скачать книгу бесплатно
Of course her agents had reported that many thought Antony was a part of the plot to assassinate Caesar, though she herself was not sure; the occasional letter Antony had written to her explained that he had had no choice other than to ignore the murder, forswear vengeance on the assassins, even condone their conduct. And in those letters Antony had assured her that, as soon as Rome settled down, he would recommend Caesarion to the Senate as one of Caesar’s chief heirs. To a woman devastated by grief, his words had been balm. She wanted to believe them! Oh, no, he wasn’t saying that Caesarion should be admitted into Roman law as Caesar’s Roman heir! Only that Caesarion’s right to the throne of Egypt should be sanctioned by the Senate. Were it not, her son would be faced by the same problems that had dogged her father, never certain of his tenure of the throne because Rome said Egypt really belonged to Rome. Anymore than she herself had been certain until Caesar entered her life. Now Caesar was gone, and his nephew Gaius Octavius had usurped more power than any lad of eighteen had ever done before. Calmly, cannily, quickly. At first she had thought of young Octavian as a possible father for more children, but he had rebuffed her in a brief letter she could still recite by heart.
Marcus Antonius, he of the reddish eyes and curly reddish hair, no more like Caesar than Hercules was like Apollo. Now he had turned his eyes toward Egypt – but not to woo Pharaoh. All he wanted was to fill his war chest with Egypt’s wealth. Well, that would never happen – never!
‘Caesarion, it’s time you had some fresh air,’ she said with brisk decision. ‘Sosigenes, I need you. Apollodorus, find Cha’em and bring him back with you. It’s council time.’
When Cleopatra spoke in that tone, no one argued, least of all her son, who took himself off at once, whistling for his puppy, a small ratter named Fido.
‘Read this,’ she said curtly when the council assembled, thrusting the scroll at Cha’em. ‘All of you, read it.’
‘If Antonius brings his legions, he can sack Alexandria and Memphis,’ Sosigenes said, handing the scroll to Apollodorus. ‘Since the plague, no one has had the spirit to resist. Nor do we have the numbers to resist. There are many gold statues to melt down.’
Cha’em was the high priest of Ptah, the creator god, and had been a beloved part of Cleopatra’s life since her tenth year. His brown, firm body was wrapped from just below the nipples to mid-calf in a flaring white linen dress, and around his neck he wore the complex mixture of chains, crosses, roundels and breastplate proclaiming his position. ‘Antonius will melt nothing down,’ he said firmly. ‘You will go to Tarsus, Cleopatra, meet him there.’
‘Like a chattel? Like a mouse? Like a whipped cur?’
‘No, like a mighty sovereign. Like Pharaoh Hatshepsut, so great that her successor obliterated her cartouches. Armed with all the wiles and cunning of your ancestors. As Ptolemy Soter was the natural brother of Alexander the Great, you have the blood of many gods in your veins. Not only Isis, Hathor and Mut, but Amun-Ra on two sides – from the line of the pharaohs and from Alexander the Great, who was Amun-Ra’s son and also a god.’
‘I see where Cha’em is going,’ said Sosigenes thoughtfully. ‘This Marcus Antonius is no Caesar, therefore he can be duped. You must awe him into pardoning you. After all, you didn’t aid Cassius, and he can’t prove you did. When this Quintus Dellius arrives, he will try to cow you. But you are Pharaoh; no minion has the power to cow you.’
‘A pity that the fleet you sent Antonius and Octavianus was obliged to turn back,’ said Apollodorus.
‘Oh, what’s done is done!’ Cleopatra said impatiently. She sat back in her chair, suddenly pensive. ‘No one can cow Pharaoh, but … Cha’em, ask Tach’a to look at the lotus petals in her bowl. Antonius might have a use.’
Sosigenes looked startled. ‘Majesty!’
‘Oh, come, Sosigenes, Egypt matters more than any living being! I have been a poor ruler, deprived of Osiris time and time again! Do I care what kind of man this Marcus Antonius is? No, I do not! Antonius has Julian blood. If the bowl of Isis says there is enough Julian blood in him, then perhaps I can take more from him than he can from me.’
‘I will do it,’ said Cha’em, getting to his feet.
‘Apollodorus, will Philopator’s river barge sustain a sea voyage to Tarsus at this time of year?’
The Lord High Chamberlain frowned. ‘I’m not sure, Majesty.’
‘Then bring it out of its shed and send it to sea.’
‘Daughter of Amun-Ra, you have many ships!’
‘But Philopator built only two ships, and the ocean-going one rotted a hundred years ago. If I am to awe Antonius, I must arrive in Tarsus in a kind of state that no Roman has ever witnessed, not even Caesar.’
To Quintus Dellius, Alexandria was the most wondrous city in the world. The days when Caesar had almost destroyed it were seven years in the past, and Cleopatra had raised it in greater glory than ever. All the mansions down Royal Avenue had been restored, the Hill of Pan towered lushly green over the flat city, the hallowed precinct of Serapis had been rebuilt in the Corinthian mode, and where once siege towers had groaned and lumbered up and down Canopic Avenue, stunning temples and public institutions gave the lie to plague and famine. Indeed, thought Dellius, gazing at Alexandria from the top of Pan’s hill, for once in his life great Caesar had exaggerated the degree of destruction he had wrought.
As yet he hadn’t seen the Queen, who was, a lordly man named Apollodorus had informed him loftily, on a visit to the Delta to see her paper manufactories. So he had been shown his quarters – very sumptuous they were, too – and left largely to his own devices. To Dellius, that didn’t mean simple sightseeing; with him he took a scribe, who jotted down notes using a broad stylus on wax tablets.
At the Sema, Dellius chuckled with glee. ‘Write, Lasthenes! “The tomb of Alexander the Great, plus thirty-odd Ptolemies in a precinct dry-paved with collector’s-quality marble in blue with dark green swirls … Twenty-eight gold statues, man-sized … An Apollo by Praxiteles, painted marble … Four painted marble works by some unidentified master, man-sized … A painting by Zeuxis of Alexander the Great at Issus … A painting of Ptolemy Soter by Nicias …” Cease writing. The rest are not so fine.’
At the Serapeum, Dellius whinnied with delight. ‘Write, Lasthenes! “A statue of Serapis approximately thirty feet tall, by Bryaxis and painted by Nicias … An ivory group of the nine Muses by Phidias … Forty-two gold statues, man-sized …”’ He paused to scrape a gold Aphrodite, grimaced. ‘“Some, if not all, skinned rather than – ah – solid … A charioteer and horses in bronze by Myron …” Cease writing! No, simply add, “et cetera, et cetera …” There are too many more mediocre works to catalogue.’
In the agora, Dellius paused before an enormous sculpture of four rearing horses drawing a racing chariot whose driver was a woman – and what a woman! ‘Write, Lasthenes! “Quadriga in bronze purported to be of a female charioteer named Bilistiche …” Cease! There’s nothing else here but modern stuff, excellent of its kind but having no appeal for collectors. Oh, Lasthenes, on!’
And so it went as he cruised through the city, his scribe leaving rolls of wax behind like a moth its droppings. Splendid, splendid! Egypt is rich beyond telling, if what I see in Alexandria is anything to go by. But how do I persuade Marcus Antonius that we’ll get more from selling them as works of art than from melting them down? Think of the tomb of Alexander the Great! he mused, a single block of rock crystal almost as clear as water; how fine it would look inside the Temple of Diana in Rome! What a funny little fellow Alexander was! Hands and feet no bigger than a child’s, and what looked like yellow wool atop his head. A wax figure, surely, not the real thing – but you would think that, as he’s a god, they would have made the effigy at least as big as Antonius! There must be enough paving in the Sema to cover the floor of a magnate’s domus in Rome – a hundred talents’ worth, maybe more. The ivory by Phidias – a thousand talents, easily.
The Royal Enclosure was such a maze of palaces that he gave up trying to distinguish one from another, and the gardens seemed to go on forever. Exquisite little coves pocked the shore beyond the harbor, and in the far distance the white marble causeway of the Heptastadion linked Pharos Isle to the mainland. And oh, the lighthouse! The tallest building in the world, taller by far than the Colossus at Rhodes had been. I thought Rome was lovely, burbled Dellius to himself; then I saw Pergamum and deemed it lovelier; but now that I have seen Alexandria, I am stunned, just stunned. Antonius was here about twenty years ago, but I’ve never heard him speak of the place. Too busy womanising to remember it, I suppose.
The summons to see Queen Cleopatra came the next day, which was just as well; he had concluded his assessment of the city’s value, and Lasthenes had written it out on good paper, two copies.
The first thing he was conscious of was the perfumed air, thick with heady incenses of a kind he had never smelled before; then his visual apparatus took over from his olfactory, and he gaped at walls of gold, a floor of gold, statues of gold, chairs and tables of gold. A second glance informed him that the gold was a tissue-thin overlay, but the room blazed like the sun. Two walls were covered in paintings of peculiar two-dimensional people and plants, rich in colors of every description. Except Tyrian purple. Of that, not a trace.
‘All hail the two Pharaohs, Lords of the Two Ladies Upper and Lower Egypt, Lords of the Sedge and Bee, Children of Amun-Ra, Isis and Ptah!’ roared the lord high chamberlain, drumming his golden staff on the floor, a dull sound that had Dellius revising his opinion about thin tissue. The floor sounded solid.
They sat on two elaborate thrones, the woman on top of the golden dais and the boy one step beneath her. Each was clad in a strange raiment made of finely pleated white linen, and each wore a huge headdress of red enamel around a tubular cone of white enamel. About their necks were wide collars of magnificent jewels set in gold, on their arms bracelets, around their waists broad girdles of gems, on their feet golden sandals. Their faces were thick with paint, hers white, the boy’s a rusty red, and their eyes were so hedged in by black lines and colored shapes that they slid, sinister as fanged fish, as no human eyes were surely intended to.
‘Quintus Dellius,’ said the Queen (Dellius had no idea what the epithet ‘Pharaoh’ meant), ‘we bid you welcome to Egypt.’
‘I come as Imperator Marcus Antonius’s official ambassador,’ said Dellius, getting into the swing of things, ‘with greetings and salutations to the twin thrones of Egypt.’
‘How impressive,’ said the Queen, eyes sliding eerily.
‘Is that all?’ asked the boy, whose eyes sparkled more.
‘Er – unfortunately not, Your Majesty. The Triumvir Marcus Antonius requires your presence in Tarsus to answer charges.’
‘Charges?’ asked the boy.
‘It is alleged that Egypt aided Gaius Cassius, thereby breaking its status of Friend and Ally of the Roman People.’
‘And that is a charge?’ Cleopatra asked.
‘A very serious one, Your Majesty.’
‘Then we will go to Tarsus to answer it in person. You may leave our presence, Quintus Dellius. When we are ready to set out, you will be notified.’
And that was that! No dinner invitations, no reception to introduce him to the court – there must surely be a court! No Eastern monarch could function without several hundred sycophants to tell him (or her) how wonderful he (or she) was. But here was Apollodorus firmly ushering him from the room, apparently to be left to his own devices!
‘Pharaoh will sail to Tarsus,’ Apollodorus said, ‘therefore you have two choices, Quintus Dellius. You may send your people home overland and travel with them, or you may send your people home overland and sail aboard one of the royal ships.’
Ah! thought Dellius. Someone warned them I was coming. There is a spy in Tarsus. This audience was a sham designed to put me – and Antonius – in our places.
‘I will sail,’ he said haughtily.
‘A wise decision.’ Apollodorus bowed and walked away, leaving Dellius to storm off at a hasty walk to cool his temper, sorely tried. How dared they? The audience had given him no opportunity to gauge the Queen’s feminine charms or even discover for himself if the boy was really Caesar’s son. They were a pair of painted dolls, stranger than the wooden thing his daughter dragged about the house as if it were human.
The sun was hot; perhaps, thought Dellius, it would do me good to paddle in the wavelets of that delicious cove outside my palace. Dellius couldn’t swim – odd for a Roman – but an ankle-deep paddle was harmless. He descended a series of limestone steps, then perched on a boulder to unbuckle his maroon senatorial shoes.
‘Fancy a swim? So do I,’ said a cheerful voice – a child’s, but deep. ‘It’s the funnest way to get rid of all this muck.’
Startled, Dellius turned to see the boy King, stripped down to a loincloth, his face still painted.
‘You swim, I’ll paddle,’ said Dellius.
Caesarion waded in as far as his waist and then tipped himself forward to swim, moving fearlessly into deep water. He dived, came up with face a curious mixture of black and rusty red; then under again, up again.
‘The paint’s soluble in water, even salt,’ the boy said, hip-deep now, scrubbing at his face with both hands.
And there stood Caesar. No one could dispute the identity of the father after seeing the child. Is that why Antonius wants to present him to the Senate and petition it to confirm him King of Egypt? Let anyone in Rome who knew Caesar see this boy, and he’ll gather clients faster than a ship’s hull does barnacles. Marcus Antonius wants to unsettle Octavian, who can only ape Caesar with thick-soled boots and practiced Caesarean gestures. Caesarion is the real thing, Octavian a parody. Oh, clever Marcus Antonius! Bring Octavian down by showing Rome Caesar. The veteran soldiers will melt like ice in the sun, and they have so much power.
Cleopatra, cleansed of her regal make-up by the more orthodox method of a bowl of warm water, burst out laughing. ‘Apollodorus, this is marvelous!’ she cried, handing the papers she had read to Sosigenes. ‘Where did you get these?’ she asked while Sosigenes pored his way through them, chuckling.
‘His scribe is fonder of money than statues, Daughter of Amun-Ra. The scribe made an extra copy and sold it to me.’
‘Did Dellius act on instructions, I wonder? Or is this merely a way of demonstrating to his master that he’s worth his salt?’
‘The latter, Your Majesty,’ said Sosigenes, wiping his eyes. ‘It’s so silly! The statue of Serapis, painted by Nicias? He was dead long before Bryaxis first poured bronze into a mold. And he missed the Praxiteles Apollo in the gymnasium – “a sculpture of no great artistic worth,” he called it! Oh, Quintus Dellius, you are a fool!’
‘Let us not underestimate the man just because he doesn’t know a Phidias from a Neapolitan plaster copy,’ Cleopatra said. ‘What his list tells me is that Antonius is desperate for money. Money that I, for one, do not intend to give him.’
Cha’em pattered in, accompanied by his wife.
‘Tach’a, at last! What does the bowl say about Antonius?’
The smoothly beautiful face remained impassive; Tach’a was a priestess of Ptah, trained almost from birth not to betray her emotions. ‘The lotus petals formed a pattern I have never seen, Daughter of Ra. No matter how many times I cast them on the water, the pattern always stayed the same. Yes, Isis approves of Marcus Antonius as the sire of your children, but it will not be easy, and it will not happen in Tarsus. In Egypt, only in Egypt. His seed is spread too thinly, he must be fed on the juices and fruits that strengthen a man’s seed.’
‘If the pattern is so unique, Tach’a my mother, how can you be sure that is what the petals are saying?’
‘Because I went to the holy archives, Pharaoh. My readings are only the last in three thousand years.’
‘Ought I refuse to go to Tarsus?’ Cleopatra asked Cha’em.
‘No, Pharaoh. My own visions say that Tarsus is necessary. Antonius is not the God out of the West, but he has some of the same blood. Enough for our purposes, which are not to raise up a rival for Caesarion! What he needs are a sister to marry and some brothers who will be loyal subordinates.’
Caesarion walked in, trailing water. ‘Mama, I’ve just talked to Quintus Dellius,’ he said, flopping on a couch while a clucking Charmian hurried off to find towels.
‘Did you, now? Where was that?’ Cleopatra asked, smiling.
The wide eyes, greener than Caesar’s and lacking that piercing quality, creased up in amusement. ‘When I went for a swim. He was paddling. Can you imagine it? Paddling! He told me he couldn’t swim, and that confession told me that he was never a contubernalis in any army that mattered. He’s a couch soldier.’
‘Did you have an interesting conversation, my son?’
‘I led him astray, if that’s what you mean. He suspected that someone warned us he was coming but, by the time I left him, he was sure we’d been taken by surprise. It was the news that we’re sailing to Tarsus made him suspect. So I let it slip that late April is the time of year when we pull all the ships out of their sheds, go over them for leaks, and exercise them and their crews. What a fortunate chance! I said. Ready to go instead of struggling for ages to mend leaky ships.’
And he is not yet six years old, thought Sosigenes. This child has been blessed by all of Egypt’s gods.
‘I don’t like that “we”,’ said the mother, frowning.
The bright, eager face fell. ‘Mama! You can’t mean it! I am to go with you – I must go with you!’
‘Someone has to rule in my absence, Caesarion.’
‘Not I! I am too young!’
‘Old enough, and that’s enough. No Tarsus for you.’
A verdict that ruptured the essential vulnerability of a five-year-old; an inconsolable sorrow welled up in Caesarion – that pain only a child can feel at being deprived of some new and passionately wanted experience. He burst into noisy tears, but when his mother went to comfort him, he shoved her away so fiercely that she staggered. He ran from the room.
‘He’ll get over it,’ Cleopatra said comfortably. ‘My, isn’t he strong?’
Will he get over it? wondered Tach’a, who saw a different Caesarion – driven, split, achingly lonely. He’s Caesar, not Cleopatra, and she doesn’t understand him. It wasn’t the chance to strut like a child king that made him hunger to go to Tarsus, it was the chance to see new places, ease his restlessness at this small world he inhabits.
* * *
Two days later the royal fleet was assembled in the Great Harbor, with Philopator’s gigantic vessel tied up at the wharf in the little annex called the Royal Harbor.
‘Ye gods!’ said Dellius, gaping at it. ‘Is everything in Egypt larger than in the rest of the world?’
‘We like to think so,’ said Caesarion who, for reasons known only to himself, had developed a habit of following Dellius around.
‘It’s a barge! It will wallow and sink!’
‘It’s a ship, not a barge,’ said Caesarion. ‘Ships have keels, barges do not,’ he went on like a schoolmaster, ‘and the keel of Philopator was carved from one enormous cedar hewn in the Libanus – we owned Syria then. Philopator was properly built, with a kelson, and bilges, and a flat-bottomed hull. It has loads of room below deck, and see? Both banks of oars are in outriggers. It’s not topheavy, even from the weight of the outriggers. The mast is a hundred feet tall, and Captain Agathocles has decided to keep the lateen sail on board in case the wind’s really good. See the figurehead? That’s Philopator himself, going before us.’
‘You know a lot,’ said Dellius, who didn’t understand much about ships, even after this lesson.
‘Our fleets sail to India and Taprobane. Mama has promised me that, when I’m older, she’ll take me to the Sinus Arabicus to see them set out. How I’d love to go with them!’ Suddenly the boy stiffened and prepared for flight. ‘There’s my nursemaid! It’s absolutely disgusting to have a nursemaid!’ And off he ran, determined to elude the poor creature, no match for her charge.
Not long after, a servant came for Quintus Dellius; time to board his ship, which was not the Philopator. He didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry; the Queen’s vessel would undoubtedly lag far behind the rest, even if its accommodations were luxurious.
Though Dellius didn’t know, Cleopatra’s shipwrights had made changes to her vessel, which had survived its seagoing trials surprisingly well. It measured 350 feet from stem to stern, and 40 feet in the beam. Shifting both banks of rowers into outriggers had increased the space below deck, but Pharaoh couldn’t be housed near laboring men, so below deck was given over to the hundred and fifty people who sailed in Philopator, most of them almost demented with terror at the very thought of riding on the sea.
The old stern reception room was turned into Pharaoh’s domain, large enough for a spacious bedroom, another for Charmian and Iras, and a dining room that held twenty-one couches. The arcade of lotus-capital columns remained in place, ending forward of the mast in a raised dais, roofed with faïence tiles and supported by a new column at each corner. Forward of that was a reception room, now somewhat smaller than of yore in order that Sosigenes and Cha’em might have rooms of their own. And forward of that again, cunningly hidden in the bows, was an open cooking area. On river cruises most of the food preparation was done on shore; fire was always a risk on a wooden ship. But out to sea, no shore to cook on.
Cleopatra had brought along Charmian and Iras, two fair-haired women of impeccably Macedonian ancestry who had been her companions since babyhood. Theirs had been the job of selecting thirty young girls to travel with Pharaoh to Tarsus; they had to be beautiful in the face and voluptuous in the body, but none could be a whore. The pay was ten gold drachmae, a small fortune, but it wasn’t the pay that reconciled them to the unknown, it was the clothes they were given to wear in Tarsus – flimsy gold and silver tissues, brocades glittering with metal threads, transparent linens in all the hues of the rainbow, wools so fine that they clung to the limbs as if wet. A dozen exquisitely lovely little boys had been purchased from the slave markets in Pelusium, and fifteen very tall barbarian men with fine physiques. Every male on show was outfitted in kilts embroidered to resemble peacock tails; the peacock, Cleopatra had decided, was to be the Philopator theme, and enough gold had been spent on buying peacock feathers to make an Antony weep.
On the first day of May the fleet sailed, and under sail, with Philopator scornfully showing the rest its stern cowl. The only wind that would have opposed their northerly heading, the Etesian, did not blow at this time of year. A brisk southeast breeze swelled the fleet’s sails and made life much easier for the oarsmen. No tempest occurred to force them into harbor along the way, and the pilot, aboard Philopator in the lead, recognized every headland on the Syrian coast without hesitation. At Cape Heracleia, which faced the tip of Cyprus’s tail, he came to see Cleopatra.
‘Your Majesty, we have two choices,’ he said, on his knees.
‘They are, Palamedes?’
‘To continue to hug the Syrian coast as far as the Rhosicum promontory, then cross the top of Sinus Issicus to the mouths of Cilicia Pedia’s great rivers. That will mean sand bars and shoals – slow going.’
‘And the alternative?’
‘To strike into open water here and sail almost due northwest – possible with this wind – until we fetch up on the coast of Cilicia somewhere near the mouth of River Cydnus.’
‘What is the difference in time at sea, Palamedes?’
‘That is hard to say, Your Majesty, but perhaps as many as ten days. Cilicia Pedia’s rivers will be flooding, an additional handicap if we hug the coast. But you must understand that the second choice is hazardous. A storm or a change in wind direction could send us anywhere from Libya to Greece.’
‘We will take the risk and voyage upon the open sea.’
