I nodded, recalling Ptolemy’s reaction when I told him that Cleopatra was alone with Caesar. “I suppose Caesar must be immune to that sort of thing, having received the adulation of so many young men over the years.” Including a copious dose from you, Meto, I thought.
Meto scowled. “You might think so, but with Ptolemy, it’s different somehow. Caesar seems equally fascinated by him. His face lights up when Ptolemy comes into the room. They put their heads together, share private jokes, laugh, and give each other knowing glances. I can’t understand it. It’s certainly not because the boy’s beautiful. He and his sister are both rather plain, if you ask me.” He snorted. “Now we shall have both of them buzzing around him, like flies around a honey pot!”
I considered this revelation. If true, It wouldn’t be the first time that Caesar had engaged in a royal romance. His erotic exploits as a young man in the court of King Nicomedes of Bithynia had become the stuff of legend, inspiring vicious gossip among his political rivals and ribald marching songs among Caesar’s own men. (Their insatiable imperator was “every woman’s husband and every man’s husband,” according to one refrain.) In the case of King Nicomedes, Caesar had been the younger paramour, and presumably the receptive partner (hence the resulting scandal and the soldiers’ teasing, since a Roman male is never supposed to submit to another man, only to play the dominant role). With Caesar and Ptolemy, the roles presumably would be reversed, with Caesar the older, more worldly partner and Ptolemy the wide-eyed youth hungry for experience.
When poets sing of lovers, they celebrate Harmodias and Aristogiton, or Theseus and Ariadne. But lovers need not always be so evenly matched in beauty and youth. I thought of my own affair with Cassandra, a much younger woman, and I comprehended the spark of mutual desire that Caesar and the king might have ignited in one another. Despite all his worldly success, Caesar was at that age when even the most robust of men feel acutely the increasing frailty of their once-invincible bodies, and begin to look with envy (and yes, sometimes lust) upon the firm, vigorous bodies of men younger than themselves. Youth itself becomes an aphrodisiac to the man who no longer possesses it; youth coupled with reciprocal desire becomes irresistible.
To an outsider, such love affairs can appear absurd or demeaning—the doddering man of means hankering after some hapless slave boy. But this was a meeting of two extraordinary men. I thought of Ptolemy’s combination of boyish enthusiasm and grave sense of purpose, self-assurance and naïveté. I thought of Caesar’s effortless sophistication and supreme confidence, and of his slightly ridiculous vanity, as betrayed by the way he combed his hair to cover his bald spot. Both were not merely men but rulers of men; and yet, not rulers only, but men as well, with appetites, frailties, uncertainties, needs; and not merely men and rulers, but—so they themselves appeared to believe—descendents and incarnations of divinity. Added to this was the fact that Ptolemy had lost his beloved father, and Caesar had never had a son. I could well imagine that Caesar and the king had something unique to offer one another, in a private realm far removed from the public arena of riches, arms, and diplomacy; that in a moment alone with each other, they might share an understanding inaccessible to the rest of us.
Why was Meto so scornful in conveying his suspicions? Had he been as intimate with Caesar as I had often been led to believe? Had that intimacy lessened, or ended altogether? Were his feelings about Caesar’s dalliances with the royal siblings tinged with jealousy—and did that jealousy make his assumptions more reliable, or less?
I gave a start, as if waking from a dream. Meto and the way of life he had chosen to follow with Caesar were no longer my concern. Even if what he had just told me was true—that he himself had begun to doubt that way of life—still, it was of no consequence to me. So I told myself.
“You speak as if a gulf has opened between you and Caesar. Yet earlier tonight, I saw with my own eyes how the two of you got along—like the best of old friends, completely at ease. Almost like an old married couple, I daresay.”
“Did it look that way? Appearances can be deceiving.” He lowered his eyes, and suddenly I felt a stab of doubt. Had Meto grown cagey and dissimulating with Caesar, using the skills of deception that had become second nature to him to put on a face to the man he had once admired but now doubted? Or was I the one being fooled? For all I knew, Meto was still very much Caesar’s trusted spy, and I was simply another source of information to be cultivated.
I stiffened my spine and hardened my heart. “You’ve said what you had to say, and so have I. It’s been a long day—too long and too eventful for an old man like me. I need my rest now. Go.”
Meto looked crestfallen. “There’s so much more I wanted to say. Perhaps . . . next time.”
I looked at him without blinking and gestured to the open door.
He gave each of the boys a hug, nodded curtly to Rupa, then turned to leave.
“Meto—wait a moment.”
He stopped in the doorway and turned back. “As long as you’re here—Rupa, would you pull the trunk closer to the bed? Open the lid, please.” Since we had settled in our rooms, I no longer kept the trunk locked. I sat on the bed and sorted through its contents.
“What are you looking for, Papa?” said Meto. “Bethesda’s things are here. She would have wanted you to have something . . . as a keepsake.”
I removed various items from the trunk, spreading them beside me on the bed to sort through them. I came across Bethesda’s silver-and-ebony comb. My fingers trembled as I picked it up. Would it mean as much to Meto as it meant to me? Perhaps; but I could not bear to part with it. I would have to find something else to give him.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“What?”
“There—that alabaster vial. Was it Bethesda’s?”
“No.”
“Are you sure? It looks like the sort of thing in which she might have kept a perfume. To be able to smell her scent again—I’d like that.”
“That vial was not Bethesda’s!”
“You needn’t speak so harshly.”
I sighed. “The vial was given to me by Cornelia.”
He frowned. “Pompey’s wife?”
“Yes. The whole story is too complicated to recount, but believe me, that vial does not contain perfume.”
“Poison?”
I looked at him sharply. “Caesar has indeed taught you to think like a spy.”
He shook his head gravely. “Some things I learned from you, Papa, whether you like it or not, and a penchant for deduction is one of them. If not perfume, what else would a woman like Cornelia carry in a vial like that? And if she gave it to you . . .”
“She didn’t hire me to assassinate someone, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I was thinking that she gave it to you out of mercy, or perhaps simple convenience—to spare you a more violent death. The poison was intended for you, wasn’t it, Papa?”
I almost smiled; his cleverness pleased me, in spite of myself. “It’s something called Nemesis-in-a-bottle, quick and relatively painless, or so Cornelia told me. She claimed it was her personal supply, for her own use if the need should arise.”
“Poor Cornelia! She must be missing it now.”
“Perhaps, but I doubt it. Cornelia survived Publius Crassus. She survived Pompey. She’ll probably survive yet another ill-starred husband.”
“If any man would be foolish enough to marry such an ill-starred wife!”
I pulled myself upright and stiffened my jaw. Engaging in banter was not my reason for calling Meto back. Among the objects strewn across the bed, I spotted a small jar made of carved malachite, with a lid of the same stone secured by a brass clamp. I picked it up, gazed it at for a long moment, then handed it to Meto.
“Perhaps you’d like this, to remember her by. The beeswax inside is suffused with the scent Bethesda wore on special occasions. I told her to leave it in Rome, but she insisted on packing it. ‘What if we attend a dinner with Queen Cleopatra?
’ she said. She was being facetious, of course.”
He unclamped the lid and held the jar to his nose. The perfume was subtle but unmistakable, its ingredients a secret even to me. I caught a faint whiff. Tears came to my eyes.
Meto clamped the lid. His voice was choked with emotion. “If you’re sure you want to give it to me . . .”
“Take it.”
“Thank you, Papa.”
He turned to go, then turned back. “That vial of poison, Papa—you should get rid of it.”
And you should mind your own business, I started to say, but the lump in my throat was too thick. The best I could manage was a curt gesture of dismissal.
Meto stepped through the doorway and disappeared.
Why did I not do as Meto advised? From my window, I could have cast the alabaster vial into the harbor, where it would have sunk like a stone. Instead, I gathered it up with the other things on the bed and stuffed them back into the trunk, then closed the lid and threw myself onto my bed.
Rupa hovered over me. I told him to go to his room. Mopsus approached, clearing his throat to speak. I told him to take Androcles and follow Rupa. They left me alone.
I covered my face with my forearm and wept. As faint as a whisper, Bethesda’s perfume lingered on the air.
CHAPTER XVII
The boys stayed very quiet the next morning, allowing me to sleep late. I was still groggy, my head full of uneasy dreams, when Merianis arrived bearing a scrap of papyrus that had been folded several times and sealed with wax. The impression in the wax was that of Caesar’s ring, which bore an image of Venus circled by the letters of his name.
“What’s this?” I said.
“I’ve no idea,” said Merianis. “A missive from Little Rome. I’m merely the bearer. Shall I stay, in case you wish to send a reply?”
“Stay, so that I can look upon your beaming face. At least someone in this palace is happy. I don’t suppose the return of your mistress has anything to do with your mood this morning?”
She grinned. “While Queen Cleopatra was gone, the temple of Isis was a place without magic.”
“And now the magic has returned.” I broke the seal and unfolded the papyrus. The letter was in Caesar’s own hand.
Gordianus
Apologies for our interrupted dinner. Much was left unsaid. But unexpected encounters bring happy results. There will be a royal reception today that I should very much like you to attend. Call it a lesson in the fine art of reconciliation. Wear your toga and come to the grand reception hall at the eighth hour of the day.
I put down the letter. Merianis looked at me expectantly. “A reception of some sort, later this afternoon,” I said.
She nodded to indicate she already knew about it.
“Will you be there?” I said.
“No power in heaven or earth could keep me from attending.”
“Then I shall go, as well. Mopsus! Androcles! Stop playing with that cat and lay out my toga for me.”
The reception hall was truly grand, the result of hundreds of years of refinements, additions, and adornments by generations of Ptolemies. Here the kings and queens of Egypt received tributes from subjects, announced treaties and trade agreements, celebrated royal weddings, and put on their most magnificent displays of wealth and power. Every surface shone with reflected light, whether from the polished marble of floors and pedestals inlaid with semiprecious stone, or from the burnished silver of brackets and lamps, or from the gold of gilded alcoves filled with gilded statues. The lofty ceiling was supported by a forest of slender columns decorated with lotus motifs and painted in vivid hues.
The room was already buzzing with excitement when Merianis and I arrived. The crowd was made up mostly of Egyptians in ceremonial dress, but there was a large contingent of Romans as well. “A lesson in the fine art of reconciliation,” Caesar had remarked in his note to me, and the Roman officers seemed to be following that theme, taking pains to mingle with the locals and engage them in conversation. Among the Egyptians, however, there seemed to be two unequal factions in the room, standing apart from one another. The greater faction I took to be adherents of the king; the lesser group, adherents of his sister. While the Romans moved among both, the two groups of courtiers did not mix, but instead exchanged suspicious, furtive glances.
Merianis took my hand and drew me toward the far end of the room, where four thrones were set upon a low dais. The gilded thrones were upholstered with crocodile flesh, and the arms of the thrones were carved to resemble crocodiles whose open jaws revealed rows of ivory teeth. On the wall behind the thrones, a vast painting depicted the city of Alexandria as it might appear to a bird soaring at a great height, with the Pharos lighthouse looming above all else. Beyond the cityscape and its teeming harbor, an expansive blue sea was scattered with tiny, but meticulously rendered, ships, and the great islands of Rhodes and Crete (identified by their names in Greek letters beneath them) loomed in the far distance.
A wave of excitement as palpable as a warm breeze passed through the room, with a loud hubbub following in its wake. I saw that an entourage was making its way through the crowd toward the dais. Pothinus was in the forefront, followed by the king, who wore the uraeus crown with a rearing cobra. Caesar came next, dressed as consul of the Roman people in his toga with a purple border. After him, resplendent in a gown of purple, adorned with jewelry, and wearing a uraeus crown with a vulture’s head, came Cleopatra.
Following the older siblings came the two members of the royal family I had not seen before, Arsinoë, who was slightly older than the young king, and the youngest of all, a boy who also bore the name Ptolemy, who could not have been more than ten or eleven. These two did not wear diadems, but were dressed in dazzling raiment.
As the royal procession passed by, I tried to read their expressions. Pothinus looked pinched and uneasy, like a man who had swallowed something that disagreed with him. King Ptolemy kept his lips tightly compressed and his gaze straight ahead, as if deliberately putting on an inscrutable face. Caesar looked eminently pleased with himself. And Cleopatra . . .
The previous night I had seen her with her hair in a bun, wearing a practical garment suitable for traveling in rough circumstances, and little other adornment. Even so, she had seemed unmistakably a queen. Now, wearing royal raiment, with a necklace made of golden scarabs adorning her bosom and rings of gold and silver upon her fingers, she seemed to fill the chamber with her presence. I looked about and saw that some of the Egyptians in the room gazed at her with loathing, others with adoration, and that the Roman officers regarded her with expressions that ranged from wonderment to simple curiosity; but every pair of eyes, without exception, looked on Cleopatra as she passed by.
Her expression was as inscrutable as her brother’s, but radiated a quality quite different. Ptolemy exuded the tension of a ratcheted catapult; Cleopatra seemed to flow effortlessly across the room, as a cloud proceeds across the sky.
The king and queen mounted the dais and sat upon the two thrones in the center. To either side of them sat Arsinoë and the younger Ptolemy in thrones only slightly lower and less magnificent. Seeing all the siblings side-by-side, I was struck by how closely the four of them resembled each other. I seemed to be looking at four manifestations of the same being incarnated in bodies of different age and gender, which were nonetheless more alike than different. Had their striking similarity served merely to make the siblings all the more hostile to one another?
Pothinus, facing the king and queen, struck his staff against the floor. The Egyptians in the room bowed their heads and knelt. The Romans hesitated, looking to Caesar for guidance. By a wave of his hand, he indicated that they should do as the Egyptians did, and with considerable grace he dropped to one knee. I followed his example but kept my head up. Caesar, I saw, bowed his head first to Ptolemy, who stared back at him blankly, and then to Cleopatra, who gazed at him with a look that left little doubt, in my mind at least, about what had occurred between the two of them afte
r I left their presence.
“ ‘History is made at night,’ ” I muttered.
“What’s that you say?” whispered Merianis.
“I was merely quoting an old Etruscan proverb.”
Pothinus stood and again struck his staff against the floor. All rose. Caesar stepped forward. From many years of experience as an orator in the Forum and a commander in the field, he was able easily to fill the vast chamber with his voice.
“Your Majesties, I stand before you today in two capacities: as consul of the Roman people, and as a friend of your late father. Eleven years ago, in the year of my first consulship, your father, driven out of Alexandria by civil strife, came to Rome to seek our help. He received it. The Senate declared him Friend and Ally of the Roman People, a very great honor; in return, he appointed the Roman people to be guardians of his children. Thus Rome and Egypt became bound together by ties of law as well as of friendship.
“The fortunes of private citizens were joined to those of the late king, as well. I myself opened my coffers and exerted all my influence to help sustain him in his exile and eventually to restore him to his throne. His passing was a tragedy for all who knew and loved him, but most especially for this kingdom, which he loved so dearly, and which has since been riven with such turmoil and strife.
“The late king did not die intestate. Indeed, a copy of his will was sent to Rome, to be deposited at the treasury, and another copy was placed under seal here in Alexandria. Alas, the first copy fell into the hands of Pompey, and is lost to us. But since I arrived in Alexandria, I have obtained the second copy of the will, broken the seal, and read it very carefully, although I hardly needed to reacquaint myself with its terms. The dictates of that will were made known upon the king’s death and were much discussed in Rome.
“Unfortunately, preoccupied by their own civil strife in recent years, the Roman people were unable to oversee the proper disposition of the late king’s will. Arriving here in Egypt, I was dismayed to find that what your father intended had not come to pass. Those who were to have an equal share in the inheritance were instead contesting with one another, by clash of arms, as to who should claim the entire estate. To some extent, the blame for this state of affairs lies with the people of Rome for having failed to carry out their duties as executors of the will and guardians of the royal family; but I now intend to redress that failing. As the embodiment of the will of the Roman people, my authority extends to this matter of executing the late king’s will, and I intend to see that its provisions are properly carried out—fairly, amicably, and for the mutual benefit of all concerned.
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