The Storm of Heaven (67 page)

Nicholas knew that was true! Their flight from Aelia Capitolina had veered into rough water once they left the inhabited regions south of the city. A long stretch of barren wasteland separated the southernmost Judean towns from the coast at Gazzah. Beyond the crumbling, half-abandoned port was a worse passage across the top of the Sinai wilderness. There was no water to speak of, and the heat of summer baked the land. By great good luck, the boy recovered from his exertions in the siege before they had ventured out of Berosaba.

"Just doing my job," Dwyrin said, looking out at the cane fields and the blue line of the sea beyond. Flocks of birds were slowly rising and falling over the mud flats, feasting on dark clouds of insects hazing the air. "I'm glad I figured out how to do it. I hate the heat."

The rest of the engineers rode up, making a milling crowd of camels, mules and stubby-shouldered horses. Sextus and Frontius cantered up to join Nicholas and his little command group.

"
Ave
, centurion!"

"Gentlemen, I think we've come to the end of our journey. If Dwyrin is right, Pelusium is not far ahead through these palms and cane. By rights, there should be a Legion outpost. Hopefully we'll be able to find someone in charge and report in."

The surveyor and the engineer nodded, though they looked a little disappointed.

"We'll be reassigned, then," lamented Sextus. "Parceled out to some other unit."

"Scattered to the winds," Frontius complained. "Like so much straw on the threshing floor."

They both sighed. Frontius jerked his head at Dwyrin. "Centurion, can we keep the lad on?"

"I think not," Nicholas growled. "We're sticking together. It's... ah..." He grinned. "It's cooler."

Sextus groaned and put his hands over his eyes. Frontius just shook his head.

"Centurion!" One of the surveyors was pointing towards the sea. Nicholas turned, shading his eyes. There were riders there, silhouetted against the sparkling blue waters. They seemed to be hurrying towards the palms. As they moved, there was a slow rippling across the mud flats and a great cloud of flamingos rose up, shifting and sparkling in the sun. The birds had been feasting amongst the shellfish in the muddy pools.

"Oh, that is fine." Nicholas raised his hand to signal the men. "We've been seen and the blind fools are sure to think we're bandits or the whole Arab army! Come on, let's go find the sentry pickets."

With another chorus of groans and bleats from the camels and some whickering from the horses, the column shook itself out and ambled across the sandy scrubland, heading for the road running beside the sea. They kept away from the coastal road during their long journey, fearing possible Arab patrols. Now they were forced to the coast by the mud and bogs and quicksand that sprawled out from the easternmost arm of the Nile.

Dwyrin took up his accustomed place at the middle of the group, lazing in the saddle, attention only partially focused on the camel. The rest of his effort, such as it was, spun slowly in the hidden world, a faint purple disk around the entire group. The hair-thin layer passed heat out and cooler air in. Too, above the column, it diffused the rays of the sun, providing a veneer of shade for the men riding below. The strength to reflect the sun came from the air itself as it calmed and grew cool. Flies and other insects were unable to penetrate the barrier, providing welcome relief from their biting and buzzing.

The Hibernian was heartened by the speed of his recovery from the effort of the siege. It seemed to him that his core self, that indefinable mote that spun and glowed at his heart, was growing stronger. He could shrug off the illusions and phantasms once tormenting him. A great sense of focus and solidity had come upon him as they crossed the desert. The emptiness let his mind find strength. His skill, though still raw, was growing. Over any kind of heat or flame, he wielded swift and encompassing power. Dwyrin thought of his friends and was glad that he had not killed Odenathus in their struggle.

The row of palms and waving green cane grew closer.

"Halt!
Quo vaditis?
"

Nicholas let his camel amble to a stop, a hand raised in greeting. The line of palms disguised a shallow, meandering channel filled with saltbush and waxy-leafed scrub. Beyond the stream, a high bank of black soil led under more date palms to a crumbling brick building. The road in front of the customhouse was half buried in sand. Nicholas hadn't expected there to be much here, so he wasn't disappointed by the dilapidated buildings.

The legionaries appearing out of the brush, swords bared, were a different matter. It took Nicholas a moment to realize what was wrong, but by the time that two iron spear points were pressed against his chest, he raised both hands. The grim-faced men in plumed helmets and shining
lorica
were Western troops, not Eastern. It was disorienting, since Egypt was an Eastern province.

"Whoa, there, lads! I'm Nicholas of Roskilde, centurion of the Fourth Engineers cohort of the First Minerva... you can put the pointy sticks away."

Behind Nicholas, the rest of the column came to a halt, surrounded by more soldiers in the brush and among the palms. Despite the tension in the air, none of the men around the column seemed to have noticed the clouds of flies under the palms were suddenly gone, or the steady drop in air temperature. Dwyrin, Sextus and Frontius pushed their way up to the head of the line.

"The First Minerva?" The Western commander stomped up to Nicholas' camel, glaring suspiciously. The man was sweating heavily. "You're a little lost, I think."

Sextus doffed his straw hat and clambered down off the horse.

"We were loaned out to the Easterners," the surveyor said. "Barely got out of Judea alive."

The Western centurion glowered at the rest of the column, then tugged absently at his chin strap. "You're the first men down this road in weeks. Been mighty quiet."

"Yes," Nicholas said, leaning forward on his saddle pommel. "The Arab army is in Gazzah, I imagine. No one's going to come down the road except them now."

"Well," the centurion said, looking sour, "you lot look Roman enough. I've orders to take anyone who comes out of the desert to the legate, so you'd better hop along. I'll get my horse."

Nicholas sat back and exchanged a bemused glance with the others. The centurion did have a horse, a nag with a mottled face, but it got along well enough and didn't mind the camels. The rest of the Western troops in the scrubby trees disappeared again and the column, after some jostling about, managed to get moving.

For a mile or two past the customhouse the land was thick with stands of green cane and muddy pools. The road was still in disrepair, blown with sand and dangerous with loose paving stones. Slender trees grew thick on the banks of the channels, hiding mottled green logs sleeping in the hot sun. Gleaming white cranes stepped through the water, hunting for frogs. Then, after passing through a belt of tall, willowy trees, the column passed under an ancient archway flanked by huge sandstone statues of men with tapering beards. This was the first time Nicholas had seen the detritus of the ancients. Dwyrin ignored the pharaohs, chewing on a piece of flatbread, but the centurion craned his neck to look up at them as they passed. Even the stone was cracked and chipped, dilapidated, oozing hoary age. Beyond the archway, everything changed.

Great plumes of dust rose from a land crawling with men. Suddenly, the road was clear and wide, lined with columns of workers trudging along under bundles of freshly cut stakes. Roman soldiers were everywhere, directing traffic and keeping a close eye on thousands of
fellaheen
digging under the blazing sun. The Western centurion urged his mount onwards and Nicholas had to swat his camel hard to get it to keep pace. Winding their way through crowds of laborers hauling dirt up out of a dry river channel, Nicholas and his men passed over a great wooden bridge.

The northerner looked down in awe at the river bottom. It was swarming with workers, digging furiously with mattocks and spades. A dark haze buzzed and drifted over the riverbed—flies and darting shapes of thousands of small brown birds preying upon them. Endless lines of brown men in white loincloths bent under the effort of hauling thick black dirt out of the excavation and up a series of ramps to the western side of the river. Even the bridge, obviously ancient, had been torn down to huge stone plugs on the riverbed. The ancient stone span had been replaced by a wooden road.

Upstream, past clouds of slowly rising yellow dust, the sloping face of a dam filled the channel.

"What is happening?"

The Western centurion looked back, grinning. "The legate likes to dig!"

They trotted down off the bridge, through another decaying triumphal arch and onto a crowded road. On this side of the dry river, dirt was rising into a sloping berm running in either direction as far as the eye could see. It too swarmed with brown men and soldiers. In some places, the top of the long wall was finished and Nicholas made out stonemasons and carpenters busily erecting a wall of fired mud-brick. Below the parapet, lines of
fellaheen
worked, pounding stakes into the outer face with mallets. The sky ahead was dark with smoke, rising from hundreds of brick pits.

An opening in the berm, shored up with massive stone blocks, let them through the barrier. Behind the sloping wall there was a half-mile-wide area stripped clear of brush and trees. The rear face of the berm was sharp and built up with a fighting platform and packed-earth ramps leading up to the walkway. Ahead of them, they saw the edge of a second river channel. Here there was less activity and another wooden bridge. As before, the roadway had been torn down to the pilings, though the water was high, rushing past in a brown flood. Western soldiers manned a pair of towers on the far side. A second wall of packed earth rose up at the water's edge.

Lines of camels and mules passed through the gates, carrying bundles of wicker, straw and cane. Nicholas and his escort waited for a dozen grains while the caravan passed by.

"This channel is wet," Nicholas remarked to the centurion. "Is the work finished here?"

"Not started yet," the Western officer grumbled. The man made a shooing motion in front of his face, though no flies had bothered him for over an hour. Nicholas assumed the motion had become automatic. At the edge of the invisible barrier riding around Dwyrin, little drifts of dead flies were piling up while Nicholas watched the camels and mules pass. Now the caravan was laden with fresh bricks wrapped in straw.

"The dam isn't done for this section yet." The centurion pointed off to the south.

Nicholas shaded his eyes, squinting, and made out—two or three miles away—a low ridge of earth and stone being built across the channel of the river. Like the river bottom they had passed, the levy swarmed with men, visible at this distance only as a rippling motion on the great mound of earth.

"They need to finish dredging the first channel," the Western officer continued. "Then they'll divert this channel into that one and close this dam. Then everyone will fall back here and finish this wall."

Nicholas looked north along the line of the berm and saw that it only ran a quarter-mile and then petered out. Obviously the bridge crossing needed to be defended first. "How long has all this taken?"

The Western officer grinned. "We've only been under way for six weeks. Not bad, eh? That's what you get from His Worship! Swift action. Come on."

The last of the mules passed and the column wound its way through the gate. A mile ahead, Nicholas could see the outskirts of a town and rising above it, squat and ugly as all sin, a whitewashed brick fortress hard on the sea. Banners and flags flapped in a desultory breeze, but they were obscured by the reek and fume of fires burning in the flat between the last bridge and the town. A huge camp sprawled in all directions. The ground on either side of the road fell away, gouged out for brick pits. Between the bowl-shaped excavations there were wilted fields of corn and onions. Legionaries and
fellaheen
passed in the opposite direction in a steady stream. Their progress slowed.

It was worse in the camp. Nicholas recognized the general outline of a traditional Legion encampment, but the tent city that housed the workers sprawled riotously in thickets of dirty tan tents. The brick-surfaced road was clogged with people coming and going. It was worse in the dust and mud off the highway. Nicholas schooled himself to patience, closing his nostrils against the humid stink of thousands of unwashed bodies, dung, flies, oil, smoke from green wood and the stench of bricks drying in the sun. Slowly, the walls of the fortress rose up, closer and closer.

Inside Pelusium, the crowds thinned, replaced by grim-faced couriers and legionaries on every corner. It seemed the city had been emptied of citizens, everyone turned out for billets and workshops. Still riding, Nicholas passed a long, low building. Through the open windows, he saw rows and rows of women squatting on the floor, splitting marsh cane for wicker and weaving it into mats.

"We use it to stabilize the face of the wall," the centurion commented. "Or to make brick forms. Need a lot of it."

At the center of the town was a plaza serving mainly to frame a giant gate into the fortress. The gate was flanked by huge round pillars and a flat, squared-off roof. Carved into the walls of the gate were figures of men and gods and tall ibis. Both doors were chocked open by column roundels and guarded by a full cohort of Western troops. The standards and battle emblems of four legions hung above the portal.

Nicholas whistled, seeing that two of the ensigns were brand-new, lacking the metal plaques depicting famous victories. It was strange to see the bronze eagles shining new and fresh in the sun, without the nicks and patina of age that marked their fellows. The other standards did show their age, though, and Sextus slapped his thigh in delight.

"Frontius, my friend, we've come home! I thought I saw Scortius directing the workers on the first bridge. Centurion..." Sextus pointed, drawing Nicholas' attention. "That's the standard of the First, by the gods, our own blessed Minerva, may she watch over us!"