“We were almost out of water ourselves,” Caesarion told him in a flat tone, wishing the fellow would go away. “Now there’s a whole century of Romans there, and they have all our baggage animals in addition to their own. They’re probably on short rations already.”
“A whole what?”
“Century,” Caesarion told him, with a faint sneer. “A division of a Roman legion. Eighty men.”
“As I live, you may be a soldier after all! Very well, we’ll have to do without water tonight. Do you know if there’s still water at Hydreuma?”
Hydreuma was the next waystation, the last before Berenike itself. “There are wells there,” Caesarion pointed out impatiently. There was, in fact, a small settlement. Eumenes had sent men there to buy vegetables.
“If your lot’s camels haven’t emptied them. Now, boy …”
“Stop calling me that!” Caesarion snapped, finally losing his temper. “I’m not a slave! I’m a freeborn Alexandrian and … and of good family. The queen herself sent me here. By Apollo! You Egyptian camel-driver, how dare you call me ‘boy’!”
Ani’s eyes narrowed. “Boy,” he said deliberately, “are you able to walk to Hydreuma?”
Caesarion looked at the ground. He could feel his cheeks burning. He was certain that he could not. He doubted he could walk as much as a mile. What was worse, he had a nasty suspicion that if he tried, it would bring on a seizure. He’d had a lot of seizures in the past two days, many more than usual, and he could feel them pressing on him like a physical weight, crushing him: he didn’t know how many more he could endure. Besides, Ani would probably abandon him at once if he knew about the disease. People tended to think it was contagious. Even in the palace, slaves had spat behind their hands before they picked up something Caesarion dropped, and they threw out his leftover wine rather than drink it. Ani had, so far, said nothing about the seizure Caesarion had had earlier that day, which undoubtedly meant he hadn’t noticed it. That was to the good.
“So,” said Ani sweetly, “you need help from this Egyptian camel-driver, don’t you? Not a very good idea to insult me, is it?”
“No,” whispered Caesarion, trembling with humiliation.
The Egyptian waited a moment; when no apology was offered, he apparently decided to accept the admission instead. “How bad’s that cut?” he asked briskly.
“I don’t know,” Caesarion replied faintly.
“Don’t know? Didn’t you even look at it when you put that myrrh on?”
“I didn’t put the myrrh on.”
“You wear perfume all the time, do you?”
Be still my heart; you have endured worse. “The Romans anointed me for the pyre. They thought I was dead. The cut can’t be too bad: I managed to walk as far as … I managed to get as far as the caravan track.”
Ani was staring at him in disbelief. “They thought you were dead? And you got up and walked off?”
“Leave me alone!” Caesarion pressed his hands to his face, choking. Mother murdered or a prisoner, Antonius dead, Egypt a Roman province—and he had to sit here, enduring the insults of a camel-driving peasant! “It was hot, they were in the shade somewhere, they weren’t watching the pyre anyway. O immortal gods, I wish I’d never woken up!”
“Now, boy!” exclaimed Ani reprovingly; and, to Caesarion’s horror and disgust, patted him on the shoulder. “You don’t mean that. You’re a young man, you still have your whole life before you … Here, let me look at what happened to you …” He tugged at the tunic.
Caesarion shoved his hands away furiously. “Leave me alone!” He caught his breath, struggled with himself, and went on, more moderately. “If I take the tunic off it will start bleeding again. It’s got myrrh on it, it can wait.”
Ani sat back, frowning. Caesarion glared back.
“You can ride the donkey again,” said Ani, after a silence. “I pray to the gods there’s water at Hydreuma. Whether or not you’re telling me the truth, that cut’s not good. Now, try and eat something: it’s going to be a rough night.”
CHAPTER II
It was indeed a very rough night. Caesarion afterwards remembered it only in fragments: sitting stiffly on the donkey with the pain red-hot in his side; lying shivering on the ground in the moonlight during a rest stop; the almost unbearable delight of the last of the beer, drunk at midnight. He was certain he had at least one seizure during the course of that nightmare journey, but he was so light-headed with pain and thirst that it simply blended unnoticed with a waking delirium.
The caravan was smaller than he’d expected: eighteen camels, three men, and a donkey. The camels were very heavily laden with immense bales of what appeared to be linen cloth, and they were roped together in strings of six, with a man to lead each string. Caesarion gathered that until they picked him up the men had carried their own luggage on the donkey, and that now they had to carry it on their backs. It was, he decided, a very poor caravan, if there was no room on the camels for the drivers.
Ani’s two assistants were called Menches and Imouthes; they were a middle-aged father and a son of about Caesarion’s own age, both coarse, dark Egyptians, much like Ani himself. They objected to Caesarion’s riding the donkey and having a share of the beer, and they argued about it in Demotic with Ani. Ani overruled them on the grounds that he expected money from Caesarion’s ship.
They left the waystation about an hour before sunset. The donkey was thirsty and unhappy and inclined to kick, even when Ani took its head. The pain from Caesarion’s wound started bad and got steadily worse, and it seemed to him that they would never reach Hydreuma, that he would jolt along in the blank darkness forever, enduring one endless minute after another after another. When at last they arrived, he did not at first realize it. By that stage he was lying facedown on the donkey’s back, his arms folded around its neck, semiconscious and shivering. He only snapped back into awareness when he was pulled off. The flare of agony up his side made him scream, and he curled up in the dust, sobbing. It was dark and cold and there were people around him. A woman’s voice said, “Sshhh!” into his ear, and he was carried inside a building and set down. An argument started over his head. He closed his eyes.
He woke up again when they gave him water. Everything was shadowy, illuminated only by the flame of a single lamp held by a woman standing over him. He was lying on a pallet next to a stone wall; above his head was what appeared to be a tent. He blinked at it muzzily. Another woman who was kneeling next to him began to splash water from a basin over his blood-encrusted tunic. She unfastened the pin that secured the cloth at his right shoulder, then slid a sponge under the tunic and dribbled more water down his side. The woman with the lamp bent over and took the pin.
“Here! That’s not yours!” said Ani. Caesarion looked for and found him, standing in the middle of the house-tent and glaring at the women.
The woman spat on the grime-coated pin, rubbed it against the shoulder of her tunic, and examined it under the lamp. She was middle-aged, with a sour face. “This is gold,” she told Ani.
“And not yours,” replied Ani, taking it away from her.
“We’re not thieves!” the woman complained. “You think we’re going to rob him?”
Ani snorted. “Yes. You’re already robbing me, the price you’re charging. Here, you can give me his belt and sandals as well, and that amulet he’s got round his neck.”
The woman with the basin smiled at Caesarion. She was younger than the one with the lamp and darker: her teeth gleamed in the lamplight. She scooped more water out of her basin onto his side, then unfastened his belt, worked it out from under him, and passed it up to Ani. She reached for the silk bag of the remedy, but Caesarion was clutching it with both hands.
“No,” he said weakly. “No, I need this.”
“Huh,” said Ani, squatting down beside him. “You’re in your right mind again, are you? Boy, that amulet would be a lot safer with me.”
“I need it,” insisted Caesarion.
The Eg
yptian shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He glanced up at the older woman. “I expect it to be here this evening—and the chain it’s hung on. It’s only a charm, anyway. There’s nothing in it but herbs.”
He must have looked in it himself to know that, Caesarion thought, with revulsion. He must have searched it for money.
The dark woman was unfastening his sandals. Ani took them, tucked them under his arm, and stood up.
“Where are you going?” Caesarion choked. He did not like or trust the caravan-master, but he trusted these women even less. They were going to hurt him. He could feel the water soaking into the mess of blood and linen at his side, and he knew that as soon as they’d softened the scab they were going to pull the tunic loose. Apollo and Asklepios, it was going to hurt!
“I’m going to see to my caravan,” the Egyptian replied shortly. “Boy, I’m paying four drachmae for these two to look after you and clean you up. Tell me if they don’t give you my money’s worth. I’ll be back this evening.”
He went out, striding from the shadowy house-tent into a dusky outside. The dark girl smiled at Caesarion again and poured some more water on his wound. The older woman spat, bent over, and tugged at the tunic. Caesarion gasped in anguish. She spat again, and said something to the dark girl in another language.
The dark girl nodded. She stood, stepped astraddle Caesarion, and hitched up her tunic. Then she squatted and urinated directly onto the wound.
He turned his face away and pressed the remedy against his mouth. He was used to the torments and indignities of medicine. Fresh urine was supposed to be good both for softening a scab and cleaning a wound. He tried to pretend that the hot stinging ache was happening somewhere else—that it was there, in that vein of quartz upon that rock in the wall …
The older woman took hold of the tunic again and began to twist it back and forth, loosening it. The ache flared into white-hot brilliance. He choked, bit the remedy, felt his stomach rising with a familiar sense of utter horror …
They’d cut off the slave’s nose, and it bubbled when he screamed, a horrible sound. The guards were flogging him. There were thorns knotted into the leather thongs of the whip, and they ripped great jagged holes in his naked back and buttocks. Caesarion wept. He ran over to his mother and caught her dress, and she looked down at him and smiled. Her hair was curled today, and the purple ribbon of the diadem she wore was stitched with pearls.
“Make them stop!” Caesarion begged her. “Please, make them stop! He didn’t mean it!”
“He insulted you,” Cleopatra told him. “My son, a king can never allow anyone who insults him to go unpunished. If he does, he loses authority, and if he loses authority, he is dead.”
The slave screamed more horribly still. Bone gleamed white in the red ruin of his back. “Please, please!” Caesarion sobbed.
Someone was playing the flute. The sound floated up through the fragrant garden, sweet and clear and piercingly beautiful.
Then it was daylight, and everything was warm and quiet. He lay on his back looking up at the roof of the tent. He was naked apart from a linen bandage which circled his chest along the line of his lower ribs. His right side was very sore, and that puzzled him, because he couldn’t remember how he’d hurt it.
I must have had a seizure and fallen on something, he thought dreamily—then remembered thinking that before, and waking …
Slowly, memory reassembled itself. He touched the bandage on his side. Under that lay a wound he still hadn’t seen. He wondered again how bad it was. He felt for the remedy bag, found to his relief that it was still there, and pressed it to his face. He wondered if the women had told Ani that he’d had a seizure. He hoped not. It was still another day’s journey to Berenike.
The dark girl came over presently, and seemed pleased to find him awake. She gave him a drink of water and spoke to him cheerfully in a language he eventually recognized as Trogodytic, the tongue of the natives of the Red Sea Coasts. His mother knew Trogodytic, but he had never learned it. “Speak Greek?” he asked her hopefully, but she laughed and shook her head. She made eating gestures, then went off and came back with a bowl. She helped him to sit up, propped him against the wall of the house-tent, and hand-fed him lentils stewed with coriander. He had not felt hungry, but the food settled deliciously into his empty stomach. He had eaten nothing but the two figs the day before—his mouth had been too dry and his tongue too sore to manage the bread—and he had had nothing at all the day before that. He remembered all the doctors who’d advised him that fasting would provoke seizures, and smiled sourly. The dark girl grinned back and said something encouraging. She helped him to lie down again, and fetched him a cushion for his head.
WHEN HE NEXT woke it was hot, but not unbearably so. The pain was receding, and he lay relaxed, listening. Goats were bleating somewhere nearby, and people were talking, their voices indistinct. Zeus, what a pleasant place Hydreuma was! Shelter from the killing sun, water in the bitter desert, company … She was pretty, that dark girl.
Maybe he should stay here for a few days. He suspected now that he’d been feverish the night before, that the wound was infected. It felt as though it had begun to heal now, but presumably traveling would make it worse again. His flesh recoiled from the prospect of climbing back onto that vile donkey—Dionysos, another night like the last one would kill him.
Ani undoubtedly intended to press on to Berenike in the evening, but did he really need Ani now? It was only about fifteen miles to the sea, and downhill all the way. He could say a long farewell to Ani and his insults, and go on to Berenike when he felt stronger.
He shifted uneasily, aware that Ani was expecting money and might not be willing to part without it. Well, there was the pin from his tunic—he could give the fellow that.
He frowned. He was pretty certain that he hadn’t been wearing that pin on the night the Romans came. He’d slept in his tunic—they all had, both because of the chill of the desert nights and because it would save time if they had to leave in a hurry—but he hadn’t worn the pin. It was a military tunic, stitched on the left shoulder, pinned on the right, so that you could unpin it and have your arm free for working. A pin always bit into his shoulder when he tried to sleep, so he slept without one. He’d never slept in belt and sandals, either.
The Romans must have dressed him for the pyre. He found himself imagining them handling his body—pinning and belting the tunic, putting the sandals on his feet, arranging his head and limbs—and was sickened. Herakles, had he even woken wearing the same tunic he’d been wearing when Rhodon burst into the tent? He couldn’t remember now. Picturing it to himself he saw only the thickly clotted blood, and couldn’t recall any rips made by the spear. They might have stripped him and insulted his naked body: he wouldn’t know.
Megasthenes, Eumenes, and Heliodoros had been set on the pyre wearing the torn clothing in which they’d died. But they hadn’t been wearing pins or belts or sandals, now he thought of it. Of course, the Romans wouldn’t have paid as much attention to them as they had to the son of the queen.
He realized abruptly that the Romans must have put him on display. They’d probably arranged him in the middle of the camp, decked out in his purple cloak and the royal diadem, and paraded all their own men and all their prisoners past him so that everyone could see him and agree that he was dead. Then they would have put aside the cloak and the diadem, together with his personal signets and whatever else they could find that he’d used to identify himself, so that they could provide the emperor in Alexandria with evidence that he was dead. If they’d been closer to the city they might have tried to take his body, or at least his head—but they hadn’t wanted to carry a decomposing corpse on a ten-day trek across the desert and a fourteen-day journey down the Nile. Dionysos! Had nobody noticed, in all that arranging and parading, that he was still breathing?
They hadn’t known that he’d had a seizure; most of them hadn’t even known that he had the disease. The queen had suppressed any discus
sion of her son’s defect and ensured that only his close attendants were aware of it.
He’d been stabbed, and shown no signs of life thereafter. He must’ve bled from the mouth after biting his tongue, and been half-suffocated by smoke from the burning tent: probably they’d believed that the spear had pierced a lung. It must’ve been dawn when they set out his body for inspection, with the air still full of smoke, and he had been in a deep stupor. Of course they thought he was dead.
No wonder they hadn’t checked the pyre before lighting it. That didn’t mean, though, that the fire had removed all traces of the Romans’ mistake. The bones would not have been consumed, not entirely. If the Romans continued to follow the proper funeral rites, they would collect the charred fragments, wash them in wine, and place them in urns for burial. Wouldn’t they notice then that there were three skulls instead of four? Rhodon and some of the others knew all about his seizures. Wouldn’t they begin to doubt, to send men out, just to be sure?
He supposed that he should be glad that the Romans had given him his belt and sandals. He never would have been able to walk across that burning desert barefoot. And the tunic pin: he needed something to pay off Ani. But perhaps he should not pay off Ani. Perhaps he should, after all, hurry on to Berenike at once, and hope that the ship was waiting.
Footsteps approached the house-tent and he sat up, hoping for the pretty dark girl. Instead the sour older woman came in. She was carrying Caesarion’s tunic over her arm; when she saw that he was awake she snorted and came over. Suddenly aware that he was naked, he looked about for something to cover himself.
She dropped the tunic across his lap. “So,” she remarked, “you’re feeling better.”
He turned the tunic over and inspected the right side. It had been washed, but the blood had left a discoloring blotch on the rich crimson. Two ragged tears in the fabric—on the right side, exactly matching the level of the wound—had been clumsily mended with a coarse white linen thread. Thank the gods for that, anyway!
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