And as we sat there, in the dim light, I heard a knock and carelessly said, “Come in.” One gets to know one’s neighbors in these close quarters, and I was well acquainted with Gaius the butcher and Marcus the baker, and Zeus knows how many others. I almost turned to stone when I looked up and saw Octavian step in.
I knew it was he—who else could look so like all the statues? Or, I should say, a version of the statues. The statues look like the handsomest man in creation, and he is not—although he is handsome enough, that I grant you. And I must give the statues credit for preserving his individual features—his little ears that are set low down on his head, and his triangular face. That was how I recognized him.
I could barely speak—and you know that is unusual for me.
“Good evening, Olympos,” he said, further robbing me of speech. Then he turned toward Caesarion, who was staring at him, and just nodded, without calling him anything. He looked around the room, disdainfully, as if to say, Is this your disguise? But he conveyed it all wordlessly, his eyes sending the message.
And those eyes…clear, grayish blue, utterly emotionless. I have never seen another creature’s eyes like that; even dead soldiers’ do not have that flatness to them, a flatness with life yet behind it, watching.
“Good evening, Triumvir,” I heard myself saying. “Fine night, isn’t it? What brings you here? I thought you were busy in Illyria.” Did that sound controlled enough? I hoped to match him and ruffle his calmness. Let him think I had expected him. “Did you have trouble finding us?”
“None.” He gave an imitation of a smile.
“Well, they say your spy system is good. I suppose you need it—so many enemies.”
Caesarion had risen to his feet. I am pleased to report he was almost the same height as the Son of the God. But then, he is also the Son of the God. All that celestial company!
Octavian turned to him, that false smile still spread across his face. “Welcome to Rome, Your Majesty,” he said. “It has been a long time—some nine or ten years, I believe—since I have seen you. You should have notified me, so I could receive you officially.”
“We did not wish to trouble you, Triumvir, since you were away fighting the enemies of Rome,” said Caesarion. I was impressed by his quick response. “It would have been an imposition.”
“Nonsense!” said Octavian. “You insult me by thinking so.”
“No insult was intended, Triumvir,” said Caesarion.
Both of them stared at one another, curiosity gripping them.
Finally, Octavian broke the silence. “But you do insult me by sneaking into my city, by using my family name, and by claiming to be the son of my father.” He was staring intently at the pendant with the Caesarean emblem on it, which was too clearly visible around the boy’s neck.
“The city of Rome is not your city, Caesar himself allowed me to use his name, and furthermore, he is not your father—he is your great-uncle,” countered Caesarion.
“Great-uncle by birth, father by adoption,” said Octavian. “At least I share his blood, which you do not. Everyone knows—it is common knowledge—that you are a bastard with an unknown father. If the Queen has told you otherwise, she has done you a great wrong.”
“Now you insult my mother!” said Caesarion fiercely. “She would never lie.”
“She lied to Caesar, pretending to carry his child, when all the world knew he was incapable of fathering children.”
“I beg your pardon, Triumvir,” I broke in, “but as a physician I must disagree with you. He had a daughter, Julia.”
“Yes, born thirty years before this—boy.”
“What does that prove? Perhaps his wives weren’t fertile.”
“All three of them?”
“Cornelia had Julia, and as for the other two—Pompeia was divorced for her suspected affairs, and Calpurnia spent barely any time with him. The case is hardly conclusive.” I certainly knew more about this sort of thing than Octavian did! “And Caesar was not a fool; he could not have been deceived so easily. After all, he knew where he had been, and when….” I hated to have to say these things in front of the boy!
Octavian snorted. His fine nostrils flared slightly. “I command you to stop using the name of Caesar!” he said coldly. “You have no legal right to it.”
“Then why did you recognize me as co-ruler with my mother, under that name, eight years ago?” Caesarion was quick to seize on this legality.
Octavian was thrown off his stride for an instant. “It was not I who did it, but the Triumvirs Antony and Lepidus who insisted on it as a concession to the Queen of Egypt, to prevent her sending ships and aid to the assassins in Asia.”
“Now you do truly insult my mother the Queen! As if she would ever send aid to Cassius and Brutus! No, you recognized me under that name because you knew it was true. It is only now that you seek to rescind it and usurp my legacy!”
Octavian seemed to grow calmer as Caesarion grew more heated. “So now you admit it—you intend to grasp your fancied Roman inheritance, and overturn Roman law! There are words for such as you—pretenders, bastards, and insurrectionists. By Roman law I am Caesar’s son, and inherit his name and estate. Only by conquering Rome and destroying her Senate and judges can you unseat me.”
I fancied he meant to say “depose,” and only just stopped himself in time.
“It is you who twist the law and deprive me of what is rightfully mine,” insisted Caesarion. I was proud of the way he refused to back off.
“Enough!” Octavian barely raised his voice. “Return to Egypt. Tell the Queen to give up her dreams of conquest of Rome, and to release the Triumvir Antony from his bondage. She is mad with the dreams of empire. But she shall not rule here! And you are not Caesar’s son! Tell her all this, and warn her to stay away from my country. Never insult me by coming here like this again!” He looked around, his eyes narrowing. “What a pitiful masquerade!”
“Is this your country?” asked Caesarion. “I thought the Triumvir Antony could also claim it for his home.”
“When he is ready to quit the east, with his concubines and eunuchs and drunken orgies, then let him return, a Roman once more.”
“I am afraid you have fallen victim to your own stories, Triumvir,” I said. “It is you who have concocted the concubines, eunuchs, and orgies. Come and visit us, and see for yourself what life he leads.”
“Never!” He looked as if he had been invited to a serpent’s den.
“Are you afraid the eastern Queen will bewitch you?” I could not help teasing him, although it was no laughing matter. His stories had gained deadly currency.
“She could not,” he said. “It would be impossible. Now get you gone! I must return to Illyria, and I will not leave you behind here.”
“So you have done us the honor to travel all the way from the frontier for this informal visit?” I asked. “Such a long journey, and for such a short time!”
“It was long enough to say what needed to be said, and for me to see what I needed to see,” he said, turning to go.
“And our journey, which was even longer, has also answered these questions,” said Caesarion.
“Vale,” said Octavian. “Farewell. I do not look to see you again.”
He seemed to vanish, so quickly did he step over the threshold of the apartment. I went to the door after him, but all I saw was the gloom of the hallway.
“O ye gods!” said Caesarion, and he was as pale as a ghost. “Was this a vision?”
“You acquitted yourself well, to deal with such an apparition,” I said. “Caesar himself could not have done better. You have proved yourself his most worthy son.”
And there it is, exactly as it happened, not an hour ago.
Your loyal, almost speechless, and shaken physician, Olympos
I received this letter not long after it was written; luck had speeded it to me. Alexandria still lay in its stupor of heat and debilitation, barely moving. But the letter jolted me like a blast of wint
er air hitting a naked man. At once I was pacing the room—where I had just been lying languidly on a couch, pronouncing myself too enervated to stir. Octavian! Octavian had swooped down on my son like a bird of prey! He must have been watching—or have spies in every house, on every corner. And even so, how would they have known who Caesarion and Olympos were? Rome had nearly a million people, most of them poor and crowded into places like the Subura. How could two individuals come to Octavian’s attention like that?
And the way he appeared and disappeared…it was almost supernatural. How had his ship traveled so fast on the windless seas, how had he entered Rome secretly?
And for such a man, a stealthy killing would be easy. Was Caesarion’s very life in danger? I reread the letter, with the ominous lines, “I must return to Illyria, and I will not leave you behind here.” If Olympos and Caesarion did not comply immediately, would he dispatch his agents to dispatch them?
“Antony!” I hurried to his quarters, clutching the letter. I expected to find him at his workdesk, hunched over papers. Instead the table, cluttered with scrolls, ledgers, and reports, stood unattended. I found him in one of the smaller connected chambers, dozing on a couch. One foot dangled off the end, and the other was propped up on a pillow. A bored attendant was fanning him, and his light breathing kept time with the puffs of heated air.
“Wake up!” I shook his shoulders. I could not bear to wait to tell him this horrible development. “Go away!” I ordered the attendant, who gladly put down the long-handled fan and left.
“Uh…” Antony slowly opened his eyes and tried to orient himself. He had been in that particularly deep sleep that sometimes falls upon us in the daytime.
Hurry up, hurry up, I thought, I need you!
I needed him to read the letter, to convince me, in his unexcited way, that it was somehow not as it seemed, or not as bad, or—I often grew exasperated by his underreaction to what I considered vital, or obvious, but now I welcomed that very trait.
“What is it?” he finally mumbled. His words were thick, his eyes still unfocused. He rubbed them.
“I—a letter has come. A dreadful letter!” I pushed it into his hands, before he had struggled to sit up. He just looked at it, bewildered.
“Well, read it!” I cried.
He lurched up from his supine position, and swung his feet down onto the floor. Groggily he held the letter and read it. I watched his face carefully. It showed nothing.
His eyes went back to the beginning and he reread it, awake now. Now there was an expression on his face—a heavy resignation, something between distaste and bracing himself.
“I am sorry,” was all he said, laying it down on the couch. And in the tone of those three words he managed to convey both sorrow and deep understanding of what we faced.
I found myself in his arms, my face buried against his shoulder, thankful for the solid feel of him, wondering why that could comfort when words could not. I also found myself weeping, like a child, while he held me. Sobs tore my chest, and I clung to him, marveling at what, perhaps, at base, marriage really is: someone to cling to when all else fails, someone whose very touch can bring surcease of pain. At moments when we revert to childhood, crying and fighting nightmares, that person stands by as an adult to dry our tears.
I had soaked the shoulder of his tunic, and only when my sobs died away did I pluck at it apologetically. “I’ve ruined it,” I said, feeling foolish. The gold threads were all twisted and broken where I had squeezed them, and the salt in my tears had made the dye run into the white.
“Never mind,” he said. “It served a good purpose.” He pulled my hair back from my neck and throat, where it stuck to the skin, matted and wet from the crying. “There.” He smoothed it down. It was like something I did for the children. Next he would ask me if I wanted a sweet.
“Here,” he said, reaching out for a plate of figs, and I laughed.
“No, thank you,” I said. He pulled his arm back and put it around my shoulder.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you cry,” he said, more to himself than to me.
“I try never to,” I said. “At least not in front of anyone. It is considered unqueenly.”
“Then you must, at last, trust me,” he said.
Yes, I supposed it must mean that. Somewhere, sometime, I had let down my guard to Antony as I never had to another person. Now there was no raising it again.
“Yes, I have learned to trust you,” I admitted.
“You are like a wild animal that has taken a long time to eat from my hand,” he said. “And still you are always poised for flight in case I make a wrong move.”
“Not any longer,” I said, wiping my face with my fingertips. And it was true—flight was out of the question. We were together, and it was not conditional.
“That gladdens my heart,” he said, tightening his arm around me. “Now, my dearest, about the letter—it is alarming. But in some ways it is liberating.”
“How so?”
“Because Octavian has finally been forced to make a move,” said Antony. “He has revealed himself—revealed his naked ambition to be Caesar, and his determination to brook no rivals. And revealed whom he considers his rival. Not me. Not you. But Caesarion.”
I supposed that was a victory of sorts. Like a creature that hid under the shadow of a rock, Octavian liked to keep his goals obscure. He shunned the sunlight that would illuminate his movements. But this time he had been flushed out into the open.
But it was scant comfort, when I feared for Caesarion’s safety.
Disguises…Caesarion’s had forced Octavian to abandon his.
HERE ENDS THE SIXTH SCROLL.
The Seventh Scroll
64
I could scarcely believe that I was once more in Antioch, and in winter, too. I had done everything backward: remained in baking Alexandria for the summer, and then transferred to Antioch for the dreary, rain-swept winter. Once again Antony was spending a winter preparing for an eastern campaign; once more he was gathering his generals around him, readying his troops. This time it was not Parthia he was aiming at, but Armenia.
The drafty, overdecorated rooms were still the same, their cavernous corridors and gaping stairs like empty eye sockets. I should not have returned; it would have been better to remember the palace when it reverberated with the first joy of my marriage. Then the rooms were more than rooms, the windows enchanted vistas. Now it had shrunk back into the ordinary, and I felt the loss keenly. The magic had flown, taken wing to its own secret places.
Antony was too busy to notice. Once he had made up his mind to launch his long-delayed retributive campaign, his days were a succession of embassies and conferences. First he had called Marcus Titius to report to us, to explain the Sextus debacle.
I say “us” because I insisted on being present. If Egyptian money was being spent, if Egyptian resources were being used, Egypt should be privy to all. Besides, Antony and I were now openly co-rulers of an eastern empire…. But more about that later.
Titius was commander of the forces in Syria, and had only to journey a little way to report to us. I had always liked him, perhaps because his lean, dark looks appealed to me, and he was younger than the other generals. And he took great care to flatter me. At the same time I sensed that he harbored some faint disdain for Antony. Do not ask me how I knew; I can sense these things acutely. When I said this to Antony, he just snorted and said, “You’ll have to have something more definite than that for me to go on.”
Titius had been among those who had taken refuge with Sextus when the proscriptions were raging; later he had joined his uncle Plancus under Antony’s banner. The two of them made an odd pair: Titius swarthy, long-faced, sardonic; Plancus blond, ruddy, and laughing.
Titus reported to us in the enormous audience chamber. I had wanted us to be seated on thrones, but Antony would not hear of it.
“Here I am the general, not Autocrator,” he said. Autocrator was a Greek word he used to describe
his status as lord and ruler of the east, although not a king.
“Well, what am I?” I asked. “I am still a queen.”
“You are the admiral,” he said. “Which is fitting, since my navy is mostly made up of your ships. So seat yourself as an admiral, in a comfortable chair, but not a throne.”
Titius strode in, looking edgy and defensive. After the usual formal greetings, and his brief summary of what had happened, Titius awaited Antony’s response.
“Who gave you the orders to execute him? That’s what I want to know,” said Antony.
“I was given to understand they were your orders,” he said. “Sextus was trying to flee, and was apprehended as he ran toward the Parthians. He meant to put himself under their protection. He was a traitor, sir.”
“A traitor to whom? He had never sworn allegiance to me.”
“A traitor to Rome. A traitor to his ancestors—a blot on their name, a shame to them!”
“So you felt called upon to punish him?”
“You killed Cicero, to punish him! And how many others during the proscriptions—of which I was almost a victim?”
“That is the shame of it,” said Antony. “Sextus gave you protection and spared your life when you sheltered under his wing. Then, in your turn, you killed him.”
Titius bristled. “With all respect, Imperator, Sextus did not flee to me—he was fleeing from me. I am a soldier, in the service of Rome. Are you suggesting that I should be traitor to my vow of allegiance to Rome, should spare her enemies, because of a personal softness? A strange sort of honor! Something more fitted for a woman, I think.”
I resented that. “If you think that women spare their enemies, General Titius, then you do not know your history. We can be as hard as men—and we have longer memories,” I said.
The Memoirs of Cleopatra Page 99