Fire had consumed his life. The flames had taken everything from him; his youth melted away leaving behind a lined face, his family to whom he was as a stranger. The brotherhood and their work had been all.
Now all these years after he had been indoctrinated into the order, here he was again on assignment for them, meeting a youth in a taverna with eyes lit with the embers of an excitement all too familiar to him. They clasped forearms and he pat the back of the younger man’s arm with his fingers once, then twice more, the youth repeating the pattern in reverse in the correct order of the most recent handshake.
“Alexandros?” the young man said in a low voice, looking about warily.
He grunted in response. “Which makes you Limenius.” He smiled as his contact glanced about furtively. “Do try to relax,” he said clapping what was little more than a boy on the back before signalling to one of the servers. “You look like you’re about to sell the emperor’s secrets to the barbarians.”
Alexandros led his charge to a table, feeling better when he saw the young man’s shoulders lower as his muscles softened.
Limenius smiled uncomfortably. “Do I really look that conspicuous?”
“Were I city guard I would clap you in shackles just for the sake of it.” Limenius visibly blanched and Alexandros couldn’t hold in his chuckle. “We’re not doing anything wrong at the Musaeum, Limenius. Just you remember that.”
The server arrived after weaving her way through the throng and Alexandros asked for a jug of wine.
Limenius waited for her departure despite his elder’s placating words. “Why then is it the greatest secret in Alexandria?” he said, raising his eyebrows as he leaned forward. He pulled back as an earthen jug lowered to the table followed by two cups.
Alexandros pressed coins into the womans palm with a smile and watched her go. “It has always been a secret.” His smile turned to the man across the table. “Just because the great library was the best known secret does not mean it was the greatest of them.”
Limenius leant forward more slowly now, mouth hanging open.
“Here,” the old man said, and poured wine into the cup furthest from him. “Do something useful with that hole in your head, would you?”
Limenius gulped down the wine, shaking his head slowly until he was ready to speak again. “Do you mean to say--”
“My dear boy, I know in our line of work that questions are our very being, but must you ask so many of me this very moment? Did Festus not explain any of this before he sent you to me?”
Once again the young man was agog, but he quickly recovered and was almost statuesque as he sat up, obviosuly feeling slighted. “He made certain allusions to the nature of your work and the manner in which it is conducted, yes. But he also made specific note of it being a very secretive endeavour.” He downed the remainder of his wine and availed himself of more.
“Festus always did have a leaning toward the dramatic,” the older man smiled almost mischievously. “We called him The Poet for that very reason, though he would have others believe it to be because his work has the grace of such verse.”
Limenius blinked several times before smiling again. “Yes, that certainly describes Festus.”
Alexandros held his cup aloft. “Drink up. Then I’ll take you to see the Museaum and what you’ve got yourself in for.”
His cup was met by the younger man’s as was his smile, though Limenius’s was far wider than his own though Alexandros could not fault him for his enthusiasm.
#
They walked the darkened streets for what seemed like an age, the young man asking him as many questions as he could as they walked and Alexandros tried to supply as many answers. They finally arrived at a darkened archway where the old man stopped.
Limenius looked about. “An old cistern?”
Alexandros held his hand up for the younger man to hold quiet and then putting his fingers to his lips emit a trill whistle that sounded like the call of a bird.
Limenius cast his gaze about, shifting from foot to foot in the bracing night air as he waited for something to happen, keeping quiet as best he could. Finally he could bear the wait no longer and was about to speak when he heard rustling and looked to see a young girl emerge from a bush and the old man stepped toward her.
“Send for Silvanus,” Alexandros said, handing her a coin.
The girl’s large eyes grew wider as she held her hands up to look the coin over in the moonlight before nodding once in silence before she disappeared back the way she’d come from.
“This way,” Alexandros said, leading the way into the structure.
It was bereft of water save for a trickle, cut off from whatever channel had once fed it that now only fed the weeds that grew in the cracks of their path, which began to dance as Alexandros lit their way after pulling out a torch and flint that had been in an oiled cloth secreted in an alcove.
“This is even more secretive than I had imagined.” Limenius’s voice carried about the cavernous structure and back to his own ears.
There were shadows from every quarter as they moved deeper into the structure, multiple dark shapes which loomed about them, their own thrown and distorted silhouettes flashing on the multitude of columns holding the roof on high.
Limenius started as something ran across a foot, and kicked the warm rough bristled body of the rat from atop his foot.
“He seems to like you,” Alexandros said, grinning as he stopped and turned. The flickering torchlight deepened the cracks on his face, lending it the look of an aged statue, his look just as stony.
“Are we here?”
“What I would really like to know,” the old man said, sounding far older now, “is who really sent you and what happened to the real Limenius and my old friend Festus.”
“I really don’t know what you--”
There was a flurry of motion before the man claiming to be Limenius held his hands up to his face, guarding them from a sudden brightness. When he lowered them again he turned a slow circle to take in the sight. A ring of red fire surrounded the two men, Alexandros now bereft of his torch.
“What have you done?” the young man shouted angrily, raising his voice so he could be heard over the noise of the inferno.
“I presume you came seeking the works of the Brotherhood of Hero. Well, here you are,” Alexandros said, stretching his hands wide and indicating the wall of flames. “One of our greatest discoveries since Hero formed the beginnings of the Musaeum six hundred years ago with his aeolipile.”
Limenius stared at flames taller than the tallest man he’d ever seen, the heat coming off it almost unbearable. “Greek fire!”
“Indeed. Now, who sent you?”
“You’re in no position to be questioning me, old fool! Once this fire is out I’ll--”
Alexandros held up a hand and the fire lashed out at them, a ball of flame bursting to life to their side with a rush of heat and light and carving leaving a new wall that made their prison smaller still.
“In no position? I think not.” Alexandros’s grim smile spoke volumes. “And I wouldn’t hold out hope of these flames dying down any time soon. We’ll bake to death in here before that happens, and my colleagues will continue to tighten our cage. I won’t ask a third time. Who sent you?”
“You’ll learn soon enough! All Alexandria will know!”
With that the man claiming to be Limenius launched himself at Alexandros, dragging them both into the flames and snuffing out the old man’s.
#
Alexandros never received his answer but the members of the Brotherhood of Hero didn’t have long to wait as promised. Only a few short weeks in fact, when the siege of Alexandria by the Arabs that would last fourteen long months began, a siege that rested the city from Byzantine hands and delivered it into Islam for well over a millennia. Though by that time the Brotherhood of Hero would be long gone not just from Alexandria and Constantinople--to which they now fled with their families--but from the annals of history altogether.
Little did they know this however, nor that the legacy of their namesake, Hero of Alexandria, would change the face of the world forever.
The young girl who watched the fire of the great lighthouse diminishing--not just from distance but the competing fires--knew even less than that. All she knew for certain as she absently turned the coin her father had given her before his death was that her home was gone. As she turned that metal disk repeatedly in her hands the colour glinting from its surface changed to an intensity that caught her eye and she turned to the source of the new light.
One of the old men that had been friends with her father had lit a bright red fire under a suspended ball in front of which he and another two men secured a heavy looking curved iron object that looked like a shield. Soon she heard a hissing and the boat began to surge forward. The men watched over the thing as if it were an infant and poured red liquid and coal onto the fire while another poured sea water into a funnel.
The boat sped faster than she had ever moved in her entire life, leaving behind a trail of fog like mist or smoke and leaving her in awe as the wind and water hit her face, until they hit a wave and her father’s coin slipped from her hands to fall overboard and be swallowed in the darkness forever.