Jan

3

Four Shards of Heaven: Prologue

2008 | Filed Under Fiction |

Article Series - Four Shards of Heaven

This post part of a larger series of a novel in progress: Start Here.

PROLOGUE

“The Boy Who Would Inherit the World”

The Outskirts of Rome, 44 BC

From the dusk-shadowed darkness beneath the wall of Julius Caesar’s villa beyond the Tiber River, the assassin Valerius looked back at the eternal city. Like a living thing, Rome seemed to breathe and pulse before him: a coiled and sleeping beast set down by the hands of gods upon her seven chosen hills. As he watched, her ancient walls seemed to float above the long shadows of the valley and the jumbled chaos of over-spilled roofs and winding streets that huddled like cold children about the city’s feet. Hung in the air, they glowed red by the light of the setting sun.

To Valerius it appeared as if the very stones of Rome were weeping blood, and he saw in the image a portent of favor.

The dictator was dead. And the gods approved.

Caesar’s blood, he did not doubt, even now still stained the tiled floor of the east forum, a perfect mirror to the strong light of this fast fading sun. Pushing his way through the astonished throngs of onlookers after the deed, Valerius had seen the corpse himself before the slaves had carried it away on a litter to his niece’s villa in the old town: Caesar’s purple robes tattered from the dozens of wounds that the sixty-some conspirators delivered.

Valerius’ knife, which he absently turned over in his hands, had not been among those that drank of Caesar, and he thought it a pity. The senators who’d done the killing were emotional men, ineffective at murder. Even with so many cuts to his body Caesar had taken some minutes to die, and though Valerius felt no particular love for him the assassin found it shameful that a man should shake out his last breaths on a cold stone floor under the eyes of dishonorable men.

Shameful, but little for it: Valerius was under no employ this morning, and the man who hired him only hours ago would never have wished Caesar dead. “Uncle Julius,” Octavian still called the dictator, despite all the titles and glories that Caesar had won over his great-nephew’s nineteen years. In the streets some citizens were even saying that Caesar had adopted the young man, that Octavian might well be his heir. That was certainly what Octavian seemed to think.

The assassin spit into the vines gathered about the foot of the wall at his back. Valerius knew little of politics, and cared for them only insofar as they effected his own movements. Heir or not, adopted son or not, Octavian was his employer now. So Valerius cared only that his employer’s beloved uncle was dead, and that he had been hired to see that Caesarion, the son of Julius and Cleopatra, the only blood child of the now dead dictator, would follow his father to the grave.

As he stopped to think about it, it seemed to Valerius odd that Octavian should wish the child of Julius such harm. The assassin had never seen the boy, but it was said that, aside from his darker tone of skin and his more delicate Egyptian features, Caesarion had every part the striking resemblance to his father. But, then again, as heir of Egypt and the only surviving child of Julius Caesar himself, Caesarion did stand in line to inherit the world. And if Octavian thought himself rightful heir to at least part of that world . . . well, no price would be too high to see the boy dead.

Not that it really mattered. Octavian’s reasons were immaterial in the end — unlike the hundred weight of gold Valerius had been promised for the killing. That was material indeed.

Up the hard-packed dirt road from the bridge to Rome came the sound of hooves, a punishing gallop of men in fury. Valerius took a deep breath to clear his mind of reasons in order to focus on the simple facts of the task at hand: to get into the villa and end the child’s life. With practiced speed he pocketed his blade, fearful of any glint it might give off despite the deep shadows in which he stood.

The staff emblem rattling above the lead rider showed the markings of Caesar’s famed Sixth Legion, and even before they were close enough for the assassin to see the details of the faces of the riders themselves he knew that the man at their center was Mark Antony: broad shouldered and handsome in his signet robes, thick curls of red hair bouncing with every downbeat, exuding arrogance and assumptive power with every movement. Even the strong and impassioned way he drove his steed, heedless of consequence to the beast, seemed emblematic of the man: if the citizens of Rome knew but one thing about Antony it was that he was full of fire and vigor, his eyes never alight on anything but his goal. He’d been Julius Caesar’s finest general, perhaps his best friend, and for some reason — Valerius couldn’t fathom why — he had been spared by the conspiratorial senators.

The assassin slowly and methodically stretched some of his tense muscles, grateful for Antony’s appearance. He’d counted on an emissary coming to call on the distraught queen of Egypt, but none could be more ideal than the famed Roman general. Chaos tended to follow him like the wake of a passing ship, and his arrival would be sure to send the household into even greater confusion than that which it already labored under, making it far easier to slip through the household to find the queen and her child residing within.

Shouts from within the villa compound passed along news of Antony’s impending arrival, and Valerius listened to the sounds from the other side of the wall as attendants and servants hurried to the main courtyard and into the house itself, rushing to their preparatory tasks. Picturing their movements in his mind, the assassin waited little more than a minute before he quietly crept up the cragged and pitted face of the wall and dropped down the other side into the gardens behind the marble-columned house.

Crouching behind a line of shaped green hedging, surrounded by the frozen figures of marble-sculpted gods, Valerius allowed himself a satisfied smile. There was no one in sight. The men who ought to have been standing watch were absent, a contact in Octavian’s pay having temporarily pulled them away, and smoke was still rising up in tendrils from the recently snuffed torch that was meant to illumine the shadowed walkway leading to the rear entrance. Stepping out from his shelter, the assassin hurried there, knowing the guards would not be long in their inattention. The twin doors were open to the growing chill of the evening, and Valerius slipped inside, catlike, tucking himself behind a line of draperies while his eyes adjusted to the dim interior light.

As he stood in stillness, his breathing shallow and silent, he listened to the sounds of the villa: servants’ feet rushing between rooms, pots and dishes being moved about in the kitchens, the muted sobs of a woman crying, and, very close, the quiet breathing of someone waiting in a nearby doorway. A male someone, by the depth of the breathing. Octavian’s contact, he hoped.

When his eyes were adjusted Valerius lifted himself to the balls of his feet, floating lightly out from his hiding place. A long wide swath of torchlight cut across the darkened floor of the foyer, spilling out from the doorway where the man awaited, effectively blinding whoever it was to anything moving in the shadows. The assassin came around the periphery of the room until he stood beside the doorway, then he took a small rock from his pocket and tossed it lightly out into the open.

The man in the doorway started at the sound of the pebble clattering across the floor, took a few hesitant steps into the open. “Hello?” he whispered. His voice trembled in fear and anxiety. “Is someone –”

The dull back of the assassin’s blade against his throat froze the man’s quaking voice. Valerius stepped in behind him and pulled him into the darkness away from the doorway. “Yes,” the assassin breathed in his ear. “Someone is here.”

“I’m … I’m …”

“That’s not it,” Valerius said, pressing the blade harder for emphasis.

The man’s body shook in fright, and his throat spasmed before he finally controlled himself enough to remember the arranged codeword. “Tiber,” he croaked. “Tiber.”

Immediately Valerius released him, spun him around to get a good look at him. Octavian’s contact was a young man, one the assassin didn’t recognize. Mid-twenties, he guessed. He had the smooth skin of someone unaccustomed to manual labor and the outdoors, and the tone of his complexion was not Italian stock, though more olive than the deeper tan of Cleopatra and her Egyptian court. Greek. Or Cretan.

“I’m Didymus,” the man said. “I didn’t –”

“Where’s the boy?”

“The boy?”

“Little Caesar,” Valerius hissed.

A new fear crossed Didymus’ face. “Varro said you wanted Cleo –”

The assassin’s voice turned low and dangerous. “Octavian will pay you, yes?”

Didymus nodded, his expression numb.

“Pay you well?”

“Yes,” Didymus managed.

“Then don’t waste my time,” Valerius whispered, raising the knife to view for emphasis. “Where?”

Didymus swallowed carefully, his eyes dark. After a moment he nodded in the direction of the lighted, open doorway. “Through my room, left beyond two curtains. There are only two rooms in that wing. Caesarion’s is the first.”

“Guards?”

“One in the room. Mehmet. An Alexandrian.”

“And the Egyptian whore?” Octavian hadn’t ordered it, but Valerius was certain there’d be a substantial bonus if both mother and child died tonight. No one in Rome had approved of Caesar’s dalliance with the Egyptian queen.

The fear in Didymus’ face was replaced with something more focused and harsh. “Her room’s beside his. You’ll know it for the moaning.”

Valerius nodded, lowered his blade, and padded into the traitor’s room. The furnishings were simple enough, but the walls were lined with tables stacked tall with scrolls in various states of binding. A tutor, he surmised. Probably the boy’s. It would explain his hesitation.

The household was still busy at the front of the house. He could hear Antony already bellowing commands, sending the servants scurrying to tend to his horse and to bring him wine for his own dust-dried throat. Soon, the assassin imagined, Antony would dispatch one of his legionnaires to fetch Cleopatra.

The assassin doubled his speed as he made his way through the curtained rooms and hallways, keeping to the shadows as much as he could, closing in on the sound of the sobbing woman he now knew for certain to be the queen of Egypt. He encountered no one before he reached Caesarion’s door, where he paused to listen for sounds of movement within.

For the second time since he crossed the wall, Valerius smiled. If the blood-red light of the sunset and the ease of his passage were not surety enough of the gods favor on his task, the few noises inside the room would have passed all doubt from his mind. The boy was playing quietly, and from the sound of it Didymus was right about the single guard.

The assassin knocked lightly on the door, then right-palmed his knife. The door cracked, filled with an Egyptian face.

Valerius bowed slightly, kept his voice low and his posture submissive, like a servant’s. “The queen requests your presence, Mehmet. There is talk of moving the boy.” He stood to one side, so as to let the guard pass into the hallway. “I’m instructed to stand at the door in your absence.”

The guard looked back once more into the room, then stepped out into the hall, pulling the door shut behind him. He nodded at Valerius, then turned in the direction of Cleopatra’s room. As he did so, Valerius stepped forward at his back, knife moving in a rapid strike up and into the center of his throat, puncturing his voice box. Then, in a smooth and practiced motion, he pulled the blade back and up and out, severing the vital arteries on the right side of the guard’s neck even as his free hand gripped the man’s weapon arm and used it as a lever to turn his body and send the bright red spray against the wall out of sight of the boy’s doorway. He pinned the man there for a moment as he shook and gurgled, then he stabbed him once more, this time in the left center of his chest.

The guard sagged almost instantly, and Valerius let him down to the floor quietly, hastily checking his own body for blood. As he expected, only his knife hand had met with the stain, and this he was quick to wipe clean on the dead guard’s tunic. Pocketing the weapon, Valerius then stepped again to the door, knocked once out of courtesy, opened it, and stepped inside.

The room was modest but not small: perhaps fifteen feet square, with only a single door and a single wood-shuttered and curtained window above a well-cushioned bed. Caesarion, the boy who might inherit the world, the three-year-old child he had been sent to kill, was kneeling in the middle of the floor, surrounded by a small toy army: chariots, horses, and warriors both Roman and Egyptian. The assassin hadn’t been sure what to expect, but he was surprised nonetheless to find the little prince dressed in a simple belted Roman tunic and thong sandals, no different than any three-year-old one might find in the market. Even more surprising, though, was how much he really did resemble his father: he had dark hair cut round and flat against a strong brow, the prominent nose of the Julians, and, when he looked up, his dead father’s piercing deep blue eyes.

“You’re one of Antony’s men, aren’t you?” Caesarion asked, his voice quiet and even.

“That’s right,” Valerius said, smiling as he did to all children. “One of Antony’s men.” Behind his back the assassin silently pushed the bolt into position, locking the room.

The boy nodded almost imperceptively. “You’re going to take me to see father’s body,” he said.

Valerius took a step forward in the room, nodding solemnly. “I’m sorry for your loss, Caesarion. Your father was a good man.”

Little Caesar blinked, then looked down to the wooden figures gathered around him on the floor. “I’m playing Alexandria,” he said. “My father against my uncle.” His hands moved a Roman chariot forward, knocked over an Egyptian warrior. “You’re in the Sixth. You were there.”

Two steps closer. “I was. A great victory for your father, over unspeakable odds.”

The boy nodded more strongly this time. He picked up the fallen Egyptian warrior, stood it on its feet and then stared, his face blank, at the pieces before him.

Valerius took another step to stand behind Caesarion, his hand moving stealthily to his pocket to retrieve the warm knife. Slowly, deliberately, he bent at the knees, crouching behind the child and gauging his neck. “I am sorry,” he said, and he started to reach forward.

An alarmed shout rang out in the hallway, the hard voice of a man. It froze the assassin’s hand as his head turned instinctively toward the locked door and his mind mapped out possible escape routes beyond the window.

Caesarion, his own head turning at the shout, saw the assassin’s weapon and pushed himself away, clattering toys. He backed into the wall, brandished a wooden playknife in his shaky hands.

Valerius, still crouched with his own knife in hand, grinned when he looked back to the boy. “You’re fast, little one.”

“You’re here to kill me.”

The assassin stood. “I am.”

Caesarion shook his head, swallowed hard.

There were answering shouts from within the villa. A sudden crash jolted the locked door, but it held. Valerius found it ironic that Julius’ servants had kept the house in such good working order that he’d be able to murder Caesar’s son in peace. By the time they breached the door he’d be out the window and on the run, the child dead. Alas that he’d not get the chance at the queen, too.

“Please,” Caesarion stammered. “You don’t have to.”

“Yes, I do.” He settled his knees a little for balance, eyes taking stock of the child’s fake knife. The boy couldn’t do him any real harm with it, but Valerius didn’t intend to take home even a scratch from this assignment.

There was a crash of sound from Cleopatra’s room, like the toppling of a great table, and the queen’s sudden screaming split the night. Not seconds later there was another crash, and Cleopatra’s voice grew even louder.

Caesarion’s wooden weapon trembled more violently in response to his mother’s terrified wails, and Valerius took a single step backward, giving himself room for a blade-dodging feint as he charged. He took a breath. Tensed.

Before Valerius could engage, heavy, running footfalls sounded beyond the shuttered window, and he had chance enough only to turn in the direction of the sounds before the wood slats separating the room from the growing night exploded inward as a massive legionnaire came through, tumbling over the bed and into the assassin.

The two men flailed to the floor together, grunting as splintered wood fell like rain in the little room. Valerius hit the ground first, but he was able to kick his lower body up in continuation of the legionnaire’s momentum, sending the bigger man hurtling against the barred door. The assassin then rolled quickly, recovering his balance even as the dazed legionnaire scrambled to get his feet under him and began pawing for the gladius at his side.

Valerius came forward at him, knife ready in his grip, but before he could strike he screamed and buckled to one knee as Caesarion jammed his little wooden blade into the soft flesh slashed at the back of his right leg. The assassin swung his arm back at the boy instinctively, catching him above the eye with the butt of his knife and sending him sprawling.

Gritting his teeth to the pain, Valerius turned back around in time to see the big legionnaire draw his arm back and forward, pushing a gladius into the assassin’s belly, just below his ribcage. Gasping against the cold steel in his gut, the assassin still tried to swing his knife, but the legionnaire held fast to his sword with strong hands, and his thick arms flexed as he twisted it in his grip, torquing the blade into bone. Valerius groaned, strained, then dropped his weapon and sank against the killing stroke, watching, helpless and gasping in furtive breaths, as the legionnaire stood, wincing from wounds of his own, and pushed forward until the assassin collapsed to his back, looking up at the ceiling.

A few short breaths later, the legionnaire came fully into Valerius’ view, painfully lifting a foot to plant it on his chest so he could pull the gladius free with a twist of those burly arms. The assassin felt a strangely comforting warmth wash over his chest. Then the legionnaire was gone, limping over his twitching body and out of view.

“Caesarion,” Valerius heard him say somewhere over his head, “are you hurt?”

The child was crying, and he heard the flex of leather and a grunt.

“There, there,” the legionnaire was saying. “All’s well now, my boy. All’s well. You’re a very brave lad.”

Valerius was having a hard time focusing now, but he saw the legionnaire come back into view, making his way toward the door, holding the sobbing boy in one arm. Someone was pounding on the door — the assassin absently wondered how long that had been going on — and the legionnaire shifted the boy to his hip so he could unbolt it.

The door swung open to a crowded hall. There was a second legionnaire, smaller than the first, who must have been doing the pounding. Mark Antony was beside him, holding back a weeping, panic-stricken and barely-clothed Cleopatra. And among the faces gathered behind them he saw Didymus, his Greek complexion gone pale with terror.

“Caesarion!” Cleopatra shouted, and she rushed forward to take the boy from the bigger legionnaire’s arms. The smaller legionnaire came forward, too, offering a shoulder to his injured comrade after he handed over the boy.

Antony pushed past them all to kneel before Valerius’ sight, filling his fading world with a flushed face and wine breath. “Who hired you?” he demanded. His thick fingers must have rooted in the assassin’s tunic because the room shifted and Antony’s face grew even closer. “Who let you in?”

Valerius coughed and felt an odd satisfaction to see flecks of red appear on Antony’s face. He tried to smile but wasn’t sure if the muscles of his face obeyed his mind’s command.

“Bah!” Antony said, releasing his grip. The assassin’s world unfocused, shook, then came back into clarity. He saw that Antony was standing now, surveying the room. “How’d you get to the window so quickly, Pullo?”

“I broke through the room next door, sir.” The battered legionnaire flicked his eyes to Cleopatra in her shift — by the gods, Valerius suddenly thought, she truly was beautiful — and he bowed slightly. “Apologies, my lady.”

Cleopatra looked up from stroking her boy’s head, seemed to have gathered control of herself. “No apologies, legionnaire,” she replied. “I owe you thanks.”

Valerius thought it strange how their voices were getting farther and farther away though they remained standing as they were before. He noticed, too, that the queen’s eyes lingered on the big man with the light of recognition. “This is the second time I find myself in your debt, Titus Pullo,” she said, smiling. Her eyes then moved to take in the smaller legionnaire on whose shoulder the big man now leaned. “And you, Lucius Vorenus.”

Through a growing fog of shadow the assassin watched as Antony looked to the two men for explanation. Pullo seemed to blush, and Vorenus in turn gave a shy smile before he spoke: “Pullo and I brought the lady back to Alexandria before the siege, sir. Before she met Caesar. It was nothing.”

“I see,” Antony said gruffly. The room was almost gone now, and the general’s words were only a receding, distant whisper. “My lady, you’re both in danger. I’ve advised your return to Egypt before, but Caesar always denied it. I beg you now to go. Make no mistake: Caesar’s death will return us to civil war, and you cannot be protected here. Go back. Pullo and Vorenus . . .”

Darkness overwhelmed the assassin’s sight, but the names lingered even after the voices receded at last into a still silence: Pullo and Vorenus.

Pullo and Vorenus.

Pullo and . . .

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