The Triumphant (The Valiant #3)(75)
Intef, my guide, led me to a temple anteroom and turned me over to a handful of priestesses. One of them pressed a cup into my hand and bid me drink. Then they took me to another room, instructed me to bathe, and once I was done, they brushed out my hair so that it hung loose down my back and gave me a linen garment to wear. It was simple and fell just to my mid-thigh, almost like a gladiatrix tunic, but it fastened with a single shoulder clasp carved of amber and was open on the side.
Back in the anteroom, I buckled my sword belt back on over the tunic to keep it closed, but Intef stepped forward and stopped me with a gentle, apologetic smile, gesturing to my weapons. I hesitated for a moment and then drew the twin swords from their sheaths, handing them over. He took them reverently and placed them in a cubbyhole with the clothes I’d worn there. Wishing me an auspicious night, he bowed himself out. I still wasn’t entirely certain what I was supposed to accomplish.
And no one seemed inclined to tell me, either.
They just led me back out to the goddess chamber, where a sleeping pallet made of woven reeds had been laid out on the floor at the feet of the Sekhemet statue. On either side, incense burned in braziers suspended from tall standing metal poles—a subtle, beguiling fragrance that made my head begin to swim a little.
“We will lock the doors,” the chief priestess, a regal older woman with long, expressive hands, informed me in heavily accented Latin. “No one will disturb you. Tonight is to be shared between you and the goddess. And whomever she sees fit to send to you.”
“Whomever she sends me?” I frowned, not understanding. “But if the doors—”
She smiled. “In the morning all will be clear.”
The priestesses drifted out of the temple, and I heard the low thrum of bars sliding across the doors. The clank of a heavy key turning. They had not only locked the world out, they’d locked me in. I sighed and sat down cross-legged on the reed mat in front of the granite statue of the goddess. She was seated, human hands resting on her lap, lioness eyes staring serenely over my head into the unknown. I tried to clear my mind and ignore the rumbling in my stomach that made me wish there was something in it other than the honeyed mead they’d given me to drink when I’d first arrived . . .
I was asleep before I even realized that I’d closed my eyes and lain down.
At least, I thought I was asleep. At first.
But then light, crimson and flickering, bloomed in the darkness, filtering through my closed eyelids. I sat up and turned to see a figure swathed and hooded in a voluminous white robe standing in front of Sekhemet’s statue, stoking the embers in the brazier before the altar. A priest of the temple, I thought. Until he turned and sat on the steps of the statue with a weary sigh and pushed the cowl back from his face. In the light from the glowing brazier, I recognized the profile.
Gaius Julius Caesar.
A long way from home.
“Oh,” he said in answer to my unvoiced thought, “so much farther away than you can imagine.”
It wasn’t the first time I’d had a conversation with someone who wasn’t there. Only this time, I knew I really was talking to a dead man. I’d seen him killed with my own eyes. Not that it made things any less awkward.
“Did you know Arviragus still lives?” I asked, without even a proper greeting. Then cursed myself for my rudeness. Caesar didn’t seem to notice.
“Ha.” He looked up at the stars overhead—which were brighter than I’d ever seen them—and chuckled. “Is that why the old rogue wasn’t there to greet me? I confess, I wondered. So many of the others were . . . Pompeii Magnus, Crassus, Cato . . . My beloved daughter, Julia . . .” His gaze drifted down from the sky to my face, and I saw stars reflected in his eyes. “This is very far from your green home too, my Victrix.”
“Yes, well.” I shrugged. “Someone had to get Cleopatra out of Rome after . . . well. After.”
“Indeed.”
A silence drifted down between us, and I wished I had some wine to offer him. Something. I realized in that moment that I actually missed my old dictator. My conqueror. The man who’d made me a shooting star in the arena of the Circus Maximus.
“Did you ever wonder, Fallon, why I crossed the sea to step my foot upon your shores?” he asked.
“I thought it was because invading far-off lands played well for the plebs back in Rome.” As much as I missed him, it seemed I was still not wholly forgiving of him.
He raised an amused eyebrow at me. “So cynical.” He tutted. “And after such a short time too.”
I raised an eyebrow back at him.
“All right.” He shrugged and adjusted the folds of his pristine, purple-striped toga. Not a dagger slash to be seen in it anywhere. Not a spot of blood. “You’re not wrong. Do you know why else?”
“Gold? Lumber? Slaves?”
“Pearls.”
I blinked at him. Pearls? It was true that the Island of the Mighty was rich with them, harvested from the rivers in the north and traded between the tribes. So rich in fact that, unlike the Romans and Aegyptians, who considered them a symbol of high status, we sometimes decorated our saddles and armor and children’s dolls with them.
“I found the richest pearl of all there . . .” Caesar continued. “Your sister.”
I thought about Sorcha’s pearl-studded breastplate, which Caesar had enshrined in his temple of Venus. She’d been wearing it when she’d ridden out from Durovernum to meet the legions on the field of battle. The night she didn’t come home. Spoils of war.