Return (Matt Turner Series Book 3) (32 page)

Just inside, Patra extracted a torch from a rack, lighting it with the wall sconce, and continued into the catacomb. Three or more figures up ahead unloaded carts with promising tempo.

Lucas called behind her, “Two more carts from the Library just entered the main corridor, Steward.”

“Thank you again,” she replied without turning. “We all appreciate your support.”

As Patra neared the Musaeum aides, one of the young men startled, shielding his eyes from the torches to glimpse the intruder. He appeared to recognize her, swatting the leg of another boy behind him—or, moving out of shadow, not a boy but a young man she knew from one of her classes—as he shoved three scrolls into an over-packed recess in the wall.

“It’s Steward Supatra,” Patra reassured. “And don’t trouble about delicacy. Tertius here has the right idea. Haste precedes care. You’re almost through with this load?”

“Yes, Steward,” said the first boy.

The third boy shoved the last bundle of scrolls into an already full alcove, papyrus crunching in protest. Stepping into Patra’s torchlight, he said in a heavy Egyptian accent, “That why I heared this scrolls good only for help fire?”

The first boy, ostensibly the youngest of the three, chided his colleague. “Harwa!”

“No, my friend,” Patra quietened. The drone of grating wheels entered the catacomb, signaling the arrival of more carts. “It’s warranted. You’ve all undertaken a perilous responsibility, and deserve to know if you risk your lives with cause.”

“I not know all this words,” Harwa said with eyes downcast.

Tertius attempted translation, but Patra relieved him, repeating herself in the boy’s tongue, and adding, “We would not waste your time or our own on worthless scrolls. Every tomb filled is akin to a century of study. I thank you.” She kissed Harwa’s head, then returned to Greek, addressing his companions and the new arrivals behind her. “I thank you all. Thank you. Your efforts equal those of the scribes who created these works. To save them now is equivalent to having written them then. Thank you.”

As Lucas led her back to the stairs, describing how his workers would later seal and mask the shaft entrance, Patra’s thoughts remained with those boys. She’d believed her assurances as they’d left her tongue, but should one or more of the aides be killed, would they have truly died defending the collection?

None of them could read a single word on the papyri they’d dared to transport across the besieged city, and hopefully they’d never know their true contents: Hebrew bills of sale, debt lists in Demotic, Aramaic legal documents, personal letters, marriage and divorce records, shipping manifests, apprenticeship contracts for flute players and harpists—scrolls only good for helping start a fire.

* * *

Wary of watchful eyes on their porters, Kaleb had devised the manner with which the scroll collection would be evacuated. The moment the Emperor’s fleet dropped anchor beyond the harbor, Musaeum members commenced gathering thousands of decoy scrolls, mixing the assorted legal and commerce documents with genuine Library scrolls, albeit commonplace pieces with abundant examples elsewhere.

Prior to losing their beasts of burden, a team would leave the Musaeum through one of various known entries, hurriedly guiding their donkey and laden cart straight to the Serapeum’s catacombs. Sans the aid of work animals, carts were pushed by hand, but by then the bulk of decoy scrolls had already made it beneath the Temple.

Other members, clad in slave’s garb, occasionally steered refuse carts at arbitrary intervals through separate gates. All day and night, still more individuals trickled from the complex, burdened with some form of sack, crate, litter, or anything in which one could conceal two hundred or more scrolls. They, too, ventured out in nondescript attire, and ambled toward locations inconsequent, before zigzagging back around toward the Serapeum, though these couriers—those bearing genuine papyri of value—would never approach the Temple’s grand entrance.

Near Alexandria’s towering south wall lay a Coptic temple closed for renovation, the large storeroom at its rear gradually filling with precious scrolls. Across the street, Nelpus—one of the Musaeum’s wealthiest members and a Library scribe—owned a large villa. Here, too, inside a grand bathhouse, scroll mounds swelled wider and taller with each hour.

Behind Nelpus’s bathhouse stood a high, vine-draped wall with a linen-toned access gate that a passer-by must seek out to discern anything but a continuous, plaster-coated wall. Exiting the villa through this gateway, onto the main north-south thoroughfare, one found themselves faced with but a single, all-consuming view: The Serapeum.

Peering left from Nelpus’s gate, the road ended at the city’s south wall. The wall was a short jaunt from either the Coptic temple or Nelpus’s villa, and it was there Kaleb had enlisted a number of his fellow Kushmen to receive bundles of salvaged scrolls inside a dry canal duct, mere steps from the Serapeum’s secluded rear embankment.

The Kushmen took the bundles and loaded them onto donkeys outside the wall, and then guided the herd to the nearby Lake Mareotis shore. From there, waiting Musaeum members gathered the bundles into a train of small, tethered riverboats, and then rowed eight or more hours to a granary storehouse at the mouth of the Nile. Every hour or two, they’d pass one of the other crews on their way back to the lake shore for another load.

Of the roughly 700,000 scrolls in the Library’s collection, a little more than half had either made it to the granaries, or were already on their way. Included in these were the 43,000 works the stewards considered “imperative” to save, 130,000 deemed “critical,” and, thus far, around half of the 415,000 they’d branded “important.” The remaining 100,000 were augmented by more worthless old legal documents, and spread throughout the Library’s stacks as ill-conceived decoys.

It wouldn’t take an extraordinary intellect to seek out and expose this ruse, proceeding on to unearth the scrolls’ true hideout: the library at the Serapeum, now brimming with its recent additions (also enlarged with city records in little-known languages).

But wait. The stewards are far craftier than that. They’d be the sorts to create an even deeper ruse! Let us seek out a
third
layer to this ploy!

And from beneath the Serapeum, crammed into catacombs behind painstakingly camouflaged, freshly sealed walls, they’d produce the final cache. In the courtyard above, soldiers would hurl the precious papyri atop a growing pile. Perhaps Emperor Antonius himself would set the mound ablaze.

And no one need bother digging for a still-deeper fourth layer.

While informants from every city quarter confirmed hearing of the Library’s clandestine relocation to the Serapeum, none seemed to know of any other covert exploits.

* * *

On her way out the Serapeum, Patra bid Lucas farewell, declined the offer of a chariot to shuttle her home, and began descending the substantial stairway to the street. From her lofty vantage point, the entirety of the city lay before her, from the vast western necropolis, to Pharos Island’s broad wing, cradling the West Harbor, its slender talon and the Lighthouse shielding the Great Harbor; the Musaeum perched atop its lush, flowery knoll; the Caesarium and Amphitheatre; all the way past the Jewish Quarter to the Hippodrome beyond the wall … were it visible.

The noonday sun shone bright overhead. Clusters of evacuating citizens trudged southward and eastward—those optimistic few who believed the impending invasion threatened not ordinary citizens, but the insolent elite across the city. The majority of Alexandrians still maintained this outlook, but something had changed the minds of those now littering the streets so many days after the initial exodus. The fires perhaps, or one of the isolated skirmishes meandering too close to home, or vandals, or looters.

Lingering a few steps beneath the stairway’s summit, Patra inspected the shrouded scene beyond the Jewish Quarter. A dust storm obscured everything outside the east wall.

But nowhere else?

Still scrutinizing the dust cloud, Patra slowly, became aware of a commotion in the streets below. It began as a vague recognition of increased activity—a persistent child’s intensifying tug—but her concentration held.

In an instant, her ears perceived a rising howl, and she finally noticed the chaotic activity in her foreground. Glancing about, she beheld a hastening rush of evacuees. Like a crested and crashed ocean wave, wailing crowds filled in the streets, compressing and advancing in a uniform arc. It was as though herds of rampaging bulls had materialized in the middle of the city, driving the previously dawdling masses outward in every southerly direction.

Patra composed herself and checked the Coptic district roads to her left. Finding them relatively clear and calm, she scuttled down the mountain of steps.

Egyptians eyed her as she dashed past the market, her palla flailing behind her. All appeared oblivious or indifferent to the neighboring goings-on.

Moments later, as Patra turned right onto the busy Canopic Road, clanks and clinks rang out from a troubling direction. A new wave of distraught Alexandrians fled toward her, and she yielded the road, opting instead for the shaded stoa. The atypically few merchants along the columns and walls craned their necks to assess the commotion, gauging whether it warranted abandoning their wares.

Patra crossed the turbulent intersection from the stoa to the adjacent shrine’s portico. The streets were near empty now. Creeping between columns, dread bubbled in her throat. Would she soon behold slaughtered city guards littering the Musaeum perimeter?

Nearing the end of the portico, she heard the first shriek: a sudden, guttural yowl, aborted as fast as it’d begun. Shouted orders, rattling armor, pleading voices, more screams, distant swords hacking away at stubborn locks.

Horrified, Patra slid back into the shadows. What could she do? Nothing. There was nothing she could do.

An onrushing scream behind her—obstructed, but growing less so. She slid around to the outside of the column until just a sliver of the Musaeum gate entered view. The screamer stopped, or paused for air.

“Please!” a teenaged boy implored, somewhere just out of sight, inside the complex wall.

“Get around behind him!” snapped a gruff voice.

“Run!” cried a woman from a far off place.

An angry man demanded, “Why are the gates still open?”

A sword’s glancing blow against stone.

“I’ve done nothing!” cried the boy, and an instant later, he appeared from the gateway, stumbling backward with his hands before him.

“You’re running away!” From the gate emerged a city guard, spear in hand. “Stop walking, or I’ll put this through your eye!”

Patra slipped behind the column once more. Her chest refused a breath—maybe a small sip … no, no only as deep as her neck. There were no piles of butchered city guards. The guards
were
the butchers.

“I’m not running!” shouted the boy, begging, and then a gravelly skidding, the thud of a body tumbling down stairs.

“Go!” roared a guard. “
Go!
”

Hustling leather soles on sandy stone.

Patra shut her eyes as if they were her ears.

A grisly
squitch
as a spear, no doubt, punctured the boy’s abdomen.

“Got him!”

Weak, bewildered cries, as though the young man simply failed to comprehend why this was happening to him—it was the unfairness of it that seared his stomach. But not for long …

“Move!”

Like a brick to a melon, a broadsword split the wounded youth’s skull.

Patra gasped though her nose. Her eyes still shut as if glued, she clawed at the pillar behind her, wishing to clench it in her fists.

Seconds later, a mother’s howl buckled Patra’s legs. Over and over, “Phorus! Phorus! Phorus! …” and Patra crumpled onto the hot stone.

“Silence her!”

“Phorus! Phorus! Phor−!”

* * *

The chorus of carnage had ended, replaced by more insistent pounding and smashing, and reassuring calls to open doors.
“You won’t be harmed!”
How many survivors remained blockaded inside Library or Musaeum walls? And how long until an exasperated commander summoned a battering ram or some other siege weapons? Were Kaleb or Philip among the trapped, dead, or somewhere else entirely? Patra wouldn’t wait to find out. There had to be a way to rescue whomever stood defiant behind those doors.

She bolted from her hiding spot, back down the Canopic Road, her mind awash with unviable ideas, all while defying the nagging pinch of this treachery’s source.

“I do hope that all you’ve shared was for the benefit of our audience?”
Zenobia had said in Isis’s Temple. Patra had confirmed it was so, but her heart still ached over Wahbi’s return.

“Sorry, yes,”
Patra had replied, shaking the tension from her face.
“Thank you for playing along. It’s also why I shared plans with the Governor, though now I believe he may genuinely support us. He’s sending city guards to defend the Musaeum.”

Zenobia had raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“I wouldn’t rely upon it. One may always have faith in the treachery of their closest friends.”

Patra had cast this aside like any other pessimistic notion with which she disagreed. Nobody understood her relationship with Cassius, or their decades of history. No one would grasp the nuance and depth of the moment they’d shared yesterday.

Leaning slightly into a doorway, she peered into the Trade Office’s skylit atrium.

She whispered, “Hello? Is anyone here?”

No answer. She sidled inside.

Upon reflection, Cassius had seemed intent on deceit when she’d first arrived (serpentine words from the wretch, Thomas Egnatius, still twisting inside his ears). She’d gone through it all in her head. She was supposed to contact the mercenary, Barbillus. A dubious pursuit. But after her conversation with Cassius—reminiscing, reconnecting—he’d shown a change of heart.

It’d all made sense before: She commissions a scoundrel to bring his fellow disgraced warriors to “protect” the Library, and just when everyone feels safe, their protector attacks the Library.