Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  “I want to see it!” exclaimed Serapion. He’d said that frequently in the past few days.

  “So you shall, child,” replied Arion easily. “They’re designed to be seen from the water.”

  Ani cleared his throat and tried again. “When we reach the city … I don’t know what your plans are.”

  Arion stopped grinning and unhooked his arm. The rest of the party fell silent. Even the Rute-player stopped his tune midnote.

  “You’re very welcome to stay on with us for a few days,” Ani said hurriedly, feeling his face heat. “You’re welcome to stay as long as we do, in fact. In fact … well, in fact, if you wanted you could leave with us, as well. I could … if you wanted some kind of partnership, we could arrange something. I would like that.” He sensed rather than saw the stir from Apollonios, and added quickly, “In respect of my own investment, not Kleon’s, obviously. You can think about it, anyway. If you’re interested, we can talk more”

  “Ani …” Arion began—then shook his head. His hand stole to the front of his tunic, and there was a glint as he wrapped the chain that held the remedy around a finger.

  “You don’t need to tell your family’s grand friends,” Ani went on—and despised himself for being so humble. “You can just say you’ve been offered a partnership by a Red Sea trader. That sound respectable enough, doesn’t it?”

  Arion shook his head again. “Ani, it isn’t like that! I …” Again he stopped, but this time resumed, suddenly very earnest. “There’s a … a question of an inheritance. A disputed inheritance. The man who has it won’t want me around. He’s … rich and powerful, much more so than Aristodemos. I don’t want to draw trouble to you.” His eyes met Ani’s, level and entirely sober. “You’ve been very kind to me. I don’t want to repay you by bringing you this man’s enmity. It would destroy you.”

  There was a terrifying certainty to the last words. Ani stared at the young Greek, trying to reason it through and see if it could possibly be justified. He had known that Arion’s family were rich and powerful and had had a high position at court; Arion had said that they were dead; he himself had guessed there would be other claimants to the estate …

  “This man’s a relative?” he asked.

  Arion’s mouth twisted in bitter amusement. “Second cousin once removed.”

  And presumably legitimate. The second cousin had control of the estate and would not be at all happy to find the family bastard, last seen heading into exile, turning up in the city. What Arion had said, however, implied something more serious than mere social embarrassment. There must be money at stake. It could not be a legacy—a bastard could not legally inherit. It must be some property which had already been settled on Arion, a legal title which he feared he could not enforce.

  So why try to enforce it? Why not just let it go?

  Ani sighed: he had taken a stupid risk because he resented the way Aristodemos had cheated him, and he was older and far less proud. If Arion felt that he was being deprived of his birthright he would fight it, even if he thought it would kill him. “What are you risking?” he demanded. “What is this man likely to do if he finds you’re back in the city?”

  Arion hesitated. “Ani, believe me, you can’t help, and you don’t want to try.”

  “Being half Roman wouldn’t help you?”

  Arion shook his head quickly. “Being half the wrong Roman is no help at all.”

  Romans had fought on both sides during the war. In Ptolemais any sort of Roman had been acceptable, but in Alexandria they were, presumably, more choosy. “Your cousin’s friendly with the Romans on the winning side, then?”

  Another twisted smile. “Yes. Very much so. Ani, this isn’t a trivial matter. This is dangerous. You don’t want to know any more, you don’t want to touch it. We will part in Alexandria, exactly as we agreed.”

  Melanthe made a noise of protest. “But what will you do?” she burst out angrily.

  He glanced at her quickly, then looked away again. “I will go to some of my mother’s friends and see if they’re willing to help me.”

  “Help you fight?” Melanthe asked. “You don’t have to fight this man, Arion! You don’t need him, you can …”

  “I’m not going to fight him.” Arion interrupted. “I’m just going to ask some of my mother’s friends to help me. Maybe one of them can suggest somewhere I can go, something I can do …”

  “Papa suggested something you could do!” exclaimed Melanthe furiously. “Why are you too proud to do it? You think you’re degrading yourself to work with dirty peasants like us? You despise us that much?”

  “No.”

  The two of them were looking at each other now as though no one else in the world existed. Melanthe’s eyes, bright with tears, held an emotion which Ani had never seen in them before. Oh, sunbird! he thought, shocked. I didn’t realize it had already gone that far. For a moment he hated Arion—and yet, Arion had done nothing except be himself. This was Ani’s own fault. He had brought the boy into the family, encouraged him to talk. He had wanted the guest to stay. What had he expected Melanthe to feel? She was at the age when girls fall in love. Arion spoke not only to her mind, but to her blood.

  “I don’t want you hurt,” Arion said abruptly. “I don’t think anyone else has ever been kind to me without wanting something for it. I don’t dare stay with you beyond tomorrow.” He got to his feet. “I’m going for a walk.”

  He climbed off Soteria onto the bank, and strode off into the dusk.

  “Well,” said Apollonios, after a silence. “Seems we’ll be rid of him in Alexandria after all.”

  Melanthe jumped up, sniffling, and ran into the cabin. Everyone else, even Ezana, glared at Apollonios, who muttered and fell silent. Tiathres glanced reproachfully at her husband, then got up and went after Melanthe.

  Ani sighed, rested his chin on his hands, and wished that he had sent his daughter to play with her brothers every time he asked Arion a question.

  He also wished that he had told Arion, Never mind the danger: we’ll help you.

  That was one thing he could not have done. Aristodemos had shown him that. Arion said his second cousin was richer and more powerful than Aristodemos, and everything about Arion himself suggested that it was true. It seemed very likely that the new pro-Roman heir to a great estate might resent the claims of a passionately royalist bastard cousin. It seemed very likely that the second cousin would try to undermine or destroy his adversary’s support, and if that happened to include an Egyptian trader with a valuable and vulnerable cargo—it could easily be done. Another false accusation, trouble with the customs office, a party of hired thugs to loot the ship—a rich man who had the favor of a new government could do anything he liked. Ani ought to be grateful that Arion had explained the situation and would leave them voluntarily.

  He just wished he didn’t feel so certain that Arion was taking himself off to Hades—and that the prospect didn’t hurt so much. He just wished that he had, after all, ordered Melanthe not to listen to Arion at all.

  It was a very subdued party which started off on the final leg of the journey next morning. The somber mood was not lifted when, midmorning, they neared the riverside terrace of Hermogenes and found that the statues Arion had mentioned were in the process of being removed. Half the dancing animals were already gone, and there were Roman soldiers working on a lyre-playing leopard, levering it up to shift it into a waiting straw-filled crate.

  “Why do they have to do that?” asked Serapion miserably.

  “The man who owns them must have sold them,” Ani replied. It was, he knew, a half-truth. In the current circumstances, it was very likely that the owner had been compelled to give up the statues by a Roman who admired them—or that he’d been executed. Clemency undoubtedly had limits.

  There were, nonetheless, still many beautiful pleasure gardens flanking the Canopic canal, leading down from many beautiful houses, and Serapion soon cheered up again, and began rushing from one side of the boat to
the other to see everything. There were statues and exotic trees, an aviary full of birds, an exquisitely landscaped mini-marsh, complete with flamingos and fish, a crocodile chained to a post by a foreleg in its own beautifully designed pond. Melanthe, however, who normally would have copied her little brother, stayed miserably in the cabin. Arion sat motionless at the prow, staring moodily at the river from under his wide-brimmed hat.

  The canal ran at last into a wide, brackish lake, brilliantly blue in the sun, and in the distance could be seen a shining mass of white walls and red roofs, towers and domes and gardens, a green, cone-shaped hill rising against a blue sky, and a spark of pure gold from some unseen monument or statue erected to the gods. They had reached Alexandria at last.

  CHAPTER IX

  Caesarion watched Melanthe reading through the letters, his throat tight. Her thick black hair hung down, hiding her face, but he knew that she was still angry. Her small hands with their charming round nails moved the pages with sharp jerks, and her voice as she read over the words was a furious mutter. They were alone in the stern cabin. From behind the partition to the forecabin he could hear Serapion talking to his nurse, and outside on deck Ani was discussing the mooring with the crew.

  He felt trampled inside, muddied and confused. When Ani had made his offer the previous evening, a part of him had astonished the rest by leaping up with a shout of “Yes!” Ludicrous idea—the last Lagid monarch working for a Coptos import-export business! Ridiculous! Insulting! Insane!

  And yet he had never in his life been as happy as he had been these last few days. He had wanted the journey to go on forever. He had saved Soteria, and everyone was grateful to him (except Apollonios, who could be ignored) and nobody was disappointed in him, and Melanthe had stopped pitying him, and looked at him with those marvelous dark eyes full of admiration and gratitude. The crew had despised him, but they’d changed—not out of fear of punishment, but because of something he had done. He had earned their respect. They had no idea that he was the queen’s son, they knew he had the disease—yet they liked and admired him! Small, stupid, simple thing; ridiculous to worry about their opinion, anyway—but it delighted him to the core. And Melanthe—beautiful Melanthe, with her skin like dark honey and her wonderful eyes, who had inherited her father’s intelligence and strength of will—Melanthe liked him, too. Or had.

  It was obviously stupid to become infatuated with a camel-driver’s daughter, to stand here writhing inside because she was angry with him. There had never been any possibility of a connection between them, quite apart from the fact that it would probably aggravate his condition if there were. Ani plainly adored his pretty daughter. He couldn’t possibly injure a man he so much liked and respected by seducing the girl—even if she’d let him, which was by no means clear. Yes, she liked him—but she wasn’t weak. She wouldn’t disgrace herself and her family by parting with her virginity before her wedding night. He didn’t even want her to—not if it would hurt her, which it would. And the idea of marriage was absurd. The law didn’t even allow it—and anyway, he was in no situation to undertake such a commitment.

  His mother probably would have had Melanthe flogged if she’d discovered that he could even bring himself to contemplate such a thing without laughing aloud. He was glad she was gone, and couldn’t.

  He hauled his mind back, astonished at himself. And yet, Cleopatra had been cruel and arrogant sometimes. He thought again of Rhodopis. Rhodopis had been his first love, his childhood sweetheart. The queen had had no call to sell the girl in the public market! If she felt she had to get rid of her, she could have freed her and given her a dowry. He’d said so at the time, and the queen had replied, “If the palace slave-girls get the idea that your bed is a route to freedom, we’ll be hauling them out of it every night.”

  He had gone down to the slave market himself, found the man who’d bought Rhodopis, and bought her back for twice the price. Then he’d freed her and provided the dowry himself, without telling his mother. It hadn’t been easy: his allowance hadn’t covered the cost, and he hadn’t dared ask money from the chamberlain, who would have told the queen. He’d sold a racehorse to one of his companions, and given Rhodopis the dowry in cloak pins and rings.

  Sixteen, he’d been, and officially a king, and yet he hadn’t been able to buy the freedom of a girl he loved without resorting to subterfuge. He had never been given any real authority. He should officially have come of age at sixteen, and been enrolled in the ephebate, the corps of young citizens who were given military training. His mother had hired tutors to provide the training, but he had not been enrolled—not until the next year, after Actium, when the queen had wanted to reinforce the shaky loyalty of the populace by showing that she believed the dynasty would survive. Shrewd of her—but he’d known even at the time that she was signing his death warrant by it. There had been just a slim chance that Octavian would spare a child, even one named Caesar. There was no chance at all that he would spare a man by that name.

  … and she hadn’t taken him to Actium, which still rankled bitterly. He had been old enough to join the army for the campaign, he had expected to be given a military command—titular, of course, with some older, experienced man to do the real work, but an opportunity to watch and learn how it was done. Instead he had been left in Alexandria with his little brothers and sister, subject still to tutors and schoolwork. “Your condition,” his mother had said—and yet, how many times had she told him that his father’s condition had never stopped him from conquering all the available world?

  He felt, with a sudden intense passion, that he had never been anything at al—the child of two divinities, but a cipher himself. Cleopatra had wanted a male Lagid as colleague; she had seen advantages in bearing a son to Julius Caesar. She had wanted, though, only a baby and obedient child. A grown man who could lead armies and think for himself—she’d never wanted that at all. Arion was more of an individual than Caesarion had ever been.

  He found himself remembering, bitterly, the doctor who had wanted to cauterize his brain. He’d been fourteen, weakened by a year of drugs, purgings, and bleedings. The fellow had argued that drilling a hole in the top of the skull and heating the membranes of the brain with red hot irons would clear the head of phlegm and enlarge the ventricles of the brain, thus making further seizures impossible. Caesarion had heard similar promises before dozens of other torments, and had begged to be spared. Olympos, Cleopatra’s own doctor, had, bless him, backed his plea with a declaration that the procedure carried a risk of death or permanent injury and was unlikely to produce any. benefits. Cleopatra had considered … and finally refused permission. But she’d allowed the enthusiast to try the irons on the back of Caesarion’s skull, behind the ears, to see if they produced any improvement.

  Apollo and Asklepios, it had hurt! He had the scars still—they must be visible now, with his hair so short. He reached up and found one, a smooth indented bar of bare skin amid the cropped fur. He had begged his mother not to let the man touch him—begged her in tears—and she had told him that he was a king, and must be brave.

  He should not be remembering such things about his mother now, so soon after her death. He should be mourning. Only … he could not help feeling glad that Melanthe, and Ani, would never meet her.

  “What’s this?” Melanthe asked sharply, breaking into his thoughts with a resentful glare.

  He took the sheet of papyrus from her. “Sample reply to an inquiry about the incense,” he told her.

  Melanthe was going to be her father’s scribe while the party was in the city. She could read and write tolerably well and had a clear, legible hand, though her spelling was erratic, her Greek far too colloquial, and she did not know the correct forms for business letters. Caesarion had already written all the letters Ani had asked for—the requests for an interview with each of Aristodemos’ old suppliers. He had also drafted several other, supplemental letters, asking for an interview with alternative suppliers—the headings left blank, since h
e didn’t know any names. He had written out everything he knew about Alexandria’s harbor and trade regulations, its syndicates and corporations—information he thought might be helpful—and he had composed several careful specimen responses for Melanthe to adapt if there was any need. There’d been time for that on the voyage, and he’d discovered that he very much wanted Ani’s enterprise to succeed.

  “And this one?” demanded Melanthe.

  “Sample reply to a merchant offering tin.”

  She leafed through the remaining letters, set them down. “That’s all, then,” she said forbiddingly.

  “Melanthe, please!”

  “What?”

  “I’ve got to leave now. Don’t be angry with me!”

  She banged the sheaf of papyri down on the strongbox and glared at him. “You expect me not to be angry, when you think it’s better to die than to go into partnership with my father?”

  “I don’t …”

  “My father is a good man! He got his money by hard work and good ideas: does that make him so much worse than somebody who just inherits it? He’s benefited everyone in our neighborhood: all the men earn extra from the flax, and the women from the weaving. He has never cheated anybody, he honors the gods and loves his family. How dare you despise him!”

  “I don’t!”

  “You do! You despise all of us. You said we degrade ourselves like slaves because we help each other. And now you’re going to go off and get yourself killed, rather than work with my father any longer! You expect me not to be angry?”

  “Melanthe, I …”

  “All that talk about how you don’t want us hurt!” Melanthe rushed on, growing more angry with each word. “It was lies, all of it! There wouldn’t be any danger at all if you just avoided this cousin of yours. He thinks you’re a Roman prisoner, or dead, or gone off into exile. Even if he finds out you’re still alive, if you’re not bothering him—if you’re not asking your mother’s old friends to make trouble for him!—why would he bother you? There’s only danger if you go and stir things up! And you don’t need to stir things up; you could work with my father. But no, you’re too proud! You expect me to say, ‘Oh, that’s all right, I understand that we’re just dirt, go off and die with your own kind and my blessing’? I won’t!”