The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(68)
“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.