The Shards of Heaven by Michael Livingston Page B

behind, and he tried, as he made his way through the winding streets between painted and columned estates, brick-walled inns, and the fluttering awnings of open shop windows, to imagine that he was an ordinary sixteen-year-old citizen of the Eternal City with few enough cares in the world.
    But for all his appearance as a common, if foreign-born, man, Juba couldn’t feel common in his mind. He was most uncommon. He had a chance to grasp the very power of the gods—if gods there were.
    He’d thought much on that particular question since he’d found the Trident in Numidia: If Neptune and Poseidon were one, if their weapon could, in turn, belong to Moses, if Thoth and Mercury and Hermes could be the same god … was it possible that all the deities of the world were reflections of the same, single, united god? And, even more difficult to consider, if the man Moses could be so much like Neptune, was it possible that Neptune had been a man, too? Might it be possible that there were no gods at all, just men made divine in the memories of other men? Juba’s adopted father, Julius Caesar, after all, had been declared an immortal god after his very mortal, very human murder.
    That there might be no gods at all was a troubling thought, but it was also a thrilling one. It was an old adage that the clothes made the man. Wear the sash of office, as Juba had just an hour earlier in the Senate strategy sessions, and the people would treat you as an officer. Perhaps it was also true, then, that the weapons made the god.
    Walking back to practice once more with the Trident of Poseidon, Juba considered this conclusion a point of much interest.
    Coming around the fruit stalls of a shop on a blind corner, lost in his thoughts of gods and men, Juba barely had time to look up and see the legionnaire on horseback bearing down the street before he was upon him. Juba gasped and dove to the right to avoid getting hit. His body crashed into a stand of apples beneath a faded green awning, sending some clattering to the stone pavement, and the churning legs of the beast just barely missed him.
    A messenger, Juba could see. Probably carrying dispatches from the port, updates on the enormous undertaking of sending the legions to Greece.
    As Juba stared after the departing horse, the shopkeeper reached for a sawgrass switch and brought it down on his hand. “You ass!”
    Juba recoiled in pain, startled. He saw the apples on the ground and instinctively began bending to pick them up. “Citizen, I—”
    The switch came down again, with more force this time. “Keep your filthy hands off, slave!”
    Juba staggered back into the flow of pedestrians that was moving in the soldier’s wake and let it carry him away from the cursing shopkeeper.
    Slave. How often had he been called that in this, his supposed home? He, an adopted son of Caesar himself, weighed and judged at a glance.
    A just god, Juba thought, would change things, make them better. That things only seemed to get worse, in fact, might be proof that no just gods existed, perhaps no gods at all.
    Juba felt a grin crossing his face even as he massaged the welt on his dark-skinned hand. If there were no gods to fix things, he’d just have to do it himself.
    *   *   *
    The villa beyond the Tiber that had once been Julius Caesar’s now belonged to his adopted son, Octavian, and it was there that Juba had been given the most secure space they could think of in which to practice using the Trident of Poseidon. The compound had been breached just once that Juba had ever heard, and that on the day that Caesar died. But since falling to Octavian’s hands, its walls had been built higher and stronger over the years, and a squad of praetorian guards—Octavian’s loyal personal bodyguard—had been permanently assigned to protect its grounds. Juba and Quintus had been given rooms there, and a pavilion had been erected in