The Shards of Heaven Read Online Free Page A

wonder … is there something to the idea that Astarte is the same goddess as the Greek Aphrodite, the Roman Venus?”
    â€œI’ll not help Rome,” the old man croaked.
    Juba heard only the briefest rush of movement before the priest gasped, a sound that reminded the young man of a cook tenderizing meat. Juba spun around and saw the old man slumped sideways, grimacing. “Laenas!” he cried out, his voice cracking with the sudden start.
    The rugged Roman straightened, his fist coming back from the priest’s side and something like a smirk momentarily passing over his face. “Wasn’t having him spitting about Rome,” he said.
    As if in reply, the priest did, in fact, cough and spit. The blood ran dark streaks into his matted beard.
    Whatever else Juba might have expected the priest to utter then—that the Trident wasn’t real, that the gods weren’t real, maybe that he had money hidden away under a rock somewhere—it wasn’t what the old man finally managed to say. “You’ve your father’s eyes.”
    Juba stared at him, unblinking, his mind and heart racing. The old man held his gaze for a long moment before shutting his own eyes in a grimace of pain. Juba still stared at him, feeling the attention of Quintus and Laenas upon him even as he dared not look at them.
    â€œLord Juba—” Quintus started.
    â€œLeave us,” Juba commanded, cutting off the slave. He flicked his gaze at Laenas just long enough to note the familiar look of disdain on the rough man’s face, the same twist of jealousy and disgust he’d seen so often while growing up in Rome as the foreign-born adopted son of Caesar. “Both of you.”
    â€œMy lord, I—” Quintus said.
    Juba silenced him with a wave of his hand. “I said go. Now.”
    â€œVery well,” Quintus said, bowing deep as he backed toward the doorway. Laenas followed with a predictably dissatisfied grunt.
    In seconds, Juba stood alone in the little room with the sagging priest. He took long, deep breaths to steady himself. “You speak the language of Rome well for a Numidian,” he said when the sounds of Laenas and Quintus had grown faint.
    The old priest licked his lips and swallowed before responding. “I was a slave to Rome, too, once.”
    â€œWhat’s your name?”
    â€œSyphax,” the old priest said.
    â€œSo you knew my father.”
    Syphax nodded slowly. “I knew the king, yes.”
    The king, Juba thought. Could it truly be that the old priest, hidden away out here on this lonesome spit of land, was a loyalist to the royal family of Numidia? The lineage of which he alone remained?
    â€œI saw him die,” Syphax said.
    â€œWhat?”
    The old priest coughed twice painfully before he regained his composure. “Saw him die on the blade of my master, Marcus Petreius.”
    Juba staggered backward into the ragged table behind him as if physically struck by the sheer weight of memory and history that flooded into his mind. He’d read the books, sought out every shred of detail he could find on his real father’s inglorious end. After Caesar had defeated the Numidian army at Thapsus, Juba’s father had fled with the general Petreius, only to be trapped. The histories spoke of how the two men dueled to the death, opting for an honorable end rather than the wrath of Caesar and the horrible, dishonorable Triumph that he would have put them through back in Rome—the Triumph that had thus fallen to his infant son, Prince Juba, first seized and then later adopted by the very man who’d driven his royal father to such a doom.
    â€œNo,” Juba managed to say. It had only been two months since Juba had knelt, at last, beside the unmarked grave of the true father Caesar had never let him know. His hands gripped the rough wood of the table at his back. “You cannot have.”
    â€œI watched them fight at the