In sending Dellius to Median Artavasdes, Cleopatra was trying to patch up an alliance that would keep this king quiet while his Armenian namesake was conquered for Rome. That it could be done was thanks to trouble at the court of King Phraates, where princes of a minor Arsacid house were intriguing against him. No matter how many of your relatives you manage to kill, reflected Cleopatra, there are always some who lie so low you don’t see them until it is too late.
Making Antony see that he didn’t dare seize upon this Parthian turmoil by trying a second time to take Phraaspa was much harder, but she had eventually succeeded by dwelling constantly upon money. Those forty-four thousand talents Octavian had sent him had been swallowed up by the cost of war—paying out some legions, arming new legions, buying the staples legionaries liked to eat from bread to pease porridge, as well as horses, mules, tents—a thousand and one necessities. And somehow whenever a general of any nationality equipped a new army, it was a seller’s market; the general paid inflated prices for every commodity. As Cleopatra continued to refuse to pay for Parthian campaigns and Antony had no more territory he could cede her in return for her gold, he was caught in her carefully laid trap.
“Content yourself with the complete conquest of all Armenia,” she said. “If Dellius can draft a treaty with Median Artavasdes, your campaign will be a huge success, something you can trumpet to the Senate in tones that make its rafters ring. You can’t afford to lose another baggage train, nor the digits of your soldiers, which means no marches into unknown country too far from Rome’s own provinces to get help quickly. This campaign is simply to exercise your experienced men and toughen your recruits. You’ll need them to face Octavianus, never forget that.”
He took it to heart, of that she had no doubt, therefore she could leave him to invade Armenia without needing to remain in Syria herself.
One other thing prompted her to go home: a letter from her lord high chamberlain, Apollodorus. Though it was not specific, it indicated that Caesarion was becoming troublesome.
Oh, Alexandria, Alexandria! How beautiful the city was after the filthy alleyways and slums of Antioch! Admittedly it held as many poor in slums as Antioch did—more, actually, as it was a bigger city—but every street was wide enough to let the air in, and the air was sweet, fresh, dry, neither too hot in summer nor too cold in winter. The slums were new, as well; Julius Caesar and his Macedonian enemies had virtually leveled the city fourteen years ago, obliging her to rebuild it. Caesar had wanted her to increase the number of public fountains and give the people free baths, but that she hadn’t done—why should she? If she sailed into the Great Harbor, she came ashore inside the Royal Enclosure, and if she came in by road, she used Canopic Avenue. Neither route saw her needing to traverse the stews of Rhakotis, and what her eyes didn’t see, her heart didn’t grieve about. Plague had reduced the population from three million to one million, but that had been six years ago; from somewhere a million people had appeared, most by the birth of babies, a smaller number by immigration. No native Egyptians were allowed to live in Alexandria, but there were plenty of hybrids from interbreeding with poor Greeks; they formed a large servant class of free citizens who were not citizens, even after Caesar’s urging her to bestow the Alexandrian citizenship on all its residents.
Apollodorus was waiting on the jetty in the Royal Harbor, but not, her eager eyes discovered, her eldest son. The light in them died, but she gave her hand to Apollodorus to kiss when he rose from his obeisance, and didn’t object when he led her to one side, his face betraying his need to give her vital information right at this moment of her arrival.
“What is it, Apollodorus?”
“Caesarion,” he said.
“What has he done?”
“Nothing—as yet. It’s what he plans to do.”
“Can’t you and Sosigenes control him?”
“We try, Isis Reincarnated, but it becomes more and more difficult.” He cleared his throat and looked embarrassed. “His balls have dropped, Majesty, and he regards himself as a man.”
She stopped in her tracks to turn wide gold eyes upon her most trusted servant. “But—but he isn’t yet thirteen!”
“Thirteen in three more months, Majesty, and growing like a weed. He is already four and a half cubits tall. His voice is breaking, his physique more a man’s than a child’s.”
“Ye gods, Apollodorus! No, don’t tell me any more, I beg you! Armed with this information, I think it’s better that I form my own opinions.” She resumed walking. “Where is he? Why didn’t he meet me?”
“He’s in the middle of drafting legislation he wanted to have finished before you arrived.”
“Drafting legislation?”
“Yes. He’ll tell you all about it, Daughter of Ra, probably before you can so much as open your mouth to try to speak.”
Even forewarned, Cleopatra’s first sight of her son took the breath from her body. In the year of her absence he had gone from child to youth, but without the awkwardness males usually suffered. His skin was clear and tanned, his thick mop of gold hair trimmed short rather than kept long as was the wont of adolescents, and, as Apollodorus had said, his body was a man’s. Already! My son, my beautiful little boy, what happened to you? I have lost you forever, and my heart is broken. Even your eyes are changed—so stern and certain, so—inflexible.
All of which was as nothing compared to his likeness to his father. Here was Caesar the young man, Caesar as he must have been when he wore the laena and the apex of the Flamen Dialis, Rome’s special priest of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. It had taken Sulla and his nineteenth birthday to free Caesar of that abominated priesthood, but here stood Caesar as he might have been did Gaius Marius not attempt to ban him from a military career. The long face, the bumpy nose, the sensuous mouth with the creases of humor in its corners—Caesarion, Caesarion, not yet! I am not ready.
He came across the wide expanse of floor between his desk and the spot where Cleopatra stood, transfixed, one hand holding a fat scroll, the other extended to her.
“Mama, how good to see you,” he said in a deep voice.
“I left a boy, I behold a man,” she managed.
He handed her the scroll. “I’ve just completed it,” he said, “but of course you must read it before I put it into force.”
The roll of paper felt heavy; she looked down at it, then at him.
“Don’t I get a kiss?” she asked.
“If you want one.” He pecked her on the cheek, then, it seemed deciding this was not enough, he pecked her on the other cheek. “There! Now read it, Mama, please!”
Time to assert her ascendancy. “Later, Caesarion, when I have a moment. First, I’m going to see your brothers and sister. Then I intend to have dinner on dry land. And after that, a meeting with you, Apollodorus and Sosigenes, at which you may tell me all about whatever it is you’ve written in here.”
The old Caesarion would have argued; the new one didn’t. He shrugged, took the scroll back. “Actually, that’s good. I’ll work on it a little more while you’re otherwise engaged.”
“I hope you intend to be at dinner!”
“A meal I never eat—why put the cooks to the trouble of making a fancy meal I won’t do justice to? I take fresh bread and oil, a salad, some fish or lamb, and eat while I work.”
“Even today, when I’ve just come home?”
The brilliant blue eyes twinkled; he grinned. “I am to feel guilty, is that it? Very well, I’ll come to dinner.” Off he went to sit behind his desk, the paper already unfurled, and bent his head to it the moment he groped for his chair and found it.
Her feet carried her to the nursery as if they belonged to a woman outside of herself, but here at least was sanity, normality. Iras and Charmian came running to hug her, kiss her, then stand off to watch their beloved mistress take in the sight of her three younger children. Ptolemy Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene were putting a jigsaw puzzle together, a scene of flowers, grass, and butterflies painted on
thin wood that some master craftsman with a fretsaw had cut into small, irregular pieces. The Sun twin was whanging away with a toy mallet at a piece that didn’t fit while his sister the Moon glared in outrage. Then she wrenched the mallet away from her brother and hit him on the head with it. Sun howled, Moon shrieked with joy; a moment later they were back working on the puzzle.
“The mallet head is made of cork,” whispered Iras.
How lovely they were! Five years old now, and so different in appearance that no one would have guessed that they were twins. The Sun was appropriately gold of hair and eye and skin, handsome in a more eastern than Roman vein; it was easy to see that when he matured he would have a curved beak of a nose, high cheekbones. The Moon had dense, curly black hair, a delicate face, and a pair of huge eyes the color of amber between long black lashes; it was easy to see that when she matured she would be very beautiful in no way save her own. Neither of them resembled Antony, or indeed their mother. The mingling of two disparate strains had produced children more physically attractive than either parent.
Little Ptolemy Philadelphus, on the other hand, was Mark Antony from head to feet: big, thickset, reddish hair and eyes, the nose that strove to meet the chin across a small, full mouth. He had been born in Roman October the year before last, which made him eighteen months old.
“He’s a typical youngest child,” Charmian murmured. “Makes no attempt to speak, though he walks like his daddy.”
“Typical?” Cleopatra asked, enveloping his wriggling body in a hug he clearly didn’t appreciate.
“Youngests don’t talk because their elders talk for them. He gabbles, they understand.”
“Oh.” She dropped Philadelphus in a hurry when he sank his milk teeth into her hand, stood flapping it in pain. “He really is like his father, isn’t he? Determined. Iras, have the court jeweler make him an amethyst bracelet. It guards against wine.”
“He’d tear it off, Majesty.”
“Then a close-fitting necklet, or a brooch—I don’t care, as long as he wears an amethyst.”
“Does Antonius wear his?” Iras asked.
“He does now,” said Cleopatra grimly.
From the nursery she went to her bath, Charmian and Iras accompanying her. In Rome, she knew, they told fabulous stories of her bath; that it was filled with ass’s milk, that it was the size of a carp pond, that a miniature waterfall refreshed it, that its heat was tested by immersing a slave in it first. None of the tales that sprang out of her sojourn in Rome was true; the tub Julius Caesar found in Lentulus Crus’s tent after Pharsalus was far more sumptuous. Cleopatra’s was a rectangular tub of ordinary size, made of unpolished red granite. It was filled by slaves carrying amphorae of plain water, some hot, some cold; the recipe was standard, so the temperature scarcely varied.
“Does Caesarion mix with his little brothers and sister?” she asked as Charmian massaged her back, poured water over it.
“No, Majesty,” Charmian answered, sighing. “He likes them, but they don’t interest him.”
“Hardly surprising,” said Iras, preparing perfumed unguent. “The age difference is too great for intimacy, and he was never treated as a child. That is the fate of Pharaoh.”
“True.”
An observation reinforced at dinner, which Caesarion attended in body, but not in mind; that was elsewhere. If someone thrust food at him, he ate it, always the plainest of fare. Clearly the servants were educated in what to offer him. His intake of fish was consoling, and he did eat lamb, but poultry, young crocodile, and other meats were ignored. Crisp bread, as snowy white as the bakers could make it, formed the largest part of his meal, dipped in olive oil or, at breakfast time, honey, he told his mother.
“My father ate plain,” he said in response to a chiding remark from Cleopatra aimed at persuading him to vary his diet more, “and it didn’t do him any harm, did it?”
“No, it didn’t,” she admitted, giving up.
She held her councils in a room designed for them, having a big marble table that could seat her and Caesarion at its end, and take four men down either side; the far end was always vacant as an honorary place for Amun-Ra, who never managed to come. This day saw Apollodorus sitting opposite Sosigenes and Cha’em. Their queen took her seat, annoyed to find no Caesarion, but before she could say something scathing, in he strolled with both hands full of documents. A loud gasp went up; Caesarion went to the place of Amun-Ra and seated himself there.
“Take your designated chair, Caesarion,” Cleopatra said.
“This is my chair.”
“It belongs to Amun-Ra, and even Pharaoh is not Amun-Ra.”
“I have contracted an agreement with Amun-Ra, that I represent him at all councils,” the lad said, unruffled. “It is foolish to sit in a chair from which I cannot see the one face I need most to see, Pharaoh—yours.”
“We reign jointly, therefore we should sit together.”
“Were I your parrot, Pharaoh, we could. But now that I have become a man, I do not intend to be your parrot. When I think it necessary, I will disagree with you. I bow to your age and your experience, but you must bow to me as senior partner in our joint rule. I am male Pharaoh, it is my right to have the final word.”
A silence followed this level speech, during which Cha’em, Sosigenes, and Apollodorus looked fixedly at the surface of the table and Cleopatra looked down its length at her rebel son. It was her own doing; she had elevated him to the throne, had him anointed and consecrated Pharaoh of Egypt and King of Alexandria. Now she didn’t know what to do for the best, and doubted that she had sufficient influence with this stranger to reassert herself as the senior partner. Oh, pray this is not the beginning of a war between ruling Ptolemies! she thought. Pray this isn’t going to be Ptolemy Gross Belly versus Cleopatra the Mother! But I see no corruption in him, no greed, no savagery. He’s a Caesar, not a Ptolemy! Which means he will not subject himself to me, that he thinks himself wiser than me, for all my “age and experience.” I must give way, I must give in.
“Your point is taken, Pharaoh,” she said without anger. “I sit at this end, you at that end.” Unconsciously she rubbed her hand across the base of her neck, where, she had discovered in her bath, a swelling had arisen. “Is there anything you wish to discuss about your conduct of state affairs while I was away?”
“No, all went smoothly. I dispensed justice without needing to consult previous cases, and none disputed my verdicts. The public purse of Egypt is properly accounted for, also the public purse of Alexandria. I have left it to the Recorder and the other magistrates of Alexandria to do all the necessary repairs to the city’s buildings, and authorized repairs to various temples and precincts along the shores of Nilus as petitioned.” His face changed, became more animated. “If you have no questions and have heard no complaints about my conduct, may I ask that you listen to my plans for the future of Egypt and Alexandria?”
“I have heard no complaints thus far,” Cleopatra said with caution. “You may proceed, Ptolemy Caesar.”
He had put his bundles of scrolls on the table, and spoke now without consulting them. The room was dim because the day was drawing to a close, but wayward spears of light dancing with dust motes flickered in time to the swaying of palm fronds outside. One ray, steadier than the rest, illuminated the disc of Amun-Ra on the wall behind Caesarion’s head; Cha’em took on his seer’s look, said something in the back of his throat too strangled to understand, and put trembling hands on the table. Perhaps it was the fading light made his skin seem grey; Cleopatra didn’t know, but did know that whatever vision had come to him would not be imparted to her. Which meant it had been malign.
“First, I shall deal with Alexandria,” said Caesarion briskly. “There have to be changes—immediate changes. In future we will follow Roman practice by providing a free grain dole for the poor. Means tested, of course. Further to grain, its price will not fluctuate to reflect its cost if bought from overseas when Nilus does not inundate. The additional
expense will be absorbed by Alexandria’s public purse. However, these laws apply only to the amount of grain a small family consumes during the course of one month—the medimnus. Any Alexandrian buying more than one medimnus a month will have to pay the going rate.”
He paused, chin up, eyes challenging, but no one spoke. He resumed. “Those residents of Alexandria who are not at the moment entitled to the citizenship will be enfranchised. This applies to all free men, including freedmen. That way, there will be citizen rolls and the apparatus to issue grain chits, be they for free grain or that one subsidized monthly medimnus. All the city’s magistracies from Interpreter down will be filled in the fairest way—by free election—and last for one year only. Any citizen, be he Macedonian, Greek, Jew, Metic, or hybrid Egyptian, will be permitted to stand, and laws will be enacted to punish electoral bribery, as well as corruption while in office.”
Another pause, greeted by profound silence. Caesarion took that as a sign that opposition, when it came, would be implacable.
“Finally,” he announced, “at every major intersection I will build a marble fountain. It will have several spouts for drawing water and a roomy pool for washing clothes. For washing persons, I will build public baths in each of the city’s districts except Beta, where the Royal Enclosure already has adequate facilities.”
Time to switch from man to boy; eyes dancing, he looked at each set face around the table. “There!” he cried, laughing now. “Isn’t all of that splendid?”
“Splendid indeed,” Cleopatra said, “but manifestly impossible.”
“Why?”
“Because Alexandria cannot afford your program.”
“Since when did a democratic form of government cost more than a bunch of life-tenured Macedonians who are too busy feathering their own nests to spend the city’s moneys where they should be spent? Why should public income support their plush existences? And since when should a youth be castrated in order to enter senior service with the King and Queen? Why can’t women guard our virgin princesses? Eunuchs, in this day and age? It’s abominable!”