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
Cleopatra 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 o
f 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.
This should never have been.
“You’ll have to go around it, woman.”
She heard the derisive jeer behind her but ignored it. The wall before her seemed to also seal up something in her heart. But she would not allow this to be the end. She would not be ruled by Rome, and she would not be ruled by the Alexandrian mob.
Cleopatra slipped along the wall to a narrow side street where she could detour and reach the royal quarter. Her pace quickened as she went, resolve strengthening her legs.
The royal quarter had been taken over entirely by the Roman legion, and Cleopatra expected less activity when she reached it.
Instead, she found more.
Roman soldiers, their iron chain mail glistening in the sun, criss-crossed the streets, yelling to each other and forming clusters of angry concern.
What is happening?
She stopped a soldier. “Has the Egyptian army come?”
He shook off her hand. “Them we can fight! But we cannot fight nature!” He hurried on.
A slave neared, an old man who had probably given many years to the palace, bent and broken under a lifetime of servitude. At the corner, she grabbed his arm. “What is it? What is this disaster?”
He looked up at her with bleary eyes. For a moment they seemed to clear in recognition. “The water. Brackish and tainted.”
Cleopatra looked across the streets, toward the nearest cistern. “How?”
The old man shrugged. “Salt water somehow. Started here, and the rest of the city said we were crazy. But now the lower parts are saying so, too.”
She let him go and started toward the cistern.
“Be careful, my lady,” the old slave called.
He has served too long at my table to be fooled by Jewish clothing.
Soldiers huddled around the cistern’s lip, drawing water and taking turns in the tasting.
“Let me through.” Cleopatra pushed one aside. She cared little for subterfuge now. She grabbed a cup from a young soldier, who objected, then lowered his head to her.
One sip convinced her. The cisterns, and therefore the canals, had been compromised.
And if the rest of the city were also complaining, it must be the entire web of underground cisterns.
For all their weapons and training, the Romans could be defeated by this one simple thing: dehydration.
And from the expressions she saw on each soldier’s face, they knew it well.
Thirty-Two
When Pothinus formulated his plans in his tent on the plains of Pelusium, he had never imagined that the whole of the Egyptian army would be at his back. But in the blue-green of the Great Sea, twenty ships rode at anchor, fifteen stadia off the coast of Alexandria, waiting for their moment of glory.
Pothinus stood at the rail of a mid-sized quinquereme, one that held one hundred soldiers to man the oars, and Arsinôe and Ganymedes besides.
He had intended to summon part of the troops in secret, those loyal to him and Ptolemy, to take the lighthouse and secure the Proginosko. Before he could set his plan into motion, Ganymedes had declared that the entire army would move on the city. To reclaim Ptolemy as rightful king, Ganymedes said. Which everyone interpreted to mean put Arsinôe on the throne.
And so now they floated, an army of ships bobbing in the sea, and Pothinus paced the wooden rail, his eye on the distant lighthouse. They were near enough to see the black finger pointing upward from the coast, to see the sun’s rays reflected back across the waves from its summit. But too far to reach out and pry the Proginosko from Sophia’s greedy fingers.
Ah, but he would have it.
Pothinus wrapped his hands around the rail and studied the lighthouse, imagining the secrets it held. His memory slipped back to the night he had left, running from Caesar and his legion, sailing out under the lighthouse’s ever-watchful eye.
The ship lifted over a swell and dropped again. Foamy water slapped at its hull. Pothinus filled his chest with the salty air and smiled. Perhaps he had left like a meek lamb. But he returned as a hungry lion, with the might of Egypt behind him.
Plebo appeared at his side.
<
br /> “Did you tell him?” Pothinus asked, without turning his head to acknowledge his diminutive slave.
“He will come,” Plebo said under his breath. Pothinus shook his head, amused at the little man’s cloaked whisper.
Plebo enjoys the subterfuge of politics as much as any royal Ptolemy.
“This time we will do it right,” Pothinus said.
Plebo sniffed. “I recruited the man whose name you gave me—”
Pothinus waved away his objection. “It is the mark of wisdom to make corrections midstream when they are warranted. You should have seen that he would not be effective.”
“How could I know that—”
A lean soldier slid to the rail beside Pothinus, and Plebo’s voice dropped away.
“Good,” Pothinus said. “I see that you are a man who knows where his loyalty will best be rewarded.” He watched the man from the corner of his eye.
The soldier, Shadin, shrugged one shoulder. Though his bones seemed to protrude in sharp angles, Pothinus could see that there was a wiry strength to him, one conditioned by many years in service. He had a reputation for extracting information from those unwilling to give it. “Your slave mentioned drachma. That is what I know.”
Pothinus frowned. He had hired one simple mercenary before, without success. He needed something more this time. He turned on the soldier. “You are loyal to whomever pays?”
Shadin eyed him and hesitated, as if unsure what truth would best serve him. “I am loyal to Egypt, and I fight for her king. Though them that joins me is not always clear.”
Pothinus allowed the soldier a tight smile of approval. “Then let me tell you how we are going to put Ptolemy back on the throne.”
But a sharp-fingered jab in the side silenced him. He glared at Plebo, who jerked his head over his shoulder in the direction of the steps that led from the hull.
Arsinôe ascended, Ganymedes on her heels.
Shadin disappeared, confirming to Pothinus that the soldier understood much.
The two joined Pothinus at the rail. Arsinôe tossed her hair behind her, letting the wind catch it, and smiled. “It will not be long now, Pothinus. We will soon take my brother from the Roman dogs.”
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