In less than two months my son will be six years old, and I am childless, barren. No sister for him to marry, no brother to take his place should anything befall him. So many nights of love with Caesar in Rome, yet I did not quicken. Isis has cursed me.
Apollodorus hurried in, his golden chain of office clinking. “My lady, an urgent letter from Pythodorus of Tralles.”
Down went the hand, up went the chin. Cleopatra frowned. “Pythodorus? What does he want?”
“Not gold, at any rate,” said Caesarion, looking up from his tablets with a grin. “He’s the richest man in Asia Province.”
“Pay attention to your sums, boy!” said Sosigenes.
Cleopatra got up from her chair and walked across to an open section of wall where the light was good. A close examination of the green wax seal showed a small temple in its middle and the words PYTHO. TRALLES around its edge. Yes, it seemed authentic. She broke it and unfurled the scroll, written in a hand that said no scribe had been made privy to its contents. Too untidy.
Pharaoh and Queen, Daughter of Amun-Ra,
I write as one who loved the God Julius Caesar for many years, and as one who respected his devotion to you. Though I am aware you have informants to keep you apprised of what is going on in Rome and the Roman world, I doubt that any of them stands high in the confidence of Marcus Antonius. You will of course know that Antonius journeyed from Philippi to Nicomedia last November, and that many kings, princes, and ethnarchs met him there. He did virtually nothing to alter the state of affairs in the East, but he did command that twenty thousand silver talents be paid to him immediately. The size of this tribute shocked all of us.
After visiting Galatia and Cappadocia, he arrived in Tarsus. I followed him with the two thousand silver talents we ethnarchs of Asia Province had managed to scrape together. Where were the other eighteen thousand talents? he asked. I think I succeeded in convincing him that nothing like this sum is to be found, but his answer was one we have grown used to: pay him nine more years’ tribute in advance, and we would be forgiven. As if we have salted away ten years’ tribute against the day! They just do not listen, these Roman governors.
I crave your pardon, great queen, for burdening you with our troubles, and our troubles are not why I am writing this in secret. This is to warn you that within a very few days you will receive a visit from one Quintus Dellius, a grasping, cunning little man who has wormed his way into Marcus Antonius’s good opinion. His whisperings into Antonius’s ear are aimed at filling Antonius’s war chest, for Antonius hungers to do what Caesar did not live to do—conquer the Parthians. Cilicia Pedia is being scoured from end to end, the brigands chased from their strongholds and the Arab raiders back across the Amanus. A profitable exercise, but not profitable enough, so Dellius suggested that Antonius summon you to Tarsus and there fine you ten thousand gold talents for supporting Gaius Cassius.
There is nothing I can do to help you, dear good Queen, beyond warn you that Dellius is even now upon his way south. Perhaps with foreknowledge you will have the time to devise a scheme to thwart him and his master.
Cleopatra handed the scroll back to Apollodorus and stood chewing her lip, eyes closed. Quintus Dellius? Not a name she recognized, therefore no one with sufficient clout in Rome to have attended her receptions, even the largest; Cleopatra never forgot a name or the face attached to it. He would be a Vettius, some ignoble knight with smarm and charm, just the type to appeal to a boor like Marcus Antonius. Him, she remembered! Big and burly, thews like Hercules, shoulders as wide as mountains, an ugly face whose nose strove to meet an up-thrust chin across a small, thick-lipped mouth. Women swooned over him because he was supposed to have a gigantic penis—what a reason to swoon! Men liked him for his bluff, hearty manner, his confidence in himself. But Caesar, whose close cousin he was, had grown disenchanted with him—the main reason, she was sure, why Antonius’s visits to her had been few. When left in charge of Italia he had slaughtered eight hundred citizens in the Forum Romanum, a crime Caesar could not forgive. Then he tried to woo Caesar’s soldiers and ended in instigating a mutiny that had broken Caesar’s heart.
Of course her agents had reported that many thought Antony was a part of the plot to assassinate Caesar, though she herself was not sure; the occasional letter Antony had written to her explained that he had had no choice other than to ignore the murder, foreswear vengeance on the assassins, even condone their conduct. And in those letters Antony had assured her that as soon as Rome settled down, he would recommend Caesarion to the Senate as one of Caesar’s chief heirs. To a woman devastated by grief, his words had been balm. She wanted to believe them! Oh, no, he wasn’t saying that Caesarion should be admitted into Roman law as Caesar’s Roman heir! Only that Caesarion’s right to the throne of Egypt should be sanctioned by the Senate. Were it not, her son would be faced with the same problems that had dogged her father, never certain of his tenure on the throne because Rome said Egypt really belonged to Rome. Any more than she herself had been certain until Caesar entered her life. Now Caesar was gone, and his nephew Gaius Octavius had usurped more power than any lad of eighteen had ever done before. Calmly, cannily, quickly. At first she had thought of young Octavian as a possible father for more children, but he had rebuffed her in a brief letter she could still recite by heart.
Marcus Antonius, he of the reddish eyes and curly reddish hair, no more like Caesar than Hercules was like Apollo. Now he had turned his eyes toward Egypt—but not to woo Pharaoh. All he wanted was to fill his war chest with Egypt’s wealth. Well, that would never happen—never!
“Caesarion, it’s time you had some fresh air,” she said with brisk decision. “Sosigenes, I need you. Apollodorus, find Cha’em and bring him back with you. It’s council time.”
When Cleopatra spoke in that tone no one argued, least of all her son, who took himself off at once, whistling for his puppy, a small ratter named Fido.
“Read this,” she said curtly when the council assembled, thrusting the scroll at Cha’em. “All of you, read it.”
“If Antonius brings his legions, he can sack Alexandria and Memphis,” Sosigenes said, handing the scroll to Apollodorus. “Since the plague, no one has the spirit to resist. Nor do we have the numbers to resist. There are many gold statues to melt down.”
Cha’em was the high priest of Ptah, the creator god, and had been a beloved part of Cleopatra’s life since her tenth year. His brown, firm body was wrapped from just below the nipples to mid-calf in a flaring white linen dress, and around his neck he wore the complex array of chains, crosses, roundels, and breastplate proclaiming his position. “Antonius will melt nothing down,” he said firmly. “You will go to Tarsus, Cleopatra, meet him there.”
“Like a chattel? Like a mouse? Like a whipped cur?”
“No, like a mighty sovereign. Like Pharaoh Hatshepsut, so great her successor obliterated her cartouches. Armed with all the wiles and cunning of your ancestors. As Ptolemy Soter was the natural brother of Alexander the Great, you have the blood of many gods in your veins. Not only Isis, Hathor, and Mut, but Amun-Ra on two sides—from the line of the pharaohs and from Alexander the Great, who was Amun-Ra’s son and also a god.”
“I see where Cha’em is going,” said Sosigenes thoughtfully. “This Marcus Antonius is no Caesar, therefore he can be duped. You must awe him into pardoning you. After all, you didn’t aid Cassius, and he can’t prove you did. When this Quintus Dellius arrives, he will try to cow you. But you are Pharaoh, no minion has the power to cow you.”
“A pity that the fleet you sent Antonius and Octavianus was obliged to turn back,” said Apollodorus.
“Oh, what’s done is done!” Cleopatra said impatiently. She sat back in her chair, suddenly pensive. “No one can cow Pharaoh, but…Cha’em, ask Tach’a to look at the lotus petals in her bowl. Antonius might have a use.”
Sosigenes looked startled. “Majesty!”
“Oh, come, Sosigenes, Egypt matters more than any living being! I have be
en a poor ruler, deprived of Osiris time and time again! Do I care what kind of man this Marcus Antonius is? No, I do not! Antonius has Julian blood. If the bowl of Isis says there is enough Julian blood in him, then perhaps I can take more from him than he can from me.”
“I will do it,” said Cha’em, getting to his feet.
“Apollodorus, will Philopator’s river barge sustain a sea voyage to Tarsus at this time of year?”
The lord high chamberlain frowned. “I’m not sure, Majesty.”
“Then bring it out of its shed and send it to sea.”
“Daughter of Amun-Ra, you have many ships!”
“But Philopator built only two ships, and the oceangoing one rotted a hundred years ago. If I am to awe Antonius, I must arrive in Tarsus in a kind of state that no Roman has ever witnessed, not even Caesar.”
To Quintus Dellius, Alexandria was the most wondrous city in the world. The days when Caesar had almost destroyed it were seven years in the past, and Cleopatra had raised it in greater glory than ever. All the mansions down Royal Avenue had been restored, the Hill of Pan towered over the flat city lushly green, the hallowed precinct of Serapis had been rebuilt in the Corinthian mode, and where once siege towers had groaned and lumbered up and down Canopic Avenue, stunning temples and public institutions gave the lie to plague and famine. Indeed, thought Dellius erroneously, gazing at Alexandria from the top of Pan’s hill, for once in his life great Caesar exaggerated the degree of destruction he had wrought.
As yet he hadn’t seen the Queen, who was, a lordly man named Apollodorus had informed him loftily, on a visit to the Delta to see her paper manufactories. So he had been shown his quarters—very sumptuous they were, too—and left largely to his own devices. To Dellius, that didn’t mean simple sightseeing; with him he took a scribe who jotted down notes using a broad stylus on wax tablets.
At the Sema Dellius chuckled with glee. “Write, Lasthenes! ‘The tomb of Alexander the Great plus thirty-odd Ptolemies in a precinct dry-paved with collector’s-quality marble in blue with dark green swirls…. Twenty-eight gold statues, man-sized…. An Apollo by Praxiteles, painted marble…. Four painted marble works by some unidentified master, man-sized…. A painting by Zeuxis of Alexander the Great at Issus…. A painting of Ptolemy Soter by Nicias…. ’ Cease writing. The rest are not so fine.”
At the Serapeum Dellius whinnied with delight. “Write, Lasthenes! ‘A statue of Serapis approximately thirty feet tall, by Bryaxis and painted by Nicias…. An ivory group of the nine Muses by Phidias…. Forty-two gold statues, man-sized….’” He paused to scrape a gold Aphrodite, grimaced. “‘Some, if not all, skinned rather than—ah—solid…. A charioteer and horses in bronze by Myron….’ Cease writing! No, simply add, ‘et cetera, et cetera….’ There are too many more mediocre works to catalogue.”
In the agora Dellius paused before an enormous sculpture of four rearing horses drawing a racing chariot whose driver was a woman—and what a woman! “Write, Lasthenes! ‘Quadriga in bronze purported to be of a female charioteer named Bilistiche…. ’ Cease! There’s nothing else here but modern stuff, excellent of its kind but having no appeal for collectors. Oh, Lasthenes, on!”
And so it went as he cruised through the city, his scribe leaving rolls of wax behind like a moth its droppings. Splendid, splendid! Egypt is rich beyond telling, if what I see in Alexandria is anything to go by. But how do I persuade Marcus Antonius that we’ll get more from selling them as works of art than from melting them down? Think of the tomb of Alexander the Great! he mused—a single block of rock crystal almost as clear as water—how fine it would look inside the temple of Diana in Rome! What a funny little fellow Alexander was! Hands and feet no bigger than a child’s, and what looked like yellow wool atop his head. A wax figure, surely, not the real thing—but you would think that, as he’s a god, they would have made the effigy at least as big as Antonius! There must be enough paving in the Sema to cover the floor of a magnate’s domus in Rome—a hundred talents’ worth, maybe more. The ivory by Phidias—a thousand talents, easily.
The Royal Enclosure was such a maze of palaces that he gave up trying to distinguish one from another, and the gardens seemed to go on forever. Exquisite little coves pocked the shore beyond the harbor, and in the far distance the white marble causeway of the Heptastadion linked Pharos Isle to the mainland. And oh, the lighthouse! The tallest building in the world, taller by far than the Colossus at Rhodes had been. I thought Rome was lovely, burbled Dellius to himself, then I saw Pergamum and deemed it lovelier, but now that I have seen Alexandria, I am stunned, just stunned. Antonius was here about twenty years ago, but I’ve never heard him speak of the place. Too busy sowing wild oats to remember it, I suppose.
The summons to see Queen Cleopatra came the next day, which was just as well; he had concluded his assessment of the city’s value, and Lasthenes had written it out on good paper, two copies.
The first thing he was conscious of was the perfumed air, thick with heady incenses of a kind he had never smelled before; then his visual apparatus took over from his olfactory, and he gaped at walls of gold, a floor of gold, statues of gold, chairs and tables of gold. A second glance informed him that the gold was a tissue-thin overlay, but the room blazed like the sun. Two walls were covered in paintings of peculiar two-dimensional people and plants, rich in colors of every description. Except Tyrian purple. Of that, not a trace.
“All hail the two Pharaohs, Lords of the Two Ladies Upper and Lower Egypt, Lords of the Sedge and Bee, Children of Amun-Ra, Isis and Ptah!” roared the Lord High Chamberlain, drumming his golden staff on the floor, a dull sound that had Dellius revising his opinion about thin tissue. The floor sounded solid.
They sat on two elaborate thrones, the woman on top of the golden dais and the boy one step beneath her. Each was clad in strange raiment made of finely pleated white linen, and each wore a huge headdress of red enamel around a tubular cone of white enamel. About their necks were wide collars of magnificent jewels set in gold, on their arms bracelets, broad girdles of gems around their waists, on their feet golden sandals. Their faces were thick with paint, hers white, the boy’s a rusty red, and their eyes were so hedged in by black lines and colored shapes that they slid, sinister as fanged fish, as surely no human eyes were intended to.
“Quintus Dellius,” said the Queen (Dellius had no idea what the epithet “Pharaoh” meant), “we bid you welcome to Egypt.”
“I come as Imperator Marcus Antonius’s official ambassador,” said Dellius, getting into the swing of things, “with greetings and salutations to the twin thrones of Egypt.”
“How impressive,” said the Queen, eyes sliding eerily.
“Is that all?” asked the boy, whose eyes sparkled more.
“Er—unfortunately not, Your Majesty. The Triumvir Marcus Antonius requires your presence in Tarsus to answer charges.”
“Charges?” asked the boy.
“It is alleged that Egypt aided Gaius Cassius, thereby breaking its status of Friend and Ally of the Roman People.”
“And that is a charge?” Cleopatra asked.
“A very serious one, Your Majesty.”
“Then we will go to Tarsus to answer it in person. You may leave our presence, Quintus Dellius. When we are ready to set out, you will be notified.”
And that was that! No dinner invitations, no reception to introduce him to the court—there must surely be a court! No eastern monarch could function without several hundred sycophants to tell him (or her) how wonderful he (or she) was. But here was Apollodorus firmly ushering him from the room, apparently to be left to his own devices!
“Pharaoh will sail to Tarsus,” Apollodorus said, “therefore you have two choices, Quintus Dellius. You may send your people home overland and travel with them, or you may send your people home overland and sail aboard one of the royal ships.”
Ah! thought Dellius. Somone warned them I was coming. There is a spy in Tarsus. This audience was a sham designed to put me—and A
ntonius—in our places.
“I will sail,” he said haughtily.
“A wise decision.” Apollodorus bowed and walked away, leaving Dellius to storm off at a hasty walk to cool his temper, sorely tried. How dared they? The audience had given him no opportunity to gauge the Queen’s feminine charms or even discover for himself if the boy was really Caesar’s son. They were a pair of painted dolls, stranger than the wooden thing his daughter dragged about the house as if it were human.
The sun was hot; perhaps, thought Dellius, it would do me good to paddle in the wavelets of that delicious cove outside my palace. Dellius couldn’t swim—odd for a Roman—but an ankle-deep paddle was harmless. He descended a series of limestone steps, then perched on a boulder to unbuckle his maroon senatorial shoes.
“Fancy a swim? So do I,” said a cheerful voice—a child’s, but deep.
“It’s the funnest way to get rid of all this muck.”
Startled, Dellius turned to see the boy king, stripped down to a loincloth, his face still painted.
“You swim, I’ll paddle,” said Dellius.
Caesarion waded in as far as his waist and then tipped himself forward to swim, moving fearlessly into deep water. He dived, came up with face a curious mixture of black and rusty red; then under again, up again.
“The paint’s soluble in water, even salt,” the boy said, hip-deep now, scrubbing at his face with both hands.