“Not like a son with his mother,” Ahenobarbus said to Fonteius, in whom he sensed an ally, “but a dog with its master.”
“He’ll get over it,” Fonteius said, sure Antony would. “He’s closer to fifty now than forty, he’s been consul, imperator, triumvir—everything except the undisputed First Man in Rome. And since his ill-spent youth with Curio and Clodius, he’s been a famous womanizer without ever yielding his essence to a woman. That’s now overdue, hence Cleopatra. Face it, Ahenobarbus! She is the most powerful woman in the world, and fabulously rich. He has to have her, and he has to keep her against all comers.”
“Cacat!” snapped the intolerant one. “It’s she leading him, not he, her! He’s turned as soft as a mushy pudding!”
“Once he’s away from Antioch and in the field, the old Marcus Antonius will return,” Fonteius comforted, positive he was right.
Much to Cleopatra’s surprise, when Antony told Caesarion it was time to go to Alexandria, there to rule as King and Pharaoh, the boy went without a murmur of protest. He hadn’t spent as much time with Antony as he had hoped, but they had managed to ride out of Antioch several times and spend a day hunting wolves and lions, which wintered in Syria before returning to the Scythian steppes. Nor was he to be fooled.
“I’m not an idiot, you know,” he said to Antony after their first kill, a male lion.
“What do you mean?” Antony asked, startled.
“This is settled country, too populous for lions. You brought him in from the wilderness so we’d have some sport.”
“You’re a monster, Caesarion.”
“Gorgon, or cyclops?”
“A new breed entirely.”
Antony’s last words to him as he set out for Egypt were more serious. “When your mother returns,” he said, “make sure that you mind her better. At the moment you ride roughshod over her opinions and her wishes. That’s your father in you. But what you lack is his perception of reality, which he understood was something quite outside his own self. Cultivate that quality, young Caesar, and when you grow up, nothing will stop you.”
And I, thought Antony, will be too old to care what you make of your life. Though I think I’ve been more of a father to you than I have to my own sons. But then, your mother matters terribly to me, and you are the center of her world.
She waited five nundinae to strike. By then almost all the newly appointed kings and potentates had visited Antioch to pay their respects to Antony. Not to her. Who was she, except another client monarch? Amyntas, Polemon, Pythodorus, Tarcondimotus, Archelaus Sisenes, and, of course, Herod. Very full of himself!
She started with Herod. “He hasn’t repaid the money he owes me, nor my share of the balsam revenues,” she said to Antony.
“I wasn’t aware he owed you money or balsam revenues.”
“Indeed he does! I lent him a hundred talents to take his case to Rome. The balsam was part of the repayment.”
“I’ll remind him by couriered letter tomorrow.”
“Remind, nothing! He hasn’t forgotten, he just doesn’t intend to honor his debts. Though there is a way to enforce payment.”
“Really? What?” asked Antony warily.
“Cede me the balsam gardens of Jericho and the bitumen fisheries of the Palus Asphaltites. Free and clear, all mine.”
“Jupiter! That’s tantamount to half the revenues of Herod’s entire kingdom! Leave him and his balsam alone, my love.”
“No, I will not! I don’t need the money and he does, that’s true, but he doesn’t deserve to be left alone. He’s a fat slug!”
A moment’s thought provoked amusement; Antony’s eyes began to twinkle. “Is there anything else you demand, my sparrow?”
“Full sovereignty over Cyprus, which had always belonged to Egypt until Cato annexed it to Rome. Cyrenaica, another Egyptian possession pilfered by Rome. Cilicia Tracheia. The Syrian coast as far as the river Eleutherus—it has been Egyptian more often than not. Chalcis. In fact, an entirely Egyptian southern Syria would suit me beautifully, so you’d better cede me all of Judaea. Crete would be good. Rhodes too.”
He sat with jaw dropped and little eyes wide, hardly knowing whether to roar with laughter or outrage. Finally, “You joke.”
“Joke? Joke? Just who are your new allies, Antonius? Your allies, not Rome’s! You’ve given away most of Anatolia and a good part of Syria to a parcel of ruffians, traitors, and brigands! In fact, Tarcondimotus is a brigand! To whom you’ve handed the Syrian Gates and the entire Amanus! You dowered the son of your mistress with Cappadocia, and gave Galatia to a common clerk! You married your daughter with a double dose of Julian blood to a grubby Asian Greek usurer! You set a freedman to rule Cyprus! Oh, what glory you’ve spread far and wide to such a wonderful bunch of allies!” She was working up her temper with masterly precision, eyes gone to the feral glow of a cat, lips peeled back, face a mask of pure venom. “And where is Egypt in all these brilliant dispositions?” she hissed. “Passed over! Not even mentioned! How Tarcondimotus for one must be laughing! As for Herod—that slimy toad, that rapacious son of a pair of grasping nonentities!”
Where was his rage? Where was his trustiest tool, the hammer with which he had crushed the pretensions of mightier opponents than Cleopatra? Not a flash of the old familiar fire warmed his veins, chilled to ice under her Medusan glare. Confused and bewildered though he was, he yet preserved a measure of craftiness.
“You cut me to the quick!” he gasped, hands clawing at the unforgiving air. “I meant no insult!”
Her apparent rage was permitted to die, but not mercifully. “Oh, I know what I have to do to get the territories I ask for,” she said conversationally. “Your bum-boys got their lands gratis, but Egypt has to pay. How many gold talents is Cilicia Tracheia worth? The balsam and the bitumen are debts, I refuse to pay for them. But Chalcis? Phoenicia? Philistia? Cyprus? Cyrenaica? Crete? Rhodes? Judaea? My treasure vaults are overflowing, dear Antonius, as well you know. That was your intention all along, was it not? Make Egypt pay thousands upon thousands of gold talents for every plethron of land! What other, less deserving minions get for nothing, Egypt will have to buy! You hypocrite! You mean, miserable twister!”
He broke down and wept, always a good political tool.
“Oh, stop crying!” she snapped, tossing him a napkin as a plutocrat might toss a penny to someone who has just done him a huge service. “Wipe your eyes! It’s time to get down to bargaining.”
“I didn’t think of Egypt as wanting more territory,” he said, bereft of sensible arguments.
“Oh, really? And what led you to make that assumption?”
The pain was beginning: she didn’t love him at all. “Egypt is so self-contained.” Eyes still swimming, he stared at her. Think, Antonius, think! “What would you do with Cilicia Tracheia? Crete? Rhodes? Cyrenaica, even? You rule a land that has great difficulty in maintaining an army to defend its own borders.” To talk stanched his tears, helped him find some composure. But not his self-esteem, lost beyond recall.
“I would add those lands to the kingdom my son will inherit, I would use them as his training ground. Egypt’s laws are set in stone, but other places are crying out for a wise ruler’s hands, and Caesarion will be the wisest of the wise,” she said.
How to answer that? “Cyprus I can see, Cleopatra. You’re absolutely right, it has always belonged to Egypt. Caesar gave it back to you, but when he died, it reverted to Rome. I’d be happy to cede you Cyprus. In fact, I had every intention of doing so—didn’t you notice I withheld it from all my grants?”
“Big of you,” she said caustically. “And Cyrenaica?”
“Cyrenaica is a part of Rome’s wheat supply. Not a chance.”
“I refuse to go home with less than your pimps and toadies!”
“They’re not pimps and toadies, they’re decent men.”
“What will you take for Phoenicia and Philistia?”
So be it, the greedy meretrix! Once he had realized that his
forty thousand silver talents from Sextus Pompey’s hoard might be years in the coming, he had fretted. Whereas here sat the Queen of Egypt, ready and able to pay. She didn’t love him a bit—the pain! But she could give him that splendid army, right now. Good, he was feeling a little better, at least in the head. “Let’s talk down payments. You’ll want complete sovereignty and all profits. Over time, a hundred thousand gold talents each. But I’ll take one percent down payment. A thousand gold talents for Phoenicia, Philistia, Cilicia Pedia, Chalcis, Emesa, the Eleutherus River, and Cyprus. No Crete, Cyrenaica, or Judaea. Balsam and bitumen, free.”
“A total of seven thousand gold talents.” She stretched and made a small, purring sound. “It’s a deal, Antonius.”
“I want the seven thousand now, Cleopatra.”
“In return for official deeds, signed and sealed by you in your function as Triumvir in charge of the East.”
“When I have the gold—and count it—you’ll have your papers. The seal of Rome affixed, plus my own triumviral seal. I’ll even throw in my personal seal.”
“That’s satisfactory. I’ll start a fast courier for Memphis in the morning.”
“Memphis?”
“It’s quicker, take my word for that.”
Which left them without any idea of where to go next. She had come to get what she could, and gotten more than she had hoped for; he had needed her strength and guidance desperately, and gotten nothing. The physical bond was frail, the mental nonexistent. A very long moment went by as they stared at each other without anything further to say. Then Antony sighed.
“You don’t love me at all,” he said. “You came to Antioch like any other woman—to shop.”
“It’s true that I came to get Caesarion’s share of the booty,” she answered, her eyes human enough now to look a little sad. “I must love you, however. If I did not, I would have gone about my task in a different way. You don’t see it, but I spared you.”
“The gods preserve me from a Cleopatra who didn’t spare me!”
“Oh, you wept, which to you means I unmanned you. But no one can unman you, Antonius, except yourself. Until Caesarion is grown—ten more years at least—Egypt needs a consort, and I have only one name in mind. Marcus Antonius. You’re not a weakling, but you lack purpose. I see it as clearly as Fonteius must have seen it.”
His brow knitted. “Fonteius? Have you been comparing notes?”
“Not at all. Simply, I sensed that he was worried about you. Now I see why. You don’t love Rome as Caesar did, and your rival in Rome is more than twenty years your junior. Short of his death, he must outlast you, and I can’t see Octavianus dying young, despite his asthma. Murder? An ideal answer, if it could be done, but it can’t be. Between Agrippa and the German guards, he’s invulnerable. Octavianus, dismiss his lictors the way Caesar did? Not if he were offered Sextus Pompeius on a golden platter! If you were older, it would be easier on you, but twenty years are not enough, though too many. Octavianus must be twenty-six this year. My agents say he’s more manly now the blush of youth has gone. You’re forty-six, and I have turned thirty-two. You and I are more ideally matched for age, and I would have Egypt regain its old power. Unlike the Kingdom of the Parthians, Egypt belongs on Your Sea. With you as my consort, Antonius, think what we might do in the next ten years!”
Was what she proposed feasible? It wasn’t Roman, but Rome was eluding his grasp, tendrils of smoke in perfumed eastern air. Yes, he was confused, but not so confused that he didn’t understand what she was proposing, and what the issues were. His hold over his adherents in Rome was slipping; Pollio had gone, and Ventidius, Sallust, all the great marshals except Ahenobarbus. How much longer could he hang on to his seven hundred senatorial clients, unless he paid long visits to Rome at fairly frequent intervals? Was it worth the effort? Could he take more effort on board, when Cleopatra did not love him? Not a rational man, he couldn’t work out what she had done to him; only that he loved her. From the day she arrived in Antioch, he was defeated, and that was a mystery beyond his capacity to solve.
She was speaking again. “With Sextus Pompeius to defeat, it will be some years before Octavianus and Rome are in any condition to look at what’s happening in the East. The Senate is a body of clucking old hens, impotent to wrest government from Octavianus—or you. Lepidus, I discount.”
She slid off her couch and came to lie beside him, her cheek on one sinewy forearm. “I’m not advocating sedition, Antonius,” she said in soft, honeyed tones. “Far from it. All I am saying is that, in concert with me, you can make the East a better and a stronger place. How can that be injurious to Rome? How can that diminish Rome? On the contrary. For instance, it prevents the rise of another Mithridates or Tigranes.”
“I’d become your consort in the blink of an eye, Cleopatra, if I could honestly believe that some of it was for me, because of me. Must every atom of it be Caesarion’s?” he asked, lips brushing her shoulder. “Lately I’ve come to understand that before I die, I want to stand alone and colossal in the full blaze of the sun—no shade of any kind! Not Rome’s shade, not Caesarion’s shade. I want to end my life as Marcus Antonius, neither Roman nor Egyptian. I want to be a true singularity. I want to be Antonius the Great. And you don’t offer me that.”
“But I do offer you greatness! You cannot be Egyptian, that is foregone. If you’re Roman, only you can cast that off. It’s just a skin, no harder to shed than a snake his.” Her mouth nuzzled the side of his face. “Antonius, I do understand! You yearn to be greater than Julius Caesar, which means conquering new worlds. But in the Parthians, you’re looking at the wrong world. Turn your head west, not farther east! Caesar never really conquered Rome—he succumbed to Rome. Antonius can earn the cognomen Great only by conquering Rome.”
That was merely the opening round of an ongoing battle that lasted until March, the Antiochean spring. A titanic struggle fought in the darkness of their tangled emotions, in the silence of their unspoken doubts and mistrusts. The secrecy was urgent and complete; if Ahenobarbus, Poplicola, Fonteius, Furnius, Sosius, or any other Roman in Antioch guessed that Antony was selling in perpetuity and without tribute what belonged to Rome in perpetuity and was merely leased to client-kings in return for tribute, then there would be a convulsion so great Antony might find himself in chains and shipped back to Rome. Cleopatra’s deeded territories had to seem innocently deeded until Antony’s power base was much stronger. So what was public knowledge in one way was known only to Antony and Cleopatra in another way. To his fellow Romans, they had to appear ordinary cessions to get the gold to fund the army. Once he was unconquerable in the East, it no longer mattered what was known. She had tried to persuade Caesar to make himself King of Rome, and failed. Antony was more malleable material, especially in his present state of mind. And the East hungered for a strong king. Who better than a Roman, trained in law and government, not given to caprices or killing sprees? Antonius the Great would weld the East into an entity formidable enough to contend with Rome for world supremacy. Thus did Cleopatra dream, knowing full well that she had a long way to go, and further still before she could crush Antonius the Great in favor of Caesarion, King of Kings.
Antony succeeded in duping his colleagues. Ahenobarbus and Poplicola witnessed Cleopatra’s documents without reading what they contained, and sniggered at her gullibility. So much gold!
But Antony’s worst conflict he could confide in no one. The Queen was adamantly against his Parthian campaign, and grudged her gold to funding it. She dreaded to see the army horribly reduced by Parthian attacks, dreaded to see the army too thinned out to do what she intended it would do: go to war against Rome and Octavian. Plans she had revealed to Antony in part only, but there in her mind constantly. Caesarion must rule Caesar’s world as well as Egypt and the East, and nothing, including Mark Antony, was going to stop that.
To Antony’s horror, he learned that Cleopatra intended to march with him on campaign, and expected to have the major say in the war c
ouncils. Canidius was waiting in Carana after a successful strike north into the Caucasus, and she was so looking forward to meeting him, she kept saying. Try though he did, Antony couldn’t convince her that she was unwelcome, that his legates wouldn’t tolerate her.
So in the space of one nundinum he got rid of the men most likely to rebel against her presence. He sent Poplicola to Rome to cheer up his seven hundred senators, and Furnius to govern Asia Province. Ahenobarbus went back to governing Bithynia, and Sosius was to continue in Syria.
Then the most natural and inevitable of events saved him: a pregnancy. Limp with relief, he was able to tell his legates that the Queen was traveling with the legions only as far as Zeugma on the Euphrates, then going home to Egypt. Amused and admiring, his legates assumed that the Queen’s love for Antony was so great that she could hardly bear to be parted from him.
Thus it was a very contented Cleopatra who kissed Mark Antony good-bye at Zeugma, and commenced the long land trek back to Egypt; though she might have sailed, she had good reason not to. A reason named Herod, King of the Jews. When he learned of the loss of his balsam and bitumen, he had come at a gallop from Jerusalem to Antioch. But when he saw Cleopatra sitting beside Antony in the audience chamber, he turned around and rode home again. An action that told Cleopatra that Herod preferred to wait until he could see Antony alone. It also meant that Herod saw what the Roman men had not; that she dominated the Triumvir in charge of the East, clay in her busy, interfering hands.