Cleopatra's Heir

by Gillian Bradshaw

  Longinus, the commander of the Praetorian Guard, looked at him with alarm. “Sir, move out of sight!” he ordered. “And you,” to one of the guardsmen, “get him a cloak and something to cover his head. You, put out that torch. Jupiter, most of the grooms and the servants know him!”

  “Sir, are my people still in the yard?” Ani asked the commander eagerly.

  “I’ll find out,” the commander said shortly, “after we’ve got your friend covered up.”

  Arion moved into the darkness of an empty stall and stood waiting quietly. Melanthe was watching him, but he did not look at her. Ani fidgeted, desperate to see his wife and sons again.

  At last the guardsman came back with a plain cloak of black wool and a wide-brimmed traveling-hat very similar to the one he had lost. He put them on. The cloak was too heavy for the hot September night, and the hat was slightly too large. He tilted it forward so that it shaded his face, and pulled a fold of cloak high enough to cover his chin. The commander regarded him a moment, then nodded in satisfaction.

  Ani’s people had been locked into the guards’ prison, just beyond the barracks. There was a certain amount of fussing and signing of releases, which Ani plainly found hard to endure, and then finally the prison door was unlocked, and the group was ushered out into the balmy night. There were tears and embraces. The story about Ethiopian spies was told. Tiathres at once blamed Aristodemos, and loudly thanked the gods that he was finally dead and could cause them no more trouble.

  Arion watched from a distance, unmoved. Even when the others at last realized he was there, he managed to avoid any embrace. The ache in his heart was growing as the sense of dreamlike numbness began to fade.

  Then at last they were walking back along the streets of the city. The four Praetorians who’d watched him in the audience chamber stayed with him, but another, ignorant man had joined them, carrying Soteria’s papers.

  Apollonios sidled up. “What happened with your cousin?” he asked.

  Arion stared at him blankly, still too stunned to feel more than a remote astonishment. “What do you know about that?”

  “The girl said Areios Didymos took you off unconscious in his carriage. Isn’t he the cousin you were talking about?”

  “No,” Arion said in bewilderment.

  “He isn’t?” Apollonios was surprised and disappointed. “Why did he take you, then?”

  Arion repeated the story about Ethiopian spies. Apollonios looked as though he didn’t believe it. “So who is your cousin?” he asked.

  “No one you know,” Arion replied wearily. “Leave me alone.”

  “But what were you doing going to Cyprus?”

  “Who says I was going to Cyprus?”

  “Melanthe. She said you were going to Cyprus to manage an estate for a friend.”

  “Then that must be why I was going to Cyprus, mustn’t it? I asked you to leave me alone.”

  “But why are you coming back? You insisted you weren’t going to stay with the likes of us. You left. Why have you come back?”

  “I’m going to marry Melanthe. Leave me alone.”

  “Do as he says,” ordered Longinus, coming up behind Apollonios and making him jump.

  Apollonios gave the commander of the Praetorian Guard a frightened look and moved away. Arion walked the rest of the way to the Mareotic Harbor shadowed by the guards, who were blessedly silent.

  There were more documents to sign at the harbor before Soteria was released. It was very late by then, and the little boy Isisdoros was asleep in his father’s arms. At last, however, all was settled, and they were allowed back to the boat.

  It looked as dirty, battered, and degraded as it had the first day Arion saw it. He stood on the side of the dock gazing at it wretchedly while the others climbed joyfully aboard.

  “Remember your oath,” Longinus told Arion, as the guards prepared to depart.

  I have made a mistake, he wanted to tell them. I didn’t mean it. I will come back with you; Octavian can have me strangled. I will sleep in the urn in the garden, among my ancestors. will die as a king.

  Somehow, he didn’t manage to say it. He nodded, silently, and went aboard the boat.

  Soteria was just as he remembered it—cramped, squalid, and dirty. He lay down on his mattress in the stern cabin, between Ani and Apollonios, and spent the night staring at the ceiling.

  In the morning he told the others that he felt ill—which was true—and stayed in the cabin. The others left him there. They were busy, anyway. It seemed that Ani had succeeded in finding a supplier of tin, as well as in buying a quantity of glassware, and all day they were running back and forth arguing about how much space the cargo would take up and what part of it should go where. Soteria, it emerged, was not large enough to carry everything at once. The difficulty was resolved when it turned out that the tin supplier did not actually have the tin on hand. Ani went off to talk to him, to bargain about whether the supplier would ship the tin to Coptos or whether Ani should come back for it. The others began to load the glass. None of it seemed real.

  Tiathres came in to see him several times, bringing cold drinks, and thanked him warmly for rescuing Melanthe. Melanthe came with her stepmother the first time, but he asked her to go. In the light of the new day the thing he had done to himself seemed more appalling and less excusable.

  In the middle of the afternoon he had a seizure, a small one, that was, oddly enough, comforting. All the memories were pleasant ones—Philadelphus playing marbles, Rhodon explaining philosophy, a garden with a carp pond. He had not, he realized, seen the man on the table since he’d told Ani about him. Zeus, it would be wonderful if he’d managed to escape that particular nightmare!

  Ani reappeared in the cabin in the evening, when the others were on deck eating supper.

  “How are you?” he asked.

  Arion stared up at the cabin roof. The answer that occurred to him was, You know the Galli, the priests of Kybele who castrate themselves in ecstatic rituals? I feel like one of them, the day after. He did not utter it. It would be unfair to this man who had pledged his life to ensure his own survival, who he trusted as he had never trusted anyone before, who he was sure loved him, whom—he could now admit it—he loved like the father he had never known. “I will live,” he said instead.

  Ani squatted next to him and pulled on his lower lip. “Be a waste if you didn’t, after all that. What happens in the Electra of Euripides?”

  “The princess Electra, the daughter of Agamemnon, is married off to a common peasant so that she cannot bear sons who will revenge her father’s murder.”

  “Oh.”

  “In fact, the peasant, out of respect for the royal house, never consummates the marriage, which is dissolved by the end of the play.”

  “Well, don’t tell that to Melanthe. She’s miserable enough as it is.”

  He remembered the brief interval with Melanthe in the corridor when he believed that he had secured her safety, but would soon die. The touch of her body, her lips, her hands on his head, her voice whispering that she loved him … it had seemed at the time that to live and possess her was worth far more than a name. Perhaps it would seem that way again; right now he felt he was a degraded coward and a fool.

  Dionysos, how could he disown his name?

  “I don’t know who I am anymore,” he told Ani, his eyes filling with tears.

  “It isn’t her fault,” Ani said. “She knows who you are. You’re Arion, who saved her family and her freedom, the man she loves. To us, you’re what you showed yourself to be.”

  “You own me!” he exclaimed angrily, sitting up. “In Berenike it was thirty drachmae; by the time we reached Coptos, it was much, much more, and now—he gave me to you, he said. Am I to be your slave?”

  “What I offered was a partnership,” Ani replied sourly. “You don’t have to marry Melanthe. There’s others would be happy at the chance.”

  He caught his breath. “Leave me alone. Please. It’s too soon, it still hurts to
o much.”

  Ani sighed, blew out his cheeks, nodded, got up. “You want anything to eat?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Clean tunic? That one looks like it itches anyway.”

  “Later.”

  In the morning they finished loading the glassware, packing it in baskets lined with palm leaves. Ani went to the bank he’d chosen, which had a branch in Coptos and a seasonal office in Berenike, and arranged letters of credit, to avoid risking the money on the voyage. He went to his supplier and finalized arrangements for the tin. Arion stayed in the cabin. Tiathres brought him a clean tunic, plain bleached linen. It had belonged to Harmias, whom the robbers had killed.

  By now, he supposed, Rhodon and Archibios have been told that I am dead.

  He remembered their offer to invest in the Red Sea trade, to buy him a ship. Ani would have liked that. On the other hand, Ani’s business looked to be prospering very well without their help. The profits this time would be Kleon’s, apart from Ani’s commission, but they were large profits, and the outbound cargo would be better than it had ever been. The next voyage was likely to produce a very fine sum indeed, and a full half of it would be Ani’s.

  He supposed he would be very useful to Ani in the business, even if he couldn’t go to Alexandria. He could deal with authority, Greek or Roman, and let Ani deal with trade. It was likely that they would prosper.

  He shivered, imagining himself living in Ani’s house, married to Melanthe, fathering children …

  He wasn’t sure whether the prospect was blissful or appalling.

  ARION HAD THOUGHT he would stay in the cabin until dark, but when Soteria began to move he put on his cloak and hat and came up on deck.

  The heavily laden boat moved slowly out onto the lake. Alexandria rose from the blue water like a fantasy city in a painting, a dream of light and shading, too beautiful to be real. His city, always his city: founded and built up by his ancestors, creation of his blood. The thought that he would never see it again was a loss as raw, almost, as the loss of Philadelphus. He leaned against the stern rail and watched it until it was out of sight. The north wind pressed against his cheek, tugged at his hat, and made the black cloak flap loudly. He thought of the black sails of Theseus, returning to Athens after he had traced the labyrinth and slain the minotaur and abandoned his lover sleeping on the shore of Naxos. He could feel Melanthe watching him, but he would not look at her.

  They made their way back along the Canopic canal, mainly by tacking across the wind, occasionally with some help from the oars. It was after dark when they reached the Nile.

  They moored Soteria very close to where they had secured it on their outward voyage. Tiathres lit the fire and cooked supper, and Ani went off and bought some wine. They gave Arion a cup and a roll of flatbread with cheese and olives, and he thanked them, and sat on the deck to eat them, apart from the others but no longer quite shut away. He decided it was safe to leave off the cloak and hat. Nobody questioned him, not even Apollonios. It seemed to have been accepted that he had given up his chance of reestablishing himself as a gentleman in order to save Melanthe, and everyone treated him with solemn courtesy.

  The Egyptians were at last beginning to recover their spirits after the stresses and strangenesses of the past few days. Pamonthes got out his flute and played folk songs, and presently some of the others began to sing. Arion remained on deck, silent, separate, but listening. He could feel Melanthe watching him again.

  After a while she came over and sat down near him. He said nothing.

  “Are you angry with me?” she asked at last.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he told her wearily.

  “Papa says it hurt you so much that you can’t bear anyone to touch it yet.”

  He found himself giving a choked grunt of acknowledgement.

  “I didn’t understand that it would hurt you like that,” she said humbly. “I was just happy, because it meant you wouldn’t die. I thought you’d be happy, too.”

  He looked down at his left wrist and rubbed the scar.

  “Do you wish you had died?” she asked in a small voice.

  “Some of me does,” he admitted. “It’s who I was, Melanthion, everything I was, everything I had. I disowned it, and I don’t know what’s left.”

  “Everything,” she told him breathlessly. “You’re no different. You’re still you. You told me, just before you had your seizure, that the ‘you’ people saw, before, was really only what you were supposed to be, and not who you are. You said they reverenced that, but ignored you—that they pretended not to see you, because they were embarrassed.”

  He’d forgotten that he’d said that. He thought it over: it was true. “I was never enough,” he told her. “I could never be what I was supposed to be. I tried, but there was the disease, and it couldn’t be cured.”

  “Nobody could be enough! How could anyone live up to being the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar?”

  “Hush, hush, hush! Don’t say it, don’t say it! That man is dead.”

  “But only a god could be enough! And you are enough, for me. You are more than I ever dreamed existed. And that’s you, Arion, not that other person!”

  “That other person is who I was born,” he told her. “It’s like the disease, innate and incurable. One can learn to live with the disease, but it won’t go away. Never expect that.”

  She caught his hand, twisted her fingers with his own. “But you’re alive. You’re free. You have people who love you, things you can do. Can’t you be happy?”

  He looked into her face—the eyes, wide and coal-black in the moonlight, the lips trembling. Then he reached over and pulled her against himself. Tense muscles relaxed, melted against his side. She shivered, and leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “I think I may learn to be,” he told her.

  Also by Gillian Bradshaw

  The Wolf Hunt

  The Sand Reckoner

  Island of Ghosts

  Render Unto Caesar (forthcoming)

  AFTERWORLD

  or, What Really Happened and What I Made Up

  Caesarion really did exist, though the question of whether Julius Caesar was his father has been hotly debated, in antiquity and ever since. It is easy to see why Cleopatra would wish to claim that he was, and equally easy to understand why Octavian would deny it. The strongest argument against Caesar’s paternity is that, despite a legendary promiscuity, Caesar had only one acknowledged offspring—his daughter Julia, born a good thirty-five years before Caesarion. On the other hand, most of Caesar’s affairs were with married women, whose offspring could not be acknowledged as his. Rumor made him the real father of at least two noble Romans, and there may have been obscure bastards as well. Caesar undoubtedly knew more about his own fertility than does any modern historian, and all the evidence is that he believed himself to be Caesarion’s father. Marcus Antonius, in fact, claimed that he acknowledged it. That may have been propaganda, but it is unquestionably true that during Cleopatra’s visit to him in Rome—which is generally agreed to have occurred after Caesarion’s birth—Caesar lodged her in one of his own houses and placed a golden statue of her in the temple he had built for the goddess Venus Genetrix, the supposed ancestress of his own clan—an utterly exceptional honor in Republican Rome, and one which Caesar never afforded his wife. It is hard to believe he would have done this if he believed she was trying to pass off another man’s child as his own.

  The real Caesarion was, almost certainly, killed in 30 B.C. by order of Octavian. There are two accounts of his fate: both agree that he was supposed to flee Egypt via the Red Sea ports, and that he was betrayed by a man called Rhodon, who was one of his tutors. Plutarch, however, says that Rhodon lured him back to Alexandria with a promise of pardon, while Dio Cassius says that he was overtaken and killed on the way into exile.

  That he was epileptic is my own invention, and I’m afraid I inflicted him with the condition because it made him more interesting to me. I had no s
uch plans when I started researching this book, but I came reluctantly to the conclusion that Cleopatra was a nasty piece of work, and that her son wouldn’t have been much better. Giving him a disability to overcome made him sympathetic again. (I wanted to admire Cleopatra, but I couldn’t. She was too ruthless, and showed far too much interest in conquering the world and not enough in looking after her own kingdom. She displayed the sort of behavior I deplore in “Great Men,” and, in good conscience, could not approve in a Great Woman.)

  In defense of the invention, all I can say is that it is within the bounds of possibility. Julius Caesar was epileptic, which would have made his offspring four times more likely to develop the condition than the norm, and the history of incest among the Lagids must have increased that risk. If Caesarion had developed the condition, the Greeks and Antonians would have suppressed the news because of the stigma attached to the illness, while the Octavians would have kept quiet about it because it would be evidence of Caesar’s paternity. Caesarion is not much in evidence during the last years of Cleopatra’s reign—there’s no mention of his presence on any campaign, despite the fact that he was old enough, and there’s no hint of any marriage arranged for him, though two of his younger siblings were betrothed. This could be because there was something wrong with him. (Of course, it could also be because Cleopatra was paranoid about sharing her own royal power.)

  For the attitudes toward, and treatments for, epilepsy in antiquity, I am indebted to Owsei Temkin’s The Falling Sickness . The pathology of the disease which I have Caesarion relate to Ani is derived from the best doctors of the time. (I hasten to add that it is, in fact, wrong. Epileptic attacks occur when the brain produces an abnormal pattern of electrical discharge, either globally or in a specific area. Temporal lobe epilepsy, which I chose for Caesarion, begins in the temporal lobes, as the name implies, and may or may not spread to the rest of the brain.)