But it was Cha’em who stepped forward, took off the leather underdress and its pteryges straps.
The three old men stood watching transfixed as Antony put the tip of his gladius against his midriff, the fingers of his left hand groping to find the bottom of his rib cage. Satisfied, he clasped the ivory eagle in both hands, drew in an audible gulp of air, and pushed with all his might. Only then did the three old men move, flying to help him as he subsided to the floor, gasping, blinking, frowning not in pain but in anger.
“Cacat!” he said, lips drawn back to show his teeth. “I missed the heart. Should have been there….”
“What can we do?” Sosigenes asked, weeping.
“Stop blubbering, for one thing. The sword’s in my liver or lights, I’m going to take some time dying.” He groaned. “Cacat, it hurts! Serves me right…. The Queen—take me to her.”
“Stay here until you die, Marcus Antonius,” Cha’em pleaded.
“No, I want to die looking at her. Take me to her.”
Two embalmer priests went up in the basket first, their apparatus around them, then stood on the shelf of the aperture while two more embalmer priests got Antony into the basket, its base stuffed with white blankets. Priests on the ground outside winched the basket up; at the aperture they pulled it across on a set of rails until they could lower it into the tomb, where the first two embalmer priests steadied it down.
Cleopatra was waiting, expecting to see a lifeless Antony beautifully arranged in a death that bore no visible stigmata.
“Cleopatra!” he gasped. “They said you were dead!”
“My love, my love! You’re still alive!”
“Isn’t that a joke?” he asked, trying to chuckle through a coughing gurgle. “Cacat! There’s blood in my chest.”
“Put him on my bed,” she said to the priests, and hovered, a nuisance, until he was placed to her liking. The scarlet padded tunic didn’t betray the blood as the white blankets on which he lay did, but she had seen plenty of blood in her thirty-nine years and was not horrified at it. Until, priest-physicians that they were, they peeled off the tunic intending to bind the wound more tightly, stop the hemorrhage. When she saw that magnificent body rent by a wide, thin tear below the ribs, Cleopatra had to clench her teeth to prevent the cry of protest, the first stab of grief. He was going to die—well, she had expected that. But not the reality. The pain in his eyes, the spasm of agony that suddenly bent him like a bow as the priests fought to bind him. His hand crushed her fingers, ground the bones together, but she knew that touching her gave him strength, so she suffered it.
Once he was made as comfortable as he could be, she drew up a chair to the side of the bed and sat there talking to him in a soft, crooning voice, and his eyes, bright with pleasure, never left her face. Moment after moment, hour after hour, helping him to cross the River, as he put it, still at the core of him a Roman.
“Will we really walk together in the Realm of the Dead?”
“Very soon now, my love.”
“How will I find you?”
“I will find you. Just sit somewhere beautiful and wait.”
“A nicer fate than eternal sleep.”
“Oh, yes. We will be together.”
“Caesar’s a god too. Will I have to share you?”
“No, Caesar belongs to the Roman gods. He won’t be there.”
It was a long time before he summoned up the courage to tell her what had happened at the hippodrome.
“My troops deserted, Cleopatra. To the last man.”
“So there was no battle.”
“No. I fell on my sword.”
“A better alternative than Octavianus.”
“So I thought. Oh, but it’s wearying! Slow, too slow.”
“It will be over soon, my dearest love. Did I tell you that I love you? Did I tell you how very much I love you?”
“Yes, and at long last I believe you.”
The transition from life to death when it came was so subtle that she didn’t realize it had happened until, chancing to look closely at his eyes, she found the pupils huge and covered with a thin patina of gold. Whatever was Marcus Antonius had left; she held a husk in her arms, the part of him he had abandoned.
A scream ripped the air: her scream. She howled like an animal, tore out her hair in handfuls, ripped at her bodice until her breasts were bare and gouged them with her nails, howling and wailing, beating at herself demented.
When it seemed to Charmian and Iras that she would do herself serious damage, they summoned the embalmer priests and forced syrup of poppies down Cleopatra’s throat. Only after she fell into a drugged stupor could the priests remove the body of Mark Antony to his sarcophagus room, there to commence the embalming.
Darkness had fallen; it had taken Antony eleven hours to die, but at the end he was the old Antony, the great Antony. In death he found himself at last.
28
Caesarion continued down the Memphis road tranquilly, though his two servants, both elderly Macedonian men, urged him to ride for Schedia and there take a ferry for Leontopolis on the Pelusiac Nile. That would avoid all risk of encountering Octavian’s army, they said; it was also a shorter way to Nilus.
“What rubbish, Praxis!” The young man laughed. “The shortest way to Nilus is the Memphis road.”
“Only when it does not contain a Roman army, Son of Ra.”
“And don’t call me that! I’m Parmenedes of Alexandria, a junior banker going to inspect the Royal Bank accounts at Coptus.”
A pity that Mama had insisted I take two watchdogs, Caesarion thought, though they couldn’t make any difference in the end. He knew exactly where he was going and what he was going to do. Not leave Mama in the lurch, first and foremost—what kind of son would consent to do that? Once they had been tied together by a cord that had poured her blood into him as he lay enveloped in the soft warm fluid she had made for him. And even after the cord was cut, an invisible one capable of stretching over the whole world still bound them. Of course she was thinking of him when she sent him off to a part of the globe so alien he would comprehend neither the customs nor the language. But he was thinking of her when he set off with the full intention of going somewhere else to do something very different.
At the fork where the Schedia road took most of the traffic he said a cheerful farewell to the several other travelers nearby, flicked his camel with a switch, and galloped off down the Memphis road. “Brrrr! Brrrr!” he urged the beast, legs hooked firmly around the front of the saddle to prevent falling; the gait was unusual, both legs on one side driving forward together, which meant a rocking progress akin to a ship in a beam-on swell.
“We must catch him,” said Praxis, sighing.
“Brrrr! Brrrr!” and off the two men went in pursuit of the rapidly disappearing Caesarion.
Not very many miles farther on, and just as his watchdogs were closing the gap between them, Caesarion saw Octavian’s army. He curbed in the camel and reduced its pace to an amble, then moved off the road itself. No one took any notice of him; both troops and officers were engrossed in their marching songs, for they knew the thousand-mile march was almost over and a good camp awaited them—proper legionary food, Alexandrian girls to give themselves willingly or unwillingly, no doubt lots of little gold votive objects no one high up would miss.
One-two, one-two,
Antonius we’ve done for you!
Three-four, three-four,
We’re a-knocking on your door!
Five-six, five-six,
Antonius counts for nix!
Seven-eight, seven-eight,
Antonius, meet your fate!
Nine-ten, nine-ten,
We’ve been there and back again!
Caesar, Caesar!
Men or women, a cock-teaser!
Alexandria!
Alexandria!
Al-ex-an-dria!
Fascinated, Caesarion noted how the soldiers varied the rhythm of their words to keep up that easy l
eft-right, left-right march, and then, as he moved slowly down the line, realized that each cohort had its own song, and that some soldier with a good voice and a keen mind made up new words to sing between the choruses. He had seen Antony’s army, both here in Egypt and in Antioch, but his troops had never sung marching songs. Probably because they weren’t on the march, he thought. It stirred him, even when the words were not very complimentary to his mother, who seemed to be the favorite subject. Witch, bitch, sow, cow, Queen of Beasts, whore of priests.
Ah! There was the general’s scarlet vexillum proponere, its shaft held in a deep tube by a man who wore a lion skin; when the general pitched his tent, it would fly outside. Octavianus, at last! Like the rest of his legates, he was on foot, and clad rather drably in a leather underdress of plain brown. The golden hair gave him away even if the scarlet banner had not. So—small! Not above five and a half feet, thought Caesarion, amazed. Slender, well tanned, beautiful in the face yet not effeminate, his little and ugly hands moving in time to the (polite) song ahead.
“Caesar Octavianus!” he called, pulling off his hood. “Caesar Octavianus, I come to treat!”
Octavian stopped dead, which ground the half of his army behind him to a halt while those in front continued until a junior legate mounted on a horse went forward.
For a wild, spinning moment Octavian genuinely thought that he beheld Divus Julius as Divus Julius must look were he endowed with Greek materialization. Then his dazed eyes took in the fawn wool of the disguise, the youth of Divus Julius’s features, and understood that this was Caesarion. Cleopatra’s son by his divine father. Ptolemy XV Caesar of Egypt.
Two older men on camels were bearing down; suddenly Octavian turned to Statilius Taurus.
“Capture them—and put up the boy’s hood, Taurus! Now!”
While the army dropped its burdens from backs and shoulders long used to the weight and parties went off to nearby Lake Mareotis to fetch water, Octavian’s command tent was hastily erected. There could be no getting out of including his marshals in the coming interview, at least at its start; Messala Corvinus and Statilius Taurus had both glimpsed the bared golden head, the manifestation of Divus Julius’s—ghost?
“Take the two others away and kill them immediately,” he said to Taurus, “then come back to me. Let no one speak to them before they die, so stay to see the deed done, is that clear?”
Three men traveled with Octavian of choice rather than for any military prowess, of which they had none. One was a nobleman, the other two his own freedmen. Gaius Proculeius was the half brother of Maecenas’s brother-in-law, Varro Murena, a man famous for his erudition and pleasant nature. Gaius Julius Thyrsus and Gaius Julius Epaphroditus had been Octavian’s slaves, and served him so well that upon their manumission, he had taken them not only into his service but his confidence. For such a one as Octavian, the unalleviated company of military men like his senior legates for months on end would have driven him mad. Hence Proculeius, Thyrsus, and Epaphroditus. As all Octavian’s marshals from Sabinus through Calvinus to Corvinus understood that their master was an eccentric, no one found it offensive or off-putting to discover that Octavian on campaign was prone to dine by himself: that is, with Proculeius, Thyrsus, and Epaphdroditus.
The shock Octavian had suffered took a little time to wear off, for many reasons, first and foremost that he had located the Treasure of the Ptolemies by following his divine father’s outline of its whereabouts to the letter. An exercise he undertook with his two freedmen; no noble Roman was ever going to see what lay in hundreds of little rooms to each side of that warren of tunnels that started in the precinct of Ptah, reached by pressing a certain cartouche and descending into lightless bowels. After wandering like a slave admitted to the Elysian Fields for several hours, he had assembled his “mules”—Egyptian men blindfolded until well inside the tunnels, then set to removing what Octavian felt he was going to need to put Rome back on her feet: gold in the main, with some blocks of lapis lazuli, rock crystal, and alabaster to give to sculptors to fashion wonderful works of art that would adorn Rome’s temples and public places. Back in the sunlight, his own cohort of troops killed the Egyptians and took charge of the wagon train already on its way to Pelusium and the voyage home. The soldiers might guess at the contents of the crates by their sheer weight, but none would open one, for each was sealed with the sphinx.
The load that had fallen from Octavian’s back at the sight of more wealth than he had dreamed existed left him exhilarated, so free and carefree that his legates couldn’t work out what it was about Memphis that had changed him so. He sang, he whistled, he almost skipped with joy as the army started up the road to the lair of the Queen of Beasts, Alexandria. Of course in time it would dawn upon them what must have happened in Memphis, but by then they—and all that gold—would be back in Rome, all opportunities lost to pop a little something into the sinuses of their togas.
So when Caesarion hailed him not fifteen miles from the hippodrome and the outskirts of Alexandria, he hadn’t yet worked out all his strategies. The gold was on its way to Rome, yes, but what was he going to do with Egypt and its royal family? With Mark Antony? What would best safeguard the Treasure of the Ptolemies? How many knew how to access it? Whom had Cleopatra told about it among her would-be allies, from the King of the Parthians to Artavasdes of Armenia? Oh, curse the boy for this unexpected and unannounced appearance! In full sight of his army!
When Statilius Taurus returned, Octavian nodded curtly.
“Bring him in, Titus. Yourself.”
He entered with his head still covered, but quickly shed the robe to stand revealed in a plain leather riding tunic. So tall! Taller even than Divus Julius had been. Octavian’s marshals sucked in a collective breath, staggered.
“What are you doing here, King Ptolemy?” Octavian asked from the ivory curule chair in which he had seated himself. There would be no handshakes, no cordial welcomes. No hypocrisy.
“I have come to treat.”
“Did your mother send you?”
The young man actually laughed, revealing yet another layer of his likeness to Divus Julius. “No, of course not! She thinks I’m well on my way to Berenice, where I am to sail for India.”
“You would have done better to obey her.”
“No. I cannot leave her—would not leave her to face you all alone.”
“She has Marcus Antonius.”
“If I read him right, he will be dead.”
Octavian stretched, yawned until his eyes watered. “Very well, King Ptolemy, I will treat with you. But not with so many ears listening. Gentlemen legates, you are dismissed. Remember the oath you swore to my person. I want no whisper of this going one man further, nor are you to discuss today among yourselves. Is that understood?”
Statilius Taurus nodded; he and the other legates left.
“Sit down, Caesarion.”
Proculeius, Thyrsus, and Epaphroditus ranged themselves along the tent wall out of eyeshot of both participants in this drama, hardly breathing from their terror.
Caesarion sat, his blue-green eyes the only part of him that did not belong to Divus Julius.
“What do you think you can accomplish that Cleopatra cannot?”
“A tranquil atmosphere, to begin with. You do not hate me—how can you, when we have never met? I want to bring about a peace of benefit to you as well as to Egypt.”
“Outline your proposals.”
“That my mother retire to private life in Memphis or Thebes. That her children by Marcus Antonius go with her. That I rule in Alexandria as king and in Egypt as pharaoh. In the clientele of Gaius Julius Caesar Divi Filius, as his loyalest, most faithful client-king. I will give you all the gold you ask for, as well as wheat to feed Italia’s multitudes.”
“Why should you rule more wisely than your mother did?”
“Because I am Gaius Julius Caesar’s blood son. I’ve already started to rectify the mistakes that many generations of the House of Ptolemy have
made—I’ve instituted a free grain dole for the poor, I’ve extended the citizenship of Alexandria to all its residents, and I’m in the process of establishing democratic elections.”
“Hmmm. Very Caesarean, Caesarion.”
“I found his papers, you see—the ones detailing his plans for Alexandria and Egypt to bring them out of a stagnation that has lasted in Egypt proper for millennia. I saw that his ideas were right, that we wallowed in an unpitying sink of privileges for the upper classes.”
“Oh, you do sound like him!”
“Thank you.”
“We share a divine father, that’s true,” Octavian said, “but you look far more like him.”
“So my mother has always said. Antonius too.”
“Hasn’t it occurred to you what that means, Caesarion?”
The young man looked blank. “No. What could it mean, apart from its reality?”
“Its reality. In a nutshell, that’s the problem.”
“Problem?”
“Yes.” Octavian sighed, steepled his crooked fingers. “If it were not for the accident of your appearance, King Ptolemy, I might well have agreed to treat with you. As it is, I have no choice. I must put you to death.”
Caesarion gasped, started to rise, subsided. “You mean I will walk with my mother in your triumphal parade and then go to the strangler? But why? What makes my death necessary? For that matter, what makes my mother’s death necessary?”
“You mistake me, son of Caesar. You’ll never walk in my triumphal parade. In fact, I wouldn’t let you within a thousand miles of Rome. Has no one ever enlightened you?”
“About what?” Caesarion demanded, looking exasperated. “Stop playing with me, Caesar Octavianus!”