The Pillars of Hercules (40 page)

But not if Hanno had a say in the matter. He’d taken shit from the Athenians for years, and he wasn’t about to exchange them for a new set of masters. He was ashamed to admit it, but he’d despaired that Carthage would ever be free; it seemed impossible that anything could ever loosen the grip of Athens. But now the impossible had occurred; now his city would be able to recapture her glory days and resume her place as chief power in the western Mediterranean. And maybe more... Hanno had been briefed at length by the Sufetes on the knowledge that had been uncovered from the secret recesses in the Library. The whole thing was insane, but it wasn’t his to question it. He was a soldier. That was why he was in charge of this mission—because he could be relied upon. Should it succeed, he’d be faced with the ultimate temptation. But really, it was no temptation. Betrayal of the city that had given him life wasn’t an option.

For Carthage itself, liberation was a little confusing.

It was hard to keep it all straight. The Athenians were gone but the Macedonians had arrived. Not that their army had been allowed inside the city. Well,
some
of their army had: various commanders and engineers were having discussions with the Sufetes who now ruled Carthage. And those Sufetes were largely the same men who had administered Carthage on behalf of Athens. Not
all
of them, of course: a few had been fed to the Baal for opposing the rebellion that threw out Athens. Or at least,
allegedly
opposing… for in the taverns and ale-houses there were those who whispered that those sacrifices were really just the result of power-plays amidst the Sufetes, with the losers served up to the ever-hungry Moloch. Or maybe it was just a matter of expediency, for how could the exact same group serve Carthage as had served Athens? Even if the gods didn’t need a scapegoat, surely the people did.

To be sure, there was ample reason to believe the gods were angry. Yes, they’d blessed the citizens of Carthage with liberation from the eastern overlords under whose yoke they’d choked for almost a century. But there were odd tales afoot. These ones were too dangerous to be told even in the bars; instead, there were whispers in back rooms and beds and alleys that thieves or demons (or maybe it was both) had taken advantage of the revolt of the Athenian prisoners to break into the treasure chambers beneath Carthage and steal a magickal jewel of terrible power. Some kind of amulet…others said that the demon-thieves had actually been caught infiltrating the libraries, but why would a library contain anything a demon would want? It made no sense.

Neither did the Macedonians. Hadn’t their kings said they intended to conquer all the known world? So why were the Sufetes even dealing with them? Had Carthage thrown out one batch of invaders only to have a second invasion hanging over her people’s heads? But the walls of the city were some of the strongest in the world, and the Macedonian army (most of it anyway) was outside the city, lacking all siege equipment and paying for all the goods it bought like allies rather than enemies. But that army had come across the desert for a reason, and what was that reason if it wasn’t going to attack Carthage?

Some said it was here to hitch a ride.

Those were the most disquieting rumors of all: that the fleet now prepping in the harbors of Carthage was going to take the Macedonians on board as passengers. Like any good rumor, it put a new twist on an expected development, for it was only logical that the fleet should be prepping to put to sea to defend Carthage against any Athenian counter-incursion. Only this fleet didn’t look like it was going to be doing much defending. Supplies were being loaded for a long voyage, and huge horse-transport barges were being prepped. The citizen-militia had been issued with arms for the first time in a long while, and mercenaries were being hired from the surrounding African territories. All of which felt a lot more like an invasion was about to be launched rather than thwarted. And the Macedonian general Perdiccas had been spotted at the dockyards more than once—indeed, some said that he’d actually been aboard one of the ships during the prison revolt. So if the newly liberated Carthaginian fleet really
was
going to transport the Macedonian army somewhere—well, there weren’t too many places it would be going. There were only so many targets.

And if you thought about it, there was really only one.

Farseeker held up to his eyes, Agathocles scanned the artificial peninsula jutting out from Italy—a protuberance that now reached a quarter of the distance across the Straits of Messina to where he stood amidst the hills of Sicily. Other members of the resistance stood around him; they had ridden out here before dawn and would ride back to Syracuse under cover of night. From the looks on their faces they’d come to the same conclusion he had: nothing was going to stop the Macedonians from crossing. The bridge they were building was the cheapest sort imaginable, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t effective. Near shore, pylons had been sunk into the seabed to support rope and a myriad wooden planks; further out, newly constructed boats had been lashed together to form a causeway over which an army could move. Agathocles could see the tents of that army spreading over every Italian hill in sight—tens of thousands of men and horses and elephants awaiting the moment when they could cross the sea and storm into Sicily.

Nor were there any prizes for guessing where they’d go there when they got there. Agathocles had spent his entire life trying to free his city from Athenian rule, but he was under no illusions about what would happen were Syracuse to fall into Macedonian hands. Athens was an empire that had passed its prime; it was weakened at the core, and it would one day fall. Macedonia was a rising power, and its rulers seemed to have an intensity about them that Athenian democracy had always lacked. If they got their hands on Syracuse, Agathocles had no doubt that he would die long before the city was freed. In fact, he would probably die very soon, as he had a feeling that the Macedonians would root out the resistance organizations in Syracuse with an alacrity that the Athenians had never brought to the task. Even in the wake of the death of Cleon, Athens had still proven unable to clean up the city. Of course, convenient as it was to blame him for the viceroy’s death, Agathocles was reasonably sure that they knew he wasn’t responsible for it. The rumor-mill said that Macedonian agents had broken into the Ortygia, killed Cleon, and made off with documents and maps vital to Syracuse’s defense. Which would make keeping that city out of Macedonian hands all the harder.

“We’re on the same side now,” said one of his men, jarring Agathocles from his reverie.

“What the hell do you mean?” he growled.

The man pointed at the bridge. “Us and the Athenians.”

“We’ve got the same enemy,” said Agathocles. “Don’t mean we’re on the same side.”

But he had to admit the man had a point. It would be best for all concerned if Alexander and his whole army drowned in the Mediterranean. Yet the truth of the matter was that Agathocles and his ragtag band could do nothing to stop that oncoming bridge from reaching their island. That was all up to the Athenians. Who so far had tried to no avail. Their ships had approached the bridge from both directions, only to be driven off by enormous stonethrowers that the Macedonians had built on the hills above the Straits. Two of the Athenian ships had been sunk by giant rocks before the rest pulled away out of range. They could still be seen there now, out toward the horizon, keeping carefully out of range. The harsh reality was that a land-based siege-engine could always be bigger—and thus reach further—than one based on a ship.

But soon the bridge would be out of range of the land-engines, and that was where things would get interesting. To be sure, the Athenian navy was understrength. Severely so, and Agathocles’s agents had given him the exact figures. Athens had lost a couple hundred ships in Egypt, and a couple hundred more trying to reinforce Carthage. And there had been another hundred ships at Massilia which no one had heard of since they’d sortied from the burning wreckage of that city. In other words, the navy had been getting its ass kicked, which was all the more disturbing since no one knew exactly what had happened to the ships in the western Mediterranean. There were stories that Poseidon himself had appeared and destroyed those boats, though Agathocles felt safe in dismissing such tales as the product of terrified men who had felt themselves to be invincible upon the water. But
something
was afoot. Something dire.

And that bridge to end all bridges was getting ever closer.

Eumenes stared up at the Pillars of Hercules as the ship sailed between them. As art, it was impressive; as engineering, it was downright scary. And Eumenes knew a thing or two about enginering: as Alexander’s chief of logistics, marshalling the resources for such projects was something he was quite familiar with. It seemed impossible that so much rock had been carved so high above the sea, on so precarious a series of precipices, using only iron tools. Then again, if some
other
set of tools had been used—well, that was the part that Eumenes really didn’t want to think about.

But now those Pillars were fading behind him as his ships surged out into the Ocean. For the first time in his life, he could see nothing to the west of him. Yet there was definitely
something
out there.

And he was going to be the one to get it for Alexander.

At first he’d been a little taken aback to be the one selected for this mission. Military operations in the Mediterranean were a long way from over, and he’d been in charge of organization and logistics for so long that his absence was going to be more than a little inconvenient for Alexander. But really, there was no other choice. What happened west of here was of paramount importance, yet Alexander couldn’t leave his army if he expected to get them across the Straits of Messina and lead them to victory. And as for Hephaestion, well, Alexander would never allow him to leave his side. Besides which—if one were brutally honest, which Eumenes was only within the privacy of his own skull—Alexander probably wouldn’t have trusted Hephaestion to carry out this operation anyway. It wasn’t that Hephaestion was incompetent—far from it. But as Alexander himself had acknowledged, his expertise lay in traditional modes of warfare, whether that meant facing Persian armies in pitched battle or rooting Afghan insurgents out of caves. Not in dealing with shit that wasn’t supposed to exist.

So that left Eumenes. He was in on all the secrets now, and his mind was flexible enough to engage with them. Though that didn’t mean he had to like it. He’d liked his world just fine before—he’d known where all the boundaries were, had known what made sense and what didn’t. Not anymore. The whole nature of the world was up for grabs. Because he’d passed beyond the boundaries of the known one.

In ships that were admirably suited for the task.

He had no idea where they had come from. Alexander had kept that one to himself. And Eumenes’ own inquiries had only turned up possibilities. Aristotle had built them… no, Aristotle had only designed it… nonsense, they’d been recovered wholesale—found at the source of the Nile. No, said someone else, wrong river: when Hephaestion’s agents had ventured into India, they’d explored the wreckage of a derelict civilization at the bottom of the Indus River, torn apart seals in dead languages, recovered the contraption in which Eumenes was now riding.

Kalyana wasn’t so sure about that one. The sorceror was from India, after all, and he’d never come across anything like these strange vessels. Then again, he was the first to admit that India was a big place, and contained a lot of “weird shit”—his exact words. Such directness was one more reason why he was accompanying Eumenes on this journey into the unknown. He was Eumenes’ official Weird Shit Consultant. From the looks of things, there was going to be a lot of it.

But ultimately, Eumenes was a pragmatist. He was less concerned as to his ships’ origin than their destination. He knew the twenty Macedonian commandos riding aboard each of them felt the same way—after all, those men believed their leader to be a god. The vessel in which they rode was evidence enough of that. Somewhere in front of them were the Carthaginian ships that had left their blockading position—Eumenes had thought he was going to have to either negotiate or fight his way through them, but they’d split for the west, hot on the trail of something important enough to make them all leave their position in front of the Pillars. That was a move that Eumenes understood. Pursuit was their way of staying in the game. They clearly intended that Carthage should be one of the players. The Persian witch—the one they were undoubtedly chasing—was another. Eumenes—on behalf of Alexander—was a third.

And Eumenes was willing to bet Philip would have something in the game too.

The ship several kilometers to the northeast was a design of Aristotle’s, though it was crewed by Byzantine sailors, all of them loyal to Macedonia. Ptolemy sat within, listened to the waters pound against the hull, took stock of the crew going about their tasks while he sat in his cabin and gazed at maps and contemplated possibilities. And prayed too, thanking Zeus for the chance to finally win everything he’d been denied all his life. He’d always known whose son he was, of course, just as he’d always known he had to keep that fact a secret, lest he burn for it. If it ever suited Philip to recognize him formally, then so be it—but Ptolemy had always figured his status would never be anything but an embarrassment to his father. So he learnt early on to hold his tongue.

But then the father had been greviously injured and—while he returned to Pella—his acknowledged son surpassed him in glory. The already strained relations between Philip and Alexander turned to shit. And Philip turned to Ptolemy and made him his spy in Alexander’s camp. The irony was that Ptolemy had long since reconciled himself to serving Alexander—after all, he’d grown up with the man, who even as a boy drew people to him with a natural magnetism. Dealing behind the back of someone he’d always idolized didn’t sit well with Ptolemy, and the nature of the promises which Philip was making only increased his discomfort. The war with Persia and then Athens placed many in awkward positions, but none more so than Ptolemy, who was caught between two rival rulers to whom he was deeply indebted—a conflict that finally culminated in Philip’s throne room.