So. What would happen now? Presumably the Romans would soon come along and ask the caravan master if he’d found any injured men. What would the caravan master answer?
Impossible to predict. He might hand over his find at once. He might ask for a reward. On the other hand, he might be afraid that admitting it would get him into trouble, and deny that he’d found anyone. He might decide to knock his dangerous acquaintance over the head and tip him down the next gully. I have not seen the man you want. Probably he died in the desert.
Or he might try to protect his guest. The smelly man had seemed kind enough. Probably, though, the smelly man wasn’t master of the caravan, but an assistant of some kind. He’d spoken Demotic, and even in Greek he’d had a native accent. A merchant able to mount a caravan from the Nile to the Red Sea would surely be a Greek, a member of the elite that had ruled Egypt for three centuries. Well, perhaps the caravan master, too, would be kind. A Greek ought to be sympathetic to a fellow-Greek in difficulties.
A lot depended, of course, on how the Romans actually phrased their question. If a couple of them tramped over saying that they were looking for a fugitive, that was one thing; if they marched up in force, saying that they were chasing the young king Ptolemy Caesar, and that to shelter such a personage was treason, that was something else. Even if the caravan master were patriotic, he was unlikely to risk his life for a cause that was already lost. Caesarion should keep his identity a secret—if he could.
A shape bulked blackly against the light outside, and then a man crawled in under the awning, on hands and knees since there wasn’t room to stand. He looked to be in his late thirties, lean, with a heavy-jawed face stubbled with unshaven traveling, and the dark brown skin and slightly kinked hair sometimes found in Upper Egypt. He was dressed in a dirty linen tunic, with a coarse linen shawl tossed loosely over his head to provide some protection from the sun. Everything about his appearance proclaimed him a native Egyptian, a peasant, so probably he was one of the caravan’s drivers. He looked annoyed about something, and when his eyes met Caesarion’s, he gave an irritated grunt.
“So,” he said sourly, in singsong Greek, “you’re awake.” Caesarion recognized the voice: it was the speaker of the night before, the smelly man who’d supported him on the donkey. “Well, boy, there isn’t any water. This thrice-cursed and god-hated place is out of it, and we can’t do anything to clean you up. Have some beer.” He held out a flask of coarse clay, stoppered with a stick wrapped in rag.
Caesarion remembered guiltily that Eumenes had been telling the men to drive the camels down to Kabalsi for water, to spare the supply at the camp. It seemed that they’d drunk the station dry. He wished they hadn’t: he wanted water. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have touched the thick beer favored by the native Egyptians, but now even that sounded delicious. He raised himself slowly up onto an elbow, began to reach for the flask, and found that the movement pulled painfully at his wounded side. He sat up properly and took the bottle with his left hand. The other man made a hissing noise through his teeth. He was staring at Caesarion’s bloodied tunic.
“That doesn’t look good,” he remarked, gesturing at the injury. “What happened?”
Caesarion didn’t know how to answer. He fumbled weakly at the bottle’s stopper. The other took it from him, opened it, and handed it back. Caesarion drank greedily, hardly tasting the bitterness in the sweet fact that it was wet.
“Don’t you understand me?” the other demanded sharply.
Caesarion lowered the bottle a moment and nodded cautiously. “Please,” he croaked, manipulating his sore tongue with difficulty. “I’m thirsty.” He glanced down at the flask, then, unable to resist, took another long drink. The beer stung his tongue and made it feel better at the same time.
“When we found you last night,” said the other man softly, “I thought either you’d been robbed, or you were a robber.”
Caesarion lowered the bottle and stared at him in consternation.
“You’re not, though, are you?” said the Egyptian. “You didn’t get that,” he gestured again at the wound, “in any beating. That came from a spear or a sword. You’re sunburned, too, like a man who isn’t used to the desert, and that tunic’s military, and top-quality cloth, too. Even last night, I thought it was a damned strange robber who goes about drenched in expensive perfume. The myrrh was for the cut, was it? Why didn’t you bandage it properly while you were about it?”
Caesarion, affronted, started to set the bottle down, then snatched it up again hurriedly as it began to tip over.
The Egyptian gave a snort of amusement. “Nothing to say for yourself?” he asked.
Caesarion looked down at the dry ground. Was this fellow playing with him? Had the Romans been here already? Certainly they’d had plenty of time to reach the waystation; in fact, he should have realized that. Was this some cruel game? He’d thought this man kind, but he certainly didn’t seem so now.
“Boy,” said the Egyptian, not unsympathetically, “a troop of Romans passed us on the road two nights ago, marching so hard they didn’t even pause to steal from us. Last night there was a fire off to the right of the trail—a big one, a couple of miles away up a wadi. Tell me the truth. You were in the queen’s forces, weren’t you?”
Caesarion gazed at him incredulously. The Romans had lit the pyre? Burned the bodies? As though nothing had gone wrong?
Maybe they hadn’t noticed he was missing. The purple awning had covered the top of the pyre, and if they hadn’t lifted it … He’d disturbed Megasthenes when he fell off, of course, but perhaps the Romans had simply assumed that one of their own people had done that. Or perhaps they hadn’t even noticed. He’d pulled the awning down again, to cover the guard’s face. Perhaps they’d just assumed that all was well, and thrust in the torch. All that scented oil, those camel saddles and sacks of flour—the pyre would have gone up with a roar and destroyed all traces of his departure.
If the Romans did believe he was dead and cremated now, would they realize their mistake when they tried to collect the ashes for burial?
“You’re young to be a soldier,” the Egyptian was continuing insistently. “From the look of that cut, you weren’t wearing armor, either. Are you slave or free?”
He stared in confusion, at first too preoccupied by his own question to take in this one—and then bewildered by the insolent implication. Finally his face stung with indignation. “Gods and goddesses!” he exclaimed hoarsely.
“Well?” asked the Egyptian, unimpressed. “I’ll hear your story. If you’re a slave, I want to know what’s happened to your master.”
“I am not a slave!” Caesarion cried furiously. His tongue was working again. “Zeus!” He set the beer bottle down with a thump. It promptly began to fall over. The Egyptian caught it, shook it, then drank down the last swallow of beer himself.
“So?” he asked, wiping his mouth. “Why weren’t you wearing armor, then?”
“I was asleep,” Caesarion said angrily. “Rhodon came, and …” He stopped.
“Rhodon your lover?” the Egyptian asked, with interest.
If he hadn’t felt so weak, Caesarion would have hit the man. That a native, a peasant, should say such a thing to him—it passed belief. The queen would crucify anyone who showed her firstborn such disrespect.
“Well, I don’t believe that soldiers on active service usually have supplies of perfume handy,” said the Egyptian, responding to the glare of outrage. “—Though if they do, it explains why the queen’s lost the war.”
Caesarion’s rage died suddenly. “The war’s over?” he asked faintly.
The other nodded, warily now. “So they were saying in Coptos when we left it. Alexandria’s fallen. The queen’s lover, the general Antonius—he’s dead, they say, and Queen Cleopatra has been taken prisoner. No word about the boy Caesarion, but he never counted for anything anyway. Egypt is a Roman province now.”
Caesarion bowed his head, pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.
Alexandria fallen, Antonius dead, Mother …
She’d always sworn that she would never allow herself to be taken prisoner, never grace a Roman triumph. She’d sworn to burn herself alive in her own mausoleum, together with all her treasures, before she surrendered to her enemies. How had this fate—this unspeakable … How …
His stomach was starting to rise. He snatched the remedy bag up to his face and breathed deeply.
“I’m sorry,” said the Egyptian quietly. Caesarion glanced at him quickly, then looked away again. His eyes were running, and he wiped them angrily without lowering the remedy. He could feel the seizure creeping toward him. Intense emotion often brought them on.
“So, you were of the queen’s party,” the other said, after a long silence. “What were you doing here?”
“Go away!” Caesarion ordered him indistinctly.
“There were nearly a hundred Romans in the troop that passed us,” the Egyptian continued, ignoring it, “and they were in a tearing hurry. It must have taken something important to bring them so far inland, so soon—I never expected to see any of them, not until they’d settled the rest of the country. I’d guess you and some friends were sent in this direction on some important business—fetching or hiding something for the queen maybe?—and somebody told the Romans, and they hurried up and caught you, and there was a fight. They get the treasure—or whatever it was?”
“Yes,” said Caesarion desperately. “Leave me alone!”
“Pity,” said the other. “You’re sure?”
“O gods and goddesses, leave me alone!”
“I’m sorry,” said the Egyptian again, and went out.
Alexandria fallen, Antonius dead, Mother a prisoner—if what the Egyptian had heard was right, if she wasn’t dead as well. He pressed his face against his knees, shaking. Even if she was still alive, she would die soon, she would die. She would never endure that, not to bow to Caesar Octavian, not to walk in chains in his triumph. She would die. It was all over. Why in the name of all the immortal gods hadn’t he stayed on the damned pyre? Why hadn’t he had the sense or the grace to die on cue?
He remembered her dancing in the shrine of Dionysos, deep in the heart of the palace. Dressed in pearls and the skin of a fawn, her hair twined with ivy, she had vine-stepped about the altar by torchlight to the wild music of the sistrum and the flute. She was all fire and grace. Antonius, who was drunk, had blundered into the dance after her—and she had somehow made even that look as though it had been planned, a nymph dancing with a bear, a dolphin cavorting with a ship, so that even accident became perfection …
The scent of carrion, and an overpowering sense of horror. Mother was striding from the ship, wearing her purple robes and a gold-worked diadem. A woman flung herself forward out of the crowd, dressed in only in a tunic, her face and shoulders bruised. “Mercy!” she screamed. “Queen, my husband committed no crime!”
A fish was swimming in the deep green of a pool. Another fish lunged suddenly from among the weeds and seized it.
The man was tied to the table facedown, naked, his hands and feet secured to the table-legs with thick ropes. The back of his skull had been removed, and blood was trickling steadily into channels cut into the stone floor. “You see here the ventricles of the brain,” said the doctor. He prodded the pulpy gray mass with a scalpel, and the man’s hand twitched. “He’s still alive!” Caesarion cried in horror …
He was sitting under an awning. It was hot. His side hurt. He straightened slowly, then lay down on his good side, trembling with exhaustion. He still had the remedy pressed to his face, but he couldn’t smell it: his nose was choked with tears.
Why had he been forced to remember such things, at a time like this? The queen was brave, brilliant, witty; her magnificence left men breathless with admiration, her ambition covered the world. To remember those things … That man on the table had been a convicted criminal, condemned to death, and that woman’s husband had been an enemy of the queen, executed at a time when the state was in danger. It was cruel ingratitude to rake up such things now, when the queen was either lying dead, or else a helpless prisoner. I’m sorry, Mother, he thought wretchedly. It was the illness that remembered it, not me.
It was no comfort. His illness had always been his worst, most unforgivable failure.
You must escape, his mother had told him, the last time they spoke together. That task was one he could still hope to complete. He must complete it. The knowledge that her son was still alive and at liberty was the only comfort he could offer the queen in her captivity, and his own survival the best memorial he could give her.
IT WAS LATE in the afternoon when the Egyptian came back: the shadows outside were long. Caesarion had slept, then woken with a raging thirst. When the Egyptian crawled in he sat up eagerly, but this time the man had no flask with him, only a piece of stale bread and couple of withered figs folded in a shawl. The Egyptian saw his disappointment.
“I told you: we’ve no water, and now we’re almost out of beer,” he declared, setting the food down. “We’re saving our last pot of it for the journey tonight. You had more than the rest of us, boy: we gave you double rations this morning, and stinted ourselves.—What’s your name, anyway?”
He suppressed a flash of irritation at the man’s tone: he didn’t want this fellow to know who it was he’d been calling “boy.” He considered answering truthfully, “Ptolemaios”—the name was common enough to attract no comment—but he wasn’t sure he’d manage to answer to it. Nobody had ever called him Ptolemy: his nickname, Caesarion, “Little Caesar,” had been used by everyone from his mother to the fishmongers on the Alexandrian quays—when they weren’t calling him “king” and “lord,” of course. He picked a name which sounded similar.
“Arion,” he told the Egyptian.
“Huh. I’m called Ani.” It was an Egyptian name, not even faintly Hellenized. “Arion,” Ani went on, “would it be any use our sending up to that camp you came from to beg some water?”
“No,” Caesarion replied, going cold despite the heat.
“They know we’re around,” Ani said reasonably. “They overtook us on the road. It’s nothing to them if we take some water, is it? It’s not as though they’re planning to spend time up there. And we used the last of our own water this morning. It’s a long walk to the next station if we have to go thirsty all the way.”
“We were already almost out of water,” Caesarion told him. “Eumenes was sending the camels down here to drink.”
“Was he?” Ani cried irritably. “Well, bugger him! So, it’s because of you that we’re thirsty?” He was silent a moment, then said, “Your lot were up there for a while, were you?”
Caesarion hunched his shoulders uncomfortably. He was giving away more than he wanted to, but he couldn’t think what else to do. He needed help from the caravan party if he was to reach Berenike and the ship; he was too weak now to do it on his own. “Yes,” he admitted.
“With a treasure. You said the Romans had taken a treasure.”
It was Ani, Caesarion remembered, who’d brought up the question of treasure: it had apparently been the first thing he’d thought of when he understood that a royal force had fought Romans in the desert. He looked at the Egyptian with distaste.
“Don’t you try to hold out on me, boy,” Ani said sharply. “I saved your life last night, if you didn’t notice. Most caravan-masters find a boy lying half-dead in the road, they leave him there, you understand? Could be a decoy for robbers. I gave you water, put you on my own donkey, looked after you like you were my own. You can answer me.”
“My debt is to the master of your caravan …” began Caesarion coldly.
Ani seemed to swell. “I am master of this caravan! Who’d you think I was?” He glared. “You think because I’m an Egyptian, because I don’t speak la-di-da fancy Greek like you, I’m nobody? Your debt, boy, is to me. What were you doing with that treasure, eh?”
Caesarion fought to master his anger: if he said
what he wanted to say, the insolent peasant would probably abandon him here in this waterless place. “We were waiting for a ship,” he admitted. “It was supposed to meet us in Berenike sixteen days ago.”
“Ah,” said Ani. After a moment, he added slowly, “I heard how the queen had all her ships moved over to the Red Sea last winter. They said she was planning to sail off to the East, with all her treasure, and make herself queen of somewhere else. But I heard that the ships were burned.”
“Yes,” agreed Caesarion distantly. “They were all in the harbor at Heroonpolis, and King Malehus of Arabia attacked them and burned them. But there were a few that were salvageable.”
Ani nodded. “So she decided to move some men and some money out of the country, to provide herself with a bolt hole if she lost Alexandria? And your lot were sent to take the treasure to Berenike, so that it could be loaded on the ship without any danger of the Arabs or the Romans finding out about it. Only the ship didn’t come, and the Romans did find out.”
“The ship may be there now,” Caesarion told him. He had to give this greedy peasant a reason to help. “We know it left Heroonpolis. It’s been delayed, but it should be in Berenike now. If you can take me to Berenike—they’d pay you for it.”
Ani regarded him suspiciously. “I suppose they might, at that,” he admitted grudgingly. “Worth something to them to know that the Romans have the treasure. What sort of treasure was it, anyway?”
“Fifty talents of gold.”
He whistled. “And you’re sure the Romans got all of it? Your lot hadn’t … well, buried some of it, in a secret place?” He could not quite hide his eagerness.
“We didn’t bury any of it,” Caesarion replied with disgust. “It was royal treasure. It was supposed to pay men to fight for Egypt.”
“Ah well,” said Ani resignedly. “I’ll have to make my fortune the hard way, then.” He sat back, squatting on his haunches, and pulled thoughtfully at his lower lip—a peasant gesture, vulgar, like the man himself. “And you say there’s no point trying to get water from your old camp?”
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