The Gate of Fire (41 page)

"Husband?" A faint whisper from the vastness of the bedclothes caught his attention.

"Helena?" Galen turned, surprised. He had not received a letter from the Empress in weeks, the last coming from her villa at Catania. No one had said anything about her being in the city. Yet here she was, turned on her side, staring at him with sleepy dark brown eyes. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you... I fell asleep, though."

Galen slid under the heavy covers, feeling the glorious sensation of a freshly made bed with clean sheets at the end of a taxing day. Unexpectedly, Helena moved to press herself against him, curling around his arm and side. Her sleek dark hair tickled his nose. Nonplussed, for their last parting had been particularly bitter, he slid his arm around her and held her close. She sighed, holding him tight, and the intimacy of their embrace tickled at his heart. He had a sudden, dreadful, premonition. "Helena, are you well?" The Empress had never been a healthy woman, suffering from the cough in her youth, and prone to colds and summer flu. Galen's mind, still wound up from the long, busy day, spun in a thousand directions, finding nothing but disaster in any path it followed. "Are you sick again?"

"No, husband." There was an odd tone in her voice. With another woman, one less given to the furious single-minded pursuit of her interests, he might have thought she was laughing at him. But Helena had never mocked him. "Did you miss me while you were in the East?"

Galen made a rueful face, though she could not see it in the darkness. "Yes, I did. I regretted the words exchanged at our last parting."

She snuggled closer, running a hand across his chest. Galen caught it and brought it to his lips.

"Did you get my letters?" She was still almost asleep.

"Yes... but I thought you might take me to task again, so I did not read them. I wanted to see you myself, to apologize."

"Do you mean," she said, rousing herself from near sleep, "that you take back calling me the 'failed broodmare of a dynasty'?"

Galen flinched, feeling the echo of terrible anger in her voice. "I do," he said, kissing the crown of her head.

"Good," she said, putting her head back down on his chest. "Because it's not true anymore. I am a successful broodmare."

A bright light seemed to fill the room, blinding Galen for a moment as his normally quick mind processed the incongruous comment. It did not seem to match up with any previous conversation.

"What?" Somehow it was all that he could manage.

"I became pregnant the last time that we lay together," Helena said, raising her head again and enunciating carefully. "I bore you a son, a healthy son, three weeks ago."

"You did?"

"I did. He is here now, in the palace, in the care of
domina
Anna from your house at Cumae."

"I have a son?" Galen was puzzled; why did he keep repeating himself?

"Huh. As brilliant as ever. Go back to sleep."

Galen lay in the darkness, wondering if there could be a more perfect day in all the history of the world. Eventually, without noticing it, he fell asleep.

"There!" Zoë gasped in exhaustion as she hauled herself up over the last pitch of rock. Negotiating the glassy lip of the waterfall had been a tricky piece of business. Two great sandstone boulders towered over her, jutting from the side of the dry canyon like the pillars of a temple. Under them was a little shade, and she collapsed into it, ignoring the pain of long scratches on her arms and legs, and the parched feeling in her mouth. Sitting, she untangled the cord of her broad-brimmed straw hat from her neck. The canyon fell away below her, lit by the unceasing sun and shimmering with heat. Acres of tumbled stone and cracked tumulus lay below her perch, bare and dry. The canyon bottom itself wound down out of the barren hills that crouched above the city, a narrow thing carved by intermittent rains. Thornbush and gnarled little trees clogged the stream bottom, making passage up it almost impossible. But she had come, following the faint trail of many men over sand and rock.

It had led her up here, to these sentinels on the mountainside. A hundred feet below she had found a lost buckle, still relatively new, and it had pointed her into this draw that plunged down the side of the mountain. On the gray-green trees that clung to the rocks she had found the marks of cord and the knives of men. Something heavy had been dragged upward, carried in a sling of ropes. It had come here.

There was a scrabbling sound on the rocks below her, and she leaned out, seeing that the old man had finally made his way up to the base of this little cliff.

"Wait," she called down, beginning to uncoil a rope from around her slim waist. "I'll make an anchor."

"Good!" floated back the reply. The old man sat down on a stone at the base of the waterfall, wiping his brow with an ancient and foully stained cloth. His desert robes had suffered, too, in the climb up out of the canyon bottom. He had preferred to wear the full
kaffiyeh
and robes and camel-boots that were the garb of the desert tribes. He and Zoë had argued, in the early morning shadows, under the ruin of the Damascus gate. She had chosen to wear a light cotton kilt and tunic, her legion boots, and her gear slung on leather belts around her waist and over her shoulder. He felt it was unseemly to go into the hills in such a state. She had overruled him.

Now he panted in the heat, below, while she felt fried like a griddle cake in a pan, above.

"What do you see?" the old man shouted.

"The two stones," she called back, "and a hidden place between them."

She thumbed the waxed plug out of one of her waterskins and took a long drink from it. The water had been cold when she had filled them from the cistern under the city, but now it was lukewarm and smelled faintly of sheep. Odenathus had urged her to take one of the copper Legion canteens with her, but it was heavier than this with all that weight of metal. Her cousin had barely marked her going—he and his mother were locked in one of their endless arguments about how to rebuild the city.

Zoë did not care. The city was dead to her. They could clear the debris from the cisterns and open the streets again, even restore the Temple of the Four Gods, or the plinth of Bel, but it would not bring back the bright, glorious city of her youth. That was dead. This dark man, this Lord of the Ten Serpents, had smashed it down in the wake of Rome's betrayal.

The young woman snarled unconsciously, her narrow, elegant face transformed by pure unadulterated hatred.
Rome will pay,
she vowed in her heart,
Pay for each murder they committed. Pay for each child's skull that lines the city streets. Then I will find this dark man, and he, too, will pay
...

Weeks of unceasing labor had not even recovered all of the bodies from the ruin of the city. Even burying them in a series of mass graves would be fruitless. The sand would cover the city soon enough, and bury everything.

Zoë stood, brushing dust and grit from her bare legs. She bent down and picked up the waterskin, tying it back to her leather harness. There was something barely visible in the deep shadow under the two monoliths; some edge of worked stone. It bore investigation.

"All together, now, heave!" Odenathus, stripped to the waist, his muscular frame glistening with sweat, put his shoulder into the pulley rope. Around him, a dozen men did the same, pulling with all their might. Others crowded around the sides of the obelisk, hands on guide ropes. Once it had stood in the square that backed onto the theater and the edge of the spring. Now it had fallen, its base cracked open by the Persians with chisels and wooden splitting stakes, and lay across the old stairway that led down into the cisterns. "Heave!"

The ropes pulled tight, and Odenathus and his men dug in, pulling with all their might. Slowly the obelisk began to turn, and the men beside it were quick to slide rollers hewn from the few unburned logs found in the city underneath the massive sandstone cylinder. The obelisk groaned and threatened to roll back, but others had jammed stakes in behind it.

"Heave!"

The cylinder turned over, slow and ponderous, but it caught on the rollers and suddenly jumped ahead. Men scattered in all directions, and Odenathus felt the rope over his shoulder go slack. He turned, eyes wide. The pillar was rolling toward him, a massive, suddenly mobile block of stone weighing a dozen tons. Scattered bricks and broken statuary shattered to pale dust under it. Odenathus leapt aside, his blood afire with shock, and threw himself into a side street. The cylinder bounced past and slammed into the side of a half-burned storefront. The facing of the building collapsed with a loud
boom
and showered the street with dust and fragments of travertine facing and ground brick.

Odenathus rolled up, coughing in the thick haze of rock dust, and looked around. "Anyone hurt? Hello?"

The others called back, their voices harsh with grit. Everyone seemed to have survived.

"Well," a querulous voice came from behind him, "you seem to have cleared the stairwell."

Odenathus made a half smile-half grimace and stood up, brushing debris from his pantaloons. He had added a fine new scrape and a thin cut along his arm to the pale scars that already ornamented his chest. "That we did,
mater
. How go things in the kitchens?"

"Poorly," his mother said, taking him by the arm. She led him a little bit away, where the workers marveling at the destruction caused by the runaway obelisk could not hear her. Her old face, tired and framed by white curls, was solemn. He looked away from her blind eyes, unable to bear the sight.

"We're fast running out of food, my son. There just isn't enough left in the stores we've excavated to feed everyone for more than a few weeks. The gardens outside the city were all stripped bare by the Persians, and no caravans will come soon. Every merchant from Edessa to Aelana knows that the city has been destroyed."

Odenathus frowned, considering the options. They did not seem good. He wanted, in his heart, to start anew here—to raise up a whole new city from the ashes of the old—but so many things stood against them. The matter of water was almost resolved. During the siege Persian engineers had cut the aqueducts that ran into the city from the hills in the west, but those catchments had been added to support a city of fifty thousand people. Now there were perhaps six hundred in the city. A few more arrived each week, travelers who had been away during the siege, or expatriates who had forced themselves to return one last time to their homes. In the beginning, he knew, the city had risen from less—no more than a wandering band of desert tribesmen had laid the first stone—but they had flocks of sheep and goats and camels and were used to living on very little.

He looked around; seeing the scarred faces of the men at his command, the thin, pinched look on the few children who were watching the business of the day from the shoulders of a nearby colossus, now fallen into the street with every other statue or idol in the city. These people were born and bred to live in a modern Roman city, with running water and a market and specialized crafts that allowed one man to purchase bread from another. All of those things were gone. If they were to remain, they would have to become nomads again, if only to gather the food they needed to live.

"Do we have any money?"

Ara laughed, putting a wizened hand to her mouth. "Oh, my son, we have plenty of good red gold. The Persians were in haste when they left, and more than one hoard of coin was left unmolested. Our own fortune, that won by your father with his caravans and ships and kegs of spices, is untouched. If there was anyone to buy from, we could buy aplenty. But no one comes here anymore—all that is dead and gone now."

"We could," he said in his stubborn way, "send a party to Damascus to buy food, livestock, tools. All the things we need here. It will be very difficult, but we can remain. The city will rise again, bit by bit."

Ara took her son's face in her hands, her fingers light, feeling the noble nose and the high cheekbones. She felt the close-cropped shape of his hair and the firm muscle along his jaw.

"In this darkness," she said, her voice sad, "you sound so much like your father. If you will it, all these people of the city will remain, but it will be very hard for them. It will be harder for the children; so many of them cannot sleep even now, thinking that the dark one will return. This place is haunted, my son, but perhaps you can make it live again."

Odenathus took his mother's hands and clasped them to his chest. "
Mater,
the city is our life, our home, the reason we are here. If we go away—if we took the gold and jewels that are hidden and passed on to some other town, some other city, we would be strangers. Outsiders, never feeling at ease. If we are to survive as a people, if our tribe will sustain, we must remain here."

"Perhaps," Ara said, freeing her hands from her son's strong grip. "But what thinks the Queen of this?"

Zoë ran her hand over a smooth surface; granite hewn from the mountains of Syria and carried sixty or seventy leagues to this hidden canyon, polished smooth and graven with long lines of the old script of the city. A door stood in the hidden space under the twin boulders, sheltered by their vast red sandstone bulk. Statues emerged from the rock face, flanking the door, statues of the first kings of the city. Their empty eyes stared out at the desert, watching the wasteland. Zoë was a tiny figure between them, crouching at the door of stone. Her fingers traced the worn lines of script, racking her brain in an attempt to decipher the words.

Crows circled high above, cawing listlessly in the hot, still air.

Zoë stood; at the bottom of the stone door the thirty-fifth line was freshly carved, and not in the old tongue. Instead, in the common Latin, it said ZENOBIA V SEPTIMA, QUEEN OF PALMYRA. Zoë's face blanched, becoming almost white. Until this moment, seeing her aunt's grave marker, she had not truly believed that the fiery, dark-haired woman of her memory was dead. But even here, in the hot air, feeling the ruin of her city at her back, Zoë did not cry. Indeed, no tear escaped her eyes, though they looked upon an abyss of pain. She staggered, and fell against the door. The stone, cool to the touch, pressed against her cheek, and her own voice cried out in her mind:
While the Queen stands, so stands the city
.