2

Oh, what bliss! was Caesar’s initial reaction to his sudden removal from the affairs of Asia Province and Cilicia—and from the inevitable entourage of legates, officials, plutocrats and local ethnarchs. The only man of any rank he had brought with him on this voyage to Alexandria was one of his most prized primipilus centurions from the old days in Long-haired Gaul, one Publius Rufrius, whom he had elevated to praetorian legate for his services on the field of Pharsalus. And Rufrius, a silent man, would never have dreamed of invading the General’s privacy.

Men who are doers can also be thinkers, but the thinking is done on the move, in the midst of events, and Caesar, who had a horror of inertia, utilized every moment of every day. When he traveled the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles from one of his provinces to another, he kept at least one secretary with him as he hurtled along in a gig harnessed to four mules, and dictated to the hapless man non-stop. The only times when work was put aside were those spent with a woman, or listening to music; he had a passion for music.

Yet now, on this four-day voyage from Tarsus to Alexandria, he had no secretaries in attendance or musicians to engage his mind; Caesar was very tired. Tired enough to realize that just this once he must rest—think about other things than whereabouts the next war and the next crisis would come.

That even in memory he tended to think in the third person had become a habit of late years, a sign of the immense detachment in his nature, combined with a terrible reluctance to relive the pain. To think in the first person was to conjure up the pain in all its fierceness, bitterness, indelibility. Therefore think of Caesar, not of I. Think of everything with a veil of impersonal narrative drawn over it. If I is not there, nor is the pain.

 

What should have been a pleasant exercise equipping Long-haired Gaul with the trappings of a Roman province had instead been dogged by the growing certainty that Caesar, who had done so much for Rome, was not going to be allowed to don his laurels in peace. What Pompey the Great had gotten away with all his life was not to be accorded to Caesar, thanks to a maleficent little group of senators who called themselves the boni—the “good men”—and had vowed to accord nothing to Caesar: to tear Caesar down and ruin him, strike all his laws from the tablets and send him into permanent exile. Led by Bibulus, with that yapping cur Cato working constantly behind the scenes to stiffen their resolve when it wavered, the boni had made Caesar’s life a perpetual struggle for survival.

Of course he understood every reason why; what he couldn’t manage to grasp was the mind-set of the boni, which seemed to him so utterly stupid that it beggared understanding. No use in telling himself, either, that if only he had relented a little in his compulsion to show up their ridiculous inadequacies, they might perhaps have been less determined to tear him down. Caesar had a temper, and Caesar did not suffer fools gladly.

Bibulus. He had been the start of it, at Lucullus’s siege of Mitylene on the island of Lesbos, thirty-three years ago. Bibulus. So small and so soaked in malice that Caesar had lifted him bodily on to the top of a high closet, laughed at him and made him a figure of fun to their fellows.

Lucullus. Lucullus the commander at Mitylene. Who implied that Caesar had obtained a fleet of ships from the decrepit old King of Bithynia by prostituting himself—an accusation the boni had revived years later and used in the Forum Romanum as part of their political smear campaign. Other men ate feces and violated their daughters, but Caesar had sold his arse to King Nicomedes to obtain a fleet. Only time and some sensible advice from his mother had worn the accusation out from sheer lack of evidence. Lucullus, whose vices were disgusting. Lucullus, the intimate of Lucius Cornelius Sulla.

Sulla, who while Dictator had freed Caesar from that hideous priesthood Gaius Marius had inflicted on him at thirteen years of age—a priesthood that forbade him to don weapons of war or witness death. Sulla had freed him to spite the dead Marius, then sent him east, aged nineteen, mounted on a mule, to serve with Lucullus at Mitylene. Where Caesar had not endeared himself to Lucullus. When the battle came on, Lucullus had thrown Caesar to the arrows, except that Caesar walked out of it with the corona civica, the oak-leaf crown awarded for the most conspicuous bravery, so rarely won that its winner was entitled to wear the crown forever after on every public occasion, and have all and sundry rise to their feet to applaud him. How Bibulus had hated having to rise to his feet and applaud Caesar every time the Senate met! The oak-leaf crown had also entitled Caesar to enter the Senate, though he was only twenty years old; other men had to wait until they turned thirty. However, Caesar had already been a senator; the special priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximus was automatically a senator, and Caesar had been that until Sulla freed him. Which meant that Caesar had been a senator for thirty-eight of his fifty-two years of life.

Caesar’s ambition had been to attain every political office at the correct age for a patrician and at the top of the poll—without bribing. Well, he couldn’t have bribed; the boni would have pounced on him in an instant. He had achieved his ambition, as was obligatory for a Julian directly descended from the goddess Venus through her son, Aeneas. Not to mention a Julian directly descended from the god Mars through his son, Romulus, the founder of Rome. Mars: Ares, Venus: Aphrodite.

Though it was now six nundinae in the past, Caesar could still put himself back in Ephesus gazing at the statue of himself erected in the agora, and at its inscription: GAIUS JULIUS CAESAR, SON OF GAIUS, PONTIFEX MAXIMUS, IMPERATOR, CONSUL FOR THE SECOND TIME, DESCENDED FROM ARES AND APHRODITE, GOD MADE MANIFEST AND COMMON SAVIOR OF MANKIND. Naturally there had been statues of Pompey the Great in every agora between Olisippo and Damascus (all torn down as soon as he lost at Pharsalus), but none that could claim descent from any god, let alone Ares and Aphrodite. Oh, every statue of a Roman conqueror said things like GOD MADE MANIFEST AND COMMON SAVIOR OF MANKIND! To an eastern mentality, standard laudatory stuff. But what truly mattered to Caesar was ancestry, and ancestry was something that Pompey the Gaul from Picenum could never claim; his sole notable ancestor was Picus, the woodpecker totem. Yet there was Caesar’s statue describing his ancestry for all of Ephesus to see. Yes, it mattered.

Caesar scarcely remembered his father, always absent on some duty or other for Gaius Marius, then dead when he bent to lace up his boot. Such an odd way to die, lacing up a boot. Thus had Caesar become paterfamilias at fifteen. It had been Mater, an Aurelia of the Cottae, who was both father and mother—strict, critical, stern, unsympathetic, but stuffed with sensible advice. For senatorial stock, the Julian family had been desperately poor, barely hanging on to enough money to satisfy the censors; Aurelia’s dowry had been an insula apartment building in the Subura, one of Rome’s most notorious stews, and there the family had lived until Caesar got himself elected Pontifex Maximus and could move into the Domus Publica, a minor palace owned by the State.

How Aurelia used to fret over his careless extravagance, his indifference to mountainous debt! And what dire straits insolvency had led him into! Then, when he conquered Long-haired Gaul, he had become even richer than Pompey the Great, if not as rich as Brutus. No Roman was as rich as Brutus, for in his Servilius Caepio guise he had fallen heir to the Gold of Tolosa. Which had made Brutus a very desirable match for Julia until Pompey the Great had fallen in love with her. Caesar had needed Pompey’s political clout more than young Brutus’s money, so…

 

Julia. All of my beloved women are dead, two of them trying to bear sons. Sweetest little Cinnilla, darling Julia, each just over the threshold of adult life. Neither ever caused me a single heartache save in their dying. Unfair, unfair! I close my eyes and there they are: Cinnilla, wife of my youth; Julia, my only daughter. The other Julia, Aunt Julia the wife of that awful old monster, Gaius Marius. Her perfume can still reduce me to tears when I smell it on some unknown woman. My childhood would have been loveless had it not been for her hugs and kisses. Mater, the perfect partisan adversary, was incapable of hugs and kisses for fear that overt love would corrupt me. She thought me too proud, too conscious of my intelligence, too prone to be royal.

But they are all gone, my beloved women. Now I am alone.

No wonder I begin to feel my age.

 

It was on the scales of the gods which one of them had had the harder time succeeding, Caesar or Sulla. Not much in it: a hair, a fibril. They had both been forced to preserve their dignitas—their personal share of public fame, of standing and worth—by marching on Rome. They had both been made Dictator, the sole office above democratic process or future prosecution. The difference between them lay in how they had behaved once appointed Dictator: Sulla had proscribed, filled the empty Treasury by killing wealthy senators and knight-businessmen and confiscating their estates; Caesar had preferred clemency, was forgiving his enemies and allowing the majority of them to keep their property.

The boni had forced Caesar to march on Rome. Consciously, deliberately—even gleefully!—they had thrust Rome into civil war rather than accord Caesar one iota of what they had given to Pompey the Great freely. Namely, the right to stand for the consulship without needing to present himself in person inside the city. The moment a man holding imperium crossed the sacred boundary into the city, he lost that imperium and was liable to prosecution in the courts. And the boni had rigged the courts to convict Caesar of treason the moment he laid down his governor’s imperium in order to seek a second, perfectly legal, consulship. He had petitioned to be allowed to stand in absentia, a reasonable request, but the boni had blocked it and blocked all his overtures to reach an agreement. When all else had failed, he emulated Sulla and marched on Rome. Not to preserve his head; that had never been in danger. The sentence in a court stacked with boni minions would have been permanent exile, a far worse fate than death.

Treason? To pass laws that distributed Rome’s public lands more equitably? Treason? To pass laws that prevented governors from looting their provinces? Treason? To push the boundaries of the Roman world back to a natural frontier along the Rhenus River and thus preserve Italy and Our Sea from the Germans? These were treasonous? In passing these laws, in doing these things, Caesar had betrayed his country?

To the boni, yes, he had. Why? How could that be? Because to the boni such laws and actions were an offense against the mos maiorum—the way custom and tradition said Rome worked. His laws and actions changed what Rome always had been. No matter that the changes were for the common good, for Rome’s security, for the happiness and prosperity not only of all Romans, but of Rome’s provincial subjects too: they were not laws and actions in keeping with the old ways, the ways that had been appropriate for a tiny city athwart the salt routes of central Italy six hundred years ago. Why was it that the boni couldn’t see that the old ways were no longer of use to the sole great power west of the Euphrates River? Rome had inherited the entire western world, yet some of the men who governed her still lived in the time of the infant city-state.

To the boni, change was the enemy, and Caesar was the enemy’s most brilliant servant ever. As Cato used to shout from the rostra in the Forum Romanum, Caesar was the human embodiment of pure evil. All because Caesar’s mind was clear enough and acute enough to know that unless change of the right kind came, Rome would die, molder away to stinking tatters only fit for a leper.

So here on this ship stood Caesar Dictator, the ruler of the world. He, who had never wanted anything more than his due—to be legally elected consul for the second time ten years after his first consulship, as the lex Genucia prescribed. Then, after that second consulship, he had planned to become an elder statesman more sensible and efficacious than that vacillating, timorous mouse, Cicero. Accept a senatorial commission from time to time to lead an army in Rome’s service as only Caesar could lead an army. But to end in ruling the world? That was a tragedy worthy of Aeschylus or Sophocles.

 

Most of Caesar’s foreign service had been spent at the western end of Our Sea—the Spains, the Gauls. His service in the east had been limited to Asia Province and Cilicia, had never led him to Syria or Egypt or the awesome interior of Anatolia.

The closest he had come to Egypt was Cyprus, years before Cato had annexed it; it had been ruled then by Ptolemy the Cyprian, the younger brother of the then ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy Auletes. In Cyprus he had dallied in the arms of a daughter of Mithridates the Great, and bathed in the sea foam from which his ancestress Venus/ Aphrodite had been born. The elder sister of this Mithridatid lady had been Cleopatra Tryphaena, first wife of King Ptolemy Auletes of Egypt, and mother of the present Queen Cleopatra.

He had had dealings with Ptolemy Auletes when he had been senior consul eleven years ago, and thought now of Auletes with wry affection. Auletes had desperately needed to have Rome confirm his tenure of the Egyptian throne, and wanted “Friend and Ally of the Roman People” status as well. Caesar the senior consul had been pleased to legislate him both, in return for six thousand talents of gold. A thousand of those talents had gone to Pompey and a thousand more to Marcus Crassus, but the four thousand left had enabled Caesar to do what the Senate had refused him the funds to do—recruit and equip the necessary number of legions to conquer Gaul and contain the Germans.

Oh, Marcus Crassus! How he had lusted after Egypt! He had deemed it the richest land on the globe, awash with gold and precious stones. Insatiably hungry for wealth, Crassus had been a mine of information about Egypt, which he wanted to annex into the Roman fold. What foiled him were the Eighteen, the upper stratum of Rome’s commercial world, who had seen immediately that Crassus and Crassus alone would benefit from the annexation of Egypt. The Senate might delude itself that it controlled Rome’s government, but the knight-businessmen of the Eighteen senior Centuries did that. Rome was first and foremost an economic entity devoted to business on an international scale.

So in the end Crassus had set out to find his gold mountains and jewel hills in Mesopotamia, and died at Carrhae. The King of the Parthians still possessed seven Roman Eagles captured from Crassus at Carrhae. One day, Caesar knew, he would have to march to Ecbatana and wrest them off the Parthian king. Which would constitute yet another huge change; if Rome absorbed the Kingdom of the Parthians, she would rule East as well as West.

 

The distant view of a sparkling white tower brought him out of his reverie to stand watching raptly as it drew closer. The fabled lighthouse of Pharos, the island which lay across the seaward side of Alexandria’s two harbors. Made of three hexagonal sections, each smaller in girth than the one below, and covered in white marble, the lighthouse stood three hundred feet tall and was a wonder of the world. On its top there burned a perpetual fire reflected far out to sea in all directions by an ingenious arrangement of highly polished marble slabs, though during daylight the fire was almost invisible. Caesar had read all about it, knew that it was those selfsame marble slabs shielded the flames from the winds, but he burned to ascend the six hundred stairs and look.

“It is a good day to enter the Great Harbor,” said his pilot, a Greek mariner who had been to Alexandria many times. “We will have no trouble seeing the channel markers—anchored pieces of cork painted red on the left and yellow on the right.”

Caesar knew all that too, though he tilted his head to gaze at the pilot courteously and listened as if he knew nothing.

“There are three channels—Steganos, Poseideos and Tauros, from left to right as you come in from the sea. Steganos is named after the Hog’s Back Rocks, which lie off the end of Cape Lochias where the palaces are—Poseideos is so named because it looks directly at Poseidon’s temple—and Tauros is named after the Bull’s Horn Rock which lies off Pharos Isle. In a storm—luckily they are rare hereabouts—it is impossible to enter either harbor. We foreign pilots avoid the Eunostus Harbor—drifting sandbanks and shoals everywhere. As you can see,” he chattered on, waving his hand about, “the reefs and rocks abound for miles outside. The lighthouse is a boon for foreign ships, and they say it cost eight hundred gold talents to build.”

Caesar was using his legionaries to row: it was good exercise and kept the men from growing sour and quarrelsome. No Roman soldier liked being separated from terra firma, and most would spend an entire voyage managing not to look over the ship’s side into the water. Who knew what lurked thereunder?

The pilot decided that all of Caesar’s ships would use the Poseideos passage, as today it was the calmest of the three. Standing at the prow alone, Caesar took in the sights. A blaze of colors, of golden statues and chariots atop building pediments, of brilliant whitewash, of trees and palms; but disappointingly flat save for a verdant cone two hundred feet tall and a rocky semi-circle on the shoreline just high enough to form the cavea of a large theater. In older days, he knew, the theater had been a fortress, the Akron, which meant “rock.”

The city to the left of the theater looked enormously richer and grander—the Royal Enclosure, he decided; a vast complex of palaces set on high daises of shallow steps, interspersed with gardens and groves of trees or palms. Beyond the theater citadel the wharves and warehouses began, sweeping in a curve to the right until they met the beginning of the Heptastadion, an almost mile-long white marble causeway that linked Pharos Isle to the land. It was a solid structure except for two large archways under its middle regions, each big enough to permit the passage of a sizable ship between this harbor, the Great Harbor, and the western one, the Eunostus Harbor. Was the Eunostus where Pompey’s ships were moored? No sign of them on this side of the Heptastadion.

Because of the flatness it was impossible to gauge Alexandria’s dimensions beyond its waterfront, but he knew that if the urban sprawl outside the old city walls were included, Alexandria held three million people and was the largest city in the world. Rome held a million within her Servian Walls, Antioch more, but neither could rival Alexandria, a city less than three hundred years old.

Suddenly came a flurry of activity ashore, followed by the appearance of about forty warships, all manned with armed men. Oh, well done! thought Caesar. From peace to war in a quarter of an hour. Some of the warships were massive quinqueremes with great bronze beaks slicing the water at their bows, some were quadriremes and triremes, all beaked, but about half were much smaller, cut too low to the water to venture out to sea—the customs vessels that patrolled the seven mouths of river Nilus, he fancied. They had sighted none on their way south, but that was not to say that sharp eyes atop some lofty Delta tree hadn’t spied this Roman fleet. Which would account for such readiness.

Hmmm. Quite a reception committee. Caesar had the bugler blow a call to arms, then followed that with a series of flags that told his ship’s captains to stand and wait for further orders. He had his servant drape his toga praetexta about him, put his corona civica on his thinning pale gold hair, and donned his maroon senatorial shoes with the silver crescent buckles denoting a senior curule magistrate. Ready, he stood amidships at the break in the rail and watched the rapid approach of an undecked customs boat, a fierce fellow standing in its bows.

“What gives you the right to enter Alexandria, Roman?” the fellow shouted, keeping his vessel at a hailing distance.

“The right of any man who comes in peace to buy water and provisions!” Caesar called, mouth twitching.

“There’s a spring seven miles west of the Eunostus Harbor—you can find water there! We have no provisions to sell, so be on your way, Roman!”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, my good man.”

“Do you want a war? You’re outnumbered already, and these are but a tenth of what we can launch!”

“I have had my fill of wars, but if you insist, then I’ll fight another one,” Caesar said. “You’ve put on a fine show, but there are at least fifty ways I could roll you up, even without any warships. I am Gaius Julius Caesar Dictator.”

The aggressive fellow chewed his lip. “All right, you can go ashore yourself, whoever you are, but your ships stay right here in the harbor roads, understood?”

“I need a pinnace able to hold twenty-five men,” Caesar called.

“It had better be forthcoming at once, my man, or there will be big trouble.”

A grin dawned; the aggressive fellow rapped an order at his oarsmen and the little ship skimmed away.

Publius Rufrius appeared at Caesar’s shoulder, looking very anxious. “They seem to have plenty of marines,” he said, “but the farsighted among us haven’t been able to detect any soldiers ashore, apart from some pretty fellows behind the palace area wall—the Royal Guard, I imagine. What do you intend to do, Caesar?”

“Go ashore with my lictors in the boat they provide.”

“Let me lower our own boats and send some troops with you.”

“Certainly not,” Caesar said calmly. “Your duty is to keep our ships together and out of harm’s way—and stop ineptes like Tiberius Nero from chopping off his foot with his own sword.”

Shortly thereafter a large pinnace manned by sixteen oarsmen hove alongside. Caesar’s eyes roamed across the outfits of his lictors, still led by the faithful Fabius, as they tumbled down to fill up the board seats. Yes, every brass boss on their broad black leather belts was bright and shiny, every crimson tunic was clean and minus creases, every pair of crimson leather caligae properly laced. They cradled their fasces more gently and reverently than a cat carried her kittens; the crisscrossed red leather thongs were exactly as they should be, and the single-headed axes, one to a bundle, glittered wickedly between the thirty red-dyed rods that made up each bundle. Satisfied, Caesar leaped as lightly as a boy into the craft and disposed himself neatly in the stern.

The pinnace headed for a jetty adjacent to the Akron theater but outside the wall of the Royal Enclosure. Here a crowd of what seemed ordinary citizens had collected, waving their fists and shouting threats of murder in Macedonian-accented Greek. When the boat tied up and the lictors climbed out the citizens backed away a little, obviously taken aback at such calmness, such alien but impressive splendor. Once his twenty-four lictors had lined up in a column of twelve pairs, Caesar made light work of getting out himself, then stood arranging the folds of his toga fussily. Brows raised, he stared haughtily at the crowd, still shouting murder.

“Who’s in charge?” he asked it.

No one, it seemed.

“On, Fabius, on!”

His lictors walked into the middle of the crowd, with Caesar strolling in their wake. Just verbal aggression, he thought, smiling aloofly to right and left. Interesting. Hearsay is true, the Alexandrians don’t like Romans. Where is Pompeius Magnus?

A striking gate stood in the Royal Enclosure wall, its pylon sides joined by a square-cut lintel; it was heavily gilded and bright with many colors, strange, flat, two-dimensional scenes and symbols. Here further progress was rendered impossible by a detachment of the Royal Guard. Rufrius was right, they were very pretty in their Greek hoplite armor of linen corselets oversewn with silver metal scales, gaudy purple tunics, high brown boots, silver nose-pieced helmets bearing purple horsehair plumes. They also looked, thought an intrigued Caesar, as if they knew how to conduct themselves in a scrap rather than a battle. Considering the history of the royal House of Ptolemy, probably true. There was always an Alexandrian mob out to change one Ptolemy for another Ptolemy, sex not an issue.

“Halt!” said the captain, a hand on his sword hilt.

Caesar approached through an aisle of lictors and came to an obedient halt. “I would like to see the King and Queen,” he said.

“Well, you can’t see the King and Queen, Roman, and that is that. Now get back on board your ship and sail away.”

“Tell their royal majesties that I am Gaius Julius Caesar.”

The captain made a rude noise. “Ha ha ha! If you’re Caesar, then I’m Taweret, the hippopotamus goddess!” he sneered.

“You ought not to take the names of your gods in vain.”

A blink. “I’m not a filthy Egyptian, I’m an Alexandrian! My god is Serapis. Now go on, be off with you!”

“I am Caesar.”

“Caesar’s in Asia Minor or Anatolia or whatever.”

“Caesar is in Alexandria, and asking very politely to see the King and Queen.”

“Um—I don’t believe you.”

“Um—you had better, Captain, or else the full wrath of Rome will fall upon Alexandria and you won’t have a job. Nor will the King and Queen. Look at my lictors, you fool! If you can count, then count them, you fool! Twenty-four, isn’t that right? And which Roman curule magistrate is preceded by twenty-four lictors? One only—the dictator. Now let me through and escort me to the royal audience chamber,” Caesar said pleasantly.

Beneath his bluster the captain was afraid. What a situation to be in! No one knew better than he that there was no one in the palace who ought to be in the palace—no King, no Queen, no Lord High Chamberlain. Not a soul with the authority to see and deal with this up-himself Roman who did indeed have twenty-four lictors. Could he be Caesar? Surely not! Why would Caesar be in Alexandria, of all places? Yet here definitely stood a Roman with twenty-four lictors, clad in a ludicrous purple-bordered white blanket, with some leaves on his head and a plain cylinder of ivory resting on his bare right forearm between his cupped hand and the crook of his elbow. No sword, no armor, not a soldier in sight.

Macedonian ancestry and a wealthy father had bought the captain his position, but mental acuity was not a part of the package. Yet, yet—he licked his lips. “All right, Roman, to the audience room it is,” he said with a sigh. “Only I don’t know what you’re going to do when you get there, because there’s nobody home.”

“Indeed?” asked Caesar, beginning to walk behind his lictors again, which forced the captain to send a man running on ahead to guide the party. “Where is everybody?”

“At Pelusium.”

“I see.”

Though it was summer, the day was perfect; low humidity, a cool breeze to fan the brow, a caressing balminess that carried a hint of perfume from gloriously flowering trees, nodding bell blooms of some strange plant below them. The paving was brown-streaked fawn marble and polished to a mirror finish—slippery as ice when it rains. Or does it rain in Alexandria? Perhaps it doesn’t.

“A delightful climate,” he remarked.

“The best in the world,” said the captain, sure of it.

“Am I the first Roman you’ve seen here lately?”

“The first announcing he’s higher than a governor, at any rate. The last Romans we had here were when Gnaeus Pompeius came last year to pinch warships and wheat off the Queen.” He chuckled reminiscently. “Rude sort of young chap, wouldn’t take no for an answer, though her majesty told him the country’s in famine. Oh, she diddled him! Filled up sixty cargo ships with dates.”

“Dates?”

“Dates. He sailed off thinking the holds were full of wheat.”

“Dear me, poor young Gnaeus Pompeius. I imagine his father was not at all pleased, though Lentulus Crus might have been—Epicures love a new taste thrill.”

The audience chamber stood in a building of its own, if size was anything to go by; perhaps an anteroom or two for the visiting ambassadors to rest in, but certainly not live in. It was the same place to which Gnaeus Pompey had been conducted: a huge bare hall with a polished marble floor in complicated patterns of different colors; walls either filled with those bright paintings of two-dimensional people and plants, or covered in gold leaf; a purple marble dais with two thrones upon it, one on the top tier in figured ebony and gilt, and a similar but smaller one on the next tier down; otherwise, not a stick of furniture to be seen.

Leaving Caesar and his lictors alone in the room, the captain hurried off, presumably to see who he could find to receive them.

Eyes meeting Fabius’s, Caesar grinned. “What a situation!”

“We’ve been in worse situations than this, Caesar.”

“Don’t tempt Fortuna, Fabius. I wonder what it feels like to sit upon a throne?”

Caesar bounded up the steps of the dais and sat gingerly in the magnificent chair on top, its gold, jewel-encrusted detail quite extraordinary at close quarters. What looked like an eye, except that its outer margin was extended and swelled into an odd, triangular tear; a cobra head; a scarab beetle; leopard paws; human feet; a peculiar key; stick-like symbols.

“Is it comfortable, Caesar?”

“No chair having a back can be comfortable for a man in a toga, which is why we sit in curule chairs,” Caesar answered. He relaxed and closed his eyes. “Camp on the floor,” he said after a while; “it seems we’re in for a long wait.”

Two of the younger lictors sighed in relief, but Fabius shook his head, scandalized. “Can’t do that, Caesar. It would look sloppy if someone came in and caught us.”

As there was no water clock, it was difficult to measure time, but to the younger lictors it seemed like hours that they stood in a semi-circle with their fasces grounded delicately between their feet, axed upper ends held between their hands. Caesar continued to sleep—one of his famous cat naps.

“Hey, get off the throne!” said a young female voice.

Caesar opened one eye, but didn’t move.

“I said, get off the throne!”

“Who is it commands me?” Caesar asked.

“The royal Princess Arsinoë of the House of Ptolemy!”

That straightened Caesar, though he didn’t get up, just looked with both eyes open at the speaker, now standing at the foot of the dais. Behind her stood a little boy and two men.

About fifteen years old, Caesar judged: a busty, strapping girl with masses of golden hair, blue eyes, and a face that ought to have been pretty—it was regular enough of feature—but was not. Thanks to its expression, Caesar decided—arrogant, angry, quaintly authoritarian. She was clad in Greek style, but her robe was genuine Tyrian purple, a color so dark it seemed black, yet with the slightest movement was shot with highlights of plum and crimson. In her hair she wore a gem-studded coronet, around her neck a fabulous jeweled collar, bracelets galore on her bare arms; her earlobes were unduly long, probably due to the weight of the pendants dangling from them.

The little boy looked to be about nine or ten and was very like Princess Arsinoë—same face, same coloring, same build. He too wore Tyrian purple, a tunic and Greek chlamys cloak.

Both the men were clearly attendants of some kind, but the one standing protectively beside the boy was a feeble creature, whereas the other, closer to Arsinoë, was a person to be reckoned with. Tall, of splendid physique, quite as fair as the royal children, he had intelligent, calculating eyes and a firm mouth.

“And where do we go from here?” Caesar asked calmly.

“Nowhere until you prostrate yourself before me! In the absence of the King, I am regnant in Alexandria, and I command you to come down from there and abase yourself!” said Arsinoë. She looked at the lictors balefully. “All of you, on the floor!”

“Neither Caesar nor his lictors obey the commands of petty princelings,” Caesar said gently. “In the absence of the King, I am regnant in Alexandria by virtue of the terms of the wills of Ptolemy Alexander and your father Auletes.” He leaned forward. “Now, Princess, let us get down to business—and don’t look like a child in need of a spanking, or I might have one of my lictors pluck a rod from his bundle and administer it.” His gaze went to Arsinoë’s impassive attendant. “And you are?” he asked.

“Ganymedes, eunuch tutor and guardian of my Princess.”

“Well, Ganymedes, you look like a man of good sense, so I’ll address my comments to you.”

“You will address me!” Arsinoë yelled, face mottling. “And get down off the throne! Abase yourself!”

“Hold your tongue!” Caesar snapped. “Ganymedes, I require suitable accommodation for myself and my senior staff inside the Royal Enclosure, and sufficient fresh bread, green vegetables, oil, wine, eggs and water for my troops, who will remain on board my ships until I’ve discovered what’s going on here. It is a sad state of affairs when the Dictator of Rome arrives anywhere on the surface of this globe to unnecessary aggression and pointless inhospitality. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, great Caesar.”

“Good!” Caesar rose to his feet and walked down the steps. “The first thing you can do for me, however, is remove these two obnoxious children.”

“I cannot do that, Caesar, if you want me to remain here.”

“Why?”

“Dolichos is a whole man. He may remove Prince Ptolemy Philadelphus, but the Princess Arsinoë may not be in the company of a whole man unchaperoned.”

“Are there any more in your castrated state?” Caesar asked, mouth twitching; Alexandria was proving amusing.

“Of course.”

“Then go with the children, deposit Princess Arsinoë with some other eunuch, and return to me immediately.”

Princess Arsinoë, temporarily squashed by Caesar’s tone when he told her to hold her tongue, was getting ready to liberate it, but Ganymedes took her firmly by the shoulder and led her out, the boy Philadelphus and his tutor hurrying ahead.

“What a situation!” said Caesar to Fabius yet again.

“My hand itched to remove that rod, Caesar.”

“So did mine.” The Great Man sighed. “Still, from what one hears, the Ptolemaic brood is rather singular. At least Ganymedes is rational—but then, he’s not royal.”

“I thought eunuchs were fat and effeminate.”

“I believe that those who are castrated as small boys are, but if the testicles are not enucleated until after puberty has set in, that may not be the case.”

Ganymedes returned quickly, a smile pasted to his face. “I am at your service, great Caesar.”

“Ordinary Caesar will do nicely, thank you. Now why is the court at Pelusium?”

The eunuch looked surprised. “To fight the war,” he said.

“What war?”

“The war between the King and Queen, Caesar. Earlier in the year, famine forced the price of food up, and Alexandria blamed the Queen—the King is but thirteen years old—and rebelled.” Ganymedes looked grim. “There is no peace here, you see. The King is controlled by his tutor, Theodotus, and the Lord High Chamberlain, Potheinus. They’re ambitious men, you understand. Queen Cleopatra is their enemy.”

“I take it that she fled?”

“Yes, but south to Memphis and the Egyptian priests. The Queen is also Pharaoh.”

“Isn’t every Ptolemy on the throne also Pharaoh?”

“No, Caesar, far from it. The children’s father, Auletes, was never Pharaoh. He refused to placate the Egyptian priests, who have great influence over the native Egyptians of Nilus. Whereas Queen Cleopatra spent some of her childhood in Memphis with the priests. When she came to the throne they anointed her Pharaoh. King and Queen are Alexandrian titles, they have no weight at all in Egypt of the Nilus, which is proper Egypt.”

“So Queen Cleopatra, who is Pharaoh, fled to Memphis and the priests. Why not abroad from Alexandria, like her father when he was spilled from the throne?” Caesar asked, fascinated.

“When a Ptolemy flees abroad from Alexandria, he or she must depart penniless. There is no great treasure in Alexandria. The treasure vaults lie in Memphis, under the authority of the priests. So unless the Ptolemy is also Pharaoh—no money. Queen Cleopatra was given money in Memphis, and went to Syria to recruit an army. She has but recently returned with that army, and has gone to earth on the northern flank of Mount Casius outside Pelusium.”

Caesar frowned. “A mountain outside Pelusium? I didn’t think there were any until Sinai.”

“A very big sandhill, Caesar.”

“Ahah. Continue, please.”

“General Achillas brought the King’s army to the southern side of the mount, and is camped there. Not long ago, Potheinus and Theodotus accompanied the King and the war fleet to Pelusium. A battle was expected when I last heard,” said Ganymedes.

“So Egypt—or rather, Alexandria—is in the midst of a civil war,” said Caesar, beginning to pace. “Has there been no sign of Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in the vicinity?”

“Not that I know of, Caesar. Certainly he is not in Alexandria. Is it true, then, that you defeated him in Thessaly?”

“Oh, yes. Decisively. He left Cyprus some days ago, I had believed bound for Egypt.” No, Caesar thought, watching Ganymedes, this man is genuinely ignorant of the whereabouts of my old friend and adversary. Where is Pompeius, then? Did he perhaps utilize that spring seven miles west of the Eunostus Harbor and sail on to Cyrenaica without stopping? He stopped pacing. “Very well, it seems I stand in loco parentis for these ridiculous children and their squabble. Therefore you will send two couriers to Pelusium, one to see King Ptolemy, the other to see Queen Cleopatra. I require both sovereigns to present themselves here to me in their own palace. Is that clear?”

Ganymedes looked uncomfortable. “I foresee no difficulties with the King, Caesar, but it may not be possible for the Queen to come to Alexandria. One sight of her, and the mob will lynch her.” He lifted his lip in contempt. “The favorite sport of the Alexandrian mob is tearing an unpopular ruler to pieces with their bare hands. In the agora, which is very spacious.” He coughed. “I must add, Caesar, that for your own protection you would be wise to confine yourself and your senior staff to the Royal Enclosure. At the moment the mob is ruling.”

“Do what you can, Ganymedes. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to be conducted to my quarters. And you will make sure that my soldiers are properly victualed. Naturally I will pay for every drop and crumb. Even at inflated famine prices.”

*     *     *     

“So,” said Caesar to Rufrius over a late dinner in his new quarters, “I am no closer to learning the fate of poor Magnus, but I fear for him. Ganymedes was in ignorance, though I don’t trust the fellow. If another eunuch, Potheinus, can aspire to rule through a juvenile Ptolemy, why not Ganymedes with Arsinoë?”

“They’ve certainly treated us shabbily,” Rufrius said as he looked about. “In palace terms, they’ve put us in a shack.” He grinned. “I keep him away from you, Caesar, but Tiberius Nero is most put out at having to share with another military tribune—not to mention that he expected to dine with you.”

“Why on earth would he want to dine with one of the least Epicurean noblemen in Rome? Oh, the gods preserve me from these insufferable aristocrats!”

Just as if, thought Rufrius, inwardly smiling, he were not himself insufferable or aristocratic. But the insufferable part of him isn’t connected to his antique origins. What he can’t say to me without insulting my birth is that he loathes having to employ an incompetent like Nero for no other reason than that he is a patrician Claudius. The obligations of nobility irk him.

 

For two more days the Roman fleet remained at anchor with the infantry still on board; pressured, the Interpreter had allowed the German cavalry to be ferried ashore with their horses and put into a good grazing camp outside the crumbling city walls on Lake Mareotis. The locals gave these extraordinary-looking barbarians a wide berth; they went almost naked, were tattooed, and wore their never-cut hair in a tortuous system of knots and rolls on top of their heads. Besides, they spoke not a word of Greek.

Ignoring Ganymedes’s warning to remain within the Royal Enclosure, Caesar poked and pried everywhere during those two days, escorted only by his lictors, indifferent to danger. In Alexandria, he discovered, lay marvels worthy of his personal attention—the lighthouse, the Heptastadion, the water and drainage systems, the naval dispositions, the buildings, the people.

The city itself occupied a narrow spit of limestone between the sea and a vast freshwater lake; less than two miles separated the sea from this boundless source of sweet water, eminently drinkable even at this summer season. Asking questions revealed that Lake Mareotis was fed from canals that linked it to the big westernmost mouth of Nilus, the Canopic Nilus; because Nilus rose in high summer rather than in early spring, Mareotis avoided the usual concomitants of river-fed lakes—stagnation, mosquitoes. One canal, twenty miles long, was wide enough to provide two lanes for barges and customs ships, and was always jammed with traffic.

A different, single canal came off Lake Mareotis at the Moon Gate end of the city; it terminated at the western harbor, though its waters did not intermingle with the sea, so any current in it was diffusive, not propulsive. A series of big bronze sluice gates were inserted in its walls, raised and lowered by a system of pulleys from ox-driven capstans. The city’s water supply was drawn out of the canal through gently sloping pipes, each district’s inlet equipped with a sluice gate. Other sluice gates spanned the canal from side to side and could be closed off to permit the dredging of silt from its bottom.

 

One of the first things Caesar did was to climb the verdant cone called the Paneium, an artificial hill built of stones tamped down with earth and planted with lush gardens, shrubs, low palms. A paved spiral road wound up to its apex, and man-made streamlets with occasional waterfalls tumbled to a drain at its base. From the apex it was possible to see for miles, everything was so flat.

The city was laid out on a rectangular grid and had no back lanes or alleys. Every street was wide, but two were far wider than any roads Caesar had ever seen—over a hundred feet from gutter to gutter. Canopic Avenue ran from the Sun Gate at the eastern end of the city to the Moon Gate at the western end; Royal Avenue ran from the gate in the Royal Enclosure wall south to the old walls. The world-famous museum library lay inside the Royal Enclosure, but the other major public buildings were situated at the intersection of the two avenues—the agora, the gymnasium, the courts of justice, the Paneium or Hill of Pan.

 

 

Rome’s districts were logical, in that they were named after the hills upon which they sprawled, or the valleys between; in flat Alexandria the persnickety Macedonian founders had divided the place up into five arbitrary districts—Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon. The Royal Enclosure lay within Beta District; east of it was not Gamma, but Delta District, the home of hundreds of thousands of Jews who spilled south into Epsilon, which they shared with many thousands of Metics—foreigners with rights of residence rather than citizenship. Alpha was the commercial area of the two harbors, and Gamma, in the southwest, was also known as Rhakotis, the name of the village pre-dating Alexandria’s genesis.

Most who lived inside the old walls were at best modestly well off. The wealthiest in the population, all pure Macedonians, lived in beautiful garden suburbs west of the Moon Gate outside the walls, scattered between a vast necropolis set in parklands. Wealthy foreigners like Roman merchants lived outside the walls east of the Sun Gate. Stratification, thought Caesar: no matter where I look, I see stratification.

Social stratification was extreme and absolutely rigid—no New Men for Alexandria!

In this place of three million souls, only three hundred thousand held the Alexandrian citizenship: these were the pure-blood descendants of the original Macedonian army settlers, and they guarded their privileges ruthlessly. The Interpreter, who was the highest official, had to be of pure Macedonian stock; so did the Recorder, the Chief Judge, the Accountant, the Night Commander. In fact, all the highest offices, commercial as well as public, belonged to the Macedonians. The layers beneath were stepped by blood too: hybrid Macedonian Greeks, then plain Greeks, then the Jews and Metics, with the hybrid Egyptian Greeks (who were a servant class) at the very bottom. One of the reasons for this, Caesar learned, lay in the food supply. Alexandria did not publicly subsidize food for its poor, as Rome had always done, and was doing more and more. No doubt this was why the Alexandrians were so aggressive, and why the mob had such power. Panem et circenses is an excellent policy. Keep the poor fed and entertained, and they do not rise. How blind these eastern rulers are!

Two social facts fascinated Caesar most of all. One was that native Egyptians were forbidden to live in Alexandria. The other was even more bizarre. A highborn Macedonian father would deliberately castrate his cleverest, most promising son in order to qualify the adolescent boy for employment in the palace, where he had a chance to rise to the highest job of all, Lord High Chamberlain. To have a relative in the palace was tantamount to having the ear of the King and Queen. Much though the Alexandrians despise Egyptians, thought Caesar, they have absorbed so many Egyptian customs that what exists here today is the most curious muddle of East and West anywhere in the world.

 

Not all his time was devoted to such musings. Ignoring the growls and menacing faces, Caesar inspected the city’s military installations minutely, storing every fact in his phenomenal memory. One never knew when one might need these facts. Defense was maritime, not terrestrial. Clearly modern Alexandria feared no land invasions; invasion if it came would be from the sea, and undoubtedly Roman.

Tucked in the bottom eastern corner of the western, Eunostus, harbor, was the Cibotus—the Box—a heavily fortified inner harbor fenced off by walls as thick as those at Rhodes, its entrance barred by formidably massive chains. It was surrounded by ship sheds and bristled with artillery; room for fifty or sixty big war galleys in the sheds, Caesar judged. Not that the Cibotus sheds were the only ones; more lay around Eunostus itself.

 

All of which made Alexandria unique, a stunning blend of physical beauty and ingenious functional engineering. But it was not perfect. It had its fair share of slums and crime, the wide streets in the poorer Gamma-Rhakotis and Epsilon Districts were piled high with rotting refuse and animal corpses, and once away from the two avenues there was a dearth of public fountains and communal latrines. And absolutely no bathhouses.

There was also a local insanity. Birds! Ibises. Of two kinds, the white and the black, they were sacred. To kill one was unthinkable; if an ignorant foreigner did, he was dragged off to the agora to be torn into little pieces. Well aware of their sacrosanctity, the ibises exploited it shamelessly.

At the time Caesar arrived they were in residence, for they fled the summer rains in far off Aethiopia. This meant that they could fly superbly, but once in Alexandria, they didn’t. Instead, they stood around in literal thousands upon thousands all over those wonderful roads, crowding the main intersections so densely that they looked like an extra layer of paving. Their copious, rather liquid droppings fouled every inch of any surface whereon people walked, and for all its civic pride, Alexandria seemed to employ no one to wash the mounting excreta away. Probably when the birds flew back to Aethiopia the city engaged in a massive cleanup, but in the meantime—! Traffic weaved and wobbled; carts had to hire an extra man to walk ahead and push the creatures aside. Within the Royal Enclosure a small army of slaves gathered up the ibises tenderly, put them into cages and then casually emptied the cages into the streets outside.

About the most one could say for them was that they gobbled up cockroaches, spiders, scorpions, beetles and snails, and picked through the scraps tossed out by fishmongers, butchers and pasty makers. Otherwise, thought Caesar, secretly grinning as his lictors cleared a path for him through the ibises, they are the biggest nuisances in all creation.

 

On the third day a lone “barge” arrived in the Great Harbor and was skillfully rowed to the Royal Harbor, a small enclosed area abutting on to Cape Lochias. Rufrius had sent word of its advent, so Caesar strolled to a vantage point from which he could see disembarkation perfectly, yet was not in close enough proximity to attract attention.

The barge was a floating pleasure palace of enormous size, all gold and purple; a huge, temple-like cabin stood abaft the mast, complete with a pillared portico.

A series of litters came down to the pier, each carried by six men matched for height and appearance; the King’s litter was gilded, gem-encrusted, curtained with Tyrian purple and adorned with a plume of fluffy purple feathers on each corner of its faience-tiled roof. His majesty was carried on interlocked arms from the temple-cabin to the litter and inserted inside with exquisite care; a fair, pouting, pretty lad just on the cusp of puberty. After the King came a tall fellow with mouse-brown curls and a finely featured, handsome face; Potheinus the Lord High Chamberlain, Caesar decided, for he wore purple, a nice shade somewhere between Tyrian and the gaudy magenta of the Royal Guard, and a heavy gold necklace of peculiar design. Then came a slight, effeminate and elderly man in a purple slightly inferior to Potheinus’s; his carmined lips and rouged cheeks sat garishly in a petulant face. Theodotus the tutor. Always good to see the opposition before they see you.

Caesar hurried back to his paltry accommodation and waited for the royal summons.

It came, but not for some time. Back to the audience chamber behind his lictors, to find the King seated not on the top throne but on the lower one. Interesting. His elder sister was absent, yet he did not feel qualified to occupy her chair. He wore the garb of Macedonian kings: Tyrian purple tunic, chlamys cloak, and a wide-brimmed Tyrian purple hat with the white ribbon of the diadem tied around its tall crown like a band.

The audience was extremely formal and very short. The King spoke as if by rote with his eyes fixed on Theodotus, after which Caesar found himself dismissed without an opportunity to state his business.

Potheinus followed him out.

“A word in private, great Caesar?”

“Caesar will do. My place or yours?”

“Mine, I think. I must apologize,” Potheinus went on in a oily voice as he walked beside Caesar and behind the lictors, “for the standard of your accommodation. A silly insult. That idiot Ganymedes should have put you in the guest palace.”

“Ganymedes, an idiot? I didn’t think so,” Caesar said.

“He has ideas above his station.”

“Ah.”

Potheinus possessed his own palace among that profusion of buildings, situated on Cape Lochias itself and having a fine view not of the Great Harbor but of the sea. Had the Lord High Chamberlain wished it, he might have walked out his back door and down to a little cove wherein he could paddle his pampered feet.

“Very nice,” Caesar said, sitting in a backless chair.

“May I offer you the wine of Samos or Chios?”

“Neither, thank you.”

“Spring water, then? Herbal tea?”

“No.”

Potheinus seated himself opposite, his inscrutable grey eyes on Caesar. He may not be a king, but he bears himself like one. The face is weathered yet still beautiful, and the eyes are unsettling. Dauntingly intelligent eyes, cooler even than mine. He rules his feelings absolutely, and he is politic. If necessary, he will sit here all day waiting for me to make the opening move. Which suits me. I don’t mind moving first, it is my advantage.

“What brings you to Alexandria, Caesar?”

“Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus. I’m looking for him.”

Potheinus blinked, genuinely surprised. “Looking in person for a defeated enemy? Surely your legates could do that.”

“Surely they could, but I like to do my opponents honor, and there is no honor in a legate, Potheinus. Pompeius Magnus and I have been friends and colleagues these twenty-three years, and at one time he was my son-in-law. That we ended in choosing opposite sides in a civil war can’t alter what we are to each other.”

Potheinus’s face was losing color; he lifted his priceless goblet to his lips and drank as if his mouth had gone dry. “You may have been friends, but Pompeius Magnus is now your enemy.”

“Enemies come from alien cultures, Lord High Chamberlain, not from among the ranks of one’s own people. Adversary is a better word—a word allowing all the latitude things in common predicate. No, I don’t pursue Pompeius Magnus as an avenger,” Caesar said, not moving an inch, though somewhere inside him a cold lump was forming. “My policy,” he went on levelly, “has been clemency, and my policy will continue to be clemency. I’ve come to find Pompeius Magnus myself so that I can extend my hand to him in true friendship. It would be a poor thing to enter a Senate containing none but sycophants.”

“I do not understand,” Potheinus said, skin quite bleached. No, no, I cannot tell this man what we did in Pelusium! We mistook the matter, we have done the unforgivable. The fate of Pompeius Magnus will have to remain our secret. Theodotus! I must find an excuse to leave here and head him off!

But it was not to be. Theodotus bustled in like a housewife, followed closely by two kilt-clad slaves bearing a big jar between them. They put it down and stood stiffly.

All Theodotus’s attention was fixed on Caesar, whom he eyed in obvious appreciation. “The great Gaius Julius Caesar!” he fluted. “Oh, what an honor! I am Theodotus, tutor to his royal majesty, and I bring you a gift, great Caesar.” He tittered. “In fact, I bring you two gifts!”

No answer from Caesar, who sat very straight, his right hand holding the ivory rod of his imperium just as it had all along, his left hand cuddling the folds of toga over his shoulder. The generous, slightly uptilted mouth, sensuous and humorous, had gone thin, and the eyes were two black-ringed pellets of ice.

Blithely unaware, Theodotus stepped forward and held out his hand; Caesar laid the rod in his lap and extended his to take the seal ring. A lion’s head, and around the outside of the mane the letters CN POMP MAG. He didn’t look at it, just closed his fingers on it until they clenched it, white-knuckled.

One of the servants lifted the jar’s lid while the other put a hand inside, fiddled for a moment, then lifted out Pompey’s head by its thatch of silver hair, gone dull from the natron, trickling steadily into the jar.

The face looked very peaceful, lids lowered over those vivid blue eyes that used to gaze around the Senate so innocently, so much the eyes of the spoiled child he was. The snub nose, the thin small mouth, the dented chin, the round Gallic face. It was all there, all perfectly preserved, though the slightly freckled skin had gone grey and leathery.

“Who did this?” Caesar asked of Potheinus.

“Why, we did, of course!” Theodotus cried, and looked impish, delighted with himself. “As I said to Potheinus, dead men do not bite. We have removed your enemy, great Caesar. In fact, we have removed two of your enemies! The day after this one came, the great Lentulus Crus arrived, so we killed him too. Though we didn’t think you’d want to see his head.”

Caesar rose without a word and strode to the door, opened it and snapped, “Fabius! Cornelius!”

The two lictors entered immediately; only the rigorous training of years disciplined their reaction as they beheld the face of Pompey the Great, running natron.

“A towel!” Caesar demanded of Theodotus, and took the head from the servant who held it. “Get me a towel! A purple one!”

But it was Potheinus who moved, clicked his fingers at a bewildered slave. “You heard. A purple towel. At once.”

Finally realizing that the great Caesar was not pleased, Theodotus gaped at him in astonishment. “But, Caesar, we have eliminated your enemy!” he cried. “Dead men do not bite.”

Caesar spoke softly. “Keep your tongue between your teeth, you mincing pansy! What do you know of Rome or Romans? What kind of men are you, to do this?” He looked down at the dripping head, his eyes tearless. “Oh, Magnus, would that our destinies were reversed!” He turned to Potheinus. “Where is his body?”

The damage was done; Potheinus decided to brazen it out. “I have no idea. It was left on the beach at Pelusium.”

“Then find it, you castrated freak, or I’ll tear Alexandria down around your empty scrotum! No wonder this place festers, when creatures like you run things! You don’t deserve to live, either of you—nor does your puppet king! Tread softly, or count your days.”

“I would remind you, Caesar, that you are our guest—and that you do not have sufficient troops with you to attack us.”

“I am not your guest, I am your sovereign. Rome’s Vestal Virgins still hold the will of the last legitimate king of Egypt, Ptolemy XI, and I hold the will of the late King Ptolemy XII,” Caesar said. “Therefore I will assume the reins of government until I have adjudicated in this present situation, and whatever I decide will be adhered to. Move my belongings to the guest palace, and bring my infantry ashore today. I want them in a good camp inside the city walls. Do you think I can’t level Alexandria to the ground with what men I have? Think again!”

The towel arrived, Tyrian purple. Fabius took it and spread it between his hands in a cradle. Caesar kissed Pompey’s brow, then put the head in the towel and reverently wrapped it up. When Fabius went to take it, Caesar handed him the ivory rod of imperium instead.

“No, I will carry him.” At the door he turned. “I want a small pyre constructed in the grounds outside the guest palace. I want frankincense and myrrh to fuel it. And find the body!”

 

He wept for hours, hugging the Tyrian purple bundle, and no one dared to disturb him. Finally Rufrius came bearing a lamp—it was very dark—to tell him that everything had been moved to the guest palace, so please would he come too? He had to help Caesar up as if he were an old man and guide his footsteps through the grounds, lit with oil lamps inside Alexandrian glass globes.

“Oh, Rufrius! That it should have come to this!”

“I know, Caesar. But there is a little good news. A man has arrived from Pelusium, Pompeius Magnus’s freedman Philip. He has the ashes of the body, which he burned on the beach after the assassins rowed away. Because he carried Pompeius Magnus’s purse, he was able to travel across the Delta very quickly.”

So from Philip Caesar heard the full story of what had happened in Pelusium, and of the flight of Cornelia Metella and Sextus, Pompey’s wife and younger son.

In the morning, with Caesar officiating, they burned Pompey the Great’s head and added its ashes to the rest, enclosed them in a solid gold urn encrusted with red carbunculi and ocean pearls. Then Caesar put Philip and his poor dull slave aboard a merchantman heading west, bearing the ashes of Pompey the Great home to his widow. The ring, also entrusted to Philip, was to be sent on to the elder son, Gnaeus Pompey, wherever he might be.

 

All that done with, Caesar sent a servant to rent twenty-six horses and set out to inspect his dispositions. Which were, he soon discovered, disgraceful. Potheinus had located his 3,200 legionaries in Rhakotis on some disused land haunted by cats (also sacred animals) hunting myriad rats and mice, and, of course, already occupied by ibises. The local people, all poor hybrid Egyptian Greeks, were bitterly resentful both of the Roman camp in their midst and of the fact that famine-dogged Alexandria now had many extra mouths to feed. The Romans could afford to buy food, no matter what its price, but its price for the poor would spiral yet again because it had to stretch further.

“Well, we build a purely temporary wall and palisade around this camp, but we make it look as if we think it’s permanent. The natives are nasty, very nasty. Why? Because they’re hungry! On an income of twelve thousand gold talents a year, their wretched rulers don’t subsidize their food. This whole place is a perfect example of why Rome threw out her kings!” Caesar snorted, huffed. “Post sentries every few feet, Rufrius, and tell the men to add roast ibis to their diet. I piss on Alexandria’s sacred birds!”

Oh, he is in a temper! thought Rufrius wryly. How could those fools in the palace murder Pompeius Magnus and think to please Caesar? He’s wild with grief inside, and it won’t take much to push him into making a worse mess of Alexandria than he did of Uxellodunum or Cenabum. What’s more, the men haven’t been ashore a day yet, and they’re already lusting to kill the locals. There’s a mood building here, and a disaster brewing.

Since it wasn’t his place to voice any of this, he simply rode around with the Great Man and listened to him fulminate. It is more than grief putting him out so dreadfully. Those fools in the palace stripped him of the chance to act mercifully, draw Magnus back into our Roman fold. Magnus would have accepted. Cato, no, never. But Magnus, yes, always.

An inspection of the cavalry camp only made Caesar crankier. The Ubii Germans weren’t surrounded by the poor and there was plenty of good grazing, a clean lake to drink from, but there was no way that Caesar could use them in conjunction with his infantry, thanks to an impenetrably creepered swamp lying between them and the western end of the city, where the infantry lay. Potheinus, Ganymedes and the Interpreter had been cunning. But why, Rufrius asked himself in despair, do people irritate him? Every obstacle they throw in his path only makes him more determined—can they really delude themselves that they’re cleverer than Caesar? All those years in Gaul have endowed him with a strategic legacy so formidable that he’s equal to anything. But hold your tongue, Rufrius, ride around with him and watch him plan a campaign he may never need to conduct. But if he has to conduct it, he’ll be ready.

Caesar dismissed his lictors and sent Rufrius back to the Rhakotis camp armed with certain orders, then guided his horse up one street and down another, slowly enough to let the ibises stalk out from under the animal’s hooves, his eyes everywhere. At the intersection of Canopic and Royal Avenues he invaded the agora, a vast open space surrounded on all four sides by a wide arcade with a dark red back wall, and fronted by blue-painted Doric pillars. Next he went to the gymnasium, almost as large, similarly arcaded, but having hot baths, cold baths, an athletic track and exercise rings. In each he sat the horse oblivious to the glares of Alexandrians and ibises, then dismounted to examine the ceilings of the covered arcades and walkways. At the courts of justice he strolled inside, it seemed fascinated by the ceilings of its lofty rooms. From there he rode to the temple of Poseidon, thence to the Serapeum in Rhakotis, the latter a sanctuary to Serapis gifted with a huge temple amid gardens and other, smaller temples. Then it was off to the waterfront and its docks, its warehouses; the emporium, a gigantic trading center, received quite a lot of his attention, as did piers, jetties, quays curbed with big square wooden beams. Other temples and large public buildings along Canopic Avenue also interested him, particularly their ceilings, all held up by massive wooden beams. Finally he rode back down Royal Avenue to the German camp, there to issue instructions about fortifications.

“I’m sending you two thousand soldiers as additional labor to start dismantling the old city walls,” he told his legate. “You’ll use the stones to build two new walls, each commencing at the back of the first house on either side of Royal Avenue and fanning outward until you reach the lake. Four hundred feet wide at the Royal Avenue end, but five thousand feet wide at the lakefront. That will bring you hard against the swamp on the west, while your eastern wall will bisect the road to the ship canal between the lake and the Canopic Nilus. The western wall you’ll make thirty feet high—the swamp will provide additional defense. The eastern wall you’ll make twenty feet high, with a fifteen-foot-deep ditch outside mined with stimuli, and a water-filled moat beyond that. Leave a gap in the eastern wall to let traffic to the ship canal keep flowing, but have stones ready to close the gap the moment I so order you. Both walls are to have a watchtower every hundred feet, and I’ll send you ballistas to put on top of the eastern wall.”

Poker-faced, the legate listened, then went to find Arminius, the Ubian chieftain. Germans weren’t much use building walls, job would be to forage and stockpile fodder for the horses. They could also find wood for the fire-hardened, pointed stakes called stimuli, but their and start weaving withies for the breastworks—wonderful wicker weavers, Germans!

Back down Royal Avenue rode Caesar to the Royal Enclosure and an inspection of its twenty-foot-high wall, which ran from the crags of the Akron theater in a line that returned to the sea on the far side of Cape Lochias. Not a watchtower anywhere, and no real grasp of the defensive nature of a wall; far more effort and care had gone into its decoration. No wonder the mob stormed the Royal Enclosure so often! This wouldn’t keep an enterprising dwarf outside.

Time, time! It was going to take time, and he would have to fence and spar to fool people until his preparations were complete. First and foremost, there must be no indication apart from the activity at the cavalry camp that anything untoward was going on. Potheinus and his city minions like the Interpreter would assume that Caesar intended to huddle inside the cavalry fortress, abandon the city if attacked. Good. Let them think that.

When Rufrius returned from Rhakotis, he received more orders, after which Caesar summoned all his junior legates (including the hopeless Tiberius Claudius Nero) and led them through his plans. Of their discretion he had no doubts; this wasn’t Rome against Rome, this was war with a foreign power not one of them liked.

 

On the following day he summoned King Ptolemy, Potheinus, Theodotus and Ganymedes to the guest palace, where he seated them in chairs on the floor while he occupied his ivory curule chair on a dais. Which didn’t please the little king, though he allowed Theodotus to pacify him. That one has started sexual initiation, thought Caesar. What chance does the boy have, with such advisers? If he lives, he’ll be no better a ruler than his father was.

“I’ve called you here to speak about a subject I mentioned the day before yesterday,” Caesar said, a scroll in his lap. “Namely, the succession to the throne of Alexandria in Egypt, which I now understand is a somewhat different question from the throne of Egypt of the Nilus. Apparently the latter, King, is a position your absent sister enjoys, but you do not. To rule in Egypt of the Nilus, the sovereign must be Pharaoh. As is Queen Cleopatra. Why, King, is your co-ruler, sister and wife an exile commanding an army of mercenaries against her own subjects?”

Potheinus answered; Caesar had expected nothing else. The littleking did as he was told, and had insufficient intelligence to think without being led through the facts first. “Because her subjects rose up against her and ejected her, Caesar.”

“Why did they rise up against her?”

“Because of the famine,” Potheinus said. “Nilus has failed to inundate for two years in a row. Last year saw the lowest reading of the Nilometer since the priests started taking records three thousand years ago. Nilus rose only eight Roman feet.”

“Explain.”

“There are three kinds of inundation, Caesar. The Cubits of Death, the Cubits of Plenty, and the Cubits of Surfeit. To overflow its banks and inundate the valley, Nilus must rise eighteen Roman feet. Anything below that is in the Cubits of Death—water and silt will not be deposited on the land, so no crops can be planted. In Egypt, it never rains. Succor comes from Nilus. Readings between eighteen and thirty-two Roman feet constitute the Cubits of Plenty. Nilus floods enough to spread water and silt on all the growing land, and the crops come in. Inundations above thirty-two feet drown the valley so deeply that the villages are washed away and the waters do not recede in time to plant the crops,” Potheinus said as if by rote; evidently this was not the first time he had had to explain the inundation cycle to some ignorant foreigner.

“Nilometer?” Caesar asked.

“The device off which the inundation level is read. It is a well dug to one side of Nilus with the cubits marked on its wall. There are several, but the one of greatest importance is hundreds of miles to the south, at Elephantine on the First Cataract. There Nilus starts to rise one month before it does in Memphis, at the apex of the Delta. So we have warning what the year’s inundation is going to be like. A messenger brings the news down the river.”

“I see. However, Potheinus, the royal income is enormous. Don’t you use it to buy in grain when the crops don’t germinate?”

“Caesar must surely know,” said Potheinus smoothly, “that there has been drought all around Your Sea, from Spain to Syria. We have bought, but the cost is staggering, and naturally the cost must be passed on to the consumers.”

“Really? How sensible” was Caesar’s equally smooth reply. He lifted the scroll on his lap. “I found this in Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus’s tent after Pharsalus. It is the will of the twelfth Ptolemy, your father”—spoken to the lad, bored enough to doze—“and it is very clear. It directs that Alexandria and Egypt shall be jointly ruled by his eldest living daughter, Cleopatra, and his eldest son, Ptolemy Euergetes, as husband and wife.”

Potheinus had jumped. Now he reached out an imperious hand. “Let me see it!” he demanded. “If it were a true and legal will, it would reside either here in Alexandria with the Recorder, or with the Vestal Virgins in Rome.”

Theodotus had moved to stand behind the little king, fingers digging into his shoulder to keep him awake; Ganymedes sat, face impassive, listening. You, thought Caesar of Ganymedes, are the most able one. How it must irk you to suffer Potheinus as your superior! And, I suspect, you would far rather see your young Ptolemy, the Princess Arsinoë, sitting on the high throne. They all hate Cleopatra, but why?

“No, Lord High Chamberlain, you may not see it,” he said coldly. “In it, Ptolemy XII known as Auletes says that his will was not lodged either in Alexandria or Rome due to—er—‘embarrassments of the state.’ Since our civil war was far in the future when this document was drawn up, Auletes must have meant events here in Alexandria.” He straightened, face setting hard. “It is high time that Alexandria settled down, and that its rulers were more generous toward the lowly. I do not intend to depart this city until some consistent, humane conditions have been established for all its people, rather than its Macedonian citizens. I will not countenance festering sores of resistance to Rome in my wake, or permit any country to offer itself as a nucleus of further resistance to Rome. Accept the fact, gentlemen, that Caesar Dictator will remain in Alexandria to sort out its affairs—lance the boil, you might say. Therefore I sincerely hope that you have sent that courier to Queen Cleopatra, and that we see her here within a very few days.”

And that, he thought, is as close as I go to conveying the message that Caesar Dictator will not go away to leave Alexandria as a base for Republicans to use. They must all be shepherded to Africa Province, where I can stamp on them collectively.

He rose to his feet. “You are dismissed.”

They went, faces scowling.

 

“Did you send a courier to Cleopatra?” Ganymedes asked the Lord High Chamberlain as they emerged into the rose garden.

“I sent two,” said Potheinus, smiling, “but on a very slow boat. I also sent a third—on a very fast punt—to General Achillas, of course. When the two slow couriers emerge from the Delta at the Pelusiac mouth, Achillas will have men waiting. I am very much afraid”—he sighed—“that Cleopatra will receive no message from Caesar. Eventually he will turn on her, deeming her too arrogant to submit to Roman arbitration.”

“She has her spies in the palace,” Ganymedes said, eyes on the dwindling forms of Theodotus and the little king, hurrying ahead. “She’ll try to reach Caesar—it’s in her interests.”

“I am aware of that. But Captain Agathacles and his men are policing every inch of the wall and every wavelet on either side of Cape Lochias. She won’t get through my net.” Potheinus stopped to face the other eunuch, equally tall, equally handsome. “I take it, Ganymedes, that you would prefer Arsinoë as queen?”

“There are many who would prefer Arsinoë as queen,” said Ganymedes, unruffled. “Arsinoë herself, for example. And her brother the King. Cleopatra is tainted with Egypt, she’s poison.”

“Then,” said Potheinus, beginning to walk again, “I think it behooves both of us to work to that end. You can’t have my job, but if your own chargeling occupies the throne, that won’t really inconvenience you too much, will it?”

“No,” said Ganymedes, smiling. “What is Caesar up to?”

“Up to?”

“He’s up to something, I feel it in my bones. There’s a lot of activity at the cavalry camp, and I confess I’m surprised that he hasn’t begun to fortify his infantry camp in Rhakotis with anything like his reputed thoroughness.”

“What annoys me is his high-handedness!” Potheinus snapped tartly. “By the time he’s finished fortifying his cavalry camp, there won’t be a stone left in the old city walls.”

“Why,” asked Ganymedes, “do I think all this is a blind?”

 

The next day Caesar sent for Potheinus, no one else.

“I’ve a matter to broach with you on behalf of an old friend,” Caesar said, manner relaxed and expansive.

“Indeed?”

“Perhaps you remember Gaius Rabirius Postumus?”

Potheinus frowned. “Rabirius Postumus…Perhaps vaguely.”

“He arrived in Alexandria after the late Auletes had been put back on his throne. His purpose was to collect some forty million sesterces Auletes owed a consortium of Roman bankers, chief of whom was Rabirius. However, it seems the Accountant and all his splendid Macedonian public servants had allowed the city finances to get into a shocking state. So Auletes told my friend Rabirius that he would have to earn his money by tidying up both the royal and the public fiscus. Which Rabirius did, working night and day in Macedonian garments he found as repulsive as he did irksome. At the end of a year, Alexandria’s moneys were brilliantly organized. But when Rabirius asked for his forty million sesterces, Auletes and your predecessor stripped him as naked as a bird and threw him on a ship bound for Rome. Be thankful for your life, was their message. Rabirius arrived in Rome absolutely penniless. For a banker, Potheinus, a hideous fate.”

Grey eyes were locked with pale blue; neither man lowered his gaze. But a pulse was beating very fast in Potheinus’s neck.

“Luckily,” Caesar went on blandly, “I was able to assist my friend Rabirius get back on his financial feet, and today he is, with my other friends the Balbi Major and Minor, and Gaius Oppius, a veritable plutocrat of the plutocrats. However, a debt is a debt, and one of the reasons I decided to visit Alexandria concerns that debt. Behold in me, Lord High Chamberlain, Rabirius Postumus’s bailiff. Pay back the forty million sesterces at once. In international terms, they amount to one thousand six hundred talents of silver. Strictly speaking, I should demand interest on the sum at my fixed rate of ten percent, but I’m willing to forgo that. The principal will do nicely.”

“I am not authorized to pay the late king’s debts.”

“No, but the present king is.”

“The King is a minor.”

“Which is why I’m applying to you, my dear fellow. Pay up.”

“I shall need extensive documentation for proof.”

“My secretary Faberius will be pleased to furnish it.”

“Is that all, Caesar?” Potheinus asked, getting to his feet.

“For the moment.” Caesar strolled out with his guest, the personification of courtesy. “Any sign of the Queen yet?”

“Not a shadow, Caesar.”

 

Theodotus met Potheinus in the main palace, big with news. “Word from Achillas!” he said.

“I thank Serapis for that! He says?”

“That the couriers are dead, and that Cleopatra is still in her earth on Mount Casius. Achillas is sure she has no idea of Caesar’s presence in Alexandria, though what she’s going to make of Achillas’s next action is anyone’s guess. He’s moving twenty thousand foot and ten thousand horse by ship from Pelusium even as I speak. The Etesian winds have begun to blow, so he should be here in two days.” Theodotus chuckled gleefully. “Oh, what I would give to see Caesar’s face when Achillas arrives! He says he’ll use both harbors, but plans to make camp outside the Moon Gate.” Not a very observant man, he looked at the grim-faced Potheinus in sudden bewilderment. “Aren’t you pleased, Potheinus?”

“Yes, yes, that’s not what’s bothering me!” Potheinus snapped. “I’ve just seen Caesar, who dunned the royal purse for the money Auletes refused to pay the Roman banker, Rabirius Postumus. The hide! The temerity! After all these years! And I can’t ask the Interpreter to pay a private debt of the late king’s!”

“Oh, dear!”

“Well,” said Potheinus through his teeth, “I’ll pay Caesar the money, but he’ll rue the day he asked for it!”

 

“Trouble,” said Rufrius to Caesar the next day, the eighth since they had arrived in Alexandria.

“Of what kind?”

“Did you collect Rabirius Postumus’s debt?”

“Yes.”

“Potheinus’s agents are telling everybody that you’ve looted the royal treasury, melted down all the gold plate, and garnished the contents of the granaries for your troops.”

Caesar burst out laughing. “Things are beginning to come to a boil, Rufrius! My messenger has returned from Queen Cleopatra’s camp—no, I didn’t use the much-vaunted Delta canals, I sent him at the gallop on horseback, a fresh mount every ten miles. No courier from Potheinus ever contacted her, of course. Killed, I imagine. The Queen has sent me a very amiable and informative letter, in which she tells me that Achillas and his army are packing up to return to Alexandria, where they intend to camp outside the city in the area of the Moon Gate.”

Rufrius looked eager. “We begin?” he asked.

“Not until after I’ve moved into the main palace and taken charge of the King,” said Caesar. “If Potheinus and Theodotus can use the poor lad as a tool, so can I. Let the cabal build its funeral pyre in ignorance two or three more days. But have my men absolutely ready to dash. When the time comes they have a great deal to do, and not much time to do it in.” He stretched his arms luxuriously. “Ah, how good it is to have a foreign foe!”

 

On the tenth day of Caesar’s stay in Alexandria, a small Nilus dhow slipped into the Great Harbor in the midst of Achillas’s arriving fleet, and maneuvered its way between the clumsy transports unnoticed. It finally tied up at the jetty in the Royal Harbor, where a detachment of guards watched its advent closely to make sure no furtive swimmer left it. Only two men were in the dhow, both Egyptian priests—barefoot, shaven-headed, clad in white linen dresses that fitted tightly under the nipples and flared gently to a hemline at midcalf. Both were mete-en-sa, ordinary priests not entitled to wear gold on their persons.

“Here, where do you think you’re going?” asked the corporal of the guards.

The priest in the bow got out and stood with arms joined at the hands, palm to palm over his groin, a pose of subservience and humility. “We wish to see Caesar,” he said in crooked Greek.

“Why?”

“We carry a gift to him from the U’eb.”

“The who?”

“Sem of Ptah, Neb-notru, wer-kherep-hemw, Seker-cha’bau, Ptahmose, Cha’em-uese,” chanted the priest in a singsong voice.

“I am none the wiser, priest, and losing my patience.”

“We carry a gift for Caesar from the U’eb, the high priest of Ptah in Memphis. That was his full name I spoke.”

“What gift?”

“Here,” said the priest, stepping back into the boat with the corporal on his heels.

A rush mat rolled into a flat cylinder lay in the bottom, a dowdy thing to a Macedonian Alexandrian, with its shabby colors and angular patterns. You could buy better in the meanest market of Rhakotis. Probably seething with vermin too.

“You’re going to give Caesar that?”

“Yes, O royal personage.”

The corporal unsheathed his sword and poked it at the mat, but gingerly.

“I wouldn’t,” said the priest softly.

“Why not?”

The priest caught the corporal’s eyes and pinned them with his own, then did something with his head and neck that caused the man to back away, terrified. Suddenly he wasn’t looking at an Egyptian priest, but at the head and hood of a cobra.

“Ssssssss!” hissed the priest, and stuck out a forked tongue.

The corporal leaped in one bound on to the jetty, face ashen. Swallowing, he found speech. “Doesn’t Ptah like Caesar?”

“Ptah created Serapis, as he did all the gods, but he finds Jupiter Optimus Maximus an affront to Egypt,” said the priest.

The corporal grinned; a lovely cash bonus from Lord Potheinus danced before his eyes. “Take your gift to Caesar,” he said, “and may Ptah achieve his ends. Be careful!”

“We will, O royal personage.”

The two priests bent, lifted the slightly floppy cylinder one at either end, and levered their burden neatly on to the jetty. “Where do we go?” asked the speaking priest.

“Just follow that path through the rose garden, first palace on your left past the small obelisk.”

And off they trotted, the mat between them. A light thing.

Now, thought the corporal, all I have to do is wait until I hear that our unwelcome guest has died of snakebite. Then I’m going to be rewarded.

 

That podgy gourmet Gaius Trebatius Testa came waddling in, frowning; it went without saying that he would choose to serve with Caesar in this civil war, despite the fact that his official patron was Marcus Tullius Cicero. Quite why he had elected to sail to Alexandria he didn’t know, save that he was always in search of new taste treats. But Alexandria didn’t have any.

“Caesar,” he said, “a rather peculiar object has arrived for you from Memphis, from the high priest of Ptah. Not a letter!”

“How intriguing,” said Caesar, looking up from his papers. “Is the object in good condition? It hasn’t been tampered with?”

“I doubt it ever was in good condition,” Trebatius said with a moue of disapproval. “A dingy old mat. A rug it is not.”

“Have it brought in exactly as it arrived.”

“It will have to be your lictors, Caesar. The palace slaves took one look at its bearers and went paler than a German from the Cimbric Chersonnese.”

“Just send it in, Trebatius.”

Two junior lictors carried it between them, deposited it on the floor and gazed at Caesar in a rather minatory fashion.

“Thank you. You may go.”

Manlius shifted uneasily. “Caesar, may we stay? This—er—thing arrived in the custody of two of the oddest fellows we’ve ever seen. The moment they got it inside the door, they bolted as if pursued by the Furies. Fabius and Cornelius wanted to open it, but Gaius Trebatius said no.”

“Excellent! Now push off, Manlius. Out, out!”

Alone with the mat, the smiling Caesar toured it, then got down on his knees and peered into one end. “Can you breathe in there?” he asked.

Someone spoke from the interior, but unintelligibly. Then he discovered that either end of the mat was plugged with a thin strip of extra rush to make the thickness uniform from end to end. How ingenious! He pulled the padding out, unrolled Ptah’s gift very gently.

No wonder she could hide in a mat. There was nothing to her. Where is all that big-boned Mithridatid blood? Caesar asked himself, going to a chair and sitting down to study her. Not five Roman feet tall, she would be lucky to weigh a talent and a half—eighty pounds if she wore lead shoes.

It was not his habit to waste his precious time speculating how unknown persons would look, even when said persons were of this one’s status. Though he certainly hadn’t expected a wispy little creature devoid of the slightest hint of majesty! Nor, he now discovered, amazed, did she care about her appearance, for she scrambled up like a monkey and never even looked around to see if there was a polished metal object she could use as a mirror. Oh, I like her! he thought. She reminds me of Mater—the same brisk, no-nonsense air to her. However, his mother had been called the most beautiful woman in Rome, whereas no one would ever call Cleopatra beautiful by any standard.

No breasts to speak of, nor any hips; just straight up and down, arms attached to stark shoulders like sticks, a long and skinny neck, and a head that reminded him of Cicero’s—too big for its body.

Her face was downright ugly, for it bore a nose so large and hooked that it riveted all attention upon it. By comparison, the rest of her features were quite nice: a full but not too full mouth, good cheekbones, an oval face with a firm chin. Only the eyes were beautiful, very large and widely opened, dark lashes below dark brows, and having irises the same color as a lion’s, golden yellow. Now where have I seen eyes that color? Among the offspring of Mithridates the Great, of course! Well, she is his granddaughter, but in no other way than the eyes is she a Mithridatid; they are big, tall people with Germanic noses and yellow hair. Her hair was pale brown and thin too, parted in rolled strips from forehead back to nape of neck like the rind on a melon, then screwed into a hard little knot. Lovely skin, a dark olive so transparent that the veins showed blue beneath it. She wore the white ribbon of the diadem tied behind her hairline; it was her only evidence of royalty, for her simple Greek dress was a drab fawn, and she wore no jewelry.

She was inspecting him just as closely, and in surprise.

“What do you see?” he asked solemnly.

“Great beauty, Caesar, though I expected you to be dark.”

“There are fair Romans, medium Romans and dark Romans—also many Romans with red or sandy hair and lots of freckles.”

“Hence your cognomina—Albinus, Flavus, Rufus, Niger.”

Ah, the voice was wonderful! Low-pitched and so melodious that she seemed to sing rather than to speak. “You know Latin?” he asked, surprised in his turn.

“No, I’ve had no opportunity to learn it,” Cleopatra said. “I speak eight languages, but they’re all eastern—Greek, old Egyptian, demotic Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Median and Persian.” The feline eyes gleamed. “Perhaps you’ll teach me Latin? I’m a very quick student.”

“I doubt I’ll have the time, child, but if you like, I’ll send you a tutor from Rome. How old are you?”

“Twenty-one. I have sat on my throne for four years.”

“A fifth of a lifetime. You’re a veteran. Sit down, do.”

“No, then I won’t be able to see you properly. You’re very tall,” she said, prowling.

“Yes, right up there with the Gauls and the Germans. Like Sulla, I could pass for one if I had to. What happened to your height? Your brothers and sister are tall.”

“Some of my shortness is inherited. My father’s mother was a Nabataean princess, but she wasn’t a full Arab. Her grandmother was the Parthian princess Rhodogune, another blood link to King Mithridates. They say the Parthians are short. However, my own mother blamed an illness I suffered as a babe. So I have always thought that Hippopotamus and Crocodile sucked my growth down their nostrils just as they do the river.”

Caesar’s mouth twitched. “Just as they do the river?”

“Yes, during the Cubits of Death. Nilus fails to rise when Taweret—Hippopotamus—and Sobek—Crocodile—suck the water down their nostrils. They do that when they’re angry at Pharaoh,” she said, absolutely seriously.

“Since you’re Pharaoh, why are they angry at you? Nilus has been in the Cubits of Death for two years, I understand.”

Her face became a study in indecision; she turned away, paced up and down, came back abruptly to standing directly in front of him, biting her lower lip. “The matter is extremely urgent,” she said, “so I can see no point in striving to seduce you with woman’s wiles. I had hoped you’d be an unattractive man—you’re old, after all—and therefore amenable toward unbeautiful women like me. But I see that the tales are true, that you can have any woman you fancy despite your great age.”

His head had gone to one side, and the aloof cold eyes were warm, though they didn’t contain any lust. They simply drank her in, while his mind reveled in her. She had distinguished herself in adverse situations—the murder of the sons of Bibulus, the uprising in Alexandria, no doubt other crises as well. Yet she spoke as a virginal child. Of course she was a virgin. Clearly her brother/husband hadn’t yet consummated their union, and she was a god on earth, she couldn’t mate with mortal men. Hedged around with eunuchs, forbidden to be alone with an uncastrated man. Her situation is, as she said, extremely urgent, otherwise she would not be alone here with me, an uncastrated mortal man.

“Go on,” he said.

“I have not fulfilled my duty as Pharaoh.”

“Which is?”

“To be fruitful. To bear children. The first Inundation after I came to the throne was just inside the Cubits of Plenty because Nilus gave me the grace of time to prove my fruitfulness. Now, two Inundations later, I am still barren. Egypt is in famine and five days from now the priests of Isis at Philae will read the Elephantine Nilometer. The Inundation is due, the Etesian winds are blowing. But unless I am quickened, the summer rains will not fall in Aithiopai and Nilus will not inundate.”

“Summer rains, not melting winter snows,” Caesar said. “Do you know the sources of Nilus?” Keep her talking, let me have time to absorb what she’s saying. My “great age” indeed!

“Librarians like Eratosthenes sent expeditions to discover Nilus’s sources, but all they found were tributaries and Nilus himself. What they did find were the summer rains in Aithiopai. It is all written down, Caesar.”

“Yes, I hope to have the leisure to read some of the books of the museum before I leave. Continue, Pharaoh.”

“That’s it,” said Cleopatra, shrugging. “I need to mate with a god, and my brother doesn’t want me. He wants Theodotus for his pleasure and Arsinoë for his wife.”

“Why should he want her?”

“Her blood is purer than mine, she’s his full sister. Their mother was a Ptolemy, mine was a Mithridatid.”

“I fail to see an answer to your dilemma, at least not before this coming inundation. I feel for you, my poor girl, but what I can do for you, I don’t know. I’m not a god.”

Her face lit up. “But you are a God!” she cried.

He blinked. “There’s a statue in Ephesus says it, but that’s just—er—flattery, as a friend of mine said. It’s true that I am descended from two gods, but all I have are one or two drops of divine ichor, not a whole body full of it.”

“You are the God out of the West.”

“The god out of the west?”

“You are Osiris returned from the Realm of the Dead to quicken Isis-Hathor-Mut and sire a son, Horus.”

“And you believe that?”

“I don’t believe it, Caesar, it is a fact!”

“Then I have it right, you want to mate with me?”

“Yes, yes! Why else would I be here? Be my husband, give me a son! Then Nilus will inundate.”

What a situation! But an amusing and interesting one. How far has Caesar gone, to arrive at a place where his seed can cause rains to fall, rivers to rise, whole countries to thrive?

“It would be churlish,” he said gravely, “to refuse, but haven’t you left your run a little late? With only five days until the Nilometer is read, I can’t guarantee to quicken you. Even if I do, it will be five or six nundinae before you know.”

“Amun-Ra will know, just as I, his daughter, will know. I am Nilus, Caesar! I am the living personification of the river. I am God on earth, and I have but one purpose—to ensure that my people prosper, that Egypt remains great. If Nilus stays in the Cubits of Death another year, the famine will be joined by plague and locusts. Egypt will be no more.”

“I require a favor in return.”

“Quicken me, and it is yours.”

“Spoken like a banker! I want your complete co-operation in whatever I am called upon to do to Alexandria.”

Her brow wrinkled, she looked suspicious. “Do to Alexandria? A strange way to phrase it, Caesar.”

“Oh, a mind!” he said appreciatively. “I begin to hope for an intelligent son.”

“They say you have no son at all.”

Yes, I have a son, he thought. A beautiful little boy somewhere in Gaul whom Litaviccus stole from me when he murdered his mother. But I don’t know what happened to him, and I never will know.

“True,” he said coolly. “But having no son of one’s body is of no importance to a Roman. We are at legal liberty to adopt a son, someone who shares our blood—a nephew or a cousin. During our lifetimes, or by testament after our deaths. Any son that you and I might have, Pharaoh, will not be a Roman because you are not a Roman. Therefore he cannot inherit either my name or my worldly goods.” Caesar looked stern. “Don’t hope for Roman sons—our laws don’t work that way. I can go through a form of marriage with you if you wish, but the marriage won’t be binding in Roman law. I already have a Roman wife.”

“Who has no child at all, though you’ve been married long.”

“I’m never home.” He grinned, relaxed and looked at her with a brow raised. “I think it’s time I moved to contain your older brother, my dear. By nightfall we’ll be living in the big palace, and then we’ll do something about quickening you.” He got up and went to the door.

“Faberius! Trebatius!” he called.

His secretary and his personal legate entered to stand with jaws dropped.

“This is Queen Cleopatra. Now that she’s arrived, things begin to happen. Summon Rufrius at once, and start packing.”

And off he went, his staff in his wake, leaving Cleopatra to stand alone in the room. She had fallen in love at once, for that was her nature; reconciled to espousing an old man even uglier than she was herself, to find instead someone who did indeed look the God he was filled her with joy, with feeling, with true love. Tach’a had cast the lotus petals upon the water in Hathor’s bowl and told her that tonight or tomorrow night were the fertile ones in her cycle, that she would conceive if she looked on Caesar and found him worthy of love. Well, she had looked and found a dream, the God out of the West. As tall and splendid and beautiful as Osiris; even the lines graven upon his face were fitting, for they said that he had suffered much, just as Osiris had suffered.

Her lip quivered, she blinked at sudden tears. She loved, but Caesar did not, and she doubted that he ever would. Not for reasons grounded in lack of beauty or feminine charms; more that there was a gulf between them of age, experience, culture.

 

By nightfall they were in the big palace, a vast edifice that ramified down halls and up corridors, sprouted galleries and rooms, had courtyards and pools large enough to swim in.

All afternoon the city and the Royal Enclosure buzzed; five hundred of Caesar’s legionaries had rounded up the Royal Guard and sent them to Achillas’s mushrooming camp west of the Moon Gate with Caesar’s compliments. That done, the five hundred men proceeded to fortify the Royal Enclosure wall with a fighting platform, proper breastworks and many watchtowers.

Other things were happening too. Rufrius evacuated the camp in Rhakotis and evicted every tenant in the grand houses on either side of Royal Avenue, then stuffed the mansions with troops. While those affluent, suddenly homeless people ran about the city weeping and wailing, howling vengeance on Romans, hundreds of soldiers barged into the big temples, the gymnasium and the courts of justice, while a few left in Rhakotis went to the Serapeum. Under horrified Alexandrian eyes, they promptly tore out every beam from every ceiling and hustled them back to Royal Avenue. That done, they commenced work on the dockside structures—quays, jetties, the emporium—and carried off every useful piece of wood as well as all the beams.

By nightfall most of public Alexandria lay in ruins, anything useful or sizably wooden safely delivered to Royal Avenue.

 

“This is an outrage! An Outrage!” cried Potheinus when the unwelcome guest marched in accompanied by a century of soldiers, his staff, and a very smug-looking Queen Cleopatra.

“You!” shrilled Arsinoë. “What are you doing here? I am queen, Ptolemy has divorced you!”

Cleopatra walked up to her and kicked her viciously on the shins, then raked her nails down Arsinoë’s face. “I am queen! Shut up or I’ll have you killed!”

“Bitch! Sow! Crocodile! Jackal! Hippopotamus! Spider! Scorpion! Rat! Snake! Louse!” little Ptolemy Philadelphus was yelling. “Ape! Ape, ape, ape!”

“And you shut up too, you filthy little toad!” Cleopatra said fiercely, whacking him around the head until he blubbered.

Entranced by all this evidence of familial piety, Caesar stood and watched with arms folded. Twenty-one Pharaoh might be, but confronted by her littlest brother and her sister, she reverted to the nursery. Interesting that neither Philadelphus nor Arsinoë fought back physically: big sister cowed them. Then he grew tired of the unseemliness and deftly separated the three brawlers.

“You, madam, stay with your tutor,” he ordered Arsinoë. “It is high time young princesses retired. You too, Philadelphus.”

Potheinus was still ranting, but Ganymedes ushered Arsinoë away with an expressionless face. That one, Caesar thought, is far more dangerous than the Lord High Chamberlain. And Arsinoë is in love with him, eunuch or no.

“Where is King Ptolemy?” he asked. “And Theodotus?”

 

King Ptolemy and Theodotus were in the agora, as yet untouchedby Caesar’s soldiers. They had been dallying in the King’s own quarters when a slave came running to tell them that Caesar was taking over the Royal Enclosure and that Queen Cleopatra was with him. Moments later Theodotus had himself and the boy dressed for an audience, Ptolemy in his purple hat complete with diadem; then the two entered the secret tunnel constructed by Ptolemy Auletes to permit escape whenever the mob materialized. It ran below ground and under the wall to emerge on the flank of the Akron theater, where it offered the opportunity to head for the docks or go deeper into the city. The little king and Theodotus elected to go into the city, to the agora.

This meeting place held a hundred thousand, and had been filling up since mid-afternoon, when Caesar’s soldiers had started plundering beams. By instinct the Alexandrians went to it whenever tumult broke out, so when the pair from the palace appeared, the agora was already choked. Even so, Theodotus made the King wait in a corner; he needed time to coach the boy until he had a short speech off pat. After dark, by which time the mob spilled out on to the intersection and covered the arcade roofs, Theodotus led King Ptolemy to a statue of Callimachus the librarian and helped him climb up to its plinth.

“Alexandrians, we are under attack!” the King screamed, face ruddied by the flames of a thousand torches. “Rome has invaded, the whole of the Royal Enclosure is in Caesar’s hands! But more than that!” He paused to make sure he was saying what Theodotus had drummed into him, then went on. “Yes, more than that! My sister Cleopatra the traitor has returned and is in league with the Romans! It is she who has brought Caesar here! All your food has gone to fill Roman bellies, and Caesar’s prick is filling Cleopatra’s cunt! They have emptied the treasury and murdered everyone in the palace! They have murdered everyone who lives on Royal Avenue! Some of your wheat is being tipped into the Great Harbor out of sheer spite, and Roman soldiers are tearing your public buildings apart! Alexandria is being wrecked, her temples profaned, her women and children raped!”

Dark in the night, the boy’s eyes blazed a reflection of the crowd’s mounting fury; a fury it had arrived with, a fury that the little king’s words spurred to action. This was Alexandria, the one place in the world wherein a mob had become permanently conscious of the power a mob wielded, and wielded that power as a political instrument rather than in pure destructive rage. The mob had spilled many a Ptolemy; it could spill a mere Roman, tear him and his whore into pieces.

“I, your king, have been wrested from my throne by a Roman cur and a traitorous harlot named Cleopatra!”

The crowd moved, scooped King Ptolemy into its midst and put him upon a pair of broad shoulders, where he sat, his purple person on full display, urging his steed on with his ivory scepter.

It moved as far as the gate into the Royal Enclosure, where Caesar stood barring its passage, clad in his purple-bordered toga, his oak-leaf crown upon his head, the rod of his imperium on his right forearm, and twelve lictors to either side of him. With him was Queen Cleopatra, still in her drab fawn robe.

Unused to the sight of an adversary who faced it down, the crowd stopped moving.

“What are you doing here?” Caesar asked.

“We’ve come to drive you out and kill you!” Ptolemy cried.

“King Ptolemy, King Ptolemy, you can’t do both,” Caesar answered reasonably. “Either drive us out, or kill us. But I assure you that there’s no need to do either.” Having located the leaders in the front ranks, Caesar now directly addressed them. “If you’ve been told that my soldiers occupy your granaries, I ask that you visit the granaries and see for yourselves that there are none of my soldiers present, and that they are full to the brim. It is not my business to levy the price of grain or other foodstuffs within Alexandria—that is the business of your king, as your queen has been absent. So if you’re paying too much, blame King Ptolemy, not Caesar. Caesar brought his own grain and supplies with him to Alexandria, he hasn’t touched yours,” he lied shamelessly. One hand went out to push Cleopatra forward, then it was extended to the little king. “Come down from your perch, Your Majesty, and stand here where a sovereign should stand—facing his subjects, not among them at their mercy. I hear that the citizens of Alexandria can tear a king to shreds, and it’s you to blame for their plight, not Rome. Come to me, do!”

The eddies natural in such a host had separated the King from Theodotus, who couldn’t make himself heard. Ptolemy sat on his steed’s shoulders, his fair brows knitted in a frown, and a very real fear growing in his eyes. Bright he was not, but he was bright enough to understand that somehow Caesar was putting him in a wrong light; that Caesar’s clear, carrying voice, its Greek now distinctly Macedonian, was turning the front ranks of the mob against him.

“Set me down!” the King commanded.

On his feet, he walked to Caesar and turned to face his irate subjects.

“That’s the way,” said Caesar genially. “Behold your king and queen!” he shouted. “I have the testament of the late king, father of these children, and I am here to execute his wishes—that Egypt and Alexandria be ruled by his eldest living daughter, the seventh Cleopatra, and his eldest son, the thirteenth Ptolemy! His directive is unmistakable! Cleopatra and Ptolemy Euergetes are his legal heirs and must rule jointly as husband and wife!”

“Kill her!” Theodotus screamed: “Arsinoë is queen!”

Even this Caesar spun to his own advantage. “The Princess Arsinoë has a different duty!” he cried. “As the Dictator of Rome, I am empowered to return Cyprus to Egypt, and I hereby do so!” His tones oozed sympathy. “I know how hard it has been for Alexandria since Marcus Cato annexed Cyprus—you lost your good cedar timber, your copper mines, a great deal of cheap food. The Senate which decreed that annexation no longer exists. My Senate does not condone this injustice! Princess Arsinoë and Prince Ptolemy Philadelphus will be going to rule as satraps in Cyprus. Cleopatra and Ptolemy Euergetes will rule in Alexandria, Arsinoë and Ptolemy Philadelphus in Cyprus!”

The mob was won, but Caesar wasn’t finished.

“I must add, people of Alexandria, that it is due to Queen Cleopatra that Cyprus is returned to you! Why do you think she has been absent? Because she traveled to me to negotiate the return of Cyprus! And she has succeeded.” He walked foward a little, smiling. “How about a rousing cheer for your queen?”

What Caesar said was relayed swiftly through the crowd from front to back; like all good speakers, he kept his message short and simple when he addressed masses of people. So, satisfied, they cheered deafeningly.

“All very well, Caesar, but you can’t deny that your troops are wrecking our temples and public buildings!” one of the mob’s leaders called out.

“Yes, a very serious business,” said Caesar, spreading his hands. “However, even Romans must protect themselves, and outside the Moon Gate sits a huge army under General Achillas, who has declared war on me. I am preparing myself to be attacked. If you want the demolition stopped, then I suggest you go to General Achillas and tell him to disband his army.”

The mob reversed like soldiers drilling; the next moment it was gone, presumably to see Achillas.

Stranded, a shivering Theodotus looked at the boy king with tears in his eyes, then slunk to take his hand, kiss it.

“Very clever, Caesar,” Potheinus sneered from the shadows.

Caesar nodded at his lictors and turned to walk back to the palace. “As I have told you before, Potheinus, I am clever. May I suggest that you cease your subversive activities among the people of your city and go back to running the Royal Enclosure and the royal purse? If I catch you spreading a false rumor about me and your queen, I’ll have you executed the Roman way—flogging and beheading. If you spread two false rumors, it will be the death of a slave—crucifixion. Three false rumors, and it will be crucifixion without broken legs.”

Inside the palace vestibule he dismissed his lictors, but put a hand out to rest on King Ptolemy’s shoulder. “No more of these expeditions to the agora, young man. Now go to your rooms. I have had the secret tunnel blocked off at both ends, by the way.” The eyes, very cold, looked over Ptolemy’s tumbled curls to Theodotus. “Theodotus, you are banned from congress with the King. By morning I want you out of here. And be warned! If you try to reach the King, I’ll give you the fate I described for Potheinus.” A slight push, and King Ptolemy ran to weep in his quarters. Caesar’s hand now went out to Cleopatra, took hers.

“It’s bedtime, my dear. Good night, everybody.”

She gave a faint smile and lowered her lashes; Trebatius stared at Faberius, staggered. Caesar and the Queen? But she wasn’t his type at all!

 

Extremely experienced with women, Caesar found it no trouble to perform a very curious duty: a ritual mating of two gods for the sake of a country, and the girl god a virgin into the bargain. Not facts that provoked the heights of passion or stirred the heartstrings. An Oriental, she was delighted that he plucked all his body hair, though she deemed that evidence of his godhead when in reality it was simply his way of avoiding lice—Caesar was a cleanliness fanatic. In that respect she came up to his standard; plucked too, she smelled naturally sweet.

Oh, but there was scant pleasure in a naked, scrawny little mound that inexperience and nervousness rendered juiceless as well as uncomfortable! Her chest was almost as flat as a man’s, and he was afraid that a hard hold would break her arms, if not her legs. In truth, the whole exercise was off-putting. No pedophile, Caesar had to exert all his massive will to push her undeveloped child’s body out of his mind and get the business over and done with several times. If she was to conceive, then once was definitely not enough.

However, she learned quickly and ended in liking what he did very much, if the juices she produced later were anything to go by. A lubricious little creature.

“I love you” was the last thing she said before she fell into a deep slumber, lying curled against him with one stick across his chest, another stick over his legs. Caesar needs sleep too, he thought, and closed his eyes.

 

By the morning much of the work on Royal Avenue and the Royal Enclosure wall had been done. Mounted on his hired horse—he had not brought Toes with him, a mistake—Caesar set out to tour his dispositions and tell the legate of his cavalry camp to close the ship canal road, cut Alexandria off from the river Nilus.

What he was doing was actually a variation on his strategy at Alesia, where he had inserted himself and his 60,000 men inside a ring with both its inner and its outer walls heavily fortified to keep out the 80,000 Gauls camped on top of Alesia mount, and the 250,000 Gauls camped on the hills beyond him. This time he had a dumbbell, not a ring; Royal Avenue formed its shaft, the cavalry camp its swelling at one end, and the Royal Enclosure the swelling at its other end. The hundreds of beams plundered from all over the city were driven like horizontal piles from one mansion into the next to staple them together, and formed breastworks on top of the flat roofs, where Caesar mounted his smaller artillery; his big ballistas were needed on top of the twenty-foot wall on the eastern side of his cavalry camp. The Hill of Pan became his lookout, its bottom now a formidable rampart of blocks from the gymnasium, and huge stone walls cut off both sides of Canopic Avenue at its intersection with Royal Avenue. He could move his 3,200 veteran infantry from one end of Royal Avenue to the other at the double, and free of the ibis menace too; somehow those crafty birds sensed what was coming, and promptly flew the Roman coop. Good, thought Caesar, grinning. Let the Alexandrians try to fight without killing a sacred ibis! If they were Romans, they’d go to Jupiter Optimus Maximus and draft out a treaty whereby they could be temporarily exonerated of guilt upon payment of an appropriate sacrifice later. But I doubt that Serapis thinks like Roman Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

To the east of Caesar’s dumbbell lay Delta and Epsilon Districts, all Jews and Metics; to the west lay the bulk of the city, Greek and Macedonian, by far the more dangerous direction. From the top of the Hill of Pan he could see Achillas—ye gods, he was slow!—trying to ready his troops, watch the activity in the Eunotus Harbor and the Cibotus as the warships came out of their sheds to splash into the water, replacing those that had come back from Pelusium and had to be put ashore for drying out. In a day or two—their admiral was as slow as Achillas—the galleys would row under the arches in the Heptastadion and sink all Caesar’s thirty-five transports.

So he put two thousand of his men to demolishing all the houses behind those on Royal Avenue’s west side, thus creating a four-hundred-foot-wide expanse of rubble larded with hazards like carefully covered pits with sharpened stakes at their bottoms, chains that rose from nowhere to loop around a neck, broken shards of Alexandrian glass. The other twelve hundred men formed up and invaded the commercial dockside of the Great Harbor, boarded every ship, loaded them with column drums from the courts of justice, the gymnasium and the agora, and proceeded to tip them into the water under the arches. In just two hours no ship, from pinnace to quinquereme, could sail through the Heptastadion from one harbor to the other. If the Alexandrians wanted to attack his fleet, they would have to do it the hard way—past the shoals and sandbars of the Eunostus, around the edge of Pharos Isle, and in through the Great Harbor passages. Hurry with my two legions, Calvinus! I need warships of my own!

Once the archways were blocked, Caesar’s soldiers mounted the Heptastadion and ripped out the aqueduct that sent water to Pharos Isle, then stole the outermost row of artillery from the Cibotus. They met some hard resistance, but it was very clear that the Alexandrians lacked cool heads and a general; they flung themselves into the fray like Belgic Gauls in the old days before they learned the value of living to fight again another day. Not insuperable foes for these legionaries, all veterans of the nine-year war in Long-haired Gaul, and delighted to be pitted against foreigners as loathsome as the Alexandrians. Very good ballistas and catapults, those pinched from the Cibotus! Caesar would be pleased. The legionaries ferried the artillery back to the docks, then set fire to the ships moored at wharves and jetties. To rub it in, they lobbed flaming missiles from the captured ballistas among the warships in Eunostus and on top of the ship sheds. Oh, what a good day’s work!

 

Caesar’s work was different. He had sent messengers into Delta and Epsilon Districts and summoned three Jewish elders and three Metic leaders to a conference. He received them in the audience chamber, where he had put comfortable chairs, a nice meal laid out on side tables, and the Queen on her throne.

“Look regal,” he instructed her. “None of this I-am-a-mouse rubbish—and take Arsinoë’s jewels off her if you can’t find any of your own. Try to look every inch a great queen, Cleopatra—this is a most important meeting.”

When she entered, he found it hard not to gape. She was preceded by a party of Egyptian priests, clanking censers and chanting a low, monotonous dirge in a language he couldn’t begin to identify. All of them were mete-en-sa save for their leader, who sported a gold pectoral studded with jewels and overlaid with a great number of amuleted gold necklaces; he carried a long, enameled gold staff which he rapped on the floor to produce a dull, booming sound.

“All pay homage to Cleopatra, Daughter of Amun-Ra, Isis Reincarnated, She of the Two Ladies Upper and Lower Egypt, She of the Sedge and Bee!” the high priest cried in good Greek.

She was dressed as Pharaoh, in finely pleated white-on-white striped linen covered by a short-sleeved, billowing coat of linen so fine it was transparent, and embroidered all over with designs in tiny, sparkling glass beads. On her head sat an extraordinary edifice that Caesar had already studied in the wall paintings, yet had not fully grasped until now, seeing it in three dimensions. Aflaring outer crown of red enamel rose to a high shaft behind and at its front displayed a cobra’s head and a vulture’s head in gold, enamel and jewels. Inside it was a much taller, conical crown of white enamel with a flattish top and a curled band of gold springing out of it. Around her neck, a collar of gold, enamel and jewels ten inches wide; at her waist, an enameled gold girdle six inches wide; on her arms, magnificent gold and enamel bracelets in snake and leopard forms; on her fingers, dozens of flashing rings; perched on her chin and hooked behind her ears with gold wires, a false beard of gold and enamel; on her feet, jeweled gold sandals with very high, gilded cork soles.

Her face was painted into a mask with exquisite care, its mouth glossily crimson, its cheeks adorned with rouge, and its eyes replicas of the eye on her throne: rimmed with black stibium extending in thin lines toward her ears and ending in little triangles filled in with the coppery green that colored her upper lids all the way to her stibium-enhanced brows; below them a curled black line was drawn down onto each cheek. The effect of the paint was as sinister as it was stunning; one could almost imagine that the face beneath was not human.

Her two Macedonian attendants, Charmian and Iras, today were clad in Egyptian mode too. Because Pharaoh’s sandals were so high, they assisted Cleopatra up the steps of the dais to her throne, where she sat, took the enameled gold crook and flail from them and crossed these symbols of her deity upon her breast.

No one, Caesar noticed, prostrated himself; a low bow seemed adequate.

“We are here to preside,” she said in a strong voice. “We are Pharaoh, you see our Godhead revealed. Gaius Julius Caesar, Son of Amun-Ra, Osiris Reincarnated, Pontifex Maximus, Imperator, Dictator of the Senate and People of Rome, proceed.”

And that’s it! he was thinking exultantly as she rolled the sonorous phrases out, that’s it! Alexandria and things Macedonian don’t even enter her ken. She’s Egyptian to the core—once she dons this incredible regalia, she radiates power!

“I am overwhelmed at your majesty, Daughter of Ammon-Ra,” he said, then indicated his delegates, rising from their bows. “May I introduce Simeon, Abraham and Joshua of the Jews, and Cibyrus, Phormion and Darius of the Metics?”

“Welcome, and be seated,” said Pharaoh.

Whereupon Caesar quite forgot the occupant of the throne. Choosing to approach his subject tangentially, he indicated one laden side table. “I know that flesh has to be religiously prepared and that wine has to be properly Judaic,” he said to Simeon, the chief elder of the Jews. “All has been done as your laws stipulate, so after we’ve spoken, don’t hesitate to eat. Similarly,” he said to Darius, ethnarch of the Metics, “the food and wine on the second table has been prepared for you.”

“Your kindness is appreciated, Caesar,” said Simeon, “but so much hospitality can’t alter the fact that your fortified corridor has cut us off from the rest of the city—our ultimate source of food, our livelihoods, and the raw materials for our trades. We note that you’ve finished demolishing the houses at the rear of Royal Avenue’s west side, so we must presume that you are about to demolish our houses on the east side.”

“Don’t worry, Simeon,” Caesar said in Hebrew, “hear me out.”

Cleopatra’s eyes looked startled; Simeon jumped.

“You speak Hebrew?” he asked.

“A little. I grew up in a very polyglot quarter of Rome, the Subura, where my mother was the landlady of an insula. We always had a number of Jews among our tenants, and I had the run of the place when I was a child. So I picked up languages. Our resident elder was a goldsmith, Shimon. I know the nature of your god, your customs, your traditions, your foods, your songs, and the history of your people.” He turned to Cibyrus. “I can even speak a little Pisidian,” he said in that tongue. “Alas, Darius, I cannot speak Persian,” he said in Greek, “so for the sake of convenience, let us have our talk in Greek.”

Within a quarter of an hour he had explained the situation without apology; a war in Alexandria was inevitable.

“However,” he said, “for my own protection I would prefer to fight the war on one side of my corridor only—the western side. Do nothing to oppose me and I’ll guarantee that my soldiers don’t invade you, that the war won’t spread east of Royal Avenue, and that you’ll continue to eat. As for the raw materials you need for your trades and the wages those of you who work on the west side will lose, I am not in a position to help. But there may be compensations for the hardships you’re bound to suffer until I beat Achillas and subdue the Alexandrians. Don’t hinder Caesar and Caesar will be in your debt. And Caesar pays his debts.”

He rose from his ivory curule chair and approached the throne. “I imagine, great Pharaoh, that it is in your power to pay all who help you keep your throne?”

“It is.”

“Then are you willing to compensate the Jews and Metics for the financial losses they will sustain?”

“I am, provided they do nothing to hinder you, Caesar.”

Simeon stood, bowed deeply. “Great Queen,” he said, “in return for our co-operation, there is one other thing we ask of you, as do the Metics.”

“Ask, Simeon.”

“Give us the Alexandrian citizenship.”

A long pause ensued. Cleopatra sat hidden behind her exotic mask, her eyes veiled by coppery green lids, the crook and flail crossed on her breast rising and falling slightly as she breathed. Finally the shiny red lips parted. “I agree, Simeon, Darius. The Alexandrian citizenship for all Jews and Metics who have lived in the city for more than three years. Plus financial restitution for what this war will cost you, and a bonus for every Jewish or Metic man who actively fights for Caesar.”

Simeon sagged in relief; the other five stared at one another incredulously. What had been withheld for generations was theirs!

“And I,” said Caesar, “will add the Roman citizenship.”

“The price is more than fair, we have a deal.” Simeon beamed. “Furthermore, to prove our loyalty, we will hold the coast between Cape Lochias and the hippodrome. It isn’t suitable for mass landings, but Achillas could get plenty of men ashore in small boats. Beyond the hippodrome,” he explained for Caesar’s benefit, “the swamps of the Delta begin, which is God’s Will. God is our best ally.”

“Then let’s eat!” Caesar cried.

Cleopatra rose. “You don’t need Pharaoh anymore,” she said.

“Charmian, Iras, your help.”

*     *     *     

“Oh, get me out of all this!” Pharaoh yelled, kicking off her shoes the moment she reached her rooms. Off came the incongruous false beard, the huge and weighty collar, a shower of rings and bracelets bouncing and rolling around the floor with fearful servants crawling after them, calling on one another to witness that nothing was purloined. She had to sit while Charmian and Iras battled to remove the mighty double crown; its enamel was layered over wood, not metal, but it was tailored to the shape of Cleopatra’s skull so it could not fall off, and it was heavy.

Then she saw the beautiful Egyptian woman in her temple musician’s garb, shrieked with joy and ran into her arms.

“Tach’a! Tach’a! My mother, my mother!”

While Charmian and Iras scolded and clucked because she was crushing her beaded coat, Cleopatra hugged and kissed Tach’a in a frenzy of love.

Her own mother had been very kind, very sweet, but always too preoccupied for love; something Cleopatra could forgive, herself a victim of that awful atmosphere in the palace at Alexandria. Mama’s name had been Cleopatra Tryphaena, and she was a daughter of Mithridates the Great; he had given her as wife to Ptolemy Auletes, who was the illegitimate son of the tenth Ptolemy, Soter nicknamed Chickpea. She had borne two daughters, Berenice and Cleopatra, but no sons. Auletes had had a half sister, still a child when Mithridates forced him to marry Cleopatra Tryphaena, but that had been thirty-three years ago, and the half sister grew up. Until Mithridates died, Auletes was too afraid of his father-in-law to dispose of his wife; all he could do was wait.

When Berenice was twelve years old and little Cleopatra five, Pompey the Great ended the career of King Mithridates the Great, who fled to Cimmeria and was murdered by one of his sons, the same Pharnaces at present invading Anatolia. Freed at last, Auletes divorced Cleopatra Tryphaena and married his half sister. But the daughter of Mithridates was as pragmatic as she was shrewd; she managed to stay alive, continue to live in the palace with her own two daughters while her replacement gave Auletes yet another girl, Arsinoë, and finally two sons.

Berenice was old enough to join the adults, but Cleopatra was relegated to the nursery, a hideous place. Then, as the conduct of Auletes deteriorated, her mother sent little Cleopatra to the temple of Ptah in Memphis, where she entered a world that bore no resemblance to the palace at Alexandria. Cool limestone buildings in the ancient Egyptian style, warm arms to fold her close. For Cha’em, high priest of Ptah, and his wife, Tach’a, took Cleopatra for their own. They taught her both kinds of Egyptian, Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic, taught her to sing and play the big harp, taught her all that there was to know about Egypt of Nilus, the mighty pantheon of gods Creator Ptah had made.

More than sexual perversities and wine-soaked orgies rendered Auletes difficult to live with; he had scrambled on to the throne after his legitimate half brother, the eleventh Ptolemy, died without issue—but leaving a will that had bequeathed Egypt to Rome. Thus had Rome entered the picture, a fearsome presence. In Caesar’s consulship Auletes had paid six thousand gold talents to secure Roman approval of his tenure of the throne, gold he had stolen from the Alexandrians. For Auletes was not Pharaoh, and had no access to the fabulous treasure vaults in Memphis. The trouble was that the Alexandrian income was in the purlieu of the Alexandrians, who insisted that their ruler pay them back. Times were hard, the price of food inflated, Roman pressures omnipresent and dangerous. Auletes’s solution was to debase the Alexandrian coinage.

The people rose against him immediately, set the mob loose. His secret tunnel enabled Auletes to escape into exile by sailing away, but he left penniless. Which was of scant concern to the Alexandrians, who replaced him with his eldest daughter, Berenice, and her mother, Cleopatra Tryphaena. The situation in the palace was now reversed; it was Auletes’s second wife and second family who had to take a back seat to the pair of Mithridatid queens.

And little Cleopatra was recalled from Memphis. A terrible blow! How she had wept for Tach’a, for Cha’em, for that idyllic life of love and scholarship beside the wide blue snake of Nilus! The palace in Alexandria was worse than ever; now eleven years old, Cleopatra was still in the nursery, which she shared with two biting, scratching, brawling little Ptolemies. Arsinoë was the worse, forever telling her that she was not “good enough”—too little Ptolemaic blood, and grandchild of a rascally old king who might have terrorized Anatolia for forty years, but still ended a broken man. Broken by Rome.

Cleopatra Tryphaena died a year after assuming the throne, so Berenice decided to marry. Something Rome didn’t want. Crassus and Pompey were still plotting for annexation, aided and abetted by the governors of Cilicia and Syria. Wherever Berenice tried to find a husband, Rome was there before her to warn the fellow off. Finally she turned to her Mithridatid relatives, and among them found that elusive husband, one Archelaus. Caring nothing for Rome, he made the journey to Alexandria and married Queen Berenice. For a few short, sweet days they were happy; then Aulus Gabinius, the governor of Syria, invaded Egypt.

Ptolemy Auletes hadn’t frittered away his time in exile, he had gone to the moneylenders (including Rabirius Postumus) and offered any governor of an eastern province ten thousand talents of silver to win back his kingdom. Gabinius agreed and marched for Pelusium with Auletes in his train. Another interesting man marched with Gabinius too: his commander of horse, a twenty-seven-year-old Roman noble named Marcus Antonius.

But Cleopatra had never set eyes on Mark Antony; the moment that Gabinius breached the Egyptian border, Berenice sent her little sister to Cha’em and Tach’a in Memphis. King Archelaus called up the Egyptian army intending to fight, but neither he nor Berenice was aware that Alexandria didn’t approve of the Queen’s marriage to yet another Mithridatid. The Alexandrian element in the army mutinied and killed Archelaus, which marked the end of Egyptian resistance. Gabinius entered Alexandria and put Ptolemy Auletes back on the throne; Auletes murdered his daughter Berenice before Gabinius had even quit the city.

Cleopatra had just turned fourteen, Arsinoë was eight, one little boy was six, and the other barely three. The scales had tipped; the second wife and the second family of Auletes were back on top again. Understanding that were Cleopatra to be sent home, she would be murdered, Cha’em and Tach’a kept her in Memphis until her father died from his vices. The Alexandrians hadn’t wanted her on the throne, but the high priest of Ptah was the present holder of an office over three thousand years old, and he understood what to do. Namely, to anoint Cleopatra as Pharaoh before she left Memphis. If she returned to Alexandria as Pharaoh, no one would dare touch her, even a Potheinus or a Theodotus. Or an Arsinoë. For Pharaoh held the key to the treasure vaults, an unlimited supply of money, and Pharaoh was God in Egypt of Nilus, where Alexandria’s food came from.

The chief source of the royal income was not Alexandria, but Egypt of the river. There, where sovereigns had existed for who knew how many thousands of years, everything belonged to Pharaoh. The land, the crops, the beasts and fowls of the field and farmyard, the honeybees, the taxes, duties and fares. Only the production of linen, in the province of the priests, did Pharaoh share; the priests received one-third of the income this finest linen in the world generated. Nowhere save in Egypt was linen woven so tenuously that it was sheer as faintly clouded glass, nowhere save in Egypt could it be pleated or dyed such magical colors, nowhere save in Egypt was it so brilliantly white. One other source of income was as unique as it was lucrative: Egypt produced paper from the papyrus plant that grew everywhere in the Delta, and Pharaoh owned the paper too.

Therefore Pharaoh’s income amounted to over twelve thousand talents of gold a year, divided into two purses, the privy and the public. Six thousand talents in each. Out of the public purse Pharaoh paid his district governors, his bureaucrats, his police, his water police, his army, his navy, his factory workers, his farmers and peasants. Even when Nilus failed to inundate, that public income was sufficient to buy in grain from foreign lands. The privy purse belonged outright to Pharaoh and could not be touched for any but Pharaoh’s personal needs and desires. In it were lumped the country’s production of gold, gemstones, porphyry, ebony, ivory, spices and pearls. The fleets that sailed to the Horn of Africa for most of these belonged to—Pharaoh.

Little wonder then that Ptolemies like Auletes, denied the title of Pharaoh, lusted after it. For Alexandria was an entity entirely separate from Egypt; while the King and Queen took a goodly share of its profits in taxes, they did not own it or its assets, be they ships or glass-works or companies of merchants. Nor did they have title to the land on which it stood. Alexandria had been founded by Alexander the Great, who fancied himself a Greek, but was Macedonian through and through. The Interpreter, Recorder and Accountant collected all Alexandrian public income, and used much of it to feather their own nests, working through a system of privileges and perquisites that included the palace.

Veterans of Assyrian, Kushite and Persian dynasties before the arrival of Alexander the Great’s marshal Ptolemy, the priests of Ptah in Memphis had come to an accommodation with Ptolemy and paid him Egypt’s public purse on the condition that sufficient was spent on Egypt of Nilus to keep its people and temples thriving. If the Ptolemy were also Pharaoh, then he took the private income too. Except that it did not leave the treasury vaults in Memphis unless Pharaoh came in person to remove what he needed. Thus when Cleopatra had fled Alexandria, she didn’t emulate her father by sailing out of the Great Harbor penniless; she went to Memphis and obtained the money to hire an army of mercenaries.

 

“Oh,” said Cleopatra, freed from the last of her regalia, “it weighs me down so!”

“It may wear you down, Daughter of Amun-Ra, but it buoyed you up in Caesar’s eyes,” Cha’em said, tenderly smoothing her hair. “In Greek guise you’re disappointing—Tyrian purple ill serves Pharaoh. When all this is over and your throne is assured, you must robe yourself as Pharaoh even in Alexandria.”

“Did I, the Alexandrians would tear me to pieces. You know how they loathe Egypt.”

“The answer to Rome lies with Pharaoh, not with Alexandria,” Cha’em said a little sharply. “Your first duty is to secure Egypt’s autonomy once and for all, no matter how many Ptolemies left Egypt to Rome in their wills. Through Caesar you can do that, and Alexandria ought to be grateful. What is this city, except a parasite feeding off Egypt and Pharaoh?”

“Perhaps,” Cleopatra said thoughtfully, “all that is about to change, Cha’em. I know you’ve just arrived by boat, but walk down Royal Avenue and see what Caesar’s done to the city. He’s wrecked it, and I suspect that what he’s done so far is only the beginning. The Alexandrians are devastated, but in a very angry way. They’ll fight Caesar until they can’t fight anymore, yet I know they can’t win. When the day comes that tames them, things will change forever. I’ve read the commentaries Caesar wrote of his war in Gaul—very detached, very unemotional. But since I’ve met him, I understand them far better. Caesar gives latitude and will continue to give latitude, but if he is constantly rebuffed, he changes. Mercy and understanding no longer exist, he will go to any lengths to kill all opposition. No one of his kind has ever warred with the Alexandrians.” The strange eyes stared at Cha’em with some of Caesar’s detachment. “When he is pushed to it, Caesar breaks spirits as well as backbones.”

Tach’a shivered. “Poor Alexandria!”

Her husband said nothing, too intent upon his welling joy. Were Alexandria utterly crushed, it would be to the advantage of Egypt—power would return to Memphis. Those years Cleopatra had spent in the temple of Ptah were paying off; witnessing Alexandria humbled and ravaged would not cause her any anguish.

“No word yet from Elephantine?” Pharaoh asked.

“It is too early, Daughter of Amun-Ra, but we have come to be with you when the news arrives, as is our duty,” Cha’em said. “You cannot come to Memphis at the moment, we know.”

“True,” Cleopatra said, and sighed. “Oh, how much I miss Ptah, Memphis and you!”

“But Caesar has married you,” Tach’a said, clasping her dear girl’s hands. “You are quickened, I can tell.”

“Yes, I am quickened with a son, I know it.”

The two priests of Ptah exchanged a glance, well satisfied.

*     *     *     

Yes, I am quickened with a boy, but Caesar does not love me. I loved him the moment I set eyes upon him—so tall, so fair, so godlike. That I hadn’t expected, that he would look Osiris. Old and young at once, father and husband. Filled with power, majesty. But I am a duty to him, something he can do with his earthly life that leads him in a new direction. In the past he has loved. When he isn’t aware that I watch him, his pain shows. So they must be gone, the women he loved. I know his daughter died in childbirth. I will not die in childbirth, the rulers of Egypt never do. Though he fears for me, mistaking my exterior for inner frailty. What there is of me is tested metal. I will live to be very old, as is fitting for Amun-Ra’s Daughter. Caesar’s son out of my body will be an old man before he can rule with his wife rather than his mother. He too will live to be very old, but he will not be the only child. Next I must have Caesar’s daughter, so that our son can marry his full sister. After that, more sons and more daughters, all married to each other, all fertile.

They will found a new dynasty, the House of Ptolemy Caesar. The son I am carrying will build temples up and down the river, we will both be Pharaoh. See to the choosing of the Buchis Bull, the Apis Bull, be at the Elephantine Nilometer every year to read the Inundation. Egypt is going to enjoy the Cubits of Plenty for generations upon generations; while ever the House of Ptolemy Caesar exists, Egypt will know no want. But more than that. The Land of the Two Ladies, of the Sedge and Bee, will regain all its past glories and all its past territories—Syria, Cilicia, Cos, Chios, Cyprus and Cyrenaica. In this child lies Egypt’s destiny, in his brothers and sisters a wealth of talent and genius.

 

So when, five days later, Cha’em told Cleopatra that Nilus was going to rise twenty-eight feet into the Cubits of Plenty, she wasn’t at all surprised. Twenty-eight feet was the perfect Inundation, just as hers was the perfect child. The son of two Gods, Osiris and Isis: Horus, Haroeris.