Keeper of the Flame (28 page)

The wind had loosed the errant lock of his dark hair, and it curled toward his eye. She used her fingertip to brush it aside, and then he was kissing her again, wrapping her up in his soldier’s battle-ready arms.

“Lucius.” She whispered the name between his kisses, giving herself to him, and he laughed and pulled her to his chest where she belonged.

No. No, she did not belong there.

She pushed away the thought, but it would not be ignored.

Even as his kisses grew more urgent, she felt herself withdrawing. As though the crest of the wave she rode had surged past him, rushing her forward to dash her against a rocky coastline.

He cannot love me. Not me. I cannot be loved. Too long on my own. Too long the fiend in her tower.

Like an angry beating drum, the words pounded at her. She thought of his beautiful Valeria. She would never be what he wanted. She pulled his hands from her face, moved outside his embrace.

He grasped at her, as though she had taken flight on the wind. “Sophia.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said, releasing him. She struggled to her feet and sought protection against the wall. “No, this cannot be.”

He half-smiled. “I know that well. But it is.”

She held up a hand, palm facing him. “I am not—you are not—”
How can I explain that he gives his love to one unworthy?
“I have done nothing to deserve this.”

A shadow passed over his face. “You make it sound as though you have been punished.”

She would have laughed, if her heart had not been shattering. But his misunderstanding gave her strength to push on.

“Not a punishment,” she said, lifting her chin. “Do not be too hard on yourself. It is many years since a man has shown interest. But do not confuse my being flattered with something more.”

Bellus stood and moved toward her. She held up her hands again, a wall of self-protection.

“Sophia, do not do this. Do not run away—”

“You are too familiar, centurion.”

“Too familiar!” He pushed her hands aside and drew close, his forearms braced on the wall at her back, his face only inches from hers. “As if we did not share all those evenings over Plato and Arcesilaus.”

Sophia forced a laugh from her throat, strangled and hoarse. “Arcesilaus. Did you truly not realize I was patronizing your supposed understanding of his work?”

He blinked. Pulled his head back a bit.

She tried to smile. “It was all I could do not to laugh in front of you as you struggled through the Greek texts in your ludicrous country accent.”

He shook his head, only once, but was silent.

Sophia pushed on, smashing herself against that rocky shore now. “I do thank you for helping me to pass the time, though. It was most amusing, and for one who prefers to remain alone, I must admit that you were a pleasant diversion.”

From the flash of his eyes, she knew that denial had flowed into anger now.

“Stop, Sophia.” He shook her shoulders. “You speak foolishness and we both know it. You cannot convince me—”

“The only foolishness here is your own, Bellus. You shame yourself with your girlish emotions. Do not embarrass us both any further.”

Like an arrow well-aimed, that last remark found its target and lodged deep. He backed away, dropped his hands, and stared at her. “You are more like the roses than I realized, Sophia.”

She licked her dry lips, tried to swallow.

“I believed I had finally seen the truth of you.” He reached into a pouch at his waist. “That I had found the hidden part of
you that was like the petals of your glorious flowers.” He held something in his hand, she knew not what. “But it seems you are made of thorns as well. Tempting and inviting and beautiful. Then sharp enough to shred a man to ribbons.”

He rolled the thing in his palm until he held it between thumb and forefinger, then lifted it to catch the dying light.

The blue scarab stone she had given him in the agora. He closed his fist around it again and brushed past her to the platform’s walled edge.

He will heave it into the sea. And then be done with me.

But he did not send the stone soaring over the wall. Instead, he placed it on the edge, as though inviting her to make the decision.

The sky was dark now, and the night wind seemed to rise to a shriek. It tangled her chitôn around her legs, as though lashing her in place.

He turned from the wall and crossed the platform, close enough to touch her as he passed. But he did not even look her way.

She saw his broad-shouldered form hesitate in the doorway of the second tier. And then he was gone, his head disappearing down the spiral ramp.

And Sophia crossed to her couch and threw herself upon it, too bruised to think and too weary to weep.

Thirty-One

C
leopatra did not become the queen of Egypt by letting events pass her by.

The city grew increasingly hostile, and she dared not parade through its streets in her litter, but she must know what was transpiring out there, among the people.

She trusted no one. Not even Caesar.

This morning she lingered in the palace courtyard garden, near a spurting stone fountain encircled by red poppies. She picked a bloom from the poppy and tore it apart, one petal at a time. Her gaze roamed the garden and rested briefly on each Roman soldier scattered there—for her protection, of course.

Along the courtyard wall, under the tangled growth of safflower and mint, a linen pouch waited, placed there in the dark last night. When the soldiers’ attention shifted to a changing of the watch, Cleopatra grabbed the pouch and hurried along a sycamore lined path, to a small iron gate in the stone wall.

Her fingers trembled at the latch.

Hurry.

She was not a prisoner. But with Caesar’s growing affection for her, a subtle tug-of-war for control had also developed. He preferred she remain in the palace; she preferred to make her own decisions.

With the gate closed behind her, Cleopatra slipped along the palace wall until she reached the narrow alley between her
father’s royal building and her grandfather’s. Tradition, that each Ptolemy add to the royal quarter by building his own new palace.

And when this business with Rome is concluded, I shall build my own.

In the cleft of the two palaces, Cleopatra stepped out of the linen dress she had donned upon rising this morning. She pulled an alternate robe from the pouch, one especially selected for her task today.

She had considered dressing as a slave but feared she would still be recognized. Better a Jew, for their women covered up more completely, with even their hair hidden. She adjusted the woolen head covering over her long waves and fixed the cord about her forehead. The tunic she had procured from one of the Jewish servants in the palace kitchen reached only to her calves, as she was a good deal taller than the old woman, but it would suffice.

The shoes.

She had not thought to bring other shoes, and with the shortened tunic her elegant jeweled sandals seemed to scream of her deception.

She shook her head and strapped the pouch, now stuffed with her dress, over her neck. No going back now.

The city smelled of fear. Fear and dust. She crossed through the royal quarter, using the narrower side streets to reach the center of the city, where she would better be able to take the pulse of the people. But long before she gained the square, she had seen more than she expected.

Makeshift workshops had been set up in storefronts, on corners, in every empty space. Slaves were employed there, bent
over fires and tools, pounding out swords, sharpening arrowheads. Cleopatra drifted past, head down but eyes taking in every detail.

Who paid for all this labor?

It could only be the city’s rich, certain that war was coming and finding ways to protect their own wealth.

A slave glanced up from his smoldering embers, then gave her a second look.

He recognizes me.

But then he smiled, gap-toothed, and winked. Cleopatra turned her head and hurried on.

Crowds thronged the streets, but it was not the busy glee of market day. On every face Cleopatra read a mix of fear and fury.

The army was coming. Of this she had no doubt. Pothinus, Arsinôe, Ganymedes. Her enemies were many and their forces imposing. And they would be greeted by a city who rejoiced to see them come and would rise up with the army to defeat the Romans among them.

She had sent word to her own army in Syria to recruit others from as far as Judea and to come at once. Meanwhile, Caesar told her, the Thirty-Seventh Roman legion sped across the Great Sea toward the Alexandrian coast.

Yes, war was coming. And those on foot raced those on ship for the first entrance into her beloved city.

On the street ahead, a tower she did not recognize rose above the shops. When had this new construction taken place?

The tower seemed to move. Cleopatra blinked and stopped in the street, letting the press of people flow around her. She was jostled from behind and shrank from the touch of the peasants that clogged the streets.

Yes, ahead, the tower rolled toward her, a siege tower, constructed of wood on a set of four wheels, pulled by a team of horses.

Cleopatra ducked into another alley and quickened her steps toward the central square of the city near the agora where the merchants hawked their wares several times each week. It was there that she would discover what Alexandria truly thought. The street grime clung to her feet, but she welcomed the disguise of her royal footwear.

Cleopatra had no more desire for Egypt to become a Roman province than any of her people. She would never be ruled by another. But in a war with the Romans, Alexandria could not win. Did they not see that?

The Egyptian army could perhaps rout Caesar’s legion, and even the Thirty-Seventh, on its way here. But if all of Rome’s military resources were brought to bear upon Egypt, they would be slaves within a season.

No, there was only one way to escape becoming yet another conquest under the mushrooming Roman republic. And it seemed that only Cleopatra could see that answer.

She hurried forward, her hand straying to her belly, still deceptively flat.

The alley ended, opening to the central square. Cleopatra strode out of the shadows, then stopped.

She had not expected the merchants today, but neither did she expect to see the center of the city crammed with soldiers.

Not Romans.

Her eyes darted left and right, making quick calculations. Cohorts of veterans, soldiers finished with their compulsory service in the Egyptian army, formed small groups within the
square, evidently assembling themselves into an army of their own, ready to join the forces of Pothinus and Arsinôe when they reached the city.

Cleopatra started forward, her royal blood boiling, then stopped herself. It would do no good to declare herself here and order them all to stand down.

A horse and chariot sped past, the driver yelling to her to step away. A cloud of dust followed in its wake, leaving grit in her eyes and mouth. Cleopatra spit on the ground and rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand.

My city
.

Like a nest of angry snakes, Alexandria writhed and turned upon itself, unaware that it would be its own downfall.

She had seen enough. The suspicion that had been nagging at her for some time was confirmed. She needed something more than her Greek rhetoric and her Egyptian piety, more than the fickle affection of the Roman general or the ridiculous marriage to her brother. She needed something to guarantee loyalty. And from the rumors she heard, her Sophia might know where to find it.

No longer caring to remain unknown, she strode down the Canopic Way, back toward the royal quarter.

The air was filled with the expectation of violence, and people’s tempers were short. Townspeople jostled, shoved and yelled, and fights erupted on street corners, like the first bubbles in a pot about to boil.

Cleopatra peered into shops and homes she passed, and into the tight and wary faces of her people.

And then the Canopic Way came to an end.

Not where it should have, at the west end of the city where
the embalming houses lay beside the Necropolis, but abruptly, still on its way to the city of the dead.

A stone wall, mortar still wet and stones set haphazardly and ill-fitting, rose from the wide granite street.

Cleopatra lifted a hand to the wall, traced her fingertips along the jagged line of stones.

Somehow this barricade struck her in a way that all the arms-making and congregating veterans had not.

An image flashed before her. Her childhood self, riding proudly beside her father as his chariot glided along the Canopic Way, to the adulation, however forced, of his people. She had not known then that the waving arms and upraised faces hid an animosity for what Ptolemy XII had brought to Egypt. She had believed that they loved him. That they loved her. And she had been happy.

Hot tears stung her eyes now, and she wiped at them, then laid her wet fingertips upon the wall.