The Triumphant, page 21
And I understood why men were powerless in her presence.
I shook my head and excused myself, leaving the boys on deck to hover around the queen like bees around a blossom, and went below to see my sister. Sorcha had not been up on deck very often since we began the journey, and I was growing increasingly worried about her. I understood, in that light, why Charon was reluctant to let her know about his own difficulties—he wanted her to focus on healing herself. Neferet had been attending to her, giving her potions to ease the searing headaches that made even the dimmest light unbearable. She’d also begun to administer poultices to Sorcha’s head wound when she’d noticed a degree of swelling around the stiches she’d sewn there immediately after we’d left Cosa.
She was there with my sister when I climbed down into the cool darkness belowdecks, holding a bowl that Sorcha weakly vomited the latest potion dose into before collapsing back onto the makeshift bed we’d arranged for her. Antonia was there too, waiting at the bottom of the ladder, and she stopped me, holding out an arm. Once we were beyond reach of our enemies, she’d switched back to wearing the plain leather sheath on her truncated limb. I looked down at it and thought to myself, Neferet healed Antonia. She will do the same for my sister. It would just take time. And a good long stretch spent on dry land.
“Maybe best to just let her rest, Fallon,” Antonia said quietly. “Nef’s been trying to make her comfortable, but she’s very restless—”
“Fallon!” Sorcha called out, her voice reedy and thin. “Is that you? Are you there?”
“Here, Sorcha. I’m right here . . .”
I went and sat on the edge of her cot. She looked at me, squinting and twisting her head so she could see me clearly with her good eye. She looked gaunt in the light of the tallow lamp that burned on a nearby crate, and the bandage wrapped around her head was stained with blood and tar-sticky unguents.
“Look at you. Your hair’s a mess,” she said, reaching up to smooth down the strands that the sea wind had been playing with all afternoon. “Where’s Clota? Have her brush it out and give you a proper plait before supper.”
I blinked at her, confused, and then looked at Neferet. Her small face was lined with concern, and she shook her head at me.
“You’ve been off in the vale again all day and look like a wild pony . . .” Sorcha kept fretfully stroking my hair. “And light the lamps, will you? It’s so dark in here . . .”
I took Sorcha’s hand and squeezed it between my own until she relaxed, sinking back into the cloak that was bundled behind her head like a pillow with a ragged sigh. After a few moments, she seemed to drift off into a doze. I placed her hand gently on her chest and stood, beckoning Neferet away from where she lay.
“Clota is my father’s bondswoman,” I said. “She took care of us after our mother died.”
Neferet nodded. “Sorcha’s confused. She has been for a while now.”
“Is it the draughts you’re giving her?”
“I don’t think so. She barely keeps enough of them down,” Neferet said. “I’m no expert, but I think she’s aggravated her old injury from the chariot accident long ago. There may be a pressure point—like a kind of bruise—on the inside of her head, but . . .” She shrugged, a look of frustration on her face. “I don’t even think Heron was skilled at remedying such a thing. There are doctors in Aegypt, though, who might be. Heron told me about them. They call them trepanners, and they are surgeons of the brain. They have tools to drill holes in the cranium—that’s the skull—and . . .”
She stopped when she looked up and saw my expression. I felt as though I might empty the contents of my stomach too, if she didn’t stop talking.
“Um.” She shrugged. “I just meant . . . perhaps they can help.”
“I’m sure they can,” I murmured, swallowing thickly.
Then I mustered an encouraging smile and climbed the ladder topside. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure. But I was sure that hovering over Neferet in the hold of the ship while she did her very best to make my sister well again wasn’t going to help.
* * *
—
The days continued to pass in a kind of waking dream. Mornings broke, blue and gold, evenings shaded to russet and purple, and the white eye of the sun glared balefully down on us from a mostly cloudless sky as we traveled ever southward across the sea. Sometimes we could see land, sometimes only waves. Boredom came and went, mitigated by practice drills and deck chores and storytelling. Usually in the form of a circle of Cleopatra’s admirers listening as she regaled them with more tales of her land and people. One afternoon, when I was done filing the burrs from my blades after a bout with Cai, I wandered over to hear what the queen was saying, leaning on the ship rail as she spoke again about her lady pharaoh ancestress.
“Did I ever tell you girls how Hatshepsut led her armies into battle against the Kushite hordes,” the queen said, “riding at the head of her troops in her golden war chariot, drawn by snow-white horses, fighting brave as any man?”
“Did she still have to wear the golden”—Devana waved her hand vaguely in the direction of her nether regions—“you know . . .”
Cleopatra laughed. “No, I shouldn’t think so,” she said. “She was pharaoh by then, and that probably would have gotten in the way. But her troops accepted her as their general and revered her as their commander.”
“Because she was good, or because they didn’t have a choice?” I asked.
I hadn’t meant to be that blunt, but the rest of the girls grew instantly silent and exchanged a few laden glances. Cleopatra turned to me, her dark eyes glittering. For a moment, I thought she was angry. But then she held out a hand and beckoned me to come and stand beside her. She took my hands and held them up between us, her smooth thumbs pressing into the calluses on my palms, built up over countless hours of practice with my swords.
“Both,” she said, her grip on my hands like iron. “Because she made herself one thing, she became the other in their eyes. Many a weak king has fallen in battle in my land—and not always with a wound on the front of his divine body, if you take my meaning. Destiny is not something that is given. It’s something you prove yourself worthy of taking. Hatshepsut would still have been Hatshepsut if she hadn’t done what she’d done. She just wouldn’t have been pharaoh. You would still be Fallon even if you’d never proven yourself Victrix. That wasn’t something mighty Caesar simply bestowed upon you. It was something you earned from his hand.” She looked around at the gathered girls. “That goes for all of you.”
I felt the tension in my shoulders release as she clapped my hands together and let them go. The girls all began to chatter among themselves, and I joined in as it led to several rounds of regaling ourselves with the deeds we’d performed both in and out of the arena that—Cleopatra was damned well right—we’d earned the right to boast of. Even if just to each other.
“And then when Damya sat on that Tarquin retiarius,” Nephele was saying, snorting with laughter, “in the middle of the arena and refused to let her up until she’d agreed to trade helmets!”
“It’s a nice helmet,” Damya said. “I still have it. Very comfortable.”
“Poor thing’d still be there if she hadn’t said yes!”
Damya shrugged. “She was pretty comfortable too.”
The deck was rolling with laughter when I looked out over the sea to the east and saw the jagged shapes of mountains rising up in the distance.
“What place is that?” I asked.
“Home . . .”
I turned to see Kore and Thalassa beside me, leaning out over the ship’s rail. Both of them were staring intently at the white sand beaches skirting rugged hills climbing upward to mountains in the distance.
“Is that Crete?” I said to Kore, who’d been the one to speak.
She nodded. “The Island of the Sacred Bull.”
“Would you ever want to go back there?” I asked. “To live?”
“Oh . . .” Thalassa shook her head vigorously. “No. No, no . . . Kore didn’t mean ‘home’ in a good way.”
Kore snorted at her fellow Cretan’s reaction and glanced at me sideways. “Remember the story?” she said. “Daedalus and Icarus built wings to escape that place.”
“I’d build wings to keep us from ever having to go back, if I had to,” Thalassa said with a shudder. “I would not step foot into that arena again.”
“What do you mean?”
“You think the Roman arena is bad?” Kore scoffed. “You never leave the ring of Knossos, and you never win your way out. You’re just another sacrifice to the Bull God waiting to happen. Day after day, you go and face the horns. Until you die. And they all die, eventually. We were lucky enough to have a troupe master who was also a vile, roaring drunk.”
“That’s lucky?” I said.
“He owed the local wine seller so much money that he had to sell us off before the bull’s horns claimed us.” She grinned. “But because of that—because we had the audacity to leave the ring of blood alive—we were considered a disgrace and shunned by our countrymen.”
“I’m sorry.” I shook my head. “I had no idea.”
“Pff.” Thalassa waved a hand dismissively in the direction of the island brooding on the horizon. “There are other fields of battle where we can earn our glory. And have at least a chance of keeping our lives while we do.”
“Tell me again why you two thought it was a good idea for us to practice flying over angry bulls, when it all sounds so delightfully lethal?” Elka called up from where she sat cross-legged on the deck with the other girls.
Kore grinned down at her. “At least we didn’t sharpen Tempest’s horns like they do in Knossos.”
“And you were really quite good at it,” Thalassa said. “Nice height. Good form—”
Elka frowned fiercely. “There’s no flying in the oath.”
“Maybe there should be,” Ajani said. “We’ve done almost everything else.”
“Burned, bound, beaten . . .” Damya counted off on her blunt fingertips.
“Don’t forget shot with an arrow,” Ceto pointed at the bandage Damya sported around her upper arm.
Damya shrugged. “Haven’t been killed by the sword. Yet.”
“Give it time,” Gratia said cheerfully, punching her good shoulder.
“Lots of time,” Lysa, the youngest of us, said. “I hope.”
I hoped so too.
XVIII
IT WAS IN the deep black watches of middle night when our ship finally approached the Great Harbor of the city of Alexandria. Almost everyone on board, except for the sailors on watch, was asleep. But slumber eluded me that night, and so it was I who first saw the fire on the horizon, blazing like the eye of some distant, fiery giant in the south. Beautiful and terrifying . . .
“The lighthouse of Alexandria,” Cai’s voice whispered in my ear.
Apparently I wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep that night.
“I’ve seen it once before,” he continued, wrapping his arms around me, “when I was a very small boy and my father brought me here.”
“A lighthouse?” I asked, leaning into the warmth of him. “What is that?”
“It’s a tower—a great stone tower reaching up into the sky, almost as tall as a hundred men standing on each other’s shoulders, at the mouth of the harbor, and it shines with a great blazing fire at night to warn approaching ships of the shallows and rocks.”
“What god built such a thing?” I asked, my voice soft with awe. Even in Rome I’d never seen anything as massive as what he’d just described.
“No god,” Cai said. “Men. The Aegyptians are master builders, the architects of many wondrous things. Now that you’re here, you’ll be able to visit them. The pyramids. The mighty Sphinx . . . Djeser-Djeseru, the temple the queen spoke of.”
As Cai spoke, I felt a cold knot of something like dread tighten in my stomach. But I didn’t quite know why. It all sounded very exciting. The chance to see such marvels as I never—not in my wildest imaginings—even dreamed of when I was a girl. A girl growing up in a village made of stone and thatch, peat smoke and spring water and mist, surrounded by the majesty of nothing more than soaring forests and dappled glades, the songs of wolves and the call of the ravens . . .
And now I was in Aegypt.
Were there even ravens here, in the desert? I wondered, suddenly panicking. What if there weren’t? How would the Morrigan find me to watch over me? The Sekhemet pendant Cleopatra had gifted me lay heavy and cold on my breast. A goddess to be honored and feared and worshipped, but not my goddess . . . Suddenly, in the darkness lit only by the distant gleam of godfire conjured by men, the weight of the last handful of weeks rose up like a rogue wave on the Mare Nostrum and crashed over me. I felt my shoulder heave with a shuddering breath and the wetness of tears on my cheeks. Cai wrapped his arms tighter around me and held me until I could manage to speak without sobbing.
I turned around to face him, and he smiled gently down on me, his eyes, reflecting the lighthouse fire’s glow, full of concern. “What is it, Fallon?” he asked in a whisper.
“I’ve never felt so far from home,” I said, my voice small in the night.
“You’ve never been so far from home.” He brushed at the tear tracks on my cheeks with his thumbs. “I think it’s probably normal to feel that way.”
“Except I don’t even know where home is anymore. I don’t know this place we’re going to, but I don’t think I will find it there.”
I kept thinking how Kore and Thalassa had first answered “home” when I’d asked them what the island of Crete was called. But then they’d vehemently denied ever wanting to go back there. All the girls of the Ludus Achillea were wanderers now, our only tribe each other, so it shouldn’t have bothered me where I was . . . but it did. The thought of waking in the morning and looking out on the shores of a place so fundamentally alien terrified me.
It was as if I’d already passed over into the Otherworld only to find myself somewhere other than the Blessed Isles.
* * *
—
The city of Alexandria was like a fever dream. Drenched in the kind of heat that sears your lungs and slides over your skin like a knife blade, awash in colors so bright the murals and statues seemed to pulse with the vibrancy of their hues. It was a place of wonder. Of mystery and magic. A portal to another realm I’d never even imagined existed. When the sun rose that morning and we sailed into the Great Harbor of Alexandria, the lighthouse was something that my mind had an even harder time comprehending than it had in the darkness. I couldn’t tear my eyes from it. I had to crane and arch my back, looking up, as we sailed beneath its shadow. It was colossal. Constructed of three tapering tiers of limestone, pale and gleaming in the sun and pointing skyward like an accusing finger that would pierce the vault of the heavens themselves. The lighthouse stood on an island called Pharos, connected to the mainland by a long narrow causeway that formed the western arm of the Great Harbor. The structure, built to house a fiery beacon, was topped with a statue of the great god Zeus, clutching a fistful of thunderbolts and gazing down at the ships that came and went far below.
“I didn’t think it possible for men to build such things,” Elka said, her jaw hanging open as she shaded her eyes to gaze up at it.
“Alexandria is full of such marvels,” Cleopatra informed us with a smile that spoke of pure joy at her homecoming. “Once we are settled in my house, I’ll take you over to the mainland and show you girls such sights,” she said, “that you will think yourselves in the land of the gods.”
Even from far out in the harbor, I could see the distant golden gleam of desert sands. Shimmering azure waves kissed the shore where clusters of date palms waved their green-spiked fans in the breeze from off the sea, and the buildings and temples and gardens sparkled like a jeweled mosaic. I wanted to see it all. But first, before setting foot in the city of gods, we were to experience the home of a goddess. For that is what Cleopatra truly was, here in her own realm. She almost shone like gold herself in the sunlight that burned my skin but only seemed to caress hers.
Darius was only allowed to pilot his ship a certain distance from the island of Antirhodos, where the queen kept her primary residence. And so we weighed anchor some ways out and waited to be ferried over from our galley, along with what scant few possessions we’d managed to bring along. A fleet of reed skiffs transported us to the crescent-shaped island with its gleaming palace rising up from the middle of the harbor like a mirage.
The skiffs were piloted by muscular men with heads completely shaved except for a braided sidelock over one ear, wearing curved swords on their hips, belted on over the briefest of loincloths. More than one of the girls went wide-eyed at the sight of them, but I thought Gratia’s eyes might actually fall out of her head when they appeared. Fickle thing, I thought to myself, grinning, and wondered if she’d grown weary of leering at Acheron’s muscles and scars. To be fair, the boatmen were uniformly handsome—almost as if they’d been handpicked to match, like a set of expensive glassware—each one sun-browned and oiled, dark-eyed and smiling enigmatically at us, a strange bedraggled gaggle of the queen’s guests. We waited until every last one of us had stepped from the skiffs onto the pristine docks, unsure of what to do next or where to go. Then the queen of Aegypt spun on the heel of her golden sandal and threw her arms wide.
“Ladies of the Ludus Achillea, worthy lords, my friends and generous saviors,” Cleopatra said with a wide smile as an army of house slaves suddenly appeared, hurrying toward us with Sennefer at their head. “Welcome to my house.”
That’s what she called it. “House.” I was the daughter of a king. I had walked the halls of Julius Caesar’s estate and the marble corridors of residences belonging to some of Rome’s richest families. And yet, I suddenly began to seriously question my understanding of the word “house.” The docks were on the eastern end of the island, and a grand causeway of sixty towering red granite columns led from them to the palace itself. We ascended the shallow steps through the cool shadows of a breezeway and out into a sprawling courtyard resplendent with palm trees and fish ponds and fountains. It felt like a dream.
