I grunted. “I tried to swim to you, but I very nearly drowned instead. I was lucky to make it to shore. That Greek captain’s a fool. We’re not cursed by the gods, Bethesda, we’re blessed by them!” I took one of her hands and pressed it to my lips.
She smiled wanly. “So here I sat and waited all morning, listening to you snore while Rupa and the boys made a meal for us. Would you care for more?”
I saw that Rupa was approaching with another roasted fish. My mouth watered, and my stomach growled again.
“Why don’t you have it?” I said.
Bethesda shook her head. “I’m not hungry.”
I tried to think of the last time I had seen her eat, and felt a prickle of anxiety. Was she not paler than before, and looking more frail than I had ever seen her? Or was she merely worn out by the events of the last few days, as any woman would be?
I sat up and took the fish from Rupa. I had devoured the first one without thinking, but this one I was able to savor. Bethesda smiled, taking pleasure in my appetite.
I licked my fingers and wiped my hand on my tunic, and felt something in the pouch: the poison Cornelia had given me. Vile stuff! What if I had swallowed it in a moment of weakness and despair? Was Cornelia regretting her gift to me now, wishing she had kept it for herself? I should pour the contents over Pompey’s ashes and throw the alabaster vial into the sea, I thought; but simple laziness prevented me. It was far more pleasurable to sit beside Bethesda, feel the warmth of the sun on my face, and watch the boys fish in the glinting surf.
That afternoon, Philip and I scouted the vicinity and discovered a small fishing village just around a spit of land to the east. Occupying a territory disputed between Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra, the war-weary villagers were wary of strangers, but they had no aversion to the Roman sesterces I was able to offer. Times were hard in Egypt, and Roman silver went a long way. For a very reasonable price I was able to hire a wagon and two mules to pull it.
My Egyptian was very rusty, and the villagers spoke nothing else; Philip, fluent in many languages, negotiated the deal, and conveyed the wagon-owner’s assurance that the coastal road was well maintained all the way to Alexandria. I asked him how we were to cross the Nile, and he said that at every fording of the many branches of the Delta, there would be ferrymen competing to carry us across. The man had a cousin in the capital; when we arrived, I was to leave the wagon and the mules with him.
Philip stayed in the village, saying he intended to head east, not west, and so we parted company. I gave him some sesterces to see him on his way. He gave me a heartfelt embrace, still harboring the mistaken assumption that I was one of Pompey’s devoted veterans.
“Anytime one travels, one must be prepared for changes to the itinerary,” I said to the assembled company on the beach that night, over our dinner of warmed-over fish supplemented by flat-bread purchased from the villagers. “Granted, we’ve taken a bit of a detour, but now we shall press on to Alexandria just as planned, except that Bethesda will be able to bathe in the Nile sooner rather than later, since the river lies between us and the city.” And Rupa will be able to scatter the ashes of his sister, I thought, and silently gave thanks to Cassandra, for it was her legacy to me that was paying for this excursion—the journey by ship, the mules and the wagon, even the morsels of flat-bread that Androcles and Mopsus were stuffing into their mouths.
The villagers had told me that Alexandria lay about 150 miles distant—a journey of several days over flat terrain. Wherever the road crossed a branch of the Nile, there would be a village, or at the very least a tavern or an inn. The landscape would consist of flat marshland interspersed with cultivated fields where farmers and slaves would be busy tending to irrigation ditches and waterwheels; for the annual inundation of the river, upon which the life of the country depended, had begun. The trip might be monotonous, but should not be particularly dangerous, and we would be safe sleeping in the wagon alongside the road if we wished; banditry, the villagers maintained, was not a part of the Egyptian character. While this was surely no more than wishful thinking—bandits exist everywhere, as do victims and heroes—it was true that we had arrived in a part of the world that was much older and arguably more civilized than Italy. Brutally beheading a potential conqueror before he could set foot in Egypt was one thing; common banditry was another, and about that I was not to worry.
The next morning, very early, we set out for Alexandria. The weather was hot, the atmosphere muggy, and the sky dotted with puffy clouds. With occasional potholes and crumbling edges, the stone-paved road was definitely not up to Roman standards. Bethesda was jostled about more than I would have liked, but the mules made steady progress.
We reached the easternmost branch of the Nile Delta at the bustling fortress town of Pelusium. The idlers at the shop where we purchased provisions were abuzz with speculation about the war between King Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra; this I gathered from Bethesda, who was able to understand the locals far better than I. She had grown up in Alexandria, speaking Egyptian, and though she claimed that the dialect spoken by the locals in Pelusium was rough and uncouth, she seemed to have little trouble understanding them. Once we reached Alexandria, everyone would speak at least a little Greek. Greek was the language of the Ptolemies and the official language of the state bureaucracy, and the upper classes spoke nothing else. But outside the capital, the native Egyptians, even after two and a half centuries of Ptolemaic rule, clung stubbornly to their native tongue.
According to Bethesda, word of Pompey’s fatal landing had already reached Pelusium, but only as a rumor. Some of the locals believed the story; some did not. Just as we were about to show our purchases to the shopkeeper, a self-important little woman with her nose in the air cut in front of us to purchase a basket of dates, and proceeded to address anyone within earshot.
“Who’s this hen?” I whispered to Bethesda.
“The wife of a local magistrate, I imagine.”
“What’s she saying?”
Bethesda listened for a while, then snorted. “Some nonsense about how Pompey met his end. She claims there was a battle between the Romans and Egyptians, and the boy-king himself wrestled Pompey to the ground and then chopped off his head. Silly hen!”
Catching Bethesda’s tone if not understanding her Latin, the woman turned around and flared her nostrils at us. I braced for a scrap, but Bethesda bit her tongue and lowered her eyes, and the woman went on with her story. The moment left me feeling uneasy; it seemed to me yet another symptom of her malady that Bethesda should submit so readily to the babblings of a pompous busybody.
Indeed, it seemed to me that Bethesda became more subdued with each passing mile, so that I regretted putting any extra strain upon her by making her deal with the locals. As our journey continued, an unnatural stillness settled upon her. She stared vacantly at the marshes and the muddy fields. I tried to draw her out with reminiscences, as I had on the sea journey, but she seemed disinterested and distant.
Even about her intentions, she had little to say. We had reached the Nile, the object of our journey, and I asked her where she intended to bathe and what was needed for the ritual of purification she had in mind.
“Not here,” she told me. “Not yet. I’ll know the place when we come to it. Osiris will show me where to step into the river. The river will show me what to do.”
The farther we traveled, the more uneasy I found the villagers. Word of Pompey’s death invariably preceded us and formed the chief topic of conversation. It seemed that the Nile had failed to rise as high as in previous years. A year of low inundation meant fewer crops, with hunger and hardship to follow. To cause such a poor inundation, something must have displeased the god (for in Egypt, the Nile itself is a god). The civil strife between Ptolemy and his sister Cleopatra had previously been blamed, for they, too, were divine, and strife between a god and goddess caused repercussions throughout both the natural and the supernatural worlds. But now it was perceived that the Nile had
been withholding its floods in anticipation of an even more cataclysmic event, the murder of the Great One, the only man to claim such a title since Alexander himself. The discord of civil war was everywhere upon the earth, bringing one disaster after another, and the people feared that some even more terrible event was yet to come.
So we passed from Pelusium to Tanis, and thence to Thmuis, and thence to Busiris, at the very center of the Delta. Each day the summer sun grew hotter and the air more stifling and humid. The rank smell of the muddy Nile seeped into my pores. Along the way, following Bethesda’s dictates, we made numerous excursions upriver and down-river, which came to nothing; she would arrive at a spot and declare it suitable, saying she would bathe there the next day, only to change her mind when the next day came. Beyond Busiris, we came to the particularly squalid little village of Sais; saying the sun had grown too bright, Bethesda remained in our private room at the town’s shabby little inn, refusing to come out. Rupa, Androcles, Mopsus, and I found little to do in Sais, and I passed several idle days drinking Egyptian beer, stifled by heat, boredom, and a growing sense of foreboding.
At last we pressed on from Sais and came to Naucratis, a village on the westernmost branch of the Nile. We had traversed the entire Delta, and still Bethesda had found no location suitable for the ritual of purification.
Each day, as our journey continued, Bethesda had given me greater cause for concern. She ate almost nothing. When I questioned her about this, she said that fasting was a part of the purification ritual. She sat motionless in the wagon for long hours, and when pressed to move, did so only very slowly and deliberately. She seemed less and less to fully occupy a place in this world, and more and more to reside in some other realm invisible to the rest of us. There were times when I glanced at her and for a startling instant thought I was looking right through her, as if she had become transparent. Then I would blink, and the illusion would pass, and I would tell myself it was merely a trick of the heat and the moisture-heavy air.
CHAPTER VI
Beyond Naucratis, the road turned north. The Nile and its Delta were to our right. The road ran parallel to the river, but eventually it would turn to the west and leave the Delta behind.
“Soon?” I asked Bethesda.
She stared at the river, the gleam on the surface lighting her face, her features so impassive that I thought she must not have heard me. But eventually she answered. “Soon,” she said, and shut her eyes, as if the simple utterance exhausted her.
At midmorning we came to a stretch of the river where palm trees and date trees grew in great profusion. The river narrowed and ran swiftly between its muddy banks, their exact demarcations obscured by tall reeds. Underground springs fed into the river, making the vegetation especially luxuriant. Low trees grew close together, strewn with vines in great profusion. Reeds encircled miniature lagoons where lotuses and lily pads spread like carpets across the water. Dragonflies flitted, and swarms of midges hovered above the water. The spot teemed with life; it seemed somehow timeless and ancient, a place set apart from the rest of the world.
“Here,” said Bethesda, sounding neither happy nor sad.
I stopped the mules. Mopsus and Androcles jumped from the wagon, eager to stretch their limbs. “You’re the Cyclops and I’m Ulysses! Catch me if you can!” shouted Androcles, slapping his brother’s forehead and racing off. Mopsus gave a yelp and raced after him. Rupa jumped out next, circled to the front of the wagon, and reached up to offer his hand to Bethesda. With my assistance from above and his from below, she alighted from the wagon.
From nearby, Androcles gave a shriek as his brother caught up with him and tackled him on a moss-covered stretch of riverbank. I would have shouted at them to behave, but my eyes were on Bethesda, who strode slowly, but steadily, downriver toward a particularly dense patch of reeds, low trees, and vines. I moved to jump from the wagon and follow her, but Rupa seized my ankle. I tried to shake his grip, but he tightened it. He pointed at the trunk in the wagon. From the plaintive look on his face, I knew what he wanted.
The key hung on a chain around my neck. I slipped the chain over my head and moved to unlock the trunk, but my fingers slipped. I tried to open the lock again, but fumbled. The key seemed determined to thwart me. At last I opened the lock and threw back the lid. It took some digging to reach the urn, which had worked its way to the very bottom of the trunk.
The bronze seemed cool to the touch. I had not held it since packing it away. I had forgotten how heavy it was. All that remained of Cassandra was inside it, the ashes and bits of bone and teeth salvaged from her funeral pyre. I gazed at the urn for a long moment, distracted by memories, then realized Rupa had circled the wagon and was standing just under me, reaching up with both hands. Reluctantly, I leaned over and handed him the urn, then jumped from the wagon.
“This is the place, then?” I asked him.
He nodded.
“Shall I come with you?”
He frowned. It was not unreasonable that he should wish to be alone with his sister’s remains while he scattered them in the Nile. From birth they had seldom been parted, and they had loved one another above all else in the world. However strong my passion for her, I had known Cassandra for only a few months before she died; the actual time I had spent with her, however special, had amounted to mere hours. It was right that Rupa, not I, should send her ashes on their final journey to the sea, and if he wished to do so in privacy, I had no right to object.
I put my hand on his shoulder to show him that I understood. He held the bronze urn to his chest and bowed his head over it, tears in his eyes, then turned and began to walk upriver. Afraid they might run after him and disturb him, I called to Androcles and Mopsus to come join me.
Bethesda, meanwhile, had reached the overgrown copse of trees downriver and had been searching for a means of entry. While I watched, she finally located a pathway. Not bothering to look back, she stepped into the foliage and disappeared from sight.
“Come along, boys!” I said, and followed after her.
I reached the copse, and stood baffled before the spot where I had last seen her. Was it possible a pathway had opened and then closed up behind her? Wherever I looked, reeds grew out of the muddy ground, and a tangle of vines hung down to meet them, without any perceptible break.
I called her name. She made no answer.
I searched the soft ground for her footprints. I finally found them, taken aback at how light were the tread marks she left, compared not merely with my footsteps, but also with those of the boys. Truly, in the last few days she had dwindled and faded, so that now she walked upon the earth as lightly as a child.
“She must have gone this way,” said Mopsus, staring at the ground.
“No, this way!” insisted Androcles.
“Both of you, step back, before you confuse the track any further,” I said, and then I followed her steps back and forth, retracing her faltering search for a way into the copse. I finally found it; a tangle of vines hung just so, obscuring the entrance completely unless one approached it from the correct angle.
“Bethesda!” I called, stepping into the copse.
The boys followed me and recommenced their bickering. “I told you it was this way,” said Mopsus.
“No, you didn’t! You said . . .” Androcles fell silent as the dappled shadows abruptly closed in around us. The boys sensed what I sensed: that we had entered a place that was not like other places. The gurgling of the river could be heard from nearby, along with the low buzzing of insects and the cries of birds in the treetops.
Ahead, through hanging vines, I glimpsed sunlight on stone. We came to a glade circled by vegetation but open to the sky. The little temple in its midst was lit by a shaft of sunlight; the shaft was so clouded with motes of dust that it seemed a solid thing, and I should not have been surprised to see dragonflies suspended motionless within its light, held fast like insects in amber. But the dragonflies hovered and flitted unimpeded, making way for Bethesda,
who approached the temple, mounted the short flight of steps to the colonnaded porch, and disappeared inside.
The temple was of Egyptian design, with a flat roof, squat columns surmounted by capitals carved like lotus leaves, and worn hieroglyphs in riotous profusion on every surface. It betrayed no hint of Greek influence, and so almost certainly predated the conquest of Alexander and the reign of the Ptolemies. It was hundreds, possibly thousands of years old; older than Alexandria, older than Rome, perhaps as old as the Pyramids. Beside it, from a jumble of fern-covered stones, a spring trickled forth, forming a tiny pool.
The spring was life itself; the spring accounted for this lush oasis beside the variable banks of the Nile, and for the sacred spell exerted by the place, and for the temple erected beside it. I gazed at the hieroglyphs on the temple; I listened to the faint gurgle of the spring; I felt warm sunlight on my shoulders, but I shivered, for the place seemed uncannily familiar. I raised a finger to my lips, instructing the boys to maintain their silence, and walked across the clearing to the steps of the temple.
I smelled the perfume of burning myrrh. From within I heard the murmur of two voices. One of them belonged to Bethesda. The other voice might have been male or female; I could not tell. I mounted the steps to the porch, inclined my head toward the opening, and squinted at the gloom within. In brief, uncertain flashes, a flickering lamp illuminated brightly painted walls covered with strange images and glyphs. The grandest of these images was that of the god Osiris: the figure of a tall man swathed in white mummy wrapping, holding a flail and crook in his crossed arms and wearing on his head the atef crown, a tall white cone adorned with ostrich feathers on each side and with a small golden disk at the bulbous top.
The Judgment of Caesar: A Novel of Ancient Rome Page 6