by Talbot Mundy
“It seems we have offended him,” said Caesar. “But it would be a pity to spoil the banquet on that account. Where is Apollodorus? Tell him to pass among the guests and reassure them. Bid them all be seated and let them go on with the entertainment. Somebody should take that young man’s place — ah, here comes Calvinus.”
Promoted to the royal table, Calvinus was rather self-conscious and uncomfortably aware of hostile glances from below the dais. None of Potheinos’ fellow ministers had dared to follow Ptolemy from the banquet-hall, but none concealed his horror that a Roman tribune should occupy Ptolemy’s couch.
“I should have been here sooner,” he said, “but I stayed to give instructions.”
Cleopatra interrupted: “Calvinus, I sent attendants to the balcony. Did you let them purge away the bloodstains?”
“Orcus! Yes, they brought a brazier and spilled hot charcoal on the place. The corpses have been ordered thrown to crocodiles. But why?”
She shuddered. “Freshly spilled blood attracts evil elementals; the blood of a eunuch is worse than any. Fire is the only remedy. That is why they burn the temple sacrifices. There are very few, even among the priests, who can keep devils away from freshly spilled blood.”
“How about a battle-field?” asked Calvinus. “Not that there were many eunuchs, at Pharsalia, for instance. But eh, Caesar? You and I must have gathered a legion or two of elementals in our day! And how about our arenas in Rome? There is bloodshed for you.”
“I am not fond of witnessing such spectacles,” said Caesar. “And I have noticed that the neighborhood of any sort of shambles is disturbing to the finer processes of thought. That is why, after a battle, I am sometimes given to extremes of magnanimity. I set myself in opposition to the thoughts of vengeance and cruelty that seem to assert themselves more violently on such occasions and in such places.”
“Yes,” said Calvinus, “and you forgive the wrong man usually! But you killed the right one this time! Let us drink to the death of all eunuchs in high places! Life is too short to be wasted arguing with such unfortunates. Their minds are twisted so that they are good for nothing but intrigue. And Ptolemy—”
Caesar frowned hire into silence.
“Ptolemy must yield now, at last,” said Cleopatra. To which Caesar made no comment.
CHAPTER XXIV. “My soul is a woman’S — yours a man’s; and war is not my business.”
Now because there is a law of opposites it must appear that there are two ways of arriving at a given goal. The one is violent, the other not; and each way has a multitude of by-Paths that may lead into inertia, but none of which connects the way of bloodshed with the way of peace. For they are separate, although their courses appear parallel; but that is only an appearance. One way leads toward the true goal, peace and patience begetting patience and peace, albeit often after many perils narrowly avoided. But he who travels by that other way sees nothing but a false goal that recedes as he advances, every act of violence inevitably giving impulse to another of its kind.
— Fragment from The Diary Of Olympus.
AND now, as so frequently happened when Caesar had done playing cat-and-mouse, he concentrated all his carelessness on one miscalculated effort, bringing on himself disaster that would irretrievably have ruined any ordinary man.
What stirred him most was Cleopatra’s grief over the ruined library. She railed against her ancestors for having been too parsimonious to fire-proof books that they had gathered from the ends of earth; but mostly she blamed herself for having, as she put it, thought of herself too much, that night, and of her charge too little. She appeared to believe that her self-surrender into Caesar’s arms had given rein to elemental forces that she might have stemmed back otherwise by spiritual watchfulness. Caesar proposed to use alchemy of his own, and swiftly to change that self-reproachful mood by making her the acknowledged as well as the anointed Queen of Egypt.
But there were other influences, too: his men were alarmed by the delay in bringing up reenforcements and by the increasing activity of the Egyptian army under Ganymedes, who had mustered a number of ships to replace the destroyed fleet and was now threatening to block the harbor entrance. Ganymedes held the Pharos; he might perhaps prevent the arrival of reenforcements; he might even sever communication with Taréntum or Brundusium and Rome.
The Alexandrian nobility had left the banquet thoroughly aroused, whereas Caesar had thought to reduce their truculence. By executing Potheinos without a gesture of recognition of the Alexandrian courts of justice (which might have been forgiven in the circumstances) and, far more, by seating Calvinus in Ptolemy’s place when Ptolemy withdrew in mingled rage and fear, he had subjected them, they felt, to gross indignity, and they returned to their homes an hour or two after midnight feeling far more outraged, and less helpless than Caesar realized.
Cleopatra warned him, but succeeded only in arousing his combative will.
He underestimated the effect of his lictors and his insolence on the mercurial Alexandrian temperament. The nobility had not forgotten his effrontery in taking on himself the privilege of dismissing them, on the occasion of their waiting on him in the throne-room. They resented this later insolence more keenly than if he had held them up for money at the sword’s point. He had a perfect right to demand enormous sums of money, which they did not intend to pay if they could help it, but which they could pay if they must. Meanwhile they proposed to retaliate for his outrage to their dignity with the sort of fervor that a nest of hornets offers the intruder.
Characteristically, Caesar ignored both Cleopatra’s warnings and the judgment of his own men, letting scorn for lesser intellects than his deceive him into thinking himself invincible in any situation. Even when his spies reported Ganymedes stirring indignation with reports that Ptolemy was being poisoned in revenge for Potheinos’ attempt, he took no steps to counteract the rumor. He was too proud — too sure of himself.
But the story, that Ptolemy was being poisoned, was the actual impulse, nevertheless, that sent Caesar headlong into disaster. He could very easily have paraded Ptolemy, alive and well, in full view of Alexandria, but he did not, so the rumor gained ground and the Alexandrians proposed to themselves to return that compliment with interest. The water supply of the Lochias royal area was brought through conduits passing beneath the city; they opened the conduits, dumped in wagon-loads of sewage, and threw Caesar’s garrison into panic — afraid to drink and casting hysterical eyes toward the open sea and home.
Cleopatra told where good sweet water could be had by digging for it in the filled-up wells that Alexander’s men had used three centuries ago. And Caesar did set men to dig; but he also invited her to choose a good position on the roof from which to observe how he conducted military operations.
“For I will show you,” he said, “how disciplined men under an intelligent commander behave against ten or twenty times their number of fugitive slaves and criminals.”
There was a tart inflection in his voice — a half-note higher than the normal: a trace of the bully: a hint of the cruelty that, by a law of nature, was inherent in his insatiable vanity. He resented her daring to suggest to him that other means than violence, and other strategy than the offensive were available. Her genius was opposite to his; as jealous as a chemical reagent, he proposed to show her that the plans she was already making for the government of Egypt were dependent on himself and hopeless of success without his all-conquering force behind them.
The Paneum, an enormous temple in a proportionately extensive area surrounded by a wall, stood on rising ground between the Lochias and the stadium, in which Ganymedes had encamped the greater number of his troops. To seize the Paneum would mean to overlook most of the main streets of the city and to split the Alexandrians in two by commanding the main thoroughfare north and south, as well as controlling the course of the water conduits.
So Caesar ordered Calvinus to march instantly against the Paneum and take possession of it. He was so sure of the outcome that
he saw no need to lead the troops in person but amused himself by pointing out to Cleopatra from the palace roof how Roman troops were handled, unit by unit, each unit acting independently and yet uniting into one force readily responsive to its leader’s brain. That roof pavilion whence they looked on rather resembled the consular box in the Roman arena.
But there very soon ceased to be the same sense of security for the onlooker. Terrific street fighting began the moment Calvinus’ small advance-guard strode with locked shields into the wide main thoroughfare. Roofs, windows, balconies revealed themselves as ambuscades from which the citizens and the troops of Ganymedes, sent a storm of missiles. Barricades were thrown across the street so swiftly as to prove long preparation, and the barricades were manned by archers who knew their business. Calvinus’ advance-guard died to a man advancing against an overwhelming arrow-fire from a prepared position — surprised, outnumbered and outflanked from the balconies and roofs.
Promptly Calvinus swung right and left to storm the houses on either side of the street. By seizing the roofs he might reverse the situation and make the cross-street barricades untenable. But the Alexandrians set fire to some of the houses and the resistance was desperate and skilfully controlled — until suddenly an unexpected swarm of Ganymedes’ men came surging from east and west down side-streets, taking the Romans in flank and rear and cutting them off from the Lochias.
Caesar took the business in hand then. Vanity evaporated, burned off by the white heat of his military genius, that seldom showed itself until the vanity had first produced a tangle out of which no ordinary mental energy could find a way. He left Cleopatra to her own resources and to the company of her women, placed himself at the head of the men whom Calvinus had left in reserve within the Lochias, and — sudden as an arrow volley out of ambush — burst up-street to save his army from destruction.
He drove a wedge between the Egyptian ranks. He set fire to the houses that they held. He threw barricades of his own across the ends of side-streets and restored the line of communication, fighting his way to Calvinus and bidding him continue the advance; for he saw that unless he should win at least a Pyrrhic victory the Alexandrians would reckon themselves conquerors and, taking courage, would pursue the initiative, that he did not dare to let pass for a single moment to the other side.
His presence in their midst, as always, instantly restored the legionaries’ morale. Their advance up-street became an irresistible, intelligent, alert and interlocking avalanche of violence, supplying from within itself the ever-ready units to replace its dead and wounded, as the outer units bore the shock of contact. And as ever, Caesar bore the charmed life that is one of the chief attributes of military genius. There was no fear in him. The exultant rush of magnetism — the enormous vigor of his concentrated will protected him, though his purple cloak made him a brilliant target and his recklessness led him wherever the danger was worst and the fighting most severe.
Magnetic in its essence, his energy aroused and magnetized the energy of others. Calvinus became a war-god. Rank and file, thrilling with valor, responded and the veriest peasant from the smallest tax-exhausted, loan-encumbered farm became a Roman, breathing Rome’s fire and fury.
The goal was utterly impossible to reach, but Caesar hurled his men toward it until Ganymedes, losing confidence, began to assume defensive tactics and withdrew his men behind a barrier of wreckage flanked by the flames of burning buildings. Caesar could afford then to withdraw within the Lochias. Victory it was not; but defeat it was not; for he had lost no standards, he could gather up his dead and wounded, and he had done more damage than the Alexandrians could view without consternation. He had lost less than a hundred men. He had slain not fewer than a thousand and he had wrecked a sixteenth of the richest city in the world. The Alexandrians were likely to take thought a dozen times before they gathered enough courage to attempt to drive him from the Lochias.
His retreat was as swift as his foray had been, he riding with the rear-guard to observe that all the wounded were recovered and that the enemy made no effort at pursuit. And he was met at the Lochias gate by Cleopatra with the news that water was already flowing in the wells the slaves were digging.
That was a meeting that, if Cleopatra had lacked genius, might easily have led to a dividing of the ways. She had advised diplomacy. He had preferred impetuosity — and failed. He had excused impetuosity on the ground of needing to control the water conduits; he had not succeeded, and she had succeeded in producing water, in ample quantities from a source that the enemy could not possibly pollute. Furthermore, it always grieved him — after the event — that loyal men must lay their lives down to enforce his will; his intellect was under the control of his emotions then, which is a dangerous condition.
In the white heat of that moment, if Cleopatra had been tactless, she would probably have condemned herself into the ranks of the women whom Caesar had deceived — another Dido left by her Aeneas to regret her own self-confidence and generosity.
But it needed a more subtle tangling of the skeins of destiny than that to overtax her ingenuity. The incident had served as warning to her that the slightest opposition was a challenge that Caesar could not resist accepting. She must yield to him and, yielding, overcome his egotism.
So she made her women bring out palace dainties for the men and comforts for the wounded, ordering Sosistrates, the royal court physician, to place himself and his staff of assistants at the service of the Roman surgeons, whose rough-and-ready crudities were aggravated by the lack of suitable supplies or trained help. But to Caesar she said very little until, by saying so little and avoiding the very mention of the military outcome, she obliged him first to broach the subject.
He had seen his men attended to, and suitably addressed them; he had gone the rounds of the battlements, inspecting guards and the extemporized defenses; he had bathed and donned clean raiment; he had consulted with his officers and drafted plans for strengthening the weaker sections of the wall; he had, in fact, done everything he could think of to delay seeing her alone, when he went in search of her at last and found her with Olympus and Apollodorus and about a score of secretaries, busily studying documents relating to the government of Egypt, that had been brought in boxes from Potheinos’ office. As he entered she was questioning a secretary about the method of storing tithe-corn and the system employed for converting the corn into money.
“What do you think of it, Caesar?” she asked.
But before he answered he enjoyed Apollodorus’ obvious discomfort — self-conscious because he had not been in the ranks of the fighting men. Caesar himself had forbidden it, regarding Apollodorus as already popular enough.
“I think,” he said then, “it is a little early to be discussing the revenue of a country not yet conquered.”
There was a challenge in his tone of voice. He was inviting her to criticize him for the morning’s failure. But she declined the challenge with a sweetly reasonable answer, and a gay reliance on his good faith:
“I am leaving to you whatever conquering is needed.”
That did not quite satisfy him. He wanted absolute surrender of her faith in unseen subtleties, in the presence of Olympus, who, it seemed to him, had reappeared to renew her reliance on mysterious hierarchies, the very possibility of whose existence challenged his arrogant will. He wanted a confession that without him and his army her ideals were imaginary nothings incapable of taking shape.
“You are making ready to rule Egypt,” he said, “as if ideas alone could do it. What is an idea? What value has it without force to turn it into something?”
“An idea,” she said, “is nearer to you than your own self — nearer to you than your life is. Men can be slain, but not ideas. They enwrap a man’s soul — give it character and quality and color. My soul is a woman’s — yours a man’s; and war is not my business.”
Apollodorus withdrew and Olympus followed him, aware that he was irritating Caesar, who watched him go with satisfaction.
“Where has that man been?” he demanded.
Cleopatra hesitated, doubtful for the first time whether frankness with this man of intellect and iron and passion was the wisest course. But her hesitation only stirred his suspicion.
“Potheinos,” he hinted tartly, “was merely another meddler.”
So she told him the truth: “Olympus has been saving certain books that were not lost when the north wing of the library was burned.”
“What has he done with them?”
“Hidden them.”
“What books were they?”
“Some that Alexander wished to burn, and even thought he had burned. Also, the Hermetic writings.”
“I would like to see them,” he said, looking at her with the cold grim glitter in his eyes that always shone there when he had a victory to win.
For the first time then she lied to him, well knowing it would be easy to show him books that he could take to Rome if he wished and ever afterward believe to be the genuine keys of the mysteries. Or he could burn them, as so many conquerors had burned books that contained philosophy destructive of their own. It would not matter. Olympus had saved the real ones.
“You may have them, Caesar. They are hidden from the mob, and from the grave-robbers and the people who sell curiosities. Perhaps they would be safer, after all, in Rome than in Alexandria.”
That offer totally disarmed him and he melted into a gentler mood, a little ashamed of having shown his temper. He had grown intimate enough with her to know that the mysterious sources of her esoteric faith were more sacred to her even than the Sibylline books were to the Roman priesthood, It appeared to him that he had conquered her, if she was willing to submit those secret books to him, so he dismissed the secretaries and began to make love — marvelously — being ever magnanimous in the hour of victory, if irritable in defeat.