Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  “Sir,” she called up to him, “do you want to …”

  She stopped. Arion’s eyes were wide, and he stared fixedly at nothing with an expression of desperate horror. He was grinding his teeth behind the bag of herbs, and his face was pale and drenched with sweat.

  “Sir?” she repeated.

  He did not seem to hear her. She touched his knee, but he did not look down. She could feel that he was trembling. He gave a choked sob that sounded like “No!” then muttered incomprehensibly.

  “Sir!” she said, really frightened now. “What’s the matter?” Hurriedly, she tapped the camel on the shoulder, the way the drivers did: it knelt down with a groan. Arion swayed in the saddle, almost falling off, then sat rocking back and forth, still gazing at nothing, grinding his teeth and muttering. She stared at him helplessly, wondering if she should throw water over him, or pull him into the shade.

  Arion moaned. His eyes rolled upwards in his head—and then shut. He shuddered and bent over, pressing the bag against his face. The muttering had stopped.

  “Sir!” she said helplessly. “Sir, are you …”

  He looked up, gazed at her a moment with a dazed expression. He looked around at the half-unloaded camel train, the slaves, the house. He looked down at the camel he sat on, then eased one leg over the front of the saddle and swiveled his foot.

  “Are you all right?” Melanthe asked nervously.

  “Who are you?” he asked, mystified.

  “Melanthe, sir. Ani’s daughter. Are you all right, sir?”

  “I had a small seizure,” he said flatly. “I’m subject to them. I’m fine.” He stood up, swayed, and sat down again.

  “I’ll get someone to help you,” she said hurriedly.

  “I’m fine!” he repeatedly, angrily this time, and got to his feet again. He stood very stiff for a moment, then stalked off toward the house. Melanthe started after him, then remembered the sheaf of papyri in the saddlebags—important documents—and went back to rescue them.

  When she got to the house, Arion had already disappeared. Papa and the sailors were still talking in the courtyard. She gave Papa the saddlebag with the papers.

  “Thank you,” he said—then, looking at her more closely: “What’s the matter?”

  “Arion had a seizure,” she told him—and found that her eyes were stinging with tears.

  The Greek sailor, Apollonios, groaned.

  Ezana, the Auxumite, shrugged. “At least we do not have to carry him to the house.”

  Papa was looking at her intently.

  “I thought people fell down when they had seizures,” she told him.

  “He does that, too,” said Apollonios. “Twice since we left Berenike. But he has staring fits every day.”

  “The gods have cursed him,” said Ezana. He had a strange, heavy accent, weighting the beginnings of his words.

  Apollonios made a noise of agreement. “I think the gods are punishing him. He says that during the staring fits he sees memories—and it is clear they’re hateful memories.”

  “We all have things we’d prefer not to remember,” said Papa slowly—and from the grim look on his face she thought he was remembering her mother’s final illness. “He says his family’s dead. A man can have terrible memories without having done anything terrible himself.”

  “I don’t like it,” declared Apollonios, giving Papa a hard look.

  “I don’t think Arion likes it, either,” replied Papa mildly.

  “‘He’s still alive!’—that gives me nightmares. Who’s still alive, and why is it so horrible that he should be? He won’t answer any questions—have you noticed that?—about that or about anything else. I think he’s committed some unholy crime, and that the gods are punishing him.”

  “I think he has a disease of the brain,” replied Papa sharply, “which he endures with considerable courage—and there’s nothing odd about not wanting to talk about something the world regards as shameful.—What’s the matter, Sunbird?”

  Melanthe felt the hot tears overflow her eyes and run onto her cheeks. In the marketplace, facing Aristodemos, Arion had been like a god. To see him staring and muttering to himself had been inexpressibly horrible. All that magnificence, twisted, broken, lost!

  “You pitied him?” said Papa gently.

  She nodded. She did pity Arion—and, in the pity, lost something, she did not know what, that she mourned bitterly.

  Papa put an arm around her and kissed her head. “My gentle girl. I do, too; Isis grant that no child of mine ever suffers the like! But we’re back at the river, and things should be easier now.”

  CHAPTER VI

  Caesarion woke the following morning, and lay quietly in bed for a long time, listening to the sounds of the house. Two women were talking nearby, chattering to each other in Demotic, occasionally laughing. Outside someone was watering the garden, a regular tramp-tramp-splash! as buckets of water were tipped over the herbs which sat in their terra-cotta pots in the courtyard.

  It was a bigger house than he’d expected—a low rambling collection of buildings surrounded by date palms, outside the city, with stables for animals and storerooms and workrooms for the linen business, pools for soaking flax and sheds for drying it. There were slaves, maybe a dozen of them, and there were linenworkers and farmworkers who appeared to be dependent upon Ani in some way or other—they could not be actual tenants, because this was Crown land and linen was a royal monopoly, but still they clearly regarded Ani as in some fashion their superior. It was something of a relief to see that Ani was not, after all, just a camel-driver. He might not be precisely rich as an Alexandrian would understand the word, but he was clearly a man of substance in Coptos. Well liked, too: that had been very plain from his welcome.

  Odd people. He thought of Ani being embraced by his daughter, Ani being embraced by his wife and sons, Ani shaking hands and back-slapping with everyone in the neighborhood. They touched one another a lot, these Egyptians. It was … well, vulgar and contemptible, of course, but very affectionate and warm. It made him feel … left out—which was stupid, because he had no desire whatever to be embraced by these people. It would be better if he could get away from them.

  He might do that. They were back at the river. His side was healing; Ani had said he would fetch a doctor to take the stitches out today. He could, conceivably, say good-bye to Ani now, sell the pin, make his own way to Alexandria … only … he owed Ani too much. In Berenike thirty drachmae would have settled the debt; he doubted that a hundred would cover it now. There was the cloak and the hat; there was the food and water and the camel; there was that long, abominable journey, where the fits had struck every day, and twice he had woken up in the heat and dust, hurting all over, with Ani sponging his face, while Menches and Imouthes, or Apollonios and Ezana, muttered that he was unclean, bad luck, ought to be left to die by the roadside …

  He owed Ani too much. It frightened him, how much he owed Ani. He was entangled in the man’s affairs, and the royal shape of his own purpose was becoming blurred, like a spear-point dropped in a garden and overgrown with beans.

  There was a sound from the doorway, and Caesarion looked over and found a small brown boy gazing at him with large dark eyes. He was dressed in a good white tunic, and wore a protective amulet on a thong around his neck. Not a slave. No, of course not, this was one of Ani’s sons—Serapion, that was the name. A name which, though it honored an Egyptian god, was Greek in form. All of Ani’s children had Greek names, to prepare them, no doubt, for the status of gentry which their father was eager to bestow on them. He’d noticed that their father made a point of speaking to them in Greek, though their mother was confined to Demotic.

  “You’re awake!” said the child, in Greek, with a mixture of pleasure and anxiety. “Papa said if you were awake to tell you that we’re going down to the boat this afternoon, and if there’s anything you need from Coptos you should say now.”

  Caesarion sighed and sat up. The wound pulled a little wi
th the movement, but not too painfully. They’d arrived yesterday ; today they would load up the boat, and tomorrow morning they would set off for Alexandria. Ani was energetic and industrious; Ani was also, he suspected, more worried about this fellow Aristodemos than he wished to admit, and eager to get away before his rival found some way of stopping him. He supposed he’d rested long enough—but he was weary still, very weary. The boat, though, would be far better than a camel, and the Nile … wide, brown, rich-smelling river, source of life for all Egypt … the Nile was infinitely better than the desert.

  “Where are my clothes?” he asked the child. His own things had disappeared yesterday, and he’d eaten supper in a borrowed tunic of bleached linen.

  Serapion looked around vaguely, then went out to the corridor and said something. The women’s voices clucked impatiently, but stopped chattering. He came back. “They’ll fetch them,” he announced proudly. “—I’m going to Alexandria, too.”

  Caesarion straightened the sheet. “Are you?”

  Serapion nodded. “And Mama, and’Dorion, and Melanthe. And Senhuris—she’s our nurse. Papa said we could. What’s Alexandria like?”

  He thought of Alexandria, the city where he had been born, which his ancestors had created. Beautiful, spacious, wealthy; teeming, squalid, and chaotic. A passionate city, much given to rioting and disorder, where the mob had raised up and brought down kings; an intellectual city, where the best minds assembled in the Museum and famous Library; a mercantile city, the world’s greatest port. At Alexandria were desperate poverty and immense wealth, wild ignorance and unparalleled learning. Altogether it was the richest, most dazzling, and most violent of all cities in the world.

  “A bright torch set on top of a termite nest,” he told Serapion sourly. So, King Ptolemy Caesar would arrive back in his capital on a peasant barge loaded with women and squalling brats? “Why is your father taking all of you to Alexandria?”

  “Because we want to go,” replied the boy instantly. “Papa says there’s a tower there, as tall as three temples stacked on top of each other, and at night they light a big fire at the top, so you can see it for miles and miles. Is that why it’s like a torch? Why’s it like a termite nest?”

  “Because it’s crowded. I thought your father had never been to Alexandria.”

  “He heard about it,” said Serapion, disappointed. “Isn’t there a tower?”

  “Oh, there is. The Pharos, it’s called—one of the wonders of the world. It lights the entrance to the harbor.”

  The child grinned, his eyes shining. I have a little brother about your age, Caesarion suddenly thought of saying, and he always loved the Pharos. Once we went up there, him and me, and had the men show us the machinery they use to raise the fuel for it, and the mirrors that reflect the light. We used to watch it together every evening after that, and see the light brighten and extend out into the night.

  He did not say it. But he found he could not simply send the child away. “There’s a big park which you’d probably like, too,” he volunteered. “It’s called the Paneion, because it’s sacred to Pan—that’s the Greek name of the god you Egyptians call Min, the god of wild places. It’s built up as a kind of artificial hill, and there’s a path with steps which winds about it to the top. From the summit you can see the whole city—the lake and the sea, and the Pharos, and the ships coming and going. And there’s a menagerie, in the palace quarter near the Museum, where there are many strange and wonderful animals. There’s a snake there as thick around the middle as a man’s waist.”

  The boy’s eyes widened. “Does it bite?”

  “No. It’s from somewhere far in the south, where the snakes grow very big but aren’t poisonous. That one’s tame, in fact. She’ll rest her head on her keeper’s shoulder and lick his ear.”

  “I want to see it!” exclaimed the child delightedly.

  “You’ll have to see if the palace quarter’s open,” Caesarion told him, belatedly remembering that it might not be. “There’s a wall between it and the rest of the city, and the Romans may have closed the gates. But even if that’s shut, there are things to see in the temples. In the temple of Serapis there are some wonderful mechanical devices. There’s a machine which pours libations when you burn incense. It has little figures of a man and a woman, worked in gold, and when you burn incense on the altar, the figures pour libations of wine.” He remembered admiring the magical device himself, and Rhodon explaining to him how the heat of the fire caused the air inside the altar to expand, and forced wine hidden in the pedestal up into tubes which led to the figurine’s hands. Even when he knew how it worked, it still seemed magical.

  Serapion laughed. “I want to see it!”

  His sister, Ani’s daughter, swept into the room, followed by a slave-girl who carried Caesarion’s clothes. “See what?” she asked, smiling.

  Caesarion scowled and hurriedly pulled the sheet higher. He knew that he had disgraced himself in front of Ani’s daughter the morning they arrived, and he had noticed her watching him since with an anxious, pitying expression, as though she expected him to fall down foaming at the mouth at any moment. What made it worse was that Melanthe was disconcertingly pretty—dark as her father, with a mass of thick, wavy, very black hair, and a wide, white, delicious smile. She was eminently kissable. To be the object of her pity was intolerably galling.

  “A magic machine in the temple!” Serapion told his sister eagerly. “Arion was telling me. And he says there’s a mana … a mener … a place with lots of animals, which has a big snake!”

  “You may not be able to see that,” Caesarion put in hurriedly. “It’s in the palace quarter. They close the gates when the city’s troubled. I should think the Romans are in the palace now, with the gates to the city shut tight.”

  He found himself imagining the Romans in the palace: the heavy studded sandals of the legionaries scarring the marble pavements; Caesar Octavian ordering his men to carry off the gold dolphins from the bathhouse to ornament his own palaces in Rome. Was anyone using his own rooms? Was Marcus Agrippa, the emperor’s right hand, sleeping on the cedarwood couch, under the richly worked cotton bedspread? Or had Octavian had the rooms pillaged, stripped down, and their contents carted off to his ships?

  Alexandria fallen; Alexandria in Roman hands.

  “The machines may not be there, either,” he added harshly. “The Romans may have taken them. They can’t make such things themselves, and they like them.”

  “I want to see the sea,” declared Melanthe, her eyes bright. “The Romans won’t have taken that away! Papa said that in the Red Sea there were flowers that ate fish.”

  He was taken aback. “What, anemones?”

  “Is that what they’re called? Do they have them in the Middle Sea as well?”

  “I think they live in most seas,” said Caesarion. This was Ani’s daughter, indeed! “They’re not flowers. The philosophers say that they’re a kind of animal, like a snail.”

  “Papa said they looked like flowers.”

  “There are insects that look like leaves, or twigs.”

  “That’s true! And they have these … anemones? … in the sea at Alexandria?”

  “They live all over the harbor walls,” said Caesarion, smiling again in spite of himself. “I used to throw them snails. They’d suck in the snail and spit out the shell later on.”

  “I want to see them,” she announced decisively. She gestured for the slave to set down the clothes on the bed. “Serapion, let Arion get dressed. Sir, the girl will fetch water if you want to bathe.” She escorted her brother out.

  He had the girl fetch some water, and he washed and dressed himself. His tunic had been cleaned and mended again. The coarse stitching from Hydreuma had been taken out, and the careful replacement showed only a very slight mismatch in the color. It was, in fact, hard to tell that the tunic had been damaged at all—but then, the linen manufactory presumably had thread in all colors. The girl had brought a bronze mirror along with the water,
and she offered to trim his hair for him.

  He sat holding the mirror while she snipped. It had been awhile since he looked in a mirror. His face was thinner than he remembered it, and stamped around the eyes and at the corners of the mouth with the traces of fresh pain. His hair which the girl trimmed back had grown in black tangles over his ears. But there was also—strange sight!—a shadow on his upper lip. He touched it with a hesitant finger: the hair was still thin and downy. The beard to go with it was confined to a faint bloom on his cheeks.

  Should he shave? It would be something of a landmark, to be able to say that he’d lived long enough to shave.

  No. In the present circumstances a moustache, even a thin shadowy one, was a gift from the gods. Here in the south there were only a few who had seen him: in Alexandria there were thousands. Obviously, anyone from the court would recognize him, but there were also public slaves—like the ones at the Pharos—city officials, and people who’d once stood in the front rows of a crowd to watch a parade. A moustache wouldn’t deceive the court, but it might deflect recognition by a more casual acquaintance—particularly when coupled with a wide-brimmed hat, an orange cloak, and a boatload of noisy Egyptians. It ought to give him time to determine the city’s state of mind, to work out who of the queen’s friends might still be willing to help him, to find out what had happened to little Philadelphus …

  And to the queen, of course, if no deadly news of her reached him first.