The Pillars of Hercules (30 page)

“What on Earth is that?” asked Matthias.

“It’s not on Earth,” she said. “That’s Polaris. The North Star.” She lowered the instrument: “And
this
is an astrolabe.”

“What’s that in Greek?” asked Lugorix.

“That
is
Greek,” she replied. “It means
taker-of-stars
.” She busied herself making adjustments to the astrolabe. Since Damitra’s death, she’d assumed co-piloting duties with Barsine, who—unsurprisingly—was still in something approaching a state of shock. Lugorix was the only one whom the Persian would confide in about her. She’d told him that Damitra had raised her from a baby—that she’d been a servant of her father Artabazus, who had attached her to his court with the specific purpose of raising Barsine in the ways of the prophet Zoroaster. But Artabazus had got a lot more than he bargained for, since Damitra’s knowledge extended into some fairly arcane areas. She hinted that had something to do with what she’d seen at the side of Alexander. Now she and Eurydice were spending increasing amounts of time in conversation. The strange part was that the two women made no secret of their dislike for each other—they had very different styles and attitudes, so maybe that wasn’t a surprise. Eurydice regarded Barsine as a stuck-up aristocrat; Barsine thought of Eurydice as a crude-talking guttersnipe. But when it came to science and magick, they apparently had a lot to talk about. And they talked out of earshot of the men whenever possible, but Lugorix kept hearing the same words over and over…
maps
….
ancients
….
secrets
….

Secrets.

Eurydice held up the astrolabe for them to admire.

“It’s a device that my father invented and I perfected,” she said.

“You’re very modest,” said Lugorix.

“I’m very smart,” she replied. “And I’d be stupid to deny it.”

“That’s my girl,” said Matthias as he put his arm around her. She yanked that arm off her with a force that nearly broke it—proceeded to flip Matthias onto the deck where he lay there, a dazed expression on his face.

“Why did you do that?” he said.

“I’m not in the mood.”

“You were ten minutes ago.”

“What kind of move was that?” asked Lugorix. She glared at him; for a moment he thought she was going to be rash enough to try the same thing to him—but then she seemed to realize that he wasn’t talking about bedroom acrobatics. Her voice took on a
glad-you’re-impressed
tone—he remembered how she’d laid into the Athenians earlier with nothing more than her hands. “My father said that ladies shouldn’t carry weapons, so he had a Spartan teach me hand-to-hand combat.”

“Must have been an interesting childhood,” said Matthias, grimacing as he pulled himself to his feet.

“Growing up at the court of Macedonia was a little
too
interesting for my taste.”

“See much of Alexander?” asked Lugorix.

“See him? He wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“He made advances on you?”

“No, I don’t think he likes girls much. But he idolized my father, so he was constantly bugging me to figure out my father’s ‘secrets.’ He always thought my father was holding stuff back from him.”

“Well, wasn’t he?” asked Matthias.

“Fuck I hope so.” She frowned. “What’s that on the horizon?”

They followed the direction of her gaze, saw what she’d just noticed. Faint flashes sparkling along the horizon. Which could only be—

“Lightning,” said Lugorix.

“I’ve never seen lightning like that.”

It
was
a little peculiar, Lugorix had to admit. Purple flared, illuminated huge clouds strung along the horizon—turned to green and then to yellow before fading to dark. It was too far away to hear any thunder.

“Must be a big storm,” said Matthias.

“At least we’re heading south of it,” said Lugorix. “Far away.”

“Very
far away,” said Eurydice. She seemed to be lost in thought. “If we can’t hear the thunder, that’s being reflected over the horizon. Must be some kind of atmospherics. Hard to tell how far.”

“What’s north of here?” said Matthias.

“Not much. Just ocean, all the way to Gaul.”

Matthias mulled that over. “Didn’t Barsine say Alexander had captured Massilia?”

“I don’t know if
captured
was the precise word,” said Eurydice. Her face was grave. “It was a massacre. Ordered by Alexander himself.” She stared off at those flickering lights. “My father… he thought he could shape the boy’s character. Guide his actions. But the prince fell prey to the dreams of his own glory. He has a way of captivating all who listen—himself most of all. And now he’s king in defiance of his father.”

“Barsine said the same,” said Lugorix. “But how is it that a kingdom can have two kings?”

“It can’t,” said Eurydice. “One of them must make way for the other, or else there’ll be two kingdoms.” She paused. “Which may yet happen, of course. If Alexander’s campaigns in the west are successful, Macedonia will stretch from the Pillars of Hercules all the way to the plateaus of Iran. And perhaps no one man could rule so vast a domain.”

“But a god could.”

Eurydice gave Lugorix a strange look. “That’s precisely his problem. He thinks he possesses superhuman abilities, and the world has yet to show him otherwise.” As she spoke, she took the astrolabe out again, began taking more measurements of the stars around Polaris. It seemed as much a nervous gesture as anything. But Lugorix was still fascinated by it.

“So what are they anyway?” said Lugorix.

“What are what?”

“Stars.”

“Oh,” said Eurydice. “Most likely other suns.”

“Just like ours?”

“Maybe smaller. Definitely further away, but like the Sun, revolving around the center.”

“That center…you mean us?”

“You have to start from first principles,” said Eurydice. “Trace the movements of those stars, and you’ll see that the stars wheel through the heavens around us.
They
move and
we
do not. Meaning the position of the stars is so predictable we can steer ships by them. So we use the celestial globe overhead to navigate our way across the globe on which we sail.”

“Globe?” Another term Lugorix had never heard of.

“The sphere of the world.”

“Damitra told me the world is flat.”

Laughter: “She’s wrong.” Then, correcting herself even as the laughter stopped:
“Was
wrong.”

“What does Barsine think?”

“She thinks it’s flat too. But my father said it’s round.”

“Why?”

“He developed several proofs. The first of those was elephants.”

“Elephants,” said Lugorix, wondering if he was being made fun of again.

“If you travel to the west, to Africa, you find elephants. If you travel to the east, to India, you find elephants too. But there aren’t any elephants in between. So these creatures must come from the same land, on the other side of the world.”

Lugorix thought that one over.

“But he didn’t stop there,” said Eurydice. “Look at the shadow of the Earth on the Moon during an eclipse. It’s circular. Naturally, his detractors said that that didn’t mean shit, that the Earth could still be a flat disc. They persist in the error of their ways, though at least it shut up the disciples of Anaximander, who maintained that Earth was a rectangle.” Her voice took on a scornful tone. “His ideas were among the most absurd ever proposed. Do you know, he thought the stars are just pinpricks in the sheet of night, with a great fire beyond them! At any rate, the final proof of the Earth’s spherical nature will have to be left to me.” She gazed at the sky overhead. “My father left a lot of unfinished business.”

“Fathers often do,” said Lugorix. When she didn’t reply: “What does Barsine say to all this?”

“She said if the the Earth was round, then ships sailing away from us would eventually disappear over the horizon.”

“They
do
disappear,” said a confused Lugorix.

“She says that’s just because they fade away because of distance—that if the Earth were round, they’d be fading quicker.” A pause, then: “The ultimate proof will be showing how the stars change positions in the sky depending on where one is on the Earth. But there isn’t enough data on that. Travellers lie, instruments are unreliable—at least until now. But I hope to make the proof during our journey. Given how much ground we’ll be covering.”

“Travelling to Carthage will show you that?”

“Um. Yes, exactly. Carthage.” But there was something weird about her tone—and Lugorix wasn’t reassured when she changed the subject. “Mathematics and astronomy can be very tricky things. Did you know that there is a number that
isn’t a number?”

Lugorix wasn’t in the mood to argue with such obvious absurdity. “No.”

“There is. It’s nothing. Which is its own number. We call it the
zero
.”

“Crazy,” said Lugorix.

“Numbers are!” she said with the enthuasiasm of one who had successfully ditched a line of conversation that she didn’t like. “Same with words. That’s why my father’s teacher’s teacher—Socrates—never wrote anything down. He thought his work was purer that way. There’s a reason the Egyptian god Thoth was not only the god of writing, he was the god of trickery.” She had yet to notice that Lugorix had stopped paying attention. “Perhaps it’s because there’s such power in words and equations.” She gestured at the stars: “Just because you’re far away from something doesn’t mean you can’t make it a basis for logical questions.”

Lugorix cleared his throat. “Like that of who killed your father?”

Afterwards, he wondered why he said that. Perhaps he was getting tired of this young woman who was so smart and yet so troubled. Or maybe it was because he was sick of her avoiding the one subject that mattered most to her. But for a moment he really
did
think that she was about to try to hit him. She raised her hand—but he just stood there, not even moving to defend himself. He could afford to be complacent: he stood a full two feet taller than Matthias, and his prowess at close-quarters combat was something that the Greek could only dream of. The truth was that he was perfectly prepared to let her strike him for what he’d just said. Perhaps recognizing this, she restrained herself.

“You shouldn’t have said that,” was all she said.

“You’re probably right.”

“Why are you trying to make me revisit this?”

“His death was a little too convenient.”

“Zeus almighty,” she said. “Do you think I’m blind?”

“Who do you think did it?”

Her lips quivered. Her face was white. “Someone who’s going to pay,” she muttered. 

Chapter Thirteen

C
leon woke with a start. He’d been dreaming of that woman again. Wondering how in the name of all the gods she’d slipped from his grasp. He was master of all Syracuse—he could have done whatever he wanted with that wayward daughter of a dead sorceror, and she’d slipped through his fingers. That fact galled at him more than a little. It would have been sweet to have her join him in this bed he lay in now, at the top of his personal tower in the Ortygia. Sweet—but stupid. There was no use dwelling in dreams. He opened his eyes.

And froze.

Someone was in the room with him. He couldn’t see them in the dark, but somehow he knew it all the same. Someone was standing there, right at the foot of his bed. Someone who was convinced he was helpless, who only needed another moment to kill him—or who was waiting for him to wake in order to gloat or make some pointless demand. Cleon didn’t care which; his response was the same regardless. The paranoid slept with knives under their pillows, but Cleon had something better. Very slowly he reached out along the edge of the bed and grasped the miniature crossbow-pistol that hung concealed there. He slid it toward him, raised it up to point at where he thought the intruder was.

Only then did he speak.

“I’m awake,” he said. For a long moment there was silence. But then—

“I realize that,” said a voice.

“Have you come to kill me?”

“I came to bring you a message.”

“You could have just sent it.”

“I’m not sure you would have listened.”

“I’m listening now.”

“Good,” said the figure. There was the sound of iron striking flint; a lantern flared into view. The man who held it had a sword in his other hand. He was of medium height, with a thick black beard, an aquiline nose, and a wolfish grin. He put the lantern on the floor and drew a second sword.

“Don’t you think one will be enough?” said Cleon.

“Is this the part where you try to assure me you’re unarmed?”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
He probably thinks I have a blade.
“Who are you?”

“I’m Ptolemy,” said the man. “Son of Philip.”

“You mean the
bastard
son of Philip,” said Cleon. Ptolemy looked surprised—Cleon laughed, enjoying the man’s discomfiture. “You Macedonians have your spies in Syracuse. We Athenians have ours in Pella.”

“Then they must have told you how unhappy Philip is with you.”

“Why should he be unhappy?”

“Because you took our gold.”

“In return for which I killed the old man.”

“But not his daughter.”

“She knew nothing.”

“You must think
I
know nothing if you expect me to believe that.”

Cleon forced his voice to sound casual. “She escaped.”

“How could you be so careless?”

“I was distracted by her tits,” said Cleon sarcastically.

“Precisely why I thought I might find them right here beside you.”

“One of my many mistakes.”

“Not killing her was the worst of them.” He paused. “You really didn’t even
fuck
her?”

“Only with my eyes.”

Ptolemy spat on the floor. “But why did you try to fuck
us?”

“I’ll admit I was hoping you were less informed.” His mind was racing furiously. “How many of my guards did you kill?”

“Just the ones outside your door. The rest I simply avoided. But let’s talk about the girl. She has at least half the knowledge of her father. She’s smart enough to figure out the rest.
So why the hell didn’t you kill her?”