Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  She had told Areios’ servant, though, that her father was a Coptos merchant moored at the Mareotic Harbor. Trade from the Red Sea was still scarce: there probably weren’t any other Coptos merchants moored here. None, probably, who’d brought their daughters along—and the harbor authority would be very well aware that Ani, son of Petesuchos, had a daughter, after the events of the previous day.

  “Papa,” she said wretchedly.

  “O Isis!” groaned Papa. “Sunbird, I think we’ve been out of our depth from the start.”

  Apollonios, catching the sudden spread of sober silence, looked up and saw the Romans too. He turned furiously back to Papa and screamed, “This is your fault!”

  CHAPTER XIII

  Caesarion woke with a sense of profound joy and gratitude, a feeling that something wonderful had happened to him, though he could not quite remember what. He lay relaxed, breathing evenly and looking up at the painting on the wall. It was the Odysseus in the Underworld of Apollodoros, which meant that he was in the private audience chamber in the Great Palace. He could not remember going there, but that was all right: he knew he had had a seizure. He felt weak and tired and ached all over, as he always did after one of the major ones, but the usual sense of guilt and shame was quite absent. In a moment, he thought dreamily, someone would come with a cold drink, and he would ask them to prepare a bath.

  “He’s awake,” someone said.

  There was something not right about it. The voice …

  … had spoken Latin. He struggled up to a sitting position—and found that he’d been lying on the floor, and that his hands were tied. He looked down at them in disbelief: lashed together in front of him with a bit of dark leather that looked like a piece of horse harness. He looked up, and saw a man standing over him and regarding him thoughtfully.

  He was in his mid-thirdes, pale, good-looking in a frail way, with a wide forehead and a small round chin; his brown hair fell in heavy locks across his brow and over his ears. He wore a white tunic that bore the wide purple stripe of the senatorial order, no cloak, and a heavy gold signet ring on his right hand. His face was familiar, but Caesarion could not remember ever having met him.

  “You are in the palace,” the man told him, in Greek. “You had a seizure on Serapeion Street, near the Canopic Way, and, unfortunately for you, my friend Areios found you and brought you here.” He retreated a little, and sat down on a couch, facing Caesarion.

  Caesarion looked down again at his bound hands, looked back up at the man. He remembered now where he had seen that face: statues and coins. “Octavian,” he said, his throat dry.

  The emperor sighed. “My name is Gaius Julius Caesar, like my father.”

  “Adoptive father,” Caesarion shot back. “You were Gaius Octavius until you were my age.”

  “And you,” Octavian replied, “were Ptolemy Caesar from the moment you were born, and given the title ‘king’ at the age of three. But I am emperor, and you are not.” He steepled his fingers. “How is it that you’re alive?”

  His heart began to beat in a slow, sick rhythm he could feel in his gut. He wondered if they’d found his knife. He did not dare check, not while they were watching him. He glanced around the room, saw another man—dark, powerfully built, plainly dressed, but not, he thought, any sort of servant—standing leaning against the doorframe, also watching him. A third man—one he knew, Areios Didymos, philosopher, former courtier, and ambitious traitor—was sitting very quietly on a stool by the opposite wall. Apart from that, the room was empty.

  The private audience chamber had two doors, one of which led into the Red Hall, the other into a long private corridor and tunnel which went directly to the stables by the gate, so that people could be brought in and out of it without being seen by other visitors or by the palace staff. Probably someone had brought him in that way. There were guards on the gate, of course, and probably there were more guards in the Red Hall, just the other side of the larger door. Presumably the reason there were no guards in the room was because the emperor did not want people to see him and know that he was alive. That wasn’t going to help him get away. He was bound, he was still weak from the seizure, and the dark man who was not a servant was standing beside the smaller door, the one that led into the private passageway. He was not going to escape. He was going to die.

  He looked down at his hands again, then reached up with both of them and felt for the remedy. It was not there.

  “We took your drug,” said the emperor. “Also the knife stitched into your tunic.” He moved a foot, and Caesarion saw both possessions, on the floor under the couch, only feet away and quite, quite out of reach. “Answer the question, son of Cleopatra.”

  He was going to die, but first they wanted him to talk. He must not betray any of his friends. He closed his eyes, made himself take a deep breath, opened them again. “When my camp was attacked,” he told Caesar Octavian, and was relieved to find that his voice stayed level, “I had a seizure and fell into a stupor. I was stabbed as well, in the side, a deep wound. The men you’d sent to kill me apparently believed that I was dead, and put me on the pyre. When I woke, it was day, and they were not watching, so I simply walked off. They had put a tent awning over the pyre as a shroud, and apparently they never moved it, and didn’t realize I had gone. There was no treachery, O Emperor—apart from Rhodon’s to me.” He paused, then added, “The drug you took from me is a help for the sacred disease, not a poison. You have no cause to deprive me of it.”

  “I had heard before that you suffered from the disease,” Octavian remarked thoughtfully.

  “I inherited it,” Caesarion told him. “From my father.”

  The emperor smiled. “And who might that be, O King? Do you even know?”

  “Yes,” Caesarion said evenly. “As you do.”

  The smile vanished, was replaced by a look of cold assessment. “So. It was, you say, simple misapprehension, and not treachery, that let you survive your execution. I have seen very deep stupors following epilepsies, and you have certainly provided evidence that you are subject to them, so I suppose I must believe you. How did you escape, and what mischance brought you here?”

  It was no good, sitting on the floor like a frightened child. Caesarion got slowly to his feet and straightened, trying with all his strength to look like a Lagid and a king. “If the men you sent to take our ship have returned, you will find that they report that an Alexandrian named Arion turned up in Berenike, and attempted to contact the man left to watch for it. The centurion, Gaius Paterculus, was deceived by the false name I employed to guard myself, and by the assurances of his comrade at the camp that I was dead. I told him that I had been an officer on the staff of Eumenes, the commander of my guard and he believed this. He decided that, since I was young, wounded and unarmed, I posed no danger to the state, and he left me, in accordance with your policy of clemency.”

  Octavian’s eyebrows shot up. “A serious error.”

  “What danger do I pose to you now?” Caesarion asked bitterly. “You have Egypt. I could not even flee into exile, and became instead a fugitive in my own country. I started back to Alexandria in the hope that I could help my mother, or at least my little brother, but I had the news of my mother’s death on the journey and my brother has proved to be beyond my reach. The only plan I had left was to disappear quietly and live out the rest of my life under a false name.”

  “Who helped you?” asked Octavian implacably. “You could not have reached Alexandria on your own.”

  “I reached Alexandria by common means. I told no one my real name or condition. If you must know, I wrote letters to pay my way. I arrived in the city only a few days ago, and I was still trying to determine the state of things when that traitor there found me.” He glanced disdainfully over his shoulder at Areios.

  “You had a girl with you,” Areios put in, low-voiced. “An Egyptian girl, who said her father was a Coptos merchant, and that you were his partner.”

  Caesarion kept his face
still, fixed in the public expression of kingship he had worn for innumerable ceremonies. “A nobody. One of the people I met on the journey. If you saw her, you know why I had her with me, but I never told her anything. Did she really say I was her father’s partner? Herakles, she was hopeful!”

  “You also had a purse containing forty drachmae,” Octavian said quietly. “And you wear a very fine tunic which is not military, and has that interesting little pocket for the knife. Do you claim that these were provided for the pyre, or that you obtained them as the wages of a scribe?”

  He wished passionately that he had not accepted the money, and that he had worn his plain red military tunic. He had put on this one because of its pocket for the knife——much good it had done him.

  “Well?” asked Octavian.

  Caesarion shook his head. “Some friends gave me money and wanted to arrange a livelihood for me. No one has asked me to contend with you, O Emperor, nor have I asked help from anyone to do so. The plan was, as I said, for me to disappear quietly. I think that objective is one you share.”

  “Who helped you?” demanded the dark man beside the door.

  He spoke in Latin, in a deep, growling voice. Caesarion glanced at him, looked back at the emperor. “I will not name them,” he said evenly, in Latin to acknowledge the intervention. “I assure you, there is no plot against you. Their only crime was wanting me to live.”

  The emperor raised his eyebrows. “Your Latin is as fluent as it was reported to be.” He, too, had shifted to Latin. “But you were raised in the hope of ruling over Romans, weren’t you? I fear that we cannot accept your assurances.”

  The dark man left the door and stalked over. A heavy hand descended on Caesarion’s shoulder. He forced himself to stand calmly and did not look around. “How many people know that you are alive?” the deep voice asked in his ear.

  He stood straight and still. “They will soon know that I am dead.” Then he allowed himself to look around into the louring face. “I presume you are Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa?”

  The emperor gave a slight snort of amusement. Agrippa scowled. It had been a fair presumption: the emperor’s chief general and right hand would be involved in resolving all his most sensitive problems. Areios’ demeanor suggested that he was only here because he’d been the one to bring Caesarion in. He probably couldn’t even understand them, now that they were speaking Latin.

  “You pose us a difficulty,” Octavian told him, still in Latin. “You have been publicly proclaimed dead. Your ashes have been paraded down the Nile and displayed in every town between here and Coptos. Your return has the appearance of a miracle. If we admit that we made a mistake, people will doubt all similar pronouncements we make in future. The next bad harvest will see a crop of pretenders.”

  “A whole rank of Caesarions, returned a second time from the dead,” growled Agrippa, “with perhaps a Cleopatra or two to keep them company.”

  “I do not expect a public apology for the mistake,” said Caesarion, and was pleased with his own coolness. “You are perfectly able to correct it privately.”

  “The question is whether we can,” Octavian told him. “How many people know that you are alive?”

  “Very few,” Caesarion told him. “Emperor, you know yourself how freely our friends betrayed us. If I’d asked help from three, one at least would have turned me in.”

  “What two helped you, then?” demanded Agrippa.

  Caesarion stood looking straight before himself and did not answer. The hand on his shoulder tightened its grip, and another hand caught his chin and forced his head round, so that he looked directly into the deep-set eyes. “You are officially dead,” Agrippa told him. “No one will know what we do to you. Do you think we can’t force the truth out of you?”

  He swallowed involuntarily, and saw with shame that Agrippa noticed. Caesarion remembered how easily Hortalus had broken him in Ptolemais. He had not believed then that anyone would dare abuse him. He believed it now.

  Agrippa let go of his chin. A heavy thumb rubbed at the scars on the back of his head. He remembered Melanthe touching them that morning, exploring them curiously, with love, wanting to know more of him. He closed his eyes, shuddering.

  “What did that?” asked Agrippa.

  O Apollo, no, please.

  He heard the emperor get up and come over to look. An imperial finger traced the line where the red-hot iron had burned its way into his skull.

  “I’ve heard of this,” said Octavian. “My uncle mentioned it once. It’s a treatment for the sacred disease. Hot irons.”

  “On a king?” asked Agrippa, surprised.

  “I imagine the queen wanted him cured,” said the emperor. “I have never heard that he was able to oppose her in anything.” He went back to his couch and sat down again. “Or did you undergo that willingly?”

  Caesarion did not answer. The memory of the cauterizing irons tightened his throat, and he knew that his voice would come out shrill if he did. He wished they would give him the remedy. O Dionysos, it would be so humiliating to have a seizure now!

  “My uncle would never let a doctor near him,” Octavian informed him. He leaned forward. “Would you undergo that treatment again? You know more about what pain is like than many, no doubt. How much of it do you think you can endure?”

  “Areios, do you understand what they are saying?” Caesarion cried loudly, in Greek. “They will torture me to obtain the names of the friends who helped me. You approve this, do you?”

  Areios tried to shrink into the wall. Caesarion looked back at Octavian. “Will even the torturers approve?” he asked, still in Greek, wanting to make sure that everyone in earshot understood him. “I am a Lagid, a god and the son of a god. I am also your own kinsman, the child of the adoptive father whom you profess to honor. Even your friends flinch from this deed, and what would it gain you? One or two names of men who will, you may be very sure, never admit to having seen me alive anyway. There was no plot. You have won, Caesar. Egypt is yours, my mother is dead, and I soon will be.”

  “We do not like having to take your word about the plot,” said Agrippa, from behind him.

  “I do not like being asked to betray my friends,” replied Caesarion. “You would silence them forever. Probably I cannot endure very much pain—but I will try. I will not give you their names freely.”

  The emperor sighed and gestured to Agrippa. The big man left Caesarion and came over to sit down beside his friend. The two of them regarded him soberly, side by side.

  “I would not have your friends put to death,” said Octavian.

  Caesarion gave a snort of derision. “No, of course not.”

  “Who was it? Timagenes? Athenion? Hermogenes? Archibios?”

  Caesarion said nothing. He hugged to himself the thought that they would never even consider Rhodon.

  “I will not harm them!” Octavian repeated impatiently. “Can’t you see that it’s getting too late for executions? I killed everyone I was going to kill within the first few days. To start beheading royalists now would attract precisely the sort of attention we wish to avoid!”

  “You are king, or something more than one,” Caesarion replied. “There is no check upon your actions but your own will. If you know who my friends are, the opinion of the people will not protect them.”

  “I am not a monster!” exclaimed the emperor. “I fought to obtain Egypt, but now that it’s mine, I want it to prosper in peace. I have been clement and merciful. I will be generous to your friends, too.”

  “Isn’t that what you told my mother?” asked Caesarion. “That you would treat her generously? But your intention was to display her in your triumph, and when you feared she might escape you in death, you tried to prevent her by threatening to murder her children. That is the true measure of your clemency!”

  “I did not kill them.”

  “There would have been no point, would there, when she was already dead? Caesar, you have just threatened me with red-hot irons. Do you real
ly expect me to believe that you would spare my friends?”

  “This is going nowhere,” said Agrippa. “Lock him up, and see what else we can find.”

  Caesarion realized, with a catch of the heart, that they had never had any intention of torturing him. It was, as he had said, something even the emperor’s friends would flinch from; it was something the emperor flinched from himself. They had merely tried to frighten him into compliance. He felt ashamed to have believed them.

  “Lock him up where?” asked Octavian. “The gossip’s probably running wild already. ‘Areios drove up to the palace in a great hurry with a body in his carriage; it was rushed to the private chamber with a cloak over its face, and the emperor and Agrippa are both closeted there now: gods and goddesses, who do you suppose it was?’”

  Areios stirred. “I did the best I could, lord!” he protested. “My attendants didn’t recognize him, and I tried to prevent anyone else from seeing him.”

  “It was not a criticism,” Octavian said at once. “You did very well. My point was that there will already be gossip about this. People will be itching to discover what’s going on, and if they see him, the rumor will be all over the city within the hour. ‘Ptolemy Caesar has come back from the dead and is a prisoner in the palace!’ There’d be a riot by nightfall. If we move him with a cloak over his head and pick guards whom we know to be trustworthy and silent, that will only show the rest that we have something we badly want to hide.” He rested his chin on his fist and stared angrily at Caesarion.

  “We could put him in the corridor for now,” suggested Agrippa. “Shackled, with two trustworthy men to watch him. It’s private, and it saves us rearranging shifts in the prison. Or we could have him strangled immediately. It’s not what I’d recommend, not without knowing who he’s seen, but it would prevent any outcry about him being alive.”

  Octavian sighed and straightened. “The corridor,” he decided. “See to it at once. And ask Longinus if he’s managed to trace the girl yet.”