The October Horse (12 page)

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.”