Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  “Well?”

  “Boat, yes. That fellow Aristobolus and four freedmen. Knives. Aristobolus gave me money, as you said he might. He said his name is Hippias, and he asked after your health, so I told him what you said I was to tell him, and he looked as savage as a man whose drink’s been spilled. So I came back, and I’ve bought thee wine and bread and eggs and smoked fish, and some olive oil and lettuce, and a couple of melons. Master, half a jar’s an awful little for eleven men and ten of ’em just received freedom, and not a drink since Cyprus.”

  “Very well, make it a jar.”

  “There’s no more money.”

  “Give them a full jar, Nathan. Mind you, if you get as drunk as you did in Cyprus I’ll reduce you to the lower oar-bench. You’re to divide the wine equally, drink for drink. That is an order. Have you understood it?”

  “Aye, aye, master. But I hadn’t finished telling. We weren’t back here before those four freedmen hit our wake and came strolling along like loafers with nothing better to do. Eastward of here, and this side of the royal boat wharf, there’s a wine-garden set in a grove of myrtles and oleanders. That’s where they are, and not drinking neither — lurking — up to no good.”

  “Aristobolus still in the boat?”

  “Yes, master. That’s to say, unless he slipped away without us seeing him. I’d be willing to wager my share of the drinks he’s there yet.”

  “Then he likely is there! Send your eight men to seize the boat. They needn’t be too gentle with Aristobolus, but they’re not to kill him if they can help it. Let them throw him in the bottom of the boat and tie and gag him. They may as well take the provisions with them. You and your other two, follow me, and follow closely.”

  “Aye, aye, master. Are we to have Aristobolus’s company in the boat all afternoon?”

  “Yes, you may un-gag him when you’re out on the lake. Use your own judgment about pretending to agree to any treachery he may suggest. Memorize his words — his exact words.”

  “Aye, aye, master.”

  Eight men, trusted for the first time with a dangerous task without Conops’s superintending eye, and looking innocent enough, in spite of armor, with their load of wine and provisions, tramped away eastward down the road between the buildings and the shore. Tros, with his sword beneath his left arm, hidden by an apparently carelessly draped himation, strolled westward, appearing to enjoy the freshness of the early afternoon breeze. Conops followed him. Jeshua and Aroun trudged at Conops’s heels.

  There was a considerable crowd along the road to eastward. Many of them were slaves, permitted a day’s idleness on account of the festival; but there were scores of gaily dressed and well-behaved families: enjoying the view or hiring rowboats, or strolling from one public garden, or one wine-booth, to another. And there was a considerable number of chariots being driven at the usual reckless speed by gallants not yet drunk enough to kill deliberately but with enough wine in their heads to enjoy scattering the crowd like scared poultry. There was a disturbance of that kind as Tros drew abreast of the myrtle and oleander thicket. Two racing chariots swerved around the western corner of the thicket and headed eastward, giving Tros their dust and scatting a screaming score of men and women.

  Conops snarled a warning. “They’re on us! Draw, you chosen people!”

  Tros’s sword licked out like the flash of lightning. His himation danced on his left arm. Conops leaped. He plunged his knife into a man’s throat. The Jews buried their swords in the bellies of two other men. Tros slew the fourth, driving the point through his heart with such force that Conops had to stand on the man’s body in order to wrench the sword out. It was all over in almost a second, like a flurry of wind in a copse, or the swoop of a hawk on a dove-cote. A few of the wine-garden’s customers peered through the thicket, but no crowd formed; on the contrary, those in the street who had seen what happened scurried out of sight to avoid trouble. It was nothing very unusual that a man should be set upon by his enemy’s freedmen; drunken brawls and unpaid debts, the volatile affections of a woman, or even a topical song was enough to start a street fight. The municipal slaves would remove the bodies unless the dead men’s friends first did it. Meanwhile, fishermen hurried ashore to be first to steal clothing, and money, and finger-rings, on the pretext of laying the bodies beside the road; they even demanded pay for doing that from passers-by, because Alexandrines disliked to see blood on a glorious May afternoon. They were not like Romans. They could always be persuaded to pay to protect their squeamishness. By the time Tros had cleaned his sword with sand and water, and Conops had wiped it dry, the incident was in a fair way to being forgotten.

  Tros dismissed Conops and the two Jews as soon as they had cleaned their weapons.

  “That squall’s over. Make haste now and get the boat offshore. I’ll be safe between here and the Queen’s barge.”

  “Aye, aye, master.”

  CHAPTER XIII. “It is your throne!”

  Choose, and take the consequences. Choose to command, and learn the pain of the barbed treachery of envy. Choose to obey, and learn how soon obedience begets contempt. Choose the philosopher’s life, and learn the famished waste of thought that, like a barren woman, lusts unpregnant. Choose, or become a victim of others’ choosing.

  — From the Log of Lord Captain Tros of Samothrace

  The approach to the royal boat wharf through the Gate of the Sun — a gate that no longer existed, because the wall had been demolished at that point to make room for imported trees — was almost the only Egyptian touch in the whole city, with its guardian sphinxes and statues stolen from ancient Nile-bank temples. The marble boat-shed was of Egyptian design and even the attending slaves were garbed in the ancient Egyptian headdress. It was a sort of symbolical gateway. Here one entered into Egypt. Today, Greece — Europe, ceased. Yesterday, mystery, melancholy and the fabled land of Khem began. Even the boats on Mareotis were of the ancient Egyptian pattern. Many of the luxurious villas and pavilions on the islands were designed to suggest the Egyptian spirit, in curious contrast to the ultra-modern Greek design of Alexandria.

  There were scores of sentries, to keep the holiday-making crowd at a respectful distance from the royal boat wharf. But nobody challenged Tros. He was not saluted, but he was not questioned. He enjoyed a sensation of being seen, and yet intentionally unseen, as if he were expected, even welcome, and yet unmentionable. He decided to test the situation and approached a lieutenant of the guard, who yawned and peacocked on the terrace in front of the Egyptian arch at the landward end of the marble jetty.

  “Promoted I see, Periander. I congratulate you. Have I blood on my clothing?”

  The officer examined him from head to foot.

  “No. But I saw that little entertainment. Good sword!”

  Six short weeks ago, Periander would have called him by name, with simulated if not actual respect.

  “I thank you.”

  “Better leave your sword here.”

  “My man has it.”

  Tros threw back his himation in proof that he was unarmed. The lieutenant nodded. Tros strolled through the arch, not exactly expecting to be daggered on the far side but, in his minds’s eye, measuring three jumps from the arch to the water. However the slaves who stood with their backs to the arch like statues took no notice of him.

  The gilded barge lay moored against the jetty with its sixteen rowers in their places; they tossed oars as Tros strolled through the arch. There was no doubt they were waiting for him. The royal barge-commander stood on the jetty actually smiling, looking a bit bacchanalian because his chaplet was awry, but spit and span in Cleopatra’s new emerald-and-orange uniform. She had a great gift for designing uniforms that made a man look picturesque but subtly menial.

  “Have you a dagger on you?” he asked. “May I feel?”

  Again no mention of Tros’s name. An air of almost, but not quite cordiality. The best seat on the barge, in the stern, behind the Queen’s awninged bridge-deck. No salute from the r
owers, but, on the other hand, respectful service from the barge slaves, who blew the dust from Tros’s sandals and sponged and wiped his legs. No command. Everyone knew what to do. The gaudily dressed sailors cast off and the barge went at top speed toward Pleasure Island, with the tubas blowing to make fishermen and holiday boating-parties scoot out of the way. No conversation, not even between the barge-commander and his lieutenant.

  There was nothing to interfere with Tros’s interest in the passing scene, and it was not long before he had picked out the gaily painted pleasure boat, in which Conops and the ten Jews were pretending to be out for an afternoon’s amusement. Eight of the Jews were rowing, and like all strong men untrained to that difficult art they were making heavy weather of it; they could easily pass for a boat-load of drunken roisterers, perhaps in a stolen boat, but surely not armed and dangerous.

  Pleasure Island loomed, took form, revealed itself in a reedy mirage, two or three miles beyond the staked deep-water channel for the laden barges from the Nile. It provided absolute privacy. Even its flower-carpeted banks were invisible until the barge had gone beyond it, and turned, and approached from the southward, the thump of the oars alarming myriads of water-fowl that took wing from the reeds and filled the air with weird music.

  Then the first sight was of naked Greek girls, some bathing and others playing games against a background of marbled terraces and columned pavilion. There was not a man in sight, not even a eunuch, except for a guard boat half-hidden in a water-lane between the reeds. There were probably several guard boats, but only one was visible. The attendants on the boat-jetty were Egyptian slave-girls, dog-eyed, bare-breasted. Their white teeth flashed in sensuous smiles. Their dark skins were like gloriously hued shadows against the sunlit marble.

  The women made the boat fast. No one spoke to Tros. As he walked up the marble path, between flowers, the sound of girls’ laughter didn’t cease for an instant. Even when the path skirted one end of the terrace on which the naked girls were playing, and he was in full view, no one stared at him. He knew at least half of those girls — knew their fathers and mothers; they were the cream of the Alexandrine aristocracy; he had been offered his pick of them, dozens of times, by a court chamberlain who would have been delighted to ally him by marriage with the ascendant political faction. But he might have been invisible for all the notice they took.

  The first greeting he received, at the top of the steps, on the terrace in front of the pavilion door, was from Charmion, looking like one of the Fates with her needle and thread and her vinegary air of prim chastity in classically draped white Chinese silk. She looked up from her sewing to answer his bow.

  “The Queen expects you. You may go straight in. The child Caesarion has just been punished for saying he loves you.”

  “Perhaps he does,” Tros answered. “Was it you who had him punished?”

  “Yes!” She almost spat the word. “Go in and try to redeem yourself! You will need the full resources of your Samothracian guile, I can assure you!”

  “I will keep my guile,” he answered, bowing like a courtier, “for gilding my esteem, where tart ingratitude occasionally chafes it thin!” He loved to annoy her. Three ladies-in-waiting, who were doing embroidery-work with Charmion, and pretending to like it, giggled. Tros nodded to them and entered the pavilion, down a corridor where seven eunuchs sat on a gilded bench, whispering and smirking like priests in a vestry. One of them opened a door, and then for the first time someone called Tros by name. The child Caesarion, a brat hardly able to toddle, but precocious, and looking already like a miniature copy of Julius Caesar, ran through the doorway and fell at his feet, seizing his legs and calling him “Twos of Samothwakee.” There was at any rate someone pleased to see him. But the child was swept up by a protesting nurse and borne off, yelling for his hero. Then a golden voice, that had no equal, anywhere:

  “You may come in.”

  The eunuch closed the door behind him and he was alone with the Queen. She was in one of her strangely magnetic moods that nobody ever knew how to divine — greenish eyes, brooding — rather sensuous lips, smiling — looking smaller than ever, because she was seated in a huge chair facing the view through the open window. Her exquisitely shapely feet, touched with henna, in gold-leafed sandals, rested, on a footstool of carved ivory. On the table beside her were pen and ink and a number of parchment scrolls that fluttered in the slight breeze; and on a long table against the wall were a number of objects obviously rifled from an ancient tomb. In her hands was a golden bracelet.

  Tros caught his breath, he bowed low, with his eyes on the bracelet. It was not Egyptian. It was not Greek, Indian, Chinese, Arabian, Persian. It was heavy, solid, hammered, and indented with an unfinished pattern that bore no resemblance to any known Egyptian design; barbaric, and yet masterly conceived and done. He had hard work to show no emotion when he had finished bowing and stood upright. It almost never paid to betray emotions in Cleopatra’s presence; it was vastly safer to simulate emotion that one did not feel.

  She appeared annoyed that he had seen the bracelet. “Can you imagine,” she asked; “a craftsman competent to do such skillful work, who would nevertheless be such a savage as to take a wrought gold vase from an ancient tomb, and smash it, and then desecrate it into such an ornament as this? Who could wear such a thing? It weighs two pounds.”

  Tros glanced at the priceless objects on the table — necklaces, vases, glass-ware, bracelets, a golden tablet a yard square covered with hieroglyphics.

  “He might have smashed those, too,” he answered.

  He knew who had done it. There was only one man south of the Baltic who would even have thought of making such a bracelet as lay on Cleopatra’s knee. She laid the bracelet aside.

  “Well?” she asked after a moment. “Why don’t you reproach me?”

  “Royal Egypt, I reproach myself,” he answered.

  “For having failed me?”

  “For having trusted you. I find myself repudiated at the Palace Gate.”

  Her answering smile was dangerous. She fingered one of the scrolls on the table beside her. It was a list of about a dozen names.

  “These are dead,” she remarked. She picked up another, shorter list. “These are, at the moment, dying. They betray one another like true Greeks at the first touch of torture. It is not that they are cowards, or I think not. Pain makes them angry. They resent that their accomplices should escape such torment. So they tell.”

  Tros almost shrugged his shoulders. “It is your throne, Egypt! Keep it if you care to!”

  “If I can!” She looked battle-angry.

  Tros grinned then. It was the first confession he had ever heard from Cleopatra’s lips that there might be an easier seat than a throne.

  She resented his grin. Her mold changed to the snake-like anger that made her terrible. She spoke with the vibrance in her voice that aroused men’s superstition — the voice that had made her name a byword — astonishing from such a small woman, not in the least loud, but vigorous with a sort of absoluteness.

  “I sent for you,” she said, “to receive from your lips an explanation of your conduct in Cyprus.”

  But she was threatening the wrong man, and she knew it. Her eyes changed even before Tros answered.

  “You have a strange way, Royal Egypt, of inviting a friend to an audience! It would have been simpler to have written my name on that list, to explain to the executioner — or not to explain, as the case might be.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense. I have a reason for seeing you secretly.”

  “Doubtless a royal reason! I would have spared you the intrusion, unless I also had reasons, Egypt, as for what I have done, at my own cost—”

  “On your own responsibility! You refused my commission, remember!”

  “It was the best I could do. I defeated and slew the pirate Anchises, and destroyed his entire fleet.”

  “Yes, and you sank two Roman biremes, in Salamis harbor, for which the Roman proconsul is blamin
g me!”

  “To which your answer has teen, to permit your minister to denounce me as a pirate!”

  “That was necessary. It was a sop to the Roman indignation.”

  “As I already said, it is your throne,” he retorted. “I have never found it necessary to denounce a loyal friend, for the sake of such a cur as Cassius, who stabbed his benefactor! If you choose between me and Cassius, as to which is your friend, I withdraw from the competition! Deadly though it may be, I prefer your enmity to the stench of being less than Cassius’s enemy to the last breath he or I shall ever breathe!”

  She laughed. “The same Tros! Friend? You speak to me as if I were your mistress, or a servant caught stealing the food from the table! Is my sister Arsinoe not my enemy? My treacherous, envious enemy? Didn’t you befriend her in Cyprus? Do you call that being my friend?”

  “What would you have had me do?”

  “You should have drowned her! She was on your ship. She was present, in the sea-fight of Salamis — where I would give almost my eyes to have been! She was present in your cabin when you brow-beat that Roman wolf Ahenobarbus. I would give almost my ears to have heard that! You gave her money. It was tribute money looted from the temple. You gave her men. They were pirates, whom you took prisoner, and Roman legionnaires, for whom Ahenobarbus had no ship-room. You set her free from Serapion’s clutches — Serapion, whom I appointed to be her viceroy because I knew he would hold her powerless, whatever treachery he might invent!”

  “I perceive that your Etruscan spy Tarquinius has saved me the necessity of making a report,” Tros answered.