain empire? Great Caesar’s ghost was dreaming.
And so was I.
But dreamers wake. And I woke then too.
The brazier was cold. Dark.
Useless, I thought. The goddess hadn’t sent me a destiny or a direction. She’d sent me a vision of a dead man with delusions. I was no closer to knowing what to do or where to go than I had been before I’d come to this place. I pushed myself up to one elbow on the reed mat and stared up at the stone visage of the lion-headed goddess reproachfully. Not even the Morrigan was so cryptic in her messages—if a message it had even been.
I sighed in the darkness lit only by torches hanging on the lotus columns. Perhaps it was my own fault. Maybe I’d done something wrong. Or maybe the goddess only spoke to her own people. I rolled up onto my knees and looked down into the black mirror of the reflecting pool. I saw only the moon above and a bounty of stars framing my own face. For a moment.
And then I saw something else.
The glint of torchlight on a dagger blade raised high over my head . . .
And Acheron’s face, smiling triumphantly, over my shoulder.
XX
I GASPED AND lunged forward, diving into the temple’s reflecting pool as the blade descended. I felt the wind of the slash between my shoulder blades in the instant before the water closed over me. Beneath the surface, I kicked for all I was worth, knifing through the water toward the far end of the pool. Faster, I hoped, than Acheron could run.
But he wasn’t running.
I swam the full length of the pool and scrambled to hoist myself up out of the water. But when I turned around, I saw that Acheron was still at the other end of the temple, lounging in the lap of the Sekhemet statue, spinning the dagger he carried in his hand like a top. I ducked behind a lotus pillar and pressed myself against it, my tunic dripping wet and clinging to me. My hands went automatically to the scabbards at my sides . . . and found them empty.
“Where are you going to go, Victrix?” he called. “They’ve locked you in for the night, and no one knows you’re here. No one but me.”
The shadow in the palace garden, I remembered suddenly. After Cleopatra had summoned me and told me to seek out the goddess, I thought I’d seen something. Someone.
“You were in the queen’s garden last night.”
“I was,” he said. “I was going to kill her, you see. But I can always get around to that later. Because no one will suspect I was the one who killed you first. No one knows you’re here.” He laughed. “Not even your precious soldier boy.”
Acheron was an assassin, I thought. And I’d brought him right into Cleopatra’s house. I cursed myself for being a fool. And then I told myself I could stop being one any time now, as that might help me figure a way out of what was clearly a bad situation.
One that became instantly, infinitely worse in that moment.
I heard the scuff of a sandal and spun around in time to see the jackal god Anubis himself swinging a sword at my head. With a terrified yelp I dropped into a crouch as splinters of stone, chiseled from the pillar by the blow from his blade, cut my cheek. I lurched past my assailant and scurried into one of the smaller altar spaces, ducking behind a stone plinth and trying not to pant with fear. Acheron wasn’t alone. He had the Aegyptian god of the dead with him!
The adversary of the goddess Sekhemet herself . . .
But then, when I risked a glance around the corner of the plinth I hid behind, I saw it wasn’t a god at all. It was a man in a jackal mask. Like the corpse-hook-bearing attendants of the arenas in Rome.
But that made no sense. What was one of them doing here?
What if I was still dreaming?
That had to be it. Not a dream, but a nightmare.
But whether it was or wasn’t, I needed time to figure out my next move. Time and darkness. There was a lit torch in a sconce on a pillar just above me. I reached up and knocked it loose, throwing it into the middle of the reflecting pool and casting that corner of the temple, at least, into darkness. Acheron laughed as the smoke from the doused flames curled up toward the stars overhead.
“What are you going to do in the dark?” he called out. “They took your weapons. And you, stupid girl, you let them. Sekhemet is a goddess of bloodshed and battle. She would never have relinquished hers so readily. You shouldn’t have either.”
He had a point. I couldn’t imagine the Morrigan ever demanding unarmed worship—the very notion seemed counterintuitive for a battle goddess. Maybe it had been some kind of test—one I’d clearly failed—and now this was the consequence of that failure.
“Do you know what made me a good gladiator, Victrix?” Acheron’s voice floated through the dim air. “Do you?”
When I kept silent, he answered his own question.
“I like to watch men suffer,” he said, and laughed.
By the sound of his voice, I could tell he was still over near the statue. I didn’t know where Acheron’s accomplice was, but I took a chance and made a dash for another lotus pillar at my end of the pool and threw that torch into the pool as well. I heard a grunt of annoyance from somewhere off to my right. The jackal man was near . . .
“Like I watched your soft-hearted decurion suffer,” Acheron continued, “every time the letter-bearers came round to the Ludus Flaminius . . . with no scrolls addressed to poor Caius Varro.”
No scrolls? But I’d sent letters weekly. “One of the advantages of being the lanista’s trusted lackey. I got myself assigned to mail duty and amassed quite a little collection of love tokens meant for some of the other lads.”
“You bastard . . .” I hissed.
The anger that bloomed in my chest was almost enough to make me step out into the open to confront him. But that’s what his taunts were designed to do. I knew that. So I darted, instead, for the next pillar over and snuffed out another torch.
“I even thought about keeping those scrolls of yours tucked away instead of sending them back to you . . .” He laughed again, and it was an ugly sound. “Almost opened one up once or twice just to amuse myself—see what kind of sweet words I was keeping away from Varro’s pretty eyes—but it was actually better imagining how you felt every time one returned to your hands, the seal unbroken.”
“Why do you hate me so much, Acheron?” I asked, creeping around an altar covered in offerings—small stones carved in the shape of the scarab beetle, a sacred symbol to the Aegyptians. I whispered an apology to Sekhemet and scooped up a few of them in my hand. “Why did you? We’d never even met—”
“A man doesn’t suffer once he’s dead,” Acheron snapped, his voice turning hard and cold. “And you, Victrix, killed the one man in all this world I wanted to suffer the most. Didn’t you? Blood of my blood spilled by your hand.”
Ixion . . .
His brother.
I’d cut that evil bastard’s throat at the Ludus Achillea, and Acheron knew it. He’d known all along that Ixion was dead, and somehow he knew that I was the one who’d killed him. But how?
“Acheron,” I said, “I’m sorry—”
“No, you’re not!” he cut my apology short with a snarl. “And why should you be? I should know better than anyone—Ixion was a soulless monster. You think I got all these scars in the arena? No . . . he was a monster, and you cut his throat. And that was a far cleaner death than he deserved.”
I could tell by the sound of his voice that he was moving, stealthily, silently . . . unlike his jackal accomplice, he must have taken off his sandals. His casual, languid pose over by the statue had been a feint, but I listened keenly to his voice and knew he was on the move.
Hunting me . . .
“I don’t understand,” I called out, intent on keeping him talking. “Ixion tortured you growing up together and you’re angry he’s dead? He—”
“Taught me!”
I heard his hand slam against stone. He was over near one of the small altars. I froze, doused another torch, and then scurried, mouse quiet, in the opposite direction I’d been moving.
“He toughened me up,” Acheron continued. “I’m not angry, Victrix. I just really, really wanted to be the one to kill him. Now? I’ll just have to settle for killing you instead. But you know what? The beauty of it is . . . that will still serve my god, Dis, and my master, Pontius Aquila, just fine.”
There it was. That was how Acheron knew I’d killed his brother. Because when Pontius Aquila had found Ixion’s body, he’d just assumed—correctly—that it had been me who’d killed him. And Acheron was Aquila’s man. He had been from the beginning.
His reasons for hating me were legion.
“Fate’s a funny old thing,” he continued, his voice tracking to my right. “I almost thought that idiot Yoreth had you convinced to let him out of his cell so he could join your noble little band. But he was so stupid you probably would have guessed his allegiance before you reached the gate out of the city.”
Yoreth too? My own countryman . . .
“You’re both Sons of Dis?” I could hear the horror in my voice.
I also heard a whispery snicker ten—maybe fifteen—paces to my left. The jackal man, it seemed, was enjoying my distress. Enough to forget himself for an instant.
“Most of us in there were.” Acheron’s voice was closer. Softer. “The arena is a place of sacred death, Victrix. You . . . you girls don’t understand that—you never could—but we men of the arena? The true gladiators? We embrace it. Revel in it. Your soldier boy is lucky to have survived as long as he did. I’ll have to remedy that too.”
“But you stood with him in the arena. You—”
“Once I saw you in the stands at the theatrum games,” he continued, “I thought, well . . . honey catches flies and all that. How best to get close to Caesar’s Victrix? Get close to her son-of-a-whore lover. And then, of all the great good fortune, you yourself rescued me. Welcomed me into your little band. And when I found out you lot were sailing—with the great bitch queen herself, no less—to Aegypt? The very land where the Sons of Dis were born. Where there are temples dedicated to our great dark lord. I told you I had a destiny . . .”
He was moving again, off to my right, circling behind.
The jackal man was still to my left . . .
They were trying to box me in. I looked up to see that the moon had drifted far enough past the temple that her light no longer shone down through the open roof. The goddess’s face no longer reflected in the mirror pool . . .
“You know . . . no one ever expected those soft-handed senators to carry out the deed and kill Caesar,” he continued, clearly reveling in the opportunity to flaunt his own cleverness. “Truthfully, I never really thought the tyrant could fall. But he did. Praise Dis Pater . . .”
I took a chance and peered around the pillar I hid behind. Acheron was standing, facing the other direction. The last of the light glimmered on the blade in his fist—and on its reflection—and I saw it clearly. I felt all the blood in my body rush from my head to my feet. I felt as if I might faint, but I couldn’t tear my eyes from the red stone in the hilt of the weapon . . . and the rust-brown stains on the blade. It was the same knife Aquila had dipped in Caesar’s blood.
I wondered if his ghost was still near, watching . . .
But how? I wondered. How did Acheron come by that blade?
And then I remembered when we’d been trying to leave the city after Caesar’s murder . . . and Acheron had been the one to lead the Dis gladiators away from the gate. Once out of sight, they, in turn, could lead him to Aquila. Who’d given Acheron the dagger and his orders.
Orders to stay with us.
To ingratiate himself with our company. To wait for an opportunity.
And now I knew, too, how Hestia had really died.
A fire that blazed hot for vengeance kindled to life in my chest. I made a dash for the last lit torch and lobbed it into the pool, plunging the temple into absolute blackness.
“And I also knew,” Acheron continued, “that even with Caesar dead, Aquila was still never going to give up his quest for your soul, sweet gladiatrix. One way or another, he is going to have it. And now? I’ll be the one to deliver it to him . . . Hah!”
I heard him strike stone with steel in the place where I’d been standing only a moment earlier. Except that, in the darkness, I’d silently slipped back into the pool, careful not to make so much as a ripple on the water.
I heard him whispering, “Where is she, Intef?”
There was an answering murmur.
Intef. The priest who’d brought me to the temple from the palace. The one who’d taken my swords. That explained, at least, how Acheron had gotten in through the locked doors. And it gave me some idea of just how deep the corruption of the Sons of Dis ran here in Aegypt. At least as deep as in Rome.
I still clutched the scarab pebbles I’d taken from the altar, and I threw one into a far corner. It made a clattering sound, and I could hear them move off in that direction. When they couldn’t find me there, Acheron started talking again, taunting me in hopes I’d give away my position.
“Of course, your countryman Yoreth will get his reward too,” he called out. “Don’t worry about that, Victrix. He’s on his way back home now. Well, back to your home, that is. With Aquila and a whole regiment of Dis mercenaries. I imagine once the walls of your little village fall, he’ll probably make himself right at home in the cozy house that used to be yours . . .”
Home . . . No . . .
A wave of fear and fury washed over me at his words. I tried hard to ignore the sensation, concentrating instead on just the sound of his voice. I threw another scarab over near the private devotee shrines and heard the scrabble of Intef’s sandals—and then a muffled curse as the priest slammed his shin on one of the low altars.
“Do you hear me, Victrix?” Acheron continued, his tone growing angrier. “I’ll join them once I’m through with you here. I’ll put my feet up by your dear old papa’s great roaring fire. And I’ll toast to his severed head hanging on the doorpost. Isn’t that the way you barbarians like to celebrate a victory? That’s what Yoreth always said . . . I’ll drink your old man’s beer and laugh while the Collector and his loyal Sons gather up all your pretty warrior friends and neighbors and send them packing back to his ludus. Endless, peerless fodder for Pontius Aquila’s munera.”
The water of the reflecting pool was warm, but I suddenly felt ice cold.
