3

The war in Alexandria raged on into November, but was confined to the west side of Royal Avenue. The Jews and Metics proved doughty allies, marshaled soldiers of their own and turned all their small metal shops and foundries into armaments factories. A serious matter for the Alexandrians of Macedonian and Greek ancestry, for in other days they had welcomed the sequestration of nasty, smelly activities like metalworking to the east end, where all the skilled metalworkers lived anyway. Grinding his teeth in anguish, the Interpreter was forced to spend some of the city’s funds on the importation of weapons of war from Syria, and do what he could to encourage anyone on the western side with any metal skills to start forging swords and daggers.

Achillas attacked across that no-man’s-land time and time again, to no effect; Caesar’s soldiers repulsed the sallies with the ease of veterans bolstered by their growing hatred of Alexandrians.

Arsinoë and Ganymedes escaped Caesar’s palace net early in November and arrived in the western city, where the girl donned cuirass, helmet and greaves, waved a sword and produced a spate of stirring oratory. Thus capturing everyone’s attention for long enough to let Ganymedes enter Achillas’s camp, where the canny eunuch murdered Achillas at once. A survivor, the Interpreter promptly made Arsinoë queen and promoted Ganymedes to the general’s tent. A wise decision; Ganymedes was made for the job.

The new general walked down to the bridge across Canopic Avenue, ordered the oxen to be harnessed to the capstans controlling the sluice gates, and shut off the water supply to Delta and Epsilon Districts. Though Beta District and the Royal Enclosure were spared, Royal Avenue was not. Then, using an ingenious combination of human treadmills and the good old Archimedes’ screw, he pumped salt water from the Cibotus into the pipes, sat back and waited.

It took two days of steadily more brackish water for the Romans, Jews and Metics to realize what was happening; then they panicked. Caesar was obliged to deal with the frenzy in person, which he did by lifting the paving in the middle of Royal Avenue and digging a deep hole. As soon as it filled up with fresh water, the crisis was over; soon paving was being lifted in every Delta and Epsilon street and enough wells appeared to resemble the efforts of an army of moles. Capped by an admiration for Caesar that raised him to the status of a demigod.

“We’re sitting on limestone,” Caesar explained to Simeon and Cibyrus, “which always contains layers of fresh water because it’s soft enough for underground streams to erode. After all, we’re not very far from the world’s biggest river.”

While waiting to see what effect salt water would have on Caesar, Ganymedes concentrated on artillery fire, lobbing flaming missiles into Royal Avenue as fast as his men could load their ballistas and catapults. But Caesar had a secret weapon: men specially trained to fire small engines called scorpions. These shot short, pointed wooden bolts the artificers made by the dozens from templates guaranteed to produce uniform flights. The flat roofs of Royal Avenue made excellent platforms for scorpions; Caesar ranged them behind wooden beams right down the length of Royal Avenue’s western mansions. The ballista operators were exposed targets; a good scorpion man could plug his target in chest or side every time he fired a bolt. Ganymedes was forced to shield his men behind iron screens, which spoiled their aim.

 

Just after the middle of November the long-awaited Roman fleet arrived, though no one in Alexandria knew it; the winds were blowing so hard that the ships were driven miles to the west of the city. A skiff stole into the Great Harbor and made for the Royal Harbor when its crew spotted the General’s scarlet flag flying from the main palace pediment. It bore messages from the legate in charge of the fleet, and a letter from Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus. Though the messages said that the fleet was desperate for water, Caesar sat down first to read Calvinus’s note.

I am very sorry that it isn’t possible to send you the Thirty-eighth Legion as well as the Thirty-seventh, but recent events in Pontus render that impossible. Pharnaces has landed at Amisus, and I am off with Sestius and the Thirty-eighth to see what I can do. The situation is very grim, Caesar. Though as yet I’ve only heard of the awful destruction, reports say that Pharnaces has upward of a hundred thousand men, all Skythians—formidable foes, if one can believe the memoranda of Pompeius Magnus.

What I am able to do for you is to send you my entire fleet of warships, as it seems unlikely that they will be needed in the campaign against the King of Cimmeria, who has brought no navy with him. The best of my bunch are the ten Rhodian triremes—fast, maneuverable and bronze-beaked. They come under the command of a man you know well—Euphranor, the best admiral this side of Gnaeus Pompeius. The other ten warships are Pontic quinqueremes, very big and strong, though not speedy. I have also tricked out twenty transports as war vessels—rigged their bows with oaken beaks and added extra oar banks. I have no idea why I have a feeling that you’re in need of a war fleet, but I do all the same. Of course, since you’re now going to Africa Province, I dare-say you’ll run into Gnaeus Pompeius and his fleets soon enough. The latest news on that front is that the Republicans are definitely gathering there for another try. It is terrible to hear what the Egyptians did to Pompeius Magnus.

The Thirty-seventh comes with plenty of good artillery, and I thought you might be in need of provisions, as we hear that Egypt is in famine. I’ve loaded up forty merchantmen with wheat, chick-pea, oil, bacon, and some very nice dried beans, perfect for bean-and-dumpling soup. There are some barrels of salt pork for the soup.

I’ve also commissioned Mithridates of Pergamum to round up at least another legion of troops for you—thank you for the imperium maius, it enabled me to waive the stipulations of our treaty. Just when he’ll turn up in Alexandria is in the lap of the gods, but he’s a good fellow, so I’m sure he’ll be hurrying. He’ll be marching, not sailing, by the way. We are too short of transports. If he misses you, he can commandeer transports in Alexandria to follow you to Africa Province.

My next letter will be from Pontus. By the by, I left Marcus Brutus governing Cilicia—under strict orders to concentrate on troop recruitment and training rather than on debt collection.

“I think,” said Caesar to Rufrius as he burned this missive, “that we’ll pull a little wool over Ganymedes’s eyes. Let’s load every empty water barrel we can find aboard our transports, and take a little sea voyage to the west. We’ll create as much fuss as we can—who knows? Ganymedes might gain the impression that his saltwater trick has worked, and Caesar is quitting the city with all his men except the cavalry, whom he has callously abandoned to their fate.”

At first this was exactly what Ganymedes thought, but a detachment of his cavalry, scouting west of the city, stumbled upon a party of Caesar’s legionaries wandering on the shore. They seemed nice, if naive, Romans; captured, they told the squadron leader that Caesar hadn’t sailed away, he was just getting fresh water at the spring. Too eager to get back to Ganymedes and tell him this news, the horsemen galloped off, leaving their erstwhile prisoners to return to Caesar.

“What we forgot to tell them,” said their junior centurion to Rufrius, “was that we’re really here to meet a new fleet and a whole lot of warships. They don’t know about that.”

“We’ve got Ganymedes!” Caesar cried when Rufrius reported. “Our eunuch friend will have his navy in the roads off the Eunostus Harbor to waylay thirty-five humble transports returning loaded with fresh water. Sitting ducks for the Alexandrians ibises, eh? Where’s Euphranor?”

Had the day been less advanced, the Alexandrian war might have ended there and then. Ganymedes had forty quinqueremes and quadriremes lying in ambush off the Eunostus Harbor when Caesar’s transports hove in view, all rowing against the wind. Not too difficult a task with empty ships. Then, as the Alexandrians moved in for the kill, ten Rhodians, ten Pontics and twenty converted transports emerged from behind Caesar’s fleet, rowing at ramming speed. With only two and a half hours of daylight left, the victory couldn’t be complete, but the damage Ganymedes sustained was severe: one quadrireme and its marines captured, one sunk, two more disabled and their marines killed to a man. Caesar’s warships were unhurt.

At dawn on the following day the troop transports and food ships belonging to the Thirty-seventh Legion sailed into the Great Harbor. Caesar wasn’t out of boiling water yet, but he had successfully fought a defensive war against huge odds until these urgently needed reinforcements arrived. Now he also had 5,000 ex-Republican veteran soldiers, 1,000 noncombatants, and a war fleet commanded by Euphranor. As well as stacks of proper legionary food. How the men loathed Alexandrian rations! Especially oil made from sesame, pumpkin or croton seeds.

“I’ll take Pharos Isle,” Caesar announced.

Relatively easy; Ganymedes wasn’t willing to expend any of his trained personnel to defend the island, though its inhabitants resisted the Romans bitterly. In the end, to no avail.

Rather than waste his resources on Pharos, Ganymedes concentrated on marshaling every ship he could put in the water; he was convinced that the answer to Alexandria’s dilemma was a big victory at sea. Potheinus was sending information from the palace daily, though neither Caesar nor Ganymedes himself had told the Lord High Chamberlain that Achillas was dead; Ganymedes knew that did Potheinus know who was in command, his reports might dry up.

 

At the beginning of December, Ganymedes lost his informant in the palace.

“I can’t permit any hint of my next move to reach Ganymedes, so Potheinus must die,” said Caesar to Cleopatra. “Do you object to that?”

She blinked. “Not in the least.”

“Well, I thought it polite to ask, my dear. He’s your Lord High Chamberlain, after all. You might be running out of eunuchs.”

“I have plenty of eunuchs, and will appoint Apollodorus.”

Their time together was limited to an hour here and an hour there; Caesar never slept in the palace, or dined with her. All his energies were devoted to the war, an interminable business thanks to Caesar’s lack of numbers. She hadn’t told him yet about the baby growing in her womb. Time for that when he was less preoccupied. She wanted him to glow, not glower.

“Let me deal with Potheinus,” she said now.

“As long as you don’t torture him. A quick, clean death.”

Her face darkened. “He deserves to suffer,” she growled.

“According to your lights, definitely. But while I command, he gets a knife up under the ribs on the left side. I could flog and behead, but that’s a ceremony I don’t have time to conduct.”

So Potheinus died with a knife up under his ribs on the left side, as ordered. What Cleopatra didn’t bother to tell Caesar was that she showed Potheinus the knife a full two days before it was used. Potheinus did a lot of weeping, wailing and begging for his life in those two days.

 

The naval battle came on shortly into December. Caesar put his ships just seaward of the shoals outside the Eunostus Harbor without a center; the ten Rhodians on his right, the ten Pontics on his left, and a gap of two thousand feet between them in which to maneuver. His twenty converted transports lay well behind the gap. The strategy was his, the execution Euphranor’s, and the preparations before the first galley left its moorings meticulously detailed. Each of his reserve vessels knew exactly which ship of the line it was to replace, each legate and tribune knew precisely what his duties were, every century of legionaries knew which corvus it would use to board an enemy ship, and Caesar himself visited every unit with cheery words and a crisp summary of what he intended to achieve. Long experience had shown him that trained and experienced ranker soldiers could often take matters into their own hands and wrest victory from defeat if they too had been told exactly what the General planned, so he always kept his rankers informed.

The corvus, a wooden gangway equipped with an iron hook under its far end, was a Roman invention dating back to the wars against Carthage, a naval power far more skilled than any Roman admiral of that time. But the new device turned a sea battle into a land one, and Rome had no peer on land. The moment the corvus plunked down on the deck of an enemy ship, the hook married it to the enemy ship and let Roman troops pour aboard.

Ganymedes arranged the twenty-two biggest and best of his warships in a straight line facing Caesar’s gap, with twenty-two more behind them, and beyond this second line a great many undecked pinnaces and biremes. These last two kinds were not to fight; each held a small catapult to fire incendiary missiles.

The tricky part of the operation concerned the shoals and reefs; whichever side advanced first was the most at risk of being cut off and forced on to the rocks. While Ganymedes hung back, hesitating, Euphranor fearlessly rowed his vessels into the passage and skimmed past the hazards to engage. His leading ships were immediately surrounded, but the Rhodians were brilliant on the sea; no matter how he tried to manipulate his own clumsier galleys, Ganymedes couldn’t manage to sink, or board, or even disable any of the Rhodians. When the Pontics followed the Rhodians in, disaster struck for Ganymedes, his fleet now in complete disorder and at Caesar’s mercy—a quality Caesar wasn’t famous for in battle.

By the time dusk broke the hostilities off, the Romans had captured a bireme and a quinquereme with all their marines and oarsmen, sunk three quinqueremes, and badly damaged a score of other Alexandrian ships, which limped back to the Cibotus and left Caesar in command of the Eunostus Harbor. The Romans incurred no losses whatsoever.

Now remained the Heptastadion mole and the Cibotus, heavily fortified and manned. At the Pharos end of the mole the Romans dug themselves in, but the Cibotus end was a different matter. Caesar’s greatest handicap was the narrowness of the Heptastadion, which didn’t permit more than twelve hundred men a foothold, and so few men were not enough to storm the Alexandrian defenses.

As usual when the going was hard, Caesar grabbed his shield and sword and mounted the ramparts to hearten his men, his scarlet paludamentum cloak marking him out for all to see. A huge racket in the rear gave his soldiers the impression that the Alexandrians had worked around behind them; they began to retreat, leaving Caesar stranded. His own pinnace sat in the water just below, so he leaped into it and directed it along the mole, shouting up to his men that there were no Alexandrians in their rear—keep going, boys! But more and more soldiers were jumping into the craft, threatening to capsize it. Suddenly deciding that today was not the day he was going to take the Cibotus end of the mole, Caesar dived off the pinnace into the water, his scarlet general’s cloak clamped between his teeth. The paludamentum acted as a beacon while he swam; everyone followed it to safety.

So Ganymedes still held the Cibotus and the city end of the Heptastadion, but Caesar held the rest of the mole, Pharos Isle, all of the Great Harbor, and the Eunostus apart from the Cibotus.

 

The war entered a new phase and was waged on land. Ganymedes seemed to have concluded that Caesar had wreaked sufficient havoc on the city to make rebuilding a major task, so why not wreck more of it? The Alexandrians began to demolish another swath of houses beyond the no-man’s-land behind the western mansions of Royal Avenue, and used the rubble to make a forty-foot-high wall with a top flat enough to hold big artillery. They then pounded Royal Avenue day and night, which didn’t make much difference to Royal Avenue, whose luxurious, stoutly built houses held up under the pounding much like a murus Gallicus wall; the stone blocks from which they were built gave them rigid strength, while the wooden beams stapling them together gave them tensile strength. Very hard to knock down, and excellent shelter for Caesar’s soldiers.

When this bombardment didn’t succeed, a wooden siege tower ten stories high and mounted on wheels began to roll up and down Canopic Avenue contributing to the chaos, firing boulders and volleys of spears. Caesar put a counterattack on top of the Hill of Pan and shot enough flaming arrows and bundles of blazing straw into the tower to set it afire. A roaring inferno, hordes of screaming men toppling from it, it rolled away toward the haven of Rhakotis, and was seen no more.

The war had reached a stalemate.

 

After three months of constant urban battle that saw neither side in any position to impose terms of truce or surrender, Caesar moved back into the palace and left conduct of the siege to the competent Publius Rufrius.

“I detest fighting in cities!” he said savagely to Cleopatra, stripped to the padded scarlet tunic he wore under his cuirass. “This is exactly like Massilia, except that there I could leave the action to my legates and march off myself to wallop Afranius and Petreius in Nearer Spain. Here, I’m stuck, and every day that I’m stuck is one more day the so-called Republicans have to shore up resistance in Africa Province.”

“Was that where you were going?” she asked.

“Yes. Though what I had really hoped was to find Pompeius Magnus alive and negotiate a peace that would have saved a great many precious Roman lives. But, thanks to your wretched, corrupt system of eunuchs and deviants in charge of children and cities—not to mention public moneys!—Magnus is dead and I am stuck!”

“Have a bath,” she said soothingly. “You’ll feel better.”

“In Rome they say that Ptolemaic queens bathe in ass’s milk. How did that myth originate?” he asked, sinking into the water.

“I have no idea,” she said from behind him, working the knots out of his shoulders with surprisingly strong fingers. “Perhaps it goes back to Lucullus, who was here for a while before he went on to Cyrenaica. Ptolemy Chickpea gave him an emerald quizzing glass, I think. No, not a quizzing glass. An emerald etched with Lucullus’s own profile—or was it Chickpea’s profile?”

“I neither know nor care. Lucullus was a wronged man, though personally I loathed him,” Caesar said, swinging her around.

Somehow she didn’t look as wraithlike in the water; her little brown breasts broke its surface more plumply, nipples big and very dark, areolae more pronounced.

“You’re with child,” he said abruptly.

“Yes, three months. You quickened me that first night.”

His eyes traveled to her flushed face, his mind racing to fit this astonishing news into his scheme of things. A child! And he had none, had expected to have none. How amazing. Caesar’s child would sit on the Egyptian throne. Would be Pharaoh. Caesar had fathered a king or a queen. It mattered not an atom to him which sex the babe emerged with; a Roman valued daughters just as highly as sons, for daughters meant political alliances of huge importance to their sires.

“Are you pleased?” she asked anxiously.

“Are you well?” he countered, stroking her cheek with a wet hand, finding those beautiful lion’s eyes easy to drown in.

“I thrive.” She turned her head to kiss the hand.

“Then I am pleased.” He gathered her close.

“Ptah has spoken, he will be a son.”

“Why Ptah? Isn’t Ammon-Ra your great god?”

“Amun-Ra,” she corrected. “Ammon is Greek.”

“What I like about you,” he said suddenly, “is that you don’t mind talking in the midst of touching, and you don’t moan or carry on like a professional whore.”

“You mean I’m an amateur one?” she asked, kissing his face.

“Don’t be deliberately obtuse.” He smiled, enjoying her kisses. “You’re better pregnant, you look more like a woman than a little girl.”

 

As January ended, the Alexandrians sent a deputation to Caesar at the palace. Ganymedes was not among its members; its spokesman was the Chief Judge, a worthy Ganymedes considered expendable if Caesar was in a mood to take prisoners. What none of them knew was that Caesar ailed, had succumbed to a gastric illness that grew worse with each passing day.

The audience was conducted in the throne room, which Caesar had not seen before. It paled every other chamber he had seen to insignificance. Priceless furniture stood around it, all Egyptian in style; the walls were gem-encrusted gold; the floor was gold tiles; the ceiling beams were covered in gold. What the local craftsmen hadn’t mastered was plastering, so there were no complicated cornices or ceilings honeycombed with detail—but with all that gold, who noticed? Most eye-catching of all was a series of solid gold statues larger than life and elevated on plinths: the pantheon of Egyptian gods, very bizarre entities. Most had human bodies, almost all had the heads of animals—crocodile, jackal, lioness, cat, hippopotamus, hawk, ibis, dog-faced baboon.

Apollodorus, Caesar noted, was dressed as an Egyptian rather than a Macedonian; he wore a long, pleated robe of linen dyed in red and yellow stripes, a gold collar bearing the vulture, and a cloth of gold nemes headdress, which was a stiffened, triangular cloth drawn tight across the forehead and tied behind the neck, with two wings that protruded from behind the ears. The court had ceased to be Macedonian.

Nor did Caesar conduct the interview. Cleopatra did, clad as Pharaoh: a great offense to the Chief Judge and his minions.

“We did not come to bargain with Egypt, but with Caesar!” he snapped, his head turned to look at a rather grey Caesar.

“I rule here, not Caesar, and Alexandria is a part of Egypt!” Cleopatra said in a loud, harsh, unmusical voice. “Lord High Chamberlain, remind this creature who I am and who he is!”

“You’ve abrogated your Macedonian inheritance!” the Chief Judge shouted, as Apollodorus forced him to kneel to the Queen.

“Where is Serapis in this hideous menagerie of beasts? You’re not the Queen of Alexandria, you’re the Queen of Beasts!”

A description of Cleopatra which amused Caesar, seated below her on his ivory curule chair, placed where King Ptolemy’s throne used to be. Oh, many shocks for a Macedonian bureaucrat! Pharaoh, not the Queen—and a Roman where the King should be.

“Tell me your business, Hermocrates, then you may leave the presence of so many beasts,” Pharaoh said.

“I have come to ask for King Ptolemy.”

“Why?”

“Clearly he isn’t wanted here!” Hermocrates said tartly. “We are tired of Arsinoë and Ganymedes,” he added, apparently unaware that he was feeding Caesar valuable information about morale among the Alexandrian high command. “This war drags on and on,” the Chief Judge said with genuine weariness. “If we have custody of the King, it may be possible to negotiate a peace before the city ceases to exist. So many ships destroyed, trade in ruins—”

“You may negotiate a peace with me, Hermocrates.”

“I refuse to, Queen of Beasts, traitor to Macedonia!”

“Macedonia,” said Cleopatra, sounding equally tired, “is a place none of us has seen in generations. It’s time you stopped calling yourselves Macedonians. You’re Egyptians.”

“Never!” said Hermocrates between his teeth. “Give us King Ptolemy, who remembers his ancestry.”

“Bring his majesty at once, Apollodorus.”

The little king entered in proper Macedonian dress, complete with hat and diadem; Hermocrates took one look at him and fell to his knees to kiss the boy’s outstretched hand.

“Oh, your majesty, your majesty, we need you!” he cried.

 

After the shock of being parted from Theodotus had lessened, young Ptolemy had been thrown into the company of little brother Philadelphus, and had found outlets for his youthful energies which he had come to enjoy far more than the attentions of Theodotus. The death of Pompey the Great had pushed Theodotus into a premature seduction that had intrigued the lad in one way, yet repelled him in another. Though he had been with Theodotus—a crony of his father’s—all his life, he saw the tutor through the eyes of childhood as unpalatably old, singularly undesirable. Some of the things Theodotus had done to him were pleasurable, but not all, and he could find no pleasure whatsoever in their author, whose flesh sagged, whose teeth were black and rotten, whose breath stank. Puberty was arriving, but Ptolemy wasn’t highly sexed, and his fantasies still revolved around chariots, armies, war, himself as the general. So when Caesar had banished Theodotus, he turned to little Philadelphus as to a playmate in his war games, and had found a kind of life he was thoroughly enjoying. Lots of running around the palace and the grounds whooping, talks with the legionaries Caesar used to police those grounds, stories of mighty battles in Gaul of the Long-hairs, and a side to Caesar he had not suspected. Thus, though he saw Caesar rarely, he had transferred his hero worship to the ruler of the world, actually relished the spectacle of a master strategist making fools of his Alexandrian subjects.

So now he stared at the Chief Judge suspiciously. “Need me?” he asked. “What for, Hermocrates?”

“You are our king, majesty. We need you with us.”

“With you? Where?”

“In our part of Alexandria.”

“You mean I should leave my palace?”

“We have another palace ready for you, your majesty. After all, I see Caesar sitting in your place here. It’s you we need, not the Princess Arsinoë.”

The lad snorted with laughter. “Well, that doesn’t surprise me!” he said, grinning. “Arsinoë’s an arrogant bitch.”

“Quite so,” agreed Hermocrates. He turned not to Cleopatra, but to Caesar. “Caesar, may we have our King?”

Caesar wiped the sweat from his face. “Yes, Chief Judge.”

Whereupon Ptolemy burst into noisy tears. “No, I don’t want to go! I want to stay with you, Caesar! Please, please!”

“You’re a king, Ptolemy, and you can be of service to your people. You must go with Hermocrates,” said Caesar, voice faint.

“No, no! I want to stay with you, Caesar!”

“Apollodorus, remove them both,” said Cleopatra, fed up.

Still howling and protesting, the King was hustled out.

“What was all that about?” Caesar asked, frowning.

 

When King Ptolemy reached his new quarters in an untouched, beautiful house in the grounds of the Serapeum, he still wept desolately; a grief exacerbated when Theodotus appeared, for Cleopatra had sent the boy’s tutor back to him. To Theodotus’s dismay, his overtures were rebuffed violently and viciously, but it was not Theodotus whom Ptolemy wanted to assault. He hungered to wreak vengeance on Caesar, his betrayer.

After sobbing himself to sleep, the boy woke in the morning hurt and hardened of heart. “Send Arsinoë and Ganymedes to me,” he snapped at the Interpreter.

When Arsinoë saw him, she squealed in joy. “Oh, Ptolemy, you’ve come to marry me!” she cried.

The King turned his shoulder. “Send this deceitful bitch back to Caesar and my sister,” he said curtly, then glared at Ganymedes, who looked careworn, exhausted. “Kill this thing at once! I shall take command of my army personally.”

“No peace talks?” asked the Interpreter, stomach sinking.

“No peace talks. I want Caesar’s head on a golden plate.”

 

So the war went on more bitterly than ever, an increasing burden for Caesar, who suffered such terrible rigors and vomiting that he was incapable of command.

Early in February another fleet arrived; more warships, more food, and the Twenty-seventh Legion, a force composed of ex-Republican troops discharged in Greece, but bored with civilian life.

“Send out our fleet,” Caesar said to Rufrius and Tiberius Claudius Nero; he was wrapped in blankets, his whole body shaken with rigors. “Nero, as the senior Roman, you’ll have the titular command, but I want it understood that the real commander is our Rhodian friend, Euphranor. Whatever he orders, you’ll do.”

“It is not fitting that a foreigner makes the decisions,” Nero said stiffly, chin up.

“I don’t care what’s fitting!” Caesar managed to articulate, teeth chattering, face drawn and white. “All I care about are results, and you, Nero, couldn’t general the fight for the October Horse’s head! So hear me well. Let Euphranor do as he wants, and support him absolutely. Otherwise I’ll banish you in disgrace.”

“Let me go,” Rufrius begged, foreseeing trouble.

“I can’t spare you from Royal Avenue. Euphranor will win.”

Euphranor did win, but the price of his victory was higher than Caesar was willing to pay. Leading the action as always, the Rhodian admiral destroyed his first Alexandrian ship and went after another. When several Alexandrian ships clustered around him, he flagged Nero for help. Nero ignored him; Euphranor and his ship went down with the loss of all hands. Both Roman fleets made it into the Royal Harbor safely, Nero sure that Caesar would never find out about his treachery. But some little bird on Nero’s ship whistled a tune in Caesar’s ear.

“Pack your things and go!” Caesar said. “I never want to see you again, you arrogant, conceited, irresponsible fool!”

Nero stood aghast. “But I won!” he cried.

“You lost. Euphranor won. Now get out of my sight.”

 

Caesar had written one letter to Vatia Isauricus in Rome at the end of November, explaining that for the time being he was stuck in Alexandria, and outlining his plans for the coming year. For the moment he would have to continue as Dictator; the curule elections would just have to wait until he reached Rome, whenever that might be. In the meantime, Mark Antony would have to perform as Master of the Horse and Rome would have to limp along without higher magistrates in office than the tribunes of the plebs.

After that he wrote no more to Rome, trusting that his proverbial luck would keep the city from harm until he could get there in person and see to things. Antony had turned out well after a dubious period, he would hold the place together. Though why was it that only Caesar seemed able to gift places with political stability, functioning economies? Couldn’t people stand off far enough away to see beyond their own careers, their own agendas? Egypt was a case in point. It cried out for firm tenure of the throne, a more caring and enlightened form of government, a mob stripped of power. So Caesar would have to remain there long enough to educate its sovereign to her responsibilities, ensure that it never became a refuge for renegade Romans, and teach the Alexandrians that spilling Ptolemies was no solution for problems rooted in the mighty cycles of good times and bad times.

 

The illness sapped him, for it refused to go away; a very serious malady that saw him lose weight by the pounds and pounds, he who carried not an ounce of superfluous flesh. Midway through February, and over his protests, Cleopatra imported the priest-physician Hapd’efan’e from Memphis to treat him.

“The lining of your stomach has become grossly inflamed,” said this individual in awkward Greek, “and the only remedy is a gruel of barley starch mixed with a special concoction of herbs. You must live on it for a month at least, then we shall see.”

“As long as it doesn’t involve liver and eggs-in-milk, I’ll eat anything,” said Caesar fervently, remembering Lucius Tuccius’s diet as he had recovered from the ague that had nearly put paid to his life while he had been hiding from Sulla.

Once he began this monotonous regimen, he improved dramatically, put on weight, regained his energy.

When he received a letter from Mithridates of Pergamum on the first day of March, he went limp with relief. His health now something that didn’t cast a grey shadow at the back of his mind, he could bend it to what the letter said with his old vigor.

Well, Caesar, I have come as far as Hierosolyma called Jerusalem, having picked up a thousand horse from Deiotarus in Galatia, and one legion of reasonable troops from Marcus Brutus in Tarsus. There was nothing to be had in northern Syria, but it seems that the Jewish king-without-a-kingdom, Hyrcanus, has a keen affection for Queen Cleopatra: he has donated three thousand crack Jewish soldiers and is sending me south in the company of his crony, Antipater, and Antipater’s son Herod. In two nundinae we expect to reach Pelusium, where Antipater assures me that he will have the authority to collect Queen Cleopatra’s army from Mount Casius—it consists of Jews and Idumaeans.

You will know better than I whereabouts my army is likely to meet opposition. I gather from Herod, a very busy and subtle young man, that Achillas removed his army from Pelusium months ago to war against you in Alexandria. But Antipater, Herod and I are all wary of entering the swamps and canals of the Delta without specific directives from you. So we will wait at Pelusium for instructions.

On the Pontic front, things are not good. Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus and the troops he managed to scrape up met Pharnaces near Nicopolis in Armenia Parva, and were defeated badly. Calvinus had no choice other than to retreat west toward Bithynia; had Pharnaces followed, Calvinus would have been annihilated. However, Pharnaces preferred to stay in Pontus and Armenia Parva, wreaking havoc. His atrocities are appalling. The last I heard before I marched myself, he was planning to invade Bithynia—but if so, then his preparations were slipshod and unorganized. He was ever the same, Pharnaces; I remember him when I was a youth.

By the time I reached Antioch, a new rumor caught me up: that the son Pharnaces left to govern in Cimmeria, Asander, waited until his daddy was thoroughly involved in Pontus, then declared himself king and his father an exile. So it may fall out that you and Calvinus will have an unexpected breathing space, if Pharnaces returns to Cimmeria first to put down this ungrateful child.

I await your reply with eagerness, and am your servant.

Rescue at last!

Caesar burned the letter, then had Trebatius write a new one purporting to be from Mithridates of Pergamum. Its contents were designed to tempt the Alexandrians into quitting the city for a quick campaign in the Delta. But first it had to reach Arsinoë in the palace in a way that led her to believe her agents had stolen it before Caesar opened it, that he didn’t know reinforcements were at hand. The false letter was sealed with an impression of a coin issued by Mithridates of Pergamum and by devious ploys it duly reached Arsinoë, apparently unopened. Both letter and Arsinoë were gone from the palace within an hour. Two days later King Ptolemy, his army and the Macedonian element of Alexandria sailed away eastward toward the Delta. The city lay incapable of any fighting, its leading caste gone.

Caesar still wasn’t entirely well, though he refused to admit it; watching him buckle himself into leather for the coming Delta campaign, Cleopatra fretted.

“Can’t you let Rufrius deal with this?” she asked.

“Probably, but if I am to crush resistance totally and bring Alexandria permanently to its senses, I must be there in person,” Caesar explained; the effort of dressing had him sweating.

“Then take Hapd’efan’e with you,” she pleaded.

But the gear was on, he had managed unassisted, and his skin was regaining some color; the eyes he turned on Cleopatra were Caesar’s eyes, in control of everything. “You concern yourself too much.” He kissed her, his breath stale and sour.

 

Two cohorts of wounded troops were left to guard the Royal Enclosure; Caesar took the 3,200 men of the Sixth, the Thirty-seventh and the Twenty-seventh Legions, together with all the cavalry, and marched out of Alexandria on a route Cleopatra for one thought unduly circuitous. Instead of going to the Delta by way of the ship canal, he took the road south of Lake Mareotis, keeping it on his left; by the time he did turn toward the Canopic arm of Nilus, he was long out of sight.

A fast courier had galloped for Pelusium well ahead of King Ptolemy’s army, his mission to inform Mithridates of Pergamum that he was to form one half of Caesar’s pincers by moving down the east bank of the Pelusiac arm of Nilus, and that he was not to enter the Delta itself. They would nip Ptolemy between them near the apex, on solid ground.

So called because it had the shape of the Greek letter delta, the Delta of Nilus was larger than any other river mouth known: on Our Sea, a hundred and fifty miles from the Pelusiac to the Canopic arm; and from the coast of Our Sea to the bifurcation of Nilus proper just north of Memphis, over a hundred miles. The great river forked and forked and forked again into many branches, some larger than others, and fanned out to empty itself into Our Sea through seven interlinked mouths. Originally all the Delta waterways had been natural, but after the Greekly scientific Ptolemies came to rule Egypt, they connected Nilus’s network of arms with thousands of canals, so that a piece of Delta land was nowhere farther than a mile from water. Why was it necessary to tend the Delta so carefully, when the thousand-mile course of Nilus from Elephantine to Memphis grew more than enough to feed Egypt and Alexandria? Because byblos grew in the Delta, the papyrus reed from which paper was made. The Ptolemies had a worldwide monopoly on paper, and all the profits of its sale went into Pharaoh’s privy purse. Paper was the temple of human thought, and men had come to be unable to live without it.

This being the beginning of winter by the seasons, though the end of March by the Roman calendar, the summer flooding had receded, but Caesar had no desire to bog his army down in a labyrinth of waterways he didn’t know nearly as well as Ptolemy’s advisers and guides did.

Constant dialogues with Simeon, Abraham and Joshua during the months of war in Alexandria had dowered Caesar with a knowledge of the Egyptian Jews far superior to Cleopatra’s; until his advent, she seemed never to have considered the Jews worth her notice. Whereas Caesar had huge respect for Jewish intelligence, learning and independence, and was already planning how best to turn the Jews into valuable allies for Cleopatra after he departed. Constricted by her upbringing and exclusivity she might be, but she had potential as a ruler once he had drummed the essentials into her; it had encouraged him when she had freely consented to give the Jews and Metics the Alexandrian citizenship. A start.

In the southeast of the Delta lay the Land of Onias, an autonomous enclave of Jews descended from the high priest Onias and his followers, who had been exiled from Judaea for refusing to prostrate themselves flat on the ground before the King of Syria; that, Onias had said, they did only to their god. King Ptolemy VI Philometor gave the Onians a large tract of land as their own in return for an annual tribute and soldiers for the Egyptian army. The news of Cleopatra’s generosity had spread to the Land of Onias, which declared for her in this civil war and made it possible for Mithridates of Pergamum to occupy Pelusium without a struggle; Pelusium was full of Jews and had strong ties to the Land of Onias, which was vital to all Egyptian Jews because it held the Great Temple. This was a smaller replica of King Solomon’s temple, even to a tower eighty feet tall and artificial gulches to simulate the Vales of Kedron and Gehenna.

The little king had barged his army down the Phatnitic arm of Nilus; it merged with the Pelusiac arm just above Leontopolis and the Land of Onias, which stretched between Leontopolis and Heliopolis. Here, near Heliopolis, King Ptolemy found Mithridates of Pergamum encased in a stout, Roman-style camp, and attacked it with reckless abandon. Hardly crediting his good luck, Mithridates promptly led his men out of the camp and waded into the fray so successfully that many Ptolemaians died and the rest scattered in panic. However, someone in Ptolemy’s army owned common sense, for as soon as the post-battle frenzy evaporated, the Ptolemaians fell back to a naturally fortified position hedged in by a ridge, the Pelusiac Nilus, and a wide canal with very high, precipitous banks.

Caesar came up shortly after Ptolemy’s defeat, more out of breath from the march than he cared to admit, even to Rufrius; he halted his men and studied Ptolemy’s position intently. The chief obstacle for him was the canal, whereas for Mithridates, it was the ridge.

“We’ve found places where we can ford the canal,” Arminius of the German Ubii told him, “and in other places we can swim it, the horses too.”

The foot soldiers were directed to fell every tall tree in the neighborhood to build a causeway across the canal, which they did with enthusiasm, a hard day’s march notwithstanding; after six months of war, Roman hatred of Alexandria and Alexandrians burned at white heat. To the last man they hoped that here would be the decisive battle, after which they could quit Egypt forever.

Ptolemy sent infantry and light-armed cavalry to block Caesar’s advance, but the Roman infantry and the German cavalry poured across in such a rage that they fell on the Ptolemaians like worked-up Belgic Gauls. The Ptolemaians broke and fled, but were cut down; few escaped to seek shelter in the little king’s fortress some seven miles away.

At first Caesar had thought to attack at once, but when he set eyes on Ptolemy’s stronghold he changed his mind. Many old temple ruins in the vicinity had contributed a wealth of stone to buttress the site’s natural advantages. Best put the men into camp for the night. They had marched over twenty miles before engaging at the canal crossing, they deserved a good meal and a sleep before the next clash. What he told nobody was that he himself felt faint, that Ptolemy’s dispositions had pitched and heaved in his gaze like flotsam on a stormy sea.

In the morning he ate a small loaf of bread laced with honey as well as his barley gruel, and felt a great deal better.

The Ptolemaians—easier to call them that because they were by no means all Alexandrians—had fortified a nearby hamlet and joined it to their hill structure by stone bastions; Caesar threw the main brunt of his initial charge at the hamlet, intending to take it and carry on by natural impetus to take the fortress. But there was a space between the Pelusiac Nilus and the Ptolemaic lines that whoever commanded had made impossible to negotiate by directing a cross fire of arrows and spears into it; Mithridates of Pergamum, driving from the far side of the ridge, had problems of his own and could not help. Though the hamlet fell, Caesar couldn’t extricate his troops from that lethal cross fire to storm the heights and finish the business.

Sitting his hired horse atop a mound, he noticed that the Ptolemaians had made too much of this minor victory, and had come down from the highest part of their citadel to help fire arrows at the beleaguered Romans. He summoned the hoary primipilus centurion of the Sixth Legion, Decimus Carfulenus.

“Grab five cohorts, Carfulenus, skirt the lower defenses and take the heights those idiots have vacated,” he said crisply, secretly relieved that rest and food had restored his usual grasp of a military situation. Easy to see how to do it when he was feeling himself—oh, age! Is this the beginning of Caesar’s end? Let it be quick, let it not be a slow dwindle into senescence!

Taking the heights provoked a generalized Ptolemaic panic. Within an hour of Carfulenus’s occupation of the citadel, King Ptolemy’s army was routed. Thousands were slain on the field, but some, harboring the little king in their midst, managed to reach the Pelusiac Nilus and their barges.

 

Of course it was necessary to receive Malachai, high priest of the Land of Onias, with due ceremony, introduce him to the beaming Mithridates of Pergamum, sit down with both of them and partake of sweet Jewish wine. When a shadow fell in the tent opening, Caesar excused himself and rose, suddenly very tired.

“News of little Ptolemy, Rufrius?”

“Yes, Caesar. He boarded one of the barges, but the chaos on the riverbank was so frenzied that his puntsmen couldn’t push away before the barge became choked with men. Not far down the river, it capsized. The King was among those who drowned.”

“Do you have his body?”

“Yes.” Rufrius grinned, his seamed ex-centurion’s homely face lighting up like a boy’s. “We also have Princess Arsinoë. She was in the citadel and challenged Carfulenus to a duel, if you’d believe that! Waving her sword around and screaming like Mormolyce.”

“What splendid news!” said Caesar genially.

“Orders, Caesar?”

“As soon as I can wriggle out of the formalities in there,” Caesar said, nodding toward the tent, “I’m for Alexandria. I’ll take the King’s body and Princess Arsinoë with me. You and the good Mithridates can clean up, then follow me with the army.”

 

“Execute her,” said Pharaoh from the throne when Caesar presented her with a disheveled Arsinoë, still in her armor.

Apollodorus bowed. “At once, Daughter of Amun-Ra.”

“Um—I am afraid not,” said Caesar in apologetic tones.

The slight figure on the dais stiffened dangerously. “What do you mean, you’re afraid not?” Cleopatra demanded.

“Arsinoë is my captive, Pharaoh, not yours. Therefore, as is Roman custom, she will be sent to Rome to walk in my triumph.”

“While ever my sister lives, my life is imperiled! I say that she dies today!”

“I say she doesn’t.”

“You’re a visitor to these shores, Caesar! You do not give commands to the throne of Egypt!”

“Rubbish!” said Caesar, annoyed. “I put you on the throne, and I command whoever sits on that expensive piece of furniture while ever I am a visitor to these shores! Attend to your own affairs, Pharaoh—bury your brother in the Sema, start rebuilding your city, take a trip to Memphis or Cyrene, nourish the child in your womb. For that matter, marry your remaining brother. You can’t rule alone, it’s neither Egyptian nor Alexandrian custom for a sovereign to rule alone!”

He walked out. She kicked off her towering sandals and ran after him, Pharaonic dignity forgotten, leaving a stunned audience to make what it would of that royal battle of wills. Arsinoë began to laugh wildly; Apollodorus looked at Charmian and Iras ruefully.

“Just as well I didn’t summon the Interpreter, the Recorder, the Accountant, the Chief Judge and the Night Commander,” the Lord High Chamberlain said. “However, I think we have to let Pharaoh and Caesar sort things out for themselves. And don’t laugh, your highness. Your side lost the war—you will never be queen in Alexandria. Until Caesar puts you on a Roman ship, you’re going to the darkest, most airless dungeon beneath the Sema—on bread and water. It is not Roman tradition to execute most of those who walk in a Roman triumph, so no doubt Caesar will free you after his, but be warned, your highness. If you ever return to Egypt, you will die. Your sister will see to that.”

 

“How dare you!” Cleopatra shrilled. “How dare you humiliate Pharaoh in front of the court?”

“Then Pharaoh shouldn’t be so high-handed, my dear,” Caesar said, temper mended, patting his knee. “Before you announce any executions, ask me what I want first. Whether you like it or not, Rome has been a profound presence in Egypt for forty years. When I depart, Rome isn’t going to depart too. For one thing, I intend to garrison Alexandria with Roman troops. If you want to continue to reign in Egypt and Alexandria, be politic and crafty, starting with me. That I am your lover and the father of your unborn child are of no significance to me the moment your interests conflict with Rome’s.”

“For Rome, infer Caesar,” she said bitterly.

“Naturally. Come, sit down and cuddle me. It isn’t good for a baby to endure tantrums. He doesn’t mind it when we make love, but I’m sure he becomes extremely upset when we quarrel.”

“You think he’s a boy too,” she said, unwilling yet to sit on his knee, but softening.

“Cha’em and Tach’a convinced me.”

No sooner had he uttered those words than his whole body jerked. Caesar looked down at himself in amazement, then toppled out of the chair to lie with back arched, arms and legs rigidly extended.

Cleopatra screamed for help, tugging at the double crown as she ran to him, heedless of its fate when it flew off and crashed to the floor. By this, Caesar’s face had gone a dark purple-blue and his limbs were in convulsion; still screaming, Cleopatra was knocked sprawling when she tried to restrain him.

As suddenly as it had come, it was over.

Thinking that the lovers were venting their spleen in physical violence, Charmian and Iras had not dared to enter until a certain note in their mistress’s cries convinced them that something serious was happening. Then when the two girls added their shrieks to Cleopatra’s, Apollodorus, Hapd’efan’e and three priests rushed in to find Caesar lying limply on the floor, breathing slowly and stertorously, his face the grey of extreme illness.

“What is it?” Cleopatra asked Hapd’efan’e, down on his knees beside Caesar sniffing at his breath, feeling for a heartbeat.

“Did he convulse, Pharaoh?”

“Yes, yes!”

“Very sweet wine!” the priest-physician barked. “Very sweet wine, and a supple reed that is well hollowed out. Quickly!”

While the other priests flew to obey, Charmian and Iras took hold of the howling, terrified Cleopatra, persuaded her to shed some of her pharaonic layers, the plethora of jewels. Apollodorus was roaring that heads were going to fall unless the hollow reed was found, and Caesar, comatose, knew nothing of the horror and terror in every breast—what if the ruler of the world should die in Egypt?

A priest came running from the mummification annex with the reed, normally used to perfuse the cranial cavity with natron. A snapped question reassured Hapd’efan’e that this reed had never been used. He took it, blew through it to see if it was patent, opened Caesar’s mouth, slid the reed inside, stroked his throat, and gently pushed until a foot of it had vanished. Then he carefully trickled the very sweet wine into its lumen too slowly and thinly to cause an air block; not a lot of wine by volume, but the process seemed to last forever. Finally Hapd’efan’e sat back on his heels and waited. When his patient began to stir, the priest plucked the reed out and took Caesar into his arms.

“Here,” he said when the eyes opened cloudily, “drink this.”

Within a very few moments Caesar had recovered enough to stand unassisted, walk about and look at all these shocked people. Cleopatra, face smeared and wet with tears, sat staring at him as if he had risen from the dead, Charmian and Iras were bawling, Apollodorus was slumped in a chair with his head between his knees, several priests fluttered and twittered in the background, and all of this consternation apparently was due to him.

“What happened?” he asked, going to sit beside Cleopatra, and aware that he did feel rather peculiar.

“You had an epileptic fit,” Hapd’efan’e said baldly, “but you do not have epilepsy, Caesar. The fact that sweet wine brought you around so quickly tells me that you have suffered a bodily change following that month of rigors. How long is it since you’ve eaten anything?”

“Many hours.” His arm curled comfortingly around Cleopatra’s shoulders, he gazed up at the thin, dark Egyptian and gave him a dazzling smile, then looked contrite. “The trouble is that when I’m busy I forget to eat.”

“In future you must keep someone with you to remind you to eat,” Hapd’efan’e said severely. “Regular meals will keep this infirmity at bay, but if you do forget to eat, drink sweet wine.”

“No,” said Caesar, grimacing. “Not wine.”

“Then honey-and-water, or the juice of fruits—sweet syrup of some kind. Have your servant keep it on hand, even in the midst of battle. And pay attention to the warning signs—nausea, dizziness, faulty vision, faintness, headache, even tiredness. If you feel any of these, have a sweet drink immediately, Caesar.”

“How did you get an unconscious man to drink, Hapd’efan’e?”

Hapd’efan’e held out the reed; Caesar took it and turned it between his fingers. “Through this,” he said. “How did you know that you bypassed the airway to my lungs? The two passages are one in front of the other, and the oesophagus is normally closed to permit breathing.”

“I didn’t know for certain,” Hapd’efan’e said simply. “I prayed to Sekhmet that your coma wasn’t too deep, and stroked the outside of your throat to make you swallow when your gullet felt the pressure of the reed against it. It worked.”

“You know all that, yet you don’t know what’s wrong with me?”

“Wrongnesses are mysterious, Caesar, beyond us in most cases. All medicine is based upon observation. Luckily I learned much about you when I treated your rigors”—he looked sly—“that, for instance, you regard having to eat as a waste of time.”

Cleopatra was improving; her tears had turned to hiccoughs. “How do you know so much about the body?” she asked Caesar.

“I’m a soldier. Walk enough battlefields to rescue the wounded and count the dead, and you see everything. Like this excellent physician, I learn from observation.”

Apollodorus lurched to his feet, wiped away the sweat. “I will see to dinner,” he croaked. “Oh, thank every god everywhere in the world that you’re all right, Caesar!”

 

That night, lying sleepless in Cleopatra’s enormous goose-down bed, her warmth tucked against him in the mild chill of Alexandria’s so-called winter, Caesar thought about the day, the month, the year.

From the moment he had set foot on Egyptian soil, everything had drastically altered. Magnus’s head—that evil palace cabal—a kind of corruption and degeneracy that only the East could produce—an unwanted campaign fought up and down the streets of a beautiful city—the willingness of a people to destroy what had taken three centuries to build—his own participation in that destruction…And a business proposition from a queen determined to save her people in the only way she believed they could be saved, by conceiving the son of a god. Believing that he, Caesar, was that god. Bizarre. Alien.

Today Caesar had had a fright. Today Caesar, who is never ill, faced the inevitable consequences of his fifty-two years. Not merely his years, but how profligately he has used and abused them, pushed himself when other men would stop to rest. No, not Caesar! To rest has never been Caesar’s way. Never will be either. But now Caesar, who is never ill, must admit to himself that he has been ill for months. That whatever ague or miasma racked his body with tremors and retches has left a malignancy behind. Some part of Caesar’s machine has—what did the priest-physician say?—suffered a change. Caesar will have to remember to eat, otherwise he will fall in an epilepse, and they will say that Caesar is slipping at last, that Caesar is weakening, that Caesar is no longer unbeatable. So Caesar must keep his secret, must never let Senate and People know that anything is wrong with him. For who else is there to pull Rome out of her mire if Caesar fails?

Cleopatra sighed, murmured, gave one faint hiccough—so many tears, and all for Caesar! This pathetic little scrap loves me—loves me! To her, I have become husband, father, uncle, brother. All the twisted ramifications of a Ptolemy. I didn’t understand. I thought I did. But I didn’t. Fortuna has thrown the cares and woes of millions of people on her frail shoulders, offered her no choice in her destiny any more than I offered Julia a choice. She is an anointed sovereign in rites older and more sacred than any others, she is the richest woman in the world, she rules human lives absolutely. Yet she’s a scrap, a babe. Impossible for a Roman to gauge what the first twenty-one years of her life have done to her—murder and incest as a matter of course. Cato and Cicero prate that Caesar hankers to be King of Rome, but neither of them has any concept of what true kingship is. True kingship is as far from me as this little scrap beside me, swollen with my child.

Oh, he thought suddenly, I must get up! I must drink some of that syrup Apollodorus so kindly brought—juice of melons and grapes grown in linen houses! How degenerate. My mind wanders, I am Caesar and I together, I cannot separate the two.

But instead of going to drink his juice of melons and grapes grown in linen houses, his head fell back upon the pillow and turned to look at Cleopatra. It wasn’t very dark, for all that it was the middle of the night; the great panels in the outside wall were flexed sideways and light poured in from a full moon, turned her skin not to silver but to pale bronze. Lovely skin. He reached out to touch it, stroke it, feather the palm of his hand down across her six-months belly, not distended enough yet to be luminous, as he remembered Cinnilla’s belly when she was close to term with Julia, with Gaius who was stillborn in the midst of her eclampsia. We burned Cinnilla and baby Gaius together, my mother, Aunt Julia, and I. Not Caesar. I.

She had budded delicious small breasts, round and firm as globes, and her nipples had darkened to the same plummy black as the skin of her Aethiopian fan bearers; perhaps she has some of that blood, for there’s more in her than mere Mithridates and Ptolemy. Beautiful to feel, living tissue that has greater purpose than simply gratifying me. But I am part of it and her, she is carrying my child. Oh, we parent babes too young! Now is the time to relish them, adore their mothers. It takes many years and many heartaches to understand the miracle of life.

Her hair was loose and strayed in tendrils across the pillow, not dense and black like Servilia’s, nor a river of fire he could wrap himself in like Rhiannon’s. This was Cleopatra’s hair, just as this was Cleopatra’s body. And Cleopatra loves me differently from all the others. She returns me to my youth.

The leonine eyes were open, fixed on his face. Another time he would have closed his face immediately, excluded her from his mind with the automatic thoroughness of a reflex—never hand women the sword of knowledge, for they will use it to emasculate. But she is used to eunuchs, doesn’t prize that kind of man. What she wants from me is a husband, a father, an uncle, a brother. I am her equal in power yet hold the additional power of maleness. I have conquered her. Now I must show her that it is no part of my intentions or compulsions to crush her into submission. None of my women has been a boot scraper.

“I love you,” he said, gathering her into his arms, “as my wife, my daughter, my mother, my aunt.”

She couldn’t know that he was likening her to real women, not speaking in Ptolemaic comparatives, but she blazed inside with love, relief, utter joy.

Caesar had admitted her into his life.

Caesar had said he loved her.

 

The following day he put her atop a donkey and took her to see what six months of war had done to Alexandria. Whole tracts of it lay in ruins, no houses left standing, makeshift hills and walls sporting abandoned artillery, women and children scratching and grubbing for anything edible or useful, homeless and hopeless, clothing reduced to rags. Of the waterfront, almost nothing was left; the fires Caesar had set among the Alexandrian ships had spread to burn every warehouse, what his soldiers had left of the great emporium, the ship sheds, the docks, the quays.

“Oh, the book repository has gone!” she cried, wringing her hands, very distressed. “There is no catalogue, we’ll never know what burned!”

If Caesar eyed her ironically, he said nothing to indicate his wonder at her priorities; she hadn’t been moved by the heart-wrenching spectacle of all those starving women and children, now she was on the verge of tears over books. “But the library is in the museum,” he said, “and the museum is perfectly safe.”

“Yes, but the librarians are so slow that the books come in far faster than they can be catalogued, so for the last hundred years they’ve been piling up in a special warehouse. It’s gone!”

“How many books are there in the museum?” he asked.

“Almost a million.”

“Then there’s very little to worry about,” Caesar said. “Do cheer up, my dear! The sum total of all the books ever written is far less than a million, which means whatever was stored in the warehouse were duplicates or recent works. Many of the books in the museum itself must be duplicates too. Recent works are easy to get hold of, and if you need a catalogue, Mithridates of Pergamum has a library of a quarter-million books, most of fairly recent date. All you have to do is commission copies of works the museum doesn’t have from Sosius or Atticus in Rome. They don’t have the books in ownership, but they borrow from Varro, Lucius Piso, me, others who have extensive private libraries. Which reminds me that Rome has no public library, and I must remedy that.”

Onward. The agora had suffered the least damage among the public buildings, some of its pillars dismantled to stop up the archways in the Heptastadion, but its walls were intact, as well as most of the arcade roofing. The gymnasium, however, was little more than a few foundations, and the courts of justice had entirely vanished. The beautiful Hill of Pan was denuded of vegetation, its streams and waterfalls dried up, their beds encrusted with salt, Roman artillery perched anywhere the ground was level. No temple had survived intact, but Caesar was pleased to see that none had lost its sculptures and paintings, even if they were stained and smirched.

The Serapeum in Rhakotis had suffered least, thanks to its distance from Royal Avenue. However, three massive beams were gone from the main temple, and the roof had caved in.

“Yet Serapis is perfect,” Caesar said, scrambling over the mounds of masonry. For there he sat upon his jeweled golden throne, a Zeus-like figure, full-bearded and long-haired, with the three-headed dog Cerberus crouched at his feet, and his head weighed down by a gigantic crown in the form of a basket.

“It’s very good,” he said, studying Serapis. “Not up to Phidias or Praxiteles or Myron, but very good. Who did it?”

“Bryaxis,” said Cleopatra, lips tight. She looked around at the wreckage, remembering the vast, beautifully proportioned building on its high podium of many steps, the Ionic columns all bravely painted and gilded, the metopes and pediment veritable masterpieces. Only Serapis himself had survived.

Is it that Caesar has seen so many sacked cities, so many charred ruins, so much havoc? This destruction seems to leave him quite composed, though he and his men have done most of it. My people confined themselves to ordinary houses, hovels and slums, things that are not important.

“Well,” she said as he and his lictors escorted her back to the unmarred Royal Enclosure, “I shall scrape up every talent of gold and silver I can find to rebuild the temples, the gymnasium, the agora, the courts of justice, all the public buildings.”

His hand holding the donkey’s halter jerked; the animal stopped, its long-lashed eyes blinking. “That’s very laudable,” he said, voice hard, “but you don’t start with the ornaments. The first thing you spend your money on is food for those left alive in this desolation. The second thing you spend your money on is clearance of the ruins. The third thing you spend your money on are new houses for the ordinary people, including the poor. Only when Alexandria’s people are served can you spend money on the public buildings and temples.”

Her mouth opened to rail at him, but before she could speak her outrage, she encountered his eyes. Oh, Creator Ptah! He is a God, mighty and terrible!

“I can tell you,” he went on, “that most of the people killed in this war were Macedonians and Macedonian-Greeks. Perhaps a hundred thousand. So you still have almost three million people to care for—people whose dwellings and jobs have perished. I wish you could see that you have a golden opportunity to endear yourself to the bulk of your Alexandrian people. Rome hasn’t suffered reduction to ruins since she became a power, nor are her common people neglected. You Ptolemies and your Macedonian masters have run a place far bigger than Rome to suit yourselves, there has been no spirit of philanthropy. That has to change, or the mob will return more angry than ever.”

“You’re saying,” she said, pricked and confused, “that we at the top of the tower have not acquitted ourselves like a true government. You harp on our indifference to the lowly, the fact that it has never been our habit to fill their bellies at our expense, or extend the citizenship to all who live here. But Rome isn’t perfect either. It’s just that Rome has an empire, she can squeeze prosperity for her own lowly by exploiting her provinces. Egypt has no provinces. Those it did have, Rome took from it for her own needs. As for yourself, Caesar—your career has been a bloody one that ill equips you to sit in judgement on Egypt.”

The hand tugged the halter; the donkey started walking. “In my day,” he said in ordinary tones, “I have rendered half a million people homeless. Four hundred thousand women and children have died because of me. I have killed more than a million men on my fields of battle. I have amputated hands. I have sold a million more men, women and children into slavery. But all that I have done has been done in the knowledge that first I made treaties, tried conciliation, kept my end of the bargains. And when I have destroyed, what I have left behind will benefit future generations in far greater measure than the damage I did, the lives I ended or ruined.”

His voice didn’t increase in volume, but it became stronger. “Do you think, Cleopatra, that I don’t see in my mind’s eye the sum total of the devastation and upheaval I’ve caused? Do you think I don’t grieve? Do you think that I look back on all of it—and look forward to more of it—without sorrow? Without pain? Without regret? Then you mistake me. The remembrance of cruelty is poor comfort in old age, but I have it on excellent authority that I will not live to be old. I say again, Pharaoh, rule your subjects with love, and never forget that it is only an accident of birth that makes you different from one of those women picking through the debris of this shattered city. You deem it Amun-Ra who put you in your skin. I know it was an accident of fate.”

Her mouth was open; she put up her hand to shield it and looked straight between the donkey’s ears, determined not to weep. So he believes that he will not live to be old, and is glad of it. But now I understand that I will never truly know him. What he is telling me is that everything he has ever done was a conscious decision, made in full knowledge of the consequences, including to himself. I will never have that kind of strength or perception or ruthlessness. I doubt anyone ever has.

 

A nundinum later Caesar called an informal conference in the big room he used as a study. Cleopatra and Apollodorus were there, together with Hapd’efan’e and Mithridates of Pergamum. There were Romans present: Publius Rufrius, Carfulenus of the Sixth, Lamius of the Fortieth, Fabricius of the Twenty-seventh, Macrinus of the Thirty-seventh, Caesar’s lictor Fabius, his secretary Faberius, and his personal legate, Gaius Trebatius Testa.

“It is the beginning of April,” he announced, looking very fit and well, every inch Caesar, “and reports from Gnaeus Domitius Calvinus in Asia Province have informed me that Pharnaces has gone back to Cimmeria to deal with his erring son, who has decided not to submit to tata without a fight. So matters in Anatolia lie dormant for at least the next three or four months. Besides, all the mountain passes to Pontus and Armenia Parva will be choked with snow until the middle of Sextilis—oh, how I hate the discrepancy between the calendar and the seasons! In that respect, Pharaoh, Egypt is right. You based your calendar on the sun, not on the moon, and I intend to have speech with your astronomers.”

He drew a breath and returned to his subject. “There is no doubt in my mind that Pharnaces will return, however, so I will plan my future actions with that in mind. Calvinus is busy recruiting and training, and Deiotarus is extremely eager to atone for being in Pompeius Magnus’s clientele. As for Ariobarzanes”—he grinned—“Cappadocia will always be Cappadocia. We’ll get no joy from him, but nor will Pharnaces. I’ve told Calvinus to send for some of the Republican legions I returned to Italy with my own veterans, so when the time comes, we should be well prepared. It’s to our advantage that Pharnaces is bound to lose some of his best soldiers fighting Asander in Cimmeria.”

He leaned forward in his curule chair, eyes roaming the row of intent faces. “Those of us who have been marooned in Alexandria for the last six months have fought a particularly enervating campaign, and all troops are entitled to a winter rest camp. Therefore I intend to stay in Egypt for two more months, as long a winter camp as events allow. With Pharaoh’s permission and co-operation, I am going to send my men to winter camp near Memphis, far enough away from Alexandria to permit of no memories. There are tourist attractions galore, and the issue of pay will give the men money to spend. Also, I am arranging to have Alexandria’s surplus daughters shipped to the camp. So many potential husbands have died that the city will be burdened by too many women for years to come, and there is method in this provision. I do not intend these girls as whores, but as wives. The Twenty-seventh, the Thirty-seventh and the Fortieth are going to remain to garrison Alexandria for long enough to establish homes and families. I am afraid that the Sixth will not be able to form permanent liaisons.”

Fabricius, Lamius and Macrinus looked at one another, not sure whether they welcomed this news. Decimus Carfulenus of the Sixth sat impassively.

“It is essential that Alexandria remains quiet,” Caesar went on. “As time passes, more and more of Rome’s legions will find themselves posted to garrison duty rather than active service. Which isn’t to say that garrison duty consists of idleness. We all remember what happened to the Gabiniani whom Aulus Gabinius left behind to garrison Alexandria after Auletes was restored to his throne. They went native with a vengeance, and murdered the sons of Bibulus rather than return to active duty in Syria. The Queen dealt with that crisis, but it mustn’t happen again. Those legions left in Egypt will conduct themselves as a professional army, keep up their soldier skills, and hold themselves ready to march at Rome’s command. But men stranded in foreign places without a home life are discontented at first, then disaffected. What cannot happen is that they steal women from the people of Memphis. Therefore they will espouse the surplus Alexandrian women and—as Gaius Marius always said—spread Roman ways, Roman ideals and the Latin language through their children.”

The cool eyes surveyed the three centurions concerned, each primipilus of his legion; Caesar never bothered with legates or military tribunes, who were noblemen and transient. Centurions were the backbone of the army, its only full-time officers.

“Fabricius, Macrinus, Lamius, those are your orders. Remain in Alexandria and guard it well.”

No use complaining. It might have been a lot worse, like one of Caesar’s thousand-mile marches in thirty days. “Yes, Caesar,” said Fabricius, acting as spokesman.

“Publius Rufrius, you too will remain here. You’ll have the high command as legatus propraetore.”

News that delighted Rufrius; he already had an Alexandrian wife, she was with child, and he hadn’t wanted to leave her.

“Decimus Carfulenus, the Sixth will go with me when I march for Anatolia,” Caesar said. “I’m sorry you won’t have a permanent home, but you boys have been with me ever since I borrowed you from Pompeius Magnus all those years ago, and I prize you the more for being loyal to Pompeius after he took you back. I will plump your numbers out with other veterans as I go north. In the absence of the Tenth, the Sixth is my private command.”

Carfulenus’s beam revealed his two missing teeth, screwed up the scar he bore from one cheek to the other across a kind of a nose. His action in taking Ptolemy’s citadel had saved a whole legion of troops pinned down by that cross fire, so he had received the corona civica when the army had been paraded for decorations, and, like Caesar, he was entitled to enter the Senate under Sulla’s provisions for winners of major crowns. “The Sixth is deeply honored, Caesar. We are your men to the death.”

“As for you lot,” Caesar said affably to his chief lictor and his secretary, “you’re permanent fixtures. Where I go, you go. However, Gaius Trebatius, I don’t require any further duty from you that might handicap your noble status and your public career.”

Trebatius sighed, remembering those awful walks in Portus Itius’s extreme humidity because the General forbade his legates and tribunes to ride, remembering the taste of a Menapian roast goose, remembering those dreadful gallops in a pitching gig taking down notes while his pampered stomach heaved—oh, for Rome and litters, Baiae oysters, Arpinate cheeses, Falernian wine!

“Well, Caesar, as I imagine that sooner or later your path will take you to Rome, I shall defer my career decisions until that day comes,” he said heroically.

Caesar’s eyes twinkled. “Perhaps,” he said gently, “you’ll find the menu in Memphis more appealing. You’ve grown too thin.”

He folded his hands in his lap and nodded briskly. “The Roman element is dismissed.”

They filed out, the babble of their talk in full spate even as Fabius closed the door.

“You first, I think, good friend Mithridates,” Caesar said, relaxing his pose. “You are the son and Cleopatra the granddaughter of Mithridates the Great, which makes you her uncle. If, say, you were to send for your wife and younger children, would you stay in Alexandria to supervise its rebuilding? Cleopatra tells me she will have to import an architect, and you’re justly famous for what you’ve done down on the sea plain below Pergamum’s acropolis.” His face took on a wistful look. “I remember that sea plain very well. I used it to crucify five hundred pirates, much to the governor’s displeasure when he found out. But these days it’s a picture of walks, arcades, gardens, beautiful public buildings.”

Mithridates frowned. A vigorous man of fifty, the child of a concubine rather than a wife, he took after his mighty father—heavyset, muscular, tall, yellow-haired and yellow-eyed. He followed Roman fashion in that he cropped his hair very short and was clean-shaven, but his garb tended more to the Oriental—he had a weakness for gold thread, plush embroidery and every shade of purple known to the dyers of murex. All foibles to be tolerated in such a loyal client, first of Pompey’s, now of Caesar’s.

“Frankly, Caesar, I would love to do it, but can you spare me? Surely with Pharnaces lurking, I am needed in my own lands.”

Caesar shook his head emphatically. “Pharnaces won’t get as far as Asia Province’s borders, let alone Pergamum. I’ll stop him in Pontus. From what Calvinus says, your son is an excellent regent in your absence, so take a long holiday from government, do! Your blood ties to Cleopatra will make you acceptable to the Alexandrians, and I note you’ve forged very strong links with the Jews. The skills of Alexandria repose with the Jews and Metics, and the latter will accept you because the Jews do.”

“Then yes, Caesar.”

“Good.” Having gotten his way, the ruler of the world gave Mithridates of Pergamum the nod of dismissal. “Thank you.”

“And I thank you,” said Cleopatra when her uncle had gone. An uncle! How amazing! Why, I must have a thousand relatives through my mother! Pharnaces is my uncle too! And through Rhodogune and Apama, I go back to Cambyses and Darius of Persia! Both once Pharaoh! In me, whole dynasties connect. What blood my son will have!

Caesar was speaking to her about Hapd’efan’e, whom he wanted to take with him as his personal physician. “I’d ask the poor fellow for myself,” he said in Latin, which Cleopatra now spoke very well, “except that I’ve been in Egypt long enough to know that few people are genuinely free. Just the Macedonians. I dare-say that Cha’em owns him, since he’s a priest-physician of Ptah’s consort, Sekhmet, and he seems to live in Ptah’s precinct. But as you at least part-own Cha’em, he’ll do as you say, no doubt. I need Hapd’efan’e, Cleopatra. Now that Lucius Tuccius is dead—he was Sulla’s physician, then mine—I don’t trust any physician practicing in Rome. If he has a wife and family, I’ll happily carry them along as well.”

Something she could do for him! “Hapd’efan’e, Caesar wants to take you with him when he goes,” she said to the priest in the old tongue. “It would please Creator Ptah and Pharaoh if you consent to go. We in Egypt would have your thoughts as a channel to Caesar no matter where he might be. Answer him for yourself, and tell him about your situation. He’s concerned for you.”

The priest-physician sat with impassive face, his black, almond-shaped eyes fixed on Caesar unblinkingly. “God Caesar,” he said in his clumsy Greek, “it is clearly Creator Ptah’s wish that I serve you. I will do that willingly. I am hem-netjer-sinw, so I am sworn to celibacy.” A gleam of humor showed in the eyes. “However, I would like to extend my treatment of you to include certain Egyptian methods that Greek physicians dismiss—amulets and charms possess great magic, so do spells.”

“Absolutely!” Caesar cried, excited. “As Pontifex Maximus, I know all the Roman charms and spells—we can compare notes. I quite agree, they have great magic.” His face became grave. “We have to clear one thing up, Hapd’efan’e. No ‘god Caesar’ and no falling to the floor to greet me! Elsewhere in the world I am not a god, and it would offend others if you called me one.”

“As you wish, Caesar.” In truth, this shaven-headed, still young man was delighted with the new turn in his life, for he had a natural curiosity about the world, and looked forward to seeing strange places in the company of a man he literally worshiped. Distance couldn’t separate him from Creator Ptah and his wife, Sekhmet, their son Nefertem of the Lotus. He could wing his thoughts to Memphis from anywhere in the time it took a ray of sun to travel across the sacred pylon gates. So, while the talk between Caesar and Cleopatra proceeded in Greek too fast for him to follow, he mentally planned his equipment—a whole dozen carefully packed supple, hollowed reeds to start with, his forceps, trephines, knives, trocars, needles…

“What about the city officials?” Caesar was asking.

“The present lot have been banished,” Apollodorus answered, “I put them on a ship for Macedonia. When I arrived with the new Royal Guard, I found the Recorder trying to burn all the bylaws and ordinances, and the Accountant trying to burn the ledgers. Luckily I was in time to prevent both. The city treasury is beneath the Serapeum, and the city offices are a part of the precinct. All survived the war.”

“New men? How were the old chosen?”

“By sortition among the high Macedonians, most of whom have perished or fled.”

“Sortition? You mean they cast lots for the positions?”

“Yes, Caesar, sortition. The lots are rigged, of course.”

“Well, that’s cheaper than holding elections, which is the Roman way. So what happens now?”

Cleopatra spoke. “We reorganize,” she said firmly. “I intend to ban sortition and hold elections instead. If the million new citizens vote for a selection of candidates, it will reassure them that they do have a say.”

“That surely depends on the selection of candidates. Do you intend to let all who declare themselves candidates stand?”

Her lids dropped, she looked cagey. “I haven’t decided on the selection process yet,” she hedged.

“Don’t you think the Greeks will feel left out if the Jews and Metics become citizens? Why not enfranchise everybody, even your hybrid Egyptians? Call them your Head Count and limit their voting powers if you must, but allow them the simple citizenship.”

But that, her face told him, was going way too far.

“Thank you, Apollodorus, Hapd’efan’e, you may go,” he said, stifling a sigh.

 

“So we are alone,” said Cleopatra, pulling him out of his chair and down beside her on a couch. “Am I doing well? I’m spending my money as you directed—the poor are being fed and the rubble cleared away. Every common builder has been contracted to erect ordinary houses. There is money enough to start the public building too because I’ve taken my own funds from the treasure vaults for that.” The big yellow eyes glowed. “You are right, it is the way to be loved. Every day I set out with Apollodorus on my donkey to see the people, comfort them. Does this win your favor? Am I ruling in a more enlightened way?”

“Yes, but you have a long way to go. When you tell me that you’ve enfranchised all your people, you’ll be there. You have a natural autocracy, but you’re not observant enough. Take the Jews, for example. They’re quarrelsome, but they have ability. Treat them with respect, always be good to them. In hard times they’ll be your greatest support.”

“Yes, yes,” she said impatiently, tired of seriousness. “I have something else I want to talk about, my love.”

His eyes crinkled at their corners. “Indeed?”

“Yes, indeed. I know what we’re going to do with our two months, Caesar.”

“If the winds were with me, I’d go to Rome.”

“Well, they’re not, so we’re going to sail down Nilus to the First Cataract.” She patted her belly. “Pharaoh must show the people that she is fruitful.”

He frowned. “I agree that Pharaoh must, but I ought to stay here on Our Sea and try to keep abreast of events elsewhere.”

“I refuse to listen!” she cried. “I don’t care about events around Your Sea! You and I are setting out on Ptolemy Philopator’s barge to see the real Egypt—Egypt of Nilus!”

“I dislike being pushed, Cleopatra.”

“It’s for your health, you stupid man! Hapd’efan’e says you need a proper rest, not a continuation of duty. And what greater rest can there be than a—a cruise? Please, I beg of you, grant me this! Caesar, a woman needs memories of an idyll with her beloved! We’ve had no idyll, and while ever you think of yourself as Caesar Dictator, we can’t. Please! Please?”