by Talbot Mundy
“Why should you think highly of me?” he asked, provoking her to flatter him again.
“Are you not the master of the Roman world? And can a man attain to that without valor and excellent judgment?”
Caesar’s smile softened. He enjoyed a logical, well-turned compliment as much as he despised mere toadyism. Her spirited assault disarmed him; and all the while, at the back of his eyes, there was conjecture — speculation — opportunist curiosity, that she detected the more readily since he was at no great pains to conceal it.
“But are our positions parallel,” he asked, “since you are not yet recognized as Queen?”
“Not recognized by whom?” she retorted. “Do you make the mistake of thinking Alexandria is Egypt? I am anointed, and crowned with the double crown, Pharaoh of the Upper and the Lower Nile. I am high priestess of Isis. Nor did I seek those dignities; they were conferred on me by those who have the right to do it.”
“I sought dictatorship of Rome,” said Caesar, hoping to put her on the defensive; but he failed.
“And were you, therefore, recognized at once by all the Roman world?” she answered. “Or were you, too, once on a time a fugitive because your enemies sought your life, knowing they could not otherwise prevent your ultimate success?”
The thrust was too well aimed for him to parry it. He bowed acknowledgment.
“Did you receive my invitation to present yourself here?” he asked.
“No. The first I heard of your arrival was from my Lord-Admiral Tros, who sighted your fleet at sea.”
Caesar raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly.
“Tros of Samothrace?”
She nodded. Caesar frowned. But she could not keep the laughter from her eyes; their sparkle was contagious; Caesar’s frown vanished.
“Was it Tros,” he asked, “who brought you back to Alexandria?” He began to smile reminiscently. “Tros has done me many an injury; but never a favor of his own free will! Did he bring you here at your command? If you can manage Tros you have not much left to learn of the art of government!”
“Tros wished to take me to Britain,” she answered. Britain was a subject Caesar was not anxious to discuss. “Where is he? Will he come here if I send him an invitation?”
“Provided that I countersign it. Tros is as much mine as Egypt is. You may as well understand, Caesar, now while it is not too late, that with the exception of my brother and sister, their ministers, and certain Alexandrians who dislike high thinking and mistrust me because I trust my intuition rather than their wantonness, all Egypt recognizes me as Queen. I am told the city received you none too well.”
“They killed nearly a score of my men,” said Caesar. “Potheinos has had the impudence to assure me that the incident expressed the genuine feeling of Alexandria — a feeling that I may feel urged to chasten.”
Cleopatra instantly leaped into that breach. “Welcome to Egypt, Caesar. I invite you to remain here, and to settle the succession to the throne as nearly in accordance with my father’s will as you consider practicable. I undertake to repay all the money my father borrowed from the Roman Senate. If you will accept that invitation, I promise you the friendship of Egypt and whatever help you need in securing your own position in the Roman world — men — ships — money — corn and supplies — influence. Your mind may be at peace regarding Egypt; you may turn your full attention on whatever problems occupy you elsewhere.”
Her frankness — her alert self-confidence, as reckless as his own, amused him and aroused his admiration. But he could not doubt that she counted on more than his sense of gallantry and fairness to protect her in the event of their not reaching an agreement. A suspicion of her lurked yet in his mind.
“You raised an army to oppose your brother. Where is it?” he asked suddenly. “Has Tros brought troops around by sea?”
She laughed. “Who would be fool enough to bring such an army as that against Caesar? You have only a few ships and men, but are you not destiny in human shape?”
That almost staggered him, though he was used to high-flown compliments as well as scurrilous abuse.
“And you?” he asked.
“I told you: I am Egypt. If you find it easier to understand, you may think of me as the sluice-gate through which the great gods choose to pour anew wisdom that reigned in the world in the old days. That will prevent you from thinking of me as wise, which I am not.”
“You appear to me exceedingly wise for your years,” said Caesar, “except when you talk about gods. Do you believe in them?”
“Whoever truly knows himself knows more about the gods than any priest can tell him,” she retorted.
Caesar fell back on sarcasm. “Do you suggest that we should sit here like a god and goddess on Olympus and define the destiny of Rome and Egypt?”
“I propose we should let wisdom enter into us,” she answered.
“I, too, am a high priest,” said Caesar. “I am Rome’s supreme pontifex. I have had frequent occasion to congratulate myself on the wisdom of holding that high office, but I have never noticed any wisdom that entered into me directly as a result of it. Do you find that the high priesthood of Isis gives you more than a political advantage?”
“It is a dreadful obligation and no advantage to me whatever,” she answered. “If I were not what I have been anointed in proof that I am, there is many a course I might have taken that would have resolved the surface of my difficulties. But I am taught, Caesar, to arrive at definite objectives by means that are not at all easy to define because they are spiritual.”
He smiled again, amused by his own sarcastic humor. “Would you call that rug in which you rolled yourself a spiritual means?” he asked.
“I call it using spiritual means to challenge your greatness,” she answered. “If you are as great as I think you are, we will very readily reach an understanding, and neither Rome nor Egypt nor you nor I can be anything but gainers by it.”
Caesar stared at her. He had talked with Vestal Virgins, who were inscrutable in their own way, but even the Vestals had always impressed him as hiding cynicism underneath a cloak of piety. This girl apparently hid nothing, and she spoke from conviction that seemed to him entirely unassumed.
“Are you the mouthpiece of the priests?” he asked, with a slightly tart inflection in his voice.
“Is a lamp the mouthpiece of a lamp?” she answered. “Or do they both have flames? One can be lit from the other, but are the flames not separate?”
Only then did it dawn on Caesar that she was speaking so well and naturally that he had not noticed what language she was using.
“At twenty years of age, how is it that you speak Latin and Greek with equal fluency?” he asked. “You speak Latin as well as Cicero does.”
“I also speak Aramaic, Arabic, Persian, Armenian, Coptic, two of the Nilotic dialects, and the ancient language of the Land of Khem, besides Greek.”
“You speak,” he said, “as if familiar with the poets and philosophers.”
“Why not? Were Plato and Pythagoras, Sappho and Homer, for instance, born under a curse that we should know only their names and not their message?”
“But who taught you?” he asked.
“They did! Who taught birds to fly? Who taught you generalship?”
“But in twenty years? I was forty before I had an army under my command—”
“Perhaps you were too eager. Impatience is like nailing shadows to a wall.”
Caesar laughed at that. “True,” he said, “I have crucified many a shadow! Does the wisdom of which you show so much evidence include a practicable plan for governing Egypt?”
“Try me!” she suggested.
He was a man of very swift decisions. He endeavored to conceal from her that already he had made up his mind; but his silence and the glitter in his gray eyes gave her more encouragement than words that might have been intentionally misleading. She, having nothing to conceal from him, continued:
“Rome needed you, and Rome ha
s had to bring you forth in travail, but not all strong governments need such a baptism of bloodshed. You were unexpected, but the gods do unexpected things, and you appear to me to be sent by the gods to deliver Egypt into my hands. Nothing is done uncompensated. Conquer Egypt I am sure you cannot — now at any rate — and there is no need. But you can hold Alexandria. Whereas I cannot hold Alexandria at present, but I can rule Egypt, because the priests accept me in obedience to a hierarchy that is as far above the priests, and you and me, as we are higher than the slaves around us.”
Caesar frowned again. The only hierarchies he could tolerate with equanimity were those that, like the Roman priestly colleges, depended on the civil government for their prerogatives and perquisites.
“Mysteries,” said Caesar, “are an open invitation to investigate what lies behind them. A government that tolerates a power greater than itself is not a government.”
“Can you control the moon?” asked Cleopatra. “Do you understand the mystery of birth? Are the stars your servants? I will answer for you: yes — if you obey the law that they obey too. But do you know the law? And do you know the mystery beyond it?”
“Is Olympus the man who has taught you?” Caesar asked. His tartness seemed to intimate that there were ways of compelling Olympus to reveal the sources of his knowledge.
“No,” she answered. “Olympus is a great physician, an astrologer and a very faithful friend, who patiently reminds me of the day, whenever darkness hides the sun.”
“He is a member of a mystery.”
“Who is not?” she retorted. “Who that is born in a womb is not a member of a mystery? Caesar, are you so wise that you can look at rocks and trees and rivers and reveal to them their origin?”
“I begin,” he said, “to realize why certain politicians hate you, and why your brother cannot bring himself to speak of you in civil terms. Explain to me why you have refused to follow precedent by marrying. It appears that one of the chief complaints against you is your refusal to marry your brother — a mere formality, I don’t doubt, but a rather obvious solution of the strife between you. I understand that several Ptolemies have followed the practice, following the example of the ancient kings and queens of Egypt. What is your objection?”
“There would be none,” she said, “if I were not anointed Pharaoh. If I were a man I could marry whom I pleased, because the woman would submit to me. But I am a woman, and yet Pharaoh — high priestess, too, of Isis. It would be the rankest blasphemy and sacrilege for me to bow that crown beneath a husband’s yoke.”
“You are a pledged virgin?”
“No. No more than you are a pledged enemy of nature. But as dictator of Rome is it lawful for you to subject yourself to any master? May you bind yourself and Rome in an alliance, as the lesser of two powers? Neither may I submit my royal crown to anyone. On that day my crown would become forfeited, and though I might wear the symbol of authority, the gods would cease to recognize it.”
“Your confidence in the existence of the gods is what surprises me most in you,” said Caesar. “I have pondered over Plato’s version of the teachings of Pythagoras, and I believe there is no system of philosophy or religion that is quite unknown to me. But the gods remain farther away than ever. The more they are studied, the more they seem to me to become figments of imagination or else nature forces.”
“You should learn to speak to the gods in their own language, Caesar. Then they would look through the veil and reveal themselves. I never speak to any man in any language other than his own, because I wish to understand him and that he should understand me. Should I speak to the gods in Greek or Latin?”
“What language do they understand?” asked Caesar.
“It is a heart-language — unspoken and not difficult to learn.”
“I believe I will ask you to teach me,” he answered. “I am sure of this: that Egypt will be safer in your hands than in your brother’s. But I am equally sure that your brother’s cause is stronger at the moment and that his claims are not to be ignored. Now, tell me about Egypt. Tell me all you know about it. I will listen until you are too tired to continue.”
CHAPTER XVIII. “I will settle the succession to the throne this morning.”
As harp responds to harp, so equals know each other, though their natures are as day and night apart. Equality is equal vibrancy, responding in the same degrees and to the same extent (however differently) to a primal impulse.
— Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.
“WHAT a glorious morning,” remarked Caesar. “Do you notice the brilliant whitecaps? Now I know what Homer meant by wine-dark sea.”
That aristocratic tone of voice and accent were habitual to him when events were entertaining. Weariness, lassitude, even some of his pallor had vanished. He was wearing a bay-leaf chaplet that made his baldness hardly noticeable. An Alexandrian barber had been found, whose fingers, with the aid of blended oils, had kneaded and relaxed his facial muscles until he looked scarcely forty instead of over fifty as he actually was.
No Roman could wear tunic and toga more gracefully; none more impudently could defy tradition, or revive it for his own use. His toga was purple, embroidered. Marian in theory — the self-appointed leader, that is, of the ultra-democratic party, as opposed to the nobility whom Pompey had upheld — he had assumed the royal costume of the ancient kings, making himself used to it before reappearing in Rome, that had cast forth kings long centuries ago and now reviled their very name.
Potheinos, seated near him on the awninged balcony, looked nervous, though he could see the Ptolemaic fleet at anchor far outnumbering Caesar’s: though he knew (and thought that Caesar did not know) that General Achillas with an army twenty thousand strong was marching on Alexandria. He could see, too, sunlight flashing on the oars of Tros’ ship, its long-tongued golden serpent headed straight for the harbor entrance; but Potheinos, unlike Caesar, was uncertain what that might portend.
Aware that Caesar was no fraction less ambitious or more scrupulous than himself, he was all the more jealous of Caesar’s easy manner, of his good looks, of the calm self-confidence with which he made nothing of dangers that it was Potheinos’ business at the moment to exaggerate.
“A beautiful morning, yes,” he answered. “But glorious? Caesar, your glory may vanish as swiftly as that of the weather can do. Let me urge you to listen to reason and recognize facts.”
Caesar smiled at him. His breakfast had been exquisitely cooked. The sea-air, sunshine, comfort, after years of strenuous campaigning frequently without the bare necessities of life, were so exactly what he needed that Potheinos’ impudence was not worth noticing. And now here came Tros of Samothrace, a constant and resourceful enemy, who had fought him in Gaul and Britain, and who could easily destroy his whole fleet under the palace windows, but who would have to refrain from doing it because of old-fashioned scruples! Tros had agreed to a mutual truce and that was too amusing to be offset by a eunuch’s lack of manners.
And it was fun — a self-indulgence in extravagance exactly of the sort he best loved, since it was extravagance of intellectual audacity — to occupy a city of nine hundred thousand with an army hardly large enough to defend the Lochias, and with a fleet that he had stripped already of its armament to help to fortify the palace.
Possibly the most amusing thought of all was the unquestionable fact that Rome was wondering what next? He was master of Rome, and he knew that Rome knew it — knew that the longer he should stay away and keep Rome guessing, the less guesswork he himself would have to use, because half of Rome’s troubles would settle themselves if Rome were let alone; the other half would readily respond to that touch of genius he knew he could apply. Rome, Alexandria, and most of the rest of the world was speculating, worrying; no better reason could exist for Caesar’s peace of mind, and he was consequently reveling in rest, the first time in a dozen years.
“Reason?” he said in his pleasantest voice. “There is a wide difference between that and argument
. But argue if you wish.”
“Caesar, you are a great philosopher as well as a great general. I would like to be your friend, although, of course, at this moment I am to all intents and purposes your prisoner.”
“Not at all. Not at all.” Caesar stared at him “You can go when you please. I am informed that your spies come and go rather frequently.”
“Let us put it this way then: Prince Ptolemy is your prisoner.”
“If that were true,” said Caesar, smiling again, “neither you nor he would have the least excuse to doubt it.”
“Well, since you say so, Caesar, I suppose it is so. Nevertheless, for him to leave the Lochias would be to surrender the whole organization of government into your hands and those of his sister, the Princess Cleopatra, who I am informed has made her way secretly to you in order to usurp his rights!”
“His rights? I am here to arbitrate the question of the title to the throne,” said Caesar. “Possibly possession, in the absence of the other claimant, might suggest the logical solution. You will naturally bear that thought in mind. However, the prince is under no restraint. His sister came to me near midnight and stated her whole case — I may add, with great command of logic. You appear to have driven her off the throne and I am inclined to credit her statement that to have returned to her palace by any other means than those she used would have led to her death at your hands or by your orders.”
Potheinos violently shook his head: “Oh, no! Oh, no!”
“I have been deeply impressed by the Princess Cleopatra’s veracity,” said Caesar.
Potheinos hesitated. Forcing suavity again and leaning forward, tapping his own knee with nervous fingers, he essayed to turn back the discussion to the point he started from:
“Caesar! May I beg that you will listen to me. You are probably more mentally exhausted than you realize. This Roman civil war has taxed your uttermost resources. It has kept you from making yourself conversant with the most elementary facts. I am here to warn you against errors that may overwhelm you. I know you were seized with illness on the day of your arrival. Ill-health leads the best of us sometimes into mistakes too serious to rectify. Olympus treated you — I trust with satisfactory results — but beware of that fellow! Beware of him! He will stop at nothing!”