Ave, Caesarion (The Rise of Caesarion's Rome Book 1)

by Deborah Davitt

  Eurydice shook her head, overwhelmed. The pleasure she’d felt at being treated as the adult woman that she technically now was, instead of the child that she’d been, faded into a kind of dull horror at her mother’s words. The idea of being held under some patrician man in his forties made her stomach churn. And then, for some reason, her dream flickered back into her mind. “Mother,” she said, switching back to Latin now. “I had the dream again this morning.”

  “Hmm. Midway between your courses again. Interesting.” Cleopatra tipped her head to the side. “Were there any differences?”

  “Last month, they were all manner of great cats. Lions, tigers, leopards. This time, they were all birds again. But every other detail remained the same.” Eurydice shook her head. “What does it mean?”

  “I do not know,” her mother replied, but Eurydice had the faint sensation that this was a lie. Her mother suspected something, but didn’t wish to give that suspicion voice yet. “When the mage-priests come—I sent a letter for them to come last night, to evaluate and train you—don’t tell them about the dream.”

  Eurydice blinked. “But I thought that priests were trained in the interpretation of dreams—”

  “Don’t tell them. Not a word. They don’t need to know about it.”

  She frowned. “As you command.”

  “If your brother asks, you may tell him, of course. He is the leader of this family now. He has every right to know. But I would not distract him with such minutiae at the moment.”

  Eurydice’s eyes widened, and she shook her head vehemently. “Oh, no! Of course not! I wouldn’t want to—I mean, we’re in the middle of a war, thousands of men on every side, I would never try to take up his attention—” And then her memory rolled the dice, and they came up with the sixes of recollection, and she put both of her hands to her face, flushing with shame. “Oh, gods. I made a spectacle of myself last night? I remember that he was here—I remember the headache—” Internally, she writhed. “What did I say?”

  Her mother sighed. “Really, I must rid you of this tiresomely self-effacing manner you have,” Cleopatra told her astringently, and Eurydice jerked back as if burned. “I realize that this is the fault of your largely Roman upbringing, and the modesty expected of a good patrician woman.” Her mother’s dark eyes gleamed. “But you are the daughter of a queen of Egypt as well as the daughter of the Imperator of Rome, and sister of another Imperator. Act like it.”

  Eurydice lifted her chin, though her knees felt like water. “Yes, Mother.”

  After a stern moment of regard, Cleopatra nodded. “Better. And in this instance, you did not make a spectacle of yourself. You instead provided vital intelligence about the prosecution of the siege.”

  I did what? “I . . . oh!” Recollection flooded back. “Mother, what I saw was a dream. My brother can’t base a siege off a dream—”

  The folds of the curtain behind Cleopatra pushed back, and Caesarion stepped through himself now. He towered a foot taller than their mother, who was scarcely five feet in height; Eurydice took more after their father in that regard, a half a foot taller than their mother, herself—making her almost too tall for a Roman woman, and downright gangly by Egyptian standards, but still much shorter than her god-born brother. “I said much the same thing last night,” Caesarion put in, letting the curtains swing closed behind him. “Which is why I sent off scouts this morning.” His smile soured. “Lepidus, Antony, and the other generals think I’ve taken leave of my senses, and told me that the chances of my younger sister being some sort of sibyl were slim to none. Which is why I informed them that we’d be verifying your visions.” He frowned now, looking down at Eurydice. “Little one, why are you dressed like that?”

  Eurydice’s mouth had gone dry with terror. Not at the sight of her brother, who looked like a god—like Mars himself, come to earth, as far as she was concerned—but at the thought of a dozen generals, all contemporaries of her revered father, knowing that she’d spouted visions and whatever else had fallen from her lips yesterday. She couldn’t form a single word as she struggled to swallow.

  And so her mother replied in a sharp, dry tone, “She’s dressed as a woman today because she is one, Caesarion. She started bleeding a year ago. I kept that from your father to prevent her from being promised to someone like my dear future husband, Antony.” A glance between her mother and brother that Eurydice didn’t understand, but felt like locked blades. “But today, and every day from this point on, she will need for your generals not to see a girl child but a young woman.” Eurydice found herself pinioned by her mother’s fierce glare. “As I told you before—you’re the daughter of a queen. And may be one yourself in time. Act like one.” And then a rapid shift into Egyptian, the syllables swift and harsh, “Don’t let those old men, with their Roman notions of a woman’s place and Roman conceptions of virtue being solely the province of men, or women who act like men—vir being the word for man, after all!—impede you in the pursuit of your destiny.”

  Caesarion’s head snapped back at the anger in his mother’s tone, and Eurydice’s eyes went wide. What destiny? How can I possibly be a queen, unless I somehow take Mother’s place in Egypt, or am married off to some petty king on the periphery of Rome . . . and I wouldn’t want that. Because then I’d be so . . . far away. But it would certainly be better than being given in marriage to someone like that horrible old Antony with his watchdog eyes—oh, poor Mother . . . . She shut the thoughts away hastily. “It does little good to think too much of the future before it’s upon us,” Eurydice finally managed through her parched lips. “We can plan for it and prepare for it, but my pedagogue says that Time makes fools of us all.”

  Cleopatra’s eyes suddenly became enormously tired and sad. “It does,” she replied softly. “Oh, if you only understood, my own, how true those words are.” She nodded to her children regally, and then swept out of the private area.

  Somehow, through all of this, Selene had slumbered peacefully. As their youngest sister started to stir, Caesarion reached out and took Eurydice’s forearm very properly in his hand, pulling her around neatly so that her hand now rested on his own arm. “Let’s take a walk before she wakes up,” he murmured. “I want to see if you can see again the way you did yesterday—only on purpose, and without the pain.” A frown rumpled his dark brows. “When I use the gifts that the gods have given me, it never hurts.”

  Bewildered, and more or less attached to his arm, Eurydice protested as she tried to keep up with his longer strides, “Could I not eat some puls or at least some bread first?” Suddenly, she became keenly aware of her own hunger. In fact, her stomach seemed quite a bit more upset than it should have been—but then, she hadn’t had an evening meal last night, either. Perhaps that explained everything.

  Looking abashed, Caesarion caught one of the servants, and found her bread and cheese as well as watered vinegar. “I have at least three meetings this morning,” he told her, grimacing. “Eat during my first two, and we’ll make time for your visions and such before the third.”

  And so she sat, tucked behind a fold in the tent, listening as officers made reports about the provisioning of the army—not entirely satisfactory, for it was early in spring, with only provender leftover from last year’s supplies. She heard Caesarion give leave for the men to set rabbit traps and to hunt any wild boars in the vicinity that were brazen enough to get close to the columns, “—but leave the local farmers’ pigs and cattle alone. We’ve enough unrest as it is, without the local nobles accusing me of stealing their property.”

  “The men have always foraged—”

  “And they may continue to do so.” Caesarion’s tone was uncompromising. “But leave the farmers’ fields intact. There’s enough grain.”

  “Wild cress, taraxacum, rabbit ears—they’re all available on the sides of the road, or on the banks of the closest stream.” Lepidus put in from the other side of the table. “Wild carrots, too, should be easy enough to find. The men won’t like it
much, but they’ll fill out the stew kettles when the rabbits prove to be thin and stringy after the long winter.” He shrugged, and pinned the unfortunate centurion making the report with his eyes. “Make it happen.”

  When the centurion left, however, Antony leaned in on his side. “It’s laudable, Caesarion, but impractical. Sooner or later, the men will need food, and we will need to take from the farms. The treasury doesn’t have enough money to pay market price for what we’ll need from the farms—”

  “Nothing taken unless paid for,” Caesarion returned firmly. “At least until there’s no more choice. That being said, if a farmer or landowner tries to raise prices simply to gouge the men? I would have no objections to them being brought before, hmm. A tribune, I think. In chains so that the bargaining process might be simplified.”

  A snort of amusement from Antony, and a slight headshake from Lepidus. Caesarion looked up, and asked, “What’s next?”

  “Dispatches from Rome. Mostly regarding the fleets currently blockading Dyrrachium and Carthago Nova in Hispania, where Tillii forces have taken refuge.” Lepidus paused. “We could use those ships to take Brundisium—”

  “And if we recall the fleets, then Tillius or Servilius forces are free to supply or move by sea themselves. They’re free to travel by land at this time, but I’d prefer to keep them penned across the oceans from the Italian peninsula for the moment.” Several versions of this argument had been made over the past month as they marched south, but Caesarion held firm. He only had so many ships, and using them to take a port specifically fortified against sea assaults seemed a bad use of his limited materials.

  With those meetings finally taken care of, and Lepidus and Antony preparing to leave, Caesarion moved to where Eurydice perched on a camp stool, out of the others’ line of sight, but within his view throughout the meeting. She’d looked guilty as she ate during the provisioning discussions, which had both amused and gratified Caesarion on an obscure level. “And now for you,” he told her lightly, pulling her out of the tent, past the surprised, assessing faces of Lepidus and Antony. Outside, the sun felt warm on his face, but the air retained a crisp bite, and Eurydice almost immediately shivered. “I thought the fresh air might do you some good,” Caesarion told her apologetically. He felt as if he scarcely knew this young woman, and in truth, he didn’t. He’d been in and out of the villa for the past six years, increasing amounts of time away from Rome itself. Her face was familiar, but her manner, her thoughts, might as well have been those of a stranger to him. And yet, if there’s anyone on earth who understands what it means to be a child of Caesar and Cleopatra, it’s her, just as much as Alexander. “If you’d rather try this inside the tent—”

  “I’m honestly not sure what you want me to do,” she replied hesitantly, glancing around at the rows and rows of tents, and the men bustling from one to another. At the far edge of the camp, the vallum, or palisade, had already been built the day before, constructed of the three or four stakes that every man in the army carried for precisely this purpose. Out of many, one; a unified defense born of communal effort. Now, men were digging ditches outside of the vallum, and preparing a second, outer ring of defenses. Just in case the rebels decided on a sneak attack while Caesarion’s forces were still scouting the situation. The rhythmic thumping of hammers and mattocks and shovels provided a counterpoint to the voices of the men that Caesarion personally found soothing. But it might not help his sister attain whatever state in which she’d found her vision yesterday.

  “I want to see if you can summon the visions at will,” he told her with a light, careful pat on her shoulder. Yesterday, he’d been able to be careless with a touch, and had held her hand to comfort her while she writhed with pain. Today, however, she wore the garb of a grown woman, and there were proprieties under Roman custom, even between siblings. “What seemed to trigger them?”

  She frowned, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “I was in the carruca, feeling sick from the jostling. A terrible headache that got worse when I looked into the light, so I covered my eyes. I remember wishing I were anyplace other than where I was. I looked out of the window, through my fingers, and I saw some hawks circling high in the sky.” Her voice became dreamy. “And I thought how wonderful it would be, if I could just . . . leave myself behind. And then I suppose I did.”

  Caesarion frowned. “I certainly hope it doesn’t require you to be vilely ill in order to receive the visions. Though it might explain why so many sibyls eat vaguely poisonous mushrooms and whatever before seeing their visions.”

  “I’m not a sibyl! I don’t see the future—at least, I don’t think I do.” A hasty, amending tone to that. “The dreams are something different, I think.”

  He held up a finger. “I’ll get back to the dreams, never fear. “ Caesarion scanned the horizon. “There,” he said, pointing to the west, away from the sun’s slanting rays. “Do you see them?”

  Eurydice’s breath caught audibly in her throat. “Oh, they’re so beautiful,” she murmured in a tone of yearning. For yes, a little further inland than he might have expected, several kestrels—tinnunculi—hovered in mid-air, seeming completely motionless, while other birds of prey circled higher above. “How wonderful it would be, to fly like that. So high that no one on earth could ever catch you.”

  Caesarion caught her arm as she swayed. He wanted to ask her, Why do you long to fly away? You’re not a slave. You’re a freeborn woman of Rome, daughter of the Imperator and a queen. You’ve never known hunger. We’ve all known fear, certainly—fear of what would happen if Father’s political rivals deposed him. But why do you want to flee so?

  But he couldn’t ask those questions. Not and possibly disturb whatever might be transpiring in his sister’s mind and heart. He just held her arm as her breath caught again, and then she spoke, her voice soft with wonder, “Oh, the world is so beautiful from above. And I can see colors I don’t have names for. Trails in the grass . . . oh! The voles in the fields leave the trails. Can a hawk see the same way that a dog smells, I wonder?” A ripple of giddy laughter that surprised him as she swayed almost into his side, and he held her upright as if she were drunk. “And then diving—got him!” Her voice held glee now, and when he looked at her face, he could see that her eyes were once more the light, piercing gold of a hawk’s, though her gaze seemed unfocused.

  The soldiers don’t need to see her like this. There’s going to be enough muttering about witchcraft as is. We Romans love our gods and omens, but a woman who uses power without it clearly being a divine gift . . . they’ll make signs to avert evil when she passes. As many do when my mother’s litter’s carried past, though my mother has barely a drop of power in her. All her claims to being the avatar of Isis when she was younger were just that—claims. Caesarion helped Eurydice back into the tent, into the privacy of the family quarters, and settled her on her bed. It didn’t change the exalted expression on her face, the slightly parted lips, or the excited gasps as the bird she seemed to be joined with rode the air currents to a safe place to eat the vole it had killed. The feral way she rubbed at her lips as if to wipe away the blood of her kill.

  “Eurydice.” Just her name, trying to call her back from wherever she’d gone. “Can you control the vision? Can you tell the bird to fly south? Or are you . . . just a passenger in the chariot?”

  A little frown of discontent, and then her brow creased with effort. “I think . . . oh.” A smile now, lightness crossing her face, a kind of childlike happiness, as if the world were somehow fresh and new for her today. “She won’t be controlled,” Eurydice told him, her tone confiding. “But I think I can ask her for her help. And now that her belly’s full . . . she has no great objections to hunting south, closer to the sea. That’s where the . . . best nesting sites are.”

  “How do you know that?” Caesarion asked, leaning forward, his eyes locked on her face.

  She shook her head, looking dazed. “I . . . don’t know.” A trickle of sweat rolled from her hai
r down the line of her jaw.

  “Is there pain?”

  “Not yet, but I’m so very warm.” She brushed at her face, and then reached out, fumblingly, with one hand. “I wish you could see it,” Eurydice whispered. “Oh, it’s so beautiful, rocking on the wind. It feels like swimming in a pool, buffeted by other people’s splashing, except I’m alone—other than the kestrel. And she’s so fast!” Wonder in her voice. “So much faster than a horse or a carruca. She’s already in sight of the walls and the sea. She doesn’t think the town is very interesting. Not enough nesting sites. But the harbor’s good. Often there are fish guts for her to snatch out of the water.” A grimace.

  No time for wonder now; awe at this gift could wait. For now, there was just hard practicality. “Do you see any ballistae?” Caesarion asked, taking her hand unconsciously. Trying to give her some measure of his strength.

  “Outside the town, yes. On hills, surrounded with pales and a small number of guards.”

  “How many?”

  A pause, and her head lolled from side to side for a moment, echoing the bird’s movements as the tiny hawk spiraled around the city. “Four separate hills. Three to four ballistae at each hill. They’re digging those ditches in between the hills.”

  “Setting up kill avenues, so that the ballistae crews don’t have to turn their equipment much,” Caesarion muttered. “How about the towers near the gates? What do they have atop them?”

  A slight frown. “Racks of bows, but only a few watchmen at the moment.” She swallowed. “Cauldrons, suspended from cooking racks, and unlit braziers beneath them.”

  Of course. They’ll keep the men rested, but ready. They want to funnel us towards their main city gates. They know that the south end of the city is safe from attack, and the sides can be lightly defended because of the vast round circle of the harbor girdling the city itself. His mind raced, looking for options. The bows will be at an extreme range to try to hit anyone going after the ballistae, but they’re using the emplacements to thin out the numbers of men able to advance on the ballistae. They want the ballistae to be able to turn towards anyone foolish enough to attack the city gates, though they’ll have a hard time hitting them there due to the city’s own walls . . . but again, they can use the ballistae to herd us. We need not go where they want us to go. We have to take the battle to them on our own terms. “You’ve seen enough,” Caesarion told her gently. “Thank you. Let the hawk go, if you can.”